Young Iraqi Jews who fled to pre-state Israel following the 1941 Farhud pogrom in Baghdad. Photo: Moshe Baruch

I was scanning the news (a common Jewish activity), when a recent article by Marwan Bishara in Al Jazeera (Aug 18, 2022) caught my eye. The article, titled “The Palestinian misuse, and Zionist abuse, of the Holocaust,” was written after Palestinian leader Mahmood Abbas accused Israel of committing 50 Holocausts. Bishara criticizes both Palestinians and Israelis for invoking the Holocaust inappropriately, but he is far more critical of Israel than he is of the Palestinians, who are portrayed in the context of being victims of Israeli aggression.

The article asserts that the Palestinians are paying the price for the horrors of the Holocaust. Bishara points out that liberal Zionists have portrayed the Palestinians as coincidental victims of victims, drawing a picture of Jews leaping out of a blazing building. He writes:

Some liberal Zionists have portrayed the Palestinians as coincidental victims of victims. According to this narrative, the Jews who survived by leaping out of a burning building, meaning Nazi-inflamed Europe, had somehow landed on a luckless bystander, the Palestinians.

Hardly a crime, right? But why deny crushing the bystander? Why the racism and the constant abuse? And what about all these leaps before and after?

Bishari ignores the religious and historical connection between the Jewish people and the land of Israel. He takes no notice of the physical presence of Jews in what was then called Palestine throughout the centuries. Bishari also seems oblivious to the fact that modern Zionism has always been, and to some extent still is, a survivalist imperative. It was no coincidence that the onset of modern Zionism coincided with the onset of years of terrible pogroms experienced by the Jews of Europe, the vast majority of the world’s Jews at that time.

In 1903 — 120 years ago, and well before the Nazis existed — a devastating pogrom took place in Kishenev (today Chişinău, Moldava) over two days, during Easter. The pogrom, sparked by the antisemitic libel accusing Jews of using the blood of Christian children for ritual purposes, resulted in 49 Jewish deaths, hundreds injured, and hundreds of women raped. This was not the first nor the last of the pogroms. But it was one of the first of the 20th century, it received worldwide publicity, and it led to the emigration of thousands of Russian Jews, including 40,000 that went to Palestine.

In 1936, as a result of violence between Palestinian Jews and Arabs, instigated by the Arab leadership to force the curtailment of Jewish immigration to Palestine, the British government created the Peel Commission. The Commission’s report, a 400 page document available online, is a remarkably detailed analysis of the situation in Palestine at that time.

In 1936, the population of Palestine consisted of 400,000 Jews and 900,000 Arabs. The Commission judged that the gulf between the two populations was too wide to bridge, and recommended that Palestine be partitioned into a Jewish state and an Arab state. The Jewish state, constituting only 17 percent of Palestine, would include a coastal strip from Rehovot and Tel Aviv northwards, as well as the Galilee. The Arab state would make up 75 percent of the total; the remaining 8 percent, mainly Jerusalem and surrounding areas, would continue to be governed by Britain.

Prior to World War I, the Near East was under the thumb of the Ottoman Turks and there were no independent Arab states. The Turkish defeat by the British liberated about one million square miles of Arab land. The Peel partition plan would have allocated about 0.2 % to the Jews.

But this was too much for the Arabs in Palestine. They rejected the proposed partition outright. The Arab leadership boycotted the Commission’s deliberations, although they did participate in the final sessions. The partition plan was discussed and debated at the 20th World Zionist Congress and reluctantly accepted. According to “A History of Zionism,” 1972, Chaim Weizmann and David Ben-Gurion argued in favor of accepting the plan, with reservations.

But the British were not willing force the Palestinian Arabs to acquiesce, and the Peel Commission Partition Plan was quietly shelved. Britain imposed a severe limit on Jewish immigration at a time of greatest Jewish desperation

How many Jewish lives might have been saved if a small Jewish state existed in 1937? Tens of thousands? Hundreds of thousands? Millions? Would such an influx have had a negative effect on the Arab demographic in Palestine as a whole?

This would have been the right thing to do. Instead, Palestinian opposition to a small Jewish state likely helped ensure that countless Jews could not escape the horrors of the Holocaust.

Jacob Sivak, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, is a retired professor, University of Waterloo.