Palestine and the Second World War
see Chapter 7
On 30 January 1933 Adolf Hitler was sworn in as Germany's new chancellor. In July 1935 Hitler's government passed the Nuremberg Laws on racial purity, laying the foundation for legal and institutionalized anti-Semitism.
On 9 November 1938, in a night of terror, the Nazis destroyed synagogues, Jewish businesses and Jewish property throughout Germany in what became known as the Kristallnacht. On 30 January 1939, on the sixth anniversary of his rise to power, Hitler made a speech predicting the destruction of European Jewry should war be ‘forced' upon him. On 1 September 1939, this war began.see Chapter 8
The political changes in Germany and the outbreak of the Second World War profoundly influenced the dynamics of the conflict in Palestine. Between 1933 and 1936, 164,000 Jews, predominantly from Germany and Austria, immigrated
to Palestine, virtually doubling the Jewish population. Unlike the First Aliyah of Zionist idealists and the Second and Third Aliyot of socialist agriculturalists, this Fifth Aliyah was predominantly middle class, bourgeois and urban. The new immigrants did not flock to outlying settlements, but instead settled in the cities of Tel Aviv and Haifa, where they expanded the yishuv s commercial and industrial sectors.
yishuv (Hebrew: settlement)
The Jewish settlement in Palestine before the establishment of the State of Israel.
While these new immigrants strengthened the Zionist state-building project, they also presented a challenge to its homogeneity. Up until this point the yishuv had been composed of mainly Eastern Europeans from working-class backgrounds. Now Jewish society in Palestine saw its first class differences as well as the introduction of a different set of cultural values and references.
The need to take in the steady stream of refugees from Europe placed Zionist leaders in an awkward position once the 1939 White Paper had been issued.
On the one hand, they had to do everything to help European Jews immigrate to Palestine, if need be illegally and in open defiance of the British. On the other hand, they had to do everything they could to support the British war effort against Germany. Indeed, with respect to the latter, an estimated 136,000 Palestinian Jews volunteered for service with the British during the course of the war, including some 4,000 women.British policy in Palestine during the war was guided by broader strategic considerations. British troops were fighting Germany in Europe and in North Africa as well as having to keep an eye on Germany's Vichy French ally who had taken over the mandate in Lebanon and Syria. What they could not afford at this time was further troops being tied down in Palestine through an Arab uprising and the only way to prevent this was strictly to enforce the limits on Jewish immigration and land purchases.
Vichy France
The regime led by Marshal Petain that surrendered to Hitler's Germany in June 1940 and subsequently controlled France until liberation in 1944.
Faced with concerted Jewish efforts to bring in refugees at all costs, this put the Zionists in a difficult situation, leading to incidents such as the sinking of the Struma in February 1941. The Struma was a decrepit cattle boat converted to bring Jewish refugees escaping the Holocaust to Palestine. It had been anchored off the Turkish coast while British and Zionist officials argued over its fate. Before any agreement could be reached, an unexplained explosion sank the boat, killing 768 Jewish refugees. This, however, did not deter the British from continuing their naval blockade, nor did it deter Jewish refugees from trying to enter Palestine.
In 1939 an average of 2,371 legal and illegal immigrants entered Palestine each month. The British reaction in October 1940 was to suspend even the quota allowed under the White Paper, to tighten the blockade, to confiscate ships, to prevent others from sailing or to divert them to ports in Cyprus and even to deport refugees who had entered illegally.
As the Nazis extended their control, effectively closing the avenues of flight, the number of Jews escaping from Europe to Palestine dwindled to 500 per month in 1941 and 300 in 1942, but increased again towards the end of the war with the liberation of the concentration camps. In 1945, at the conclusion of the war, the population of the yishuv had increased to 554,000, including 115,000 Jewish refugees who had entered illegally.While the Jews were trying to balance their position vis-à-vis the British, some Palestinian leaders saw the war as an opportunity to free themselves from British colonial control. For instance, the mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Husayni, who had already overplayed his hand with the British during the Arab Revolt, now made contacts with the Axis Powers from his exile in Iraq. He believed that a German victory would not only free Palestine from both the British and the Zionists, but also lead to independence. The Germans conversely saw the mufti as a vehicle for undermining Britain's position in the Middle East, particularly in Iraq, as well as for recruiting Bosnian Muslims into the SS. The British reaction to Hajj Amin's collaboration with the Nazis was as forceful as their attitude towards Jewish immigration. Failing to capture the mufti himself, the British mandate authorities in Palestine sentenced to death thirty-nine Palestinian nationalists between November 1939 and June 1940. Every single one of them was either a personal or family friend of the mufti.
The combined Arab and Zionist challenge to British policy, the latter of which increasingly included paramilitary attacks from the Irgun and Stern Gang, as well as the fact that Britain's priority lay in Europe, led to the loosening of British control over Palestine. This trend was reinforced by the end of the war and changes in the international balance of power, most notably the decline of the British Empire and the rise of the United States. At the same time American decisionmakers had also started to become the target of Zionist lobbying.
In May 1942, the American Zionist network issued the Biltmore Program which called for a Jewish state in Palestine. The programme did not find immediate support in the Roosevelt administration, which was preoccupied with the war in Europe and worried about Arab oil supplies. It was, however, eventually adopted by both key parties in the 1944 presidential elections owing to the first recorded lobbying pressure that directly linked Jewish votes to support for the Zionist project. Both Democrats and Republicans thus endorsed the quest for a Jewish state, laying the foundation for future American policy. The support of the United States was further strengthened through the wave of revulsion which swept the population upon the liberation of the concentration camps and the revelation of the full details of the Holocaust. The extermination of 5.6—6.9 million Jews not only made the Zionist movement more determined than ever to achieve its goal, but also engendered widespread international sympathy for its cause. Interestingly, the establishment of a Jewish state was not only seen as a morally just cause, but was also, in a more practical sense, perceived as a partial solution to the much broader European refugee problem and was recommended as such by the 1946 Anglo- American Commission of Inquiry.