Aviva Halamish. Israel Studies. Volume 29, Issue 1. Spring 2024.
The events on October 7, 2023 in the area surrounding the Gaza Strip, commonly referred to as “The Black Saturday”, evoked associations, comparisons, and analogies to past occurrences. While the very fact that right away the adjective “Black” was affixed to that Saturday, probably out of lack of historical knowledge, is forgivable, the lessons of the original “Black Saturday”, as well as of a few other past events associated with acts of pogrom, and Zionist reactions to them, are worth pondering. This article attempts to do so, with the first leitmotif being the outcome of such past events and of the “Black Saturday” of June 29,1946—a Zionist readiness to compromise and redefine its goals in the face of changing circumstances. The second leitmotif is the current discourse on the Holocaust. Once the magnitude of casualties on that horrific day became known, it was noted that October 7, 2023, was the bloodiest day in Jewish history since the Holocaust, claiming the lives of the greatest number of Jews murdered in a single day since the end of WWIL And when only a partial depiction of the atrocities became known-the desperate situation of men, women, and children in the Kibbutzim, Moshavim, and towns attacked by Hamas brought to us-first over live broadcasts and later in survivors’ testimonies-the catastrophic events of October 7th began to be widely referred to as a “Shoah”. The spontaneous analogy to the Holocaust resonates with the fears of imminent annihilation of Israel on a Holocaust-like scale, in a manner similar to the experience during the “waiting period” before the Six-Day War (1967) and in the first days of the Yom Kippur War (1973).
When we compare events and rely on the past to better understand the present, we must look at both similarities and differences. Applying this rule to current events requires first a clear reminder of the meaning of the term Shoah-the systematic, bureaucratic, state-sponsored killing of six million Jewish men, women, and children by Nazi Germany and its collaborators during World War II to achieve “the final solution to the Jewish question” by annihilating the Jewish people and its culture. A thorough understanding of the Shoah as a unique historical event, sui generis, disqualifies it from serving as a direct analogy for the October 7th catastrophe. The indescribable atrocities carried out by the fanatic, fundamentalist, Palestinian terrorist members of Hamas were perpetrated during a single day, within the territory of the sovereign state of Israel. Still, during that single day, people experienced and witnessed terrifying situations of helplessness, of abandonment, the kinds of situations experienced by Jews during the pogroms carried out against them in Europe and during the Holocaust. Another theme related to the Holocaust to be pursued in the article is the renewed allegations following October 7th regarding the decisive role the Holocaust played in the establishment of Israel and as the cause of the 1948 Nakba.
The Outcome of the Kishinev Pogrom, 1903: Uganda Instead of Palestine
Until the Holocaust, the Kishinev pogrom of 1903 was the archetype of modern anti-Jewish persecution, and it is the most remembered pogrom in Zionist collective memory. The terror lasted for less than three days, claiming the lives of forty-nine Jews. Other casualties were ninety-two gravely injured and over 500 lightly wounded; Jewish women were raped, and 1,500 homes were damaged, all by homicidal gangs stalking the streets, chasing down Jews and beating them to death.
What made the Kishinev Pogrom a landmark in Jewish history were two poems by Hayim Nachman Bialik. The first, “On The Slaughter”, was the poet’s spontaneous reaction to the news about the pogrom. In that poem, Bialik coined the lesson quoted widely ever since up to these days:
And cursed be the man who says:
Avenge! No such revenge-revenge for
the blood of a little child-has yet been
devised by Satan.
In his poem “In the City of Slaughter”, written after Bialik visited Kishinev and interviewed survivors of the pogrom, there are shattering descriptions of the atrocities committed during the pogrom and of the perceived passivity of the Jews in the face of the mobs.
The news about the Kishinev pogrom shocked Theodor Herzl and convinced him to go ahead with negotiations on the Uganda Scheme to create a Jewish homeland in a portion of British East Africa, proposed by British Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain. Herzls rationale was that if, six years after its establishment, the Zionist Organization was not capable of providing an answer to such manifestations of Antisemitism, it might lose its appeal to the Jewish masses in Eastern Europe. The move was aimed also at gaining recognition of the Zionist Organization as the legitimate representative of the Jewish people.
