Chapter Thirteen INFILTRATING DISPLACED PERSON’S CAMPS IN EUROPE TO FUNNEL PEOPLE TO PALESTINE by Alison Weir

 

Chapter Thirteen INFILTRATING DISPLACED PERSON’S CAMPS IN EUROPE TO FUNNEL PEOPLE TO PALESTINE by Alison Weir

 Chapter Thirteen
INFILTRATING DISPLACED PERSON’S CAMPS IN EUROPE
TO FUNNEL PEOPLE TO PALESTINE
A similar underground campaign was operating in Europe. Zionist cadres infiltrated displaced
person’s camps that had been set up to house refugees displaced during WWII. These infiltrators tried
secretly to funnel people to Palestine. When it turned out that most didn’t want to go to Palestine, they
worked to convince them – sometimes by force.
The fact was that Zionists needed more people to go to Palestine. As Ben-Gurion stated in 1944:
[T]he essence of Zionism is one of a populating endeavor, to populate [Israel] with multitudes of
Jews.”[310]
Israeli professor Yosef Grodzinsky explains that Zionists were looking for “chomer ‘enoshi tov
(good human materials, a phrase Zionist organizers frequently used). Convincing Jews to uproot
themselves and move to Palestine proved to be a formidable task: When life is good, people tend to
stay where they are. Candidates for Palestine immigration therefore had to be Jews whose life was
not good. Post-Holocaust DPs [displaced persons], became a human reserve of great immigration
potential, hence a prime target for the Zionists…”[311]
A senior Mossad commander anticipated that even these might not wish to come to Palestine and
would need to be actively recruited: “We must not think that thousands upon thousands will come
knocking at the country’s gates once they open. The Zionist movement must understand that it must be
first on the market.”[312]
When only a minority of Jewish refugees wished to go to Palestine, a report by Zionist operative
Rabbi Klaussner concluded, “[T]he people must be forced to go to Palestine.”

Author Alfred Lilienthal reports that Zionists working in the refugee camps employed numerous
means to compel residents to agree to go to Palestine, including confiscation of food rations,
dismissal from work, expulsion from the camps, taking away legal protection and visa rights, and, in
one case, “even the public flogging of a recalcitrant recruit for the Israel Army.”[313]
The Jewish Brigade of the British Army, a unit long sought by Zionists and finally created in the
final months of the war,[314] was one of the first on the scene. Its soldiers and officers turned into
clandestine emissaries of the Zionist movement.[315]
Grodzinsky reports, “One role Brigade soldiers took upon themselves was to gather Jewish
children hidden away in monasteries, or with non-Jewish families.”[316]
He writes, “Jewish orphans were to be found in many places, having survived thanks to the
goodness of Christian families and institutions that hid them throughout the war.” Now the Brigade’s
soldiers, directed by the Jewish Agency‘s Diaspora Center, were retrieving them and taking them to
special orphanages, “where they were to be cared for, receive Zionist education, and be trained for
immigration to Palestine.”
Grodzinsky reports that the process was not always easy. “Many families who rescued Jewish
children were now treating them as if they were their own. To retrieve these children, Brigade men
occasionally resorted to force.”
Future Israeli Major General Yossi Peled and his sisters were among them. They had been raised
by a Christian family almost from infancy. Brigade soldiers “came in one day, armed, and threatened
[the adoptive parents] saying that ‘these are Jewish children and they must give us away, otherwise
they would suffer’. They had no choice but hand us over, and we were put in a Jewish orphanage in
Belgium.” [317]
The children tried to refuse to leave the house, and one of his sisters later said that her brother’s
“screams still echo in her head.”
One of the best-known orphanages, Selvino House, was run by Brigade soldiers who implemented
strict rules, including requiring that only Hebrew be spoken. Children were not permitted to leave the
orphanage to search for relatives out of concern that they might then stay in Europe rather than go to
Palestine.
Grodzinsky goes on to report that thousands of children passed through such institutions, “their
period of residence there being just another part of ‘the journey to the promised land.’”[318]
In July 1945 Zionists organized the “First Congress of Jewish Survivors in Germany,” which
issued a proclamation calling for the “immediate establishment of a Jewish State in Palestine.” While
the proclamation claimed to represent the survivors, in reality most of the ten signatories were Zionist
envoys from Palestine.[319]
Future Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion believed that Palestine should be the only
destination for Jewish survivors.
Grodzinsky and other Israeli authors provide little-known context for the odyssey of the 4,500
survivors from German camps who set sail in July 1947 as illegal immigrants on a ship later named
Exodus.
