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    Underground to Palestine: And Other Writing on Israel, Palestine, and the Middle East
    Underground to Palestine: And Other Writing on Israel, Palestine, and the Middle East
    Underground to Palestine: And Other Writing on Israel, Palestine, and the Middle East
    Ebook493 pages9 hours

    Underground to Palestine: And Other Writing on Israel, Palestine, and the Middle East

    By Mark Crispin Miller, I. F. Stone and D. D. Guttenplan

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    A moving and unforgettable eyewitness account of the courageous exodus of Holocaust survivors from post–World War II Europe to the Promised Land, now expanded with Stone’s frontline reporting on the Arab-Israeli crises of 1948–49 and the Suez War of 1956, and with a new foreword by D. D. Guttenplan

    In the spring of 1946, American journalist I. F. Stone embarked on an incredible adventure, accompanying Holocaust survivors as they made their historic voyage from Eastern Europe to the biblical Promised Land. Undertaken in secrecy against the strict orders of Palestine’s British colonial governors, this harrowing escape began in the displaced persons camps of Germany and Poland. An illegal convoy of the homeless, proud, and determined, these refugees traveled by train and by foot across the European continent before boarding the ship that would carry them past the British blockade to their ancient, ancestral home.

    No account of the historic twentieth-century exodus is as poignant, powerful, exhilarating, and dramatic as this acclaimed first-person narrative. Through the words of author I. F. Stone, one of America’s most provocative and revered investigative reporters, these courageous men, women, and children live again. Largely implicit but nevertheless unyielding is Stone’s belief in a binational Arab-Jewish state, a creed unacceptable to the Zionist movement of the time.

    Included are essays written in the years following Israel’s establishment, reflecting on the state of the newly reborn nation and the volatile situation in the Middle East thirty years beyond the establishment of Mandatory Palestine. Caught between the immediate, innate sense of belonging he felt in Palestine and his own developing critique of Zionism, Stone wrote into each of these works a personal struggle, a question of justice unsolved today.

    With a new introduction by D. D. Guttenplan, this edition reveals a perspective indispensable to understanding past and present tensions in the Middle East.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Media
    Release dateMar 3, 2015
    ISBN9781497698017
    Underground to Palestine: And Other Writing on Israel, Palestine, and the Middle East
    Author

    I. F. Stone

    I. F. Stone (1907–1989) was an American journalist and publisher. After working at the New York Post, the Nation (as editor from 1940–1946), and PM, he started his own journal, I. F. Stone’s Weekly, in 1953. This publication notably covered the New Deal, McCarthyism, the birth of Israel, and the Vietnam War. In 1999, I. F. Stone’s Weekly was voted the second-best print-journalism product of the entire twentieth century in a poll of fellow reporters. Stone also published more than a dozen books and was considered one of the most influential journalists of the post-war period.

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    • 4/5
      Underground to Palestine by Issy.E.Stone 1946 240pg 12/7/18 This book is an excellent historic document written at the time.The Hagana had recruited a group of Jewish sailors take an illegal ship into Palestine, up till then foreign sailors been hired. The reporter wanted to travel with them but instead was sent by planw to Europe where he describes the DP camps. Interesting that most of the inmates were Polish Jews who had fled to Germany. There were DP camps all over Europe with people from as far away as Ethiopia and Afghanistan. Germans cities are buildings in rubble. Polish refugees said that the Polish government was okay but the people were leading pogroms against Jews. Getting over the border between Poland and Czechoslovakia was difficult. The writer could speak Yiddish the most common language amongst the immigrants.This was a time when the Americans had requested that 100 000 Jews be let into Palestine and Britain disagreed. Britain was in the throws of getting out of Egypt and wanted to hold Palestine as a strategic asset to have a hold over Suez canal.Slovakia was self administered under the Nazi's and was a place for Germans to relax and had plenty of food during the war. Where refugees and not let out of Poland the reporter goes to the Bratislava head and tells them what he is writing in the US press and they relent. He crosses to Austria which is divided up into different allied sections. Only 4000 of 200 000 Jews living in Vienna and they were mostly converts to Catholicism. He meets Yiddish speaking Russian officers who tell him they are communist supporters but support the Zionist idea as there is no place for Jews in Eastern Europe.He now goes to Italy where the ship is ready and it leaves the port and later picks up the refugees at a small place along the coast at night. He eventually gets onto a ship that has an American Jewish crew. Everything has to be done to avoid the British knowledge.Every DP camp is under the allies with the Joint and Hagana involved. Quite a number of non Jews arrive with the refugees an example is a Polish women who took 2 children for her Jewish neighbour and wanted to be with them. Families who fled to the Russian sector repatriated to Poland and then onto DP camps towards Israel. He says that the ship was two thirds men as less women survived and the all showed signs of optimism compared to the people in defeated countries.Later at sea a Turkish boat comes and many are transferred to it to run the gauntlet. The engine breaks down and the are stranded at sea and water is running out. An SOS brings a British ship but as they are in open sea does nothing. Eventually the get the ship to go and it gets to Haifa where the narrator has a visa and gets off. The refugees are put in Atlit. Later people were put on Cypress.The book concludes that Britain hadn't come to terms with the end of Empire. They wanted to make treaties with the Moslem effendis to control the masses against the Bolsheviks. The Jews and Christian of the region were not important to their policy. He believes that so many refugees will arrive that they can't be stopped. One has to understand Britain's relationship to American and France as well as Cold War at the time.
    • 4/5
      This is a good story by a journalist who shadowed a group of Jews from Poland to Palestine, traveling as they did, in stealth to avoid the Nazis and their colaborators.