The Outcome of the 1929 Disturbances in Palestine and the Massacre in Hebron: Geographical Separation between Jews and Arabs
Another pogrom that left a painful scar on Zionist collective memory took place in the summer of 1929 in Hebron and a few other locations in Palestine. During the week of “the disturbances” (the official British term), from 23 to 29 August, Arabs killed 133 Jews and injured 339. Most of the casualties were unarmed, and many of them lived in isolated areas or mixed towns with a predominantly Arab population.
It all started with the Yom Kippur incident near the Wailing Wall in the fall of 1928. The Muslims enflamed the tension around the issue of the rights of the Jews to pray near the Wailing Wall and utilized it for promoting national goals; the Yishuv leadership tried to confine the dispute to the Wailing Wall and to prevent it from expanding to the Temple Mount, out of fear lest the dispute aggravate the entire Muslim world and turn from a limited religious issue to a wider national confrontation. The National Council of the Yishuv issued an open letter to the Arabs living in Palestine, assuring them that it is inconceivable that any Jew intends to infringe on the rights of the Muslims in their holy places and that any attempt to portray the will of the Jews to pray near the Wailing Wall as establishing a strategic base for attacking the Muslim mosques is either false imagination or vicious libel intended to cause hostility among two friendly peoples.
As the dispute over the Wailing Wall intensified with the provocative activity of Arabs to disturb Jewish prayers near their holy place, some circles in the Yishuv founded “Committees for the Protection of the Wailing Wall” to pressure the Yishuv institutions to act more assertively in defending the Jewish holy place. Right-wing circles, the Revisionists and the religious party Ha-Mizrahi, called for demonstrations, even if they would involve bloodshed, going against the position of the national institutions, which called for restraint. On the other hand, the Labor movement leaders wished to circumscribe the conflict and refrain from turning it into a religious war. One of its leaders warned that the “hysteria of the Rabbinate and the Beitar movement has the potential to cause bloodshed on Tish’a B’Av [August 15, 1929]”. On Tish’a B’Av, members of Beitar marched to the Wailing Wall, violating some conditions of the authority’s license. The atmosphere in Jerusalem constantly heated up the following week, and on Friday, 23 August, Muslim worshippers stormed out of the Temple Mount, attacking Jews and looting Jewish stores. The official verdict given by the British Shaw Commission of Inquiry as to the causes leading to the disturbances contended that the cause of the rioting was rooted in Arab fears of continual Jewish immigration and land purchases.
In the Yishuv, it was debated whether the disturbances constituted a ‘revolt’ or a pogrom. Either option posed difficulties from a Zionist point of view. If it was a pogrom, then what difference had Zionism made for the Jews, who were still subject to persecution by the Gentiles even in Palestine, which had been designated as a safe haven for the Jewish people (The Basel Program, 1897)? It was feared that if even in Palestine Jews were subject to pogroms, Palestine would not be an attractive destination for Jews wishing to immigrate, and Zionism was not the solution to the Jewish problem. At the same time, if the events were “merely” a pogrom, the solution was to tighten the security measures by both the Mandate Government and the Yishuv. However, if the disturbances were a ‘revolt’ carried out by a national movement, this would call for recognition that the time had come to stop denying the existence of a Palestinian-Arab national movement and conduct direct negotiation with its leaders rather than limiting the political contacts to the British authorities. Another debate in the Zionist circles at the time, and later in the historiography, which has an echo in the reaction to the October 7th event, revolved around the question of whether national aspirations or religious emotions were the fundamental cause, and which posed graver negative potential for the Jews living in Palestine.
The 1929 disturbances led to a change in the Zionist settlement policy aiming at geographical separation between Jews and Arabs. The new policy was to establish new settlements in proximity to existing ones, to forge defensible Jewish settlement blocks and refrain from setting up isolated Jewish settlements in the midst of Arab-populated areas.
1937: The Outcome of the First Stage of the Arab Revolt: A Jewish State in Part of Palestine
The new settlement policy following the 1929 disturbances was tactical, dictated by security considerations. Following the first stage of the Arab revolt, the British Government sent a royal commission to investigate the roots of the Arab-Jewish conflict and to propose solutions. In 1937, once rumors about the partition recommendations of the Peel Commission began to spread, Zionist settlement policy was directed by strategic considerations aiming at determining the boundaries of the expected Jewish state to be established in part of Palestine. After the official Peel Commission recommendations were published in July 1937, the Twentieth Zionist Congress accepted the principle of partition and the establishment of a Jewish state in part of Palestine rather than on the entire land. To fully understand the Zionist position in 1937, we need to be aware of the alternative set down by the Peel Commission in the event that partition was rejected: continuing the British Mandate and fixing a ceiling of 12,000 Jewish immigrants a year so that the population ratio between Jews and Arabs would be permanently maintained at one third to two thirds respectively.
