By the beginning of 1942 the Germans had close to 9 million Jews under their control (out of a total of 11 million Jews living in Europe and the Soviet Union). And, of course, it was their plan to murder them all.

Already, the Einsatzgruppen killing squads had machine-gunned 1.5 million Jews, (as we saw in Part 60) but this was not an efficient way of killing so many more millions of people -- it was too messy, too slow, and it wasted too many bullets.

So the Germans embarked on a policy called the "Final Solution" which was decided upon at a conference held in Wannsee, near Berlin, on January 20, 1942:

"Instead of immigration there is now a further possible solution to which the Fuhrer has already signified his consent. Namely deportation to the East. Although this should be regarded merely as an interim measure, it will provide us with the practical experience which will be especially valuable in connection with the future final solution. In the course of the practical implementation of the final solution Europe will be combed from West to East."

DEATH CAMPS

The Final Solution -- the systematic gassing of millions of Jews -- was put into place primarily by the top Gestapo brass, namely Adolph Eichmann and Reinhardt Heidrich.

Of the 24 concentration camps (besides countless labor camps), six specific death camps were set up. They were:

Auschwitz is the most famous because there the killing machine was the most efficient. There, between 1941 and 1944, 12,000 Jews a day were gassed to death. In addition to the Jews, hundreds of thousands of others deemed threats to the Nazi regime or considered racially inferior or socially deviant were also murdered.

As if cold-blooded murder of millions of Jews was not enough, it was done with extreme, perverse cruelty. The victims were packed into cattle trains with standing-room only and without food or water, or heat in the winter, or toilet facilities. Many did not arrive at the camps alive. Those who did arrive at their destination had their heads shaved, with the hair to be used for stuffing mattresses. Stripped of all clothing, most were herded naked into the gas chambers.

Bizarre and sadistic "medical experiments" were done on many victims without the use of anesthetics. Some people were sewn together to make artificial Siamese twins. Others were submerged in freezing water to test the limits of human endurance.

The Jews were even debased in death. Gold fillings were torn from the mouths of the corpses. In some instances soap was made from their rendered bodies and lampshades from their skins.

Some of those deemed strong enough were used as slave labor for the Nazi war effort. On starvation rations, they were pushed to their physical limit and then killed or sent to the death camps.

RESISTANCE EFFORTS

Any attempt at escape or resistance was met with brutal reprisals. For example, on March 14,1942 a number of Jews escaped from a work detail in Ilja, Ukraine, and joined the partisans. In revenge, all old and sick Jews were shot in the street and 900 more herded into a building and burned alive.

Sam Halpern, a survivor of the Kamionka labor camp explained: "I would never consider escaping. I will not have others killed because of my decision."

Nevertheless, in at least five camps and twenty ghettos, there were uprisings.

The most famous attempt was the Warsaw Ghetto rebellion. On April 19, 1943 the Nazis began the liquidation of the ghetto -- that is, shipping off Jews to Auschwitz -- and were met with armed resistance.

Mordechai Anielewicz, the 23-year-old leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, wrote in his last letter (dated April 23, 1943):

"What happened is beyond our wildest dreams. Twice the Germans fled from our ghetto. One of our companies held out for forty minutes and the other, for over six hours ... I have no words to describe to you the conditions in which Jews are living. Only a few chosen ones will hold out; all the rest will perish sooner or later. The die is cast. In the bunkers in which our comrades are hiding, no candle can be lit for lack of air ... The main thing is: My life's dream has come true; I have lived to see Jewish resistance in the ghetto in all its greatness and glory."

But in the end, the Jews were no match for the artillery, machine guns, and troops of the Germans. (Compare 1,358 German rifles against 17 among the Jews). The end result was that the entire ghetto was destroyed with those hiding in bunkers burned alive.

UNPRECEDENTED

The Nazi attempt to deliberately, systematically eliminate an entire people from the planet was unprecedented in human history.

Hitler targeted the Jews for a specific reason, which was not just racial. The elimination of the Jews had a unique "status" in Hitler's master plan. While he certainly killed millions of others (gypsies, homosexuals, etc.) he made exceptions for all these groups. The only group for which no exception was made was the Jews -- they all had to die.

Writes Lucy Dawidowicz in the War Against the Jews:

"The final solution transcended the bounds of modern historical experience. Never before in modern history had one people made the killing of another the fulfillment of an ideology, in whose pursuit means were identical with ends. History has, to be sure, recorded terrible massacres and destructions that one people perpetrated against another. But all, however cruel and unjustifiable, were intended to achieve an instrumental ends, being means to ends and not ends in and of themselves."

In other words, the elimination of the Jews was not the means to an end. It was an end in itself. What that end was Hitler explained himself in his writings and speeches.

Hitler believed that before monotheism and the Jewish ethical vision came along, the world operated according to the laws of nature and evolution: survival of the fittest. The strong survived and the weak perished. But in a world operating according to a Divinely-dictated ethical system -- where a God-given standard applies and not anyone's might -- the weak did not need to fear the strong. As Hitler saw it, the strong were emasculated and he blamed the Jews for this.

His plan was to take over the world and set up a barbarian master race - a plan that he came very close to executing. But to do so, he had to get rid of the Jews first. As he said:

"The Ten Commandments have lost their validity... Conscience is a Jewish invention. It is a blemish like circumcision ... The struggle for world domination is fought entirely between us, between the Germans and the Jews."

(See Hermann Rauschning, Hitler Speaks, pp. 220, 242.)

Everything in his war machine was set up for this purpose. At the very end, when the Allies were destroying the German Army, he was not so much bothered by this as he was by the fact that there were Jews still alive.

He diverted trains that were badly needed to transport more soldiers to the Russian front, where he was losing the war, just to send more Jews to Auschwitz. To him, the greater enemy was the Jew.

The last thing he said before committing suicide in his bunker in April 30, 1945 was to urge that the fight continue against the enemy of all humanity -- the Jews. His last dispatch read:

"Above all, I enjoin the leaders of the nation and those under them to uphold the racial laws of their full extent and to oppose mercilessly the universal poisoner of all peoples, International Jewry."

