THE RETURN OF THE REMNANT CHOSEN BY GRACE TO ISRAEL

Martin M. van Brauman 

 

FUGITIVES FROM THE SWORD WILL RETURN . . .  TO THE LAND

OF JUDAH, FEW IN NUMBER . . .  JEREMIAH 44:28

 

I will assemble you from the nations and gather you in from the lands where you have been scattered, and give you the Land of Israel . . . I will give them an undivided heart and I will place a new spirit in them; I will remove the heart of stone from their flesh and give them a heart of flesh, so that they may walk in My decrees and observe My laws and fulfill them. Then they will be a people unto Me, and I will be a God for them. Ezekiel 11:17, 19-20.

In a letter to Willy Hellpach in 1929, Albert Einstein wrote about the necessity for Zionism as a way for Jews to bear “the hatred and the humiliations” endured throughout the Diaspora; for there could be no Jewish dignity, self-sufficiency, productive work, or authentic union with humanity unless there was a Jewish homeland in Palestine to liberate and “revive the soul of the Jewish people.”[1]  Emil Fackenheim wrote that the Jewish reaction to the Holocaust was Israel’s existence and the Law of Return.[2]

The Law of Return is the legal result from the “ingathering of the exiles” in the first operative paragraph of Israel’s Declaration of Independence.  The Law of Return is a symbolic statement that Jews will never again as during the 1930s find themselves without a place to go.  The Law of Return requires only one Jewish grandparent, based upon the Nazi laws defining a Jew for extermination.

As remarked by Debbie Drori in Israel during the Intifada in 2003:

My parents are Holocaust survivors from Auschwitz.  They had to fight hard.  They stayed alive so that we would live.  Unfortunately, we have to keep living and fighting for our children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren so that there is a place for us to live here, not in Europe, the U.S. or any other place.  Jews have only one country.[3]

The future Jewish return to Israel has been a dynamic that has maintained the unity of the Jewish Diaspora.  The Jews, having passed through the fire, are seeing the prophecy of Isaiah 11:12 fulfilled:

And he shall set up an ensign for the nations,

and shall assemble the outcasts of Israel,

and gather together the dispersed of Judah

from the four corners of the earth.[4]

However, some continuous Jewish presence has existed in the Holy Land for over 33 centuries and in the Middle East, North Africa and Arabia for over 25 centuries.[5]   There has been always a Jewish presence in the Holy Land varying from the thousands to the tens of thousands.[6]  Mostly, there were ultra-orthodox Jewish communities centered in Jerusalem, Safed, Tiberius and Hebron, waiting patiently for the Messiah to rise and lead the Jewish Diaspora back to Israel.[7]  Jews have always been the majority in Jerusalem except during the periods when Roman Emperors or Christian Kings prohibited their presence on the risk of death.[8]

Since the time of Joshua, Jews have lived in the land of Israel in unbroken sequence for more than 3,300 years.[9]  After the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians in 586 B.C.E. and again after the destruction of the Second Commonwealth by the Romans in 70 C.E., Jews continued to live in the land.[10]  Although most of the nation was forced into exile, there have always remained Jewish settlements in the area referred to as the Holy Land.[11]

In 135 C.E. after the revolt by the pseudo-Messiah Bar-Cochba against the Romans ended, the main centers of Jewish population and life shifted to the Galilee around Sepphoris, Tiberias and the southern hills in Judaea, but there were no residents in Jerusalem until Empress Endocia (394-460), widow of Theodosius II, secured permission for the Jews to return.[12]  There were some Jewish communities in many of the coastal cities and in the caravan cities of Peraea.[13]

Nevertheless, from 135 to 400 C.E. witnessed the completion of the Mishnah and most of the Jerusalem Talmud.[14]  However, Christian Emperor Valentinian III in 425 closed down the Jewish schools of study and Babylonia became the seat of Jewish learning resulting in the Babylonian Talmud.[15]  The Temple and Jerusalem was replaced by the synagogue and the school in every Jewish settlement.[16]  In the 4^th century, Jews were still a majority of the population of Galilee, but a minority in the south where they never recovered from the revolt in 135 C.E.[17]

During the rule of the Byzantine emperors, legislation in Palestine excluded Jews from all honorary office, prohibited them from building new synagogues with only essential repairs to exiting Jewish structures, and prohibited Jewish conversions of slaves and freedmen along with other oppressive actions.[18]  The Jewish communities suffered 300 years of Christian intolerance and violence by the monks for half the period.  During the 7^th and 8^th centuries, Tiberias was the Jewish center of population, while some Jews returned to Jerusalem after the Muslim invasion ended Byzantine rule in 640.[19]

As Jews resettled in Jerusalem during the 7^th and 8^th centuries, they lived in the southern quarter near the Western Wall, in the northeast between the Damascus and St. Stephen’s Gates and later they purchased the slopes of the Mount of Olives facing the Temple.[20]  Along with completing the Jerusalem Talmud, work was performed on collecting and editing the commentaries known as the Midrash and to the development of a new and more efficient system of pointing and punctuation (Masorah) for the actual language in the Biblical text.[21]

During the conquest of the country by the crusaders, the entire Jewish communities of Jerusalem, Acre, Caesarea and Haifa were destroyed and those of Ramleh and Jaffa were dispersed, but the Jewish communities in the Galilee survived.[22]  In 1119, Jews were expelled from Hebron after Christian clerics decided to control the Tombs of the Patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.[23]

In 1170, the famous Jewish merchant-traveler Benjamin of Tudela passed through Jaffa and found only one Jew, a dyer, since the Crusaders had massacred the Jews and forbid the return of any Jews to Jaffa.[24]  Benjamin also met a few Jewish dyers working in Jerusalem, who were allowed to resume trading near the end of Crusader rule.[25]  According to Benjamin about 500 Jews resided in Tyre, and 200 in Ashkelon and Karaites with substantial Jewish populations in Acre, Tiberias, Beirut and Caesarea.[26]  After the encouraging visit of Benjamin of Tudela to Eretz Israel and Jerusalem, a number of Jewish pilgrims from Europe traveled to the Holy Land with the belief that their pilgrimage would bring the coming of the Messiah and Redemption.[27]

The Jewish population began to grow and beginning in 1200 the Jewish artisans had almost a monopoly of the manufacture of enameled pottery and glass, which became a major export from Jaffa to Italy and southern France.[28]  The important pottery and glass industry in Jaffa was practiced almost exclusively by Jewish artisans and introduction of its products into southern France from the end of the 12^th century onwards exerted a strong influence on the development of French ceramic art.[29]   Jewish dyers were returning back to Jerusalem, along with the occupations of Jews in banking, medicine, glass making, shipping and peddling, and the coastal cities were gaining back its Jewish population by the 13^th century.[30]

In 1211, around 300 rabbis, scholars and other Jewish immigrants from England and France settled at Acre, during a period of controversy about the rationalism of the Egyptian Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides (1135-1204)(the “Rambam”).[31]  The Jewish academy of Acre seemed to be of the mystical school of religious thought instead of the rationalism of Maimonides.[32]  Other Jewish European immigrants arrived in the impoverished community of Jerusalem.[33]  The great scholar Nachmanides (1194-1270)(the “Ramban”) from Spain settled in Jerusalem and revived the Jerusalem Jewish community and his synagogue became the center of Jewish life.[34]

By the 14^th century, the Jewish community in the Jewish quarter of Jerusalem numbered over several hundred and there were established Jewish communities in Lydda, Ramleh, Gaza, Beisan, Tiberias, Safad and Acre.[35]  In 1488, the Italian scholar Obadiah da Bertinoro arrived in Jerusalem and established a rabbinical college, which became an important authority in rabbinic matters among the Jewish communities in the Islamic world.[36]  Of course, during the Mamluk centuries the Jewish and Christian communities suffered losses of population and became a land of peasants and Bedouin.[37]

The sultans of the Ottoman Empire began ruling Palestine in 1517.[38]  The Jewish communities expanded during the Turkish rule with Sephardic immigration from the Iberian Peninsula and Italy outnumbering the local Arabic-speaking Jews until the 18^th century when Ashkenazi immigrants from Poland and northern Europe arrived.[39]  During Turkish rule, Safed became an important commercial center for its industries of weaving and the preparation of woolen cloth and emerged as an important center of Kabbalah scholars.[40]

Under the leadership of Isaac Luria (1534-1572), the Zohar with its mysterious prophecies became the center of study in Safed, influenced by the founder of Jewish mysticism, Simeon ben Jochai, who had lived in the Galilee.[41]  The Jewish population of Safed reached 15,000 during the middle of the 16^th century with 3,000 looms for weaving wool and the mystic Joseph Caro combined the studies of Kabbalah with the Talmud and produced the Shulhan Arukh, which became the standard codification of Talmudic law for orthodox Jews worldwide.[42]

However, the prosperity of the 16^th century in Safed and Tiberias was destroyed beginning in the 17^th century by raids by Bedouins and Druzes.[43]  The Turkish pashas were indifferent to the neglect and local wars of local amirs, Bedouin tribes, Druzes and others that reduced not only the Jewish community, but the whole country to poverty and desolation by reducing fertile fields to marshes and desert and towns to ruins.[44]

From the 17^th to the 19^th centuries, a number of political visionaries pleaded for the restoration of the Jews and the reestablishment of a Jewish state in Palestine.[45]  The Danish merchant Paulli submitted plans to King William III of England, Louis XIV of France and other European kings.[46]  The French priest Pierre Jurieux pleaded for the reestablishment of the Jewish homeland and Prince de Ligne in 1797 published a document in which he pleaded for the reestablishment of the Kingdom of Judea in Palestine.[47]

When Napoleon invaded Egypt and Syria in 1799, he published an appeal to the Jews of Asia and Africa “to join his colours in order to restore ancient Jerusalem.”[48]  To create a base for an empire against the British, Napoleon invited Jews from all nations to establish a Jewish state.[49]  The French historian Chateaubriand visited Jerusalem after Napoleon and was in awe of the Jewish community by writing:

It has seen Jerusalem destroyed seventeen times, yet there exists nothing in the world which can discourage it or prevent it from raisng its eyes to Zion. He who beholds the Jews dispersed over the face of the earth, in keeping with the Word of God, lingers and marvels.  But he will be struck with amazement, as at a miracle, who finds them still in Jerusalem and perceives even, who in law and justice are the masters of Judea, to exist as slaves and strangers in their own land; how despite all abuses they await the king who is to deliver them . . . If there is anything among the nations of the world marked with the stamp of the miraculous, this, in our opinion, is that miracle.[50]  

By the beginning of the 19^th century, the Jewish communities had suffered great decline along with the rest of the inhabitants after the epidemic plague in 1812 and an earthquake in 1837.[51]  When Mehemet Ali, the Viceroy of Egypt, overran Syria in 1832, the international powers suggested that a Jewish buffer state be set up in Palestine between Turkey and Egypt.[52]  In England, Sir Lawrence Oliphant, British Consul in Jerusalem, and Warder Cresson advocated a national home for the Jews.[53] In 1838, the seventh Earl of Shaftesbury asked the five Western powers to restore the Jews to Palestine and continued to address the issue during the London Convention of 1840.[54]

