Britain's Naval and Political Reaction to the Illegal Immigration of Jews to Palestine, 1945-1949

Freddy Liebreich

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781135766931
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

This book provides an important shift in the analysis of Britain's policy towards the illegal postwar Jewish immigration into Palestine. It charts the development of Britain's response to Zionist immigration, from the initial sympathy, as embodied in the Balfour Declaration, through attempts at blockade, refoulement and finally disengagement.
The book exposes differences in policy pursued by the great departments of state like the Foreign, Colonial and War Offices and their legal advisors, and those implemented by the Admiralty. The book argues that the eventual failure of Britain's immigration policy was inevitable in view of the hostility shown by many European nations, and America, towards Britain's ambition to retain her position in the Middle East.

1
Introduction

So a vicious circle is set up. The more refugees arrive in the west, the greater the activity of Zionists in organising illegal immigration, the greater the number of illegal immigrants making their way to the coast of Palestine, the greater the need for His Majesty’s Government to take measures to prevent such an influx from destroying the chance of an agreed solution to the problem. The stricter these measures, the larger the number of Jewish refugees piling up in camps in Europe.¹

The high emotions raised by the subject of illegal immigration to Palestine have subsided long ago and it is now possible, indeed essential, to deal with the topic dispassionately. Most historians have described the events basically from the Jewish or Zionist view, this book, however, has outlined some aspects as seen and reported by the blockaders, although Jewish sources have frequently been consulted. There must be no misunderstanding; the author of this book has sought objectivity and detachment despite natural sympathy with the refugees. He obviously could not defend the views of those who either from pragmatic, or from other apparently justified reasons, supported restrictions on the number of immigrants allowed into Palestine and who demanded a more pro-Arab direction to the British post-war Palestine policy. The author did try to explain and describe this policy in the general immediate post-war context. Researches into the historical facts, a striving for detachment, but also a perception of the humanity expected by the survivors of the Holocaust became elements of this book, which examines the historical evidence in an attempt to understand how the situation has developed, how policies were executed and the extent to which they were effected. The contemporary words of policy-makers are often the most faithful way of presenting evidence, the author has therefore quoted, often extensively, from documentary sources.

Throughout this book the author, a relative newcomer to these shores, has used ‘English’ and ‘British’ as interchangeable concepts, perhaps an irritating solecism which was, however, common especially among Scottish and Welsh writers. He recognised that already in the eighteenth century, when the principle of nationality had entered European politics, England was fast becoming part of a single polity covering all the British isles.

In spite of an inevitable feeling of closeness and perhaps even identification with the passengers of the illegal ships, the author has tried not to take the side of the would-be immigrants, but neither could some of the British actions taken in prevention of illegal immigration be justified. Herbert Butterfield’s dictum that historians should refrain from judgemental moralising, self-righteous accusations and from the emphasis on sin and wickedness has always been kept in mind. The book attempts to be ‘judicious and even handed and fails to blame anyone in particular, but the writer does not eschew the responsibility incumbent on a historian occasionally to point the finger’.²

A number of officers and ratings who served at the time in His Majesty’s ships involved in the ‘Palestine Patrol’, as well as crew members of illegal Jewish vessels were interviewed in researching this book, and I am indebted for their generous assistance, but it is also well-known that the perspectives of actors who played roles in historical events could not always be entirely unbiased and objective, although the writer has sought to maintain a balanced approach that covered all the institutional participants. The perspectives, as recorded in memoirs, reports, memoranda and letters are compelling and fascinating, but the real question remains: are they history? When respectable historians such as Dalia Ofer and Zeev Vania Hadari could and did confuse the Patria with the Parita³ and the river steamer President Warfield (Exodus) with the corvette Norsyd (Haganah) or the Beauharnois (Wedgwood),⁴ or when Mordechai Naor locates the Athenai (Rafiah) sinking to Cyrenica,⁵ then unless authoritatively corrected this confusion will be perpetuated by generations of future historians, who may base their own researches on the perusal of such prestigious sources.

Corroboration of individual testimonies with documentary sources has been attempted, whenever possible or feasible. For as the historian Marc Bloch wrote in The Historian’s Craft: ‘The majority of minds are but mediocre recording cameras of the surrounding world. There is no reliable witness in the absolute sense. There is only more or less reliable evidence.’

In cases where memories of incidents reported in testimonies differ radically from those of other participants in these events, historians may wonder: ‘Is he telling the truth as he honestly remembers it or is he suffering from that failure of accurate recollection that unfortunately affects all of us sooner or later?’⁶

There is no doubt that participants in events may be totally mistaken and that the more likely reason for their version of events was attempting to paint themselves in the best possible light,⁷ but even serious publica-tions have accepted hearsay or anecdotal evidence as fact and thus perpetuated misconceptions.⁸

Researching and recording the history of any underground organisation, as the Zionist authorities promoting the clandestine immigration to Palestine necessarily had to be, as well as the measures adopted by their opponents who were occupying the Palestine desks of the great British departments of state, or perusing the reports by officers of Britain’s armed forces, presented special difficulties.