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

It is important to note here that the anti-Semitism which drove the Nazis to understate the unthinkable did not exist in isolation. It was not even Hitler's personal philosophy.

We might recall (see Part 53) that it was one of Germany's biggest thinkers of the 19th century -- Wilhelm Marr -- who coined the term "anti-Semitism." In so doing he wanted to distinguish hatred of the Jews as members of a religion (anti-Judaism) from hatred of the Jews as members of a race/nation (anti-Semitism). In 1879, he wrote a book called The Victory of Judaism over Germandom, a runaway best-seller; in it Marr warned:

"There is no stopping them [the Jews]. Are there no clear signs that the twilight of the Jews is setting in? No. Jewry's control of society and politics as well as its domination of religious and ecclesiastical thought is still in the prime of its development. Yes, through the Jewish nation Germany will become a world power, a western new Palestine. And this will happen not through violent revolution but through the compliance of the people. We should not reproach the Jewish nation. It fought against the western world for 1,800 years and finally conquered it. We were vanquished. The Jews were late in their assault on Germany but once started there was no stopping them ...

 

"I am marshalling my last remaining strength in order to die peacefully as one who will not surrender and who will not ask for forgiveness. The historical fact that Israel became the leading social political superpower in the 19th century lies before us. We have amongst us a flexible, tenacious, intelligent foreign tribe that knows how to bring abstract reality into play in many different ways. Not individual Jews but the Jewish spirit and Jewish consciousness have overpowered the world. All this is the consequence of a cultural history so unique in its way, so grand that every day polemic can achieve nothing against it. With the entire force of its armies the proud Roman Empire did not achieve that which Semitism has achieved in the West and particularly in Germany."

Keep in mind that when Marr wrote these words, the State of Israel did not exist, nor was there even a hint in the geo-political situation that it might come into being anytime soon. Marr, in speaking of the Jewish national threat, was speaking about the great ideological struggle of Jewish worldview versus paganism, which had been playing out throughout Jewish history. We saw it between the Greeks and the Jews (Part 27) and between the Romans and the Jews (Part 33).

Hitler saw it as continuing between the Germans and the Jews.

LIGHT UNTO THE NATIONS

Hitler's understanding of the role of the Jews in the world was not warped. His was, in fact, the traditional Jewish understanding. When the Jews accepted the Torah at Mt. Sinai, they became the chosen people whose role and responsibility was to bring a God-given code of morality to the world. They were to be "the light unto the nations" in the words of prophet Isaiah.

And this is what Hitler wanted to bring an end to, because as long as there were even a few Jews left on earth, they were going to continue that God-given mission:

"If only one country, for whatever reason, tolerates a Jewish family in it, that family will become the germ center for fresh sedition. If one little Jewish boy survives without any Jewish education, with no synagogue and no Hebrew school, it [Judaism] is in his soul. Even if there had never been a synagogue or a Jewish school or an Old Testament, the Jewish spirit would still exist and exert its influence. It has been there from the beginning and there is no Jew, not a single one, who does not personify it."

 

(Hitler's Apocalypse by Robert Wistrich, p. 122.)

When we look at it from that perspective we get a completely different view of what the Holocaust was about. Traditional Judaism says that it is part of the ultimate struggle between good and evil which had been going on since the beginning of time.

LIBERATION

In the end, Hitler did not succeed in his plan to completely eliminate the Jews. He succeeded however in murdering over one third of the world's Jewish population and teaching the world the meaning of evil.

When the Allied armies (Russians from the east and the Americans and British from the west) liberated the camps at the close of the war, they were met with scenes of unspeakable horror.

The films made by the Allied forces upon entering the camps were so horrible that they were not publicly shown for many years.

Liberation did not end the deaths of Jews.

In spite of Allied efforts to save them, many victims perished after liberation from weakness and illness. In the Belson camp, 13,000 died after the British liberators arrived.

Some who did survive met death at the hands of non-Jewish partisans or peasants when they left the camps. Some tried to reach their old homes, but found nothing left or that they now had new tenants who were very opposed to the return of the original owners.

The death total was unimaginable.

Intentionally using minimum figures and probable underestimates, Sir Martin Gilbert (in his work The Holocaust) finds that at least 5,950,000 Jews were murdered between 1939 and 1945.

This figure represents nearly half of the entire Jewish population of Europe.

Eastern European Jewry had been virtually wiped out.

But while the Holocaust brought an end to the Jewish community of Eastern Europe, it brought about - in an indirect way - the rebirth of the Land of Israel, as a Jewish state for the first time in 2,000 years. How it became the great refuge for the Jews in the modern period we will take up in the next installment.

To learn more about the Holocaust, go to: http://www.aish.com/holocaust/

NEXT: RETURN TO THE LAND OF ISRAEL

The yearning for the land of Israel never left the Jewish people.

In other words, the land of Israel was always a place in the minds of the Jews where the Jewish national potential could someday be fulfilled.

But, as a practical reality, this did not begin to happen in a significant way until the birth of modern Zionism, not as a religious, but as a political movement.

The re-birth of Israel is an unprecedented phenomenon in human history. That a people should go into exile, be dispersed, and yet survive for 2,000 years, that they should be a nation without a national homeland and come back again, that they should re-establish that homeland is a miraculous, singular event. No one ever did such a thing.

BRIEF OVERVIEW

Before we discuss the Jews' return to their homeland, let us then look back at history and review briefly what had been happening in the Land of Israel from the time that the Temple was destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE, (See Parts 35 thru 37.)

Subsequently, Jerusalem was leveled, rebuilt on the Roman model, and re-named Aeolia Capitolina. The land of Israel was re-named Palestine (after the extinct Phillistines, some of the worst enemies of the Jews in ancient times).

