The Great War for Civilisation (75 page)

In those memoirs, Lloyd George makes scarcely any reference to the Balfour declaration—and then only to suggest that it was a gesture made to reward the prominent Zionist Chaim Weizmann for his scientific work on acetone, a chemical essential in the making of cordite, and therefore to the British war effort. Weizmann's name, Lloyd George would enthuse, “will rank with that of Nehemiah in the fascinating and inspiring story of the children of Israel.” Nehemiah was responsible for the fifth-century BC rebuilding and restoration of Jerusalem, a task he accomplished after his release from captivity by the Persian king Artaxerxes. But at almost the same time Lloyd George was writing this panegyric—in 1936— he was speaking far more frankly about the Balfour Declaration in the House of Commons during a debate on the Arab revolt:

It was at one of the darkest periods of the war that Mr. Balfour first prepared his Declaration. At that time the French Army had mutinied; the Italian army was on the eve of collapse; America had hardly started preparing in earnest. There was nothing left but Britain confronting the most powerful military combination that the world had ever seen. It was important for us to seek every legitimate help that we could get. The Government came to the conclusion, from information received from every part of the world, that it was very vital that we should have the sympathies of the Jewish community . . . We certainly had no prejudices against the Arabs because at that moment we had hundreds of thousands of troops fighting for Arab emancipation from the Turk. Under these conditions and with the advice they received, the Government decided that it was desirable for us to secure the sympathy and cooperation of that most remarkable community, the Jews, throughout the world. They were helpful to us in America to a very large extent; and they were helpful even in Russia at that moment because Russia was just about to walk out and leave us alone. Under those conditions we proposed this to our Allies. France, Italy, and the United States accepted it . . . The Jews, with all the influence that they possessed, responded nobly to the appeal that was made.

The French army's mutiny and potential collapse on the Italian front, it seems, had more to do with promises for a Jewish “national home” than did Nehemiah. But now the Arabs “were demanding practically that there should be no more Jewish immigration,” Lloyd George complained to the Commons. “We could not accept that without dishonouring our obligations. It was not as if the Arabs were in a position to say that Jewish immigration is driving them, the ancient inhabitants, out . . .” But Lloyd George grasped, if with too little gravity, where the problem lay:

The obligations of the Mandate were specific and definite. They were that we were to encourage the establishment of a National home for the Jews in Palestine without detriment to any of the rights of the Arab population. That was a dual undertaking and we must see that both parts of the Mandate are enforced.

But both parts of the British Palestine Mandate could not be enforced, and Nazi Germany's persecution of its Jews in 1936, which Lloyd George specifically mentioned, would turn into the Holocaust that would ensure the existence of an Israeli state in Palestine—whatever “the rights of the Arab population.” By 1938, George Antonius was saying quite clearly that “the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, or of a national home based on territorial sovereignty, cannot be accomplished without forcibly displacing the Arabs . . .” Antonius wanted an independent Arab state “in which as many Jews as the country can hold without prejudice to its political and economic freedom would live in peace, security and dignity, and enjoy full rights of citizenship.” Fearing “an unpredictable holocaust of Arab, Jewish and British lives,” help for the Jews of Europe, he said, must be sought elsewhere than in Palestine:

The treatment meted out to Jews in Germany and other European countries is a disgrace to its authors and to modern civilisation; but posterity will not exonerate any country that fails to bear its proper share of the sacrifices needed to alleviate Jewish suffering and distress. To place the brunt of the burden upon Arab Palestine is a miserable evasion of the duty that lies upon the whole of the civilised world. It is also morally outrageous. No code of morals can justify the persecution of one people in an attempt to relieve the persecution of another. The cure for the eviction of Jews from Germany is not to be sought in the eviction of the Arabs from their homeland; and the relief of Jewish distress may not be accomplished at the cost of inflicting a corresponding distress upon an innocent and peaceful population.

