#1102 3/6/22 – The Meaning of Homeland – A Second Lesson From Russia-Ukraine Especially for Us

WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG:  Many have commented that small nations like Israel must draw from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, in the face of its commitment to respect Ukraine’s independence and territorial integrity, the need to rely first and foremost on their own resources.

A second lesson for Jews, which all of us should have learned long ago, is the need for a small minority people’s Diaspora to have a secure, meaningful homeland to go to when destructive invasion renders continued Diaspora existence untenable.  The Bricha – the during and post-WWII Palestinian Jew-aided escape of Europe’s unwanted-in-Spades Jews from Europe to Israel – stands as a supreme instance of the importance of Homeland.     

The Meaning of Homeland – A Second Lesson From Russia-Ukraine Especially for Us

Lesson Two

In last week’s #1101, I cited two internet articles drawing a lesson for small countries like Israel to learn from the Russian invasion of Ukraine.  Over the course of this past week, a number of similar articles followed.  The lesson all drew, citing the U.S., Britain, Russia commitment to “refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine” if it gave up its nuclear weapons, which it did, is that small nations must primarily rely on themselves.

But there’s a further lesson for the world’s Jews from this right-now WWII-like Russian invasion of Ukraine.  Just how terribly brutal to civilians this invasion actually has become is still subject to conflicting claims, but this fact about the magnitude of population upheaval is abundantly clear:  more than a million Ukrainian civilians have already fled to neighboring lands.  This is far more than the Arabs who fled Israel in the 1948 Arab invasion, and more than the indigenously Middle-eastern Jews who fled to Israel from Arab lands and Iran in that 1948 war’s wake.  This second lesson is that a minority people’s Diaspora displaced by intolerable violence, whether or not directed exclusively against it, desperately needs a welcoming homeland to which to go.

This is a lesson that Diaspora Jews who are uncomfortable with Israel as a “Jewish state” that’s “apartheid” against “Palestinians” should have learned long ago.  The Jewish claim to historic Jerusalem and Judea-Samaria (which are not “East Jerusalem” and “the West Bank”) doesn’t date from “their capture by Israel in 1967,” but from ancient Israel and Jewish presence thereafter, recognized in the Palestine Mandate.  Jews didn’t dimension Israel’s Law of Return out to “one Jewish grandparent.”  Hitler did that.  Jews didn’t send the pathetic St. Louis’ Holocaust-escaping passengers back to the Holocaust.  America and Central American nations did that.  Dr. Weizmann didn’t divide planet Earth between places Jews could not live and could not enter.  The Earth’s nations did that.  The Haganah didn’t deport Haganah Ship Exodus 1947’s Holocaust survivors back to Hamburg, Germany.  The still pre-Holocaust Jewish immigration-ending “White Paper”-waving British – without resigning their fiduciary charge to facilitate in western Palestine, the land of Israel, re-establishment of the Jewish national home with “close settlement of Jews on the land” – did that.

Lots of internet articles this week deal with Israel’s aid to shelled and shell-fleeing Ukranians, and in facilitating aliyah.  Since Israel’s independence in 1948, there’s been no British blockade, and given Israel’s status as the Jews’ homeland state, there’s no quota on Jewish refugees.

Books on the Bricha

But let’s go back for a moment to when there not only still was that British anti-Jewish Palestine sea blockade, but relentless British pressure exerted upon Europe’s states to block Holocaust survivors’ movement in Europe and to prevent departure from Europe’s ports of Aliyah Bet ships.  Most books on this are not easy reading, but what they reflect is that this movement of the survivors, often first back east to Poland seeking family survivors and then, disappointed, back west toward Aliyah Bet sailing sites, was driven by intense intention to get to Palestine originating within the survivors themselves, and what the Palestinian Jews, those sent from the land by Mossad and those already there in the Jewish Brigade, did was to facilitate and guide this determined self-directed movement, not to instill it.

I vowed last week to recommend to you, and through you to less Israel aid-motivated American Jews who can be reached, books on these themes that are, in the first instance, non-tedious reading.  On the Bricha, the movement of the survivors and surviving partisans, against the will of the British, to the ships, I recommend two books:  Journalist I. F. Stone’s Underground to Palestine, and Howard Blum’s The Brigade, both richly rewarding reading.

There are, of course, many worthwhile, if less intensely readable, works out there for the willing.  These include Ehud Avriel’s Open the Gates! The Dramatic Personal Story of ‘Illegal’ Immigration to Israel; Yehuda Bauer;s Flight and Rescue: Brichah, the Organized Escape of the Jewish Survivors of Eastern Europe, 1944-1948; Bracha Habas’ The Gate Breakers, A Dramatic Chronicle of the Jewish Immigration into Palestine; Ephraim Dekel’s B’riha, Flight to the Homeland; Herbert Agar’s The Saving Remnant; and Leo Schwarz’s The Redeemers.  Some of these authors played important roles in the process.  My recollection is that I read them, if I don’t necessarily remember in my eighty-second year now which details are in which.

However far you get in reading about the Bricha, what must strike you, and it is to be hoped less intensely pro-Israel American Jews upon whom you foist these volumes,  as extraordinary is the willingness and strength beyond normal people’s, let alone death camp-damaged people’s endurance, to travel ill-clad, ill-fed, over mountains in winter, across unwelcoming guarded borders, often on foot or packed in unweather-protected rail cars, through often less than Jew-loving places, from interim to interim destinations.   Their Palestinian facilitators, who helped as they could, were heroes, but no less were the determined self-motivated survivors they helped.