From that time, Jews were barred from Jerusalem. The Byzantine Empire (the Constantinople-based Christian version of the Roman Empire) continued the earlier policy, and Jews were not allowed into Jerusalem until the Muslims conquered the Byzantines in 638 CE. (See Part 42.)

Once the Muslims took over the Land of Israel, they held onto it with the brief exception of the period of the Crusades. (See Part 45.)

The Turkish Ottoman Empire held onto power here the longest: from 1518 to 1917. Yet, during all this time, the Muslims generally treated the Holy Land as a backwater province. There was virtually no attempt to make Jerusalem, which was quite run-down, an important capital city nor to improve its infrastructure (save for the re-building of the walls of the city in 16th century during the reign of Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent.) Similarly, only limited building went on in the rest of the land, which was barren and not populated by many Arabs. The only major new city built was Ramle, which served as the Ottoman administrative center.

Mark Twain who visited Israel in 1867 described it like this in Innocents Abroad:

We traversed some miles of desolate country whose soil is rich enough but is given wholly to weeds - a silent, mournful expanse... A desolation is here that not even imagination can grace with the pomp of life and action. We reached Tabor safely... We never saw a human being on the whole route. We pressed on toward the goal of our crusade, renowned Jerusalem. The further we went the hotter the sun got and the more rocky and bare, repulsive and dreary the landscape became... There was hardly a tree or a shrub anywhere. Even the olive and the cactus, those fast friends of a worthless soil, had almost deserted the country. No landscape exists that is more tiresome to the eye than that which bounds the approaches to Jerusalem... Jerusalem is mournful, dreary and lifeless. I would not desire to live here. It is a hopeless, dreary, heartbroken land... Palestine sits in sackcloth and ashes."

EARLY MIGRATIONS

During the time of the Muslims, life for the Jews here was for the most part easier than under the Christians.

In 1210, following the demise of the Crusaders, several hundred rabbis, known as the Ba'alei Tosefot, re-settled in Israel. This marked the emergence of the first Ashkenazic European community in Israel.

In 1263, the great philosopher Nachmanides also known as the Ramban, established a small Sephardic community on Mount Zion which was outside the walls. (See Part 47.) Later, in the 1400s, that community moved inside the walls and they established the Ramban Synagogue which still exists today.

When Nachmanides came to Jerusalem there was already a vibrant Jewish community in Hebron, though the Muslims did not permit them entry into the Cave of the Machpela (where the Jewish Patriarchs and Matriarchs are buried). Indeed, this ban continued until the 20th century.

More Jews started to migrate to Israel following their expulsion from Spain in 1492. In the 16th century, large numbers of Jews migrated to the northern city of Tzfat (also known as Safed) and it became the center of Jewish mysticism -- the Kabbalah.

In mid-1700s a student of the Ba'al Shem Tov by the name of Gershon Kitover started the first Hassidic community in Israel. This community was part of what was called Old Yishuv. (Today, when in the Old City of Jerusalem, you can visit the "Old Yishuv Court Museum" and learn some fascinating facts about it.)

By 1880, there were about 40,000 Jews, living in the land of Israel among some 400,000 Muslims.

One of the major figures of this time period was Moses Montefiore (1784 to 1887) -- the first Jew to be knighted in Britain.

Montefiore had made his fortune with the Rothschilds, who struck it rich in the Napoleonic Wars. They used carrier pigeons and they knew about the victory at Waterloo before anyone else; this is how they made a killing on the English stock market.

With his fortune made by age 40, Montefiore embarked on a career in philanthropy, becoming a tireless worker for the Jewish community of Israel.

At that time, most of the Jews then lived in what is now called the Old City of Jerusalem, specifically in what is now called the "Moslem Quarter." The main entrance to the city for the Jews was through Damascus Gate and of the many synagogues in Jerusalem, most of them were in the "Moslem Quarter" close to the site where the Temple stood on Mount Moriah.

The city was hugely overcrowded and sanitary conditions were terrible, but due to the lawlessness of that time, people were afraid to built homes and live outside.

Montefiore built the first settlement outside the walls of the Old City, called "Yemin Moshe" in 1858. He opened the door and more neighborhoods were built in the New City. One of the earliest ones, built in 1875, was Mea Shearim (which, contrary to popular opinion does not mean "Hundred Gates" but "Hundredfold" as in Genesis 26:12.)

Besides Montefiore, another extremely important personality in this period of time was Baron Edmond de Rothschild (1845 to 1934).

Rothschild was a man who more than anyone else, financially made the re-settlement of Jews in the land of Israel possible. During his lifetime he spent 70 million francs of his own money on various agricultural settlements and business enterprises such as the Carmel Winery for example. So important and generous was Rothschild that he was nicknamed HaNadiv HaYaduah, "The Famous Contributor."

Although Rothschild was quite assimilated and disconnected from the Jewish yearning for the land, he was greatly influenced by Rabbi Shmuel Mohilever, who was one of the first religious Zionists from Poland.

Mohilever converted Rothschild to his ideology and from that point on the rich banker began to look at Israel as an "investment." He made it possible for thousands of Jews to return to the land and survive here in those days.

EARLY POLITICAL ZIONISM

We do not see the appearance of political Zionism until late in the 19th century as a reaction to the intolerable persecution of the Jews of Russia.

The early political Zionists, being largely secular, did not feel a special yearning for Israel rooted in tradition or religion, rather they felt that the Land of Israel was the only place where Jews could create a national identity, regain their pride and productivity, and hopefully escape the horrible anti-Semitism of Czarist Russia and other places.

One of the main organizations involved in early political Zionism was called Hibbat Zion "the love of Zion" founded in 1870. (Its members were called Hovevei Zion, "lovers of Zion.")

A major personality among the Hovevi Zion was Judah Leob Pinsker (1821-1891). A Polish doctor, Pinsker started out as one of the Maskilim, a group which wanted their fellow Jews to drop Judaism and merge with Russian culture in the hope that if Jews were socially accepted, then Russian anti-Semitism would disappear. (See Part 56.) But after the pogroms following the assassination of Czar Alexander in 1881, he and many other of the Maskilim came to the conclusion that their efforts were futile and anti-Semitism was never going to disappear. Like Theodor Herzl later, Pinsker was shocked at the depth of European anti-Semitism. The only solution, he came to believe, was for Jews to live in their own national homeland.