Sir Moses Montefiore, traveling in Palestine in May of 1839, had proposed the idea of colonization near Tiberius.[55]  The idea of the return of the Jewish people to Palestine was a subject that continually engaged public opinion.[56]  In 1839, the first British consul in Jerusalem made a report on the Jewish situation and estimated Jerusalem with 5,000 Jews, Safed with 1,500, Hebron with 750, Tiberias with 600, Acre with 200, Haifa with 150, Jaffa with 60, Nablus with 150 and various villages with about 400, resulting in a total Jewish population of approximately 10,000.[57]  In 1840, Britain’s Foreign Secretary Palmerston recommended to the Sultan Jewish settlements in Palestine to strength the Ottoman Empire.[58]

The Jews are the only nation to have a national claim to the Land.  Lord Shaftesbury said in 1843:

There is a country without a nation; and God now in his wisdom and mercy, directs us to a nation without a country, His own once loved, nay still loved people, the sons of Abraham, of Isaac and of Jacob.[59]

In 1334, Jewish traveler Rabbi Isaac Chelo visited Jaffa, where the Jews had built a beautiful synagogue with a school and library.[60]  After subsequent years of wars of destruction in Jaffa, the Jewish community disappeared until 1830 when a new Jewish community was established.[61]  In 1841, the Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem, Abraham Hayyim Gagin, appointed a rabbi for Jaffa, Jehudah Halevy.[62]  By 1844, Jews were the largest single religious group in Jerusalem and in 1872 they outnumbered the total Christian and Muslim community.[63]

Moses Hess, a German Jew and disturbed by the Damascus blood libel in 1840, envisioned the restoration of the Jewish people to a Jewish state in the Holy Land, when he wrote Rome and Jerusalem in 1862.[64]  Although the Jews were experiencing a period of emancipation and assimilation in Germany, Hess asserted that Germans would continue to hate Jews for racial reasons and would continue to despise the Jews.[65]  He claimed that a Jewish state would raise the Jews from their parasitic position and correct the injustice.[66]  He predicted accurately that European powers and Jewish philanthropists with immigration primarily from religious eastern European Jews would create the Jewish state.[67]   German Jews in the Jewish Reform movement were hostile towards Hess and his book was forgotten yet his ideas were adopted by Zionist leaders 40 years later.[68]

In 1870, the Alliance Israélite Universelle of French, British and American Jews bought land outside Jaffa for an agricultural school, Mikveh Israel.[69]  Previously, Rabbi Zvi Hersch Kalischer (1795-1874) called a conference in 1860 at Thorn and from the conference “The Society for the Colonisation of the Land of Israel” was founded in 1861.[70]  Kalischer and his followers influenced the Alliance to establish Mikveh Israel.[71]

In 1873, Tiberias consisted of about a two thousand residents of which one-third were Jewish, who were divided between Russian and Spanish immigrants.[72]  In 1873, it was reported how Jews would come every Friday as for centuries to the “wailing place of the Jews”, which was a portion of the lower walls of the destroyed Temple in Jerusalem.[73]

In 1875, land north of Jaffa was purchased for agricultural work and named Petah Tikvah (gate of hope), followed by similar agricultural settlements by Jews from Rumania, Poland and Russia.[74]  In 1882, Rumanian Jews settled at Samarin (later renamed Zikron Yaakob) in the hills south of Carmel and at Rosh Pina on the road from Tiberias to Lake Huleh.[75]  Russian Jews settled in Rishon le Zion (First in Zion) and in the Jerusalem colony of Petah Tikvah, while Polish Jews settled north of Rosh Pina.[76]  By 1880, there were over 25,000 Jews in Palestine and by 1914 Jewish colonies were established along the coastal plain and in the Galilee and Jewish presence in Jerusalem and other cities was increased.[77]

Many early settlements were provided funds from Baron Edmond de Rothschild and later his interests were handed over to the Jewish Colonisation Association in 1899 to reform the agricultural programs and improve the economic conditions of the settlements.[78]  Between 1882 and 1898, Alliance continued to establish schools in Jerusalem, Haifa, Jaffa, Acre, Safad and Tiberias.[79]  To survive, the Jewish refugees had to established agricultural settlements, which were dependent upon wealthy benefactors such as Baron Edmond de Rothschild.  By the beginning of the First World War, 55 settlements, including the town of Tel Aviv, had been established.[80]

With the opening of the Jaffa-Jerusalem Railway in 1892 and with continued Jewish immigration, Jaffa experienced development in trade and shipping with the Jewish suburb of Tel Aviv being established in 1909.[81]  The remarkable growth and development of Jaffa and the surrounding area was due to the creation of Jewish agricultural settlements and the large influx into Jaffa and Tel Aviv of Jewish Zionists.[82]  By 1922, Tel Aviv was the first constituted town in the world whose administration was entirely Jewish with a population of around 18,000 Jews.[83]

The first major wave of emigration, or First Aliyah (“to ascend” or “to go up”) of Jewish refugees escaping persecution in Russia and Eastern Europe began in the 1880s and continued with a second major wave or Second Aliyah in 1903.[84]  Rishon le Zion, southeast of Jaffa, was established in 1882 and by 1900 there were about 20 other settlements of about 4,500 settlers throughout the country from Metula in the north to Gedera in the south.[85]

During this period, Jewish immigration was driven by the rise of anti-Semitism in Russia.  On April 19^th and 20^th of 1903, a mob in Kishinev attacked its Jewish community, killing 49 men, women and children, injuring over 500 and looting and destroying Jewish property.[86]  Kishinev was followed by fifty other pogroms throughout Czarist Russia during the Easter holidays.[87]  In the late 19^th century, Greek Orthodox clergy in Palestine were aggressively importing anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism from Czarist Russia and the local German Protestant Templars were hostile to Jewish immigration as economic rivals.[88]

Prior to the Zionist waves of immigration in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, the Jews in Palestine lived in extreme poverty, especially in Jerusalem where even before the 1840s they were the largest part of the population.[89]  The Holy Land was destroyed by centuries of Islamic misrule and absentee landlords, until the Jewish people started to return in increased numbers to the Land in the late 1800’s and began planting trees in the desert, draining malarial swamps and establishing agricultural areas.  This development by the Jewish settlers drew Arab laborers from Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the Sudan.  By 1914, over 12,000 Jewish settlers were farming about 100,000 acres of agricultural land.[90]  The total Jewish population was close to 100,000 by 1914 with around 60,000 in Jerusalem (a majority of the inhabitants), 12,500 in Safad and 12,000 in Jaffa-Tel Aviv.[91]

However, because of the Islamic rule under the Ottoman Empire the Jews were treated as dhimmis, second-class subjects, who were considered inferior by custom and law and were segregated by residence and subject to discrimination and periodic pogroms.[92]  The Jerusalem-resident Arabs would deliberately scatter broken glass along the Jews’ path to prayer at the Western Wall, against which the Arabs would dump garbage, sewage, urine and feces.[93]

This discriminated status rejects the so-called Arab claims that under Islamic rule Christians, Jews and Muslims have lived always in peace, fraternity and tolerance and, as historian David Landes summarized, the dhimmis rules under Islamic law in all Muslim countries were the following:

Jews had to pass Muslims on their left side, because that was the side of Satan.  They had to yield the right of way, step off the pavement to let the Arab go by, above all make sure not to touch him in passing, because this could provoke a violent response.  In the same way, anything that reminded the Muslim of the presence of alternative forms of worship had to be avoided so synagogues were placed in humble, hidden places and the sounds of Jewish prayer were carefully muted.[94]

The Palestinian, pan-Arab and Islamist fundamental hatred against Zionism cannot be understood without considering this dhimmi background.[95]  Muslim nationalism cannot accommodate the sovereignty of the Jewish people residing in the “abodes of Islam,” who are not in the dhimmi status.[96]

Eliezer Ben Yehuda (1858-1922), Lithuanian born and Paris educated, arrived in Jerusalem in 1881, established a newspaper, promoted the use of Hebrew as the local language and created a modern usage Hebrew dictionary.[97]  In 1913, Hebrew was used at the Institute of Technology in Haifa.[98]  By the end of World War I, Hebrew was the public language, uniting the Jewish people in the Land after 2,000 years.[99]

Emigration had increased with Theodor Herzl promoting the idea of a Jewish homeland in 1895 through the Society of Maccabaeans in London.[100]  European anti-Semitism was the driving force that returned Herzl to his Jewish identity from his assimilated background.[101]  In 1896, he published Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State) and political Zionism was born.[102]

Herzl insisted that the creation of a Jewish state was possible “[i]f you will it, it is no dream.”[103]  Zionism represents the ingathering of the Jewish people in its historic homeland, Eretz Israel, from all countries and the re-establishment of the nation-state of Israel with Jerusalem (Zion) as its capital.  In the late 19^th century with the rise of nationalism, countries especially in Eastern Europe were organizing based upon national heritage, as Poles, Romanians, Slovaks, Serbs and Jews.[104]  Zionism was simply considered the national liberation movement of the Jewish people.[105]

The First Zionist Congress with over 200 delegates from all over the world was established by Herzl in 1897 for the “aim of Zionism to create for the Jewish people a home in Palestine secured by public law.”  However, Herzl died in 1904 with all of his endeavors in failure.[106]  Herzl was unable to convince the German Kaiser to use his power with the Sultan of Turkey to set up in Palestine a Jewish Chartered Company under German protection.[107]  Herzl was unable to conclude an agreement with the Sultan Abdul Hamid for authority to purchase lands in certain areas in Palestine and Syria for Jewish immigrants by offering the Sultan a loan of four million Turkish pounds to establish the Jewish-Ottoman Land Company.[108]  Herzl unsuccessfully pursued efforts in Russia and with the Vatican to gain support for Zionism and to influence Turkey.[109]

Also, Herzl held negotiations with the British Foreign Office for a Jewish settlement in El Arish, near the southern frontier of Palestine, but was opposed by the Egyptian and Turkish governments.[110]  Later, the Zionist Congress rejected an offer after the El Arish failure from Britain’s Colonial Secretary, Joseph Chamberlain, of the British Foreign Office to settle Jews in the colony of Kenya in East Africa to avoid the pressure of Jews from Eastern Europe immigrating to Britain and exciting anti-Semitic protests.[111]

Herzl foresaw the menace posed by the growing populist anti-Semitism in France, Algeria, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Romania, and Russia and believed that only a mass exodus by the Diaspora Jews from Europe resettling in the ancient homeland would avoid persecution and pogroms.[112]  The ancient homeland was a tiny part of the Ottoman Empire and there were never a separate Palestinian people.[113]  Unfortunately, anti-Semitism has not diminished or disappeared after the establishment of Israel in 1948.[114]  Instead, Israel itself has become the new “Jewish question” and its enemies reject its very right to exist.[115]

