While British imperialism did not call for genocide of the Jews, the abrogation of a Jewish State would have spelled disaster for the Jewish people.
German soldiers are seen marching in Warsaw following the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939.
(photo credit: FLICKR)
World War II broke out on September 1, 1939, with Nazi Germany’s invasion of Poland. The conflict left Europe in ruins, cost millions of lives, and proved a most crushing blow to the Jews of Europe, unspeakable and unfathomable in scope.
Hours after the invasion, far away from battle, a cargo ship with 1,400 illegal Jewish refuges – the Tiger Hill – ran ashore off Tel Aviv. As the British Mandate authorities trained their searchlights on the ship, the Jews sang “Hatikvah” in defiance.
The British shot three Jews in the operation, all of whom died so the first Jews to die in the war were at the hands of the British, not the Nazis.
Sir Martin Gilbert writes in his 1998 history of Israel, “The Mandate authorities boarded the ship and took the ‘illegals’ to the Sarafand detention camp, on the Tel Aviv to Jerusalem road.”
The saga of the Tiger Hill, while at first glance a footnote in the larger scope of Jewish history, epitomizes the painful predicament of the Jews in the Second World War. While the British were fighting those whom the Germans marked for mass murder, at the same time the fading Empire was obstructing the Zionist settlement of the Land of Israel. The 1939 MacDonald White Paper, known to the Jews of the yishuv as “the Black Paper,” prohibited more than 75,000 Jews from escaping Europe over a period of five years and settling in Eretz Yisrael – the Land of Israel – thereby assuring an Arab majority.
JEWS CROWD onto a British army armored car as they celebrate in downtown Jerusalem the morning after the United Nations voted to partition British mandate Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state. (credit: REUTERS)
While the Germans were the most urgent enemy to defeat, the British held the Jews hostage in the Third Reich by not allowing them to escape genocide. The Jews of the Yishuv had the painful choice of opposing Britain, even while fighting the Third Reich. David Ben-Gurion, leading the Yishuv, strikingly declared, “We will fight with the British against Hitler as if there were no White Paper; we will fight the White Paper as if there were no war.” While a brilliant summation of Yishuv strategy, Ben-Gurion would soon face the reality that his words would be challenged by some Jews, themselves.
More than 30,000 Jews in the Mandate fought in the British Army in WWII. No doubt, their experience as soldiers readied them for the battles again the Arabs in the War of Independence in 1948. Still, the tension with the British imperialists would not disappear.
The Hagana – the underground Jewish paramilitary organization in the Mandate, representing the established Zionist leadership of the Jewish Agency – set aside operations against the British during most of the war. Defeating the Germans was more important.
Yet, the Hagana organized Mossad le-Aliyah Bet late in 1938 to organize illegal immigration. The underground of the followers of Jabotinsky and Begin – who engaged in anti-British activity during the last years of the war – was also a key to the rescue of Jews from Nazi Europe. And the story of the Tiger Hill is a constant reminder that while British imperialism did not call for genocide of the Jews, the abrogation of a Jewish State would have spelled disaster for the Jewish people.
The writer is rabbi of Congregation Anshei Sholom in West Palm Beach, Florida.
@Michael S
I found a notice of a Steinhardt’s report after he came back from the USSR (the article dated NYT 11/28/1941) – I doubt that it was about the Eastern European Jews, though), you need a subscription to view it:
https://www.nytimes.com/1941/11/28/archives/roosevelt-receives-steinhardts-report-to-discuss-soviet-further.html
Most likely, it was his final report as an ambassador to to USSR, the notice didn’t give any other information.
@Michael S
Here is a quote from Raphael Medoff’s The Jews Should Keep Quiet: Franklin D. Roosevelt, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, and the Holocaust about Steinhardt’s objection from 1940 to granting of emergency visas to some Jews (Steinhardt’s name was mentioned only once in the book):
@Michael S
While I am researching this (I am not unfamiliar with the subject), how did you find out that you have been “designated by the Dept. of Homeland Security as a “domestic terrorist threat””?
This is what I found on Steinhardt so far in public domain:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_Steinhardt
Hi, Reader. I believe I read that in Druks’s book, “Failure to Rescue”. You can get the book online. Here’s an excerpt:
It may have been some other source. Druks was my cousin, which is why I read his book.
If you’re interested in the subject, there are others here who probably know much more than I do on the matter; but I definitely read that there were highly placed US Jews who resisted mass Jewish immigration because they were afraid this would stir up antisemitism in the US.
World War II is water under the bridge, as far as I’m concerned. My focus is on World War III, and the New Fascism taking over the world. Of course, there’s self interest at work here: I have been designated by the Dept. of Homeland Security as a “domestic terrorist threat”, because I have been taliking about election fraud and about the dangers of the experimental “vaccines”.
All the best to you.
The first action of the British in the war was killing Jews, and the last action of the British in the war was killing Jews.
@Michael S.
Where did you read that?
I’ve never heard of it.
…and the American Jews encouraged President Roosevelt not to accept Jewish refugees, for fear that this would turn to the disadvantage of those Jews already here.
The whole world stank, including the Jews — not just the British.