A NEW ISRAEL?
As debate over Zionism raged in pre-war Europe, some envisaged a more distant new homeland for Polish Jews. Book excerpt, IN3
Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning, by Yale University historian Timothy Snyder, examines the origins of the Holocaust in the mind of Adolf Hitler and the geopolitics of pre-war Europe. To restore the “natural order” of the planet, Hitler believed, Jews had to be eliminated, and to eliminate them he first had to render them stateless by absorbing or overrunning the countries where they lived. “The German destruction of neighbouring states,” Snyder writes, “created zones where . . . techniques of annihilation could be invented.” In this excerpt from his book, Snyder writes about pre-war Poland, where Jews made up about a tenth of the population, and proposals to reduce the numbers of European Jews through mass immigration to Palestine or beyond.
Naturally, there were Polish spies in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, some of them on a rather unusual assignment. On June 8, 1935, Polish military intelligence ordered its officers in Soviet Ukraine to make tours of all the battlefields of the Polish-Bolshevik War of1919-20. Their task was not to prepare some new campaign, but to commemorate a past one. Jozef Pilsudski (the former revolutionary and leader of Poland since 1926) had died the month before, and a small bag of earth from each of the battle sites was to be discreetly gathered for his burial mound.
The end of a political life reopened the issue of the character of the Polish state. Pilsudski’s authority had been personal, and the old comrades (“the colonels”) who wished to succeed him had to contend with popular politics at a time of economic depression. Pilsudski’s old enemies, the National Democrats, chose to exploit popular anti- Semitism to mount a challenge to the regime that his associates established after his death. Their encouragement of pogroms, at the same time an act of racism and a violation of the law, was understood by both sides as an attack on the state.
The new regime enjoyed greater formal powers than had Pilsudski himself, since it exploited an authoritarian constitution that had been conceived while he was still alive. Although most of his successors were not anti-Semitic by conviction themselves, they tried to ride out the challenge from the National Democrats by adopting anti-Semitic public policy. In so doing, Pilsudski’s successors compromised the basic moral premise of his politics: that Poland was a state and not a race.
In 1935, responsibility for Jewish affairs was transferred from the Ministry of Internal Affairs to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Jews were no longer normal citizens to be integrated and protected by the state, but somehow aliens: a matter for the world at large, objects whose future might be negotiated with foreign officials. Pilsudski’s electoral organization, which had been popular with Jews, was replaced by a party of power which excluded them.
This new Camp of National Unity (Oboz Zjednoczenia Narodowego, OZON), created in 1937, announced its preference for the emigration of about 90 per cent of Poland’s Jews. Such policies, regarded as a loathsome betrayal of tradition and principle by much of the Polish centre and left, were meant to prevent the pogroms organized by nationalists. The leader of OZON had a Jewish wife, something unthinkable for a Nazi. Nevertheless, by the standards of previous Polish practice, the change after 1935 was fundamental and unmistakable.
The man responsible for Jewish policy was Wiktor Tomir Drymmer, a close collaborator of Polish foreign minister Jozef Beck. With a background in military intelligence, Drymmer was formally in charge of both personnel and consular affairs in the Foreign Ministry. He was also the head of its emigration office, charged with arranging the exit of citizens. Poland’s official position was that European maritime empires should either permit Poland access to resources in their overseas colonies or allow Polish citizens to migrate to such places. This analysis had a force that went beyond Jewish policy. At a time when rural unemployment exceeded 50 per cent, Warsaw was pushing for the right of all of its citizens to emigrate. In the case of Jews, Polish diplomats pointed to the dramatic consequences of frozen migration routes. Before the First World War, roughly 150,000 Jews left Europe each year; in the 1930s the figure was a small fraction of this. In “trying to find an outlet for its surplus population” the Polish government had “in mind the Jews first of all.”
The question of the settlement of European Jews was a general European one, in which Poland occupied a position somewhere between the Nazi one (Jews must be eliminated, and emigration seemed the practical way to achieve this) and the Zionist one (Jews had a right to a state, which would have to be created from an existing colony).
The question of where European Jews might settle had been open since the 19th century, and very different sorts of politicians and ideologues proposed the same places.
The island of Madagascar, a colonial French possession off the southeast African coast in the Indian Ocean, was introduced to the discussion by the anti-Semite Paul de Lagarde (actually a German named Boetticher) in 1885. This idea could be considered with greater or lesser hostility or sympathy. It had supporters in Great Britain and, of course, among Germans, including the Nazi leadership. Only in French could one say “Madagassez les Juifs,” but not all of those who considered the idea in France were enemies of the Jews. Zionists also considered Madagascar, although most rejected it.
