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Did Germany Help Save Palestine's Jews during World War One?

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  • Did Germany Help Save Palestine's Jews during World War One?

    The Jewish Daily Forward
    Aug 3 2014

    Did Germany Help Save Palestine's Jews during World War One?

    More Jews Died in Great War Than All Wars of State of Israel Combined

    By Nir Mann
    Published August 03, 2014.


    (Haaretz) - "The war had already had an impact on Palestine. Not a
    single gunshot had yet been heard, but hundreds of lives had already
    been claimed by the contagious diseases introduced by the Turkish
    forces. The crisis had only just begun, and the 'sick man' (Turkey)
    had already demonstrated its state of rottenness, its lack of culture,
    its lack of organizational skill."

    These words were written by Boris Schatz, founder of the Bezalel
    School of Art in Jerusalem, at the time of the outbreak of World War
    I. Later, at the height of the war, he added, "All of the disease, the
    cholera, typhus fever, dysentery, malaria and the other angels of
    destruction have been forgotten due to the starvation ... The synagogues
    have removed the silver crowns and ornaments from the Torah scrolls to
    sell them by weight - from their silver they have made whip handles ...
    The Arabs wore our prayer shawls on their heads; the shopkeepers used
    our sacred books to package their goods ... Mothers sold themselves to
    save their children from death ... Thousand upon thousands have died of
    starvation."

    During those war years, a mortal blow struck the Yishuv, the Jewish
    community in Palestine. More Jews died during the Great War than in
    all the wars of the State of Israel combined. In four years beginning
    at the start of the World War I, this community shrank from 85,000 to
    approximately 45,000 or 50,000, at its end. Half the Jews who died
    were residents of Jerusalem - a third of the city's Jewish population.

    The historiography, and writings by contemporary writers Avshalom
    Feinberg, Moshe Smilansky and Shlomo Zalman Sonnenfeld, underscore the
    terrible suffering experienced by Palestine's Jews during the war
    years, but the dimensions of the loss have never been properly
    investigated or documented.

    Revisionist Zionist leader Ze'ev Jabotinsky wrote in March 1918, from
    Cairo: "They are saying that the mood in the Land of Israel is
    positive. The colonies and the pioneers have made an outstanding
    impression. But Jerusalem is in a bad state. Even though half of the
    people who receive the charity handouts perished - fortunately -
    before the English arrived, it is enough that we have the remaining
    half ... They squabble with one another, they write slanderous things,
    and their honorable ladies and young women often engage in 'the easy
    livelihood.' All of this is painful and depressing."

    A few weeks later, Chaim Weizmann, who chaired the Zionist Commission,
    wrote: "It is so dismal in Jerusalem! ... Jerusalem is not a Hebrew
    city! One barely discerns the young Hebrew presence, and the old
    people ... are merely broken vessels, weakened and shrouded in
    generations of mold. The Jewish neighborhoods of Jerusalem are nothing
    but filth and contagious disease. It is impossible to describe in
    words the poverty, the absolute ignorance and the fanatic zealotry;
    the heart weeps at the sight of it all!"

    Historical research mainly focused on the Zionist narrative - the
    establishment of the Zion Mule Corps by Jabotinsky and fellow Zionist
    activist Joseph Trumpeldor, the battles fought by the Jewish Legion,
    and the anti-Turkish Nili underground, which was spying on behalf of
    the British - and tended to disregard the catastrophe experienced by
    the country's long-time Jewish residents. In the generation that
    followed, research focused on attempts to evaluate the dimensions of
    the calamity, based on statistical approaches and demographic
    methodology.

    Studies by the late Prof. Isaiah Friedman, who analyzed the war from
    the German perspective rather than through an Anglophile prism,
    examined the political repercussions of Ottoman policy on the Yishuv,
    a subject not adequately studied. The large quantity of documents he
    gleaned from archives of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in Vienna and the
    German Empire in Berlin raise a question: Did Ahmed Jamal Pasha, one
    of the Ottoman rulers, intend to obliterate the Jewish community in
    Palestine - or the Zionist entity within it?



    A second Armenia

    On July 28, 1914, one month after the assassination of Archduke Franz
    Ferdinand, crown prince to the Austro-Hungarian throne, the
    Austro-Hungarian empire declared war on the kingdom of Serbia. Three
    months later, Turkey joined the axis of central European powers, and
    Jamal Pasha, one of the triumvirate of governors who controlled the
    Ottoman Empire (and its navy minister), was appointed commander of the
    Fourth Army and ruler of the Levant (Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Jordan
    and the Hijaz).