Following several pogroms in Russia during 1905, the Second Aliyah increased from 1902 to 1914.[116]  Around 1908, Palestine was still an underdeveloped backwater and a desolate area in the Ottoman Empire, but the Jews had acquired over 156 square miles of land and had established 26 settlements.[117]  As mentioned previously, the Jewish community in Palestine (or the Yishuv) numbered over 100,000 people by the outbreak of the 1^st World War.[118]  By 1914, the Jews had purchased 130,000 acres of which 90,000 were under cultivation in the 26 separate agricultural communities.[119]  The Third Aliyah beginning in the early 1920s from Communist Russia expanded the kibbutz system and greatly increased the Jewish population in the 1930s with Nazi persecution in Europe.[120]

In 1898, Kaiser Wilhelm sought support from the Ottoman Empire’s Sultan Abdul Hamid and ceased any promising support to Herzl and the Zionists to appease Hamid.[121]    In 1914, the Kaiser unleashed an anti-Jewish global jihad through Max von Oppenheim to destroy the British Empire in the Middle East.[122]  Britain was considering a public embrace of Zionism since the Russian Revolution in February of 1917 to win the support of the Jewish populations in Russia to return to the war effort for Britain and in the United States to help US war mobilization.[123]  Sir Mark Sykes expressed the opinion after the Russian Revolution that a public endorsement of Zionism would keep Russia in the war for the Allied cause.[124]

The final push for the British came from a German newspaper editorial in the Vossische Zeitung on October 18, 1917, in which Richard Lichtheim pleaded with Zionists not to give up on Germany and her Ottoman ally “while the Entente can only make promises, Turkey, being in virtual possession of Palestine,” could offer “more tangible concessions.”    The London Times cried “insidious propaganda” and demanded on October 26, 1917 that the government endorse Zionism, in which after receiving Cabinet approval on October 31^st two days later Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour released his famous declaration.[125]

The Kaiser’s attempt in pan-Islam was a strategic failure to help Germany in the First World War, but the flames of revolutionary Islamic jihadism appeared throughout the Middle East.[126]  The German produced Arabic jihad pamphlet during the winter of 1914-1915 read:

The killing of the infidels who rule over the Islamic lands has become a sacred duty, whether it be secretly or openly, as the great Koran declares in its word: ‘Take them and kill them whenever you come across them.’[127]

On November 9, 1914 after Turkey’s entry into World War I, Herbert Samuel, a member of the British Cabinet as President of the Local Government Board, proposed to Foreign Secretary Gray, concerning the post-war disposition of the Ottoman Empire of “the opportunity for the fulfillment of the ancient aspiration of the Jewish people and the restoration there of a Jewish State” and a Jewish state in Palestine might become a “fountain of enlightenment.”[128]

However, by early 1915 Samuel’s position changed to recommending a British Protectorate for Palestine with allowances for Jewish land purchases and controlled Jewish immigration, but with an Arab majority a Jewish state was out of the question until the Jews obtained a majority over time in the land.[129]  The theme of gradual evolution to Jewish self-rule in some form under British power to Samuel’s early statements to actively propose a Jewish return to Palestine did form the framework of thought, in which the Balfour Declaration was drafted in 1917.[130]

On November 2, 1917, A.J. Balfour, Foreign Secretary in Lloyd George’s government, sent a letter to the head of Britain’s Zionist Federation, Lord Lionel Walter Rothschild, a letter known ever since as the Balfour Declaration.[131]  The Balfour Declaration stated that “His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.”[132]  Balfour, who knew the Bible, suggested that this Declaration might be atonement by the Christian world for its persecution of the Jews.[133]  In 1918, Balfour commented that “My personal hope is that the Jews will make good in Palestine and eventually found a Jewish State.”[134]

The Balfour Declaration was approved by the War Cabinet in October 1917 and published on November 9^th.[135]  On December 2, 1917 in the London Opera House before a full house with overflow people in the streets outside, leading officials, such as Herbert Samuel, former Liberal cabinet minister, Robert Cecil, assistant foreign secretary, Sir Mark Sykes, War Cabinet assistant secretary, spoke in celebration of the British government’s pledge “to use their best endeavors to . . . [establish] in Palestine . . . a national home for the Jewish people.”[136]  With the presence of Zionist leaders Chaim Weizmann and Nahum Sokolw, Lord Rothschild spoke first by saying “We are met on the most momentous occasion in the history of Judaism for the last eighteen hundred years.  We are here to return thanks to His Majesty’s government for a declaration which marked an epoch . . . For the first time since the dispersion, the Jewish people have received their proper status by the declaration of one of the great Powers.”[137]

Balfour during his discussions in 1906 with Chaim Weizmann, a lecturer in organic chemistry at Manchester University, witnessed that the Jewish love of Israel was unique and at the end of his life Balfour stated that “what he had been able to do for the Jews had been the thing he looked back upon as the most worth his doing.”[138]  Weizmann was rewarded with the Balfour Declaration by successfully producing synthetic acetone from grain rather than wood pulp, which was becoming scarce in Britain.[139]  Acetone was an essential ingredient in cordite for explosives in ammunition.[140]

The War Cabinet hoped with the promise of a home in Palestine that Russian Jews would encourage Russia to stay in the war and American Jews would help increase the United State military’s participation in the war.[141]  Many Britons in 1916 held the misconception of the existence of a monolithic, powerful and worldwide Jewish association.[142]  Winston Churchill as Secretary of State for the Colonies stated in June 22, 1921 that the Balfour Declaration was an obligation made in wartime “to enlist the aid of Jews all over the world.”[143]

When Dr. Chaim Weizmann went to Palestine in spring of 1918 as head of the Zionist commission sent by the British government to plan the implementation of the Balfour Declaration for the Jewish homeland, the seeds of anti-Semitism were implanted already into the British officer corps.[144]  General Wyndham Deeds showed him copies of the Protocols, which belonged to the British officers who served in the British Military Mission in the Caucasus on the staff of the Grand Duke Nicholas.[145]

In autumn of 1919, publications of the Protocols appeared in England, causing a rise in anti-Semitism and an incorrect linkage between the mythical Jewish conspiracy of world domination and the Bolshevik Revolution.[146]  An anti-Semitic political environment developed in Britain, in which an anti-Bolshevik fixation negatively affected Zionist attitudes among the government officials.[147]

On June 4, 1918, Dr. Weizmann met with Emir Feisal, leader of the Arab armies against the Ottoman Empire and the son of Emir Hussein the Grand Sharif of Mecca and leader of the Arabs of Hejaz in Akaba, to welcome the Jews to their National Home in Palestine.[148]  On January 3, 1919, the Weizmann-Faisal Agreement between Chaim Weizmann of the Zionist movement and His Royal Highness the Emir Faisal was signed, which assured under Articles III and IV a Jewish homeland in Palestine.[149]

Haj Amin al-Husseini was enraged with Faisal’s signing and the Balfour Declaration and incited four days of rioting in Jerusalem on April 4, 1920 during the annual Nabi Musa procession.[150]  Even though al-Husseini was sentenced to 10 years in prison by the British for instigating the riots that devastated the Jewish residential areas in Jerusalem, the British Mandate Governor Herbert Samuel appointed al-Husseini the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem for life to make peace with al-Husseini and to maintain a balance of power between the Husseini and Nashashibi clans on May 8, 1921.[151]

In 1921, the British excluded Transjordan from the Jewish National Home, for Feisal’s brother Emir Abdullah to rule.[152]  Feisal expected the British to give him Syria with its capital in Damascus, in return for abandoning all claims to Palestine for the Jewish National Home.[153]

In 1921 when the Balfour Declaration was challenged in the House of Lords by Lord Rothermere, Lord Balfour replied that he was aware of the large Arab population in Palestine and accepted self-determination for all countries with the exception of Palestine.[154]  He explained further that exception:

Every Jew throughout the world has his portion in Palestine, and, therefore, if I take all the Jews throughout the world, surely in strict numbers they overcome the Arabs present.[155]

Balfour’s concept of the Jewish Diaspora has been expressed as “He who lives in the land and he who waits to see it are both part of the patrimony of the Jewish heritage and its destiny.”[156]

Although the principles of the Balfour Declaration was incorporated into the Versailles Peace Treaty of 1919, the League of Nations Mandate to Britain to oversee the Jewish national home was finalized at the Allied conference in San Remo, Italy.[157]  The Balfour Declaration was adopted by the San Remo Conference as a “declaration of sympathy for Jewish Zionist aspirations” and Great Britain was granted a Mandate over Palestine, which was confirmed and defined by the League of Nations.[158]

The San Remo Conference on April 25, 1920 incorporated the Balfour Declaration into the peace treaty with Turkey at Sèvres and to grant the Palestine mandate to Britain.[159]  Article 2 of the San Remo resolution, which was ratified by the League of Nations on July 24, 1922, provided the international legal support for the British promise to create a Jewish homeland.[160]  The League of Nations approved three mandates carved out of the Ottoman Empire, Palestine and Mesopotamia as British mandates and Syria as a French mandate, and approved Arabia as independent under pro-British monarchs.[161]   The British wanted the Sinai as part of the Palestine Mandate, but France disagreed so the Sinai was allotted to Egypt, which had not requested it out of the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire.[162]

President Wilson supported the Balfour Declaration beginning in 1917 and the U.S. Congress endorsed it in September 1922, while Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes opposed the Congressional endorsement.[163]  The State Department worked with anti-Zionists, the Arab delegation, Protestant missionaries and the British Colonial Office during the 1919 Paris Peace Conference to prevent the endorsement of it.[164]

The Preamble of the Mandate recognized the historic right of the Jews to a national home in Palestine.[165]  President Woodrow Wilson on March 3, 1919 stated that “the Allied Nations with the fullest concern of our own government and people are agreed that in Palestine shall be laid the foundation of a Jewish Commonwealth.”[166]

I will return the captivity of My people Israel, and they will rebuild desolate cities and settle them; they will plant vineyards and drink their wine; they will cultivate gardens and eat their fruits. I will plant them upon their land and they will never again be uprooted from their land that I have given them, said the Lord, your God. Amos 9:14-15.

