Tuesday 17 December 2013

Alive and Kicking

we follow the trail of some old but still active Nazis

A MATHS PROFESSOR GOES MISSING

In January, 1985, Boris Weisfeiler disappeared on a hiking trip in southern Chile. His rucksack, clothes, shoes, credit card and return air ticket were found by the river Nuble. Chilean police said the maths professor must have drowned trying to swim the river. Professor Weisfciler’s colleagues at Penn State University didn’t accept this story. Chileans who knew the river said it would be far too full and fast at that time of the year for anyone to try it. In 1986 the Washington Post reported that the US State Department had asked Chilean authorities for information on Professor Weisfeiler’s whereabouts.

Weisfeiler, a Russian-born Jew, had disappeared not far from a mysterious German settlement called Colonia Dignidad, founded by an old Nazi. On June 30 last year the Department declassified 250 official documents relating to the Weisfeiler case. These show that two or three weeks after the professor disappeared, a person called the American embassy in Santiago and told them the professor was alive. In 1987 the embassy heard that Weisfeiler had been arrested and taken to Colonia Dignidad where he was being held in inhuman conditions, and tortured. Another report said he had been killed.

All this information remained locked up in secret government files while Boris Weisfeiler’s family were trying to find out what had happened to him. The Committee of Concerned Scientists, of which he was a member, set up a legal fund for an investigation. Last year, Chilean courts agreed to re-open the case - one of many concerning disappearances under General Pinochet’s 17-year dictatorship. On 11th October last year police raided the offices of Colonia Dignidad.

US State Department documents obtained by the Weisfeilers lawyers describe Colonia Dignidad as ‘a religious sect led by a charismatic leader similar to Jim Jones in the Jonestown (Guyana) disaster’. Schaefer, an SS veteran and army doctor, became a preacher in post-war Germany, but fled abroad to avoid charges of whipping and molesting children at an orphanage near Bonn. Some of his flock were already in Chile and others followed. They set up Colonia Dignidad on remote land in the Andean foothills 200 miles south of Santiago in 1961. The 32,000-acre farm, shielded behind high barbed wire fences, was watched over night and day by armed guards with attack dogs. Visitors were not encouraged, and residents were not permitted to leave. A German government investigation reported that the sexes were segregated, and children separated from their parents. People caught trying to leave were subjected to psychological and physical punishment, such as being held for long periods in solitary cages, beaten, and injected with drugs. Wolfgang Mueller, who did escape, claimed that as a young boy he had been sexually abused by Schaefer. Others told of sexual assaults and forced labour. Schaefer has been on the run since paedophile charges were brought against him four years ago.

Two visitors who were welcomed at Schaefer’s colony were General Pinochet, and his security chief General Manuel Contreras. Pinochet’s secret police, DINA, enlisted a former SS man. Colonel Walter Rauff, as an adviser. In 1941, as head of the technical division at Reich Security Head Office, RSHA, Rauff decided to ease the work of German forces on the eastern front, by having some 20 heavy trucks converted into mobile gas chambers, and dispatched to the einsatzgmppen (extermination squads). 'So far as the extermination of Jews in Russia is concerned, I know that gas vans were used. Did I think twice about employing the gas vans? I couldn’t say. At the time the most important consideration for me was the psychological stress felt by the men involved in the shootings. This problem was overcome by the use of gas vans.’ An estimated 200,000 people were killed in these vans.

In 1943 Rauff became SS commander in northern Italy. Captured by the Allies, he escaped a prisoner of war camp in 1946, and hid in an Italian monastery, before travelling to South America. A West German extradition request in 1963 was rejected because the crimes of which Rauff was accused were beyond Chile’s statute of limitations. The SS colonel was able to resume his career under General Pinochet. Retiring in comfort, he died in 1983 of natural causes.


Pinochet’s persecution of opponents was not confined to Chilean borders. The CIA and FBI supplied DINA with intelligence reports on Chilean exiles, and Colonia Dignidad helped it ‘draw on national and international contacts’, a declassified CIA report says. In April 1974 two Italian fascists, Prince Luis Borghese and Stefano delle Chiae, arrived in Chile and met Pinochet. Like Walter Rauff, Borghese had served in northern Italy. Captured by partisans, who might have executed summary justice for his crimes against them, he was spared on the insistence of US intelligence officer James Jesus Angleton. Della Chiaie was a younger fascist, a street-fighter who gloried in violence and was implicated in bombings in Italian cities aimed at terrorising people into submission to a right-wing dictatorship. In December 1970, after attempting a fascist coup, the `Black Prince' fled attempting a fascist coup, the 'Black Prince’ fled with his street thug protege to Spain, where Borghese’s wartime comrade in arms, SS Colonel Otto Skorzeny welcomed them.

