The Transfer Agreement (19 page)

The organized withdrawal of all Jews from Europe carried an obvious appeal, even an unintended justification, for anti-Semites. As such, Zionism was as much a threat to comfortable middle-class Jews as anti-Semitism itself. Established Jewish communities insisted they were entitled to be treated like ordinary citizens of any country in which they lived. Herzl's answer to the expected resentment of the Jewish majority was simply to wait. "Great exertions will hardly be necessary to spur on the movement." "[Anti-Semites] ... need only do what they did before, and then they will create a [Jewish] desire to emigrate where it did not previously exist."
¹³

"Der Judenstaat"
was an instant success, propelling Herzl to the forefront of the tiny Zionist movement. In
I897,
a year after
"Der Judenstaat"
was published, the First Zionist Congress was convened in Basel, where the Basle Programme was adopted.
It
called for the legal, international, supervised acquisition of a Jewish State and the orderly, peaceful, and voluntary emigration of all Jews in the world to its boundaries. At the same time, the Zionist Organization was established to function as "the Society of Jews" to lobby for the Jewish homeland and represent all Jews who accepted Zionism. Membership was granted to any Jew who paid the biblical shekel, a token fee equaling about twenty-five cents. Two years later, in
I899,
Herzl's "Jewish Company" was founded as the Jewish Colonial Trust Company, a banking entity incorporated in England. In
I90I,
the Jewish National Fund was established to purchase and cultivate land in Palestine in preparation for the Jewish State. It was prohibited from ever selling any land, once acquired, and would ultimately become the corporate owner of all land in the Jewish homeland.
¹⁴

Deep philosophical divisions gripped the Zionist Organization from the outset. Soon a circle of dissident factions and opposing parties began fighting for leadership of the movement. The chief conflict was between "practical" and "political" Zionists. The "practicals" wanted to settle the Jewish home-land "step by step," gradually colonizing to create the ultimate political reality. The "politicals" eschewed what Herzl had already labeled as "infiltration" and insisted upon a full political arrangement prior to organized settlement.
¹⁵

That full political arrangement was promised in
I9I7
when England issued its Balfour Declaration committing Turkish Palestine to a Jewish Homeland should the Allies win the War. When the dream seemed likely to become a reality, anti-Zionist Jewish forces, including the world's influential Jewish leaders, fought the prospect bitterly. But in the postwar era, with the Allies devoted to ethnic self-determination for Arabs, Europeans, and even faraway colonial subjects in Africa and Asia, Jewish nationalism was an eminently legitimate even if still controversial aspiration. The League of Nations and the victorious Allies concurred that the Jews should return to their original homeland after an exile of almost 2,000
years.

Although the Balfour Declaration's essence had been incorporated into the Versailles Peace Treaty of
I9I9,
the actual League of Nations Mandate to Britain to oversee the Jewish national home was not finalized until April
I920
at an Allied conference in San Remo, Italy.

Herzl's dream had been realized within barely two decades. The Jewish State was virtually a fact. There were ifs and buts. The declarations did not use the words "Jewish State," but instead used the words "national home for the Jewish people." Moreover, intense last-minute lobbying changed the phrasing to
"a
national home," not
"the
national home." As such, the existing Arab populations were to be a protected group within Palestine's borders. And, of course, the rights of Jews in other countries would not be prejudiced.
¹⁶
But limitations aside, the Jews had finally reached the road back to their Promised Land. The obligatory Talmudic incantation "Next year in Jerusalem" now possessed an exciting and real meaning.

During the years before the League of Nations Mandate, the Zionist movement was in nervous limbo, unsure when the creation of the Jewish State would commence, and what form it would take. A long list of Zionist Organization parties, factions, and splinter groups developed. Each was self-righteously convinced that its approach to the Zionist ideal was the best, each claimed to speak for the Zionist movement and the Jewish people, each clamored for its version of Zionism to be recognized by the international community. They disagreed on whether the Balfour Declaration and the League Mandate constituted the long-awaited international sponsorship Herzl had required, with step-by-step colonizing now to be the future focus. Or were the British merely supplanting the Turks as an authority that would continue to refuse Jewish sovereignty? Should Jewish Palestine be a territory associated with Britain, an independent nation, an autonomous canton of a larger British colony, or the Jewish partner of a binational entity in Palestine?
¹⁷

During I920,
amid daily massacres on the Polish border and political uncertainty, eminent Zionist leader Max Nordau espoused a stark new concept some called
catastrophic Zionism.
Nordau, a radical philosopher with a doomsday outlook, had been Herzl's closest ally in Zionism's founding years.
In Herzl's dying moments in
I904,
his followers insisted Nordau succeed him as head of the Zionist movement. But Nordau refused, preferring to remain outside the upper echelon. At the Tenth Zionist Congress in
I9II, Nordau predicted that if a Jewish Palestine were not granted soon, millions of Jews in Europe would be annihilated by the emerging political forces.
¹⁸

As the slaughter of Jews on the Polish-Russian border and the question of Jewish sovereignty in Palestine were tediously debated, Nordau proposed the immediate transfer of 600,000
pogrom-afflicted Jews to Palestine within a few months—without any real preparation. The assets of these 600,000
Jews would of course come with them. Nordau reportedly predicted that a
third of those Jews would starve to death, a third would find Palestine unacceptable and reimmigrate. The remaining third would create a majority or near-majority in Palestine, and the Jewish State would quickly and finally be achieved.
¹⁹

It
had been twenty-five years since Herzl first declared "Whoever can, will, and must perish, let him perish .... Whole branches of Judaism may wither and fall, but the trunk remains." Max Nordau, Herzl's reluctant heir, was now proposing to extend philosophical writings and dogmatic utterances into reality. The result of his plan, if carried out, would be the accepted sacrifice of hundreds ofthousands of Jews, the dispossession and redispersion of hundreds of thousands more, but the survival of enough people with enough resources to achieve the all-important salvation of future generations. Nordau argued that it was better for hundreds of thousands of Jews to perish in the struggle to achieve Jewish redemption in the land of Israel than wait for the cossack's sword to fall.
²⁰

The Zionist leadership rejected Nordau's plan as frightening and impractical. Although placed on the shelf, Nordau's catastrophic Zionism firmly moved many in the Zionist leadership to believe that the coming decisive moment would somehow arise out of a similar, perhaps even more threatening, tragedy.