The Jewish immigration and financial investment after World War 1 changed the Palestine economy and attracted Arabs from everywhere in the Middle East to the improving socio-economic conditions by the development of the Jewish National Home.[167]  The 1937 British Commission of inquiry headed by Lord Peel acknowledged:

The general benefit effect of Jewish immigration on Arab welfare is illustrated by the fact that the increase in the Arab population is most marked in urban areas percent in Haifa was 86, in Jaffa 62, in Jerusalem 37, while in purely Arab towns such as Nablus and Hebron it was only 7, and at Gaza there was a decrease of 2 percent.[168]

However, the Peel report stated that:

We have found that, though the Arabs have benefited by the development of the country owing to Jewish immigration, this has had no conciliatory effect.  On the contrary . . . with almost mathematical precision the betterment of the economic situation in Palestine meant the deterioration of the political situation.[169] 

Because of the political situation with the Balfour Declaration, there were Arab attacks on the Jewish quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem with 47 Jewish deaths following Muslim religious celebrations on April 4, 1920.[170]  Haj Amin Husseini led the pogrom in Jerusalem and was later sentenced by a British military court to 10 years in prison, but was able to flee the country and was pardoned subsequently by High Commissioner Samuel, who in April 1921 appointed Haj Amin to Palestine’s highest Islamic post of Mufti.[171]

After the war, the British took the side of the Arabs.  When Arab mobs raged against the Jews throughout Jerusalem in April 1920, veterans of the Jewish Legion of General Allenby’s army lead by Vladimir Jabotinsky protected the Jewish community in New Jerusalem, but the British army prevented Jabotinsky’s militia from entering the Old City to protect the Jewish community.[172]  The British military tribunal acquitted most of the Arab rioters, but sentenced Jabotinsky to 15 years hard labor for the crime of trying to defend his people from a murderous mob, which a court of inquiry by the British army later reversed the outcome and recalled the anti-Semitic military government in Palestine.[173]

In 1920, the Jews had formed the Haganah, a paramilitary organization lead by Jabotinsky, since the British failed to defend the Jews during the pogroms.[174]  The Irgun and the Stern Gang were formed in the 1930s to launch offensives against the Arabs and the British army.[175]

During 1928, out of Egypt was formed in Ismailia the Muslim Brotherhood headed by Hassan al-Banna, with the purpose to conduct jihad against Zionism as a political and national movement and against the Jewish people as the carrier of an alien and destructive religion and ideology.[176]  The name of this evil movement is Islamic Jihadism, as launched by al-Banna (1906-1949) with the call to jihad.[177]

During Yom Kippur in 1928, a collapsible screen to separate male and female worshippers, a mechitza, was set at the Western Wall and the Arabs yelled jihad that the Jews were trying to rebuild their Temple and destroy the al-Aksa Mosque.[178]  Because of the jihad call, hundreds of Jews were killed leading up to the 1929 pogrom in Hebron, which eliminated the entire ancient Jewish community.[179]  In June 1930 during an international commission on the future of the Western Wall after the 1929 massacres, the Mufti’s representatives refused to recognize any Jewish rights at the Wall and in Palestine at all, which was repeated at a pan-Islamic congress meeting in Jerusalem in December 1931.[180]  After the pogroms, the British decreed to appease the Arabs that the Arabs were the sole owners of the Western Wall and the Jews were forbidden to blow the shofar near the Wall.[181]

During the 1929 pogroms in Jerusalem, Safed and Hebron, over 133 Jews were murdered by Arab mobs that were inspired by the British-appointed grand mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini.[182]  After the Jewish massacres, Jerusalem Arab students in September 1929 with the authority of the Moslem Supreme Council called for a boycott of Jewish businesses, which continued under the Palestinian Arab leadership during the Mandate period.[183]  The wife, Beatrice Webb, of the anti-Zionist Colonial Secretary, Lord Passfield, commented to Chaim Weizmann, regarding the mass killing of Hebron’s Jews in 1929 that

I can’t understand why the Jews make such a fuss over a few dozen of their people killed in Palestine.  As many are killed every week in London in traffic accidents, and no one pays any attention.[184]

Syrian Arab sheikh ‘Izz al-Din al-Qassam, who actively cooperated with Haj Amin from the early 1920s, led jihad terror attacks against the British mandate and Jewish civilians as an Islamic inevitability.[185]  Al-Qassam’s death near Jenin in a gunfight against British police in November 1935 made him into a hero of the Palestinian resistance (“Qassam” rockets and brigades).[186]  Qassam promoted jihad as a war against unbelievers as interpreted by the Koran with no tolerance for any deviance.[187]

In 1936, Ahmad Hussein, founder of the Young Egypt movement and later known as the Islamic Nationalist Party, and a delegation of his paramilitary Green Shirts participated in the Nazi Nuremberg Rally.[188]  In October 1938, Arabic versions of Mein Kampf and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion were distributed at the Islamic parliamentarians’ conference in Cairo.[189]  After a September 1938 visit by 30 Iraqis to Nuremberg as the guests of Hitler and the Hitler Youth, Sami Shawkat, a government minister, created the al-Futuwa youth organization modeled after the Hitler Youth.[190]

The grand mufti established a Palestinian youth organization under the name of the “Nazi Scouts” before the war, which adopted Hitler Youth-style shorts and leather belts.[191]  During the Palestinian revolt of 1936-1939, the swastika, German flags and photographs of Hitler were displayed by the Arabs and Arab children greeted each other with the Hitler salute.

During the 1936-1939 Arab riots, the followers of Al-Qassam carried on such a campaign of terror and indiscriminate murder that the Arab revolt eventual disintegrated within the Palestinian camp.[192]  Of the nineteen Jews in Tiberias that were murdered by the Arabs, eleven children were burnt alive in their nursery.[193]  Yasser Arafat’s Fatah organization and Hamas have revered him as “the first commander of the Palestinian Revolution.”[194]

During the 1920s and 30s, Jewish settlements increased economic opportunities in the area, making immigration attractive to the Arabs living in the nearby underdeveloped countries.[195]  In 1933, about 4 percent of Palestine’s 10,000 square miles was in Jewish possession in enclaves around Jaffa-Tel Aviv, the northern Mediterranean coast, Haifa and the Galilee, about 20 percent was Arab owned and large tracts were reserved for cultivation.[196]  The Mandate government owned the remaining 70 percent and half of that was uninhabitable desert.[197]  From 1933 to 1935, over 120,000 Jews mainly from Germany and Poland immigrated to Palestine, bringing the Jewish population to around 355,000.[198]  During this time Arab immigration from Arab regions as far as from Morocco to Afghanistan increased to more than 1,300,000 by 1936 with a Jewish population of 380,000.[199]

On August 7, 1933, the Zionist movement concluded the Transfer Agreement (Haavara) with the Third Reich in which approximately 60,000 German Jews with $100 million in personal wealth were transferred to Palestine in return for the Zionists to halt the worldwide Jewish-led anti-Nazi boycott.[200]  The Transfer Agreement, by allowing money and Jews to move to Palestine, launched the possibility of a Jewish state, a “nation no Jew could enter as a refugee or a stranger, a nation all Jews would enter as full citizens.”[201]  Edwin Black wrote that

the price of this new nation would be the abandonment of the war against Nazi Germany. Whole branches of Judaism would wither, but the trunk would survive – Herzl’s words . . . From this crisis of humiliation, agony, and expulsion would come sanctuary, nationhood, and a new Jew, with a new home to call his own.[202]  

Over the four year period beginning in 1933, the Transfer Agreement between the German Economics Ministry and the Jewish Agency, as the Zionist representatives in Germany and Palestine, encouraged the Jewish exit from Germany by allowing limited property transfers to Palestine in spite of the financial crisis in Germany, but the majority of the personal wealth was taken by the Nazi government as an exit charge.[203]  The British imposed a £1,000 Palestine entry requirement for Jews, which allowed the British a refined racial barrier to Jewish immigration, since most Jews could not meet the financial requisites.[204]

In 1933, Hitler considered Palestine as only a stretch of desert and swamp, in which German Jews would be sent to a remote, self-run concentration camp and would be politically isolated.[205]  Edwin Black wrote that while the worldwide boycott against Hitler in 1933 did not succeed, the initial boycott did force the Third Reich to agree to the Transfer Agreement and without such an agreement “a precious human and financial remnant would have never been saved, a remnant indispensable to building the Jewish State.”[206]  During this period, Hitler’s political power rested upon the German expectation of economic recovery and the German boycott during 1933 was devasting to the economy and employment.[207]

In 1933, most of the Jewish Palestinian economy was based upon citrus exports, primarily oranges.[208]  The Haavara brought capital, businesses, and how-how to produce an economic explosion of jobs in Jewish Palestine and by 1936 the Jewish population had doubled.[209]  When hundreds of thousands of Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, representing a remnant of a family, a village, or a community in Europe, and “when the moment of the in-gathering of the exiles was at hand, Israel was ready” for a nation was waiting that had not existed 15 years earlier.[210]

After the Evian conference in July 1938, the resulting Intergovernmental committee of Refugee’s representative in London, George Rublee, began negotiating with Hjalmar Schucht from the German government about Jewish emigration, following the general pattern of the Haavara.[211]  The negotiations continued with Helmut Wohlthat, Göring’s representative in the Rublee talks, resulting in the Rublee-Schacht-Wohlthat agreement.[212]  President Roosevelt pressured the American Jewish leadership to agree to the Rublee-Wohlthat plan and early June 1939 the Jewish leadership had established the Co-ordinating Foundation to finance the German-Jewish emigrants, but the war in September 1939 ended the resettlement project.[213]

The influx of Jewish immigration was met with Arab armed revolt between 1936 and 1939.[214]  In October 1930, the Colonial Secretary, Lord Passfield issued a new Palestine White Paper to appease the Arab hostility to a Jewish National Home and drastically altered the commitment to both Arabs and Jews.[215]  Churchill argued that the British obligation “was to Jews wherever they might live, to have the right to become part of the Jewish National Home” and “no similar obligation had been made to the Arabs outside Palestine.”[216]  Churchill emphasized that Britain had pledged to the Jews alone to build a homeland in Palestine by immigration.[217]  While the Peel Commission report published on July 7, 1937 was being debated in the British Parliament over the proposed partition of Palestine into a Jewish State and an Arab State, Churchill reiterated that the Mandate intended for a Jewish State to constitute the whole of Palestine from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River.[218]

Considering the continuing conflict without end in Israel with the Arabs, Churchill’s statement in 1937 may prove to be the eventual outcome for the State of Israel by declaring that

[i]f the Mandate was ‘worked a bit slower, on the lines that had been intended,’ he said, eventually he ‘considered it to be inevitable that we should have sovereignty over the whole of Palestine, although that might take a century or two centuries.’ Jewish civilization . . . was ‘the stronger and would ultimately dominate,’ . . . [219]   

Arguing against partition, Churchill held that a small Jewish State “can be ravished by its enemies, defeated in war, annexed to other powers or suffer any of the other incidents that are common to small States in the fortunes and chances of war. . .  Once you have accepted your State, and it has gone, or been destroyed, your great moral claims will have disappeared too.”[220]

Regrettably, Churchill later argued in 1938 for a fixed ratio of Jewish and Arab immigration over a ten-year plan to maintain existing population percentages to the dismay of the Zionists, who wanted to secure a Jewish majority within ten years in Palestine.[221]  In 1939, Churchill did argue against the MacDonald White Paper (known to the Jews as the Black Paper) as a betrayal of the Balfour Declaration and a reprehensible act of appeasement to the Arabs.[222]

Between the beginning of the Arab uprising in April 1936 and the spring of 1939, Arab attacks on British military had resulted in more than 5,000 Arabs killed by British troops and more than 500 Arabs, advocating good relations with the Jews, killed by Arabs.[223]  To end Arab violence, Neville Chamberlain “to have the Moslem world with us” proposed a policy to guarantee a permanent Arab majority.[224]   Chamberlain stressed that “[i]f we must offend one side . . .  Let us offend the Jews rather than the Arabs.”[225]

Following every outbreak of Arab violence, the British would reduce the unrest by limiting Jewish immigration.[226]  Thus, the “Arab extortion” began, in which the Arabs realized that by attacking Jews they could force the British to impose greater restrictions on the Jews while the Jewish victims were perceived as being at fault.[227] Even today, Arab attacks against Israel and the Jews bring pro-Arab world reactions that reinforce and encourage the cycle of Arab violence.