Set loose in Latin America, the Italian fascist Delle Chiaie ranged from Argentina to El Salvador, helping DINA hunt dorm Chilean exiles, and assisting right-wing death squads. After Chile’s former ambassador in Washington, Orlando Letelier, was blown up on Embassy Row, together with a young American aide, Ronnie Moffat, on 21st September 1976, there was an outcry which eventually led to the conviction of DINA chief and CIA liaison Contreras. By then the Argentine military had emulated Pinochet, and launched its ‘dirty war’ to wipe out ‘subversives’. Then in July 1980, Delle Chiaie’s masterpiece coup in Bolivia brought to power a barbaric military regime which brutalised, tortured and murdered 1,000 people in its first week.

For one resident, it brought comfort and joy. Klaus Barbie, the wartime Gestapo butcher of Lyons, recruited after the war by US army intelligence to spy on left-wing trade unionists in Europe, had been given an assisted passage to South America when French prosecutors first got on his trail. In La Paz he made himself known to the military as representative for the German arms company Merex. Arms dealers can go where diplomats fear to tread. In 1978, after Amnesty International reported what had gone on at Colonia Dignidad, Merex boss, Gerhart Mertens, also linked with intelligence services, was prominent in a ‘Circle of Friends’ of the German settlement. Skorzeny was a Merex director.

Barbie had done well in Bolivia, organising torture and death squads for the right-wing military dictator Hugo Banzer, and financing them through the cocaine trade and money laundering. He even set up Transmaritima Boliviana, buying boats for a landlocked country. Then in June 1980, Bolivia's elections put a reforming coalition led by Herman Siles'Suazo into office, pledged to clean up corruption. The new government accused Barbie of massive fraud, and looked set to deport him. But on 18th July the military seized power, under Luis Garcia Meza, and Barbie could breath freely. Trade unions were abolished, newspapers closed, curfews imposed, and thousands of people arrested, tortured and killed. The Butcher of Lyons was back in business for a few years more, with the butchers of La Paz. Reports used to distinguish between ‘neo-Nazis’ or ‘neo-fascists’ and old ones, but here we see the continuity at work between them.

OTTO SKORZENY'S WEB

After the defeat of Hitler’s Third Reich, a handful of senior Nazi war criminals were tried and executed at Nuremburg, The will to prosecute Germany’s bankers and industrialists was blunted by their links with American and British business. The onset of the Cold War against the Soviet Union and communism meant Hitler’s generals and their allies were perceived as NATO assets. As is now well-known, leftovers from the Ukrainian SS Galicia division and Latvian units were shipped to Britain, whence some were despatched on ill-fated missions to infiltrate the USSR. Other Nazis and fascists were assisted by various routes (Madrid and the Vatican were favourite rest stops) to warmer climes, where they formed a network available for skulduggery while awaiting their return to power -the so-called Fourth Reich. This was a hidden counterforce against peoples who aspired to raise themselves, between two world power blocs, as a ThirdWorld.

Otto Skorzeny, the commando whom Hitler sent to rescue Mussolini, and entrusted with organising Werewolf resistance to the Allies, was acquitted at Nuremburg on charges concerning his actions in the Ardennes, where unarmed US prisoners were massacred at Malmedy. His subsequant ‘escape’ from an internment camp in 1948, just ahead of an extradition demand from Czechoslovakia, was probably arranged by his American captors, so that Skorzeny could recruit fellow-Nazis to a ‘stay behind’ network to stop communism. But he was involved in a parallel network, a later favourite of thriller and movie writers, the Organisation of Former SS members known by its German initials as ODESSA. Some reports spoke of die Spinne - the spider’s web.

Living on a farm in Bavaria rented by Countess Use Luthje, niece of the Nazi finance minister, and banker Hjalmar Schacht, Skorzeny contacted General Reinhard Gehlen, the wartime intelligence officer with whom he had set up underground units in Russia and eastern Europe. Gehlen’s post-war American-backed spy organisation, based at Pullach, just outside Munich, became the official Federal German intelligence service, the BND, in 1955. By then, Skorzeny had married Use Luthje and moved to Madrid, where he became an arms dealer. With help and advice from Uncle Hjalmar, the Skorzenys amassed a fortune and a host of useful connections. Among those who had found the climate in Franco’s Spain better for their health in post-war years was Leon Degrelle, commander of the SS Walonie Division on the eastern front. Sentenced to death in absentia by his native Belgium, Degrelle entertained fascists from all over Europe at his luxurious seaside apartment in Malaga, and considered Skorzeny a ‘great friend’.