    The devastation of the civilian governance system in Palestine began
    with an announcement by the Turkish regime, upon the outbreak of the
    war, that it was declaring a moratorium on repayment of its loans.
    This caused an immediate suspension of financial activity. A draconian
    taxation regime was imposed to finance the war, and all critical
    assets were confiscated.

    With maritime traffic brought to a standstill, the transfer of
    charitable funds for distribution among members of the Yishuv was cut
    off. Cancellation of the protective status that had been granted to
    foreign subjects compromised the legal situation of some 40,000 Jews
    with Russian citizenship who were living in Palestine, as well as
    thousands of British- and French-born residents. Approximately half
    the Jews in Palestine were now considered to be citizens of enemy
    regimes.

    The Ottoman regime suspected members of the Yishuv, and particularly
    the newly arrived Zionists, of disloyalty to the Sublime Porte in
    Constantinople. On December 17, 1914, Baha al-Din, the governor of
    Jaffa, issued a general decree of deportation of all foreign subjects
    who had not yet become Ottomanized. Panic spread throughout Jaffa over
    fears of an all-out massacre - until the intervention of the
    government of Germany.

    >From the start of the war, high-ranking members of the German
    diplomatic corps had supported settlement in Palestine as a way of
    enlisting the backing of world Jewry, and American Jewry in
    particular, on behalf of the German cause. They included the German
    foreign minister, Arthur Zimmermann, and Germany's ambassador in
    Turkey. Through pressure exerted by American Jewry and through
    Germany's intervention, Al-Din was dismissed in late December.

    However, the sense of anxiety did not abate when Hassan Bey al-Basri
    (Hassan Bek) was appointed in his place. The latter was known for his
    brutal cruelty toward both Arabs and Jews. Upon his arrival in Jaffa,
    he declared his intent to eliminate the Jewish presence there, since
    he perceived it to be a foreign element that served the interests of
    foreign powers.

    In advance of the Turkish military campaign to conquer the Suez Canal,
    Jamal Pasha arrived in February 1915 at his headquarters in Jerusalem,
    situated in the Augusta Victoria compound on the Mount of Olives. He
    was welcomed to the city at an impressive reception hosted by Rabbi
    Moshe Franco, known as the Hakham Bashi, who was chief rabbi of the
    Sephardic community.

    Jewish communal leaders heard the newcomer crudely proclaiming that
    Zionism was an anti-Turkish revolutionary movement that had to be
    wiped out. Thirty prominent Zionists, including Manya and Israel
    Shochat, Yehoshua Hankin, David Ben-Gurion and Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, were
    placed under arrest. Most of them were released through the
    intervention of Albert Antebi, the representative in Jerusalem of the
    Alliance Israelite Universelle and the Jewish Colonization
    Association, but widespread fear of the Ottoman regime among the Jews
    increased.

    The participation of regiments of the Zion Mule Corps within the ranks
    of the British army in the battles of Gallipoli in 1915 and 1916
    raised the indignation of Jamal Pasha. In September 1916, he exiled
    Arthur Ruppin, head of the Zionist movement's Eretz Yisrael Office, to
    Constantinople (notwithstanding Ruppin's German citizenship); in
    December he declared that all means must be used to suppress Zionism,
    and that Zionists were "diligent and practical people, but due to
    their ideology, Palestine was liable to become a second Armenia."

    The big shift in the military arena began in January 1917, when the
    British army conquered Rafah, and intensified 10 months later when it
    occupied Be'er Sheva and Gaza. In advance of the battles of Gaza,
    40,000 residents of that city were expelled from their homes. At the
    same time, Jamal Pasha expelled all the residents of Jaffa on the
    pretext that his forces had to make preparations to thwart an
    amphibious landing in the city by General Allenby's forces. Howerver,
    while the Arabs of Jaffa were sent to the nearby orchards "until it
    blows over" and were permitted to return to their homes a short while
    later, the city's 9,000 Jews (including Jews residing in Tel Aviv),
    were expelled to the Sharon region, the Galilee and elsewhere.

    The German consul in Jerusalem, Dr. Johan Brode, suspected that the
    evacuation of Jaffa was intended to be the start of the deportation of
    Jerusalem's Jews; his suspicions were shared by the Austrian consul.
    It is not surprising, then, that an Austrian attaché at the main
    headquarters, who had close knowledge of the operational plans, was
    the first to call attention to Jamal Pasha's intent to deliver a death
    blow to the Yishuv.

