From Coexistence to Conquest

International Law and the Origins of the Arab–Israeli Conflict, 1891–1949

By Victor Kattan

Pluto Press

Copyright © 2009 Victor Kattan
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7453-2578-1

Contents

Foreword Richard A. Falk, ix,
Acknowledgements, xiii,
Preface, xv,
Chronology, xxi,
About the Author, xxxi,
Maps, xxxiii,
Introduction, 1,
1. Anti-Semitism, Colonialism and Zionism, 8,
2. Palestine and the Scramble for the Middle East, 38,
3. Arab Opposition to Political Zionism, 78,
4. The Hussein-McMahon Correspondence, 98,
5. The Question of Self-Determination, 117,
6. The Partition of Palestine, 146,
7. The Arab-Israeli Conflict, 169,
8. The Palestinian Refugees, 209,
9. The Creation of Israel, 232,
Epilogue, 248,
Notes, 262,
Bibliography, 368,
List of Individuals, 388,
Glossary, 396,
Index, 403,

CHAPTER 1

Anti-semitism, Colonialism and Zionism

‘Dr. Herzl was indifferent at first whether he led them to Argentina or to Palestine, he quickly perceived the commercial value of keeping the name of the old firm on his prospectus … And the promoters knew their public. Poor Jews, who would have preferred the fleshpots of Egypt to the unknown terrors of South America, jumped at the sound of Jerusalem.’

Aspects of the Jewish Question by a Quarterly Reviewer with a Map (London: John Murray, 1902), p. 20

‘The Congo State has land enough which we can use for our settlement. We can take over part of the responsibilities, that is, pay an annual tax, which may be fixed later, to the Congo State, in return for which we naturally lay claim to self-government … If King Leopold turns a willing ear to the matter, I shall go to see him at once.’

Theodor Herzl, 12 July, 1903 in Raphael Patai (ed.), The Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl, Vol. IV (New York: Herzl Press, 1960), pp. 1511-12

‘There is only one cure for this world-evil, and that is for all the Christian white races to combine and to repatriate to Palestine and the neighbouring territories every Jew, male and female, and to take the most drastic steps to see that, once they have founded their Zionist state in their own Promised Land, they permanently remain there.’

The Jews’ Who’s Who: Israelite Finance. Its Sinister Influence, Popular Edition (London: The Judaic Publishing Co., H.H. Beamish, Proprietor, 1921), p. 43

‘What the French could do in Tunisia, I said, the Jews could do in Palestine, with Jewish will, Jewish money, Jewish power and Jewish enthusiasm.’

Dr Chaim Weizmann, Trial and Error (New York: Shocken Books, 1966), p. 244

If there were three words which could explain the success which lay behind the creation of Israel and the conquest of Palestine in 1948 they would be anti-Semitism, colonialism and Zionism. Not only do these words end with the same suffix, but they all contributed directly to the decision by Britain to support Jewish colonisation in Palestine. And law, being the end product of politics, was there every step of the way providing legitimacy and a legal framework through which Jewish immigration into Britain would be controlled and restricted in 1905, before being redirected into Palestine after the Balfour Declaration of 1917, and regulated thereafter through the implementation of a League of Nations Mandate from September 1923 until May 1948. It therefore becomes necessary to take a closer look at the history behind these three inter-related phenomena, as well as the colonisation of Palestine that had already begun in the nineteenth century, before analysing the big international legal issues, with which the rest of this book is devoted.

ANTI-SEMITISM

Anti-Semitism, that is, hostility towards Jews as Jews, is a phenomenon, which manifested itself in its most extreme form in Nazi Germany in the 1930s where the Jews were stripped of all civil and political rights before being subjected to the extermination camps and the gas chambers during the Final Solution (1942-45). This form of racism and religious and ethnic persecution was not, however, new. It had been around for over a millennium, particularly in Christian Europe where Jews were expelled from England in the thirteenth century, and from Spain and Portugal in the fifteenth century. Indeed, many of the Jews expelled from the Iberian Peninsula, the Sephardim, would find refuge in North Africa and the Middle East. Then, it was the Muslims who welcomed them and the Roman Catholics who drove them from their homes. But the maltreatment of Jews did not end in the fifteenth century. In the nineteenth century, Jews were not only expelled from their places of origin, but they were killed in organised pogroms in Russia and Romania which led to a Jewish exodus westwards, primarily into Britain, France, Germany, and the United States, as well as into Palestine where a very small number of Russian Jews established colonies. Yet, even after all the appalling atrocities the Jews had been subjected to in those countries they were not always welcomed, even in the ‘enlightened’ states of Western Europe. Indeed, today it is common to blame the Germans, and almost they alone, for the scourge of anti-Semitism – and for good reason. After all, German intellectuals from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, like Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Eugen Duhring, Heinrich von Treikschke, Heinrich Class, Ludwig Woltmann, Wilhelm Marr, Konstantin Frantz, Johannes Scherr, Adolf Stoecker, Wilhelm Stapel, Hans Bluher, Richard Wagner, Max Wundt, and Johannes Pfeffrkorn, among many others, were all self-professed anti-Semites who argued that there was no place for the Jews in modern Germany. They considered anti-Semitism as a natural reaction of the German Volksgefuhl (popular consciousness) against a ‘foreign element’ that they claimed never intended to assimilate. They had a particular dislike for the Ostjuden, those Jews who had been arriving in Germany and other places from the ghettos of Eastern Europe and Russia in an area called the Pale of Jewish Settlement created by Catherine the Great in 1791 (see Map 1). Ultimately these German intellectuals provided the political and philosophical foundations that would give succour to the crazed conspiracy theories of Alfred Rosenberg who incorporated it into Nazi dogma, and which ultimately influenced the policies of Adolf Hitler.