Pinsker published his ideas in a pamphlet called "Auto-Emancipation." In it he penned these memorable words:

"We must reconcile ourselves to the idea that the other nations, by reason of their inherent natural antagonism, will forever reject us."

FIRST ALIYAH

In 1882, another important organization was formed in Russia. It was called Bilu, an acronym of the opening words from verse in Isaiah (2:5): Beit Yaacov lechu Venelech meaning, "House of Jacob, come, let us go...

Bilu was very active in the early settlement movement, what came to be called the "First Aliyah" -- the first large migration of Jews from Russia to the Land of Israel.

Aliyah means "ascent." To migrate to Israel -- to make aliyah -- means to come from a low place and to "go up."

The year 1882 marked the first such aliyah, when Jews began to arrive in the land of Israel in droves -- some 30,000 Jews came in two waves between 1882-1891 and founded 28 new settlements.

(Among these new settlements was Hadera, which has been so much in the news lately as the repeated target of vicious terrorist attacks.)

Hundreds of thousands of acres were purchased by these early Zionists from absentee Arab landowners who usually lived elsewhere in the Middle East. The majority of the lands purchased were in areas that were neglected and considered un-developable -- such as the sandy coastal plain or the swampy Hula Valley in the north. Amazingly, and with much effort, these early settlers made the barren land bloom again.

What drove many of these early immigrants was an idealism that was captured by Zev Dugnov, a member of Bilu:

"My final purpose is to take possession of Palestine and to restore to the Jews the political independence for which they have now been denied for two thousand years. Don't laugh. It is not a mirage. It does not matter if that splendid day will come in 50-years' time or more. A period of 50 years is no more than a moment of time for such an undertaking."

In fact, it would take 66 years. Meanwhile, Jews would continue to come, reclaim the land and build a strong political movement demanding back their ancient homeland.

NEXT: MODERN ZIONISM

We cannot study Zionism without studying Theodor Benyamin Ze'ev Herzl (1860-1904).

We already saw in Part 59, as a correspondent during the Alfred Dreyfus affair, he was shocked to hear the civilized French screaming "Death to the Jews!" He determined then and there that the solution to anti-Semitism was the establishment of a Jewish national state. He wrote a book about it, entitled Der Judenstaat ("The Jewish State") in which he described his vision for a Jewish homeland.

Although Zionism was not his invention, Herzl became the driving force of the movement. There were several factors that made him the ideal leader:

In 1897, on August 29th, Herzl convened the First Zionist Conference in Basel, Switzerland. Present were 197 delegates from 16 countries who formed the initial Zionist policy. This gathering proved a major event in the establishment of the modern State of Israel.

Afterward Herzl wrote in his diary:

"Were I to sum up the Basel Congress in one word which I shall guard against pronouncing publicly, it would be this: At Basel I founded the Jewish State. Perhaps in five years but certainly in 50 everyone will know it."

 

(See The Siege by Connor Cruise O'Brian.)

In fact, the State of Israel was declared on May 14, 1948 - 50 years and 9 months later.

Unfortunately, Herzl did not see it happen. He died at age 44 of a heart attack following the stormy controversy involving the proposal that the Jewish people make their home in Uganda. Herzl, who had provisionally supported the idea, settled the controversy convincing his detractors that he had remained faithful to Jewish settlement in the Land of Israel. Thus, he safeguarded the unity of the Zionist movement, but his weak heart gave out in the process.

Herzl's is a tragic story. He died having given his life for the cause and he died bankrupt having spent all his money on his cause.

Perhaps the saddest thing is that he left no descendants to carry on after him. His wife Julia, who was not Jewish, tried to carry on, but she died at age 35. Of his three children - Pauline, Hans and Trude -- all died tragically. Pauline became a drug addict and died in France. Hans, after becoming Catholic, shot himself on the day of Pauline's funeral. Trude Margarethe died at Theresienstadt at the hands of the Nazis. Herzl's only grandchild, Stephen Theodor (Trude's son), changed his name to Norman and committed suicide by jumping from a bridge into a river in America.

Herzl was buried in Europe, but after the state of Israel was declared, his body was disinterred and brought to Israel. He is buried in Jerusalem in a cemetery now known as Mount Herzl, where various heads of state and military heroes are also buried.

KEY PERSONALITIES

Of the key personalities at this time, we must mention three:

Weizmann was a Russian-born chemist, who early on in his youth became associated with the group Hovevei Zion ("Lovers of Zion"). After Herzl's death in 1904 he became the de facto leader of the Zionist Movement.

Interestingly, Weizmann invented artificial acetone, the chief ingredient in gunpowder, in 1915 in the middle of World War I. His invention enabled the British to mass-produce gunpowder for the war effort.

Because of this, he became friendly with Arthur Balfour, the foreign secretary of England. Balfour, who in 1917 promised British support for a national homeland for Jews in Palestine, said that acetone converted him to Zionism. (We will discuss the Balfour Declaration in the next installment.)

David Ben-Gurion was born David Gruen in Plonsk, Poland. A very significant personality, he was small in stature but a real powerhouse. Although he came from a religious family which was fervently Zionistic, early on he abandoned his religious roots.

Ben-Gurion arrived in Israel in 1906 at age 20, working in the orange groves and in the wine cellars of the early settlements. He was active in the Po'alei Zion ("Workers of Zion"), but he took some controversial positions in his party -- such as that immigrants and settlers have the right to manage their own affairs without interference from the Diaspora, that immigrating to Israel was the obligation of every party member, and that Hebrew be the sole language of his party.

