Black Earth(59)

Of the three European states with an active interest in Palestine in the 1930s, only two remained as the decade came to an end: Nazi Germany and Great Britain. They were at war with each other, which meant that Jewish fighters in Palestine might gain some leverage by siding with one or the other. Nazi Germany was the enemy of Jews in Europe (although to what extent was not fully clear, even in 1939). It was also the enemy of the British Empire, which controlled Palestine and prevented Jewish emigration. Irgun could not decide between the obligation to defend Jews and the obligation to fight for a Jewish state, so chose neutrality between Germany and Britain. Avraham Stern now led a split within Irgun, establishing a splinter group eventually known as Lehi. He was joined by Yitzhak Shamir, another Polish Jew who had hoped for further training in Poland but had run out of time. Lehi then did exactly what other Far Right groups did at the time: It made a proposal to Hitler.

The appeals sent by Jewish and Ukrainian nationalists to Hitler were very similar. The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists used this language in June 1941: “The newly emerging Ukrainian State will cooperate closely with the Great Nazi German Reich, which under the guidance of its Führer Adolf Hitler is forming a new order in Europe and the world and which will help the Ukrainian Nation liberate itself from Muscovite oppression.” In Palestine, Lehi saw the British much the same way as the Ukrainian nationalists saw the Soviets, and it drew the same practical conclusions. In January 1941, Stern proposed “cooperation between the New Germany and a renewed racial-national Hebrewdom,” which would involve “the erection of a historical Jewish State on national and totalitarian foundations, which would stand in a treaty relationship with the German Reich, in the interest of the protection and strengthening of the future German power position in the Near East.”

Stern assumed that Hitler wished to rid Europe of Jews and that a logical way to do so would be to send them all to Palestine. Perhaps misled by his contacts with Polish elites, he confused the Polish with the German approach. The Polish regime really had supported a mass Jewish emigration to Palestine and a Jewish state. Lehi could be trusted to make a Jewish state that would be a good partner for Nazi Germany, continued Stern, because “in its worldview and structure it is closely related to the totalitarian movements of Europe.” Stern was asking Berlin to replace Warsaw as the patron of Lehi. The documents concerning Poland’s official Zionism, he helpfully (and correctly) noted, could be found in the Polish archives, now under German control.

Neither of these nationalist proclamations, the Ukrainian or the Jewish, should be understood to express the desires of the nation concerned, or even for that matter the convictions of the authors. With the destruction of the Polish state and the advance of German power, an alliance with Nazis could seem logical, at least to radicals who expected the old order to collapse anyway. Of course, those who issued such appeals did not intend to be used by the Nazis but rather to use them for their own purposes, however unrealistic this calculation might have been. Even the expressions of ideological sympathy need not be taken too literally: Some Ukrainian nationalists had once been communists, and Lehi would shift towards a pro-Soviet orientation a few years later.

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Every method of changing the world has advantages and disadvantages. Different tactics generate different needs. A group that chooses legions, as Jabotinsky was still urging Jews in Palestine to do, gambles that the occupying empire will win the war and will then owe something to the oppressed but supportive minority after the victory. A group that chooses terror needs the occupying empire to be destroyed, but almost always lacks the strength to carry out such a deed itself. Therefore it has an objective need for an outside backer. This need for help was the political resource available, in theory, to the Germans.

These Jewish and Ukrainian offers of collaboration with Nazi Germany had to fail, and did fail, and in a certain way failed together. In making their offer to Hitler, Ukrainian nationalists were revealing the political resource, a vulnerability that Hitler did exploit up to a point: the desire for a state. Because German forces really were going to enter lands inhabited by Ukrainians, it was possible for the German leadership to turn the desire of Ukrainian nationalists for a state towards their own purposes. With Jews in Palestine, matters were entirely different. No German troops would enter Palestine; and even if they had, they would have encountered an Arab rather than a Jewish majority. Insofar as the Germans wanted to exploit a local political force, it was far simpler for them to direct Arab nationalism against both the British and the Jews, as had been their practice already in the 1930s.