Skorzeny’s links with Schacht and General Gehlen (and through Gehlen with the CIA) brought valuable business assignments from foreign governments such as Argentina and Egypt, who wanted arms, investment and expertise from wherever they came. Much of the Nazis’ looted gold had been shipped to Argentina after the Vatican and the British government took their cut, and a former Nazi agent in Spain, Horst Fuldner, helped General Peron recruit German scientists and technicians. Through his connections, Nazis like Adolf Eichman found employment in Argentina. Croatia’s wartime dictator Ante Pavelic even set up a ‘government in exile’ in Buenos Aires.

When the infamous ‘Angel of Death’, Josef Mengele slipped away to Argentina, he was helped by Hitler’s ace pilot, Colonel Hans-Ulrich Rudel, who was involved in Argentina’s plane industry. Although Mengele retreated to Paraguay, Rudel continued in business and Nazi politics, starting a Nazi paper and returning to Germany to launch the neo-Nazi Deutsche Reichspartei. In March 1962, meeting in Venice with Italian and French fascists, the Belgian Jean Thiriart and Britain’s Oswald Mosley, Rudel helped form a European National Party. Among the 2,000 people who flocked to Rudel’s funeral in December 1982 was David Irving. Two jets of the modern Luftwaffe flew over and dipped their wings in salute to the dead Nazi hero. German Defence Minister Manfred Worner, a future NATO secretary-general, claimed he knew nothing of Rudel’s politics, but respected his ‘achievements as a soldier'.

A MARRIAGE MADE IN LANGLEY, VIRGINIA

After the defeat of the 1936-39 Palestinian revolt, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin el Husseini, allied himself with Hitler, hoping Nazi victory would help rid Palestine of both the British and the Jews. (The right-wing Zionist Stern group to which future Israeli premier Yitzhak Shamir belonged, also naively sought an alliance with the devil, albeit with less success.) After the war, the Mufti took up residence in Egypt. Many Germans made their way where Nazi influence had gone before, as mercenaries, businessmen or technicians.

For nationalist army officers and  parties who had fought ‘democratic’ colonial powers, and found state intervention necessary to their country’s development, words like ‘national socialism’ had an appeal. So did anti-Jewish conspiracy theory (suitably adopted, to appeal to people who were also ‘Semites’), when they tried to understand why the West and the Soviet Union had backed partition in Palestine and helped bring about the Naqba (catastrophe).

But insofar as there was a marriage between European Nazism and Arab nationalism, it was an arranged one, and America’s CIA was the shadchan (matchmaker). US policy in these Cold War years was not averse to seeing British, French or other allies (and business competitors) eased out of their colonial fiefdoms, so long as Soviet influence was kept out, and social revolution did not threaten US interests.

In Egypt the Free Officers movement overthrew the corrupt King Farouk in 1952, and two years later Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser became top leader. Striking textile workers at Alexandria were ruthlessly crushed, and militants executed. Communist Party leaders were thrown in jail. The CIA wanted to help the new regime, but without being seen to dirty its hands. So it donned German gloves. Or as Miles Copeland, the CIA’s man in Cairo in the 1950s, put it, the Agency ‘had on its     hands a number of Germans who were not - or in some cases not quite - war criminals’. Seeking jobs  for them, it decided in 1953 that Egypt’s intelligence and security services needed help. In talks with CIA director Allan Dulles, General Reinhard Gehlen said the best man to take charge of the job would be Otto Skorzeny With a little persuasion, and promised the CIA would top up whatever Nasser paid, Skorzeny agreed, and began recruiting his team. His old friend Hartmann Lauterbacher was in touch with the Mufti, and became the BND’s station head in Cairo.

Among those arriving in Egypt was SS Major Leopold Gleim, who had been Gestapo officer   responsible for Jewish affairs in Poland. SS General Oskar Dirlewanger, who had commanded a penal brigade, took charge of training Nasser’s guards, assisted by SS Major Eugen Eichberger, who had participated in Nazi extermination squads in the Ukraine. Recommended by the Mufti, Johannes Von Leers, who had worked with Goebbels, took the Muslim name ‘Omar Amin’ and a post in Egypt’s Information Ministry, with special responsibility for ‘Jewish Questions’. Louis Heiden, alias Louis al-Hadj, translated Mein Kampf into Arabic, and the Egyptian government also published an .Arabic version of the notorious Czarist secret police forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Franz Bunsche, another ex-Goebbels hack with Skorzeny’s team, might have had a better-seller with his work, The Sexual Habits of Jews, if he’d turned it into a series of postcards.