Baruch Kimmerling, an Israeli professor and author of nine books on the founding tenets of
Zionism, writes, “The real story of the ship was far less glorious than the one told in Leon Uris’s
1958 bestseller and Otto Preminger’s 1960 film.” Israeli author Idith Zertal calls it “an orchestrated
media event.” [320]
Kimmerling, citing Zertal’s research, writes that Ben-Gurion “felt that the plight of Jewish
refugees in Europe needed to be dramatized in order to attract more sympathy for the Jewish struggle
over Palestine.”
While many people have heard that British authorities refused to allow their illegal immigration
into Palestine and forced the boat to be returned to Germany, few know that the French government
had agreed to host the refugees. Ben-Gurion rejected this solution, and the survivors were forced,
unnecessarily, to remain on board for seven months.
Kimmerling commented: “Ben-Gurion‘s strategy in the Exodus affair paid off. The fate of the
refugee ship attracted considerable and sympathetic attention around the world, and served the Zionist
cause well. Few observers at the time knew that many of the refugees from the Exodus had applied
for immigration visas to the United States, and were hardly anxious to settle in Israel.”
Kimmerling points out, “By dramatizing the fate of the survivors, in whom he had little interest
except as future residents of the state he was building… Ben-Gurion helped to make Israel the
world’s chief power broker over Jewish affairs. Under his leadership, Israel established a claim to
represent all of world Jewry, and on this basis successfully claimed reparations from the Federal
Republic of Germany.”[321]
Kimmerling and Zertal point out that this enabled Israel to acquire the right to speak not only for
living Jews but also for those who had perished under the Nazis, “to whom Ben-Gurion suggested
granting symbolic citizenship – in effect, turning them into martyrs for the Jewish state.” This despite
the fact that some, possibly many, had been anti-Zionist.
Zionists implement forced conscription
Grodzinsky reports that Zionist leaders determined that they needed to implement forced
conscription if they were going to attain sufficient numbers for the war they were planning against
Palestinians. Since American and European Jews would never have gone along with this, they
targeted the weakest population for this compulsory draft: residents of the displaced persons camps.
After a voluntary recruitment drive netted less than 0.3 percent of the DP population, a compulsory
draft was implemented.[322]
This bizarre project – in which a non-nation state imposed compulsory military service on people
who had never even lived in the land for which they were required to fight – was enforced through a
number of mechanisms, including publishing black lists of “draft evaders,” firing them from jobs,
evicting them from dwellings, withdrawing their food rations, and beating them. These tactics were
also at times used on their relatives.
In one camp “a father of a Giyus [draft] evader Wecker was beaten up, as was the father of one
who did not register; in another case an old father – Richter Aizik, was beaten because his son Moshe
Richter did not register for the Giyus.”[323]
Men and women who weren’t able to evade this draft “were sometimes assigned to combat units
with minimal training, and given little time to get their bearings.” They were paid less than volunteers
from English-speaking Western countries and had fewer privileges.[324] Many could not even
understand their Hebrew orders. Some died in battle, others died unknown, as Grodzinsky reports,
“having had neither a home nor a family to come back to.”[325]
Israeli author Tom Segev reports that most of the immigrants from Germany were refugees who
came “against their will... They were not Zionists.” In Israel they were “objects of condescension and
contempt.”[326]
The American public, however, was led to believe that European Jews desperately wished to go
to Palestine, and the well organized, well funded, and frequently ruthless operation behind the
emigration was hidden from view. Funding for the emigrant-recruitment operation included $25
million from the nongovernmental organization the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee.
A British general who had been Eisenhower’s deputy and was credited with the buildup for the
Normandy invasion, Sir Frederick Morgan, noticed what was going on. He publicly pointed out that
many of the refugees headed for Palestine were well dressed and well fed – “their pockets bulging
with money” – and concluded that something must be encouraging their emigration.
The World Jewish Congress stated officially and duplicitously, “General Morgan‘s allegation of a
‘secret Jewish force inside Europe aiming at a mass exodus to Palestine‘ is… fantastically untrue.”
Morgan was forced to apologize, even though, as a pro-Israel author writes, “Morgan‘s analysis
of the situation was quite correct.”[327]
The Sieff group:
Blocking a counter-Balfour declaration
Another secret group working on behalf of Zionism was formed in 1942 by Israel M. Sieff, a
British clothing magnate who was temporarily living in the U.S.
The Sieff group was, as historian Peter Grose puts it, “a sophisticated version of Brandeis‘s
Parushim.”