In October 1938 to appease the Arabs, the Sir John Woodhead commission recommended renouncing the partition plan and by January 1939, the colonial secretary, Malcolm MacDonald, insisted on active measures to improve Anglo-Arab relations.[228]   While Hitler was entering Prague during his pillage of Czechoslovakia and the destruction of the Jewish communities in March 1939, Chamberlain, who so handled Herr Hitler in Munich, made public the White Paper on May 19, 1939, which limited Jewish immigration to 75,000 Jews over the next 5 years and required Arab approval for any additional Jewish immigration after 5 years.[229]

In July 1939, MacDonald suspended all Jewish immigration to Palestine from October 1939 until March 1940.[230]  The White Paper essentially stopped the immigration of the persecuted Jews from Hitler’s Europe and the possibility of a Jewish place of sanctuary.[231]  Graciously as a “humanitarian” gesture, the British government permitted 9,000 to 10,000 Jewish children from Germany, Austria, Poland, Czechoslovakia and the Free City of Danzig to enter Britain.[232]

On February 28, 1940, the Land Transfer Regulations were placed in effect, which prevented further Jewish land purchases in Judea, Samaria, Galilee, the immediate areas surrounding Jerusalem, the Jerusalem corridor, Beersheba, the area north of Acre and the Jezreel Valley, but Jews could continue to purchase land along the coast around existing Jewish settlements and around Haifa.[233]  The regulations essentially nullified the terms of the British Mandate.[234]

A coup d’état on April 1, 1941 against the pro-British government of Regent Abdul al-Ilah by pro-Nazi Rashid Ali Kilani was inspired by the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini.[235]  One of the coup plotters was Yunis es-Sebawi, who was involved in the Arabic translation of Mein Kampf.[236]  Al-Husseini offered the Germans the support of the Arab countries, if they would allow the Arabs to destroy the promise of a Jewish Home in Palestine.[237]  Through radio broadcasts, the Mufti claimed that the Jews worked as spies for the British and called for their death.[238]

Haj Amin was appointed Mufti of Jerusalem in May 1921 by the “brilliant” Sir Herbert Samuel despite the fact that Haj Amin had been tried in absentia for his part of the 1920 riots and sentenced to 15 years imprisonment by the British.[239]  In April 1920 and in May 1921, anti-Zionist riots occurred in Jerusalem, Jaffa, Hadera and Petach Tikva.[240]  Since the early 1920s, Haj Amin aroused the Muslim believers by falsely claiming that the Jews were planning to take the al-Haram al-Sharif (the Temple Mount area) to rebuild Solomon’s Temple on the ruins of the great mosques and he called on Muslim leaders in the world to defend the holy places of Islam against Zionist imperialism.[241] This same fake claim is used consistently today to inflame the Muslim world against the very existence of the Jewish state and the Jews.

Haj Amin fled to French-controlled Beirut in 1937 to avoid arrest by the British and then to Iraq after the British suppressed the Palestine revolt in 1939 and fled again after the 1941 pro-Axis coup in Baghdad to Tehran, Ankara, Rome and then Berlin.[242]  The British-led Arab Legion from Jordan drove out the junta in Baghdad after 30 days and returned power to the Regent, but before the Legion’s return mobs murdered 180 Jews and injured and mutilated several hundred, desecrated synagogues and destroyed Jewish property.[243]  The farhud (great pogrom) in Baghdad changed forever the position of the Jews and, after the State of Israel was established, the Iraq government began promulgating numerous anti-Semitic decrees.[244]

On March 19, 1933, the swastika was unfurled over the German consulates in Jerusalem and Jaffa.[245]  By 1937, there were about 2,000 Aryan Reichdeutsche residing in Palestine and most of them being members of the Templar sect with loyalty to the Nazi Party, which considered the German settlements as foreign posts of the Third Reich.[246]  Arab nationalists, the Muslim Brotherhood, and the Palestinian leader Haj Amin developed relationships and ideological connections with the local Nazis, which provided the anti-Semitic underpinning for the current Islamo-fascism.[247]  The ideologies of Hezbollah and Hamas are viscerally anti-Semitic, encompassing conspiracy theories from the Protocols of the Elders as well as from the Koran.[248]

On November 28, 1941, Hitler met with the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and promised there would be no Jewish territorial problem after the war, for the last objective in the Middle East would be the annihilation of the Jews living under British protection in Arab lands.[249]  There were more than 700,000 Jews living in the Middle East and North Africa, who would be subject to the Final Solution.[250]

Previously, Nazi officials by the spring and summer of 1936 had assured Arab diplomats that Nazi ideology and German race laws were directed against the Jews and not against non-Jewish Semites, despite the Aryan racial superiority presented in Mein Kampf.[251]  During the end of 1937, Arabic translations of Mein Kampf omitted the racial ladder theory that placed Arabs on one of the lowest racial rungs just above the Jews.[252]

On April 28, 1942, Hitler agreed to an accord with the Grand Muffi of a German commitment to Arab independence in Palestine and “to the abolition of the Jewish National Homeland in Palestine.”[253]  On December 18, 1942, the Grand Mufti opened the Islamic Central Institute in Berlin to launch his Islamic war against the Jews to drive them out of the Arabian Peninsula as preached by the prophet Muhammad.[254]  The Nazis paid 75,000 marks per month to the Mufti as salary and provided a home on Berlin’s fashionable Klopstock Street, a full staff of servants, a chauffeured Mercedes limousine as well as four other residences and suites in two of Berlin’s luxury hotels.[255]

Enjoying access to Himmler and Eichmann, the Grand Mufti visited Auschwitz and Majdanek where “he paid close attention to the efficiency of the crematoria, spoke to the leading personnel and was generous in his praise for those who were reported as particularly conscientious in their work.”[256]  The Mufti was on intimate terms with Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Hoes, Mauthausen commandant Franz Ziereis, Theresienstadt commandant Siegfried Seidl and Belsen commandant Josef Kramer.[257]  According to the Grand Mufti, the “solution” of the “Palestinian question” was to be found in the killing fields of Auschwitz.[258]

Later, Haj Amin assisted in the recruitment of Moslems from the Balkans and other Muslim areas into units of the Waffen SS.[259]   Haj Amin brought Moslem Arabs from the British colony of Palestine to serve in the Moslem brigades.  Haj Amin’s Waffen-SS company of Bosnian Muslims (the “Hanjars”) murdered 90 percent of Bosnian Jewry and burned Serbian churches and villages and the Mufti sent Bosnian Muslims to Croatia and Hungary to assist in killing Jews.[260]

The Grand Mufti went to all efforts to ensure that Himmler would “take all measures to prevent the Jews from going [to Palestine]” and send them to the death camps.[261]  SS Colonel Walter Rauff (who fled to Chile after the war) with Rommel’s Afrika Korps, expecting to conquer Palestine in 1942, was assigned by the Reich Main Security Office in Berlin to implement a Middle Eastern “Final Solution” for the Jews.[262]  In October 1942, Rauf was in charge of “Einsatzgruppe Egypt,” which was to be comprised of 24-member killing squads and to enlist Palestinian Arabs for the extermination of Jews in Egypt, Lebanon, Syria and Iraq.[263]  With Rommel’s defeat at El Alamein in November 1942 and the retreat of German and Italian forces from North Africa, the killing squads were disbanded.[264]

Beginning in September 1939, the German Foreign Ministry was broadcasting Arabic-language propaganda over shortwave radio to the Middle East and North Africa, which found common ground with the anti-Semitism contained within the Koran, its commentaries and the traditions of Islam.[265]  The Axis broadcasts focused on anti-Zionism and continually reported that the British planned to extend the boundaries of the Jewish national home and supported Jews to the detriment of the Arabs.[266]

Just preceding the war in North Africa, the status of Jews in Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia had deteriorated already under the impact of French anti-Semitism, Arab nationalism, the Palestine conflict, Fascist Italy’s influence and German propaganda, in which restrictions were placed on the professions, Jewish businesses were seized and school and university enrollments were limited.[267]  The Nazi propaganda’s primary focus to the Arabs was that the war was started by the Jews and Jewish-Bolshevism and Roosevelt and Churchill were acting under Jewish orders and influence for the Zionist goal of a Jewish national home in Palestine with the Arabs deported elsewhere.[268]  However, during this time Britain restricted Jewish immigration to Palestine, Roosevelt postponed any formal decision of a Jewish state in Palestine until after the war, the Soviet Union cared nothing about the mass murder of the Jews on the Eastern Front and the Jews were completely powerless.[269]

In January 1944, Resolutions 418 and 419 were introduced into the U.S. House Committee on Foreign Affairs to rescue Europe’s Jews and lift restrictions on Jewish immigration to Palestine after reports of the Jewish genocide and in February 1945 Senator Robert Wagner, a Democrat, and Senator Robert Taft, a Republican, introduced a similar resolution to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.[270]  The resolutions were withdrawn after the White House, Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, Secretary of State Hull, General George C. Marshall, the U.S. Army chief of staff, and L. Roy Henderson, the American ambassador to Iraq all wrote and stated that the resolutions were not advisable at this time as it would strengthen Axis propaganda and undermine Allied creditability among the Arab world.[271]

From 1941 to 1945, Haj Amin made the anti-Semitic broadcasts to the Arab world from Berlin and in a November 2, 1943 speech stressed the ideological connection among radical Islam, Arab nationalism and National Socialism and how the Germans are solving the Jews problem.[272]  On the same day, the Mufti received a congratulatory telegram from Heinrich Himmler as if the Nazi leadership was passing the torch of genocidal anti-Semitism to the Arabs.[273]

Although the Grand Mufti was charged with war crimes in 1945 for organizing SS Muslim divisions in the Balkans, legal proceedings were dropped in order not to upset the Arab world and by 1946 a de facto amnesty was in place after his escape to Egypt with French assistance.[274]  The German officials who had worked with the pro-Nazi Arabs in Berlin were all placed in important positions in the reconstruction of the West German diplomatic corps dealing with the Middle East.[275]