For Egyptian Jews and Communists (many' of whom were also Jews), falling into the hands of Gestapo-trained torturers was not so amusing. An Israeli campaign of sabotage and provocations, misusing idealist young Egyptian Jews, did not exactly help the Jewish community. Whether Nasser believed the nonsense produced by Nazi propagandists, or merely thought it would impress people in the West, is unclear. In the period before Suez the Egyptian leader did consider clandestine peace contacts, some via the British Jewish Labour MP Maurice Orbach. But the Protocols continued to circulate, and their influence can be seen in some supposedly Islamic material. Antisemitic and racist groups have been funded by some Arab states, including Saudi Arabia. In 1962 Egypt’s military attache in London entertained the British Nazi Colin Jordan. Ill-advised as such dalliances are from an Arab standpoint, it has suited both Western imperialists and Arab reactionaries to exaggerate the power of the ‘Jewish lobby’,rather than see anger directed at the West and its interests.

US policy received a couple of blows in 1955 when, stung by heavy Israeli ‘reprisal’ raids for fedayeen action, Egypt turned to the Soviet bloc for arms and aid. Nasser went to the Bandung conference of‘non-aligned’ nations, and recognised the People’s Republic of China. Egypt emerged from the 1956 Anglo-French-Israeli invasion shambles holding its canal, international status, and courtship from both superpowers. German companies like Krupp and Siemens invested in Egypt’s development, while Gehlen’s Org, now the official West German intelligence service, BND, expanded through the Middle East. Alois Brunner, wanted for war crimes including deportation of Jewish children to Auschwitz, moved from Cairo to become BND station chief in Syria. The US had hoped Egypt would join the pro-Western Baghdad Pact, but the 1957 Iraqi Revolution tore Baghdad out of the Pact. Egypt and Syria formed the United Arab Republic in 1958, but Iraq’s General Kassem obstinately pursued his own policies, even letting Iraqi Communists out of prison and into his coalition.

In 1963, Kassem was overthrown in a CIA-supported coup by Ba’athists allied to Nasser. Egypt’s Nazi-trained and officered secret service played its part in the coup and the bloody massacre of thousands of Iraqi workers and leftists, which foreshadowed the even bigger slaughter in Indonesia two years later, and the Pinochet coup in Chile in 1973. Among Iraqi officers whose careers were advanced by the CIA coup was Saddam Hussein.

ISRAEL: IS IT GOOD FOR THE JEWS?

Israeli propaganda naturally made much of the Nazi presence in the Middle East, as though it explained Arab hostility, rather than merely exploiting it. The capture of Adolf Eichman in Argentina in 1960, and his trial in Jerusalem, highlighted Israel’s claim to defend Jewish people and bring retribution upon our enemies. But as relations with West Germany improved, Israeli agents were told to lay off fugitive Nazis. Reports on Mengele’s whereabouts were filed away for no action. Mossad was concerned about German scientists and engineers developing Egypt’s weapons technology and sent ex-Sternist Yitzhak Shamir to Paris to organise a two-pronged campaign. Scientists and their families received threats and parcel-bombs, newspapers received sensational articles about a Nazi plot to wipe out the Jewish state with new fiendish weapons of mass destruction.

After each world war defeat, Germany’s military-industrial complex took itself abroad to work its way around restrictions on rearmament. But in response to Israel’s concerns, Gehlen’s BND helped an Israeli agent, Wolfgang Lotz, infiltrate German circles in Egypt, where he spied on the government and waged cloak and dagger war on the weapons scientists. In 1963, Israeli agents met Otto Skorzeny in Spain, and enlisted his help. This liaison may have been facilitated by the BND’s Gehlen, or the CIA’s James Angleton, who handled links with foreign services, and managed good relations with assorted Nazis, fascists and Zionists. A German rocket scientist visiting Skorzeny was told the two inquisitive gentlemen with him were ‘NATO officers’.

By the 1970s, Israel itself grew big in the defence and security business. Military exports overtook diamonds, textiles and citrus as earners, and retired or serving Israeli officers turned up in numerous countries, among them Argentina. During the junta’s ‘dirty war’ when at least 11,000 people were ‘disappeared’ by the military, it is estimated that at least 5% of victims were Jewish, although Jews only constituted 1% of the population. This might partly be explained by the targeting of left-wing intellectuals and professional people, but there is other evidence that Nazi training had left its mark on the Argentine officer class and its outlook. Former prisoner Nora Strejilevich recalls: ‘They assured me that the “problem of subversion" was the one concerning them most but the “Jewish problem" ranked second and they were collecting information.’ During raids on homes the security forces became especially vicious if they found a family was Jewish. In prison Jews were made to crawl on their knees, as Jacobo Timerman recounts, humiliated and tortured. Amnesty International reported that torture centres were decorated with swastikas and portraits of Hitler. The military saw nothing incongruous about condemning Timerman as, among other things, a ‘Zionist’, and doing business with the Zionists in Israel.