    Book preview

    Underground to Palestine - Mark Crispin Miller

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    Underground to Palestine

    and Other Writing on Israel, Palestine, and the Middle East

    I. F. Stone

    To

    Those Anonymous Heroes

    The Shelikhim of the Haganah

    Contents

    Series Introduction by Mark Crispin Miller

    Introduction by D. D. Guttenplan

    UNDERGROUND TO PALESTINE, 1978 Edition

    A Word in Preface a Generation Later

    In Explanation

    Summons to Adventure

    I See the DP’s

    Underground Railway to Bratislava

    Through the Iron Curtain

    Adventure in Italy

    I Cross the Mediterranean

    Epilogue

    Reporting from the Front Lines, PM, May 1948

    British Declare Military Law in ‘Zone of Evacuation’ as New State is Born

    Tel Aviv Takes 8 Air Raids Calmly, Cheers as Inflow of DPs Begins

    Refugees Just Off Ship Swell Israeli Army

    Traveling the Road of War South From Tel Aviv

    A Visit to a Negev Settlement Under Attack by Egyptian Planes

    ‘Take Good Care of Your Rifles, They’re Hard to Get.’

    Israeli Children in Settlements Get a Big Kick out of the War

    An English Gentleman Makes a Place for Himself in a ‘Kibbutz’

    How a Tiny Negev Settlement Reacts to an Egyptian Air Attack

    Continual Arab Air Raids Give Negev No Chance to Relax

    Trip to Jerusalem on Israel’s ‘Burma-Road’

    Selections from This is Israel

    From Chapter 1: The Pains of Birth

    From Chapter 2: Lusty Baby

    From Chapter 3: The Wicked Midwives

    From Chapter 4: Israel is Born

    From Chapter 6: The Test of Open War

    From Chapter 7: Epilogue as Prologue

    The Daily Compass Report From Israel, 1949

    August 29, 1949

    August 30, 1949

    August 31, 1949

    September 1, 1949

    September 2, 1949

    September 4, 1949

    September 6, 1949

    September 7, 1949

    September 8, 1949

    September 9, 1949

    September 11, 1949

    September 13, 1949

    September 14, 1949

    September 15, 1949

    September 16, 1949

    September 18, 1949

    September 19, 1949

    September 20, 1949

    I. F. Stone’s Weekly, Suez 1956

    War May Come At Any Time

    Israel’s Hopes and Fears of Russian Intervention

    The Road to Peace Lies Through the Arab Refugee Camps

    The Truth About The Bombardment of Gaza

    No Pat Answer for That Crisis Over Suez

    On Adlai, Suez and Ike’s Latest Arms Letter

    Morocco, Yemen and the Sudan Are Adjacent to Suez, But Not Israel

    The Same Old Squeeze Play On Israel

    The View From A (Non-Ivory) Washington Tower

    America’s Satellites Turn Desperate, Too

    Do We or Nasser Menace the World Interest in Suez?

    The Terrible Truth About The World Crisis (And Me)

    Reflections and Meditations Thirty Years After (From Underground to Palestine)

    Part I: Confessions of a Jewish Dissident

    Part II: The Other Zionism

    Acknowledgments

    About the Author

    "The Germans killed us. The British don’t let us live." —Jewish ex-Partisan.

    Introduction

    I

    We the people seem to have the freest book trade in the world. Certainly we have the biggest. Cruise the mighty Amazon, and you will see so many books for sale in the United States today as would require more than four hundred miles of shelving to display them—a bookshelf that would stretch from Boston’s Old North Church to Fort McHenry in South Baltimore.

    Surely that huge catalog is proof of our extraordinary freedom of expression: The US government does not ban books, because the First Amendment won’t allow it. While books are widely banned in states like China and Iran, no book may be forbidden by the US government at any level (although the CIA censors books by former officers). Where books are banned in the United States, the censors tend to be private organizations—church groups, school boards, and other local (busy) bodies roused to purify the public schools or libraries nearby.