It is astonishing that such remarks—so prescient in view of the Palestinian disaster a decade later—could have been written in 1938. Yet there were others who foresaw future disaster in equally bleak terms. Only a year earlier, but reflecting upon the future, Winston Churchill had written of the impossibility of a partitioned Palestine and had written—far more prophetically—of how:

the wealthy, crowded, progressive Jewish State lies in the plains, and on the sea coasts [of Palestine]. Around it, in the hills and the uplands, stretching far and wide into the illimitable deserts, the warlike Arabs of Syria, of Transjordania, of Arabia, backed by the armed forces of Iraq, offer the ceaseless menace of war . . . To maintain itself, the Jewish State must be armed to the teeth, and must bring in every able-bodied man to strengthen its army. But how long would this process be allowed to continue by the great Arab populations in Iraq and Palestine? Can it be expected that the Arabs would stand by impassively and watch the building up with Jewish world capital and resources of a Jewish army equipped with the most deadly weapons of war, until it was strong enough not to be afraid of them? And if ever the Jewish army reached that point, who can be sure that, cramped within their narrow limits, they would not plunge out into the new undeveloped lands that lie around them?

If Palestine should be partitioned, Churchill concluded, “I find it difficult . . . to resist the conclusion that the . . . [partition] scheme would lead inevitably to the complete evacuation of Palestine by Great Britain.” And so, as they say, it came to pass.

John Bagot Glubb, commanding the Arab Legion from 1939, would comment movingly that “the Jewish tragedy owed its origin to the Christian nations of Europe and America. At last the conscience of Christendom was awake. The age-long Jewish tragedy must cease. But when it came to the payment of compensation in expiation of their past shortcomings, the Christian nations of Europe and America decided that the bill should be paid by a Muslim nation in Asia.”

Antonius would have had the world settle Jewish refugees in countries other than Palestine—we know that the British considered Uganda—while we also know that prewar Zionist committees were contemplating the “transfer”—ethnic cleansing—of Palestine's Arabs to, among other locations, the Djezaira area of Syria, the very deserts around Deir es-Zour and Aleppo in which the Armenian deportees “had ended their miserable existences” twenty years earlier. It was in this atmosphere of suspicion, paranoia and immense suffering that the Arabs and Jews watched the Second World War overwhelm Europe, the former fearful that Britain would eventually sanction an Israeli state on their lands, the latter observing the annihilation of their race in Europe while the British sought to block even those few Jewish refugee ships that made a run for the Promised Land. This was the world in which Haj Amin, the Grand Mufti, set off to Germany and urged Hitler to end Jewish emigration to Palestine. But at what cost?

HERE THE MORAL COMPASS begins to spin at ever-increasing speed. Why did the Palestinians have to bear the fate of Britain's First World War promise to a people whose ancestors lived on their land two thousand years before? Why did this new flood of Muslim refugees have to pay this price, then—like the Armenians—be told that they were the aggressors, and those who dispossessed them the victims? For in the decades to come, the Palestinians would be the “terrorists” and those who took their lands would be the innocent, the representatives of a Phoenix nation rising from the ashes of Auschwitz. In the eyes of the world—especially in 1948, in a world grown weary of war and familiar with the millions of refugees who had washed across Europe—what was the lot of 750,000 Palestinian refugees when measured against the murder of 6 million Jews?

It is April 2002, a bright spring morning in west Jerusalem, and I am in the small, neat apartment where Josef Kleinman and his wife, Haya, live in what might seem—if we did not know its historical significance—to be just another tree-stroked suburb. Kleinman is excited, an instantly generous man who, asked to tell about the blackest days of his life, leaps from his chair like a tiger. “I will show you my museum,” he says, and scampers into a back room.

He returns with a faded old khaki knapsack. “This is the shirt the Americans gave me after I was freed from Landsberg on April twenty-seventh, 1945.” It is a crumpled, cheap chequered shirt whose label is now illegible. Then he takes out a smock of blue-and-white stripes and a hat with the same stripes running from front to back. “This is my uniform as a prisoner of Dachau,” he says. Familiar from every 1945 newsreel, from
Schindler's List
and from a hundred other Holocaust movies, it is a shock to touch—to hold—this symbol of a people's destruction. Josef Kleinman watches me as I hold the smock. He understands the shock. I am thinking: this was in Dachau. This was produced by the Nazis. This is part of the real, dysentery-soaked, cyanide-gassed history of extermination, every bit as much a witness to inhumanity as those Armenian bones that Isabel Ellsen and I had keyed out of the Syrian mud ten years ago. In the newsreels, the concentration-camp smocks are black and white, but the actual mass murder of the Jews of Europe was performed in colour. Blue and white. The same colours as the Israeli flag. On the front of the smock is the number 114986.

