ABSTRACT
The history of the Palestine mandate cannot be understood without reference to the reactions to the Holocaust of the three principal “players” in the Palestine Triangle – the Arabs, the British and the Jews. This chapter deals with British and Jewish reactions. Chapters 17 and 18 will deal with the Arabs’ affinities to Nazism in the 1930s, and with the Mufti of Jerusalem’s collaboration with the Nazi regime during the war. Over the last 15 years, the work of Richard Breitman has shown that the
Allies knew far more about Nazi atrocities, from a much earlier stage of the war, than historians had previously believed.1 The crescendo of reports reaching the West about the Nazis’ wholesale slaughter of the Jews in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union left no doubt about their unprecedented mass scale. The Allies’ response was a cynical mix of spontaneous shock, followed by calculations of realpolitik and anti-Semitic recoil. Jewish appeals for aid and rescue were met with procrastination, disingenuousness and lies. The Allies’ formal reply to all calls for help was that they could not divert military resources from operations against the enemy. But exceptions were made: the Allies mounted missions to rescue their own prisoners of war, and carried out operations that served their post-war political interests, notably the airlift of supplies and arms to the pro-Western Polish Home Army during their uprising against the Nazis in Warsaw in August 1944.2
The Allies’ failure to divert resources against the Nazi death machinery was determined not only by military factors but also by their fear of domestic criticism, of accusations that they were fighting the war on the Jews’ behalf. The British had an additional fear – losing the support of the Arabs, should successful rescue efforts in Europe lead to an irresistible flood of Jewish immigrants into Palestine.