    Despite such local prohibitions, we can surely find any book we want. After all, it’s easy to locate those hot works that once were banned by the government as too obscene to sell, or mail, until the courts ruled otherwise on First Amendment grounds—Fanny Hill, Howl, Naked Lunch. We also have no trouble finding books banned here and there as antifamily, Satanic, racist, and/or filthy, from Huckleberry Finn to Heather Has Two Mommies to the Harry Potter series, just to name a few.

    II

    And yet, the fact that those bold books are all in print, and widely read, does not mean that we have the freest book trade in the world. On the contrary: For over half a century, America’s vast literary culture has been disparately policed, and imperceptibly contained, by state and corporate entities well placed and perfectly equipped to wipe out wayward writings. Their ad hoc suppressions through the years have been far more effectual than those quixotic bans imposed on classics like The Catcher in the Rye and Fahrenheit 451. For every one of those bestsellers scandalously purged from some provincial school curriculum, there are many others (we can’t know how many) that have been so thoroughly erased that few of us, if any, can remember them, or have ever heard of them.

    How have all those books (to quote George Orwell) dropped into the memory hole in these United States? As America does not ban books, other means—less evident, and so less controversial—have been deployed to vaporize them. Some almost never made it into print, as publishers were privately warned off them from on high, either on the grounds of national security or with blunt threats of endless corporate litigation. Other books were signed enthusiastically—then dumped, as their own publishers mysteriously failed to market them, or even properly distribute them. But it has mainly been the press that stamps out inconvenient books, either by ignoring them, or—most often—laughing them off as conspiracy theory, despite their soundness (or because of it).

    Once out of print, those books are gone. Even if some few of us have not forgotten them, and one might find used copies here and there, these books have disappeared. Missing from the shelves and never mentioned in the press (and seldom mentioned even in our schools), each book thus neutralized might just as well have been destroyed en masse—or never written in the first place, for all their contribution to the public good.

    III

    The purpose of this series is to bring such vanished books to life—first life for those that never saw the light of day, or barely did, and second life for those that got some notice, or even made a splash, then slipped too quickly out of print, and out of mind.

    These books, by and large, were made to disappear, or were hastily forgotten, not because they were too lewd, heretical, or unpatriotic for some touchy group of citizens. These books sank without a trace, or faded fast, because they tell the sort of truths that Madison and Jefferson believed our Constitution should protect—truths that the people have the right to know, and needs to know, about our government and other powers that keep us in the dark.

    Thus the works on our Forbidden Bookshelf shed new light—for most of us, it’s still new light—on the most troubling trends and episodes in US history, especially since World War II: America’s broad use of former Nazis and ex-Fascists in the Cold War; the Kennedy assassinations, and the murders of Martin Luther King Jr., Orlando Letelier, George Polk, and Paul Wellstone; Ronald Reagan’s Mafia connections, Richard Nixon’s close relationship with Jimmy Hoffa, and the mob’s grip on the NFL; America’s terroristic Phoenix Program in Vietnam, US support for South America’s most brutal tyrannies, and CIA involvement in the Middle East; the secret histories of DuPont, ITT, and other giant US corporations; and the long war waged by Wall Street and its allies in real estate on New York City’s poor and middle class.

    The many vanished books on these forbidden subjects (among others) altogether constitute a shadow history of America—a history that We the People need to know at last, our country having now become a land with billionaires in charge, and millions not allowed to vote, and everybody under full surveillance. Through this series, we intend to pull that necessary history from the shadows at long last—to shed some light on how America got here, and how we might now take it somewhere else.

    Mark Crispin Miller

    Introduction

    For Tony Judt

    Like the vast majority of American Jews of his generation, I. F. Stone was not, originally, a Zionist. Born in Philadelphia to Russian immigrants in December 1907, Isidor Feinstein—as he was then named—grew up in a Yiddish-speaking household, only learning English after a disastrous attempt at "talking mame-loshen" to his kindergarten classmates during a brief stay in Richmond, Indiana. His parents kept kosher, and sent Izzy and his brothers to cheder to prepare for their bar mitzvahs, but their promised land was America, not Palestine.

    Nothing he saw changed that. Not even the rising tide of domestic anti-Semitism that in 1937 led Feinstein—then the chief editorial writer for the New York Post and a frequent contributor to both the Nation and the New Republic—to change his name. Stone was a supporter of the New Deal, Fiorello La Guardia, and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), and by the late 1930s his passion and his politics could best be summed up by the term antifascism. At the Post, Stone’s support for the Spanish Republic got the paper banned by the Catholic archdiocese; his insistence that America would have to go to war to stop Hitler eventually got him fired.

