Arrows in the Dark: David Ben-Gurion, the Yishuv Leadership, and Rescue Attempts during the Holocaust (review)

David Wyman's The Abandonment of the Jews, as well as variousother scholarly and non-scholarly books, films, magazine articles, and public discussions, have left most American Jews with the sense that their own community and its leaders failed shamefully to come to the aid of European Jewry in the course of the Holocaust. That David Ben-Gurion and the leaders of the Jewish community in Palestine were comparably guilty of abandoning their brothers and sisters is a notion that has penetrated much less deeply into their collective consciousness. In the United States, not many people other than the relatively few who have read Tom Segev's The Seventh Million, or kindred works by other "new historians," are likely even to be aware of any argument that the Palestinian Jewish leaders were as timid and inactive during World War II as their counterparts in America are widely believed to have been.

In Israel the situation seems to be different. Tuvia Friling can thus speak in the conclusion to his two volumes of the extent to which "the image of a cruel Ben-Gurion has struck deep roots" and that Ben-Gurion and his colleagues are regarded as people "who viewed with equanimity their people going up in the smoke of the crematoria." Deeply dismayed by this misreading of the minds of the wartime leadership of the Yishuv and similar misconceptions about their actions, Friling has devoted a great deal of energy to setting the record straight. On occasion, Friling has done this in a polemical fashion, as in his point-by-point contestation of Segev's book ("The Seventh Million—A March of Folly and Wickedness of the Zionist Movement" in Iyunim Betkumat Israel, vol. 2, 1992 [Hebrew]). In Arrows in the Dark, however, he does not bother to engage his adversaries directly. Segev's name, for instance, is absent from the book's index (though it can be found tucked away in some of its final footnotes and in the bibliography). But even if he is almost out of sight, he is far from out of mind. Friling's massive work is clearly designed to replace Segev's and other new historians' rendering of Ben-Gurion and the Yishuv leadership's conduct during the Holocaust with one that represents it in a far more favorable light. He makes a very powerful case that these men cared quite deeply about what was going on in Nazi Europe and that they made strong efforts to come to the aid of Hitler's Jewish victims.

Friling is especially effective in dispelling the misconception that their ideology of "negation of the Diaspora" and their "Palestinocentrism" prevented Ben-Gurion and his colleagues from devoting due attention to the plight of European Jewry. His citations from their private correspondence reveal clearly enough the depth of their pain and anguish at what was happening to the inhabitants of the world from which most of them had come. For Ben-Gurion, in particular, "Palestinocentrism was not a matter of the Yishuv's egotism but rather an expression of the Yishuv's commitment to the Diaspora, which stemmed from its role as essential center of the Jewish nation." He felt that the Yishuv was responsible for the Diaspora and acted energetically on the basis of this feeling. For what value, he asked, did Palestine have, "with all its mountains and valleys, if the Jewish nation does not find within it its salvation?"

Ben-Gurion was not cold but he was calculating. For this reason he was skeptical about public demonstrations, strikes, and protests on behalf of the Jews of Europe, which he generally (but not always) considered ineffectual and sometimes derided as mere "witchcraft." He also feared that protests could spin out of control and result in the kind of violence that might end Allied cooperation in the rescue efforts that were being planned. Inveterate pragmatist that he...