Key to Three Crises: The Ha’avara Agreement, Jewish Immigration, and the Peel Plan of Partition of Palestine

86 Journal of South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies Vol. XXXVII, No.1, Fall 2013 Key to Three Crises: The Ha’avara Agreement, Jewish Immigration, and the Peel Plan of Partition of Palestine Farid al-Salim* Palestine occupied an exceptional place in German strategic thinking long before Hitler’s rise to power, indeed before his birth. Ashkenazi Jews from Germany and Poland established a small religious community in Jerusalem around 1800. They lived in abject poverty, supported by contributions from fellow Jews in Europe, and devoted all of their time to religious study. In 1858 they numbered about 5,000 persons, all of whom were considered foreigners by the Ottoman authorities, even those born in Palestine, and they enjoyed the immunity from Ottoman jurisdiction accorded to foreigners under the Capitulations. German Christians had a tremendous religious interest in Palestine as well. In 1841 the governments of Prussia and Great Britain agreed to establish a bishopric of the Anglican Church at Jerusalem under joint Prussian-British control. The Anglican and Lutheran churches agreed to share a church building in Jerusalem and cooperate in their missionary activities.1 The arrangement lasted until 1887, when Kaiser Frederick William IV of Prussia cancelled it. From that date the German Lutheran religious mission in the Holy Land operated independently of the *Farid Al-Salim received his Ph.D. in 2008 from University of Arkansas in history and Middle East Studies. His areas of interest are the Middle East, Islamic Studies, Security and International Studies. Currently, he is an assistant professor of Modern Arab history at Qatar University in Doha. 1 John Murray, A Handbook for Travellers in Syria and Palestine (London: John Murray, 1858), 83-86. 87 British.2 A small millenarian Protestant sect, the Deutscher Tempel, or the German Temple Society, established an unauthorized agricultural colony near Nazareth in 1867. The Templers received permission from the Ottoman government to establish a small colony at Sarona, near Jaffa, and another at Haifa in 1868. Actual founding of the Jaffa and Haifa colonies coincided with German unification in 1871.3 By the early twentieth century the Templers numbered about 1,200 people in colonies at Jaffa, Haifa, Nazareth, and Jerusalem. Germans also had a strong commercial presence in Palestine. Jaffa boasted a German commercial colony that was separate and apart from the Templers at Sarona. Three of Jaffa’s five hotels were owned by Germans, and Germans were prominent among Palestine’s tour operators and foreign business community.4 Kaiser Wilhelm II and the intellectual visionaries, who fashioned the ideological concept of the Drang nach Osten, Germany’s drive to the East, envisioned a German Empire that would extend from the North Sea, through Central Europe, the Balkans, and Anatolia, and down the Tigris and Euphrates valleys to the Persian Gulf. Wilhelm II wanted Palestine to be part of it, a desire that he did not attempt to conceal. Along with its political, economic, and geo-strategic imperialism, the Drang nach Osten had strong Christian religious overtones that meshed with Jewish political Zionism.5 From its beginning, German Jews were prominent in the Zionist movement. In the years leading up to the First World War, the British government believed that a group of wealthy Jews of German origin secretly controlled the Committee of Union and Progress, the revolutionary clique known as the “Young Turks” that from 1908 ruled the Ottoman Empire from behind a constitutional façade. Sir Gerard Lowther, the British ambassador in Constantinople, went so far as to accuse the American ambassador, Oscar Straus, whose family was of German Jewish origin, of being one of the principal leaders in the Jewish conspiracy.6 Further, several important figures in the British government believed that 2 Karl Baedeker, Palestine and Syria, with the routes through Mesopotamia and Babylonia (Leipzig: Karl Baedeker, 1906), 21. 3 Helmut Glenk, Horst Blaich, and Manfred Haering, From Desert Sands to Golden Oranges: The History of the German Templer Settlement of Sarona in Palestine 1871-1947 (London: Trafford, 2005), xviii. 4 Karl Baedeker, Palestine and Syria, 6-10. 5 Evans Lewin, The German Road to the East; an account of the “Drang nach Osten” and of Teutonic Aims in the Near and...