Haj Amin encouraged Yasser Arafat, who was related by blood, to pursue terrorist jihad against the Jews.[276]  Arafat recruited for Fatah and the PLO former Nazis such as Erich Altern, who was in the Jewish affairs section of the Gestapo, and Willy Berner, an SS officer in Mauthausen death camp, and neo-Nazis, such as Otto Albrecht, Karl van der Put and Jean Tireault, secretary of the fascist La Nation Européene.[277]

With the anniversary of the Balfour Declaration on November 2, 1945, the worst anti-Jewish pogrom in Cairo’s history occurred in the Jewish Quarter with houses, businesses and the Ashkenazi synagogue destroyed and over 400 people injured.[278]  In Alexandria, violent riots occurred with at least 5 people killed.[279]  In the same year, the Arab League initiated a boycott of Jewish Palestinian businesses and the next year the ban was extended to anything Jewish.[280]

By 1946, the British Mandatory Government recorded 1,200,000 Arabs living in Israel, an increase of 65 percent over 1922, composed mainly of recent immigrants seeking economic opportunity created by Jewish enterprises.[281]  In April 1946, the Anglo-American committee submitted a report recommending the immediate admission into Palestine of 100,000 Holocaust survivors and the abolition of the restrictions on Jewish land purchases, but the British government quickly denied any entry of refugees to Palestine.[282]  On Yom Kippur in the fall of 1946, President Truman demanded that the more than 100,000 refugees be authorized by the British government to enter Palestine and stated that a Jewish state should be created.[283]

During July of 1946, the British launched “Operation Agatha” in which British troops entered the Jewish settlements to confiscate hidden weapons, operational plans of the Hagana and the Irgun and to arrest over 2,000 activists including prominent Jewish leaders.[284]  Since the confiscated operational plans were assumed located in the headquarters of the British government in Palestine, the King David Hotel, the southern wing of the hotel was dynamited by the Irgun on July 22, 1946 and approved by the United Resistance Command.[285]

In 1947 with the continued Arab refusal of a partition for a Jewish state, the British referred the Palestine question to the United Nations.[286]  Foreign Secretary Bevin expected that the UN would send the political problem back to Britain to continue the trusteeship over Palestine, in which the Jews would remain a small minority in an Arab state.[287]  Britain thought that an affirmative UN vote would never happen on partition, since a two-thirds majority would be needed, requiring the Eastern bloc and the United States to support the same resolution.[288]  Britain raised objections to the creation of a Jewish state and warned UN members that an Arab oil embargo would cripple Europe’s economic recovery after the war, there would be violent Islamic attacks against the West and the Jewish state would become a Soviet bridgehead in the Middle East.[289]

Pope Pius XII opposed the partion of the Mandate and the creation of a Jewish state and expected that the UN would recognize the Roman Catholic Church as the primary ecclesiastical power at the Holy Sites and entitled to exercise extra-territorial power.[290]  Not until December 30, 1993 was there signed a Fundamental Agreement between the Holy See and the State of Israel for mutual recognition; however, the Holy See maintains the ambition of an “internationalized” Jerusalem.[291]  On February 15, 2000, Pope John Paul II meeting with Yasir Arafat at the Vatican affirmed the joint support for international status for Jerusalem under the “Basic Agreement Between the Holy See and the Palestine Liberation Organization” and warned Israel not “to change the unique character of Jerusalem.”[292]

Contrary to British expectations, the United States and the Soviet Union agreed and on November 24, 1947 a Political Committee of the United Nations proposed under Resolution 181 that the Mandate be terminated and Palestine divided into two sovereign states, one Jewish and the other Arab, with Jerusalem internationalized.[293]  Thirty-three UN members voted for the resolution, thirteen voted against and ten abstained including Great Britain.[294]

On the night of November 29, 1947, the Israeli novelist Amos Oz described the country’s reaction after listening to the UN roll call vote on the radio to the adoption of Resolution 181:

Our faraway street on the edge of Kerem Avraham in northern Jerusalem . . . roared all at once in a first terrifying shout that tore through the darkness and the buildings and trees, piercing itself, not a shout of joy, nothing like the shouts of spectators in sports grounds or excited rioting crowds, perhaps more like a scream of horror and bewilderment, a cataclysmic shout, a shout that could shift rocks, that could freeze your blood, as though all the dead who had ever died here and all those still to die had received a brief window to shout, and the next moment the scream of horror was replaced by roars of joy and a medley of hoarse cries and “The Jewish People Lives.”[295]

“The Jewish People lives” is the message of the State of Israel, as described in the Balfour Declaration a “national home for the Jewish people” more than a mere state.[296]  Israel, as a “national home,” has resurrected a Jewish character and peoplehood that a life in the Diaspora could never realize.[297]  Beyond a Jewish homeland and reviving the Hebrew language, statehood has brought about the Jews’ return as major players on the stage of history.[298]

Although the Partition Plan was adopted by the U.N. General Assembly on November 29, 1947, it was never accepted by the Arabs, who violently opposed it and appealed to Arabs to flee before the coming invasion of the Arab armies.[299]  The Partition Resolution gave the Arabs 82.5 percent of the country, in addition to their vast holdings all over the Middle East.[300]

Haj Amin Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem and leader of the Arab Higher Committee that was the “government” of the Palestinian Arabs, carried out thousands of attacks with the pan-Arab irregular army against the Jewish settlements during the five and a half months between the UN resolution and the end of the British mandate in an attempt to prevent the establishment of a Jewish state.[301]

In British ruled Aden on December 2, 1947, Muslim mobs during three days destroyed 106 Jewish-owned shops, hundreds of Jewish homes, Jewish schools, the synagogue and killed 82 Jews of the Jewish community that had lived in Aden for over a thousand years.[302]  In December 1947 in the Syrian city of Aleppo, Muslim mobs attacked the Jewish community in existence since the 12^th century, destroying all 18 synagogues, 5 Jewish schools, the orphanage and youth club and the Syrian government legitimized the violence by denying Jewish citizens civil protection.[303]

Throughout the Muslim world, the ancient Jewish communities were no longer safe, but persecuted during the march toward Jewish statehood by the rise of Arab nationalism and hatred against Zionism.  Dr. Stephen Wise, President of the World Jewish Congress, wrote on January 18, 1948 an article entitled “Crime of Arabs is Genocide” in which he pleaded with the U.S. Secretary of State, George C. Marshall, to intervene to protect the Jewish communities in Muslim countries.[304]  Wise wrote “[b]etween 800,000 and a million Jews in the Middle East and Africa, exclusive of Palestine, are in greatest danger of destruction by Moslems being incited to holy war over the partition of Palestine.”[305]

By February 1948, the Arab Liberation Army numbered over 12,000 men in Palestine with 7,000 “Liberation Army” troops in the north under Fawzi el-Kaukji and his Syrian aide, Shishakli, 4,000 Palestine irregulars around Jerusalem under the Muft’s Husseini family and 1,000 fanatic Egyptian “Moslem Brotherhood” in the Negev.[306]  Under the Anglo-Transjordan Treaty of Alliance on March 1948, the British-financed, armed and led Arab Legion was given the green light by the British to invade Palestine after the termination of the Mandate to provide “law enforcement” and “peacekeeping operations” while driving the Jewish state into nonexistence to Bevin’s and his foreign office’s delight and to secure Britain’s most loyal Arab ally, King Abdullah.[307]  By 1948, the British military command in Palestine was openly pro-Arab and anti-Semitic as recorded by Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen in his diary:

Violence and murder are the order of the day in Palestine.  Apparently, having done our best to disarm the Jews, we are prepared to abandon them to their fate and the Holy Land to anarchy, whilst arming the Arabs as hard as we can.[308]

At 6:45 a.m. on May 14, 1948 the Union Jack was lowered from the King David Hotel, where the Palestine government’s administrative officers were located, to be replaced by the International Red Cross flag.[309]  The British mandate came to an end at midnight.[310]  Abdel Rahman Azzam, the Arab League’s secretary, promised that the Arab armies would drive the Jews into the sea within hours of the proclamation of the Jewish state.[311]

At 4 p.m. on that Friday the 14^th of May, David Ben-Gurion read a 979 word declaration of independence before a small audience at the Tel Aviv Art Museum, 16 Rothschild Boulevard, with the following main passages:

The Land of Israel was the birthplace of the Jewish people.  Here their spiritual, religious, and political identity was shaped.  Here they first attained to statehood  . . .

After being forcibly exiled from their land, the people kept faith with it throughout their Dispersion and never ceased to pray and hope for their return to it and for the restoration of their political freedom.

On November 29, 1947, the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution calling for the establishment of a Jewish State in Israel, requiring the inhabitants of Israel to take such steps as were necessary on their part for the implementation of that resolution.  This recognition by the United Nations of the right of the Jewish people to establish their State is irrevocable.  This right is the natural right of the Jewish people to be masters of their own fate, like all other nations, in their own sovereign State.

Thus members and representatives of the Jews of Palestine and of the Zionist movement upon the end of the British Mandate, by virtue of “natural and historic right,” and based on the United Nations resolution  . . . Hereby declare the establishment of a Jewish state in the Land of Israel to be known as the State of Israel.[312]  

Upon finishing Ben-Gurion stated “The state of Israel is established!  The meeting is ended.”  Ben-Gurion had announced that the new republic would be “based on the principles of liberty, justice, and peace as conceived by the prophets of Israel.”[313]  On that day Elie Wiesel said that “Shabbat was not an offering to Israel . . .  [but] . . . Israel was an offering to Shabbat.”[314]

Who has heard such as this? Who has seen such as these? Has a land ever gone through its labor in one day? Has a nation ever been born at one time, as Zion went through her labor and gave birth to her children? Isaiah 66:8.

The recreation of the State of Israel can only be compared to the Exodus out of Egypt.  As Ben-Gurion stated in Israel if you do not believe in miracles, you are not a realist.[315]  The State of Israel returned in the Hebrew year 5708.  The 5,708^th verse of the Torah, Deuteronomy 30:2 reads and you shall return unto the Lord, your God.

