Fateful Triangle

by Noam Chomsky

  As for the wretched survivors of Hitler’s Holocaust themselves, it is likely that many—perhaps most—would have chosen to come to the United States had this opportunity been offered,* but the Zionist move

  * To my knowledge, there has been no serious study of this question. For conflicting opinions, see Lieut.-General Morgan, British Chief of Staff to the Supreme Allied Commander, 1943-44, and Chief of UNRRA (the UN Relief and Rehabilitation Administration) Operations in Germany, 1945-46; and Yehuda Bauer, a well-known Israeli historian. Morgan believes that what “was represented as being the spontaneous surge of a tortured and persecuted people toward their long-lost homeland” was in fact the result of superb Zionist organization and “iron discipline” in the camps, misrepresented by “the skill of the Zionist propaganda campaign.” “I fancy that, in reality, there were few among the travellers [Jewish refugees from Eastern Europe] who, of their own free will, would have gone elsewhere than to the U.S.A.” His allegations concerning Zionist exploitation of UNRRA for political goals with little concern for the interests of the refugees read remarkably like subsequent Zionist allegations concerning Arab exploitation of its successor organization, UNRWA, in connection with the Palestinian refugees in its charge. Bauer, in contrast,

  ment, including American Zionists, preferred that they settle in a Jewish state8, a story being relived today with Jewish emigrants from the USSR.9 After the war, tens of thousands of Jewish displaced persons died in camps from miserable conditions and lack of care, and congressional Displaced Persons (DP) legislation gave priority not to Jews but to refugees from the Russian-occupied Baltic states, many of them Nazi sympathizers, including even SS troopers. There was little American Zionist support for legislation intended to bring DPs to the U.S. in contrast to massive support for resolutions calling for the establishment of a Jewish state. Dinnerstein comments: “Unspoken publicly, but in the air privately, was the Zionist concern that fewer European Jews would resettle in Israel if the possibility existed of getting to the United States.” Jewish support for the legislation, which was extensive, was from non-Zionist or anti-Zionist groups, overwhelmingly.10

  Some found this objectionable. Roosevelt’s adviser Morris Ernst wrote concludes that the vast majority of the refugees preferred to go to Palestine, citing an UNRRA questionnaire indicating that 96.8% preferred to go to Palestine with only 393 of 19,311 wanting to go to the U.S. (pp. 202-3; his source is a Hebrew investigative commission report, published in Tel Aviv in 1946). He also concludes that by late 1947 about half would have preferred to go to the U.S., though after the establishment of the State of Israel in May 1948 “most Jews chose it” (pp. 317-8)—no alternative was in fact available. The Report to President Truman by his envoy Earl G. Harrison on the conditions and needs of displaced persons concluded that Palestine was the first choice of the Jewish DPs, noting however that many want to go there “because they realize that their opportunity to be admitted into the United States or into other countries in the Western hemisphere is limited, if not impossible.” Archival sources in Israel might well provide the answer to this question.

  in 1948 of his shock at the refusal of American Jewish leaders to consider the possibility of giving “these beaten people of Europe a choice,” instead of offering them only the option of emigration to Palestine; the program he advanced “would free us from the hypocrisy of closing our own doors while making sanctimonious demands on the Arabs,” he wrote, adding that he “was amazed and even felt insulted when active Jewish leaders decried, sneered and then attacked me as if I were a traitor” for suggesting that the survivors of the Holocaust be permitted the choice of emigrating to the United States.11