    Moving to Washington, DC, as a correspondent for the Nation, Stone also joined PM, the legendary left-wing tabloid that introduced America to Dr. Spock and Dr. Seuss, as columnist and star reporter. His exposés of war profiteering and unpreparedness on the home front brought plaudits from Senator Harry Truman, who called Stone’s book Business as Usual (1941) absolutely essential. After Franklin D. Roosevelt’s death, Stone returned the favor, assuring PM readers that the new president was a good man, an honest man, a devoted man. Yet when the paper sent Stone to San Francisco in May 1945 to cover the opening of the United Nations, he worried that too many of the delegates were already focused on the next war—between the United States and the Soviet Union.

    It was at the San Francisco conference that Stone made his first contacts with the Zionist movement, spending hours in conversation with Gershon Agronsky, editor of the Palestine Post, Eliahu Elath, representative of the Jewish Agency, and Jesse Zel Lurie*, director of American Friends of Haganah. Encouraged by his new friends to come and see for himself, Stone made his first visit to Palestine—also his first trip outside the United States—in October 1945. He was immediately captivated by what he saw: the whiteness of the buildings [in Jerusalem], the stone and stucco cleanliness, the streets crowded with folk of every kind—Chassidic Jews with ear locks and fur hats, European Jews, some obviously German with horn-rimmed specs; dignified town Arabs with red tarbooshes; country Arabs with flowing kaffiyeh head dress and desert robes; monks in cowls and Ethiopian Christian prelates in tall, black hats, like magi. And everywhere peace.

    In Palestine, he wrote, a Jew can be a Jew. Period. Without apologies, without any lengthy argument as to whether Jews are a race, a religion, a myth, or an accident. He need explain to no one, and he feels profoundly at home; I am quite willing to attribute this to historic sentimentality but it remains nonetheless a tremendous and unescapable fact.

    Touring the Yishuv, the Jewish settlement, Stone was dazzled by the accomplishments of the young men and women of the Jewish colonies … the grandest young folk I have ever met. But he remained clear sighted enough to notice that the country was already inhabited by more than a million Arabs for whom Palestine is their home. They love their country. Any equitable and lasting solution to the Palestine problem must take these Arabs and their feelings into account.

    Warning that in all his travels he did not find a single Arab who favored a Jewish state, nor a single Jew who claimed to know one, Stone was "painfully impelled to disagree with majority opinion in the Yishuv favoring statehood. As for his new Zionist friends, they have been carrying on a campaign in America based on half-truths."

    His conclusions gave him no pleasure: I am a Jew. I fell in love with Palestine. I want desperately to help the homeless of Central Europe to find a home there. … I do not blame them for refusing to accept minority status in an Arab state. … But equally I do not blame the Arabs of Palestine for fighting against minority status in a Jewish state.¹

    Instead of a single Jewish state, Stone favored a binational state inside a broader Arab federation, which would provide a home to Jews who wanted to leave Europe while allowing the land’s Arab inhabitants to retain their own religious, civil, and political rights without either people dominating the other. Such an approach, he admitted, was not what most Jews wanted—and Palestinian Arabs were even more opposed. It was, however, the only just solution, he insisted.

    He never really changed his mind. Not in 1946, when a phone call to the press gallery at Hunter College in the Bronx, at the time the home of the UN Security Council, sent him on the journey that gives this book its title. Summoned by a Haganah contact to meet a group of young Jewish Americans recruited to serve as crew aboard a ship smuggling refugees to Palestine as part of the illegal Aliyah Bet, Stone surprised them—and himself—by volunteering to go along on the voyage. Reluctantly he agreed to wait until the ships—a pair of rusty corvettes bought as scrap from the Canadian navy and renamed the Josiah Wedgewood and the Haganah—reached Europe, which gave him time to inform his wife, Esther, and their children, as well as his editor at PM. Told after a week of waiting in London that the ship was subject to unforeseen delays, he boarded the Orient Express for Munich, where he and a colleague from PM drove to Nuremberg in time to hear Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz, tell the tribunal that he always knew when the people in the gas chambers had died because they stopped screaming.

    Stone’s first attempt to travel underground to Palestine nearly ended in disaster when a police captain in Savona, Italy, notified the British authorities that he had seized a ship loaded with Jews. Only some quick thinking by Stone, Ada Sereni (described in the book simply as Mrs. A.- … my Italian translator, but actually a veteran operative in the Aliyah Bet and the widow of Enzo Sereni, who had parachuted behind German lines for the British and been executed at Dachau), and Yehuda Arazi (whom Stone calls a man known locally as Phil, but who was also the highest ranking Jewish agent in Italy—with a price on his head for his role in confiscating five thousand rifles from the British for the Haganah) allowed the ship to depart—without I. F. Stone.

