Posted on 04/26/2008 3:17:31 PM PDT by Borges
Tel Aviv - Yossi Harel, who led a shipload of Jewish refugees trying to reach Israel after World War II, died Saturday at his home in Tel Aviv. He was 90. Harel suffered a heart attack, his family told the Israeli news website Ynet.
Harel commanded the ship Exodus, which was loaded with 4,500 Holocaust survivors bound for Israel, in a mission that was illegal according to Britain, the colonial power in 1947 over Palestine, where Israel was founded a year later.
Enforcing a blockade to keep Jews from entering Palestine, a British Navy vessel stopped Exodus, and three people on board the passenger ship died resisting British forces, before the ship was forced to return to Europe.
A novel and a movie based on the incident later fictionalized the story.
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus
Prior to, and immediately after, the beginning of World War II, the Nazis were willing to allow Jews to leave to go to Palestine. It was the British who tried, with some success, to interdict that path, leading to the Holocaust.
That is one of the most appalling things I have ever read on FR. Are you some kind of Nazi apologist?
I don't care what the policy of the British with respect to Palestine was, it certainly didn't include genocide of the Jews, and NOTHING they did can even remotely be considered as "leading to the Holocaust."
-ccm
Your ignorance of history is appalling. Have you learned nothing since the 8th grade good guys - bad guys lessons? Read the Jewish, not the Anglo-Saxon historians.
While you’re at it, how about dropping the folks at the Wiesenthal center a note and call them names as well.
The Nazis wanted to get rid of the Jews in the part of Europe they controlled. They facilitated the movement of hundreds of thousands of Jews from central Europe to the Middle East - in some cases releasing folks from Dachau to make the trip. The problem wasn’t at that end of the line - it was with the British blockade at the other end, and the British diplomatic efforts to intefere with the needed transit visas.
The Nazis also explored Madegascar as a destination. You are, of course, familiar with US efforts to prevent the escape of Jews from Europe, aren’t you?
Here’s an article at the Wiesenthal center in the unlikely event that you want to disabuse yourself of some of your ignorance and bigotry:
http://motlc.wiesenthal.com/site/pp.asp?c=gvKVLcMVIuG&b=395105
Read your history. It was the British who stopped Jewish immigration to Palestine. They caved in to Arab demands that the Jewish refugees be stopped from entering Palestine.
The Nazis were responsible for the Holocaust, but the British didn’t help the plight of the desperate Jews who tried legally and illegally to escape to Palestine. The British were actually part of most of the nations of the world who made next to impossible for Jewish refugees to immigrate to ANY country. Severe and drastic limitations were put on how many Jews could be allowed into a country. Chief among these was the United States, who could have taken in so many more than the pitiful few that we did. But getting back to the British, they fought and opposed Jewish immigration with all they had, only taking in a limited amount of Jewish children after Kristalnacht.
The whole world at that time was anti-semetic. The Nazis cynically exploited this when they were actually allowing Jews to immigrate to any nation that would have them. The Jews were pretty much friendless in the world, with a few little nations like Denmark and the Netherlands who had the heart and the willingness to take as many as they could. It must be said, however, that Winston Churchill, not the Prime Minister at the time, was opposed to his government’s stand on Jewish immigration, since he was visionary in his opposition no Nazism and Hitler from the beginning. He wasn’t a naive fool like a few other former Prime Ministers and the present one, being Chamberlain and taken in by the Nazis propaganda.
No it didn't, but hundreds of thousands died because the Brits refused to follow through on the obligations they accepted from the League of Nations.
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http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/125976
Published: 04/27/08, 10:30 AM
Yossi Harel, Commander of ‘Illegal’ Pre-State Aliyah, Dies at 90
by Ezra HaLevi
(IsraelNN.com) Yossi Harel, who commanded four ships bringing Jews to Israel illegally, died at the age of 90 in Tel Aviv Saturday.
Harel assisted 24,000 Jews in reaching Israel aboard four ships, including the famed SS Exodus, between 1945 and 1948. Great Britain, which controlled the region at the time, banned Jewish immigration due to Arab pressure. The other three ships were called Knesset Yisrael (Gathering of Israel), Atzma’ut (Independence) and Kibbutz Galuyot (Ingathering of the Exiles).
The Exodus was made famous by a film of the same name.
Born in 1919, Harel was the sixth generation in his family born in Jerusalem. At the age of 15 he joined the pre-state Hagana defense force. By the age of 28 he oversaw the clandestine immigration operations bringing Jews, many of them survivors of the Holocaust, to the Holy Land.
Later on, Harel oversaw the IDF’s Unit 131, an intelligence unit that ran a spy ring in Egypt until the so-called Lavon Affair of 1954.
I don’t know about “leading to the holocaust” but the problems with the British are true.
Of course, Hitler had already aligned himself with the arabs, and had set them in place to do his dirty work -— thereby keeping his hands relatively clean.
From Menachem Begin’s memoirs “The Revolt”:
“A few years ago, the British government decided to shorten the period of secrecy. At the beginning of 1972, the minutes of the cabinet meetings in the early forties were made public. Now we know.
The International Red Cross had planned, according to one of the documents, to transfer forty thousand Jews from Hungary to Turkey, with one clear intention that they would continue to Eretz Israel. This intention gave the British no rest. They contacted the Red Cross headquarters and protested against this plan, with the argument that the humanitarian organization had no right to implement it without the permission of the British government. The Red Cross plan was dropped. Another forty thousand Hungarian Jews were sent to the gas chambers....”
From the same book (Menachem Begin quotes from Arthur Morse “White Six Million Died”):
“We have received the views of the Foreign Office on the proposal of the U.S. Treasury to license remittance to Switzerland of 25,000 dollars as a preliminary installment, to be expended on the rescue of Jews from France and Rumania. The Foreign Office is concerned with the difficulties of disposing of a considerable number of Jews, should they be rescued.” (December 1943).”
There are plenty more examples.....
Today Israel deeply requires a prime minister of Menachem Begin’s quality leadership.
Thank you all for your additional comments and info on the subject.
I would lay a bit more fault for the Holocaust at the feet of the British than some of you, however. Certainly, the British blockade of the Nazi efforts to exile Jews was a contributing factor in their (the Nazis) ultimate decision to opt for a policy of genocide.
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