Jewish and British scholars and authors used basically the same documents in preparing their respective theses, dissertations, books and photographs and came up with quite different interpretations,⁹ with most British sources taking a lenient view of British responsibility, and most Jews laying the chief burden on Britain, while all agreed on the narrow limits of the engagement, that is, there was always mutual recognition of restraints and adherence to the unwritten rules of the game.

Researching the material for this book very soon revealed a major shortcoming: a surfeit of primary documentary material, mainly British, was unearthed in several archives, while most secondary sources as well as television programmes were written or produced by Zionist Jews and inevitably described the Jewish aspect of events. None of these accounts directly addressed the major questions of the crisis in British-Zionist relations, which culminated in the confrontation on the question of Jewish immigration to Palestine. I have tried to remedy this in this study.

There has hitherto been a marked absence of eye-witness accounts from British participants, who could testify and narrate the viewpoint of Royal Navy’s officers and ratings who participated in the efforts to stop the post-war illegal immigration of Jews to Palestine.

After considerable efforts it proved possible to alleviate this shortcoming partly by locating and identifying 45 sailors of different ranks, who served in HM warships during the critical time and were able to remember events and the attitudes of participants. I had the privilege to conduct interviews and conversations with a number of British¹⁰ and Jewish participants in the crisis. I again wish to express my gratitude to these men for their assistance.

A caveat about the reliability of the human memory has been given above by quoting the historian Marc Bloch and it seems relevant to add at this point some of the reservations expressed by the historian Jan Vansina¹¹

In many instances the reminiscences of these elderly participants in events were seen…as no more than attempts by the narrator to project a consistent image of himself and in some cases a justification of his actions. Other memories could be considered to have been reordered, reshaped or incorrectly remembered according to the part they played in the creation of the narrator’s self-portrait.

The author’s interviews with the above-mentioned elderly ex-RN and Illegal Jewish Immigration (IJI) sailors proved again, if proof was needed that ‘human memory is such, that it may rule out certain types of reminiscences genuinely believed to be correct’.¹²

Following the perusal of a large number of testimonies dictated or written by participants in historical events, even of interviewees quoted in this book, and especially after a critical examination of many recollections of his own war experiences or memories, as related to his own children and grandchildren, the author can confirm that ‘at some moment beweeen middle and old age most people’s memories start to falter and the brain’s function of eliminating the irrelevant and non-essential becomes unreliable’.¹³ However, he did acquire ‘a good insight into the gap between what may have been in the past and the rendering of memories’.¹⁴

Furthermore, historians attempting to utilise oral testimonies in order to research contemporary or near contemporary events must be aware that memory ‘is not immune to the influence of emotions and can therefore play strange tricks, magnifying and dramatising some experiences and diminishing or moderating others’.¹⁵

I myself tried quite recently the reliability of oral testimonies being muddled by time. In a relatively late issue of the Navy News (December 2001) the writers of Letters to the Editor, all ex-naval personnel, made no fewer than ten statements, which although they were obviously from memory, contained more fiction than fact. But in spite of my reservation regarding the excessive use of oral testimonies, I still wished to rely in some cases on adherence to sections of witnesses’ often-cited oral narratives, albeit with the admonishment taken from an impeccable source, Josephus Flavius:

if you [i.e. Justus] had written it twenty years ago, you might then have obtained the evidence of eyewitnesses to your accuracy. But not until now, when those persons are no longer with us, and you think you can no longer be confuted, have you ventured to publish it.¹⁶

True and applicable as far as the British-Zionist confrontation on the clandestine immigration is concerned, but many if not most British documents covering the subject were only released in the 1970s and 1980s and omitting this vital documentary evidence reposing in closed archives could have thrown grave doubts on the veracity of the narrative, which would not have been illuminated by oral testimonies, whose occasional reliability I sometimes permit myself to doubt.

The author can therefore confirm that in the case of some writers and in some interviewees a kind of ‘retrospective embellishment happens… when, probably unconsciously, they repress the negative aspects of their lives or the events they describe’.¹⁷

I believe that in decrying the need to treat uncorroborated testimonies with care, I can do no better than to cite Siegfried Sassoon:

The unrevealed processes of memory are mysterious. Neither unconscious selection nor unconscious hazardry can be held responsible for one’s recovery of some moment which emerges—actual as ever—in contrast to the generalised indistinctness from which one elaborates the annals of personal experience.¹⁸

This book contains many attempts to verify dates, for the original date may have been false. Wherever the date of a quoted document was missing, the author has tried to ascertain it, and wherever a document was signed or initialled, the author has tried to establish the writer’s full name, his rank and his position in whatever authority he represented at the time.

