History of the Jews

by Paul Johnson

The great mass of Jews who remained, overwhelmingly religious, were deceived and self-deceived. Their history told them that all persecutions, however cruel, came to an end; that all oppressors, however exigent, had demands that were ultimately limited and could be met. Their strategy was always geared to saving ‘the remnant’. In 4,000 years the Jews had never faced, and had never imagined, an opponent who demanded not some, or most, of their property, but everything; not just a few lives, or even many, but all, down to the last infant.

Jewish religious training tended to encourage passivity. The hasidic Jews were the most ready to accept their fate as God’s will.

The fanaticism with which they clung to their duties as mass murderers, long after the Third Reich was irretrievably doomed, is one of the gruesome curiosities of human history.

So nearly six million Jews died. Two millennia of anti-Semitic hatred, of all varieties, pagan, Christian and secular, superstitious and cerebral, folk and academic, had been soldered by Hitler into one overwhelming juggernaut and then driven by his unique energy and will over the helpless body of European Jewry.

The effect of the Holocaust was chiefly to transfer the principal focus of anti-Jewish hatred from east-central Europe to the Middle East.

Even in Europe, there was often loathing, rather than pity, for the bewildered survivors. Their very nakedness, the habits bred by their atrocious treatment, stirred new waves of anti-Semitism.

In Poland, anti-Semitic riots broke out in Cracow in August 1945 and spread

During the first seven months after the end of the war there were 350 anti-Semitic murders in Poland.

Between 1945 and 1951 a total of 5,025 Nazis were convicted, 806 being sentenced to death. But in only 486 cases was the death sentence carried out.

Moreover, a Clemency Act passed in January 1951 by the US high commissioner in Germany led to the early release of many senior war criminals in US hands.

Large numbers of national war-crimes trials were held in nearly all the states involved in the war,

The struggle to secure compensation for the victims produced similar mixed results.

At the time of writing, about $25 billion has been paid out, and by the end of the twentieth century the figure will be over $30 billion.213 These payments cannot exactly be described as generous or even adequate. But they are a great deal more than Weizmann or Ben Gurion ever expected and they represent a genuine desire on the part of the federal government to pay for Germany’s crime.

The rest of the reparations story is much less satisfactory. None of the German industrialists involved in the slave-labour programme ever acknowledged the smallest moral responsibility for its atrocious consequences.

They resisted compensation every legal inch of the way and behaved throughout with a striking mixture of meanness and arrogance.

But the behaviour of the German capitalists was no worse than that of the Communist successor states. The East German government never even troubled to reply to requests for compensation. Nor was there any response from Rumania. The whole vast area of oppression controlled by Communist authorities since 1945 yielded the Jews nothing whatever.

Austria’s behaviour was the worst of the lot.

The Second World War

persuaded the overwhelming majority of Jews that such a state had to be created and made secure whatever the cost, to themselves or to anyone else.

the great eastern massacres of 1648 led to the return of a Jewish community to England, and so to America, thus in time producing the most influential Jewry in the world, an indispensable part of the geopolitical context in which Israel could be created. Again, the massacres of 1881 set in motion a whole series of events tending towards the same end. The immigration they produced was the background to the Dreyfus outrage, which led directly to Herzl’s creation of modern Zionism. The movement of Jews set in motion by Russian oppression created the pattern of tension from which, in 1917, the Balfour Declaration emerged, and the League of Nations Palestine mandate was set up to implement it. Hitler’s persecution of the Jews was the last in the series of catastrophes which helped to make the Zionist state.

another Jewish contribution to the shape of the modern world: the scientific use of terror to break the will of liberal rulers.

It was to become a commonplace over the next forty years, but in 1945 it was new.

Among the Jews there were three schools of thought about the British. Weizmann still believed in British good faith. Ben Gurion, though sceptical, wanted to win the war first. Even after it he drew an absolute distinction between resistance and terrorism, and this was reflected in Haganah policy. On the other hand there was an extremist breakaway from the Irgun, known as the Stern Gang after its leader Avraham Stern. He disobeyed Jabotinsky’s instructions for a cease-fire with the British on the outbreak of war, and was killed in February 1942. But his colleagues, led by Yizhak Shamir and Nathan Yellin-Mor, carried on an unrestricted campaign against Britain. Begin took a third course. He thought the Haganah too passive, the Stern Gang crude, vicious and unintelligent. He saw the enemy not as Britain but the British administration in Palestine. He wanted to humiliate it; make it unworkable, expensive, ineffective. He had 600 active agents. He rejected assassination but he blew up CID offices, the immigration building, income-tax centres, and similar targets.

Begin,

believed Haganah would have to join him to get rid of Britain. He was proved right.

disagreements on targets remained. The Haganah would not employ terror in any form. It would employ force only in what could plausibly be called a military operation. Begin always rejected murder, such as the cold-blooded killing by the Sternists of six British paratroopers in their beds on 26 April 1946. He repudiated, then and later, the label ‘terrorist’. But he was willing to take moral risks, as well as physical ones.