Yet we forget just how widespread anti-Semitism was. Germany was not the only country to produce intellectuals and politicians who viewed these Eastern European Jews with suspicion. For instance, the ‘Jewish Question’, coined by Bruno Bauer, which, among other things, concerned the question as to whether members of the Jewish faith could be ‘true patriots’, if they refused to assimilate with non-Jews, was also something debated quite openly in Britain especially amongst the educated elite. Indeed, there was a certain commonality between the anti-Semites and the Zionists. For those same German intellectuals, mentioned earlier, who considered the Jews alien to Germany, were, in fact, the most ardent Zionists, because Zionism supported their philosophy of encouraging the Jews to remove themselves from Germany and into Palestine. In the words of the eighteenth-century German idealist philosopher Johann Fichte: ‘I see no other way to protect ourselves from the Jews, except if we conquer their promised land for them and send all of them there.’ The Zionist concept of the Jews as a distinct national or racial community, deserving its own homeland or state, coincided with the anti-Semitic view of the Jews as a ‘foreign body’. Its appeal to them lay in the Zionists’ ultimate acceptance of the exclusion of the Jewish people from the German Volksgemeinschaft (racial community) and the necessity of a Jewish homeland in Palestine or elsewhere overseas, capable of drawing Jews away from Europe. Theodor Herzl, the Austro-Hungarian journalist and founding father of political Zionism, was well aware of this paradox and realised that his movement could expect considerable support from the anti-Semites. ‘The anti-Semites will have carried the day’, Herzl confided in his diary in 1895. ‘Let them have this satisfaction’, he wrote, ‘for we too shall be happy. They will have turned out to be right because they are right.’ Herzl’s alliance with the anti-Semites did not, however, pass without comment. He was attacked quite vociferously in liberal Jewish quarters:

Dr. Herzl and those who think with him are traitors to the history of the Jews, which they misread and misinterpret. They are themselves part authors of the anti-Semitism they profess to slay. For how can the European countries which the Jews propose to ‘abandon’ justify their retention of the Jews, if the Jews themselves are to be the first to ‘evacuate’ their position, and to claim the bare courtesy of ‘foreign visitors’?

Zionism’s ‘dark side’ is that it was the twin of anti-Semitism. As Herzl told the First Zionist Congress in his opening address in Basel on 29 August 1897, ‘Anti-Semitism … is the up-to-date designation of the [Zionist] movement.’ Instead of struggling for equal civil and political rights with Europe’s Christian majority, and by accepting the premise that the Jews were, in fact, a separate ‘race’ in need of their own state, Herzl and his Zionists were giving succour to the anti-Semites who were essentially making the same argument. It also affirmed the prejudices of Adolf Hitler, who in Mein Kampf, made the following observation about Jews and Zionism whilst wandering the streets of Vienna:

Yet I could no longer very well doubt that the objects of my study were not Germans of a special religion, but a people in themselves; for since I had begun to concern myself with this question and to take cognisance of the Jews, Vienna appeared to me in a different light than before. Wherever I went, I began to see Jews, and the more I saw, the more sharply they become distinguished in my eyes from the rest of humanity. Particularly the Inner City and the districts north of the Danube Canal swarmed with a people which even outwardly had lost all resemblance to Germans.

And whatever doubts I may still have nourished were finally dispelled by the attitude of a portion of the Jews themselves.

Among them there was a great movement, quite extensive in Vienna, which came out sharply in confirmation of the national character of the Jews: this was the Zionists.

In Hitler’s eyes Zionism reconfirmed his pre-existing bigoted and racially narrow-minded views about the Jews not being ‘true’ Germans and being responsible for all that was wrong with his vision of what Germany should be. Therefore, like Fichte and the other German anti-Semites, Hitler supported the emigration of the Jews to Palestine as one way of solving Germany’s Jewish Question. Indeed, today, it is all too often overlooked that Hitler, who greatly admired the British Empire throughout most of his adult life, and lamented the loss of Germany’s colonies in Africa and the Pacific at the end of the First World War, supported the policy of encouraging the Jews to immigrate to Palestine for almost a decade prior to the Final Solution. Indeed, once in power, he probably did more than anyone else to encourage Zionism and the largest influx of Jewish immigrants into Palestine (1932-36) occurred when he was the Fuehrer of the Third Reich (see Table 1).