Israel was selling arms to Argentina. What else was it selling? A 1976 CIA report said officers from an Israeli intelligence centre in Rio de Janeiro had ‘gone to Buenos Aires to give training to the Argentines. In the course of these contacts the Israelis recommended greater involvement in joint anti-terrorist operations.’ The junta, of course, claimed Its ‘dirty war ‘ was a war against terrorism. A report into the ‘dirty war’ commissioned by Argentina's Jewish representative institution, the DAIA, says Jews were interrogated about alleged ‘Jewish campaigns’ and about the community, its institutions, buildings, staff and ideologies. ‘The victims state that torturers evidenced a surprisingly accurate knowledge on some of such issues, and some of them even spoke Hebrew or Yiddish.’

Where US operations or direct arms exports were restricted by Congress, Israel was ready to fill the gap. After Bolivia’s 1980 coup, and brutal repression, the US government, followed by Britain and other European Union countries, and several in Latin America, broke off diplomatic and trade relations, and the IMF refused to renew loans. Israel, together with South Africa, Argentina, Paraguay, Egypt and the USSR, maintained relations, and went further, offering arms and military aid to the brutal dictatorship that was shielding Klaus Barbie. That the ‘butcher of Lyons’ was brought to justice three years later owed nothing to Israel. ‘We must be guided in our relationships by the one criterion that has guided governments of Israel since the establishment of the state, namely: “Is it good for the Jews?”’, wrote former military intelligence Brigadier Haim Vivien Herzog, before becoming president of Israel. Perhaps he even believed it.

LOOKING AT CONNECTIONS

In 1992 the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires was bombed, and 29 people killed. Two years later a car bombing at the AMIA, Jewish welfare society premises killed 86 people and wounded hundreds.

It was assumed that Middle Eastern terrorists were responsible for both bombings, and the finger pointed at Iran. But Argentine Jews suspected an Argentine connection. ‘The key question in the case is: who provided local intelligence and support?’ said Horacio Lutzky. ‘That means looking into the Nazi underground, and we all know of the deep influence Nazi ideas have on the Argentine, police, military and security agencies.’

As Argentine democracy attempts to probe the truth about Nazi gold and the ‘dirty wars’, the Far Right lashes out, and new links are revealed. When police investigating the AMIA bombing raided an army barracks at the end of 1995 they uncovered a military coup plot, and found literature produced by the White Aryan Resistance, a US-based Nazi outfit. People remained sceptical, suspecting those arrested, mainly NCOs, were small fry. In 1996 it was revealed that Justice Minister Rodolfo Barra had been a member of a violent Nazi youth movement. On 24th September, 2001, the trial began of 15 former police officers and five civilians charged with supplying the van that was packed with explosive in the AMIA bombing. Who was responsible for the bombing, and why, has yet to be established. Some doubt it ever will.

When I was growing up in the 1950s, adults told me Nazism was past history, and neo-Nazis insignificant, not worth bothering about. Sadly, their optimism has proved mistaken. Starting in Boris Weisfeiler’s ill-fated footsteps, our hike through history to a Buenos Aires courtroom has found hidden connections between yesterday’s horrors and today. The collapse of the Soviet Union and end of the Cold War are bringing new contradictions and strange alliances. We will need to confront them with open eyes.

(first published in Jewish Socialist magazine, Spring 2001)

Sunday 1 December 2013

Last Exit NOT to Brooklyn

During the 1970s and 1980s an international campaign was waged to "free" Soviet Jewry. Although previous campaigns by Jewish students and others had supported the rights of Jews in the Soviet Union to cultural expression and freedom from persecution, the new campaign focused on the right to leave the Soviet Union. Campaigners widely used the Biblical-derived slogan "Let My People Go!", and it became increasingly clear that the Jews who made this Exodus were expected to head for Israel.
Various groups and tactics were engaged in this campaign, from social fundraising, and lobbying political leaders to harassment of Soviet cultural tours and even (in the United States) terrorism. Not all those involved realised let alone questioned the politics in the background.

The campaign did succeed in bringing large numbers of Soviet Jews to Israel, not all of whom bcame willing right-wing settlers, and many of whom though welcoming political freedom found the Zionist state far from being a Land of Milk and Honey, or the standards of welfare and social justice they had hoped for. Others have made it to the traditional 'Goldiner Medina' in the United States, or even settled in, of all places, Berlin.


Meanwhile the campaign also led to such unpleasant sights - insofar as people have able or willing to see them - as Russian Jews being forced on to an Israel-bound plabe at Schipol, Amsterdam, some of them in handcuffs (so much for Zionist freedom); or of Russian-origin neo-Nazi skinheads,their parents having presumably posed as Jews, roaming  streets in Petah Tikvah and other places in Israel, assaulting Jews and Muslims.
 