Down in the entrance to Kleinman's block of flats, there are flyers reminding tenants of the forthcoming Holocaust Day. Givat Shaul is a friendly, bright neighbourhood of retired couples, small shops, flats, trees and some elegant old houses of yellow stone. Some of the latter are in a state of dilapidation, a few are homes. But one or two bear the scars of bullets fired long ago, on 9 April 1948, when another people faced their own catastrophe. For Givat Shaul used to be Deir Yassin. And here it was, fifty-four years ago, that up to 130 Palestinians were massacred by two Jewish militias, the Irgun Zvai Leumi and the Stern Gang, as the Jews of Palestine fought for the independence of a state called Israel. The slaughter so terrified tens of thousands of Palestinian Arabs that they fled their homes en masse—just a few of the 750,000—to create the refugee population whose vale of sorrow lies at the heart of the Israeli–Palestinian war.

Back in 1948, around the old houses that still exist close to the Kleinmans' home, Palestinian women were torn to pieces by grenades thrown by Jewish fighters. Two truckloads of Arab prisoners were taken from the village and paraded through the streets of Jerusalem. Later, many of them would be taken back to Deir Yassin and executed. Their mass grave is believed to lie beneath a fuel-storage depot that now stands at one end of the Jerusalem suburb. So a visit to the Kleinman home raises an unusual moral question. Can one listen to his personal testimony of the greatest crime in modern history and then ask about the slaughter that cut down the Palestinians at this very spot, when the eviction of the Arabs of Palestine, terrible though it was, comes nowhere near, statistically or morally, the murder of 6 million Jews? Does Josef Kleinman even know that this year, by another of those awful ironies of history, Holocaust Day and Deir Yassin Day fall on the same date?

Josef Kleinman is no ordinary Jewish Holocaust survivor. He was the youngest survivor of Auschwitz and he testified at the trial of Adolf Eichmann, head of the special “Jewish Section” of the SS, who ran the Nazi programme to murder the Jews of Europe. Josef Kleinman even saw Dr. Josef Mengele, the “Angel of Death,” who chose children, women, the old and the sick for the gas chambers. At the age of just fourteen, he watched one day as Mengele arrived on a bicycle and ordered a boy to hammer a plank of wood to a post. Here is part of Kleinman's testimony at the Eichmann trial:

We weren't told what was to happen. We knew. The boys who couldn't pass under the plank would be spared. Those boys whose heads did not reach the plank would be sent to the gas chambers. We all tried to stretch ourselves upwards, to make ourselves taller. But I gave up. I saw that taller boys than me failed to touch the plank with their heads. My brother asked me: “Do you want to live? Yes? Then do something.” My head began to work. I saw some stones. I put them in my shoes, and this made me taller. But I couldn't stand at attention on the stones. They were killing me.

Josef Kleinman's brother, Shlomo, tore his hat in half and Josef stuffed part of it into his shoes. He was still too short. But he managed to infiltrate the group who had passed the test. The remainder of the boys—a thousand in all—were gassed. Mengele, Josef Kleinman remembers, chose Jewish holidays for the mass killing of Jewish children. Kleinman's parents, Meir and Rachel, and his sister had been sent directly to the gas chambers when they arrived at Auschwitz from the Carpathian mountains, in what is now the Ukraine. He survived, along with his brother—who today, a carpenter like Josef, lives a few hundred metres away in the same suburb of Givat Shaul/Deir Yassin. Josef Kleinman also survived Dachau and the gruelling labour of building a massive bunker for Hitler's secret factory, constructed for the production of Germany's new Messerschmitt Me 262 jet fighter aircraft.

After his liberation by the Americans, Kleinman made his way to Italy and then to a small boat that put him aboard a ship for Palestine, carrying illegal Jewish immigrants who were to try to enter the territory of the dying British Mandate. He could carry only a few possessions. He chose to put his Dachau uniform in his bag—he would not forget what had happened to him. Turned back by the British, he spent six months in the Famagusta camp on Cyprus, eventually ending up in an immigrants' camp at Atlit in Palestine. He arrived in Jerusalem on 15 March 1947, and was there when Israel's war of independence broke out. He fought in that war—but not at Deir Yassin. I mention the name, almost in passing. But both Josef Kleinman and Haya nod at once.