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Underground to Palestine: And Other Writing on Israel, Palestine, and the Middle East
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Overview
In the spring of 1946, American journalist I. F. Stone embarked on an incredible adventure, accompanying Holocaust survivors as they made their historic voyage from Eastern Europe to the biblical Promised Land. Undertaken in secrecy against the strict orders of Palestine’s British colonial governors, this harrowing escape began in the displaced persons camps of Germany and Poland. An illegal convoy of the homeless, proud, and determined, these refugees traveled by train and by foot across the European continent before boarding the ship that would carry them past the British blockade to their ancient, ancestral home.
No account of the historic twentieth-century exodus is as poignant, powerful, exhilarating, and dramatic as this acclaimed first-person narrative. Through the words of author I. F. Stone, one of America’s most provocative and revered investigative reporters, these courageous men, women, and children live again. Largely implicit but nevertheless unyielding is Stone’s belief in a binational Arab-Jewish state, a creed unacceptable to the Zionist movement of the time.
Included are essays written in the years following Israel’s establishment, reflecting on the state of the newly reborn nation and the volatile situation in the Middle East thirty years beyond the establishment of Mandatory Palestine. Caught between the immediate, innate sense of belonging he felt in Palestine and his own developing critique of Zionism, Stone wrote into each of these works a personal struggle, a question of justice unsolved today.
With a new introduction by D. D. Guttenplan, this edition reveals a perspective indispensable to understanding past and present tensions in the Middle East.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781497698017 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Open Road Media |
| Publication date: | 03/03/2015 |
| Series: | Forbidden Bookshelf , #14 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | NOOK Book |
| Pages: | 265 |
| Sales rank: | 358,352 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
I. F. Stone (1907–1989) was an American journalist and publisher. After working at the New York Post, the Nation (as editor from 1940–1946), and PM, he started his own journal, I. F. Stone’s Weekly, in 1953. This publication notably covered the New Deal, McCarthyism, the birth of Israel, and the Vietnam War. In 1999, I. F. Stone’s Weekly was voted the second-best print-journalism product of the entire twentieth century in a poll of fellow reporters. Stone also published more than a dozen books and was considered one of the most influential journalists of the post-war period.
Read an Excerpt
Underground to Palestine
And Other Writing on Israel, Palestine, and the Middle East
By I. F. Stone
OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 1978 The Estate of I. F. StoneAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4976-9801-7
CHAPTER 1
Underground to Palestine, 1978 Edition
A Word in Preface a Generation Later
The Second World War was like a giant earthquake which uprooted millions of Europeans. One scene I remember brought it all home to me in the autumn of 1945. In the battered railroad yards of Frankfurt-am-Main, I watched some of the worst railroad stock I have ever seen—half-wrecked freight cars and ancient third-class coaches jam-packed with refugees from the extermination camps of Nazi Germany. These were among the lucky few who had escaped starvation and the human furnaces. They exuded a joyful air, despite the grimy tatters they wore. The trains switched, some north, some south, some east, some west. They were going home. Looking on, one felt what the word meant to them. But still in the camps, now dubbed—antiseptically—"displaced persons' camps," were more than 100,000 Eastern and Central European Jews with no homes to return to. These were the other survivors of the Holocaust.
While the great powers in the newly organized United Nations debated and hesitated, none anxious to add to the ranks of their unemployed by opening their doors to the "displaced," these survivors began to move out of the camps in a more or less secret "underground to Palestine," and the British mustered a fleet in the Mediterranean to keep them out. This is the account of who they were and what they experienced by the first reporter to travel with these illegal emigrants through the British blockade. Appended to this new edition is the same reporter's reaction, thirty years later, to the plight and the moral challenge of the Arab refugees created in their wake.
June 1978
In Explanation
This is a story of personal adventure. I was the first newspaperman to travel the Jewish underground in Europe and to arrive in Palestine on a so-called illegal boat. But this is more than the narrative of a journalistic escapade. I am an American and I am also and inescapably—the world being what it is—a Jew. I was born in the United States. My parents were born in Russia. Had they not emigrated at the turn of the century to America, I might have gone to the gas chambers in Eastern Europe. I might have been a DP, ragged and homeless like those with whom I traveled. I did not go to join them as a tourist in search of the picturesque, nor even as a newspaperman merely in search of a good story, but as a kinsman, fulfilling a moral obligation to my brothers. I wanted in my own way, as a journalist, to provide a picture of their trials and their aspirations in the hope that good people, Jewish and non-Jewish, might be moved to help them.