In that time, the land of Israel was still under the control of the Ottoman Empire and Ben-Gurion, who studied law in Constantinople for a while, favored loyalty to Turkey and adoption of Ottoman citizenship for Jews. However, when World War I broke out and the Turks began to persecute Zionists, he ran into trouble with the authorities and was exiled. He went to New York where he founded the Ahdut ha-Avodah ("United Labor Party").

(The second part of Ben-Gurion's story -- when he returned to Israel to become the head of the Jewish Agency in 1935 and then the first Prime Minister of Israel in 1948 -- will be covered in the next installment.)

The third key personality was Asher Hersh Ginsberg, whose pen name was Ahad HaAm. He was originally one of the Maskilim who became disillusioned with their plan to acculturate the Jews to Eastern European society. He became the great intellectual leader of the early Zionist movement. His vision for the Jewish state was not as a refuge for the oppressed Jewry of the world, but rather a place where the modern Jew could create a new secular, progressive, "enlightened" state which would become the center of a new modern Jewish culture.

In 1897, he wrote in The Jewish State and The Jewish:

"This Jewish settlement, which will be a gradual growth, will become in course of time the center of the nation, wherein its spirit will find pure expression and develop in all its aspects to the highest degree of perfection of which it is capable. Then, from this center the spirit of Judaism will radiate to the great circumference, to all the communities of the Diaspora, to inspire them with new life and to preserve the over-all unity of our people. When our national culture in Palestine has attained that level, we may be confident that it will produce men in the Land of itself who will be able, at a favorable moment, to establish a State there -- one which will be not merely a State of Jews but really a Jewish State."

Ginsberg personified the dominant element in the Zionist movement -- enlightened Jews who started out wanting to solve the problem of anti-Semitism by helping Jews to assimilate. Only later, when they found their efforts were futile -- in the face of terrible persecution which did not let up no matter how much the Jews tried to blend in -- did they turn to working for a Jewish homeland.

The key factor which shaped their worldview was a nationalism based not only on the notion of creating a physical Jewish homeland, but also of creating a new kind of Jew to build and maintain this homeland. Many of these early Zionist thinkers felt that centuries of ghettoization and persecution had robbed the Jews of their pride and strength. To build a homeland required a proud, self-sufficient Jew: a Jew who could farm, defend himself, and build the land.

The pious, poor, ghettoized Jew -- who presented a pathetic image of a man stooped-over and always at the mercy of his persecutors -- had to be done away with. To build a state required something all-together different -- a "Hebrew." The early Zionists called themselves "Hebrews" and not Jews, and deliberately changed their German or Russian or Yiddish names to sound more Hebraic and nationalistic (for example, David Gruen became David Ben-Gurion).

These early Zionist leaders knew of course that religion had preserved Jewish identity in the ghettos and shtetls of Europe, but in the modern Jewish state, they felt there would be no need for it.

REACTION TO ZIONISM

This attitude was part of the reason why many rabbinic leaders were opposed to Zionism. They were reacting to the antagonism toward religion by the early secular Zionists and to the idea of a state devoid of religious values.

Rabbi Tzadik Hacohen Rabinowitz, who was known as the Tzadik of Lublin (1823 to 1900) typified this view:

"We surely know that if we were believers and truly trusted in the salvation of the Lord and were observers of the commandments of God, we would even today be dwelling in our Holy Land. Why did the Land perish? 'Because they abandoned My laws which I put before them.' It has already been made clear that the Zionists reject all the commandments and cleave to every manner of abomination. It may be assumed that if the Zionists gain domination they will seek to remove from the hearts of Israel, belief in God and in the truth of Torah. They have thrown off their garments of assimilation and put on a cloak of zeal so that they appear zealous on the behalf of Judaism. They are in fact digging a mine beneath our faith and seeking to lead Israel from beneath the wings of the Shechina, the Divine Presence."

Not all Orthodox Jews shared this attitude. There were many religious Zionists who were some of the fiercest fighters for returning to the land.

As we saw in Part 62, it was Rabbi Shmuel Mohilever, one of the first religious Zionists from Poland, who heavily influenced Baron de Rothschild in supporting early settlements.

Another key figure was the Kabbalist Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, who saw God's hand in the foundations laid by the secular Zionists and endeavored to work with them. He wrote the famous Orot ("Lights") about the holiness of the newborn nationalism. In 1921, he became the chief rabbi of Palestine.

Reform Jews in America and Germany were very much opposed to Zionism.

German Reform Jews said: "The hope for national restoration [to Israel] contradicts our feelings for the fatherland [Germany]." And American Reform Jews said: "We consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community, and therefore expect neither a return to Palestine... nor the restoration of any of the laws concerning the Jewish state..." (See Parts 54 and 58 for more on this subject.)

SECOND AND THIRD ALIYAH

Still, whatever the reaction of the Jewish world at large, Jews kept returning to Israel.

In the last installment we covered the first aliyah -- "ascent to the land" -- which brought 30,000 Jews to Israel between 1882 and 1891.

The second aliyah -- following the Kishinev Progrom on Easter 1903 (see Part 57) and following the first aborted Russian Revolution of 1905 -- brought another 40,000 Jews to Israel between 1904 and 1914.

The third aliyah -- following World War I and the Russian Revolution -- brought another 35,000 (between 1919 and 1923).

By this time, the dream of a Jewish homeland was no longer just a dream. It was becoming a reality as the victorious Allied Forces conquered the Ottoman Empire (which had picked the losing side in World War I) and the British took over control of the Middle East.

NEXT: THE BRITISH MANDATE

World War I changed the map of the world.

World War I, a huge conflict waged over four years (1914-1918) pitted the Allies (chiefly France, Britain, Russia, and the U.S.) and the Central Powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Turkish Ottoman Empire) against each other. The end result of their struggle was very dramatic:

BALFOUR DECLARATION

The French Mandate included the northern part of the Ottoman Empire. The British Mandate included the southern and eastern part of the Ottoman Empire.

