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- that the idea can be traced to Zionist education at least as far back as the 1930s and
- that both the international organized Jewish community and the WW2 Allies acquiesced in this idea when the Zionist leadership of Palestine in concert with Zionists in the DP camps thwarted the evacuation of Jewish children to Britain in 1945 and began drafting adult male Jewish Holocaust survivors as cannon fodder in the Zionist program of stealing Palestine from the native population.
- at Israeli brutality toward the native population,
- at the ongoing genocide of the Gazans, or
- at the mentality of racism and violent hatred that grows ever more extreme among the supporters of Zionism throughout N. America and Europe.
Millions of Jews, annihilated as they had no land of their own, watch us from the ashes of history, and command us to settle and establish a state for our people.
Moshe Dayan on the fresh grave of Ro'i Rothberg, a farmer ina frontier kibbutz who was killed by infiltrators from Egypt. April 1956.1
If they are right-those who claim that a Jew must not live abroad ̶̶ I shall know no peace of mind, as all of them have not come to live in Eretz Yisrael.
Chayim Ozer Grodzinsky, the last Vilnius Rabbi, in a letter to Rabbi Ya'acov Reines, founder of Mizrahi, after the latter declared that every Jew has an obligation to live in Eretz Yisrael, 1906.2
A Very Brief Summary
We embarked on a journey to the DP [WW2 Displaced Person] camps in quest for clues regarding the relationship between ethnicity and national territory ̶̶ between Jewish identity and Zionism as manifested through the State of Israel ̶̶ a Jewish state in Western Palestine. Before proceeding to general issues, it is important to briefly summarize the main themes of the Jewish DP story that this book brings up:
a) The vast majority of the population of the Jewish DP camps (more than 90 percent) strongly supported the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine.
b) At the same time, the majority of the very same population (more than 60 percent) did not immigrate to Palestine/Israel and chose other destinations, despite the fact that at any given
c) point in time during the relevant years (1945-1951), Palestine/Israel was the least difficult target location to which to obtain passage.
d) The Jewish DP population in Germany, Austria and Italy, whose size is conservatively estimated to be 333,000, held great demographic promise to Zionist planners. By comparison, as Independence was declared in May 1948, the entire Jewish population of Palestine was slightly over 600,000; between 1948-1951, Israel received an additional 700,000 Jewish immigrants (while concomitantly blocking the return of approximately the same number of Palestinian refugees who fled or were expelled between 1947-1949).3
e) Zionist conduct in situations where there was a conflict between their interests and the DPs' indicate that Zionist leaders, planners and organizers put the interests of their movement before the well-being of the Jewish refugees whom they were trying to help. Three findings lead to this conclusion: (1) The children's affair (1945), in which a few thousand children who could arrive to safety in England and France were forced to stay in the camps; (2) The compulsory IDF draft affair (1948); (3) The way the Zionists perceived the DPs' obligation to their movement, as revealed by the internal Zionist discourse.
f) Upon being called to fulfill "their duty" and join the IDF draft, most Jewish DPs were reluctant. A failed voluntary draft drive (to which less than 0.3 percent of the DP population volunteered) led to compulsory conscription. A significant number of DPs was drafted forcibly (increasing the IDF manpower gain 11-fold). The result was a significant contribution of 7,800 new Foreign Draftees to an army whose personnel totaled 100,000 men and women. It appears, then, that about 100 of these ex-DP conscripts died in the war.
What do these findings mean? Could the DP affair be used as a key to an understanding of Zionist conceptions of national identity, territory, and sovereignty? In the pages that follow, I will try to look for answers.
The DP Story,
the Zionists, and World Jews
States, even the most democratic ones, use coercive practices against their citizenry. They make you pay taxes, fulfill your civic duties, and when circumstances so require, your state can even impose compulsory conscription on you. This coercion is legitimized, as it is normally construed, as an act in which the state acts as the agent of popular will, and harnesses the individual for the common good. Thus a forced draft as such is rarely illegitimate, because citizenship is universally interpreted as a status to which both rights and obligations are attached. While the Jewish DPs were conscripted to the IDF, their case is an entirely different matter. On grounds of general civic duties it is difficult to find justification to the conscription of non-citizens, who live outside the territory of the coercive government, who had never set foot there, do not speak the local language, and for the most part have no interest in going there. That is, the characteristics that are typically diagnostic of citizenship-geographical location, language, past personal history and intentions for the future-are not found in the DP population. Likewise, it is difficult to see what legitimized the Zionists' action earlier, when in 1945 they banned the transfer of Jewish children to England and France.
