Black Earth(28)

The Polish position differed from both the British and the German. London favored Jewish statehood (at some distant and undefined point) but opposed much further Jewish migration for the time being. Berlin opposed Jewish statehood, but wanted Jews to leave Germany as soon as possible for some distant and undefined place. Warsaw wanted both massive emigration of Jews from Europe and a Jewish state in Palestine. In public the Polish foreign minister and other diplomats called upon the British to ease immigration restrictions and create a Jewish National Home as soon as possible. The Poles had very specific ideas of what such an entity should be: “A Jewish, independent Palestine, as large as possible, with access to the Red Sea.” This meant both sides of the River Jordan; in private, Polish diplomats even raised with British colleagues the issue of the Sinai Peninsula, in Egypt. In 1937, the Polish armed forces began to offer arms and training to the Haganah, the main Zionist self-defense force in Palestine.

—

Zionism was the Jewish political movement, active for half a century, whose advocates identified the future of the Jewish people with the settlement of Palestine and the establishment of a state. As a general matter, Zionists believed that this would be achieved through cooperation with the British Empire and other great powers. Although its advocates held a variety of political positions and its factions were many, many Zionists in the 1930s were left-wing, envisaging agricultural communes that would transform both the ancient Jewish land and the modern Jewish people. In Poland, Zionism was the ideology of a whole range of political parties, from extreme Left through extreme Right. Much to the dismay of Zionist leaders in London and New York, the direction of the overall movement was much affected by the politics of Zionism within Poland.

The world Zionist movement split in September 1935, just as Polish policy on Jews was revised by Pi?sudski’s successors. Vladimir Jabotinsky emerged then from the General Zionist movement with a program of Revisionist Zionism. He urged Jews in Europe to consider massive and rapid emigration while calling for the immediate creation of a State of Israel in the Mandates of both Palestine and Trans-Jordan. This version of Zionism spoke to Poland’s new leaders. In June 1936, Jabotinsky presented his “evacuation plan” to the Polish foreign ministry. He claimed that Palestine, over time, could absorb eight million Jews. When his initiative was announced in the Polish press a few weeks later, the specified goal was the settlement of Palestine on both sides of the River Jordan by 1.5 million Jews in the course of the following ten years.

Jabotinsky wanted Poland to inherit the Mandate of Palestine from Great Britain. He even proposed that Poland be given the Mandate of Syria, which it could then trade for the Mandate of Palestine or use as leverage against the Arabs generally. This sort of thinking about foreign policy was very much in the Polish diplomatic tradition: an imaginative attempt to turn nothing into leverage. Indeed, the easy agreement between Jabotinsky and Polish leaders was not simply a matter of common interests. Although Jabotinsky spoke French when he made his case in Warsaw, he like most Polish leaders was born a Russian imperial subject and had been educated in the Russian language. The idea of building a nation-state from empires that partitioned historic national lands was a common one.

Jabotinsky’s power base by 1936 was Polish. Revisionism was a movement of youth, based in paramilitary organizations. By far the largest of these was Betar, the right-wing Jewish youth paramilitary in Poland, whose members promised to devote their lives “to the revival of the Jewish state with a Jewish majority on both sides of the Jordan.” Betar’s model was the Polish Legions of the First World War, which in the favorable conditions of war among empires had prepared the way for Polish independence. Like the Poles of the Legions, the Jews of Betar trained with weapons and awaited the opportune moment of general conflict. The vast majority of Betar members were products of the Polish school system, and imbibed its core message of secular messianism (“Our dream: to die for our people!”). When Betar brawled with Jewish leftist organizations, its members sang Polish patriotic songs—in Polish. Uniformed Betar members bearing firearms marched and performed at Polish public ceremonies alongside Polish scouts and Polish soldiers. Their weapons training was organized by Polish state institutions and provided by Polish army officers. Menachem Begin, one of Betar’s leaders, called upon Betar members to defend the borders of Poland in the event of war. Betar members wrote in their newspapers of their two fatherlands, Palestine and Poland. They flew two flags, the Zionist and the Polish, until the end of their existence in Poland—in the ghetto uprising of 1943 they raised both banners from Warsaw’s tallest building.