It is important to keep in mind that the Ottoman Empire controlled the Middle East from the 16th to the 20th century -- for some 400 years. During this time, the countries of Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, etc. did not exist. The residents in these areas were predominately Arab subjects of the Ottoman Empire, living in loosely organized tribal communities.

The British Mandate included the landmass on the West Bank of the Jordan River all the way to the Mediterranean Sea, as well as the landmass on the East Bank of the Jordan River, an area known as Trans-Jordan. The British called this whole huge area "Palestine."

(As we might recall from Part 38, the name Palestine for the land of Israel had been coined by the Romans after their destruction of Jerusalem, which they re-named Aelia Capitolina.)

When the British took over the land of Israel, suddenly the dream of a homeland for the Jews became a real possibility as opposed to a fervent hope.

By this time, there were between 85,000 to 100,000 Jews living in the Land of Israel, of a total population of 600,000. (See History of the Jews by Paul Johnson, p. 430.) Most of the Arabs living in the land had migrated there only in the previous thirty years attracted by the jobs created by the Jews who were building and farming. (Note that when Jews began to immigrate to Palestine in large numbers in 1882, fewer than 250,000 Arabs lived there. See From Time Immemorial by Joan Peters, p. 244)

A big boost for a Jewish homeland came from Earl Arthur Balfour (1848-1930), then foreign secretary, who in 1917 promised British support for the cause.

As we might recall from Part 63, Balfour became a friend of the Jewish cause in some measure because of Chaim Weizmann whose invention of artificial acetone, the chief ingredient in gunpowder, enabled the British to mass-produce gunpowder for the war effort. Balfour said that acetone converted him to Zionism.

A fascinating conversation is recorded between Balfour and Weizmann in 1906, with Balfour arguing that the Jews should consider the offer made by the British some three years earlier to take Uganda instead of Israel:

In reaction, Weizmann said to Balfour, "Would you take Paris over London?"

 

Balfour replied, "But we already have London." (He meant, of course, Jews should take whatever they can get; beggars can't be choosers.)

At which point Weizmann came back with, "Mr. Balfour, the Jews had Jerusalem when London was a marsh."

That gave Balfour pause. "Are there many Jews who think like you?" he asked.

"I believe I speak the mind of millions of Jews whom you will never see and who cannot speak for themselves, but with whom I could pave the streets of the country I come from," Weizmann answered.

"If this is so, you will one day be a force," Balfour concluded.

Balfour's support for a Jewish homeland became known in history as the Balfour Declaration which was issued in the form a letter to Lord Rothschild on November 2nd, 1917. It stated:

"His Majesty's government looks with favor upon the establishment in Palestine of a national homeland for the Jewish people."

But talk is cheap, and when it came to the reality of creating such a state, the British had many other considerations and interests to take into consideration, as we shall see presently.

FAILED PROMISES

Despite the support of certain British political figures, the British Foreign Ministry and others were generally much more pro-Arab, and the British government got busy carving out Arab countries from the lands of the Ottoman Empire.

Through their efforts the country of Iraq was created in 1921. It was a monarchy with Faisal ibn Hussein, the son of Hussein the Sherif of Mecca, as king. Soon thereafter Iraqi oil started to flow to the West.

Iraq has the second largest oil reserves in the world (after Saudi Arabia) and it is no wonder the British were interested in having a bond with this country as well as other oil-rich Arab states.

Another country created by the British was Jordan. In 1927, the British installed Abdullah ibn Hussein, another son of the Sherif of Mecca, as emir of the new country called Trans-Jordan, later Jordan. Jordan was confined to the East Bank of the River Jordan and did not include any part of the West Bank.

Why were the sons of the Sherif of Mecca made rulers of these countries?

The British wanted alliances with all the Arab kingdoms. They had shored up support for the Ibn Saud of the Arabian Peninsula, who had fought the Turks alongside them. Ibn Saud got Saudi Arabia.

But when that happened, the British had to pay off the Hussein Sherif of Mecca, who was in charge of the Islamic holy sites. (The Hussein family are Hashemites, the tribe of Mohammed, the founder of Islam, and have been traditionally the keepers of Holy City of Mecca.)

They had to give him and his children some land, so they gave them Iraq and Trans-Jordan -- the land on the East Bank of the River Jordan.

NO ISRAEL

Yet despite all this country-making, and despite the Balfour Declaration, the British could not get around to creating a country called Israel.

Why not?

There was a clear British bias against the Jews as is readily apparent to anyone who has studied the series of White Papers issued by the British government in the 1920s and 1930s.

The reasons for this bias were:

Meanwhile the poor Jews, not knowing that the British were going to back out of their promise, kept migrating to the land.

The third migration or aliyah (between 1919 and 1923) brought 35,000 Jews to the land. The fourth aliyah (between 1924 and 1928) brought 80,000 Jews to the land. The fifth aliyah (between 1929 and 1939 as Hitler rose to power in Germany) brought 250,000 Jews to the land.

ARAB RIOTS

The Arabs made it clear that they were not going to sit still for a Jewish state. In August of 1929, due to the instigation of the preachers in the mosques, a series of riots broke out in which many Jews were massacred.

The New York Times in its history of Israel (Israel: from Ancient Times to the Modern Nation, pp. 38-39) writes of this time:

"The riots of August, 1929, were ignited in Jerusalem over a rumor spread by Arab leaders that Jews were going to destroy Al-Aqsa Mosque, Islam's third most holy shrine. Fighting soon spread throughout Palestine. The worst massacres were in Hebron, sacred to Jew and Muslim alike, where 67 Orthodox Jews - men, women and children - were slaughtered by Arabs and 50 more wounded. Pierre van Paassen, a reporter, described the horror that he witnessed by lamplight in a Jewish seminary in Hebron: 'The slain students in the yard, the dead men in the synagogue, slashed throats and mutilated bodies.' By the time order was restored 133 Jews had been killed, 399 wounded."

The 1930s saw more rioting and more massacres, especially in Jaffa and again in Hebron.