  The question remains a sensitive one, not surprisingly. In 1980 a private commission of prominent American Jews was established, headed by former Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg, “to examine the behavior of Jewish organizations in this country at the time of the Nazi campaign to annihilate European Jews.” 15 months later the commission had “split up in anger and dissension,” with charges and countercharges as to what had gone wrong. The commission’s main financial backer alleged that “It became apparent that the vestiges of the old establishment were fighting to protect its name.” Goldberg, as well as research director Seymour Finger, denied this charge, claiming that “the promised money wasn’t forthcoming.” “Commission sources said that [established Jewish groups] had objected to the panel’s examining such painful questions as whether thousands, or tens of thousands, of Jews could have been saved if American-Jewish organizations had acted forcefully and applied pressures on the Roosevelt Administration.” A draft report stated that it was “incontrovertible” that “the Jewish leadership in America at no stage decided to proclaim total mobilization for rescue.” Established Zionist organizations, the draft report continued, were “riveted to postwar plans” and the creation of a Jewish state, so that the “energies of those American Jews who were profoundly concerned were dissipated, when the ground was burning under their feet.” One of the leading members of the American Jewish community, Rabbi Stephen Wise, who was also close to Roosevelt, opposed a congressional effort in 1943 to set up a commission “to effectuate the rescue of the Jewish people of Europe” because the resolution failed to include a provision demanding that the British open up Palestine to Jews. The draft states:

  What is certain is that the exclusive concentration on Palestine as a solution, coupled with its intrinsic pessimism as to other alternatives, distracted the Zionist movement as well as large segments of American Jews from giving serious attention to various rescue plans offered by the advocates of separating rescue from political or ideological considerations.12

  These conclusions accord reasonably well with the scholarly literature; see note 10. Note that the mandate of the Goldberg Commission did not extend to the question raised above: the attitude of established Jewish organizations, particularly the Zionist organizations, to Jewish immigration after Europe was liberated, a question touched upon only obliquely in the scholarly literature.

  Whether there would have been a way to reconcile competing claims and needs in the former Palestine is not clear. By the time of the Second World War and the Nazi Holocaust, the question had become academic, at least for the large majority of the Zionist movement. In the spring of 1942, the American Zionist movement endorsed the idea of a Jewish state (the “Biltmore program”) and in November, “the creation of a Jewish state became the official goal of the Zionist movement” under Ben-Gurion’s initiative.13 Prior to this, the official position had been a commitment to some form of “parity” between Jewish and Arab populations.* This commitment to Jewish statehood preceded the discovery of firm information that the Nazi state was undertaking its Final Solution,14 though its vicious anti-Semitism had long been apparent.

  2. The War of Independence/Conquest In November 1947, the General Assembly of the United Nations recommended the partition of mandatory Palestine (cis-Jordan) into a Jewish and an Arab state. The recommendation was accepted by the bulk of the Zionist movement—though not by Begin’s terrorist army (the Irgun Tsvai Leumi) and LEHI (the Stern Group), the terrorist force commanded by the current Foreign Minister, Yitzhak Shamir†—and rejected

  * Simha Flapan argues that these commitments were tactical maneuvers. See also TNCW, pp. 258-9, citing, in particular, Nahum Goldmann’s rather cynical interpretation of the outspoken rejection of the concept of a Jewish state by BenGurion and others.

  †It has been known for some time that this group, an offshoot of the Irgun, offered to cooperate with the Nazis against the British. The topic has recently been brought to public attention in Israel, where columnist B. Michael published a LEHI proposal of January 1941 to the Nazis (Ha’aretz, Jan. 31, 1983; also Feb. 6). The proposal expressed its sympathy for the “German conception” of a “New Order in Europe” and offered to cooperate in the formation of a Jewish state “on a national and totalitarian basis, which will establish relations with the German Reich�
�� and protect Nazi interests in the Middle East. An English version appears in Lenni Brenner, Zionism in the Age of the Dictators (Lawrence Hill, Westport Conn., 1983), translated from the original in the Nazi archives, from David Yisraeli, The Palestine Problem in German Politics (Bar Ilan University,

  with near unanimity by the Arabs of Palestine.15 General Assembly resolutions are considered to be non-binding; Israel, for example, holds the world record for rejection of subsequent ones. The U.S. remained ambivalent, for a time preferring a trusteeship until Truman recognized the Jewish state established in May 1948.

