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LESSONS OF A WEIMAR ANTI-FASCIST IN PALESTINE  
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Barry Yourgrau
September 3, 2024
The Nation
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_ After my father fled Nazi Germany in 1933, he witnessed a toxic new
nationalism rising among Jews in Palestine—and was silenced for
trying to warn of its dangers. _

Before exile: Wolfgang Yourgrau, still in his 20s, enjoys the life of
a young intellectual in Weimar Germany. Inset: Yourgrau’s entry
health certificate to Palestine shows him in formal attire., All
images in this story are courtesy of the author unless otherwise
noted.

 

_THIS ARTICLE APPEARS IN THE SEPTEMBER 2024 ISSUE
[[link removed]] OF THE
NATION, WITH THE HEADLINE “A WEIMAR ANTI-FASCIST IN PALESTINE.”_

On April 1, 1933, the day of the Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses, my
father, Wolfgang Yourgrau, then 24 years old, was attacked by a group
of storm troopers in a Berlin shop. He fought back furiously (he was a
university boxer) but was badly beaten. Through almost grotesque luck,
he managed to recover from his injuries and avoid arrest—hiding out
at a gynecological sanatorium for Nazi ladies run by an old
girlfriend. After more furtive weeks in Berlin, my father, an
assimilated Jew and a vocal anti-fascist who would later become an
internationally known physicist and philosopher, left Germany and the
collapsed Weimar Republic on a forged passport. From 1934 to 1948, he
found refuge in Palestine under the British Mandate—not as a Zionist
but as a political exile.

The story of his bloody Nazi brawl and high-adventure escape was part
of the familial lore as I was growing up in 1960s Denver, where my
father taught at the university. It headlined the miscellany of juicy
tidbits from his Berlin life that he’d recite in our Rocky Mountain
living room, his mood mellowed by a glass of pink gin, and which I’d
welcome hazily as highlights from his heroic age of yore, along with
tales of his student times under Albert Einstein and Erwin
Schrödinger.

For her part, my mother, Thella, a Jew from South Africa who had
migrated to Palestine in the 1930s, not under duress, was fond of
retelling how in 1946 she was working as a secretary at the British
Army offices in Jerusalem’s King David Hotel when the building and
its occupants were dynamited by Zionist terrorists. Forty-one Arabs
and 17 Jews were among the 91 killed. By sheer luck, my mother was off
that day, at the beach.

My father had his own unnerving brush with Zionist terror in
pre-Israel Palestine, though he never brought it up. During his time
there, he published
[[link removed]] a
controversial German-language political and cultural weekly
called _Orient_, which, though quixotic and short-lived, is
recognized as part of the German exile press—newspapers and
magazines of German-speaking exiles who had fled Hitler, including the
likes of Thomas Mann and Bertolt Brecht. A distinctive outpost of this
press in Palestine, _Orient_ offers a fascinating window into the
forces already stirring there, as well as the travails of some of its
German Jewish refugees. After almost a year of being the target of
constant hostility from a wide spectrum of the _yishuv_ (the
community of Jews in Palestine before Israel’s 1948
founding), _Orient_ was finally silenced when a bomb blew its print
shop to pieces.

Unpopular opinions: Two of the 45 issues of the German-language
journal Orient, published by Wolfgang Yourgrau.

I learned all this only long after my father died, while I was
researching my memoir, _Mess_, a decade ago. Digging further in the
appalling wake of October 7, I’ve come to the acute realization that
the story of my father’s exile and his milieu is a cautionary tale,
one that evokes a dark, internecine version of the currents swirling
toward Israel’s birth, currents that have swept through the decades
to today’s horrors in Gaza and the West Bank. And it undercuts any
consoling narrative that nationalist Zionism’s embrace of—even
devotion to—ruthless force became visible to Jews only recently, or
that Palestine’s Jews were united behind the brand of Zionism that
was bent on establishing a Jewish nation-state; on the contrary, there
were dissenters from the earliest days, and they were not just scorned
but too often viciously punished.