    Researching Stone’s biography I found Sereni and Arazi’s accounts of the episode in the Haganah archives and realized that his version—the version in this book—downplayed his own heroism. But then the things he’d seen and heard on his way to the ship—in the courtroom in Nuremberg, but also riding with a trainload of refugees from Poland to Bratislava—transformed Stone. My parents were born in Russia, he wrote. Had they not emigrated … I might have gone to the gas chambers in Eastern Europe. I might have been a DP, ragged and homeless like those with whom I traveled. No longer a newspaperman merely in search of a good story, he had come to see himself as a kinsman, fulfilling a moral obligation to [his] brothers.

    In June 1946 Stone boarded the Haganah in Sete, west of Marseille, eventually landing in Haifa on July 2. His account of the journey, and of his adventures in Europe, made front-page news back in New York. It also cost him his job at the Nation, where his editor didn’t take kindly to being left in the dark about the nature of Stone’s absence. Published in book form in January 1947, Underground to Palestine got rave reviews from the New York Times, the Post, and the Herald Tribune. Albert Einstein called Stone a genuine artist who described what he saw and lived through. The book made Stone, who was already well known, famous. And it would have made him rich. A favored speaker to Jewish groups across the country, Stone was taken to lunch by friends in the Zionist movement and offered a lavish publicity campaign to put the book across.

    There was just one condition. There was one sentence, I was told … that had to come out. In its entirety, the offending sentence read: I myself would like to see a bi-national Arab-Jewish state made of Palestine and Trans-Jordan, the whole to be part of a Middle Eastern Semitic Federation. Stone refused to delete it. Recalling the events thirty years later, he wrote: That ended the luncheon and, in a way, the book.

    Stone’s dispatches from May 1948, when he flew to Tel Aviv aboard the same plane as Col. David Mickey Marcus, the former US Army Ranger who’d volunteered to help organize the Israel Defense Force, are silent on the question of a binational state. Arriving just in time to witness David Ben Gurion proclaim Israel’s independence, Stone soon found himself scared and helpless in a ditch in the Negev, under fire from the Egyptian air force. Invited by Marcus to join the night crews working, again under fire, to build a Burma Road carrying supplies into a besieged Jerusalem, Stone was the first correspondent to reach the city after the ceasefire. I learned in Israel, he wrote proudly, what men … once learned at Lexington—not to scare easily. But his jubilation was tempered by the sight of a jeep carrying the casket of Marcus, who had been shot in error after failing to understand a Hebrew-speaking sentry’s demand for a password.

    Stone’s vivid battlefield reportage—for the New Republic, PM, and its successor paper, the New York Star—forms the basis for This Is Israel, a handsomely produced coffee-table book with famed photographer Robert Capa’s arresting images and Stone’s text. Hitler and the crematoriums, he wrote, made the Jewish people everywhere Zionist. We can see the shift in Stone’s text, where the Arabs feature only as adversaries on the battlefield, a fearsome Goliath whose supposedly overwhelming numerical superiority was bravely overcome by David’s modern-day descendants. Ill-armed, outnumbered, however desperate their circumstances, the Jews stood fast. The Arabs very early began to run away, Stone wrote, in many cases abandoning homes and fields out of sheer fright without attack.

    We would have to wait forty years for Benny Morris, Avi Shlaim, Tom Segev, and the rest of the Israeli New Historians to demolish the myth of Arab flight—and to reveal the near parity of the two sides’ armed forces. But Stone, who reported from Israel at least once a year from 1945 to 1951, when the State Department demanded he surrender his passport (Stone refused, but didn’t get his passport renewed for another five years), could only maintain a prudent silence for so long. Though he had been in Israel at the time of the Deir Yassin massacre, the name of the village appears in none of his dispatches from 1948. A year later, however, he described the Palestinian village as a place where Arabs were massacred by Irgunists with Biblical ferocity; a shameful page in the history of the Jewish war of liberation.²

    Not that Stone ever felt detached from Israel’s fate. Indeed he very nearly became an Israeli himself, insisting after 1948 that his two sons learn Hebrew and on a visit with his adult daughter, Celia, in 1950, confiding that given the political climate in America he was considering emigrating. Father was afraid American intellectuals were going to be put in concentration camps, Celia told me.

    Instead the Stone family spent that year near Paris, in Jouy-en-Josas, at the former home of Leon Blum, before returning to face the Red Scare and launch I. F. Stone’s Weekly—a period that, though Stone never knew it, included daily FBI surveillance of him and his family, having his garbage rummaged through and his mail opened, and, for a period of several months, a full-scale espionage investigation that ended only when J. Edgar Hoover concluded that Stone really did have nothing to hide. Or as Stone explained when, years later, he was asked how he survived the McCarthy period without ever being subpoenaed or hauled up before some congressional committee: Like Gypsy Rose Lee, I was taking it off every week. There was nothing left to expose.