Most of the relevant official papers in Britain are now open to inspection in the Public Record Office, but by 2001 permission to cite from the navy’s official pre-publication copy of the Narrative of the Palestine Patrol by Commander N.L.Stewart RN (retd) had not yet been granted. It was finally released with publication of Commander Stewart’s Naval Staff History narrative The Royal Navy and the Palestine Patrol published by Frank Cass in August 2002.

Sections of this book refer to documents which came into the author’s possession or were brought to his attention in their original French, Italian or Hebrew version. Minor inaccuracies may have crept in as a result of his translation, although every effort has been made to provide an English rendering faithful in substance and spirit to the original. This book has been written around distinct aspects of the main topic: the policy of the British Cabinet and the major Departments of State, the Colonial Office (CO), Foreign Office (FO) and War Office (WO), towards post-Second World War Illegal Jewish Immigration to Palestine.

The book investigates the immigration and anti-immigration activities of what were traditionally considered Britain’s finest institutions, the army, the Royal Air Force, and especially the Royal Navy, in sealing off the coast of Palestine against the entry of the remnants of European Jewry. A relatively large professional and highly motivated Royal Navy force had applied their customary skill and initiative along with their arsenals of conventional and unconventional weapons and equipment to carry out their government’s anti-immigration policy. However, the unwritten rules of engagement excluded the use of the ships’ primary armaments. They faced a fleet of miscellaneous ships crewed by a mixture of mercenary non-Jewish seamen and ideologically committed young Jewish men and women.

This book describes the motives for this policy and the tangled web of support it received from Britain’s centres of administrative and executive power, from the Colonial Office, the Foreign Office, the Admiralty, the Chiefs of Staff, the War Office, the Lord Chancellor, the Board of Trade, the Mandatory government of Palestine, the Cabinet and finally from the Prime Minister himself. The book also shows some of the disputes and divisions between Whitehall departments and between Whitehall and the Colonial governments of Palestine and Cyprus. It shows some of the disagreements between these institutions. There were differences of attitudes which sometimes seemed to border on rifts over the role of anti-Zionist themes in the denigration of immigration. It will be shown that the Foreign and Colonial Offices had developed different approaches in their confrontation with the Illegal Jewish Immigration. I hope the book will reveal some of the divergences of opinions based on contrary agendas advanced by the various offices of state and the inter-departmental search for compromises. Such controversies are illuminated at some length in the sections of this book which deal with the disputes about the three-mile limit of territorial waters, the legal background to the fight against the Illegal Jewish Immigration and the unsavoury saga of continued detainment of Jewish refugees after abandonment of the Mandate.¹⁹

The book will show that officials in the Foreign Office were quite prepared to stretch the facts in the service of what they perceived to be a wider political cause, while the Colonial Office was sometimes perhaps more scrupulous in their arguments, although they carried ultimate responsibility for Palestine and were, therefore, frequently biased in favour of the High Commissioner for Palestine and the Palestine government. The most global view of possible consequences of the confrontation was usually held by the Admiralty. In 1938 the Navy had already washed ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Figures
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations and Acronyms
• 1: Introduction
• 2: The Determinants of British Policy towards Jewish Immigration into Palestine, from the Balfour Declaration via the Royal Commissions to the 1939 White Book and to the Final Abandonment of the ‘national Home’ Commitment
• 3: The British preoccupation with the Perceived Danger of Communist Infiltration and Subversion
• 4: Britain’s fight against the sources of Illegal Immigration beyond the Borders of Palestine and her Confrontation with the Financial, Logistic and Moral Supporters in Europe and North America
• 5: The legal Issues Involved
• 6: Detention in Palestine—the deportation of illegal Jewish immigrants to Cyprus and their detention/imprisonment
• 7: The Rules of Engagement Adopted by the Adversaries
• 8: The British Forces Engaged in Anti-immigration Patrols and the confronting Jewish Adversaries
• 9: The physical Confrontation
• 10: Refoulement1 and Abandonment of the Boarding Policy
• 11: Conclusion Conduct and Effects of the British policy and the final failure of the Blockade
• Appendix 1: List of RN and PP Vessels Engaged in the 'Palestine Patrol'
• Appendix 2: List of Deportation and Prison Ships
• Appendix 3: Details of Jewish illegal ships which Landed Immigrants on the Palestinian coast or were Intercepted by British Armed Forces or Palestine Police
• Appendix 4: Crew members of HM ships Interviewed by the Author
• Appendix 5: Crew members of IJI Ships Interviewed by the Author
• Appendix 6: Biographical Glossary
• Notes
• Bibliography