The Plan for Mass Suicide

By Steve Rodan

In the summer of 1942, the Zionist leadership feared for their end. The German Army of Gen. Erwin Rommel was sweeping through North Africa toward Palestine. On June 30, Rommel's Afrika Korps was some 100 kilometers from Cairo, or about a day's travel. The Wehrmacht, accompanied by the SS, was a week away from Tel Aviv and with orders to exterminate the Jews.

The British Mandate administration had been ordered to evacuate Palestine. Bureaucrats were burning documents and making plans to flee to neighboring Syria and then Iraq. The Jews would be left without weapons to fend for themselves. Others were left stranded in German-occupied Greece.

"It’s possible that there will be atrocities here," Moshe Shertok, regarded as the No. 2 man in the Jewish Agency, said.

Eighty years later, it would be impossible to exaggerate the fear of the Yishuv leadership to Hitler's hordes. Shertok had been responsible for the conscription, in many cases forced, of 30,000 Jews to the British Army. The Jewish Agency's promise that the recruits would fight Germany was a lie. The great majority did menial work in British bases in Egypt and Algeria.

"All of us as one to defend our lives," Davar, the newspaper of the Histadrut federation, wrote in a headline on Page One on June 30.

The military recruitment was meant to remove the young men and women who might lead a revolt against London's policy to stop Jews from entering Palestine. As early as June 1941, the British army asked Jewish soldiers whether they would consider leaving Palestine permanently. Some of the soldiers protested and their complaints reached Shertok, who consulted with his superior, David Ben-Gurion. Ben-Gurion, who owed his career to London, was noncommittal.

But as the Jewish Agency Executive urged Jews to sign up for the British army, the Zionist elite were packing their bags. Many of them were begging the British to take them along. The preferred destination was South Africa, which the leadership would veto as a haven for European Jews who sought to flee Hitler.

Zalman Aran, who held top posts in the ruling Mapai Party and Histadrut, urged London to resettle the entire Zionist establishment in either South Africa or the United States. Aran's plan also called for the transfer of millions of pounds from Zionist coffers to safe shores.

"...a handful of personalities, the Zionist core, that would pull the thread," Aran said of the proposed exiled leadership.

The Zionist leadership in Palestine felt alone. Ben-Gurion, the on-again-off-again chairman of the Jewish Agency, was in the United States for what seemed to be a long if not permanent stay. So, was Chaim Weizmann, the head of the Zionist movement, whose base was in London. Both of them were in America on orders of the British, who preferred that the leadership in Palestine remain incapable of any other decision except that dictated by the empire.

Ben-Gurion was unavailable. His infrequent cables to Shertok hardly dealt with the German threat, rather boasted of how the Allies were considering the formation of a Jewish army to fight Hitler.

As a result, the meeting of the Jewish Agency Executive on June 30 took on a surrealistic air. All the members knew that the Germans would arrive with the same ardor for genocide as that taking place throughout Europe. Their response, however, varied from comical to pathetic.

"We have to defend Eretz Yisrael with all means, but they must be legal," Emil Shmorek, who represented the General Zionists, said.

Shertok agreed that only legal means would do -- "of course until the [German] conquest of the Land."

Yitzhak Greenbaum, who months later would become head of the agency's rescue panel, was incredulous.

"We won't even fight unless we have uniforms?" Greenbaum asked.

Indeed, several Executive members ruled out resistance. They envisioned reaching an accommodation with the Germans that would make the Jewish Agency into a Judenrat, the quisling leadership that sent hundreds of thousands of Jews to the gas chambers in Poland and other occupied countries.

Moshe Shapira, a member of the religious Mizrahi movement, said not all the Jews in Palestine have to die. The survivors could agree to become a ghetto ruled by the Germans.

On July 5, the Executive met again. This time, Shertok reported on British defense plans for Palestine. High Commissioner Harold MacMichael disclosed the formation of the "Local Jewish Defence Organisation," with some 10,000 members. Their job would be to defend government property, detention camps, airports and trains.

The British would also set up the "Palestine Voluntary Forces." This organization would not be equipped with even one rifle.

Shertok asked MacMichael to allow a Jewish Agency representative to travel to London to plead for help. The high commissioner did not reply.

Eventually, the Zionists came up with a plan. The Mapai-dominated Palmach, formed by the British, drafted what was termed the "Plan of the North." The Palmach, in a variation of a British proposal, called for the evacuation of some women and children to Cyprus.

The rest of the 500,000 Jews would be brought to Mount Carmel, an area of 200 square kilometers, for a Masada-like last stand against Rommel, whose aides had met SS Lt. Col. Walther Rauff, the designer of mobile gas chambers, employed in the Soviet Union. The Palmach's rival, the Irgun, drafted a similar plan, this one in Jerusalem.

Greenbaum saw the Masada plan as little more than mass suicide. But he could foresee a modern-day Masada as eventually reviving Zionism.

"If...we find ourselves in a state of invasion, we must make sure that at the very least we will leave a Masada legend after us," Greenbaum told the Executive session on June 30. "We should not be like the Jews of Germany and Poland, because if such were the case there would be no revival of Zionism."

In the end, Rommel was stopped at El Alamein, near the northwestern coast of Egypt. The British army victory was highlighted by thousands of German-speaking Jews, who conducted espionage and sabotage missions among Rommel's troops. In their German uniforms, the Jewish commandos entered German bases and slit the throats of the enemy. They stopped German transports, shot dead drivers and brought back the vehicles to the British. The Germans feared every stranger in a Wehrmacht uniform.

Few have acknowledged the heroics of these Jews. But the Germans did. In his memoirs, Gen. Siegfried Westphal wrote that Hitler had ordered the SS to deal with captured "political refugees" by first torturing and then killing them.

"We received a radio signal from Hitler ordering that all captured Israelites be 'slaughtered in battle,'" Westphal wrote of a Jewish battalion under the French Foreign Legion, an ally of the British in Libya.

When World War II ended, the Zionist leadership saved Rauff. Ben-Gurion approved the recruitment of the SS officer who killed 200,000 Jews and now assigned to supply intelligence on Syria. By 1950, Rauff, with help from Israeli intelligence, fled to South America, where he established an escape route for his SS colleagues.

Below: Gen. Rommel toasting a victory.