Two hours after Ben-Gurion’s proclamation, the United States announced U.S. recognition.[316]  The Chief Rabbi of Israel later told President Truman that “God put you in your mother’s womb, so you would be the instrument to bring the rebirth of Israel.”   President Truman had to overrule the State Department, the Pentagon, key cabinet members such as Secretary of State George Marshall and Defense Secretary James Forrestal, the oil lobby, and the entire U.S. intelligence community.[317]  However, the State Department did not give up its pro-Arab position and forcefully imposed the arms embargo against Israel to facilitate its demise as five Arab armies invaded.[318]

President Truman knew that some of the members of the State Department were anti-Semitic and the last thing the State Department wanted was instant American recognition of Jewish statehood.[319]  Prior to President Truman’s decision on Israel, Edward Jacobson, the son of Lithuanian Jewish immigrants and the former business partner with Truman in a haberdashery store in Kansas City between 1919 and 1934, made the trip to Washington to ask his friend Harry Truman to meet with Chaim Weizmann about statehood.[320]

King Abdullah issued a militant communiqué following the proclamation of the Jewish state on May 14^th that:

The ending of the British Mandate means the termination and abrogation of the promises contained in the Balfour Declaration.  The Jews have no rights in Palestine; the Jews have no rights to local self-independence as they rejected my previous proposals; I repeat my promise that Palestine inhabitants will freely determine their future.[321]

King Abdullah proposed previously to the Jews the status of a tolerated minority in the dhimmi tradition under Islam in the Arab regime he wanted to create in Palestine as part of the Transjordan.[322]  Abdel Rahman Azzam, the Arab League Secretary-General, at a Cairo press conference on May 15 said, predicting the victory of the invading Arab forces into Palestine that:

We will sweep them into the sea!  This will be a war of extermination and momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacre and the Crusades.[323]

Sir John Bagot Glubb, the British commander of the Jordanian Arab Legion, who was an unabashed anti-Semite, held that the “unlikable character” of the Jews was the prime cause of anti-Semitism and were “to blame for the habit of religious persecution and massacres in the history of Christendom.”[324]  Glubb also defamed Zionism as a form of “Jewish Nazism.”[325]  General Glubb and British Brigadier Norman O. Lash, second in command of the Arab Legion, led the invasion of Palestine against the Jews with 40 other British officers spread out through the Legion.[326]  The British Colonial Secretary Bevin assumed that the Arab League was stronger and would win.[327]

On May 15^th, Israel was simultaneously invaded by armies from Egypt, Transjordan, Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Lebanon, which were launched by the Arabs in response to the UN decision for partition.  After more than 5 months of fighting the Palestine irregulars (the Arab Liberation Army) of 2,500 before the Declaration of the Jewish state, the Jewish force was met with 6 professional armies of overwhelming superiority in weapons, artillery and air power, consisting of an Egyptian army of 10,000 plus 2,500 of the Moslem Brotherhood, the Transjordan Arab Legion of 4,500 plus 1,500 of the Frontier Corps, a Syrian army of 5,500, an Iraqi army of 4,000, a Lebanese army of 1,500 and a Saudi Arabian army of around 300.[328]

Trained and led by 40 British officers and armed with British equipment, the Arab Legion opened artillery fire on the Jewish quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem and several hundred Jews were killed when the Jewish Quarter was overrun.[329]  During the low point of the invasion, Jerusalem was cut off and the Transjordanian army was within 15 miles of Tel Aviv.[330]  The Arabs’ purpose was the extermination of the Jewish people and this Arab invasion was considered the last campaign of the “Final Solution” of World War II.[331]

Some with chariots, and some with horses; but we, in the Name of the Lord, our God, call out.  They slumped and fell, but we arose and were invigorated.  Lord save!  May the King answer us on the day we call. Psalms 20:8-10.

During the first session of the provisional Israeli government on May 16^th, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion reported on the military status as follows:

The number of [Jewish] recruits has exceeded 30,000, but only 40% of them are armed due to the lack of rifles.  The [Arabs] are using artillery, aircraft and tanks, while we have a single tank and a number of [captured] British armored cars.  In my opinion we’ll be able to teach them a lesson they’ll remember for generations.  But for the time being the situation is extremely serious.[332]

The most famous poem during that period was by Natan Alterman, who speaks of a boy and a girl out of the hundreds that died as the “silver platter” on which was delivered the state of Israel:

Then the nation, in tears and ecstasy, asks: ‘Who are you?’ And the two softly reply: ‘We are the silver platter on which the Jewish state is offered you.’  They so said and fell at its feet, enveloped in shadow.  And the rest shall be told in the annals of Israel.[333]

During the short-lived true on June 11^th, the UN special mediator Count Folke Bernadotte attempted to impose the British 1937 Peel plan, which would have reduced Israel to less than half of the land allotted by the UN and limit the immigration to Israel.[334]  When Felix Kersten, working with the Swedish Minister of Foreign Affairs Christian Günther, persuaded Himmler to release 3,000 Jewish concentration camp prisoners to Sweden on December 8, 1944, this Count Bernadotte was asked by the Swedish Minister to arrange the Swedish portion of the transfer.[335]  Later, not only did the Count self-glorify his role in this matter after the war, but initially before the transfer he refused to handle non-Scandinavian prisoners to the surprise of Himmler and the dismay of Kersten.[336]

Not only did the British vision of Israel consist of an indefensible silver of land along the coast, but to severely limit the Jewish population so as not to offend the Arabs.[337]  British policy attempted to prevent the remnants of European Jewry from arriving during the Mandate’s final years by maintaining the 1939 White Paper’s immigration restrictions, enforcing a naval blockade and herding Holocaust survivors reaching Israel into concentration camps in Cyprus without the gas chambers.[338]

On June 17, 1948, a truce between Israel and its Arab attackers entered into force with the UN, but the Arabs rejected any settlement and the concept of any Jewish statehood.[339]  Israel would remain even today as the only state in the world that’s right to exist is continually debated and denied.[340]

 

[1] Robert S. Wistrich, A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad, (1^st ed. 2010), p. 241.

[2] David Patterson, Emil L. Fackenheim: A Jewish Philosopher’s Response to the Holocaust, (1^st ed. 2008), p. 124.

[3] Liza M. Wiemer and Benay Katz, Waiting For Peace: How Israelis Live With Terrorism, (1^st ed. 2005), pp. 32-33.

[4] Littell, Franklin H., The Crucifixion of the Jews: The Failure of Christians to Understand the Jewish Experience, (1^st ed. 1975), pp. 117-118.

[5] Maurice M. Roumani, The Case of the Jews From Arab Countries: A Neglected Issue, (1^st ed., 4^th printing 1983), p. 22.

[6] Norman Rose, ‘A Senseless, Squalid War’: Voices from Palestine 1945-1948, (1^st ed. 2009), p. 5.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Paul Charles Merkley, Those That Bless You, I Will Bless: Christian Zionism in Historical Perspective, (1^st ed. 2011), p. 113.

[9] Abraham J. Heschel, Israel, An Echo of Eternity, (1^st ed. 3^rd printing 1969), p. 67.

[10] Ibid., pp. 67-68.

[11] Ibid., p. 68.

[12] James Parkes, A History of Palestine From 135 A.D. to Modern Times, (1^st ed. 1949), p. 61.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Ibid., p. 61.

[15] Merkley, p. 64.

[16] Parkes, p. 63.

[17] Ibid., pp. 64-65.

[18] Ibid., p. 79.

[19] Ibid., pp. 82, 94.

[20] Ibid., p. 94.

[21] Ibid.

[22] Ibid., p. 121.

[23] MartinGilbert, In Ishmael’s House: A History of Jews in Muslim Lands, (1^st ed. 2010), p. 60.

[24] S. Tolkowsky, The Gateway of Palestine: A History of Jaffa, (1^st ed. 1924), p. 99

[25] Gilbert, In Ishmael’s House, p. 60.

[26] Haim Beinart, Atlas of Medieval Jewish History, (1^st ed. 1992), p. 46.

[27] Ibid., p. 44.

[28] Tolkowsky, p. 99.

[29] Ibid., p. 125.

[30] Parkes, p. 122.

[31] Ibid., p. 147.

[32] Ibid.

[33] Ibid.

[34] Ibid.

[35] Ibid., p. 149.

[36] Ibid., p. 148.

[37] Ibid., pp. 151-151.

[38] Jonathan Schneer, The Balfour Declaration: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, (1^st ed. 2010), p. 7.

[39] Parkes, p. 167.

[40] Ibid.

[41] Ibid., pp. 167-168.

[42] Ibid., p. 168.

[43] Ibid., p. 169.

[44] Ibid., p. 170.

[45] Abraham J. Heschel, Israel: An Echo of Eternity, p. 76.

[46] Ibid.

[47] Ibid.

[48] Ibid., p. 76.

[49] John Weiss, Ideology of Death, Why the Holocaust Happened in Germany, (1^st ed. 1996), p. 59.

[50] Jonathan Sacks, Future Tense: Jews, Judaism, and Israel in the Twenty-First Century. (1^st ed. 2009), p. 143.

[51] Parkes, p. 261.

[52] Heschel, p. 79.

[53] Ibid.

[54] Ibid.

[55] Ibid., p. 79.

[56] Ibid., p. 80.

[57] Parkes, p.261.

[58] Yaacov Herzog, A People That Dwells Alone, (1^st American ed. 1975), p. 184.

[59] Sacks, Future Tense, p. 138.

[60] Tolkowsky, p. 127.

[61] Ibid., p. 156.

[62] Ibid., p. 160.

[63] James Rudin, Christians & Jews Faith to Faith: Tragic History, Promising Present, Fragile Future, (1^st ed. 2011), p. 142.

[64] Michael Makovsky, Churchill’s Promised Land, Zionism and Statecraft, (1^st ed. 2007), p. 53.

[65] Ibid.

[66] Ibid.

[67] Ibid.

[68] Ibid., pp. 53-54.

[69] Parkes, p. 265.

[70] Ibid., p. 266.

[71] Ibid.

[72] Thomas W. Knox, Backsheesh! or Life and Adventures in the Orient, (1^st ed. 1875), pp. 339-340.

[73] Ibid., p. 397.

[74] Parkes, p. 265.

[75] Ibid., p. 268.

[76] Ibid.

[77] Herzog, p. 183.

[78] Parkes, p. 272.

[79] Ibid.

[80] Rose, p. 6.

[81] Tolkowsky, p. 163.

[82] Ibid.

[83] Ibid., pp. 175-176.

[84] Anthony S. Travis, On Chariots With Horses of Fire and Iron: The Excursionists and the Narrow Gauge Railroad from Jaffa to Jerusalem, (1^st ed. 2009), p. 110.

[85] Martin van Creveld, The Land of Blood and Honey: The Rise of Modern Israel, (1^st ed. 2010), p. 21.

[86] Rose, p. 5.

[87] Ibid.

[88] Wistrich, A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad, p. 687.

[89] Ibid., p. 689.

[90] Parkes, p. 275.

[91] Ibid.

[92] Wistrich, A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad, p. 690.

[93] Ibid.

[94] Ibid.

[95] Ibid., p. 691.

[96] Ibid.

[97] Van Creveld, p. 27.

[98] Ibid.

[99] Ibid.

[100] Travis, p. 110.

[101] Wistrich, A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad, p. 13.

[102] Travis, p. 110.

[103] Daniel Gordis, Saving Israel: How the Jewish People Can Win a War That May Never End. (1^st ed. 2009), p. 121.

[104] Wiemer and Katz, p. 42.

[105] Ibid.

[106] Herzog, p. 178.

[107] Ibid.

[108] Ibid., pp. 178-179.

[109] Ibid., p. 179.

[110] Ibid.

[111] Ibid.

[112] Wistrich, Hitler and the Holocaust, (1^st ed. 2001), pp. 13-14.

[113] Wiemer and Katz, p. 42.

[114] Wistrich, Hitler and the Holocaust, p. 15.

