From Catastrophe to Power: Holocaust Survivors and the Emergence of Israel (review)

Abstract

From Catastrophe to Power: Holocaust Survivors and the Emergence of Israel, by Idith Zertal. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. 344 pp. $29.95. In the conventional retrospection that Nazi brutality occasioned, the past destruction of European Jewry is prologue to revival and the establishment of Israel in 1948 as a Jewish state. While acknowledging that no political development could literally and fully compensate for the massive numbers of deaths or the endless sadism of the death camps, Israel's political leaders insisted, quite boldly in earlier decades, that a Jewish state promised hope and the reconstitution of a people. In the vocabulary of the period, total destruction gave rise to absolute rebirth. The linkage between the savagery to which European society succumbed and the epic heroism of Israel's founding are not simply symbolic or a public relations image drawn by clever politicians. Holocaust survivors - part of the displaced persons permanently uprooted by war and the racialist hatred still lingering in local communities after Hitler's defeat - had no place but Palestine to call home. In the chaos of postwar Europe with its shifting zones of occupation subject to no single victorious power or policy, controlling the flow of people on the move and meeting the subsistence needs of millions of the verge of starvation generated a set of common interests between Zionists, on the one hand, and three of the four allied countries, on the other. For despite sensitivity to the unspeakable horror to which the Jews were subjected, most Western countries clung to immigration policies that denied access to Jewish refugees. Without options, then, these Jews were compelled to channel their will to survive into a determination to live in the land of Israel. Sympathy for Holocaust survivors, however, did not spontaneously generate the international pressure to meet Zionist demands for increased Jewish immigration. Zionist political leaders had to claim the refugees as their constituents and assert what they insisted was an inalienable right of all Jews to live in Palestine. These politicians, according to Idith Zertal in her exquisitely conceived book, turned a humanitarian issue into an international campaign with sufficient power to maneuver Great Britain out of its colonial possession and create a balance of global forces favorable to the idea of establishing a Jewish state in Palestine. Zertal's novel and provocative thesis starts by tracing the Mossad operations launched from ports in Italy, France, Romania, and Yugoslavia. Each country presented its own particular set of opportunities and obstacles. On the shores of Italy's Ligurian Sea, the Mossad could function with relative autonomy because a defeated government ruled without full authority amidst a population expressing considerable public shame over past collaboration in the deportation of Jews. For Mossad operatives in countries about to be enclosed by the Iron Curtain, conditions were dramatically different: domestic disorder arose from the imposition of a new governmental authoritarianism and not from the contradictions of opposing political structures as in Italy or from the clash of major policy orientations as in France. In Eastern Europe, Mossad handlers eventually managed to forge alliances with Soviet rulers and dragoon local communists into their maneuvers, actions which required the endurance to withstand a tangle of incomprehensible bureaucratic regulations and a series of unfulfilled agreements. Frequently cut off for long periods from their superiors stationed in Paris or their comrades in Palestine, these agents were also imbued with a genuine sympathy for the refugees themselves. …