India and Israel Against Islamic Terror

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living- The Israeli Arab, no doubt, has many imaginary woes,

or at least distorted out of all perspective and fanned by

hostile propaganda from the surrounding Arab states. But

many of the problems faced by Israeli Arabs are real enough,

particularly land tenure. The government is certainly aware

of this, and has consistently maintained its position ever

since the founding of the country that without peace between

Israel and her neighbors there can be no satisfactory solution

to persistent problems such as repatriation or compensation

for the Arab refugees who fled Palestine and, generally, the

establishment of a modus vivendi between Israel and the

Arab lands. It’s curious that, with all the agitation calling for

immediate reparation to Arab refugees without considering

other allied issues at stake, few people have mentioned the

property of which about a million Jewish refugees were

relieved before being permitted to leave their Arab

homelands, before they came to Israel.”
As the process of nation making starts, certain ’landmark’

events of the past stand out. Again Mark Tessler:
”Chaim Weizmann, who was to become the first President

of Israel and who was for many years president of the

World Zionist Organization and the Jewsh Agency for Israel,

was very likely the most influential of that disparate collection

of extraordinary talents known as Zionists. Deeply influenced

by Asher Ginzberg whose pen name was Ahad Ha’am, a

Russian-born philosopher and major writer in modern

Hebrew who taught that Jewish culture rather than economic,

political or military power was the base of the unprecedented

survival of this people. Weizmann agreed with this conclusion,

adding science to the humanities as part of this Jewish cultural

inheritance”.
”Arguing at the Eleventh Zionist Congress in Vienna in 1913

for his dream of a Hebrew University, Weizmann said:

”Although we have at present an ardent desire to see our

people plow the fields and to make it faithful to its soil, we

know that we are and shall always be the people of the

Book. Our strongest weapon is the spirit, and it is our duty
156 INDIA AND ISRAEL CHAPTI
ERIi
to cultivate this spirit, to sharpen the weapons with which

we must fight for a better existence. The university will be

our spiritual dreadnought; it will be of greater value to us

than armies and navies are to other nations.”
Isaiah Berlin, Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory

and Fellow of All Souls College at Oxford, has said in his brief

beautifully written biographical essay ’Chaim Weizmann:’
”As he reflected on the poverty of the land and its lack of

natural resources, he placed his hope upon turning the one

kind of capital that the Jews did seem to possess technical

skills, ingenuity, energy, desperation-to the production of

miracles in scientific technology.”
”In all of Weizmann’s long and single-minded struggle to

establish a Jewish State, education was central to his plans.

With his friend Martin Buber he published a pamphlet in

1903 which said plainly that to make cultural Zionism a

reality would call for a Hebrew University in the Holy Land.

In 1918, with Turkish troops retreating in the distance and

British artillery pounding away from the outskirts of Jerusalem,

Weizmann laid the foundation stone of the Hebrew Univesity

on Mount Scopus. Now, the new Hebrew University at Civat

Ram in Jerusalem works together with its medical faculty at

the Hadssah University Medical Centre at the Jerusalem

suburb of Ein Kerem and the original Mount Scopus campus

recovered in 1967,which is the site of the Harry S. Truman

Peace Memorial. The university also maintains branch

institutes in Haifa and Beersheba as well as the agricultural

faculty at Rehovot.”
The Jews despaired of their never-ending captivity

underestimated the innate resources of the human spirit.

Menachem Begin describes the metaphysics of Jewish rebellion

in the following way:
”The revolt sprang from the earth. The ancient Greek story

of Antaeus and the strength he drew from contact with

mother Earth is a legend. The officials of the British Foreign

Office had no conception of this when they made their
-*-;TER -) 1 THE STRUGGLE AND THE HOME COMING 157
plans. What could they foresee of those hidden forces which

Herzl used to speak of as the ’imponderables’; their error

was not mathematical; they were not wrong about the

number of Jews wanting to come to Eretz Israel. They

assumed that in Eretz Israel, too, the Jews would continue

to be timid supplicants for protection. The conduct of the

jews-or rather the attitude of their official leaders, expressed

in the well-known policy of self restraint (Havlaga)-seemed

to justify and confirm this assumption. But those unseen

forces, which have ever saved the Jewish people from

obliteration, demolished the British assumption....A new

generation grew up which turned its back on fear. It began

to fight instead of to plead. For nearly two thousand years,

the Jews, as Jews, had not borne arms, and it was on this

complete disarmament, as much psychological as physical,

that our oppressors calculated. They did not realize that the

two phenomena were interdependent; we gave up our arms

when we were exiled from our country. With our return to

the land of our fathers our strength was restored...
”When Descartes said: ’I think, therefore I am’, he uttered

a very profound thought. But there are times in the history

of peoples when thought alone does not prove their existence.

A people may ’think’ and yet its sons, with their thoughts

and in spite of them, may be turned into a herd of siavesor

into soap. There are times when everything in you cries

out: your very self respect as a human being lies in your

resistance to evil.
We fight, therefore we are.
Between Irgun and some moderates of Hagannah, the overarching

organisation for the struggle of freedom, there were

Serious differences on tactics of punitive measures to be

undertaken against the British. Irgun wanted to retaliate for the

kidnapping of their men while Hagannah advised restraint. It is

a measure of common unity among these groups that ultimately

the writ of Hagannah ran. It avoided dissensions among their

ranks, despite strong provocations from the British authorities.