In the Midst of World War II: A Jewish State from the Jordan to the Sea
In late 1938, the British abandoned the Peel Commission partition plan as a world war was looming on the horizon. During World War II, the Zionist Organization adopted a plan for the political future of Palestine once the war would end. At a conference held at the Biltmore Hotel in New York in May 1942, a few months before reliable information about the systematic extermination of European Jews was released, the Zionist Organization set forth the demand that after the war, “Palestine be established as a Jewish Commonwealth [=state]”. This goal, to establish a Jewish state in the entire area of Palestine (west of the Jordan River) was still in effect when the Zionist struggle for a Jewish state resumed after World War IL And a year later came the turn of the original “Black Saturday”, June 29,1946.
The Outcome of “The Black Saturday”, 29 June 1946: Zionist Diplomatic Initiative and Partition
Following a year of constant and fierce activity against the Mandatory power that included illegal immigration, armed attacks on military installations, and blowing up infrastructure targets, the Zionist Movement had not moved forward one inch on the road to establishing a Jewish state on the entire area of Palestine. Following the so-called “Night of the Bridges” of June 16-17, 1946, in which nine bridges linking Mandatory Palestine to the neighboring countries were blown up, the British retaliated on Saturday, June 29, 1946. They imposed a curfew on many cities, conducting house-to-house searches; more than 2,700 individuals, including some of the Yishuv leaders, were arrested; The Jewish Agency Headquarters in Jerusalem was raided, and documents and files were confiscated; several settlements, most famously Kibbutz Yagur, were searched, and hidden weapons were seized.
Facing a political deadlock and British efforts to break the military power of the Haganah, the Zionist leadership had to decide how to carry on the struggle and, more importantly, to define its goals. On the tactical level, it was decided to scale down military activity against the British in Palestine and shift the focus of Zionist activity to the political-diplomatic sphere. On the strategic level, the breakthrough was redefining the budding state ‘s territorial dimensions. At an emergency meeting of the Jewish Agency Executive that was convened in early August 1946 in Paris, the Zionist goal was defined as creating “a viable Jewish state in an adequate area of Palestine.” The idea was not to make the decision public but to conduct behind-the-scenes diplomacy so that another party would offer the idea. Envoys of the Jewish Agency were sent to the USA to convince the American administration to adopt the idea. Indeed, less than two months after the Paris decision, President Truman delivered his “Day of Atonement Statement” (October 4,1946, during the mid-term election campaign), in which he said that
Meanwhile, the Jewish Agency proposed a solution of the Palestine problem by means of the creation of a viable Jewish State in control of its own immigration and economic policies in an adequate area of Palestine instead of the whole of Palestine. It proposed furthermore the immediate issuance of certificates for 100,000 Jewish immigrants.
This proposal received widespread attention in the United States, both in the press and in public forums. From the discussion which has ensued, it is my belief that a solution along these lines would command the support of public opinion in the United States. I cannot believe that the gap between the proposals which have been put forward is too great to be bridged by men of reason and goodwill. To such a solution our Government could give its support.
About a year later, the United Nations General Assembly adopted Resolution 181 to partition Palestine into two states-one Jewish and one Arab. This historical decision was not only accepted by the Zionist movement, but the Zionist movement was in fact its initiator, and worked very hard for its approval. Since then, there has been a debate on how the partition plan came about, with an intensified dispute over the role or weight of the Holocaust in that decision.