As the commission which compiled these statistics noted, by 1936 immigration from Russia had almost entirely ceased, its place being taken over by Germany which supplied the largest proportion of immigrants overall after Poland and Russia. These statistics did not include illegal Jewish immigration into Palestine, however, and so the true figures were higher. That immigration peaked in 1935 was no coincidence. In that year on 15 September, Germany passed the Nuremberg Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honour, which, among other things, prohibited marriages between Germans and Jews as well as extramarital intercourse and the flying of the Reich flag by Jews. With regard to Zionism, the introduction accompanying that law included the following statement:

If the Jews had a state of their own in which the bulk of their people were at home, the Jewish question could already be considered solved today, even for the Jews themselves. The ardent Zionists of all people have objected least of all to the basic ideas of the Nuremberg Laws, because they know that these laws are the only correct solution for the Jewish people.

In 1937, the Palestine Royal Commission Report was published, which for the first time envisaged establishing a Jewish state in Palestine. The report provoked intense debate within the German Foreign Ministry where the pros and cons of encouraging Jewish emigration from Germany into Palestine were debated. Finally, the ministers involved decided to ask Hitler for a final ruling, and he, in turn, asked Rosenberg for a special report. After studying the document he received from his racial expert, Hitler’s decision was communicated by the Foreign Affairs Office of the Nazi Party to all the Ministries concerned. They were told that the Fuehrer had decided again that: ‘Jewish emigration from Germany shall continue to be promoted by all available means. Any question which might have existed up to now as to whether in the Fuehrer’s opinion such emigration is to be directed primarily to Palestine has thereby been answered in the affirmative.’ Although Jewish immigration into Palestine fell significantly after 1937, the number of German immigrants as a proportion of the total number of immigrants entering Palestine was still high and increased appreciably in 1939. According to A Survey of Palestine prepared in 1945-46 for the information of the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, emigration from Germany overtook that of Poland in 1938 and surged in 1939. However, by that time Britain had decided to restrict Jewish immigration into Palestine.

In 1961, Adolf Eichmann was indicted before the District Court of Jerusalem on 15 charges, which included crimes against humanity, crimes against the Jewish people, and being a member of an outlawed organisation. At the trial he attempted to defend his horrendous actions when he was working for the Department of Jewish Emigration, which was responsible for deporting hundreds of thousands of Jews to their deaths, which led, after 1942, to the mass murder of millions, by claiming that the initial emigration policy of the National Socialist Party was consistent with Zionism. He told the District Court that Theodor Herzl’s Der Judenstaat (‘The Jewish State’) and Adolf Bohm’s Die Zionistische Bewegung (‘The History of Zionism’) were required reading by the employees of that Department. Eichmann also told the Court that he protested the desecration of Herzl’s grave in Vienna in 1939 and that he even commemorated the 35th anniversary of his death. During the cross-examination he told the presiding judge, to the bemusement of those sitting in the gallery, that in Vienna he regarded the Jews as opponents with respect to whom a ‘mutually fair solution’ had to be found:

That solution I envisaged as putting firm soil under their feet so that [the Jews] could have a place of their own, soil of their own. And I was working in the direction of that solution joyfully. I cooperated in reaching such a solution, gladly and joyfully, because it was also the kind of solution that was approved by movements among the Jewish people themselves [that is, the Zionists], and I regarded this as the most appropriate solution to this matter.

Eichmann was essentially echoing what Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf; that Zionism was compatible with the emigration policy of the National Socialist Party in Germany, although obviously not with the extermination of European Jewry that became part of official Nazi policy at the House of Wannsee Conference in 1942. In its judgment, the District Court of Jerusalem referred to Eichmann’s testimony, just quoted, which formed a part of the Madagascar Plan. In short, this plan entailed the total deportation of the Jews from German-ruled territory, which at that time numbered four million, to Madagascar where they could create their own ‘homeland’. However, it was not to be as ‘joyful’ as Eichmann had rather disingenuously suggested to the Court. According to the judgment:

… even deportation to Madagascar would have been preferable to the physical extermination which later befell European Jewry. But … the Madagascar Plan must be viewed in terms of the pre-extermination period. It is sufficient to glance at the details of the written plan in order to discover its true significance: the expulsion of four million Jews – the whole of European Jewry at that time under the rule of the Hitler regime – within four years into exile, and their complete isolation from the outside world. It was stated explicitly that the organization of the Jews as an independent State was out of the question and that this would be a ‘police state’ supervised by RSHA [the Reich Main Security Office] men … the economic living conditions of millions of Jews in their new abode did not particularly worry the authors of the plan. They had in mind employing them for many years on public works such as draining swamps and building roads, that is to say, on forced labour under the supervision of the German masters of the island … as for finance, this in part would come from the property of the Jews themselves, which would be confiscated on their leaving their places of residence and transferred to ‘a central settlement fund’, while the rest would be raised by imposing a tax on Jews of the Western Powers, payment to be guaranteed by the peace treaty. Western Jewry would also pay for the transport of the deportees to Madagascar, as ‘reparations for damage caused to the German nation by the Jews economically and otherwise as a result of the Versailles Treaty’.

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