[115] Ibid.

[116] Travis, p. 124.

[117] Wistrich, A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad, p. 684.

[118] Efraim Karsh, Palestine Betrayed, (1^st ed. 2010), p. 9.

[119] Schneer, p. 11.

[120] Wistrich, A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad, pp. 696-697.

[121] Sean McMeekin, The Berlin-Baghdad Express: The Ottoman Empire and Germany’s Bid for World Power, (1^st ed. 2010), p. 355.

[122] Ibid.

[123] Ibid., pp. 352-353.

[124] Ibid., p. 343.

[125] Ibid., p. 353.

[126] Ibid., p. 341.

[127] Ibid., p. 123.

[128] Herzog, p. 215.

[129] Ibid., pp. 216-217.

[130] Ibid., p. 218.

[131] Martin Gilbert, Churchill and the Jews: A Lifelong Friendship, (1^st ed. 2007), p. 27.

[132] Heschel, p. 82.

[133] Yaacov Herzog, A People That Dwells Alone, (1^st ed. 1975), p. 58.

[134] Makovsky, p. 77.

[135] Schneer, p. xxviii.

[136] Ibid., pp. xxvii-xxviii.

[137] Ibid., p. xxviii.

[138] Anthony Julius, Trials of the Diaspora: A History of Anti-Semitism in England, (1^st ed. 2010), p. 292.

[139] Schneer, p. 155.

[140] Ibid.

[141] Gilbert, Churchill and the Jews, p. 27-28.

[142] Schneer, pp. 152-153.

[143] Gilbert, Churchill and the Jews, p. 69.

[144] Maurice Samuel, Blood Accusation: The Strange History of the Beiliss Case, (1^st ed. 1966), p. 260.

[145] Ibid., pp. 260-261.

[146] Makovsky, pp. 80-81.

[147] Ibid., pp. 83-85.

[148] Gilbert, In Ishmael’s House, p. 147.

[149] David Patterson, A Genealogy of Evil: Anti-Semitism from Nazism to Islamic Jihad, (1^st ed. 2011), p. 109.

[150] Ibid.

[151] Patterson, A Genealogy of Evil, p. 109.

[152]Gilbert, In Ishmael’s House, p. 147.

[153] Ibid., p. 148.

[154] Herzog, p. 122.

[155] Ibid.

[156] Ibid.

[157] Edwin Black, The Transfer Agreement: The Dramatic Story of the Pact Between the Third Reich and Jewish Palestine. (2^nd ed. 1999), p. 76.

[158] Heschel, p. 82.

[159] Klaus-Michael Mallmann and Martin Cüppers, Nazi Palestine: The Plans for the Extermination of the Jews in Palestine, (1^st English ed. 2010), p. 5.

[160] Ibid.

[161] Makovsky, pp. 77-78.

[162] Irving Greenberg, For the Sake of Heaven and Earth: The New Encounter Between Judaism and Christianity, (1^st ed. 2004), pp. 38-39.

[163] Mitchell Bard, The Arab Lobby: The Invisible Alliance that Undermines America’s Interests in the Middle East, (1^st ed. 2010), pp. 2-3.

[164] Ibid.

[165]Heschel, p. 82-83.

[166] Ibid., p. 83.

[167] Karsh, p. 12.

[168] Ibid.

[169] Ibid., p. 16.

[170] Wistrich, A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad, p. 694.

[171] Karsh, pp. 16-17.

[172] Sean McMeeklin, The Berlin-Baghdad Express: The Ottoman Empire and Germany’s Bid for World Power, (1^st ed. 2010), p. 354.

[173] Ibid., pp. 354-355.

[174] Schneer, p. 376.

[175] Ibid.

[176] Gilbert, In Ishmael’s House, 157.

[177] Patterson, A Genealogy of Evil: Anti-Semitism from Nazism to Islamic Jihad, p. xi.

[178] Yehuda Avner, The Prime Ministers: An Intimate Narrative of Israeli Leadership, (1^st ed. 2010), p. 9.

[179] Ibid., p. 9-10.

[180] Karsh, p. 30.

[181] Avner, p. 10.

[182] Wistrich, A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad, p. 694.

[183] Julius, p. 481.

[184] Julius, p. 300.

[185] Wistrich, A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad, pp. 694-695.

[186] Ibid., p. 695.

[187] Mallmann, p. 15.

[188] Ibid., p. 33.

[189] Ibid.

[190] Ibid., p. 35.

[191] Wistrich, A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad, p. 698.

[192] Ibid., p. 695.

[193] Julius, p. 301.

[194] Wistrich, A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad, p. 695.

[195] Maurice M. Roumani, p. 43.

[196] Black, The Transfer Agreement, p. 98.

[197] Ibid., pp. 98-99.

[198] Gilbert, Chuchill and the Jews, p. 108.

[199] Ibid.

[200] Black, The Transfer Agreement, p. xix.

[201] Ibid., p. 250.

[202] Ibid.

[203] Jeffrey Herf, Nazi Propaganda For the Arab World, (1^st ed. 2009), p. 27.

[204] Black, The Transfer Agreement, p. 132.

[205] Ibid., p. 98.

[206] Ibid. p. xxiii.

[207] Ibid., p. 10.

[208] Ibid., p. 317.

[209] Ibid., p. 375.

[210] Ibid., p. 379.

[211] James S. Pacy and Alan P. Wertheimer, Perspectives on the Holocaust: Essays in Honor of Raul Hilberg, (1^st ed. 1995), p. 95.

[212] Ibid.

[213] Ibid., pp. 95-96.

[214] Herf, p. 27.

[215] Gilbert, Chuchill and the Jews, p. 93.

[216] Ibid., p. 94.

[217] Ibid.

[218] Ibid., p. 123-124.

[219] Ibid., p. 131.

[220] Ibid.

[221] Ibid., p. 153.

[222] Ibid., p. 158.

[223] Ibid., p. 157.

[224] Ibid.

[225] Ibid.

[226] Mallmann, p. 8.

[227] Ibid.

[228] Karsh, p. 57.

[229] Gilbert, Chuchill and the Jews, p. 158-159.

[230] Karsh, p. 57.

[231] Gilbert, Chuchill and the Jews, p. 158.

[232] Rose, p. 49, note.

[233]Gilbert, p. 164-165, 170.

[234] Ibid., p. 171.

[235] Debórah Dwork and Robert Jan van Pelt, Auschwitz: 1270 to the Present, (1^st ed. 1996), p. 362.

[236] Herf, p. 60.

[237] Dwork and van Pelt, p. 362.

[238] Ibid., p. 363.

[239] Rose, p. 23.

[240] Ibid., p. 22.

[241] Wistrich, A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad, p. 694.

[242] Herf, pp. 8, 37.

[243] Dwork and van Pelt, p. 363.

[244] Ibid.

[245] Black, The Transfer Agreement, p. 12.

[246] Rose, p. 42.

[247] Wistrich, Hitler and the Holocaust, p. 45.

[248] Ibid.

[249] Mark Roseman, The Wannsee Conference and the Final Solution: A Reconsideration. (1^st ed. 2002), p. 74.

[250] Herf, p. 78.

[251] Ibid., p. 23.

[252] Gilbert, In Ishmael’s House, p. 175.

[253] Carroll, Jerusalem, Jerusalem, p. 255.

[254] Wistrich, A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad, p. 671.

[255] McMeeklin, p. 361.

[256] Wistrich, A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad, p. 671.

[257] Patterson, A Genealogy of Evil: Anti-Semitism from Nazism to Islamic Jihad, p. 116.

[258]Wistrich, pp. 671-672.

[259] Rose, p. 55.

[260] Wistrich, A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad, p. 700.

[261] Ibid., p. 674.

[262] Ibid., p. 700.

[263] Gilbert, In Ishmael’s House, p. 186.

[264] Ibid.

[265] Herf, p. 3.

[266] Ibid., p. 71.

[267] Ibid., p. 89.

[268] Ibid., pp. 86-87.

[269] Ibid., p. 103.

[270] Ibid., p. 207.

[271] Ibid., pp. 207-212.

[272] Wistrich, Hitler and the Holocaust, p. 52.

[273] Ibid.

[274] Wistrich, A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad, p. 700.

[275] Herf, p. 238.

[276] Wistrich, A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad, p. 701.

[277] Ibid.

[278] Julius, p. 481.

[279] Ibid.

[280] Ibid.

[281] Roumani, p. 44.

[282] Karsh, p. 78.

[283] Saul Friedländer, When Memory Comes, (1^st ed. 1979), p. 158.

[284] Avner, pp. 17-18.

[285] Ibid.

[286] Karsh, p. 84.

[287] Ibid.

[288] Ibid., p. 85

[289] Ibid.

[290] Merkley, pp. 179-180.

[291] Ibid., p. 180.

[292] Ibid.

[293] Heschel, p. 84.

[294] Karsh, p. 1.

[295] Gordis, Saving Israel, pp. 14-15.

[296] Ibid., p. 15

[297] Ibid. p. 38.

[298] Ibid., p. 43.

[299] Roumani, p. 44.

[300] Ibid.

[301] Karsh, p. 2.

[302] Gilbert, In Ishmael’s House, pp. 209-210.

[303] Ibid., pp. 211-212.

[304] Ibid., pp. 215-216.

[305] Ibid., p. 216.

[306] Ted Berkman, Cast a Giant Shadow: The Story of Mickey Marcus, Who Died to Save Jerusalem, (1^st ed. 1962), p. 69.

[307] Karsh, pp. 195-200.

[308] Berkman, p. 70.

[309] Rose, p. 210.

[310] Ibid., p. 211.

[311] Karsh, p. 2.

[312] Van Creveld, p. 62.

[313] Berkman, p. 211.

[314] Wiesel, All Rivers Run to the Sea, p. 169.

[315] Greenberg, p. 377.

[316] Rose, p. 211.

[317] Wistrich, A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad, p. 467.

[318] Bard, The Arab Lobby, p. 34.

[319] Avner, p. 122.

[320] Ibid., pp. 119-121.

[321] Karsh, pp. 208-209.

[322] Ibid., p. 202.

[323] Ibid., p. 209.

[324] Wistrich, A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad, pp. 376-377.

[325] Ibid., p. 377.

[326] Berkman, p. 245.

[327]Gilbert, Churchill and the Jews, p. 275.

[328] Berkman, pp. 212-213.

[329] Gilbert, Churchill and the Jews, p. 268.

[330] Van Creveld, p. 66.

[331] Wiemer and Katz, p. 42.

[332] Karsh, pp. 210-211.

[333] Friedländer, When Memory Comes, p. 173.

[334] Karsh, p. 212.

[335] Felix Kersten, The Kersten Memoirs 1940-1945, (1^st ed. 1956), pp. 14-15.

[336] Ibid., p. 15.

[337] Karsh, p. 213.

[338] Ibid.

[339] Ibid., p. 244.

[340] Ibid., p. 245.