The Soviet Jewry campaign has passed into history, and so has the Soviet Union - some like to think their activity in the former contributed to the latter's demise. This article from 1990, critically looking at an aspect of the campaign, is one I am now adding to my collection of Historical Passages.

Towards the end of 1988, it became apparent that the United States government was no longer assuring Soviet Jews refugee status and therefore settlement rights in the US, though it was still pressing the USSR to grant more exit visas. Some officials cited budget difficulties; others pointed to human rights improvements in the USSR to argue there was no longer a "well-founded fear of persecution" .

According to Philip Saperia of the long-established Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (BIAS): 'The policy is causing panic in the Soviet Jewish community here in the US and in the Soviet Union" (Guardian 7 December 1988). The Union of Councils for Soviet Jews claim that ~hundreds of Soviet Jews" had been denied refugee status in the past few months, and threatened that the issue would be an embarrassment for the incoming Bush administration.

In recent months, we have seen a spate of publicity given to Russian antisemitic organisations like Pamyat with its threats of pogroms. Some Jewish publicists affect to see escalating antisemitism even in parts of the Soviet Union where it has never existed,and claim widespread murders of Jews have begun. It would be dangerous to play down the threat of Russian fascism and Black Hundredism - and Jewish Socialist was one of the first publications to expose Pamyat. Of course, even if the threat is as serious as made out or genuinely feared (despite the racists' failure in the last election, though things could look different if the economic depression continues to worsen), our answers might still be different.

Present fundraising efforts emphasise panic and flight - in effect, telling Russian Jews they have no future in the country where they have lived for centuries, and for which they made sacrifices and shed blood, and tapping powerful emotional springs in diaspora Jews, prompting them to help the olim (immigrants to Israel) as refugees.

So what about entry to the United States? On 6 September 1989, the ]erusalem Post reported:

"American Jewish organisations that have been pushing hardest to get more Soviet Jews into the US on refugee status are now ready to accept limits on numbers. They are seeking a compromise with the administration that would channel more US aid to Israel to help it cope with an increased Soviet aliya (immigration to Israel)."

The report quoted Micah Naftalin of the Union of Councils for Soviet Jews as saying: "We acknowledge that there are finite limits to how many refugees the US can handle." But Naftalin rejected the policy of giving refugee status only to those with close relatives in the United States.

David Harris of the American Jewish Committee said limitations were inevitable, but the Bush administration was hoping to reach an accord with the Jewish community so as to prevent a fight with Congress, which was considering a bill giving all Soviet Jews automatic refugee status.

HIAS president, Ben-'Zion Leuchner, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that "the majority of federations (Jewish communities in each city) will not fight the government on this because of their own financial problems. Some Jewish communities are nearing the point where they can only fund family reunification cases." However, both Leuchter and Harris said the Jewish community would only support the administration in return for concessions.

Enter Shamir, far right

The Israeli government also had a view on Soviet Jews. Speaking to Likud Party veterans, Shamir declared that mass immigration of Soviet Jews was a "miracle", and that it required Israel to be big as well". They could not think of giving up the Occupied Territories. " We need the space to house all the people," he said, to applause (Jerusalem Post, 14 and l9 January 1990). The call for lebensraum has not gone unnoticed abroad, and not least by the Arabs, of course; but after a period of Intifada, and talk in Israel of a so-called "transfer", a more accurate interpretation might have been that  Shamir's Israel desperately needs more Jews if it is to hold the territories.

Shamir had been pressing the US government for some time to stop Soviet Jews entering, and he also wanted the Soviet authorities to permit direct nights to Israel so that people could not drop out en route.An earlier plan had been to have Soviet Jewish migrants fly to Israel via Bucharest, where Ceausescu might cu-operate in stopping dropouts, but circumstances intervened.

Back in 1982 the Jewish Agency bitterly attacked the Austrian government for placing a Russian language information poster at the Vienna transit centre, telling migrants the addresses of Jewish and non-Jewish organisations which would help them go to destinations other than Israel.'The Israeli ambassador in Vienna persuaded the Austrians to remove the poster. The Agency also sought the collaboration of US Jewish organisations in ensuring that only Soviet Jews with "first degree" relatives in the USA should be helped to go there (Jewish Chronicle, 15 January 1982).

Pressure was put on HIAS. and the Joint Distribution Committee to stop them helping Russian Jews. After attacks from the chair of the Jewish Agency, Arye Dultzin, and Anya director, Raphael Kotlowitz, HIAS, which had earlier claimed it was helping the "drop-outs" only to stop them falling into the clutches of the Satmar Hassidim {ultra orthodox anti-Zionists) or non-Jewish organisations, caved in to a plea from Begin. The board of governors of the American Society agreed by 13-3 to accept that it should help only those with close relatives in the US

(Jewish Chronicle, 9 Oct, 6 Nov, II Dec 1981).