The Jews held their hand and did not persecute their persecutors.
158 INDIA AMD ISRACL CHAPTER i
11 ^
However, one of the daring actions of the Irgun was th

attack on the Ramat Can police strongpost. The Irgun fighter

dressed as ’Arab prisoners’ and guarded by the British officers

raided the armoury of the police station and robbed it of all itweapons

and ammunition. Soon after the dacoity was discovered

heavy fighting took place between the two forces and Irgun lost

three of their men and some others were wounded. Their

undergound newspaper Af-al-pi, described this daring

operation in some details

of the Haganna^i authorities, towc’ds this sacrifice of the Irgun,

which stirred trwir conscience to take a more proactive stance.

The Irgun also openly declared their policy to the British authorities

that for every jew prisoner hanged there will be retaliatory hanging

of a British national. And they stood by their words. A typical

example of this policy is given in the biographical book of

Menachin Begin The Revolt:
”There followed the heroic drama of this wounded prisoner,

unique not only in our annals but in human history, the via

dolorosa of suffering and ultimate sacrifice along which he

went despite all our efforts to save him. We wanted to

prevent the execution of the men who were sent to the

gallows; we had the gravest repugnance to hanging British

captives. Not only Joshua at the Sarafand camp ordered his

British prisoners to run for their lives before he lit the fuse,

many a time we took British prisoners, scores of them, but

once they had raised their hands in surrender they became

a sacred trust and safe against all harm. At the exhibition

grounds in Tel Aviv we raided a British camp for arms. Over

forty British soldiers were taken prisoner. But they were not

hanged.”
But the British did not reciprocate this gesture. One Irgun

fighter, Dov Gruner, fell into their hands and he was sentenced

to be hanged. He happily climbed the gallows singing ’Hatikvah.’

The Irgun again warned that ” Execution of prisoners of war is

a premeditated murder. We warn the British regime of blood

against the corn mission of this crime.” As a sequel a British

officer was hanged. Constant repetition of such retaliatory/
***** ii I HE STRUGGLE AND THE HOME COMING 159

CHAPTER 1 ’
•ngs of the British ultimately had the desired result, and

if P were no more hanging of the Irgun underground fighters

l. ethe British Authorities.
The Jewish Secret Service, Shim Bet, and it’s intelligence was

tremely effective. They got information both from the British

nd the Arab sources, through bribes, intimidation or temptation.

British intelligence on the other side based on the same tenets

of acquisition of intelligence, utterly failed in Eretz Israel. Some

of the Jewish weil-wishers like Arthur Koestler advised them to

use drinks as a lubricant for diplomacy. But the Jews did not buy

the argument and obtained all their intelligence through

abstinence. While the British underestimated the singlemindedness

of the underground Jewish organisations, the jews

obtained whatever information they wanted. The British

intelligence never succeeded in breaking through the counter

intelligence cordon of the underground Jewish fighters.
Despite serious differences between the various forces

operating under Hagannah, no serious surface cracks developed

and the strategy of joint struggle agreed upon by the Hagannah,

Irgun and the freedom fighters for Israel (FFI) worked very

satisfactorily. However, there were moderates who sometimes

went to extremes to restrain the radical Irgun by adopting a

countervailing peaceful course. But the supreme fighting spirit

continued. As Menachem Begin states:
”They went to concentration camps, were thrown into dark

cellars, starved, beaten, and maligned yet not one ever broke

his solemn undertaking not to retaliate on his tormentors. I

saw them in their anguish and I was tormented with them.

But I also saw them in their greatness and I was proud of

them. Discipline? What is military discipline, discipline in

action, compared with this discipline of inaction, when your

whole soul cries out for retaliation and retribution. A human

”order” would have been of no avail here. The order came

from ”somewhere,” from the depths of Jewish history; and

’t was obeyed. We were spared the catastrophe of

catastrophes. And before many months went by the revolt

embraced the whole people. The persecutors and persecuted
160 INDIA AND ISRAEL CHAPTER
11
of yesterday went out to battle together, to a cornmn
battle for our people and our country....”
There were two factors affecting the Jews during the Second
World War. First the extermination of millions of jews by Hitler
in occupied Europe and the British cussedness in keeping the
gates of the Jewish ”National Home” tightly shut against the
migrants. Menachin Begin comments on the indifference of the
world community towards the extermination of the Jews thus”Indifference-that
is the danger. Humanity might claim that
it was at least progressive when it could be aroused on
account of injustice to a single Dreyfus in Paris to a Sscco
and Vanzetti in America, to a Dimitrov in Berlin. Humanity
will retrogress into the darkness of savagery if it remains
unconcerned about the fate of millions of ’Dreyfuses’ or if
it fails to produce- as it has failed during these terrible yearsa
single Emile Zola. And if humanity at large is threatened
by the enemy called indifference, how much greater is this
threat to the Jewish people? That is why the most solemn
warning for Jews as for Gentiles, speaks to us in Kipling’s
immortal words, ”Lest we forget!”
The Indian people, on the other hand, have a propensity

for forgetting historic wrongs.
One thing which emerges out clearly from the records is that

the British attitude towards the Jews in Palestine was not merely

indifferent but also aimed to achieve the maximum reduction in

the number of Jews wishing to enter the land of Israel. The

Balfour Declaration left more questions unanswered than it sought

to answer. While the mandate lasted, theoretically the Jews were

free to immigrate, though restricted in numbers, thanks to British

generosity. But those who did so would be forever aliens to the

land and open to rebellion by the Arabs as if fighting a fo’eign

invasion. Thus the Jews would be forever a threatened minority

and each side to be protected by the British bayonets.
True to their form, the British followed a similar policy in

India when they abetted and incited Moslems to call for a separate

homeland based on religion. While our ’secularists’ continued opposing