  Civil strife broke out immediately after the partition recommendation, with terror and violence on both sides. As usual, it is the record of Arab violence that remains in popular consciousness, but that is far from the whole story. For example, on December 18 the Palmach—the kibbutzbased strike force of the Haganah (the Defense Force of the Jewish settlement in Palestine, the precursor of the IDF)—carried out a “retaliation” operation against the village of Khissas, killing 10 Arabs, including one woman and four children. Israeli military historian Uri Milshtein writes that this operation, commanded by Moshe Dayan, was contrary to the Haganah policy “not to ‘heat up’ relatively quiet areas,” but was justified by Dayan on the grounds that it had a “desirable effect.” Sykes suggests that this operation, three weeks before the first Arab irregulars entered the country, may have “precipitated the next phase of the war.”16

  The better-organized Jewish community had the advantage in the military conflict. By May, its armies had taken over parts of the territory assigned to the Palestinian state. The Irgun-LEHI Deir Yassin massacre in April had already taken place, one major factor in causing the flight of much of the Arab population. This fact was reported with much enthusiasm in official statements of Irgun and LEHI, specifically, by the terrorist commander Menachem Begin, who took pride in the operation in which some 250 defenseless people were slaughtered, including more than 100 women and children, with 4 killed among the attacking forces.

  Ramat Gan, Israel, 1974). Recently discovered personal testimonies of the leaders of the operation reveal that the majority favored eliminating whoever stood in their way, including women and children, and proceeded to do so, murdering captured and wounded. Begin praised his killers for their humanity, for “acting in a way that no other fighting force had ever done,” a refrain that has been echoed after every war, including the 1982 war, and that is loyally repeated by supporters who are much in awe of Israeli “purity of arms,” a new phenomenon in the history of warfare. The Irgun command sent an internal message of congratulations on the “wonderful operation of conquest,” saying: “As in Deir Yassin, so everywhere... Oh Lord, Oh Lord, you have chosen us for conquest.” The Haganah command condemned the operation, including the looting and plunder that appear to have been the objective according to the recently discovered documents, noting that the village was one of those that had avoided any cooperation with the Arab forces. The massacre was also condemned officially by the Palestinian Yishuv (the pre-state Jewish settlement). An official government military history accords the incident 3 lines, giving the date, reporting that combat was “light,” and finishing with the statement that “in the course of the conquest of the village about 200 of its inhabitants were killed, including women and children.” An additional paragraph then explains how Arab propaganda over what it called “the Deir Yassin massacre” backfired; “there is no doubt” that the affair contributed effectively to the collapse of the Arab forces because of the fear induced concerning “the cruelty of the Jews.”17 By May, about 300,000 Arabs had fled, about 1/3 of them from territories assigned to the Palestinian State.18

  The armies of the Arab states entered the war immediately after the State of Israel was founded in May. Fighting continued, almost all of it within the territory assigned to the Palestinian state, leading to an eventual further partition, with about half of the proposed Palestinian state incorporated within Israel and the remainder taken over by Jordan (then Transjordan) and Egypt. This arrangement persisted until 1967, when the remainder too was conquered by Israel (along with the Syrian Golan Heights and the Sinai). About 700,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled in the 1948 conflict.

  It is common to refer to these events in a manner such as this: “Events during 1947-1948 led to a situation whereby Jordan became the Arab successor state in Palestine.”19 This is inaccurate. The events led to a situation whereby Jordan and Israel became “the successor states.” The Gaza region was divided between Israel and Egypt, and the remainder of the territory assigned to the Palestinian state was divided between Israel and Jordan. Israel and Jordan, but not Egypt, annexed the territories they occupied. About half the Palestinian state became part of Israel.

  For many years, it was claimed that the Palestinians fled in 1948 on the orders of Arab leaders. The basis for this claim was undermined by Erskine Childers in 1961, though one hears it still. In fact, it seems that the Arab leadership tried to prevent the flight, which was encouraged by Israeli terror and psychological warfare, sometimes direct expulsion.20

  Additional thousands of Arabs—citizens of Israel, in this case—were expelled from Israel’s Galilee region during the attack on Egypt in 1956,* and hundreds of thousands more fled or were expelled from the conquered territories during and after the 1967 war21. In a detailed

  * This fact, previously unknown, was revealed by former Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin of the Labor Party, who at the time was commander of Israel’s northern region, where the expulsions took place. He estimates that 3-5000 Arabs— Israeli citizens—were expelled by the Army to Syria at that time. These Arabs had been expelled from their native villages in 1951 in the course of water diversion projects.