The Role of the Holocaust in the Establishment of Israel
The claim that the establishment of Israel is a result of the Holocaust has been made in some quarters in the past and gained momentum in the 1990s as part of the post-Zionist trend associated with the “New Historians”. This contention is being revived these days, following October 7th, 2023. The Holocaust shocked the world, thus goes the argument, and out of a guilty conscience, many states, mainly in Europe and the USA, decided to compensate the Jews by establishing a Jewish state at the expense of the Palestinians. From here, only a short step is required to portray the Palestinians too as victims of the Holocaust, as indeed some historians and other academicians and intellectuals have been claiming. Regrettably, this is yet another case of historical ignorance. Just as many Israelis are not familiar with the “Black Saturday” of 1946, and it is doubtful whether students calling to “Free Palestine from the River to the Sea” know where those geographic entities lie, university professors, intellectuals, and theorists, as it turns out, are also afflicted by a rather partial acquaintance with historical facts. Recently, the renowned philosopher Slavoj Žižek wrote:
The disaster is that Israel, which was established out of Europe’s colossal sense of guilt following the Holocaust in a desperate attempt to give the Jews a safe haven, is now becoming a symbol of European oppression and colonialism. The original sin is that of the Western European countries, which tried to atone for the Holocaust by giving the Jews a piece of land, most of which had been inhabited by others for hundreds of years.
A careful examination of the international activity regarding the Palestine problem after World War II reveals that the international involvement with the Palestine question was indeed first focused on the Jewish Displaced Persons (DPs) in Europe. The Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry (1945/46) first visited Europe, became acquainted with the situation at the DP camps, and then arrived in Palestine to see whether it was a feasible destination for the DPs. The impression reported by the Anglo-American Committee was that 96.8% of the DPs indicated Palestine as their preferred destination. But the committees main conclusion was NOT to establish a Jewish state in Palestine. Rather, it recommended that for the time being, Palestine would remain neither Arab nor Jewish, and eventually it would become an independent bi-national state. It also recommended opening the gates of Palestine for the immigration of 100,000 Jewish DPs.
A year later, after Britain handed the Palestine question over to the United Nations, the circle of international involvement with the question widened. By that time, the focus had shifted from alleviating the agony of the DPs, who were stuck in a sort of dead-end situation in Europe for over two years after the end of the war, to finding a solution to the deteriorating situation in Palestine. UNSCOP (the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine) first visited Palestine and other Middle Eastern countries and only then decided to add Europe to its itinerary. UNSCOP’s mission, as the committee s full name indicates, was focused on Palestine. Based on its impression of the situation there, it recommended partitioning the country and establishing there a Jewish state and an Arab state, with Jerusalem being a Corpus Seperatum under UN control.
The votes that tilted the scale toward resolution 181 on the crucial night of November 29, 1947, in Lake Success were those of Haiti, Liberia, and the Philippines-countries on which the Holocaust had no impact. Furthermore, scrutinizing the proceedings of the General Assembly between the submission of the UNSCOP report and the Partition Resolution reveals that the Holocaust was not mentioned even once, except for negligible indirect remarks.
What, then, brought about the UN decision of November 29 th, 1947? What led thirty-three states to vote in favor of establishing a Jewish state in part of Palestine?
- The fact that about half a million Jews were living there, comprising about 30% of the population. Though they constituted a minority, they nevertheless comprised a critical mass that could not be ignored.
- A secondary consideration was the wish to ease the DP problem, though the committee made it clear that the future Jewish state was not intended to solve the DP problem in its entirety.
- III. The fact that the idea of partitioning Palestine and establishing a Jewish state there had been in the pipeline since 1937 and had been brought to a halt by the darkening clouds in the lead-up to World War II.
- UNSCOP perceived the Yishuv as mature and ripe for independence (much as the Peel Commission had ten years earlier). For all intents and purposes, except for being sovereign, it was run as a democratic political entity with elected institutions, an executive branch, and a military arm functioning under the authority of elected civil institutions. The investigating committees were impressed by the obedience displayed by the members of the Jewish community to the authority of the democratically-elected leadership despite its lack of legal tools to enforce its decisions.
While the Holocaust did not play a decisive factor in the international arena, it did have an impact on the Jewish people and, in this sense, contributed to the establishment of the State of Israel. The trauma suffered by the Jewish people between 1939 and 1945 changed conceptions and attitudes and set off new activities and methods of action:
- The American Jewish community mobilized for the Zionist cause and became an active and assertive pressure group within the USA.
- Many Holocaust survivors adopted a kind of post-catastrophe Zionism, manifested in their insistence on leaving Europe and immigrating to Palestine.
