Between destruction and revival

The chasm between Holocaust Remembrance Day and Independence Day is narrower than we believe. Had the Allies not defeated Erwin Rommel – “Hitler’s general” – in North Africa, the Nazis would have conquered the British Mandate and exterminated the Yishuv, the pre-State Jewish population. Jewish armed resistance would not have been able to stop the juggernaut of the Axis powers.

German success in North Africa dominated the early years of World War II. Had the Germans not been defeated by British forces at El Alamein in November of 1942, it is greatly doubtful that there would be a State of Israel celebrating its 73rd birthday. The Germans would have conquered Cairo and gone on to destroy the Jews of Palestine.

Gershom Gorenberg’s new study of the Allied breaking of the highly complex German Enigma code – War of Shadows – is a groundbreaking work that has everything to do with the survival of Jews in the British Mandate. While the book is invaluable in describing the genius decoders of Bletchley Park, a mansion in between Oxford and Cambridge, I find the book’s description of the Nazi plans for the Yishuv sobering and frightening. Had the Allied code-breakers failed, the State of Israel would not exist.

The reality of war came to the Yishuv early in the conflict. On September 9, 1939, Italian aircraft bombed Tel Aviv, killing 107 Jews. Sir Martin Gilbert in his 1998 study of Israel’s history describes Yitzhak Rabin’s reaction, returning home from the sea when the bombs exploded less than a half a mile in front of him. “He was horrified by the carnage,” writes Gilbert, “which he was to recall vividly while on a visit to London more than 50 years later.”

While this raid on Tel Aviv was frightening, the Nazi plan to murder the Jews of Palestine was a chilling reality that far surpassed the bombing. The Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) prepared to send SS officer Walter Rauff, inventor of the mobile gas chamber, to Africa while the Germans were winning the war in the region. His commando’s mission was to begin by murdering the 75,000 Jews of Egypt and then to move on to the rest of the Middle East and exterminate the Jews of Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq – and of course, Palestine.

MOST ARAB regimes were sympathetic to the Fascists. The Jews would not be protected from the Germans. The former grand mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, pleaded with Hitler to exterminate the Jews of the Land of Israel. He need not have begged. Hitler would attempt to destroy every Jew under German control, wherever they were.

Despite British colonialism – the epitome which was the Mandate – by 1945, 30,000 Jews in Palestine enlisted in the British forces. This reality made Israel stronger by the time they had to fight the invading Arab armies in the War of Independence in 1948. The British Special Operations Executive trained members of the Palmah as a Jewish strike force to fight the Nazis if Germans gained a foothold in the Middle East. While there was always tension between the Jews and the British over the issue of illegal immigration of Jews to Palestine, the Jews worked with the British to create strongholds in case of German invasion of the Mandate. But at the end of the day, the Jews of the British Mandate were alone.

Author Gorenberg eloquently describes the heroism and fear of the Jews of the Yishuv: “The half million Jews of Palestine, or at least the hundred thousand of the Haifa area, would take refuge in the Carmel to determine their own fate. Memory transmogrified the British Defenses of the Final Fortress into the groundwork for Masada on the Carmel. Yet, to be carried out, the plan depended on support that Britain never offered or considered giving. The memory was a defense of the mind against the horror of being defenseless.” It went back to ancient Masada – “from defiant hope of holding out, to a tragedy in which the only choice was how to die.”

The Bletchley Park’s breaking of the Enigma code would change the course of history. But for the Jews it was more than that. It would ensure their survival in the face of what the Germans were planning for all Jews: genocide.

The writer is rabbi of Congregation Anshei Sholom in West Palm Beach, Florida.