If we would like to see the gravity of the problem, and also try to connect it to our present day existence, it is important to understand what in the eyes of the Zionists legitimized the conscription of Jews in Europe to the Israeli army. Such an understanding might give us an unusual glimpse into the conception of Jewish nationalism of Yishuv leaders, and thus provide hints on the way Zionists in Israel view their connection to world Jewry today.
From an archival perspective, it appears that these matters hardly concerned leaders. The legitimacy of the Foreign Draft was not discussed. Rather, leaders made general statements about the affinity between Sh'erith. ha-pleyta [surviving remnant of European Jews] and the Zionist project in Palestine, although it was clear that this affinity is one-sided: Jews must support the Zionist enterprise.
The activists who were closer to the action-especially those who were advocating the use of force against dodgers could not avoid a personal confrontation with the problem of legitimacy. Aware of the coercive nature of their actions, they needed a world view that would enable them to live with their violent acts. Nahum Shadmi, originator of the European draft idea, was the first to understand the problematic connection between the survivors and the Zionist movement. He realized that the survivors did not constitute a monolithic Zionist group, and that if Haganah wanted draftees, then a forced draft would have to be imposed on the DPs. He thus tried to rationalize the forced draft in an attempt to legitimize the coercive measures he and his men were about to take. "We oblige Jews in the camps to be drafted," he wrote, "as if they were citizens of Israel, and not of Germany [...] Once Israel makes military service compulsory for Jews of certain age groups-this duty should fall upon She' erit ha-pleyta as well."4
Not all envoys needed this stipulation. Most of them took the equation Jew=Zionist for granted, and felt betrayed by those Jews who did not "rush to help when their home was on fire," and wanted instead to make a home elsewhere (mostly in the United States). "We demanded of the Jews to recognize their own state," wrote one of them proudly to Jerusalem.5 Others were even more expressive: "These Jews are so corrupt that they show absolutely no interest in the nation's struggle,"6 wrote an envoy in Austria with disdain. Palestine envoys in Germany, then, viewed Jewish identity as necessarily Zionist. To many of them, failure to conform with this equation was socially deviant, and justified violent acts.
But where did this equation come from? The place of Zionism in Jewish history at the time was not as well-established as to justify the envoys' conception that equated Jewish identity with it. This view of Zionism and Jewish identity could hardly have emerged by itself in the minds of so many. It must have been invented by someone with access to a system that educated these envoys. It is here that the role of historians as nation builders becomes apparent. The development of a Zionist outlook on Jewish history concerned historical scholars in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem since the 1930s. With access to the hearts and minds of many, and with willingness to participate in the act of nation building, this group of historians seems to have played a critical role in shaping the consciousness of activists. Indeed, an examination of their writings immediately points to the origins of the equation Jew=Zionist. Consider the manifesto by professors Yitzhak (Fritz) Baer, Ben Zion Dinburg (later Dinur, Israel's first Minister of Education) and Haim Hillel Ben-Sasson in the first issue of the academic journal Zion, published in Palestine in 1936. In it they lay new foundations for the study of Jewish history. "Jewish history itself," they asserted, "is the story of the Israeli nation [sic], which has never expired, nor has its significance waned at any point in time. Jewish history is unified as a homogenous entity that encompasses all times and places, all instructive of one another."7 A similar view is espoused in a text that Dinur (now Education, Minister) later wrote for an eighth grade reader, where the notion of continuity and uniformity of Jewish history is applied to a particular event:
The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was not one of its kind: Its flames illuminate for us hundreds of rebellions, numerous struggles nearly everywhere [...] Five years after the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, Israel declared its independence. We withstood a bitter struggle. We triumphed, we overcame. The war of independence is seen as a continuation of the Jews' armed struggle in World War II, since the epic of Israel's bravery is one and the same.8
This view-expanded, repeated, and developed, taught in schools and preparatory courses for envoys (Chapter 3), and rehashed by leaders-is what made activists feel legitimized in performing violent acts on their brethren. This is the essence of the so-called Palestinocentric view of modem Jewish history ̶̶ the idea, so eloquently expressed by Dinur in the paragraph above, that Zionist history is the necessary, hence sole, continuation of Jewish history. On this view, the Sho'ah is directly linked to T'kumah (the resurgence of the State of Israel). For the Palestine envoys in Germany, this meant that a survivor, a stateless Jew becomes ipso facto a citizen of the Jewish state, hence subject to the same rights and obligations as other Israeli nationals, precisely as Shadmi had written. The irony in this construal of Jewish history is hard to miss: The very movement that was created to bring deliverance to the Jews now took possession of Jewish national identity, and in its name expropriated the rights of the people, so that its own needs could be served. This is why the DP draft has been so embarrassing to those who seek to defend the Zionist line.