While its existence was never openly acknowledged, it grew into the secret back channel to
officials in Washington during the last years of FDR‘s presidency and the critical first years of
Truman‘s.
Its members included such men as Ben Cohen, a member of the White House staff; Robert Nathan,
in intelligence; David Ginsburg, a New Deal bureaucrat; David Lilienthal, chairman of the Tennessee
Valley Authority; and David Niles, a high White House official under both Roosevelt and Truman.
Grose reports:
“The little nucleus possessed the entree and the clout to carry the message of Jewish Palestine into
the highest policymaking circles – through casual suggestion, indirection, chance remarks among
well-placed colleagues in the corridors of power and the salons of social Washington.”[328]
On July 27, 1943, US State Department officials and English diplomats, concerned that Zionist
activities were causing serious harm to the war effort, almost issued a “reverse Balfour” declaration
calling for these activities to cease. The Sieff group, Felix Frankfurter, Henry Morgenthau, Jr., David
Niles, Bernard Baruch and others took emergency action and blocked the declaration.[329]
Chapter Fourteen
PALESTINIAN REFUGEES
By 1949, Israel’s “War of Independence“ and ethnic cleansing[330] had created hundreds of
thousands of Palestinian refugees. The U.S. Representative in Israel sent an urgent report to Truman:
“Arab refugee tragedy is rapidly reaching catastrophic proportions and should be treated as a
disaster...Of approximately 400,000 refugees approaching winter with cold heavy rains will, it is
estimated, kill more than 100,000 old men, women and children who are shelterless and have little or
no food.”[331]
The number of refugees continued to grow, reaching at least three-quarters of a million, and
desperate, starving Palestinians inundated neighboring Arab countries. U.S. diplomats in Cairo and
Amman described a disastrous situation in which the “almost nonexistent resources” of these
countries were stretched nearly to the breaking point.
The State Department reported that during the last nine months of 1948 Arab states had donated
$11 million to refugee aid, stating, “This sum, in light of the very slender budgets of most of these
governments, is relatively enormous.”[332]
During this time, the report noted, “…the total direct relief offered…by the Israeli government to
date consists of 500 cases of oranges.”[333]
Meanwhile, Israel had acquired formerly Palestinian-owned properties worth at least $480
million in 1947 dollars; the equivalent of $5.2 trillion in today’s dollars.[334]
Journalist and academic Anders Strindberg reports:
“In the process of ‘Judaizing’ Palestine, numerous convents, hospices, seminaries, and churches
were either destroyed or cleared of their Christian owners and custodians. In one of the most
spectacular attacks on a Christian target, on May 17, 1948, the Armenian Orthodox Patriarchate was
shelled with about 100 mortar rounds—launched by Zionist forces from the already occupied
monastery of the Benedictine Fathers on Mount Zion. The bombardment also damaged St. Jacob’s
Convent, the Archangel’s Convent, and their appended churches, their two elementary and seminary
schools, as well as their libraries, killing eight people and wounding 120.”[335]
Truman, whose caving in to Zionist pressures had helped create the disaster, now tried to
convince Israel to allow the refugees to return to their homes.[336] His main representative working
on this was Mark Ethridge, former publisher of the Louisville Courier Journal.
Ethridge was disgusted at Israel’s refusal, reporting to the State Department:
“What I can see is an abortion of justice and humanity to which I do not want to be
midwife…”[337]
The State Department finally threatened to withhold $49 million of unallocated funds from an
Export-Import Bank loan to Israel if it did not allow at least 200,000 refugees to return. The U.S.
coordinator on Palestine Refugee Matters, George C. McGhee, delivered the message to the Israeli
ambassador and later described his response:
“The ambassador looked me straight in the eye and said, in essence, that I wouldn’t get by with
this move, that he would stop it… Within an hour of my return to my office I received a message from
the White House that the President wished to dissociate himself from any withholding of the Ex-Im
Bank loan.” [338]
Edwin Wright, a State Department Middle East specialist from 1945-66, was the subject of an
oral history interview many years later for the Truman Library. About this interview, he said:
“The material I gave [interviewer] Professor McKinzie was of a very controversial nature--one
almost taboo in U.S. circles, inasmuch as I accused the Zionists of using political pressures and even
deceit in order to get the U.S. involved in a policy of supporting a Zionist theocratic, ethnically
exclusive and ambitious Jewish State. I, and my associates in the State Department, felt this was
contrary to U.S. interests and we were overruled by President Truman.”[339]