The Lie and the Reward

By Steve Rodan

Throughout Israel's history, there has been a promising path to political success: that of a journalist who could unswervingly and effectively defend the establishment. In the early years, there were David Ben-Gurion and Moshe Sharett. They were followed by Yossi Beilin, Nachman Shai, Yair Lapid, Nitzan Horowitz and many others who left journalism for government.

Shalom Gottlieb started out no different. Born in a Hasidic family in 1902, he became a leading Zionist journalist in Poland and fled Hitler in 1939. Arriving in Palestine a year later, he abandoned Polish and Yiddish for Hebrew, and soon, writing under pen names, became active in the Zionist media. Gottlieb's talent: He could write about any topic. His specialty was mysteries.

In November 1941, Gottlieb was asked to write about the German occupation of Poland. The article was not meant to highlight the cruelty of the Germans; their starvation and killing of the Jews. It was meant to do the opposite: Portray the new Warsaw Ghetto as benign; where Jews would struggle but survive and even enjoy life occasionally.

Gottlieb lacked direct knowledge of Warsaw. But that didn't matter: His Zionist handlers, particularly those in the Jewish Agency, would tell him what to write and what to leave out. His job was to honor the Zionist agreement with Hitler to distort if not deny German atrocities, then taking place with horrifying efficiency in the Soviet Union and Romania. Gottlieb was also ordered to discredit the New York-based Jewish Telegraphic Agency, long a bane of the Zionist movement and a major source of news on the Final Solution.

On Nov. 24, Gottlieb published an article titled "On the Horrible News that Keeps Changing." It appeared on Page 2 of Haaretz, the privately-owned daily that served the Zionist leadership and the British Mandate in Palestine. Unlike Ben-Gurion's Davar, Haaretz was the newspaper of the elite. It was used as a talent pool for the Jewish Agency when it sought propagandists. Unlike Davar, which questioned reports of the extermination, Haaretz simply denied that Jews were being killed en masse.

Gottlieb began with an attack on JTA and its competitor Palcor: "Had the directors of the telegraphic and non-telegraphic agencies known how much pain they are causing on occasion by relaying unclear news, they would be more cautious and they would not frequently use such terms as JTA and Palcor do, such as 'thousands of Jewish victims', etc."

Then, Gottlieb asserted that JTA and Palcor were exaggerating the death toll by the Germans in comparison with the Polish media. He said the two agencies reported on the death of Jews in Poland when actually the victims were mostly gentile. This, he said, has caused untold grief to the relatives of the Polish Jews in Palestine.

Now for the truth: "First of all, we must know that there has not been any change in terms of murder by the Nazis from the first day of their invasion in this war," Gottlieb wrote.

Then comes the apology: The German killing has been part of its war against the partisans. The Gestapo has sought to stop the distribution of anti-German leaflets, which included those in Yiddish. Still, Gottlieb said, Jews were not singled out. He insisted that there was nothing to support a recent report in JTA that 6,000 Jews were killed in a German operation.

Instead, Gottlieb cited "private sources in Poland" that there was a decline in the killing of Jews in the so-called General Government in Poland. The Germans, he said, were stressing war production in the occupied territories, and this has resulted in greater labor opportunities in the Jewish ghettos. The Jewish laborers were said to obtain a small wage and enough food to survive.

"Apparently, the Germans have withdrawn from the General Government most of the Gestapo and attack units and in many places brought soldiers from the Italian Army," Gottlieb wrote.

That was the good news. Gottlieb said the Italians, unlike the Germans, could be bribed to overlook restrictions or reduce punishment of the Jews. He said that one Jew from Warsaw even managed to take a two-week vacation in an unnamed city in Poland.

Now for the Warsaw Ghetto: The situation is dire but those with a few pennies can manage to obtain food in secret. To support this, Gottlieb quoted a Swedish newspaper that claimed the opposite: that the Jews don't have money to buy even the staples that are available.

There was also good news from the Gulag. Gottlieb said many Polish Jews were taken by Soviet authorities to Siberia. But the Polish government-in-exile had submitted a list of Jews requested for release. American Jewish organizations were discussing this issue with Soviet diplomats in Washington. The British could even be expected to help with visas to Palestine.

Israel Gutman survived the Warsaw Ghetto and after his arrival in Israel studied the Holocaust. In his 1977 book "The Jews of Warsaw: 1939-1943," Gutman does not obfuscate: At most five percent of Jews in the ghetto, mostly the rich as well as smugglers, were managing. The rest were starving and desperately seeking work. Gutman quoted an official from the Judenrat, the quisling council set up by the Germans to facilitate the starvation and deportation of the Jews.

"Perhaps 20-30,000 are sufficiently sated, those from the social elite. Facing them is the masses of a quarter of a million who are completely bankrupt, destitute and fighting merely to delay the date of their death by starvation."

Gottlieb's article was one of the few published in the Zionist media during World War II that sought to put the German campaign against the Jews in perspective, albeit falsely. The lion's share of the media, under the control of Ben-Gurion, published little more than one-paragraph items on the extermination. The goal of the Zionist leadership, coordinated with the British, was to play down the German killings to avoid unrest in Palestine.

Eventually, Gottlieb was rewarded for his work. He rose in Haaretz and was even allowed to write a fictional serial on anti-Nazis in occupied Europe.

In July 1953, Gottlieb was appointed editor of Israel's new pictorial weekly "Chayei Sha'ah" or "Now," which focused on Hollywood starlets and serialized novels. Under Ben-Gurion's directive, he changed his name to Shalom Yedidya, and his magazine would try to compete with the prime minister's worst enemy, the popular weekly Haolam Hazeh, whose new editor Uri Avneri, was reporting on corruption in the ruling Mapai Party.

"Now" appeared to be a one-man operation. There were virtually no bylines above the articles on crime, cinema, espionage, politics and sports, all believed written by Yediyda. The exception was the women's page, headed by Yedidya's wife, Miriam. With few ads and readers, "Now" ended publication in 1958 after 230 editions. In the meantime, Yedidya oversaw a failed magazine on fashion.

Haolam Hazeh survived other Ben-Gurion-aligned publications and remained the biggest magazine in Israel through the 1980s. Miriam wrote a woman's novel published in 1961, and, like her husband, soon faded from the scene. The obituary of neither Shalom or Yediya could be found on the Internet. Years after Shalom's heyday, historian Mordechai Naor summed up his abilities:

"He apparently excelled in two areas: The ability to write on any topic, whether it took place 1,000 years ago or last week, and the speed of his writing. An examination of the topics on which he wrote, and their substitution when required, reveals unusual adaptation to changing positions."

Below: Shalom Gottlieb