In this context, my father’s relentless insistence that fascism and
toxic nationalism could arise anywhere, among Zionists too, is a
starkly urgent lesson, an alarm that’s blaring right now, in Israel
and, eerily, even in Germany, with its stifling of pro-Palestinian
voices. “The totalitarian specter is…wreaking havoc in the Jewish
camp,” my father wrote at the turn of 1943. “Grab it by the throat
wherever you meet it,” he implored.

A day in the life of Palestine: Palestinian men sell their goods and
survey each other’s wares on a street in Nazareth, circa 1935.
(Staff/ Mirrorpix / Getty Images)

My father was born in 1908 and grew up in Berlin as the only child of
a nonobservant Jewish mother and a father he always described as a
Belgian Catholic. (He was, I discovered only recently, an Ashkenazi
Jew from Grozny, Chechnya, who resided in Belgium from 1914 until his
death, converting to Catholicism at some point.) My father’s parents
divorced dramatically when he was a year old, and my grandfather
departed the scene. My father spent long stretches in the company of
three maternal uncles, all married to gentile women and all German
nationalists, like many German Jews were at the time. As a boy, my
father passionately followed suit. In gymnasium, or high school, a
charismatic teacher ignited in him a never-extinguished devotion
to _bildung_, the idea of morally ennobling culture and education, of
which Germans held themselves supreme exemplars, with Goethe, Kant,
Hegel, Heine, Bach, and so on. This devotion was particularly fervent
for the German Jewish intelligentsia, which Amos Elon so eloquently
records in his elegiac history _The Pity of It All_. Their “true
home…was not ‘Germany’ but German culture and language,” Elon
writes. When Vienna’s Theodor Herzl, the father of political
Zionism, needed refreshing while writing (in German) his seminal
text, _The Jewish State_, he listened to Wagner.

As Weimar’s efflorescence reached full bloom, my father immersed
himself deep and wide. The University of Berlin occupied the center of
the physics universe; he became a teaching assistant of the worldly
Schrödinger and a student and somewhat friend of Einstein, with whom
he sat in on cello several times in the string quartet in which
Einstein played violin. He was involved in theatrical productions and
corresponded with Herman Hesse. And he socialized often with the
wealthy crowd of his gentile cousins.

At the same time, he led a double life. Deeply stirred by the other
face of Weimar—the economic ravages, the looming shadow of
Nazism—he was already a committed socialist and anti-fascist, an
early member of Willy Brandt’s small left-wing party. He taught
evening classes to workers, and to help cover his university fees, he
found jobs on Berlin’s tough building construction crews. He took a
leave from his doctoral studies to travel around giving speeches whose
theme was “fascism means war.”

Then came the attack by the storm troopers and his flight from
Germany—first to Latvia, then to Poland, where my father continued
his anti-Nazi warnings, only to be taken for a communist and told to
leave by the authorities. He declined trying for asylum in Belgium
(where he would be drafted) or the Soviet Union (he wasn’t a
communist) or the United States (he was doubtful of its anti-fascist
commitment). Other options were limited by entry restrictions.
Finally, with the aid of the prominent Zionist Robert Weltsch, my
father, a young man of Weimar and Berlin, arrived in Palestine,
wrenched from his homeland, in 1934.

At the time, Palestine was administered by Britain under a mandate
from the League of Nations. That mandate, in line with the terms of
the Balfour Declaration of 1917, required the establishment of “a
national home for the Jewish people” (“national home” not
precisely defined)—without harming the rights of the resident Arabs.
It was a tumultuous moment. As Jews fled Nazism and antisemitism in
Central Europe, pouring into a land that was more than 75 percent
Arab, my father arrived in a world that was a welter of competing
drives and nationalisms.