I have not faked and I have not fictionalized except to hide the names of persons and places. I have not glossed over the unpleasant. My comrades of the voyage would be dishonored by anything less than the truth. I hope that, however inadequately, I may also have provided a record of some value to history. The clandestine exodus of the Jews from postwar Europe is the greatest in the history of a wandering people—greater than the exodus from Egypt or from Spain—because their sufferings under Hitler were greater than any our ancestors ever underwent before. We know comparatively little of the emigration from Egypt or of what went on aboard those tragic ships out of Spain which Columbus may have passed in 1492 on his way to a new world. This narrative may fill a humble gap in the annals of the current emigration. It was a privilege to take part in that emigration. I only wish I had the power to portray what I saw against the background of the world situation today. The plight of the Jews may be a minor affair. But world indifference to that plight is of spiritual significance for the future of us all.
I can only record as a reporter what I saw and heard, traveling with the least fortunate but the bravest of my people.
—April, 1946
Summons to Adventure
1
I was in the press gallery at Hunter College in the Bronx when the call came. It was April, 1946. The Security Council of the United Nations was in session. The floodlighted scene below me seemed unreal, like the setting for a play—perhaps a play about the fumbling of the peace. Sir Alexander Cadogan, Britain's representative at that horseshoe-shaped council table—a small man, dapper and correct—was making a professionally astringent argument designed to prevent action against Franco. An usher tapped me on the shoulder and said I was wanted on the phone.
The interruption was not so irrelevant as it seemed at first. In Sir Alexander's subtle apologetics for a Fascist dictator, I had seen one aspect of the Empire's postwar policy. I was soon to see another. When I picked up the phone in one of the booths in the big press room in the basement, I heard the voice of an American I had met the preceding November in Palestine.
"How would you like to meet some boys who volunteered to serve as seamen for the illegal immigration?" he asked me. Neither of us realized on what a journey that question was to send me.
Of course I was interested. I had reason to believe that the man who phoned me was in close touch with the leaders of the Haganah, the Jewish people's militia of Palestine. I had heard many stories of its exploits during the war, when the Haganah directed underground rescue work in Hitler Europe. In April, 1946, a year after the liberation, the Haganah was back at much the same job, though under altered circumstances. The cruelty of the Nazis had given way to the indifference of the victors; the concentration camps had become DP camps. The Jews in them were still homeless.
Earl Harrison of Philadelphia had returned eight months before from a special tour of these camps to report at the White House, "We seem to be treating the Jews as the Nazis treated them, except that we do not exterminate them." President Truman had asked the British government to open the doors of Palestine to the 100,000 Jews in the displaced persons' camps of Germany and Austria before winter came, but the only result was an Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry. It was spring and the committee had yet to make its report. A trickle of 1500 a month was entering Palestine legally under the limited immigration quota granted by the British, but the one hope of the rest was still the Aliyah Beth.
Aliyah is a Hebrew word which may be translated as "immigration," though its connotations are richer. Literally, the word means an "up-going," as to a high place; its associations are those of the pilgrimage. Beth in this context means "second," and distinguishes this immigration from the one allowed by the British. Aliyah Beth is the Palestinian term for what the British call the "illegal" immigration; the difference goes deeper than terminology.
This is a subject on which the British do not see eye to eye with the Jews. The Colonial Office looks back to the White Paper of 1939. Under its terms the doors of Palestine should be shut tight against further Jewish immigration. But to the Jews Palestine is still—as in the Bible—Eretz Israel, the land of Israel. To them the British are another of those historic vexations like the Assyrians and the Romans. From the Jewish point of view the White Paper is a violation of the Balfour Declaration; the whole affair—the 1917 promise and the 1939 breaking of it—a bit of latter-day presumption. For is it not written, of an older covenant with Abraham, "And He said unto him, I am the Lord that brought thee out of Ur of the Chaldees, to give thee this land to inherit it.... Unto thy seed have I given this land"?
This may, indeed, be theological nonsense and stubborn Jewish foolishness. Mr. Bevin and the gentlemen of the Foreign Office and the Colonial Office may be right in dismissing it as such. But the Jews have been that way for a long time; they were that way long before there was a Britain; unconsciously they feel that way today.