One who reluctantly spurned Max Nordau's concept in
I920
was
Vladimir Jabotinsky, a fiery maximalist who advocated extreme approaches
to Jewish nationalism and Jewish self-defense. However, in an equally controversial move, Jabotinsky ironically sealed a pact with the Ukrainian nationalists responsible for the massacres leading to Nordau's plan. Jabotinsky's agreement established a Jewish militia at the rear of the Ukrainian forces to protect Jewish civilians, many of whom were Zionists. Although violently criticized in
I92I
at the Twelfth Zionist Congress, Jabotinsky silenced his foes by dramatically declaring from the rostrum, "In working for Palestine, I would even ally myself with the devil." The curses turned to cheers as the audience endorsed Jabotinsky's rationale with a standing ovation. That ovation was the turning point for many who now came to believe not only that the decisive moment for Zionism would be some coming catastrophe, but also that the solution would require Zionist negotiations with the hand responsible.
²¹

January
30, I933.
Adolf Hitler came to power.

During the first days after the Hitler boycott against Germany's Jews, the Zionist movement's hierarchy in Europe and America was busy trying to plot a course of action. Their objective was not to mobilize Jewish and non-Jewish resources for the preservation of Jewish rights in Germany. Rather, they sought a means of turning the miseries of German Jewry into a new impetus for a Jewish homeland in Palestine.

Zionist leadership had, in fact, refused to oppose the Nazi expulsion ideology from the outset. Within twenty-four hours of Hitler's appointment, German Zionists finalized a recently discussed program called Youth Aliya.
²²
Aliya
is the Hebrew term for emigration to Israel; its literal translation is
ascent.
On the premise that there was no longer any future for Jews in Germany, Youth Aliya organized youngsters to find a future in the Jewish homeland. Loving parents, mostly non-Zionists, hoped that one day after Hitler had passed, their children might return to Germany spared the scars of Nazism. The project began none too soon. Within a few months, Jewish children were either banished, segregated, or subjected to quotas throughout the Reich's eduational system. And the Nazi theory of race, which humiliated every Jewish child, quickly became mandatory teaching in all classes.
²³
Youth Aliya served a noble purpose in allowing young German Jews to grow up in dignity as part of a historic new future. But it was also a sign to the Nazis that Jews themselves were willing to organize their own expulsion.

The Zionist acceptance of Jewish expulsion was not limited to the Germans. Zionist leaders worldwide saw Hitler's persecution as the fateful beginning. Even a defender of Jewish rights as eminent as Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis quietly conceded the right of Jewish existence in Germany: Within a fortnight of der Fuhrer's January
30
appointment, Justice Brandeis shocked Stephen Wise by candidly declaring, "The Jews must leave Germany. There is no other way." An astonished Rabbi Wise asked, "How can five-hundred eighty-five thousand people be taken out of Germany?" Brandeis interrupted, "I would have the Jews out of Germany. They have been treated with deepest disrespect. I urge that Germany shall be free of Jews. Let Germany share the fate of Spain. No Jew must live in Germany."
²⁴

Nazi leadership, of course, gleefully noted the Zionist acceptance of Jewish expulsion—even if it was clear that the concurrence was perverse, since the Nazis sought Jewish cultural destruction and the Zionists sought a Jewish renaissance. But concurrence or not, the Nazis regarded the Zionists as their enemy personified, and from the outset carried out a terror campaign against them in Germany.

German Zionist officials felt certain their phones were tapped, their mail read, and their office subject to covert entry. Morale was shattered. So precarious was the Zionist position that the ZVfD's headquarters at
I0
Meinekestrasse suspended all open correspondence with Zionist bureaus in London and even Palestine. Information was instead passed through secret channels at border towns near Czechoslovakia. In one such report in early March, Czechoslovakian Zionist official Dr. Franz Kahn passed the following briefing to Zionist offices throughout the world: "No Jew can possibly establish relations with the government; all previous contacts are now of no value whatever. The ZVfD expects to be completely closed down .... All available cash funds have been either pulled out or sent to Palestine."
²⁵

But Zionism's threatened status in Germany changed instantly following the March
25
meeting in Goering's office with Jewish leaders.
It
was after Kurt Blumenfeld's utterance that only the Zionists possessed the international organization capable of stopping the anti-Nazi movement that the Nazi view changed. From that moment on, the Third Reich realized it could exploit the Zionist movement against the Jews. At the same time, Zionists became convinced they could exploit the Nazi movement for the benefit of future generations of the Jewish people.

As soon as Blumenfeld and his colleague Martin Rosenbluth returned home from Goering'S office that day, they summoned their associates to discuss Goering's orders.
It
became clear that the Zionists were suddenly heading the mission to London. This was an opportunity for the Zionist cause to rise to the forefront of the crisis.
It
was agreed Blumenfeld could not be spared from Berlin for even a few days. Rosenbluth would go. To avoid the appearance that only the Zionist Federation of Germany was talking to British Jewry, other Jewish personalities would have to accompany Rosenbluth. The officials selected Richard Lichtheim, a former member of the Zionist Executive Committee who was currently a leader in Vladimir Jabotinsky's dissident Revisionist Union.
²⁶