Zionism itself was riven by rival factions and visions, from the Labor
Zionism of David Ben-Gurion, which represented the _yishuv_’s
dominant ideology, to the Revisionist Zionism of Ze’ev Jabotinsky,
an Odessa-born admirer of Mussolini, who in 1923 called for an “iron
wall” of force as the only way to accomplish the Zionist project.
Barred from Palestine by the British in 1930, Jabotinsky was a
cofounder and head of such illegal paramilitary organizations as the
Haganah, forerunner of the Israel Defense Forces, and the Irgun, the
outfit responsible for the King David Hotel terror bombing and
the 1948 Deir Yassin massacre
[[link removed]].
Another rogue player was the fanatical Stern Gang, which carried out
terrorist acts against the British and Arabs, including at Deir
Yassin. Other Zionist visions at the time included the religious
Zionism of the Latvian-born Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, who argued for a
messianic Jewish “return” to the Holy Land; his son would later
galvanize members of the settler movement that has been ravaging the
West Bank. And then there was the cultural Zionism of the Viennese
philosopher Martin Buber and others, who envisioned a
cultural/spiritual Jewish homeland in a binational state with Arabs.

As the Zionist presence swelled, Palestine’s indigenous Arabs nursed
their own national aspirations, along with growing alarm at what they
understood to be the intensifying colonial ambitions of the Jewish
population, to say nothing of the enduring grip of British imperial
rule. This culminated in the Great Arab Revolt of 1936 to ‘39—“a
popular uprising, on a massive scale,” in the words of the historian
Rashid Khalidi—which the British suppressed with overwhelming force,
killing at least 5,000 Palestinian Arabs. All the while, the various
Zionist paramilitaries ratcheted up their attacks on the British—and
the Arabs and other Jews—with bouts of terrorism.

A history of violence: The bombed-out shell of the King David Hotel,
which was targeted by the Irgun in June 1946. (HUM Images / Universal
Images Group via Getty Images)

Such was the world my father discovered when he arrived in Palestine,
but with one additional, complicating twist particular to his
condition as an immigrant from Germany. Before 1933, the _yishuv_’s
numbers from Germany, where Zionism had a weak following, were a scant
few thousand. By 1939, when immigration to Palestine was severely
throttled by the British, some 60,000 German speakers had poured in
during the so-called Fifth Aliyah (wave of immigration to Palestine),
a great flood of some 250,000 Jews overall, most from Eastern Europe.
Not zealots eager to construct a Zionist entity in the heat and dust,
the Germans stood out as predominantly middle-class, well-educated
refugees rushing for shelter. “They became displaced
persons,” writes the scholar Yonatan Shiloh-Dayan
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“in the sense that they neither belonged to their homelands nor to
their new host society.”

The result was an ongoing multifaceted cultural tension. For one
thing, as noted by Max Brod, Kafka’s Prague friend and a Zionist,
“The real need was for young and vigorous people: pioneers, men of
action, engineers, tractor drivers, chicken farmers, loggers and
herdsmen.” The influx of German money was welcome. But intellectuals
were not in demand.

My father’s entry documents listed his profession as “builder.”
No mention of _bildung_.

Moreover, most of Palestine’s Zionists were Eastern European Jews,
notoriously scorned as backward others by their arrogant German
brethren. In Palestine, the shoe was painfully on the other foot. The
new arrivals were derisively nicknamed _Yekkes_, most likely from the
German word for “jacket,” a reference to their hopelessly
out-of-place formal manner and dress. Fittingly, the photo on my
father’s entry health certificate showed him in black tie.

And then there was the burning issue of language. The Zionists
insisted on Hebrew as the language of the _yishuv_ and resented and
despised the use of German—likewise Yiddish, for that matter. The
aim was for a new model of Jew: a bold and forceful Jew, a proud Jew
proudly speaking and writing the ancestral tongue.

Sowing terror: A bus destroyed by a bomb that was set off by the
Irgun, killing 11 Palestinians and two British constables. (Universal
History Archive / Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

In an essay titled “my life in Germany before and after January 30,
1933
[[link removed]],”
which my father submitted to a competition sponsored by Harvard in
1940, he wrote (in German) from Tel Aviv that he was lecturing at the
local Histadrut, the powerful Zionist labor union, “on questions
around the Middle East” and contributing to an anti-fascist
journal-in-exile in Europe. He was also finishing a book, “a
scientific and critical” appraisal of Zionism.