    No sooner did Stone get his new passport, thanks partly to his brother-in-law Leonard Boudin’s victory in Kent v. Dulles establishing the right to travel, than he was once again bound for Israel. Arriving at Nahal Oz, a kibbutz northeast of the Gaza Strip, in April 1956, he reported on the Egyptian bombardment and Israeli retaliation. He knew what he was asking was immensely difficult—a challenge … worthy of Isaiah’s people—but he saw only one way to break the cycle: The road to peace lies through the Arab refugee camp.³ (This was also the trip when Stone, an admirer of the Soviet experiment right up to the Hitler-Stalin pact and a sympathetic fellow traveler of the American Communist party for a while longer, made his first visit to Moscow, where he famously declared: This is not a good society and it is not led by honest men.)

    He still instinctively took Israel’s side. When the Jewish state joined Britain and France in seizing the Suez Canal in October 1956 he hailed England’s declaration of independence from US foreign policy, adding cynically, if the deed were done, ’twere well—as Lady MacBeth said—if it were done quickly. If Nasser could be toppled before the other Arab States join in the melee … peace might be patched up. Within a week, however, he repented:

    Because so many bonds attach me to Israel, I am ready to condone preventative war; I rejoiced when my side won. Though I preach international understanding and support for the UN, I found all the excuses for Israel that warring nationalisms always find. …

    Israel’s survival seemed worth the risk to world peace. And this is how it always is and how it starts, and I offer up the mote in my own eye. ⁴

    He would never again stifle his conviction, as he wrote just days after Israel’s swift and brilliant military victory in June 1967, that the country’s finest day will be the day it achieves reconciliation with the Arabs. His prophetic suggestion that the key to any settlement was to find new homes for the Arab refugees, some within Israel, some outside it, was disregarded, along with his equally prophetic comment that from 1948 to 1967 Arab refugees have been carrying on a sit-down strike for 19 years on Israel’s borders. Now the sit-down strikers are inside.⁵

    Writing later that year in response to a special issue of Les Temps Modernes edited by Claude Lanzmann and dedicated to le conflit israélo-arabe, Stone called for a reexamination of Zionist ideology lest the Jews succumb to the moral imbecility [that] marks all ethnocentric movements. The Others are always either less than human, and thus their interests may be ignored, or more than human, and therefore so dangerous that it is right to destroy them. The latter is the underlying pan-Arab attitude toward the Jews; the former is Zionism’s basic attitude toward the Arabs. Instead Stone urged a return to Zionism of Achad Ha’am, Martin Buber, and Judah Magnes, "who tried to preach Ichud, ‘unity,’ with the Arabs, though he had little hope his message would be heard, especially since the U.S. press is so overwhelmingly pro-Zionist."⁶

    Stone’s candor—and his increasingly vocal defense of Palestinian rights—made him some bitter enemies. In 1964, as the New Left generation of antiwar activists began to look for trustworthy sources of information, a young Harvard lecturer named Martin Peretz assured the readers of Dissent that Stone, though a radical with an old-fashioned faith, had not permitted his pages to serve as an intellectual pastorate for oppression. It wouldn’t take long for the New Republic, which Peretz bought in 1974, to attack Stone for his PLO apologetics or for Peretz himself to accuse Stone of asking his admirers to put up money so the PLO can continue to fight. Nor did the enmity end with Stone’s life. By 2009—nearly twenty years after his death—Peretz, disregarding his own youthful certainty, declared, that [Stone] lied for the tyrants is unquestionable.⁷

    And though Stone was probably impervious to his enemies, his friends could still wound him. Michael Blankfort, a friend since their undergraduate days at the University of Pennsylvania, sent him a long letter attacking his position on Israel after the Six Day War. When the New York Review of Books published Stone’s essay War for Oil? in February 1975, the philosopher Isaiah Berlin, whose friendship Stone particularly cherished, wrote a four-page letter comparing Stone’s argument with those used by [Charles] Lindbergh … when he warned the Jews against inciting America into war.

    Though Stone eventually repaired his friendships with both men, he continued to speak out in warning that Israel’s refusal to relax its grip on the occupied territories—a policy that has only grown more persistent—would ultimately cost the country its Jewish identity and its Jewish soul. More unusually, he remained a vocal advocate of justice for the Palestinians—and of the essential humanity of their cause—for the rest of his life.