King David Hotel,

22 July 1946,

The Resistance Movement broke up into its component parts. Nevertheless the outrage, combined with others, achieved its effect. The British government proposed a tripartite division of the country. Both Jews and Arabs rejected the plan. Accordingly, on 14 February 1947, Bevin announced that he was handing over the whole Palestine problem to the United Nations.

further episode, for which Begin was again responsible, proved decisive. He was opposed to Sternist-type assassinations but he insisted on Irgun’s moral right to punish members of the British armed forces in the same way as Britain punished Irgun members. The British hanged and flogged. Irgun would do the same. In April 1947 three Irgun men were put on trial for an attack on the Acre prison-fortress, which freed 251 prisoners. Begin threatened retaliation if the three were convicted and hanged. They were, on 29 July. A few hours later two British sergeants, Clifford Martin and Mervyn Paice, who had been captured for this purpose, were hanged on Begin’s instructions by Irgun’s operations chief, Gidi Paglin. He also mined their bodies. This gruesome murder of Martin and Paice, who had committed no crime, horrified many Jews. The Jewish Agency called it ‘the dastardly murder of two innocent men by a set of criminals’.12 (It was even worse than it seemed at the time, for it emerged thirty-five years later that Martin had a Jewish mother.) It caused unrestrained fury in Britain. A synagogue was burned down in Derby. There were anti-Jewish riots in London, Liverpool, Glasgow and Manchester–the first in England since the thirteenth century. These in turn produced critical changes in British policy. The British had assumed that any partition would have to be supervised and enforced by them; otherwise the armies of the Arab states would simply move in and exterminate the Jews. Now ...

the death of Roosevelt on 12 April 1945. In his last weeks he had turned anti-Zionist, following a meeting with King Ibn Saud after the Yalta Conference.

The Soviet Union and the Arab states, followed by the international left in general, later came to believe that the creation of Israel was the work of a capitalist-imperialist conspiracy. But the facts show the reverse.

Neither the American State Department nor the British Foreign Office wanted a Jewish state.

The British War Office was equally strong in opposition. So was the U...

The British and American oil companies were even more vehement

Indeed, if there was a conspiracy to create Israel, then the Soviet Union was a prominent member of

During the war, for tactical reasons, Stalin suspended some aspects of his anti-Semitic policies.

His reason seems to have been that the creation of Israel, which he was advised would be a socialist state, would accelerate the decline of British influence in the Middle East.

The switch to anti-Zionism abroad took longer to develop but it came decisively in the autumn of 1948. By this time, however, Israel was securely in existence.

American policy was also changing, as the growing pressures of the Cold War dissolved her mood of post-war idealism and forced Truman to listen more attentively to Pentagon and State Department advice. If British evacuation had been postponed another year, the United States would have been far less anxious to see Israel created and Russia would almost certainly have been hostile. Hence the effect of the terror campaign on British policy was perhaps decisive to the entire enterprise. Israel slipped into existence through a fortuitous window in history which briefly opened for a few months in 1947-8. That too was luck; or providence.

However, if Begin’s ruthlessness was responsible for the early British withdrawal, it was Ben Gurion who...

Once the UN partition vote was taken the Arabs were bent on destroying all the Jewish settlements and began to attack them immediately. Azzam Pasha, secretary-general of the Arab League, said on the radio: ‘This will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre.’

By March 1948 over 1,200 Jews had been killed, half of them civilians, in Arab attacks. The Czech arms were beginning to arrive and were deployed over the next month. The British mandate was not due to end until 15 May. But early in April Ben Gurion took what was probably the most difficult decision in his life. He ordered the Haganah on to the offensive to link up the various Jewish enclaves and to consolidate as much as possible of the territory allotted to Israel under the UN plan. The gamble came off almost completely. The Jews occupied Haifa. They opened up the route to Tiberias and the eastern Galilee. They took Safed, Jaffa and Acre. They established the core of the state of Israel and in effect won the war before it started.

Ben Gurion read out the Scroll of Independence on Friday 14 May in the Tel Aviv museum.

The Israeli government systematically resettled all its refugees as part of its national-home policy. The Arab governments, with the assistance of the UN, kept the Arab refugees in camps, pending a reconquest of Palestine which never came.

at every stage, during the mandate and after, the Jews were flexible and willing to accept any reasonable partition proposal put to them.

the Arabs insisted that Israel retire behind the 1947 UN partition lines (which they had never accepted or recognized) without even, in return, granting the new state recognition. Whereas Israel saw the armistice as a prelude to peace, the Arabs saw it as no more than a truce, and a prelude to war when it should become convenient to them. Moreover, the Arab states were unwilling to keep to the terms of the various armistice agreements.

For the Arabs, armistice was the continuation of war by other means. Hence in a real sense Israel has been at war with most of her Arab neighbours from November 1947 until this day.

This brought about a fundamental reappraisal of the nature of the Zionist state.

The secular pioneers had seen it as a pacifist, collectivist Utopia. The religious pioneers had seen it as a holy theocracy. Now both were alike obliged to inves...