The book on Zionism doesn’t seem to have materialized. In 1942,
however, my father suddenly got the opportunity for a “critical
appraisal” by acquiring the publishing permit of a German-language
weekly called _Orient_, whose name he had to retain. My father
became _Orient_’s publisher, editor, and editorial writer. Over its
turbulent and erratic 38-issue life, it would always be produced by
the seat of the pants—sometimes partly hectographed, not formally
printed—its funding ever uncertain. Its pages, my father explained
in the magazine’s first issue
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were intended for those for whom learning Hebrew would remain an
“unattainable goal” during the war. _Orient_ would be a
“tribune” for “factual contributions” regarding Palestine’s
problems as well as international affairs and culture. While others in
his exile milieu were just biding their time until returning to
Europe, he was actively engaging with his situation.

The model for_ Orient_ was the Weimar era’s iconic anti-fascist
leftist weekly _Die Weltbühne_ (_The World Stage_) and its fearless
martyred editor, Carl von Ossietzky. The Nazis arrested von
Ossietzky—a prominent pacifist, as well as a gentile—the morning
after the Reichstag fire in 1933 and shut down his publication. He
received the 1935 Nobel Peace Prize
[[link removed]] while
imprisoned in a concentration camp, thanks to an international
campaign to give him the award as a way to help encourage his release.
The honor was short-lived: Broken by torture, von Ossietzky died in
1938.

To fill the role of _Orient’_s figurehead co-editor and its marquee
main contributor, my father enlisted Arnold Zweig, a _Die
Weltbühne _veteran and a friend of von Ossietzky as well as Brecht
and other notables. A German Jew, Zweig was a well-known Weimar
literary figure and the author of the internationally acclaimed 1927
anti-war novel _The Case of Sergeant Grischa_. Some 20 years older
than my father, he was a pacifist, socialist, and great advocate of
psychoanalysis; he and Freud were warm correspondents. Unlike my
father, Zweig was also a longtime cultural Zionist—though with
diminishing ardor—who in 1920 had collaborated with the illustrator
Hermann Struck on _The Face of Eastern European Jewry_, an effort to
convey to German Jews the poignant humanity of their Lithuanian
brethren, the scorned _Ostjuden_.

In 1933, Zweig watched from the crowd as his books were burned in
Berlin’s Opera Square. He left Germany at once, reaching Palestine
in 1933.

He arrived joylessly. Two years earlier, he’d published a novel
inspired by the notorious 1924 assassination—by Zionists—of Jacob
de Haan, a prominent gay, anti-Zionist, religious Jew
[[link removed]]:
“Palestine’s first political murder,” Zweig called it. It had
profoundly shaken him. “I view the necessity of living here among
the Jews without enthusiasm,” he wrote to Freud from Haifa,
“without any false hopes and even without the desire to scoff.” He
would become increasingly miserable, alienated from Zionist
nationalism and Jewish life in Palestine—and deeply resented and
sidelined for using German and refusing to learn Hebrew.

The other prominent sometime _Orient_ and former _Die
Weltbühne_ contributor was the Expressionist poet Else
Lasker-Schüler. This fantastically bohemian German Jewish luminary of
the Berlin scene was now elderly and living hand to mouth in virtual
obscurity in Jerusalem, stranded in exile. My father was helping to
support her. (He was at her bedside when she died in 1945.) A besotted
Hebraic orientalist, Lasker-Schüler wrote in German and declined to
have her poems translated into Hebrew.

“She dreamt Hebrew visions,” a writer noted
in _Commentary_ magazine, “but the only words she could clothe
them in were German.”

Last words: The final issue of Orient was published in April 1943, two
months after a bomb destroyed their printers.

With such a provenance, _Ori__ent_ made its debut in April 1942.

“This Palestine is our fate,” my father declared in his opening
editorial. “Few sought it, many fought it. But you cannot decree a
homeland; you can only shape it with love and reason.” He was
speaking for German Jews’ struggles to adapt and be accepted, but
arguably too for the _yishuv_’s situation overall. With _Die
Weltbühne_–style bite, he then deplored the way the “longing for
Palestine” of “the European Jew” had become the narrow horizon
of Zionist reality, a philistine “clod” of patriotism and
provincialism, dominated by the “almost totalitarian” manner of
its various actors. “We live in the Orient,” he insisted. “Arab
peoples are our neighbors.” Rapprochement was a necessity if any
form of Jewish homeland was to survive there.