Rich Uncle in the States?

Having said they couldn't afford to fund the settlement of Soviet Jews in America as one reason they backed down from challenging Bush over restrictions, American Jewish leaders are now calling upon their communities to cough up the cost of settling the Jews in Israel.

Likud Knesset member Michael Kleiner, chairman of the Knesset Immigration and Absorption Committee, told the Jerusalem Post's Asher Wallflsh on 14 January that Shamir and Pores must go to the US to raise the money for settling Soviet Jews in Israel. Criticising Jewish Agency targets of $1 billion from American Jewry (twice what they'd originally set) as inadequate, Kleiner said Israeli and diaspora Jews should agree to meet the eventual cost, whatever it was. Admitting that it could rise to between $6 and $10 billion, he said that Israel would have to shelve all national and municipal development budgets (hard luck, Hatikvah quarter) and that diaspora Jews must come in 50:50 (Jerusalem Post, 14 Jan 1990) .

At a press conference in New York attended by Natan Sharansky, honouring an announced $20 million housing fund for Soviet Jews in Israel set up by investment banker Joseph Gruss, David Sacks of the United Jewish Appeal said the Appeal might raise its $350 million pledge over one year, instead of three as originally planned. Asked about the overall $500 million, Sacks said: "I can see the possibility of doubling that figure."

Last February the Council of Jewish Federations (CJF), at its General Assembly in Miami, pledged that its members would deliver its financial commitment to Israel "whether or not we are successful in raising the full amount", according to executive director Don Felstein, who explained that if necessary federations would have to borrow the money, or cut other budgets. The U}A had meanwhile upped its target, to raise $420 million in one year (Jerusalem Post, 9 February 1990).

Rescue or aliyah?

According to Felstein, some delegates at the CJF's Assembly were concerned about Shamir's remarks on the need for a big Israel". The leadership had managed to calm their fears, saying that less than 1% of Soviet}ews were settling the West Bank.

Felstein said that what had helped convince delegates of the need to deliver the money was a set of articles in the New York Times about the growth of antisemitism in the Soviet Union. There was a general realisation in Miami that American Jewry has a chance in 1990 to do what it failed to do in 1939 (]erusalem Post, 9 Feb 1990).

This last remark is significant. We all know of the Jews who were turned away from America's shores in 1939 and after. In 1981 a commission was set up to examine the way American Jewish organisations had behaved during the years of Nazi mass extermination of the Jews of Europe. Among the questions posed was whether these organisations might not have saved thousands of lives if they had put pressure on the Roosevelt administration. The commission broke up in disarray at the end of 1982 without completing its work (Daily Telegraph, 5 }an 1983).

However, a privately circulated interim report stated: "In retrospect, one incontrovertible fact stands out above all others: in the face of Hitler's total war of extermination against the Jews of Europe, the Jewish leadership in America at no stage decided to proclaim total mobilisation for rescue" (New York Herald Tribune, 5 }an 1983) .

Whether pressure on Roosevelt might have worked, we can only guess. The American Jewish community did not feel so confident then. There was fear that America's own antisemites would use the prospect of mass Jewish immigration to stir up hatred against those already there. Later, American Jews would vent their feelings on Britain for restricting entry to Palestine. Leon Uris could write Exodus and Hollywood make the movie.

One can understand the remark about not repeating 1939, but have Don Felstein or the Jewish Federation read the history properly? Weren't guilt pangs over bowing down to the antisemites during the War assuaged by listening to other arguments?

"If Jews will have to choose between the refugees, saving Jews from concentration camps and assisting a national museum in Palestine, mercy will have the upper hand and the whole energy of the people will be channeled into saving Jews from various countries. Zionism will be struck off the agenda . . . If we allow a separation between the refugee problem and the Palestine problem we are risking the existence of Zionism," wrote David Ben Gurion in a letter to  the Zionist Executive in  1938, concerned lest other territories be found to take Jewish refugees (The Other Israel by Arie Bober, published by Matzpen).

The Goldberg commission's report noted that established Zionist organisations were "riveted to post-war plans" for a Jewish state and this was another reason not to demand entry for Jews to America. And today?

"Could Israel morally survive the appearance of 500,000 Jewish refugees heading for another galut(diaspora) were the gates of the USSR opened?" asked Mikhail Agursky and Alexander Libin, in the ]erusalem Post (6 October 1982). "The drop out phenomenon corrupted and demoralised Soviet Jewry", they claimed. The Zionist writers rejected any move to grant refugee status to Soviet Jews wishing to enter America.