I set all this down at the beginning of my story so that the reader will understand that when my American friend referred to the "illegal immigration" he did so only as a matter of convenience and that when he warned that the visit he suggested must be kept highly confidential, it was not as though he spoke of something shameful or furtive.
I said, "Call me back in fifteen minutes." I phoned my managing editor.
"John," I pleaded, "please let me have the rest of the day off for an expedition of my own. I may never be able to tell you about it, but I know you would agree it was worth while."
He tried to sound exasperated. "Go ahead, Izzy," he told me wearily. "You always were a mysterious guy. I suppose there's no use trying to hold you."
II
When my mysterious friend called back, I arranged to meet him at a railroad station in Manhattan. I took the Lexington Avenue subway downtown. I have never known the subway to go so slowly.
On my way downtown I thought of my visit to Palestine in November, 1945. The publication of the Harrison report the preceding autumn had sent me off on my first visit to the Holy Land. I had wanted to see the country for myself. Like most American Jews I was neither a Zionist nor an anti-Zionist. The problem of "displaced" European Jewry—what a gingerly understatement that adjective embodies!—and the reported desire of the majority to go to Palestine had awakened my interest. I went out to estimate for myself the possibility of rebuilding their lives in that country. I fell in love with the place, with its vitality and its pioneering spirit. I understood the motivations behind the Return. Now it seemed to me, as I impatiently watched the subway stations go by, that perhaps I might have the opportunity of seeing something of the other side of the picture, of catching some glimpse of the migration itself and the conditions behind it.
When I met my friend at the railroad station, I asked him impatiently, "Where are we going?"
He was in a happy mood. "You'll see," he said, and led me by the arm to a train. He had the pleased look of a small boy with a surprise up his sleeve. But I had a bigger surprise for him. An idea had begun to form in my mind on the way down.
Late that night in a city near New York I met a group of two dozen American Jewish boys who were preparing to sail for Europe the next day. There they would be sent to a Mediterranean port where they would board one of the illegal ships and prepare to take it through the British blockade and into Palestine.
"Until now," my friend told me proudly, "we had depended on professional sailors attracted by good pay for a dangerous mission. This ship will be the first to be manned by American Jewish boys who volunteered their services in a desire to help. Some are experienced sailors. Others are going to sea for the first time.
I was flattered when some of the boys recognized me and one said he had read my articles on Palestine in PM and the Nation. There were drinks all around and then I sprang my surprise.
"I'd like to go along," I told my Palestinian friend, "and write the whole story of the voyage from the beginning to the arrival in Palestine."
The boys were to sail the next day, and I said I was prepared to come back in the morning and sail with them. I said I was ready to board their illegal ship in Europe as newspaperman, passenger, crew member or stowaway—whichever was the most convenient. The proposal precipitated an argument.
Some liked the idea of having an official historian along on the voyage, especially those who were PM fans. Others feared that my presence might arouse suspicion in Europe.
It was finally agreed that I should be allowed to go along, but my American friend warned me that there was no point in my trying to sail next day with the boys. He warned me that they would have to wait four to eight weeks in Europe before an illegal ship and its passengers were ready for them.
"I suggest," he said, "that you wait until an illegal ship is ready to take on its cargo in Europe for Palestine. You can then fly across to Europe in time to get on the boat before it embarks for the voyage across the Mediterranean."
We all agreed that that would be the wiser plan. But even this plan had to be somewhat tentative.
"We must tell you, however," my friend said, "that you cannot be absolutely certain of making the trip. Final decision will have to rest with Haganah officials in Europe. Circumstances might arise which would make it impossible for them to allow a newspaperman on one of the ships. You might fly across and then find that you could not embark after all."
I said I was willing to take the chance.
I was also warned that a great deal depended on my discretion. No other newspaperman had ever been permitted to travel the underground route to Palestine. "Any leak," I was told, "might be disastrous."
I told no one but my wife—the most discreet woman I know—and the two top editors of PM what I was planning to do. My chief on the Nation, Freda Kirchwey, was out of the country at the time, herself on the way to Palestine. I hoped my other colleagues on the Nation would forgive me for telling them that I was taking a leave of absence to cover the Paris Peace Conference for PM.
I applied for and obtained my passport, but getting a visa from the British for Palestine was a problem. I intended to go without a visa if the British refused to grant me one. At the British Embassy in Washington, the official in charge wanted to know what I intended to do as a newspaperman in Palestine. Was I, he inquired delicately, going to cover the—uh—Arabs or was I going to cover the—uh—Jews? I pretended not to understand. I said it was a small country and that to get a real story I'd have to cover both.