    In the 1973 documentary I. F. Stone’s Weekly, he tells his wife, Esther, Honey, I’m going to graduate from a pariah to a character, and then if I last long enough I’ll be regarded as a national institution. He lasted long enough, with the film playing no small part in his rehabilitation from dangerous radical to patron saint of investigative journalism. Though his enemies continue to question his judgment, his honesty, and his patriotism, Stone, who has a journalism medal with his name and face on it bestowed annually by the Nieman Foundation at Harvard, and other prizes named after him elsewhere, now seems unimpeachably respectable.

    Which is more than can be said for his views on the Middle East. In October 2003 the historian Tony Judt published an essay in the New York Review of Books entitled Israel: The Alternative. He began with an observation: The Middle East peace process is finished. But in his espousal of a binational state Judt soon moved from polemic to prophecy, and although I had not yet finished my biography of Stone, I wrote to Judt, who’d seemed unaware that his argument had antecedents—including in those very same pages—suggesting he would be the ideal person to write an introduction to a collection of Stone’s writings on Israel and Palestine. In other words the very book you now hold in your hands. To my delight Judt responded with interest, but before I could finish American Radical, let alone assemble a suggested table of contents, he was diagnosed with ALS, the disease that cut short his life at the age of sixty-two.

    Like Stone’s essays, Judt’s arguments were dismissed as naive at best, and often as a symptom of Jewish self-hatred or internalized anti-Semitism. Among other consequences of his heresy, Judt was removed from his position as a contributing editor to the New Republic.

    Today, nearly sixty years after I. F. Stone offered up the mote in his own eye, rockets are still falling on Nahal Oz. So perhaps we may at last be allowed to wonder whether Stone, or Judt, or Edward Said, or Noam Chomsky—or any of those who have seen basic injustice as the root of the matter between Israel and the Palestinians—is really so naive after all. If we want history to stop repeating itself in all its blood and futility, we first need to identify alternatives. In that process, as in so many others, the writings of I. F. Stone can serve as an essential guide.

    D. D. Guttenplan

    London

    November 2014

    * Who, amazingly, is still (in the winter of 2014-2015) alive and blogging at zlurie.tumblr.com/!

    ¹ I. F. Stone, Jewry in a Blind Alley, The Nation, November 24, 1945, pp. 543–544.

    ² I. F. Stone, I. F. Stone Reports from Israel, Daily Compass, August 29, 1949, p. 3.

    ³ I. F. Stone’s Weekly, April 30, 1956.

    ⁴ I. F. Stone’s Weekly, November 5 and November 12, 1956.

    ⁵ I. F. Stone’s Weekly, June 12 and June 19; July 3, 1967.

    ⁶ I. F. Stone, Holy War, The New York Review of Books, August 3, 1967.

    ⁷ Martin Peretz, As He Saw It, Dissent, Summer 1964: 368–69; Peretz, I. F. Stone Lied for Tyrants, The New Republic, April 22, 2009.

    Underground to Palestine, 1978 Edition

    A Word in Preface a Generation Later

    The Second World War was like a giant earthquake which uprooted millions of Europeans. One scene I remember brought it all home to me in the autumn of 1945. In the battered railroad yards of Frankfurt-am-Main, I watched some of the worst railroad stock I have ever seen—half-wrecked freight cars and ancient third-class coaches jam-packed with refugees from the extermination camps of Nazi Germany. These were among the lucky few who had escaped starvation and the human furnaces. They exuded a joyful air, despite the grimy tatters they wore. The trains switched, some north, some south, some east, some west. They were going home. Looking on, one felt what the word meant to them. But still in the camps, now dubbed—antiseptically—displaced persons’ camps, were more than 100,000 Eastern and Central European Jews with no homes to return to. These were the other survivors of the Holocaust.

    While the great powers in the newly organized United Nations debated and hesitated, none anxious to add to the ranks of their unemployed by opening their doors to the displaced, these survivors began to move out of the camps in a more or less secret underground to Palestine, and the British mustered a fleet in the Mediterranean to keep them out. This is the account of who they were and what they experienced by the first reporter to travel with these illegal emigrants through the British blockade. Appended to this new edition is the same reporter’s reaction, thirty years later, to the plight and the moral challenge of the Arab refugees created in their wake.

    June 1978

    In Explanation

    This is a story of personal adventure. I was the first newspaperman to travel the Jewish underground in Europe and to arrive in Palestine on a so-called illegal boat. But this is more than the narrative of a journalistic escapade. I am an American and I am also and inescapably—the world being what it is—a Jew. I was born in the United States. My parents were born in Russia. Had they not emigrated at the turn of the century to America, I might have gone to the gas chambers in Eastern Europe. I might have been a DP, ragged and homeless like those with whom I traveled. I did not go to join them as a tourist in search of the picturesque, nor even as a newspaperman merely in search of a good story, but as a kinsman, fulfilling a moral obligation to my brothers. I wanted in my own way, as a journalist, to provide a picture of their trials and their aspirations in the hope that good people, Jewish and non-Jewish, might be moved to help them.

