The Blue and the Yellow Star of David: The Zionist Leadership in Palestine and the Holocaust, 1939-1945 (review)

Abstract

VoLume 9. No.3 Spring 1991 157 in principle with establishing diplomatic relations [with Israel]. However, there are certain difficulties and problems that the Holy See would first want to have resolved." For a book on diplomacy, Kreutz has written a readable and at times interesting chronicle. Though hindered by the closure of part of the Vatican archives, Kreutz's analysis is detailed and important. The accusation by Jews, including Jewish progressives, that the Vatican policy toward Israel is antiJewish is hardly substantiated by Kreutz, and the present policy toward Israel seems almost generous compared to most international organizations. Unfortunately , perhaps the underlying meaning of Kreutz's analysis is that neither Jews nor Palestinians, separate or together, have much importance in the rarefied atmosphere of those who claim to carry forward the message of the messiah. MarcH. Ellis Maryknoll School ofTheology Maryknoll, New York . The Blue and the Yellow Star of David: The Zionist Leadership in Palestine and the Holocaust, 1939-1945, by DinaPorat. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990. 334 pp. $27.95. Researchers who have spoken out against the indictment of the role played by American Jewry during the Holocaust have special reason to welcome this book. Dina Porat at last gives us a standard against which the American Jewish posture during the Holocaust can be measured. Although the Yishuv was smaller and in a far different strategic position, the problems faced by its leadership during the crisis are familiar. As in America, the Zionist movement in Palestine was painfully slow to understand the threat facing European Jewry. It also lacked power to meet the challenge. In contrast to the World War I period, where notions of Jewish power were exaggerated, during World War II there was an almost total lack of leverage with the Allied governments. The Jews wer~ neither wanted nor needed to help win the war. Above all, the movement was torn by deep divisions. There was a constant fear that the Revisionists, on the Right, would make political capital out of the crisis. On the Left there was the ideological challenge of Communism, which the Jewish labor movement had barely warded off. As was the case in American Zionism, there were bitter bitter personal conflicts within the leadership. But most vexing was the persistent inability to believe that a systematic mass murder operation was being conducted as a matter of public policy by a modern state. Until 1944 the 158 SHOFAR leadership of the Yishuv assumed that the gruesome stories they heard were exaggerated and that a portion of Europe's Jews would survive to build the Yishuv. This despite its superior sources of information, which included exchangees . Some came to believe that leaders like Ben Gurion had simply written off European Jewry. The leadership gave priority to the security of the settlements. "In Palestine," Porat relates, "daily life continued scarcely affected by the war, indeed the war accelerated economic development ..." (p. 62). The same observation has been made regarding American Jewish life during the war. But there the analogy with American Jewry ends. The Jewish Agency administered the Yishuv under the close supervision of London, where real power resided. It was charged with safeguarding the welfare of its constituency , Palestinian Jewry. Everything beyond that was secondary. If Porat had gone back to the conflict over the boycott, which the Jewish Agency Executive (AlE) broke because of its need to maintain the transfer agreement with the Reich, or had she scrutinized the policy followed for resettlement of Jews outside Palestine, which it also opposed, the dilemma of the Yishuv leadership might have come into even sharper perspective. Although "negation of the golah" played some minor role in determining priorities, Zionist leaders were aware that the population stock being destroyed was requisite for the suCcess of its enterprise. Something else interfered with a direct response to the Final Solution-its anomalous position as a legal governmental body. Whether it concerned the activities of the International Committee of the Red Cross, the Vatican, or neutral or allied governments, whenever such agencies or governments were involved in rescue, their priorities reflected first and foremost their own security and well-being. The Jewish Agency was no exception to this...