    The agronomist, Nili member and Zionist activist Aaron Aaronsohn wrote
    from Cairo: "On April 1, the Jews were ordered to leave within 48
    hours. About 300 Jews had been deported a week earlier from Jerusalem
    by the cruelest measures, at which time Jamal Pasha declared that the
    Jews' rejoicing at the approaching British forces would be
    short-lived. He would make them partners in the fate of the Armenians
    ... Jamal Pasha would not issue a call for murders in cold blood.
    Rather, he would drive the population to starvation and death by
    disease."



    'Tragic tactical mistake'

    About 10 days after the evacuation of Jaffa, Jamal Pasha convened the
    consuls and announced that he was compelled to evacuate the entire
    civilian population of Jerusalem within 24 hours, and transfer it to
    Jordan and Syria. Due to the firm opposition of consul Friedrich Kress
    von Kressenstein, the chief of staff of the Fourth Army, German
    authorities intervened and temporarily foiled the plan.

    On April 16, 1917, von Kressenstein alerted the German embassy in
    Istanbul that Jamal Pasha was planning to evacuate Jerusalem in an
    effort to utterly destroy the city's Jewish and Christian populations
    and their institutions. "The evacuation of Jerusalem could have been a
    tragic tactical mistake," von Kressenstein wrote in his memoirs. "The
    uprooting of such a large population would have been liable to cause
    inestimable results. The catastrophic events that occurred to the
    Armenians who were expelled, were liable to be repeated here.
    Thousands would have died through starvation and disease."

    Following the entry of Greece into the war against Turkey in July, the
    Ottoman authorities expelled Jewish subjects of Greece living in
    Palestine to Istanbul; hundreds were trapped in the city of Hama in
    Syria. Two months later, some 550 Jews possessing American citizenship
    were deported to Damascus, in a state of terrible distress.

    In October 1917, the Turks exposed the Nili underground; the capture
    of its members threatened to wreak devastation on the Jewish community
    of Palestine. A full siege was imposed on Atlit, Hadera and Zichron
    Yaakov, where some members of the spy group were active, with elderly
    people, women and children arrested, but the colonies themselves were
    not destroyed and Aaronsohn's home in Zichron remained standing.

    The governor of the Haifa district and the military governor of
    Nazareth, both of whom had taken part in massacres of Armenians, were
    given responsibility for arrests and interrogations after the exposure
    of the espionage ring. Detainees at the Nazareth and Haifa prisons
    were severely tortured. The Jerusalem governor, Izzet Bey, accused the
    Jews of treason and pressed for their annihilation. Forty Jews were
    deported on foot to Jordan, while communal figures were jailed at the
    Kishle, the Turkish prison near Jaffa Gate in Jerusalem.

    In November, with the advance of the British army, military command of
    the Palestinian front was transferred to the German general Erich von
    Falkenhayn, and von Kressenstein was placed in charge of the forces in
    Jerusalem, having been promoted to general. Von Kressenstein moved the
    Turkish, German and Austrian regiments out of the city and positioned
    them on the ridges of the surrounding hills. Simultaneously, Jamal
    Pasha again attempted to exploit the moment to get rid of the Jews.

    Following exposure of the Nili spies and the charge of subversion
    against the Jewish community, and on the pretext that the evacuation
    of Jerusalem was necessary due to "military requirements" - Jamal
    Pasha planned to expel all the city's Jews. Documents uncovered by
    Isaiah Friedman revealed that it was thanks to the firm intervention
    of General von Kressenstein on November 5 that the planned deportation
    of that community was thwarted.

    Yaakov Thon, Ruppin's replacement, wrote to the Zionist General
    Council: "If not for the strong hand of the German government, which
    protected us in our hour of danger, we would have suffered a mortal
    blow ... To our great fortune, during these recent critical days,
    supreme command was placed in the hands of General von Falkenhayn. Had
    Jamal been responsible for events, he would have acted upon his threat
    and would have expelled the entire population... and turned the country
    into a pile of ruins."

    On December 9, 1917, the British army entered Jerusalem. Some 730
    years of Muslim rule in Jerusalem came to an end.


    Ottoman abuse

    In December 1914, it was easy to discern the anti-Zionist elements of
    Turkish policy, which employed deportation and starvation to repress
    population groups suspected of disloyalty. The deportation of the Jews
    of Jaffa and Tel Aviv signaled the implementation of a policy of
    harassment that would be applied to the entire Jewish community of
    Palestine. The veteran members of the Yishuv, the weakest link,
    absorbed the harshest blow of all.

