Past & Present

With the 60-year anniversary of the creation of Israel upon us, I expect lots of attention on this messy history. And that’s good. I also predict zealots on both sides will mangle the facts, and strangle the parts that stain their side.  

Newly opened documents flesh out the problems that Britain faced trying to manage Palestine just after World War II. Yes, the British’s interest in ruling the former Ottoman territory after World War I flowed in part from the oil of the Mideast. There were also Brits who led them into the snake pit with earnest concern for both Arabs (T.E. Lawrence) and Jews (Alfred Balfour). But it is one of those episodes that from hindsight looks so obviously to have been a predictable quagmire. What were they thinking?

Zionists, especially, were so understandably militant due to the  holocaust that no patience was possible toward British aims to balance the population in Palestine between Arabs and Jews. I remember reading Golda Meir’s autobiography and her conviction at the time that no one in the world cared for these European refugees except the yishuv of Palestine.

The new documents show Britain officials agonizing as much about their own image as about the plight of the victimized Jews of Europe when a renegade ship called the Exodus, overloaded with those European Jews, tried to break through with this cargo of huddled masses the British embargo on any additional immigrants to Palestine.

The Exodus’ ordeal focused world attention on the British blockade of Palestine and the plight of Jews fleeing Europe after World War II.

The documents show that diplomats and military officers knew that sending Jews back to Germany and putting them in camps so soon after the Holocaust would set off protests.

Although the British worried about effects of these acts on worldwide p.r., I wonder instead what role these episodes played in propelling militant zionists such as the Irgun who would embrace terrorist tactics and kill Brits and Arabs in Palestine until the British left on May 14, 1948.

Does the Torah, like the Old Testament, also contain that passage about sowing the wind?

Trackback URI | Comments RSS