In response, the British convened the Peel Commission which almost totally did away with the Balfour Declaration that had originally promised a Jewish homeland in Palestine on both sides of the River Jordan.

In July of 1937, the Peel Commission issued a report which said that all the Jews should be confined to a tiny state that would include a sliver of land along the Mediterranean coast and a small piece in the north abutting the west side of the Lake Kineret ("Sea of Galilee").

The Arabs greeted the Peel Commission recommendation with a revolt which lasted until 1939.

The Arab Revolt was led by Haj Amin Husseini, who was originally appointed as the Mufti of Jerusalem by the British. It is interesting to note that in addition to hundreds of Jews who were killed by Arabs, some 3,000 Arabs died in this revolt at the hands of other Arabs and at the hands of the British.

For all the British criticism of Israel today, at that time the British were not shy in their efforts to quell the rioting. They introduced the policy of housing demolition and used artillery to shell rebellious towns.

The revolt was finally crushed and the Mufti fled first to Beirut and later to Europe, where he became an ally of Adolph Hitler, organizing a Bosnian S.S. unit to kill Jews in the Balkans.

After the war he was captured but escaped. He was later involved in fomenting violence, including the assassination of King Abdullah of Jordan in 1951. He was last heard of living as a guest in Saudi Arabia. (Faisal Husseini, who was the PLO's representatives in Jerusalem and who recently died of a heart attack was a relative of his.)

DEATH SENTENCE

The British did not keep the promise contained in the Balfour Declaration and neither did they keep the promise contained in the Peel Commission report.

They did enforce one aspect of the Peel Commission report -- that which limited Jewish migration to the land to only 12,000 a year for the next five years (1939-1943). By doing so the British doomed the Jews under the control of Nazis -- they would no longer be able to find refuge in their homeland.

They did this, knowing full well what the Germans were doing to the Jews -- this was after the Nuremberg Laws and Kristallnacht (see Part 60). And still the British closed an escape route that would have saved millions of Jewish lives.

The Jews were desperate and they tried to come illegally. In response, the British set up a blockade to keep them out.

Many Jews managed to circumvent the blockade and it is estimated that 115,000 Jews got through. But 115,000 is a very small number compared to the 6 million Jews who died in the Holocaust and who could not find refuge in the land of Israel.

JEWISH RESISTANCE

Meanwhile, the mainstream of the Zionist movement in the Land of Israel coalesced into the Jewish Agency, an organization headed by David Ben Gurion. Officially recognized by the British as representing Jewish aspirations, the Jewish Agency tried not to antagonize the British openly.

The Jewish Agency did have an underground military organization called the Haganah, which tried to protect the Jewish settlements from the Arabs (since the British were doing next to nothing in this regard.)

There were other Zionists, who were not part of the Jewish Agency, who felt that the Jewish Agency was too conciliatory to the British. As they saw it, the British had broken promise after promise to the Jews and had openly sided with the Arabs. Therefore, the Jews had to be much more pro-active.

One of those who had a more aggressive attitude was Vladimir Jabotinsky (1880-1940).

Originally from Odessa, Jabotinsky broke away from the mainstream Zionist movement and in 1925 formed the World Union of Zionist Revisionists. This organization from 1936 on urged the evacuation of Eastern European Jews to Palestine. Had their pleas been heeded by the British, many Jews could have been saved from the Holocaust.

At this time Jabotinsky also became the head of the Jewish underground movement called Irgun Tzevai Leumi -- simply known as the Irgun -- founded in 1937.

In 1941, Menachem Begin (1913-1992), who would later become Prime Minister of Israel, arrived from Russia and assumed the leadership of the Irgun, which took a radical approach towards confronting the British and attacking the Arabs, who were responsible for the death of Jews.

Another, even more radical group, was the Lochamei Cherut Yisrael -- better known as Lechi and called by the British the "Stern Gang" after its founder Avraham Stern (1907-1942). The future Prime Minister of Israel, Yitzchak Shamir, was one of the key leaders of Lechi.

As Jewish patience with the British withered after the devastation of the Holocaust, these more radical groups engaged in violent resistance against the British.

For example, the Irgun blew up one wing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in 1946 which at the time was the headquarters of the British authorities in Palestine. Their prior warning was apparently received and ignored. Menachem Begin quotes one British official who supposedly refused to evacuate the building, saying: "We don't take orders from the Jews." As a result, the casualty toll was high: 91 killed and 45 injured. Among the casualties were 15 Jews.

They also hanged two British army officers in retribution for the hanging of Irgun members, and staged a daring break-out of the Acco (Acre) prison where the British held many Jews active in the resistance.

A senior British officer summed up the effects of the Jewish resistance groups:

"The British Army suffered greater losses in traffic accidents than in all the [Jewish] underground operations put together. But the blows to the Empire's pride and prestige were something which could not be digested. The break-in at the Acre Prison and hanging of the two sergeants were blows to our pride. The break-in at the prison gained the symbolic significance of the fall of the Bastille." (To the Promised Land by Uri Dan, p. 120)

But the British still did not give in.

NEXT: THE STATE OF ISRAEL

The British broke promise after promise to the Jews while they created new Arab countries out of the land of the former Ottoman Empire. In addition, because of Arab revolts and pressure, the British even barred entry to the land of Israel to Jews fleeing the Holocaust. (See Part 64.)

Even when the full scope of the Holocaust was known, and thousands of Holocaust survivors were stranded in refugee camps (DP camps), the British refused to relent.

One of the most egregious of the British actions involved the refugee ship, Exodus, which the Royal Navy intercepted in 1947 in the Mediterranean Sea with 4,500 Jews aboard. The ship was brought into Haifa port under British escort; there the Holocaust survivors were forcibly transferred to another ship and returned back to Germany via France.

Abba Eban, who was then the Jewish liason to a special UN committee -- called Special Commmitte On Palestine or UNSCOP -- persuaded four UN representatives to go to Haifa to witness the brutality of the British against the Jews.