He vowed that the magazine would be an independent voice, and he
closed his editorial with a ringing credo: “We declare the fiercest
fight against every fascist impulse, every attempt to restrict the
right to freely form opinions, which is one of the eternal rights of
humanity!”

Brave words.

A subsequent early issue notably swung its exile gaze back toward
Europe, to the lost Jewish world of Viennese culture
[[link removed]].
The writer Stefan Zweig had recently died by suicide in Brazil. My
father memorialized him as an aesthetic “aristocrat”—but faulted
him, with unbending candor, for not being “a fighter…a champion of
the idea of ​​humanity, humanism, culture.” The issue also
featured a eulogy by Arnold Zweig (no relation to Stefan) for his
friend Joseph Roth, whose desperate warnings about Hitler had gone
unheeded, and reprints of Stefan Zweig’s eulogy for Freud; Freud’s
preface to the Hebrew edition of _Totem and Taboo_ (in German);
letters between Freud and Arnold Zweig; and two brief poems by Karl
Kraus, the most caustic of moralists and anti-fascists and a ferocious
guardian of the German language.

Upcoming issues would carry occasional acute assessments of the
war’s developments—without neglecting critiques of
the _yishuv_ Zionists’ “almost totalitarian manner,” such as
their violent dragooning of young Jews into joining the British Army
to fight the Nazis (and gain experience for Zionist purposes in the
process). My father excoriated the “excesses” of the Haganah and
the fascist-styled youth movement Betar (another project of the
Mussolini fan Jabotinsky).

From the start, and notwithstanding its small
circulation, _Orient_ drew heat from all quarters. “People started
a boycott, wrote letters, and wildly agitated against us,” my father
recalled in 1947. “They called us Communists, traitors to Zionism,
and café literati. We were reproached for being a demoralizing
influence, uprooted intellectuals, and
typical _Weltbühne_ people”—insults reminiscent of Nazi
vocabulary, Jean-Michel Palmier noted in his monumental
history, _Weimar in Exile
[[link removed]]_.
Some socialists found the publication insufficiently radical, while
its use of German infuriated, in my father’s words, the “language
fanatics.”

And despite _Orient_’s frequent protests that Western European Jews
were being unfairly sidelined in _yishuv_ politics—“treated as a
foreign, often unpleasant element”—many fellow German arrivals
were also hostile. According to Hans-Albert Walter, an authority on
the literature of exile, German Jews were accustomed to staying
inconspicuous, keeping the peace. _Orient_ was “too political and
too principle-oriented, also too ‘loud’ and too
‘ostentatious.’”

On May 30, 1942, a speech by Arnold Zweig (in German, of course) at
Tel Aviv’s elegant Bauhaus-style Esther Cinema was violently broken
up by members of Betar. Zweig, 54 years old and with failing eyesight,
a man whose books had been burned by the Nazis, was roughed up.

“Today, terror also seems to be the language of the
Jews,” _Orient_ declared in the aftermath
[[link removed]].
Terror by Jews against Jews.

In this hostile climate, with its journalists being assaulted, its
printers and potential advertisers being warned
off, _Orient_ defiantly soldiered on. Zweig wrote a series,
“Antigermanismus
[[link removed]],”
arguing against equating Nazism with Germany’s people and culture.
My father polemicized in support of a binational entity shared by Jews
and Arabs as the only viable and moral solution for
Zionism—seconding the ultimately futile calls of Martin Buber and
Judah Magnes, the American-born Zionist rabbi who founded Hebrew
University. “Would that [Palestine] were large and empty enough to
absorb millions of persecuted, wandering Jews and to be constituted
into a Jewish state!” Magnes wrote in _Foreign Affairs_. “The
fact remains that Palestine is small and it is not empty.” (A later
admirer of Magnes’s “Other Zionism
[[link removed]]” was I.F.
Stone, whose 1946 book _Underground to Palestine_ is an account of a
group of European Holocaust survivors who heroically attempted to
reach the Holy Land by ship. He found himself ostracized in
America, he wrote in 1978
[[link removed]],
for suggesting a binational state.)