  investigation of the refugee flight, W. W. Harris estimates that of a prewar population of about 1.4 million, approximately 430,000 left their homes from June to December 1967 (most of them in June), with considerable variation among regions (over 90% of the 100,000 people in the Golan Heights fled, but less than 20% of the 400,000 residents of the Gaza Strip, with other local variations). High population losses in some areas resulted from “a legacy of assorted fears,” for example, in the vicinity of Qibya, where Israeli forces commanded by Ariel Sharon had conducted a major massacre in 1953 (see chapter 6, section 6.3). Israeli hawks on occasion threaten a new expulsion if the Arabs do not mind their manners, as when Defense Minister Sharon warns that “the Palestinians should not forget 1948.” “The hint is clear,” Amnon Kapeliouk comments, citing Sharon’s statement.22

  In the U.S., it is commonly argued that the annexation of the West Bank by Jordan was illegitimate. The argument has merit, but then it is difficult to see why it does not apply with equal force to Israel’s annexation of half of the designated Palestinian state—though this question is, in fact, academic, and has been since 1949. The argument also overlooks the fact that Israel and Jordan were acting in accord with a secret agreement to partition Palestine in 1947-8, both of them regarding the Palestinian leadership as a primary enemy. Yoram Peri observes that Ben-Gurion’s “tacit understanding with King Abdullah of Transjordan, which allowed the latter to move into the territories west of the River Jordan, which had been allotted by the 1947 UN Partition Plan to the Arab Palestinian state,…was not revealed either to the Cabinet nor to the military command,” leading to internal conflict when the Southern Commander, Yigal Allon, was prevented from launching an expedition into the West Bank by Ben-Gurion in October 1948. It has been argued further that the entry of the Arab states into the war was in part motivated by opposition to the ambitions of King Abdullah and that”…Egyptian intentions were not to invade Palestine, but to find a diplomatic solution to the conflict.”23 Similar beliefs led Nahum Goldmann to recommend against the May decision to establish the State of Israel at the time, on the assumption that a peaceful diplomatic settlement might be possible.

  King Abdullah was assassinated by a 19-year old Palestinian in July 1951. This fact is
commonly cited as proof that the Palestinians (or Arabs more generally) will not tolerate a “moderate” leadership that will accept the existence of Israel. A closer look at the backgrounds—in particular, the Israeli-Jordanian plan to destroy the planned Palestinian state—suggests a somewhat different interpretation.

  As for Nahum Goldmann, he became President of the World Zionist Organization from 1956 to 1968 but remained critical of Israel’s diplomacy, including its entry into the Cold War system on the side of the U.S. and its post-1967 rejectionism. He was also critical of the tactic of converting the Holocaust into a device to justify atrocities and murder. At the beginning of the Jewish New Year, in October 1981, he wrote:

  We will have to understand that Jewish suffering during the Holocaust no longer will serve as a protection, and we certainly must refrain from using the argument of the Holocaust to justify whatever we may do. To use the Holocaust as an excuse for the bombing of Lebanon, for instance, as Menachem Begin does, is a kind of “Hillul Hashem” [sacrilege], a banalization of the sacred tragedy of the Shoah [Holocaust], which must not be misused to justify politically doubtful and morally indefensible policies. 24

  Goldmann was also one of those who felt that American “supporters of Israel” were causing it considerable harm. At the January 1981 meeting of the World Jewish Congress in Israel, he spoke of the need “to effect a change in our policy towards the Arabs.” “What Israel is doing in this regard is very bad,” he added, “and equally bad is the effect of the screams uttered by American Jewry.”25 He was also a sharp critic of the Lebanon invasion. Goldmann died in August 1982, after a lifetime of service to the Zionist cause. Prime Minister Begin did not attend his funeral and “no official statement of grief was issued by the government,” the American Jewish press observed, noting that this indicated the “shabby way” in which the Israeli government treats “its opponents.” A headline in the Jerusalem Post read: “Goldmann’s Death is Ignored.” PLO chairman Yasser Arafat sent condolences, stating: