Ruth King
 
British organizational boycotts of Israel have been much in the news of late. But nothing has been said of the most reprehensible British boycott – the boycott of their own history. The English have simply turned their back on the ugly story of their perfidy to the Jews after they had undertaken responsibility for establishing a Jewish National Home in the Mandate for Palestine. Some of the story has come to light (no thanks to British authors), much even now is virtually unknown. For example, the crucial Jewish contribution to British victory in North Africa in World War II has been consigned to a memory black hole.

This forgotten episode, along with the rest of British treachery to the Jews of Palestine, is meticulously described in Pierre van Paassen’s The Forgotten Ally, first published in 1943. Sociologist David Kirk published several chapters a few years ago and now a group of writers and editors, headed by Carol Gould, have made the entire book once more available.
Born in Holland, Van Paassen emigrated to Canada. As a correspondent for The Toronto Globe, he would travel extensively to Europe, Africa and Middle East: his postings even included an interview with Hitler, whose global menace Van Paassen was one of the first to understand.

In the chapter entitled “The Best Kept Secret of World War II” Van Paassen describes how, in the summer of 1942, the British were in danger of being routed by German forces in Egypt. Fifty percent of British manpower and ordnance had been lost to the armies of Rommel and the Mediterranean sea lanes were heavily patrolled by Axis bombers, limiting resupply. Sentiment among the Arabs, including those of Palestine, was solidly on the side of Hitler.

The Jews of Palestine volunteered in vast numbers, even for “suicide missions” which required laying down mines under withering enemy fire. General Marie-Pierre Koenig of the Free French saluted the ragged Jewish survivors of this mission and insisted on bearing the Jewish flag on his truck (to the wrath of the British), ordering his men to salute it.

Jewish engineers organized and manned coastal defense signals; entire Jewish families volunteered for the British Red cross; Jewish meteorologists helped predict weather which is of critical importance in the desert campaigns; Jewish builders erected bridges and fortifications; the Jewish Coast Guard ran speedboats along the dangerous Mediterranean; 2500 Jews were bombardiers, pilots and observers with the RAF; Jews manned anti-aircraft stations; Jewish units penetrated and demolished enemy fortifications; Jews provided medical care in Jerusalem for injured Allied soldiers; Jews provided blankets, bandages, medicines, food, concrete, cutting tools, oil -- even beer. All these were lugged to the front lines by Jewish volunteers. Their contribution is detailed in page after page of The Forgotten Ally.

While van Paassen may have exaggerated the Jewish role (he claims General Montgomery said the Jews turned the tide for Britain) there is no doubt that the Palestinian Jewish contribution of manpower and resources contributed significantly to the success of the North African campaign.

The British displayed the rankest ingratitude. Even while Jews were dying for Britain, English ships fired on vessels trying to bring desperate Jews to Palestine and forced others to distant ports where in one grotesque episode, 750 sank in the harbor of Istanbul.

Neglect of Jewish contributions, and indifference to Jewish suffering was an established British pattern during the decades of their rule in Palestine.

In a telling passage in an earlier book Days of Our Years Van Paassen recounts his personal experience as a journalist following the massacre of Jews in the home of Rabbi Slonim in Hebron in 1929. "What occurred in the upper chambers of Slonim's house could be seen when we found the twelve-foot-high ceiling splashed with blood. The rooms looked like a slaughterhouse. When I visited the place in the company of Captain Marek Schwartz, a former Austrian artillery officer, the blood stood in a huge pool on the slightly sagging stone floor of the house. We stood silently contemplating the scene of slaughter when the door was suddenly flung open by a British soldier. In strolled Mr. Keith Roach, governor of the Jaffa district, followed by a colonel of the Green Howards battalion of the King's African Rifles. They took a hasty glance around that awful room, and Mr. Roach remarked to his companion, 'Shall we have lunch now or drive to Jerusalem first?'"

Van Paassen’s contempt for British duplicity is the recurring theme in his book. He describes the Balfour Declaration as a noble gesture supported by Lloyd George, Jan Smuts, Mazaryk, Clemenceau, the United States and fifty other nations. The irony is that the colonial officers like Ronald Storrs, Humphrey Bowman, Keith-Roach and the indefatigable “Queen of the Desert” Gertrude Bell who were asked to help implement the transition of Palestine to a Jewish state did everything in their power to abort the entire enterprise. Van Paassen does not spare Herbert Samuel, a Jew who behaved in a super impartial way and helped in “slowing the building of the house for his own people.”

Van Paassen points to the diaries and letters of Gertrude Bell who acknowledged Arab indifference to Palestine, but, in a nice anti-Semitic touch, prophesied the failure of Zionism in spite of all the “gold of the Hebrews.” He records the notes of Charles Ashbee, adviser to the Governor of Jerusalem: ‘We are for the Arabs…We make great capital of the Arab tradition of Jerusalem coming back to the Arabs”….Ashbee’s pan-Arabism was so strong that he was ignorant of the very minor ties of Moslems to Jerusalem. And, there are the hundreds of letters to the Home office recommending a stop to Jewish immigration which led to the disastrous White Papers which trapped millions of European Jews.

Nor does Van Paassen spare the Jews of America. As a journalist covering Eastern Europe in the 1920s he was stunned by the terrible conditions of the Jews, dislocated, stripped of property and civil rights, relegated to poverty and hunger. He strove to bring all this to the attention of Jews in America and for his efforts many leading Jews decried his reports as intentionally alarmist, exaggerated and even “unobjective.” Van Paassen’s comments on this have a particular bite, as applicable today as when he wrote them, indeed more so, for Jewish achievement of a homeland has not cured the fundamental Jewish malady of which he writes.

“Making a high virtue of a cruel historical fatality, they proclaimed Israel’s mission to be dispersal….to be a light unto the Gentiles and an example to the peoples…..They are not aware that their nervous fear of life, the fear of their own people, their self-hatred and self-abasement and servilism…..are the surest symptoms of the Jewish peoples’ mortal malady: the lack of a homeland, the lack of a backbone…..Humanity sympathizes with a strenuous aspiration. It cannot have respect for people who lack self-respect.”
 
Pierre Van Paassen completed The Forgotten Ally, a virtual “J’Accuse” against British perfidy, in 1943, but British infamy did not stop then. The end of World War II brought no relief in the British war against the Jews. The British fired on refugee ships in Haifa harbor; they transferred arms, vehicles and material assistance including intelligence to the Arabs; they sent refugees from the charnel houses of Europe to camps in Cyprus ringed with barbed wire and manned with armed guards. In additional acts of betrayal, before leaving Palestine, the British abstained in the United Nation’s vote to recognize Israel and in the immediate aftermath of the cease-fire of 1949 they offered, along with only one other state, Pakistan, de jure recognition of Jordanian sovereignty in the “West Bank” including old Jerusalem.

The late Richard Crossman, author of A Nation Reborn was editor of the Socialist weekly The New Statesman. In a stunning BBC interview on December 12, 1971, he bluntly accused the former Labor Prime Minister Clement Attlee and Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin, who presided over Palestine after World War II, of having "tried to destroy the Jews of Palestine." (It is worth noting that Bevin is cited by James Baker as a role model in his Princeton thesis.)

To be fair, the Jewish people owe a great debt to the British who initially stood alone in fighting Hitler. But the British have acknowledged all their allies in this monumental endeavor except for the Jews of Palestine. Moreover, British historians and writers, BBC miniseries and politicians have come to terms with the less favorable aspects of British colonial rule, even bending over backwards to be sympathetic to the Indians, the Africans, and all the nations of their empire where the sun never set.

But when it comes to Palestine, they have never presented a fair accounting: if anything, they are more obdurately pro-Arab than ever. Emanuele Ottolenghi describes England’s current Middle East policy: “Betray your friends, appease your enemies, pay ransom, surrender, and where possible, and lucrative, collaborate.”

It is the boycott of England’s history in betraying the Mandate that should most distress friends of Israel but this is the boycott which no academics or Nobelists or Jewish grandees will even address.

Now The Jerusalem Post reports that England has sharply cut back on selling arms to Israel. It seems that when it comes to betraying the Jews there will always be an England.