- The Zionist leadership, driven by a deep conviction that it was “now or never,” was prepared to make compromises that had been unthinkable before. The most crucial point in this regard is the demographic catastrophe that had befallen the Jewish people as a result of the Holocaust, and that imposed the territorial shrinkage of the Zionist solution, leading to an effective Zionist relinquishing of the Biltmore program of 1942 of establishing the entirety of Palestine as a Jewish state. Instead, it led to the adoption of the more modest and realistic goal of establishing a viable Jewish State in an adequate area of Palestine.
I contend that the two aspects of the current references to the Holocaust, the contention that October 7th constituted a Shoah and that Israel was established because of the Holocaust, both constitute dismissals of Zionism and its achievements. If, after seventy-five years of an independent Jewish state, the Jews living there were subject to a Shoah, then-as was contemplated in earlier stages of Zionist history-what difference have Zionism and Israel made in determining the Jewish fate? Therefore, it should be clear that the October 7th disaster resembled Shoah-like situations but was not a Shoah in its full historical meaning. Similarly, the contention that the Holocaust was the decisive catalyst in the establishment of the State of Israel means that Zionism was not a factor in the process of achieving a Jewish state. This position overlooks decades of Zionist activity and fails to see the establishment of Israel as a link in the sequence of Jewish history and Zionist activity. Such a claim serves opponents and enemies of Israel and, with all due deference, cultivates the Shoah as a central-arguably even the central-component of the Israeli ethos and the main object of Israeli identification. It does this while discarding factual history and doing a disservice to Zionist ideology and practice.
A Search for the Archimedean Point
So far, I have pointed to some historical events that served as turning points during the pre-state period. Recently, several historical events that occurred since Israel was established have been mentioned in the initial search for the Archimedean point that led to October 7th. Some have pointed to the unilateral disengagement of Israel from the Katif Bloc in the southwest area of the Gaza Strip in 2005; others have claimed that the attack was one of the negative ricochets of the 1993 Oslo accord; on the other extreme of the timeline stands the 1948 war, as echoed in the slogan that has now become viral, “From the River to the Sea Palestine will be Free”, implying the destruction of Israel. In fact, an examination of October 7th from a historical perspective leads to the conclusion that the source of the current tragic situation lies in 1967: the consequences of the Six-Day War lie at the roots of 1993, 2005, and all other landmarks and dates in the last fifty-six years in the history of the Israel-Palestine conflict. As time passes and the heavy cost of the “seventh day” of the 1967 war mounts up, it becomes increasingly evident that considering its results, the Six-Day War was the second most devastating catastrophe that beset the Jewish people in the 20th century. October 7th is a cruel reminder of this assessment.
Some Conclusions
Each event briefly surveyed in this article has a lesson associated with the current situation. The Kishinev Pogrom stirred a political move by the founder of the Zionist movement, who was ready to deviate from his initial goal when faced with a new situation. The 1929 disturbances and the Hebron Massacre illuminated the explosive potential of religious conflict over the holy places in Jerusalem and led to an intentional geographical separation of Jews and Arabs. The first stage of the Arab revolt of 1936 and the change of British policy in Palestine that seemed to be portended in the Peel Report (1937) pushed the Zionist Organization to accept the principle of partition and adopt a settlement policy of strategic separation. A mistaken assessment of the future global situation after the end of World War II and a lack of information as to the fate of European Jews led in 1942 to a decision to establish a Jewish state in the entire area of Mandatory Palestine-a decision that was then relinquished in the face of the demographic reality faced by the Jewish people as a consequence of the Holocaust.
The Holocaust, more than being the cause of the creation of the state of Israel, had demographic consequences that made the division of Palestine a global necessity and a notion that was accepted by the majority of the Zionist movement. In this sense, the Holocaust did make the establishment of a Jewish state possible, but only in part of Palestine. This consequence was embodied in the nature of Zionist diplomatic initiatives and the new formulation of Zionist goals that took place following the original “Black Saturday”: the establishment of a Jewish state in part of Palestine. This decision, equivalent to the present Two-State solution, paved the way for the UN resolution on November 29, 1947. It remains to be seen whether the current Israeli decision-makers will adopt their predecessors’ realistic vision and pragmatic conduct, and whether the “Black Saturday” of October 7th, 2023 will turn into a milestone leading to a political solution rather than to more of the same military response.