    I have not faked and I have not fictionalized except to hide the names of persons and places. I have not glossed over the unpleasant. My comrades of the voyage would be dishonored by anything less than the truth. I hope that, however inadequately, I may also have provided a record of some value to history. The clandestine exodus of the Jews from postwar Europe is the greatest in the history of a wandering people—greater than the exodus from Egypt or from Spain—because their sufferings under Hitler were greater than any our ancestors ever underwent before. We know comparatively little of the emigration from Egypt or of what went on aboard those tragic ships out of Spain which Columbus may have passed in 1492 on his way to a new world. This narrative may fill a humble gap in the annals of the current emigration. It was a privilege to take part in that emigration. I only wish I had the power to portray what I saw against the background of the world situation today. The plight of the Jews may be a minor affair. But world indifference to that plight is of spiritual significance for the future of us all.

    I can only record as a reporter what I saw and heard, traveling with the least fortunate but the bravest of my people.

    —April, 1946

    Summons to Adventure

    1

    I was in the press gallery at Hunter College in the Bronx when the call came. It was April, 1946. The Security Council of the United Nations was in session. The floodlighted scene below me seemed unreal, like the setting for a play—perhaps a play about the fumbling of the peace. Sir Alexander Cadogan, Britain’s representative at that horseshoe-shaped council table—a small man, dapper and correct—was making a professionally astringent argument designed to prevent action against Franco. An usher tapped me on the shoulder and said I was wanted on the phone.

    The interruption was not so irrelevant as it seemed at first. In Sir Alexander’s subtle apologetics for a Fascist dictator, I had seen one aspect of the Empire’s postwar policy. I was soon to see another. When I picked up the phone in one of the booths in the big press room in the basement, I heard the voice of an American I had met the preceding November in Palestine.

    How would you like to meet some boys who volunteered to serve as seamen for the illegal immigration? he asked me. Neither of us realized on what a journey that question was to send me.

    Of course I was interested. I had reason to believe that the man who phoned me was in close touch with the leaders of the Haganah, the Jewish people’s militia of Palestine. I had heard many stories of its exploits during the war, when the Haganah directed underground rescue work in Hitler Europe. In April, 1946, a year after the liberation, the Haganah was back at much the same job, though under altered circumstances. The cruelty of the Nazis had given way to the indifference of the victors; the concentration camps had become DP camps. The Jews in them were still homeless.

    Earl Harrison of Philadelphia had returned eight months before from a special tour of these camps to report at the White House, We seem to be treating the Jews as the Nazis treated them, except that we do not exterminate them. President Truman had asked the British government to open the doors of Palestine to the 100,000 Jews in the displaced persons’ camps of Germany and Austria before winter came, but the only result was an Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry. It was spring and the committee had yet to make its report. A trickle of 1500 a month was entering Palestine legally under the limited immigration quota granted by the British, but the one hope of the rest was still the Aliyah Beth.

    Aliyah is a Hebrew word which may be translated as immigration, though its connotations are richer. Literally, the word means an up-going, as to a high place; its associations are those of the pilgrimage. Beth in this context means second, and distinguishes this immigration from the one allowed by the British. Aliyah Beth is the Palestinian term for what the British call the illegal immigration; the difference goes deeper than terminology.

    This is a subject on which the British do not see eye to eye with the Jews. The Colonial Office looks back to the White Paper of 1939. Under its terms the doors of Palestine should be shut tight against further Jewish immigration. But to the Jews Palestine is still—as in the Bible—Eretz Israel, the land of Israel. To them the British are another of those historic vexations like the Assyrians and the Romans. From the Jewish point of view the White Paper is a violation of the Balfour Declaration; the whole affair—the 1917 promise and the 1939 breaking of it—a bit of latter-day presumption. For is it not written, of an older covenant with Abraham, And He said unto him, I am the Lord that brought thee out of Ur of the Chaldees, to give thee this land to inherit it.… Unto thy seed have I given this land?

    This may, indeed, be theological nonsense and stubborn Jewish foolishness. Mr. Bevin and the gentlemen of the Foreign Office and the Colonial Office may be right in dismissing it as such. But the Jews have been that way for a long time; they were that way long before there was a Britain; unconsciously they feel that way today.

    I set all this down at the beginning of my story so that the reader will understand that when my American friend referred to the illegal immigration he did so only as a matter of convenience and that when he warned that the visit he suggested must be kept highly confidential, it was not as though he spoke of something shameful or furtive.

    I said, Call me back in fifteen minutes. I phoned my managing editor.

    John, I pleaded, "please let me have the rest of the day off for an expedition of my own. I may

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