Polish authorities also allowed themselves to be tempted by the prospect of colonizing Madagascar. The idea of settling Madagascar with Polish citizens was first raised in 1926; at that time the idea was the emigration of Polish peasants from the overpopulated countryside. A decade later, after Pilsudski’s death, the idea returned in a Jewish variant. Beck proposed the emigration of Polish Jews to Madagascar to French prime minister Léon Blum in October1936, and Blum allowed the Poles to send a three-man exploratory delegation to the island.
The representative of the Polish government thought that about 50,000 Jews could be settled immediately — a significant number, but not one that would have affected the population balance in Poland. The delegate from the Jewish Emigration Association thought that 400 families might settle. The agricultural expert from Palestine thought that even this was too much. The inhabitants of Madagascar rejected any settlement from Poland. French nationalists, for their part, were concerned that the Polish colonization project would succeed and that the island would become Polish. Meanwhile, the pro-Madagascar propaganda of the Polish regime backfired: When told that the island was suitable for colonization, Polish nationalists demanded “Madagascar only for the Poles!” Beck and Drymmer expressed a special interest in the future of Palestine, a former Ottoman possession that was under British authority. The decline and fall of the Ottoman Empire had been a lesson for many European statesmen. Whereas Hitler tended to see the creation of Balkan nation-states from the Ottoman Empire as a positive example of militarism, Poles understood the same history as national liberation that would spread from Europe to Asia.
Whereas European territories taken from empires after the First World War generally became nationstates, Asian territories tended to become part of the French or British empires, sometimes in the form of “mandates” from the League of Nations. These were places judged not ready for sovereignty, and thus allotted to the great powers for political tutoring.
Palestine, taken from the defunct Ottoman district of South Syria, was such a mandate. Although the territory had a rather small Jewish minority when the British took control in 1920, British policy presented Palestine as a future Jewish National Home. This was in line with the hopes of Zionists, who hoped that one day a deal for full statehood could be struck.
Hitler’s Jewish policy forced all of the powers to clarify their position on the future of Palestine. About 130,000 German Jews emigrated in the years after Hitler came to power, some 50,000 of them settling in Palestine. Their arrival reduced the de- mographic advantage of local Arabs, who tended to consider Palestine as part of some larger Arab homeland.
Thinking that a continuation of Jewish immigration could lead to the success of Zionism, Arab leaders organized political action: first riots in April 1936, then the formation of strike committees and a general strike that lasted through October. This meant that 1937 was the moment of truth for the European states with a declared interest in the future of Palestine: Great Britain, Nazi Germany, and Poland.
London at first reacted to the Arab disturbances with a proposal for the partition of Palestine. When this led to further political chaos, the British restricted Jewish immigration to a quota. As the world was seen from London, Palestine was only a tiny part of the vast Arab and Muslim territories of the British Empire. Pleasing Jews over Palestine could mean alienating Muslims throughout the Near East and southern Asia.
Berlin specified in 1937 its own attitude toward Zionism and a possible State of Israel. Palestine had appealed to the Nazi regime as a place where Jews could settle so long as this had no clear political implications for the Near East. But in spring 1937 the German consul in Jerusalem was concerned lest the creation of a State of Israel from Palestine weaken Germany’s position in the world. The German foreign minister circulated the official position to all embassies and consulates that June: Jewish statehood in Palestine was to be opposed, as a State of Israel would become a node in the world Jewish conspiracy.
The Polish position differed from both the British and the German. London favoured Jewish statehood (at some distant and undefined point) but opposed much further Jewish migration for the time being. Berlin opposed Jewish statehood, but wanted Jews to leave Germany as soon as possible for some distant and undefined place.
Warsaw wanted both massive emigration of Jews from Europe and a Jewish state in Palestine. In public the Polish foreign minister and other diplomats called upon the British to ease immigration restrictions and create a Jewish National Home as soon as possible. The Poles had very specific ideas of what such an entity should be: “A Jewish, independent Palestine, as large as possible, with access to the Red Sea.” This meant both sides of the River Jordan; in private, Polish diplomats even raised with British colleagues the issue of the Sinai Peninsula, in Egypt. In1937, the Polish armed forces began to offer arms and training to the Haganah, the main Zionist self-defence force in Palestine.