The answer didn't satisfy him. He said I'd have to give him $25 to cover the cost of a cable to the British information officer in Jerusalem, presumably to ask whether I was persona grata. The British don't like newspapermen around their empire who fail to absorb the British point of view. I remembered the troubles my friend, Constantine Poulos, of Overseas News Agency had encountered in the Middle East after he had sent a dispatch comparing British actions in Palestine with their conduct in Greece, and I recalled also the difficulties which had piled up for the late Ben Robertson of PM when he failed to see eye to eye with the British on India. I told the Embassy visa officer that I couldn't wait while he consulted the British authorities in Jerusalem on my acceptability.
I went around to see a high official of the Embassy, a gentle and scholarly Tory, who gave me my visa at once after telling me pointedly that of course the British, unlike the Russians, did not intend to hide behind an iron curtain. I thanked him. (When I got back I gathered that the poor chap was in hot water with the Foreign Office for his devotion to freedom of the press. Almost my first call on my return to America was from my friend, Charlie Campbell, the chief British information officer in Washington, saying that London wanted to know how I had gotten my visa.)
I spent an impatient month around Washington. The day finally arrived when I got word that it was time to leave for Europe. It was the middle of May when I took off from La Guardia Field and headed for the North Atlantic.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Underground to Palestine by I. F. Stone. Copyright © 1978 The Estate of I. F. Stone. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
- Cover Page
- Title Page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Epigraph
- Series Introduction by Mark Crispin Miller
- Introduction by D. D. Guttenplan
- UNDERGROUND TO PALESTINE, 1978 Edition
- A Word in Preface a Generation Later
- In Explanation
- Summons to Adventure
- I See the DP’s
- Underground Railway to Bratislava
- Through the Iron Curtain
- Adventure in Italy
- I Cross the Mediterranean
- Epilogue
- Reporting from the Front Lines, PM, May 1948
- British Declare Military Law in ‘Zone of Evacuation’ as New State is Born
- Tel Aviv Takes 8 Air Raids Calmly, Cheers as Inflow of DPs Begins
- Refugees Just Off Ship Swell Israeli Army
- Traveling the Road of War South From Tel Aviv
- A Visit to a Negev Settlement Under Attack by Egyptian Planes
- ‘Take Good Care of Your Rifles, They’re Hard to Get.’
- Israeli Children in Settlements Get a Big Kick out of the War
- An English Gentleman Makes a Place for Himself in a ‘Kibbutz’
- How a Tiny Negev Settlement Reacts to an Egyptian Air Attack
- Continual Arab Air Raids Give Negev No Chance to Relax
- Trip to Jerusalem on Israel’s ‘Burma-Road’
- Selections from This is Israel
- From Chapter 1: The Pains of Birth
- From Chapter 2: Lusty Baby
- From Chapter 3: The Wicked Midwives
- From Chapter 4: Israel is Born
- From Chapter 6: The Test of Open War
- From Chapter 7: Epilogue as Prologue
- The Daily Compass Report From Israel, 1949
- August 29, 1949
- August 30, 1949
- August 31, 1949
- September 1, 1949
- September 2, 1949
- September 4, 1949
- September 6, 1949
- September 7, 1949
- September 8, 1949
- September 9, 1949
- September 11, 1949
- September 13, 1949
- September 14, 1949
- September 15, 1949
- September 16, 1949
- September 18, 1949
- September 19, 1949
- September 20, 1949
- I. F. Stone’s Weekly, Suez 1956
- War May Come At Any Time
- Israel’s Hopes and Fears of Russian Intervention
- The Road to Peace Lies Through the Arab Refugee Camps
- The Truth About The Bombardment of Gaza
- No Pat Answer for That Crisis Over Suez
- On Adlai, Suez and Ike’s Latest Arms Letter
- Morocco, Yemen and the Sudan Are “Adjacent” to Suez, But Not Israel
- The Same Old Squeeze Play On Israel
- The View From A (Non-Ivory) Washington Tower
- America’s Satellites Turn Desperate, Too
- Do We or Nasser Menace the World Interest in Suez?
- The Terrible Truth About The World Crisis (And Me)
- Reflections and Meditations Thirty Years After (From Underground to Palestine)
- Part I: Confessions of a Jewish Dissident
- Part II: The Other Zionism
- Acknowledgments
- About the Author
- Copyright Page
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