“The Arab question is deliberately ignored and the national
aspirations of the Arab people are either trivialized or
obscured,” my father wrote in _Orient_ in late 1942
[[link removed]].
With grim prescience, he added, “It remains the historic achievement
of a small group of intellectuals to have clearly recognized the
political danger zone that this negation of Arab national existence in
Palestine created.” The bold attempt to “transform the national
antagonism into a binational-state consciousness” was bound to fail,
he concluded, because “it would have meant a modification of the
Zionist concept.”

This concept had been starkly expressed that May at the Biltmore
Conference in New York, when David Ben-Gurion called for a Jewish
commonwealth for “historic” Palestine, on both sides of the
Jordan.

By early 1943, my father was again vehemently warning that fascism was
not exclusive to Germany and Italy. “The totalitarian specter
is…wreaking havoc in the Jewish camp,” he wrote in what was to
be _Orient_’s penultimate issue
[[link removed]].
“Grab it by the throat wherever you meet it…. Otherwise we in this
country could be witnesses to the tragicomedy that is causing
amusement among other peoples, that fascism would mature in Palestine
at a time when the liberated nations would bury it.”

My father’s fears were almost immediately confirmed. On the night of
February 2, 1943, a powerful bomb (or bombs) destroyed _Orient_’s
printers in Haifa.

My father never said who he thought was responsible. A US intelligence
report, cited in Thomas Suárez’s book _State of Terror_, ascribed
the bombing only to “extremists.” “In short,” the report
concluded [[link removed]],
“Zionism in Palestine, apart from all its good aspects, has bred a
type of nationalism which in any other country would be stigmatized as
retrograde Nazism.” It was a nationalism that resorted to violence
to get what it wanted, even against its own.

The last issue of _Orient_ appeared
[[link removed]],
very haphazardly printed now in Jerusalem, dated April 7—precisely
10 years and one month after _Die Weltbühne_ was silenced by the
Nazis. Decrying the general “witches’ sabbath,” my father wrote:
“People have accused my co-workers, myself and some of those who
sympathize with this publication of being anti-Zionist…. To this
there can be only one response: whoever…feels in the deepest reaches
of their soul a surge of sympathy, responsibility and self-sacrifice
for this Jewish community, must not remain silent about what has been
happening here in this land for months, no, years. Has anyone still
not noticed how we are gradually degenerating politically and
therefore humanly to such a degree that even a few years ago we would
have thought unimaginable?”

After exile: Wolfgang Yourgrau in his later years, which he dedicated
to the study of philosophy and physics.

After the demise of _Orient_, my father was briefly the editor of
German-language broadcasts for the Mandatory government’s Jerusalem
Radio. In 1944, he was in Cairo working for America’s Office of
Strategic Services, the short-lived precursor to the CIA, producing
“black propaganda” to feed to the German army. Back in Jerusalem,
he returned to academia at the British Council’s School of Higher
Studies.

He and my mother met on VE Day in 1945 and married in 1947, second
marriages for them both. In 1948, right before Israel became a state,
they emigrated to South Africa—or rather, fled practically overnight
from the chaos and gunfire, leaving behind my father’s vast library,
papers, research, and international correspondence in storage at
Hebrew University. These were never recovered.

My father’s life turned for good from politics to academia, a
complete severance. After 11 years in South Africa, where my two
brothers and I were born and where my father taught at various
universities, we moved to the United States. In 1963, my father took a
job at the University of Denver, where he remained until his death in
1979. (Strange to say, Benzion Netanyahu, the father of Bibi—and
personal secretary to Jabotinsky when the latter was in America in
1940—also taught there during some of that time.) He cofounded an
important international physics journal, _Foundations of
Physics _(its current editor is the physicist and best-selling author
Carlo Rovelli), and was close to Karl Popper, championing Popper’s
philosophy of science. In the ’60s, he frequently visited East
Germany to collaborate with fellow physicists. Perhaps he was reunited
there with Arnold Zweig, who left Israel in late 1948 for what would
become the German Democratic Republic, where he was celebrated and
lionized. If they did meet, my father never mentioned it.