More recently, Isi Leibler, vice-president of the World Jewish Congress and a leading Zionist figure in Australia (doubtless another over-populated little country that couldn't possibly find room for more }ews), said; 'The Soviet Jewry movement is not a travel agency, and transfer of one diaspora to another, even from a Communist society to a democracy, is not a pressing national Jewish objective. This is especially true if the overwhelming majority of Jews wanting to leave - currently over 90% - do not want to go to Israel."

Double bind

One problem with these arguments is that the Soviet Union today, whatever it is, is not Germany in 1939.Far from having been systematically persecuted and driven from public life as German  Jews were by state policy from 1933 on (and more especially from 1938), Soviet Jews are enjoying a new flowering of cultural and political freedom. The antisemites are menacing, but not yet much  more. There is violence, but not much greater than in, say, the United States (or, in a different way, in Israel). The Russian Nazi groups'votes were derisory.

This  is not to recommend complacency but to suggest that antisemitism in Russia can be fought and beaten. But in order to squeeze huge sums out of Jewish communities already facing cash  problems, the Zionist movement has had to hype up the Russian situation to make it sound as though Auschwitz is round the comer. "Shadow Of The New Nazis" screamed the headline to an article by Jane Moonman of BIPAC (Jewish Chronicle, 9 Dec 1988). "Never Again 1939" is the kind of sentiment being tapped into in the States.

The snag is, if people really believe it's that bad, mightn't they decide that what's needed is rescue rather than aliyah to Israel? Mightn't they press for open doors and refugee status?

On 15 February, Israel's Absorption Minister, Rabbi Yitzhak Peretz, shocked Zionist opinion by naively declaring; "Should the escape route of the Soviet Jews lead them to Western Europe or the United States, this is better than they they should stay in the Soviet Union." (Peretz is a member of the non Zionist orthodox Shas Party.) Shamir promptly told the Israeli press: 'There is no need to take note of the remarks made by Absorption Minister Yitzhak Peretz" (Ha'areiz, 16 Jan 1990).

Michael Kleiner, of the Knesset' s Immigration and Absorption Committee, complained that Peretz's remarks would be used by "HIAS officials, who don't care about the well-being of the Jews", but merely wish to keep going as an organisation by "disseminating untruthful propaganda about Israel and about the condition of Soviet Jewry . Kleiner went on to claim the Absorption Minister had "fallen victim to the propaganda and fear-spreading campaign conducted by vested interests who are striving to reopen the gates of the United States to Jewish immigrants" (Ha'aretz, 15 Feb 1990).

Jewish Agency chairman, Simha Dinitz, had revealed on 11 February that the Agency had approached American Jewish leaders some weeks before to ask them to stop HIAS opening an office in Moscow which might help Jews going to America and "sabotage immigration to Israel".

On 18 February, Michael Kleiner proclaimed; 'This cancerous growth called HIAS must be totally eradicated." Claiming that HIAS lobbying had persuaded the US government to grant 8,000 more refugee-entry permits to Soviet Jews, Kleiner accused the Jewish organisation of doing this just to maintain 'bloated bureaucracy and corrupt officials".

Furthermore, he accused; 'HIAS is preparing the ground for an upsurge of antisemitism in the United States," because, by "luring Jews who really want to settle in Israel to go to America instead," it was leading to the day when American Jewry would be accused of stealing the places of others" (]erusalem Post, 19 Feb 1990).

So how did the American Jews respond to this belligerent language and the threatening suggestion that Jews are to blame for a rise in antisemitism? Ben Zion Leuchner of HIAS denied that his organisation had asked the US to increase its ceiling on Jewish refugees. He pointed out that HIAS was actually reducing staff. He denied that it sought to persuade anyone to go to America: "To the contrary, our staff members are instructed to tell the relatives of Soviet Jews that the quickest way for their family to be resettled in freedom is to go to Israel" (]erusalem Post, 4 March 1990).

Martin Kraar, of the North American Council of Jewish Federations, reassured Kleiner that the 8,000 Jews who were being assisted had already been allowed for in October and that there was no intention of increasing the entry quota further. He further assured Kleiner that his Council would be keeping an eye on HIAS to "ensure it didn' t divert Soviet Jews to any other destination save Israel."

So once again language that would be rightly denounced as antisemitic on the lips of others is considered acceptable from Israeli leaders. And once again diaspora Jewish leaders kowtow to Israeli leaders, protesting their innocence of any charge that they are making demands on their own government to assist fellow Jews find freedom! No longer are they demanding: "Let My People Go," but: "Don't Let My People In"!


A useful memorandum on Soviet Jewish migration has
been produced by the Committee to Open Borders. Send a
large sae to Jewish Socialist, BM3725, London WCIN
3XX, for a copy.