    Deportations, draconian taxation and abuse of Jews in the country were
    carried out under the same doctrine of punishment and repression that
    the Turkish regime imposed throughout its disintegrating empire.
    Coercive enlistment, expropriation of food and property, mass
    deportations and starvation were used to threaten the existence of
    Palestine's Jews. These heavy-handed methods were imposed by the
    empire on national minorities suspected of disloyalty. These also
    included massacres of Christians, Assyrians and Greek communities; the
    Armenian genocide was, indeed, carried out in the same way.

    Historian Yair Auron has written about the genocide of the Armenians
    (in his book, "The Banality of Denial: Israel and the Armenian
    Genocide").

    "An important component of the annihilation process (in the summer of
    1915) was the evacuation and deportation of the Armenian population,"
    he writes. "Usually, the population was given a period of a few days
    to prepare to be evacuated, ostensibly dictated by needs of the war.
    Evacuees were permitted to take a limited amount of baggage, and they
    were assured that their homes and assets would be preserved. The
    deportees were concentrated in convoys that began to move toward the
    Syrian desert. Once they left the villages and cities, the men were
    separated from the women and were murdered nearby.

    "The women, children and aged," he notes, "were then subjected to a
    slow and prolonged death as they were forced to walk on foot for
    hundreds of kilometers. Along the way, the convoys were attacked in
    sporadic ambushes. The hunger, thirst, cold, heat and epidemics raised
    the number of victims. Very few of those who began the journey
    succeeded in making it alive to the end."

    Jamal Pasha was known to have systematically executed those who rose
    up against him in Hijaz, Beirut and Damascus, and to have taken part
    in the massacre of the Armenian people. His modus operandi in
    Palestine was identical to that adopted in the repression of the
    Armenians and the Assyrians - except that in Palestine he was
    prevented from realizing his final solution as a result of the German
    government's influence on the Turkish leadership.

    Reliable evidence of the policies and character of Jamal Pasha may be
    found in the autobiography of Richard Lichtheim, the World Zionist
    Organization's representative in Istanbul, who was a primary figure in
    forging contacts between the Yishuv and the Ottoman leadership.
    Lichtheim writes that he vehemently opposed Jabotinsky's plan for
    enlistment in the British army, which sparked "great opposition among
    the Turkish authorities, and which was capable of becoming a source of
    trouble for the Jews of the Land of Israel." Lichtheim added that in
    early February 1915, it clearly seemed as if "Jamal Pasha and his
    friends were plotting to destroy and annihilate the Zionist settlement
    enterprise in the Land of Israel."

    Referring to Jamal Pasha's character, Lichtheim wrote, "He was full of
    contrasts, and these usually depended more on mood than on judgment.
    Could it be that he was more anti-Semitic than the rest of his vizier
    colleagues in Constantinople? Or did he hold a special hatred for
    Jews? No and no ... The attempt he made to arouse the Muslim to jihad
    and to thereby win the hearts of the Arabs who would stand together
    with Turkey proved unsuccessful, at which point he set out to commit
    even crueler acts against the Syrian nationalists, in which he
    sentenced their leaders to death by hanging. Nevertheless he did not
    alter his hostile position toward the Jews.

    "Jamal Pasha was the individual who initiated a politics of
    persecution of all of the non-Turkish nations in the Ottoman Empire,
    which led to the deportation of hundreds of thousands of Greeks from
    their homes and to the horrific slaughter of the Armenians in
    Anatolia, in which over one million people fell victim."

    During World War I, there was sharp disagreement within the World
    Zionist Organization on the matter of that movement's diplomatic
    orientation. Following Allenby's victory and the Balfour Declaration,
    the pro-British line gained ascendancy, as the position that had
    supported (the by-then defeated) Germany shriveled.

    Following the Holocaust (and before the archives were opened), no
    historiographic effort was invested in elucidation of hypothetical
    scenarios from the past, and the role played by Germany was once again
    shrouded in mystery. Now, with a full century having passed, it can be
    stated that it was thanks to the strident intervention of Germany that
    the danger of annihilation faced by the shattered and desperate Yishuv
    was avoided.

    Excerpted from the essay "A Century Without Monument and Memory: A
    Public Appeal for Commemoration of the Jewish Community of Eretz
    Israel's Fallen in World War I," published in the Hebrew journal Aley
    Zait Vacherev (Olive Leaves and Sword), The Galili Center for Defense
    Studies.


    http://forward.com/articles/203403/did-germany-help-save-palestine-s-jews-during-wo/

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