In 1970, a circle from his earlier world was closed: My father wrote
one of the five official nomination letters successfully backing Willy
Brandt for the 1971 Nobel Peace Prize. Brandt, when he was a young man
in exile in Norway, had been fervently active in the Nobel Prize
campaign for _Die Weltbühne_’s Carl von Ossietzky.

Which brings me to a complicating coda.

In 1975, the American Jewish Committee Holocaust Project recorded an
interview with my father at his home. He had lost an uncle at
Buchenwald and cousins elsewhere (so I would learn; he never talked
about this either). Listening to the recording a few years ago, I
noted his emphatic reiteration—his voice rising—that fascism could
spring up anywhere under the right conditions. “God forbid America
ever has 10 to 15 percent unemployment!” he said.

Revisiting that interview recently, I was bemused to register his
brief but forthright comment that he’d changed his mind about
Israel.

“I was against its establishment,” he declared. “But now that
Israel has demonstrated its potential…its ability to survive
surrounded by an Arab sea, I must take my hat off in admiration. I am
convinced Israel is here to stay. It must never be allowed to
disappear.”

As for Arnold Zweig, he got in trouble with the East German
authorities for declining, as a celebrated cultural figure, to sign a
petition condemning Israel during the 1967 Arab-Israeli War.

What to make of these expressions of support by _Orient_’s
principals for “plucky Israel” (as the cliché goes) and its
military muscle—muscle that had brought about Israel’s fateful,
calamitous occupation of the West Bank and Gaza? Was it the case of
old men distant from the sharp edges of their bygone struggles and
insights? Zweig was almost 80 in 1967, in grievous health; he would
die a year later. My father was 66 in 1975, suffering from depression
and the heart disease that would kill him in 1979.

I don’t have any context to explain this development. My father
never visited Israel, never expressed any desire to do so, never
talked seriously about Israeli matters. But one possibility I have
considered is that perhaps he and Zweig were affected by a deep and
lingering gratitude to the place that had enabled them to survive.
Despite all they had undergone among the _yishuv_—the pain of
exile, the hostility and violence directed at _Orient_, the larger,
outward-facing violence infecting the society—there, in Palestine,
they avoided the fate of millions of Jews. In a late 1942 editorial
[[link removed]],
my father wrote these words:

We who linked our future to Palestine—in which case the distinction
between Zionists and non-Zionists is insignificant—escaped
destruction. While the Jews of Europe only have one certainty, namely
their unstoppable downfall if the rage of the fascist beast is not
stopped very soon, we, on our Jewish island, are trying to make our
lives normal…. It’s probably no exaggeration when we are
astonished to find that in probably no other country in the world have
people been spared from the bitterness and horrors of war to the
extent that we Jews in the towns and villages of Palestine have been.

Decades on, this paradoxical truth in my father’s story has lingered
not just for those who survived the era but for scores of Jews born to
later generations—forging an allegiance to an idea, and a state,
that has inflicted far worse horrors than the ones my father witnessed
during his time in Palestine. Now, as Israel commits daily atrocities
in Gaza, I hope he would again have made the connection between the
“rage of the fascist beast” in Europe and the carnage of
Israel’s variant today. How could he not?

In that same 1942 editorial, my father wrote: “Officials use such
laconic words to record human tragedies, of our friends and relatives
who fell by the wayside, died in misery or chose suicide…. These
thousands of unfortunate creatures will one day be spoken of when
those responsible are sentenced.”

Here again, my father’s words proved painfully prescient. His
friends and relatives, the millions of “unfortunate creatures” who
died at the Nazis’ hands, _were_ eventually spoken of when some of
those responsible were sentenced. But it took far too long then—just
as it is taking far too long now. The Palestinians slaughtered today,
like the Jews slaughtered 80 years ago, cannot wait for the world to
take action.

_BARRY YOURGRAU is a fiction writer (Wearing Dad’s Head, The
Sadness of Sex), memoirist (Mess), and journalist. His website
is barryyourgrau.com [[link removed]]._

_Copyright c 2024 THE NATION. Reprinted with permission. May not be
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