Under British Bayonets

Further to my last post, and in particular to Arnold Toynbee's reference to interwar Jewish immigration into Palestine being "imposed on the Palestinian Arabs by British military power until the immigrants were sufficiently numerous and sufficiently well-armed to be able to fend for themselves with tanks and planes of their own," legendary US journalist I.F. Stone's 1946 coverage of illegal postwar Jewish immigration into British Palestine, Underground to Palestine, has some interesting light to shed on this subject.

Far from being the hapless survivors of Nazi concentration camps, many of the East European Jewish immigrants described by Stone were heavily indoctrinated Zionist youth, in short the ideal type to take on the British and/or the Palestinian Arabs militarily:

"As soon as the train began to move, everybody began to sing. The first song whose words I could make out was a Yiddish song written by a young man I was to meet soon. It was called 'Khalutsim, Gretan Zikh Far Eretz Israel' [Pioneers Prepare Themselves for Palestine]. The singing was spontaneous and joyful... Khalutsim means pioneers in Hebrew and is the term for people who have been in training for life in a settlement in Palestine. They are the Zionist elite, dedicated to the building of Palestine. The ten I was with, five boys and five girls, had all trained for several months in the same kibbutz [collective training settlement] in Poland. It was a kibbutz near Lodz called Dror [Freedom], supported by funds of the Poale Zion, the labor Zionist movement." (pp 38-39)

And note here how the immigration process is fully in the hands the leaders of the Zionist yishuv [settlement]:

"We each filled out a blue certificate printed in Hebrew on one side and in English on the other. It was called, 'Permit To Enter Palestine.' We wrote in our name, the names of our parents, the place and date of our birth, and our nationality by birth. The certificate stated that we 'had been found qualified by the representatives of the Jewish Community of Palestine for repatriation to Eretz Israel.'

"The certificate cited four authorities for the Jewish community's action.

"The first was from Ezekiel: 'And they shall abide in the lands that I have given unto Jacob my servant, wherein your fathers abode, and they shall abide therein, even they, and their children, and their children's children, forever.'

"The second was from Isaiah: 'With great mercies will I gather thee.'

"The third was Lord Balfour's Declaration of 2 November 1917, and the last was The Mandate for Palestine." (p 177)

Needless to say, the Palestinian 'natives' and their wishes were nowhere on the minds of Stone's interlocutors.