Historian Martin Gilbert includes Eban's account of what happened there in Israel: A History (p. 145):

"[In Haifa] the four members watched a 'gruesome operation.' The Jewish refugees had decided 'not to accept banishment with docility. If anyone had wanted to know what Churchill meant by a "squalid war," he would have found out by watching British soldier using rifle butts, hose pipes and tear gas against the survivors of the death camps. Men, women and children were forcibly taken off to prison ships, locked in cages below decks and set out of Palestine waters.'

 

"When the four members of UNSCOP came back to Jerusalem, Eban recalled, 'they were pale with shock. I could see that they were pre-occupied with one point alone: if this was the only way that the British Mandate could continue, it would be better not to continue it at all.'"

UN PARTITION OF PALESTINE

The British also wanted out of the problem. They had 100,000 soldiers/police trying to maintain control with a total population of about 600,000 Jews and 1.2 million Arabs. (Interestingly, they had the same size force controlling India with a population of over 350 million!)

And so it came to pass that the British turned the matter over to the UN which decided to end the British Mandate over what was left of "Palestine" (after the creation of the country of Jordan) and to divide the remaining land among the Arabs and Jews. The proposal called for the Jews to get:

The Arabs were to get:

Jerusalem was to be under international control.

On November 29, 1947, the United Nations voted for this partition plan. Of those voting, 33 nations voted yes, including USA and USSR; 13 mostly-Arab nations voted no; 11 nations abstained.

Hard-hearted to the end, the British did not vote yes; they abstained.

As disappointed as the Jews were with the portion allotted for the Jewish state, they felt that something was better than nothing after all the waiting and the pain.

However, the Arabs, always maximalist in their demands, rejected the UN resolution. The next day Arab rioting began, and two weeks later soldiers from surrounding Arab countries began arriving into Palestine.

The British, happy to be out of the situation, were packing up to go and turned their backs on what was going on. Writes David Ben Gurion in his Israel: A Personal History (p. 65):

"The British did not lift a finger to stop this military invasion. They also refused to cooperate with the UN committee charged with supervising implementation of the General Assembly resolution. At the same time, the Arabs living in the district destined to become part of the Jewish state began evacuating their homes and moving to the Arab states neighboring Palestine at the orders of the Arab High Committee."

In the midst of confusion, the rioting continued with almost 1,000 Jews murdered by Arabs in the ensuing four months.

One of the worst incidents occurred on April 13, 1948. A convoy of 70 doctors and nurses making their way to Hadassah Hospital on Mount Scopus was ambushed by Arabs. This happened 200 yards of a British police station. After a seven-hour shoot-out, during which the British did nothing, all the doctors and nurses were killed. Afterwards, the Arabs mutilated their bodies.

JERUSALEM UNDER SIEGE

In all of this, the British encouraged the King of Jordan, Abdullah, to invade and annex the Arab sections to his kingdom. To Abdullah this was not enough. He wanted Jerusalem too.

As a result Jerusalem came under siege.

The focus of the struggle during April and May 1948 was the road to Jerusalem which passes through the mountains. The vehicles on that road are completely exposed to gunmen up above. It was on this road that all supplies to the Jews of the city had to come. But they could not get through.

Hunger reigned. The residents of the Jewish Quarter of the Old City were completely cut off.

And then an amazing incident happened. A young Yemenite Jew, who was not known for his shooting skills, almost accidentally killed three Arab men in the hills. One of these men was the Arab leader, Abdul Khader el Husseini. Demoralized, the Arab forces abandoned their positions to attend his funeral.

As a result a huge convoy of 250 trucks of food was able to re-supply the city. Writes Berel Wein in Triumph of Survival (p. 397):

"[On Shabbat, April 17, 1948] Jews left their synagogues and, with their prayer shawls still draping their shoulders, helped unload the convoy. The siege of Jerusalem was broken for the moment. The Arabs, however, mounted a strong counter-attack, and by the end of April once again cut the Jerusalem road... for the next seven weeks Jewish Jerusalem was isolated."

A NEW STATE IS BORN

The official date given by the United Nations in their partition vote for the creation of the two new entities was May 15th, 1948.

Thus, May 14th was to be the last day of the British Mandate. At 4 p.m., the British lowered their flag and immediately the Jews raised their own.

It was a flag designed in 1897 by the First Zionist Congress. It was white (the color of newness and purity), and it had two blue stripes (the color of heaven) like the stripes of a tallit, the prayer shawl, which symbolized the transmission of Jewish tradition. In its center was the Star of David.

Thus on May 14, 1948 at 4:00 p.m., Hay Iyar, the 5th of Iyar, Israel declared itself a state.

After 2,000 years, the land of Israel was once more in the hands of the Jews.

David Ben Gurion read the Declaration of Independence over the radio:

"The Land of Israel was the birthplace of the Jewish people. Here the spiritual, religious and national identity was formed. Here they achieved independence and created a culture of national and universal significance. Here they wrote and gave the Bible to the world...

 

"Exiled from Palestine, the Jewish people remained faithful to it in all the countries of the dispersion, never ceasing to pray and hope for their return and restoration of their national freedom.

"Accordingly we, the members of the National Council met together in solemn assembly today and by virtue of the natural and historic right of the Jewish people and with the support of the resolution of the General of the United Nations, hereby proclaim the establishment of the Jewish state in Palestine to be called Israel...

"We offer peace and amity to all neighboring states and their peoples and invite them to cooperate with the independent Jewish nation for the common good of all...

"With trust in the Rock of Israel, we set our hands to this declaration at this session of the Provisional State Council in the city of Tel Aviv on Sabbath Eve, 5th Iyar 5708, 14th day of May 1948."

(Note that the Declaration of Independence of Israel -- unlike the American Declaration of Independence -- does not mention God. This is because the hard-line secularists that dominated the Jewish Agency opposed any such thing. "Rock of Israel" became a compromise.)

Everyone was dancing in the streets. But not for long.

Almost immediately five Arab countries declared war and Egypt bombed Tel Aviv.

NEXT: WAR