Israeli historians thus decided to be active participants in the nation-building endeavor, rather than commit to the standards and norms of their profession. This is not atypical: Controversial parts of national history receive a similar treatment in many countries. The consequence, at any rate, was that the DP affair I told here was expunged from the books, remaining unknown for long decades. Repeated allegations (mostly by Bund members) regarding violence in the DP camps in the context of the draft were denied by Zionist historians. Historian Yehuda Bauer, to take one prominent example, who by all accounts is a leading student of the period, dismissed these accounts. There may have been some violent incidents in the camps, he argued, but these were scattered initiatives of crazed individuals, and not a matter of policy. At issue were a few isolated cases in which "overzealous recruiters switched from convincing to forced convincing to force." The authorities, he wrote, tried to act against them, but to no avail, and "even the Z.K..[Zentralkommittee, Central Committee] was helpless."9 As we have seen, such dismissals are not based on a careful examination of the factual record. No thorough study of the DP affair was available, despite the fact that the archives which were used for this book have been accessible to the public since the 1950s.
Having grown up in Israel during the 1950s-60s, the factual record as it unfolds in this book was unknown to me, and its discovery came as a complete surprise. The DP story was mentioned in school (as well as in books and movies) in the context of the continuity and uniformity of Jewish destiny, in keeping with the Baer/Dinur/Ben-Sasson line. We were told that virtually all the survivor DPs immigrated to Palestine/Israel, after a courageous struggle against the British. Those who joined the army, we were told, were registered for the draft upon their arrival in Palestine; we were also told that refugees and survivors arrived in Palestine eagerly, ready to join the forming Israeli society and assist in the war effort. But the real story was kept from us. The truth, as we saw it here, is that many pale, Yiddish-speaking Holocaust survivors had been forcefully drafted abroad in 1948, and were then dropped against their will into the grim reality of the battlefields of Palestine.
Over the years, the Zionists have made many demands on world Jewry. The sad story told in these pages is extreme, perhaps, but not atypical. May its lesson stand as a sobering note to all.
EPILOGUE
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1 This speech is considered to be a defining moment in Israeli history, as it is thought to have exposed Israel's offensive strategy of the 1950s which culminated in the part the IDF played in the Anglo-French Suez Operation of fall 1956. For discussion see Morris, Benny: Israel's Border Wars 1949- 1956. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993.
2 In Moshé Haim Efrayim Bloch, ed., Dovev siftey yeshenim (from the lips of the sleepy), part 3. New York: Tif'eret Publishers, 1965, p. 265.
3 See Cohen.
4 The Haganah/Mossad covention in Paris conference, 29.2.1948. Cf. Ben-David, p.94.
5 Summary of the directorate meeting, Jewish Agency mission in Munich, Germany, 17.8.48. Ha'apaláh project archive, Tel Aviv University, 44.15-1 (photocopied from Lochamei ha-Geta'ot archive).
6 Letter by the leadership of the Gordonia youth movement, Austria (Linz) to movement secretariat in Tel Aviv, 28.3.48. Ha'apaláh project archive, Tel Aviv University, 24-95.11 (from Gordonia-Young Maccabean, Chulda archive, container 60, file 9).
7 Baer, Yitzhak and Ben-Zion Dinburg, Megamatenu (Our aim), Zion Aleph, 1, 1936. For a recent critical analysis see Raz-Karkotzkin, Amnon. 'Galut be-toch ribonut' (Exile in Sovereignty), Te'oria u-Vikoret (Theory and Criticism), 5,1994, pp. 113-132.
8 Ben-Zion Dinur. Mikra 'ot Yisrael le-Chitah Chet (an Eighth Grade Reader), Efrati and Melamed, eds., 1956, p. 221.
9 Cf. Ashes, p. 265.
