The world lives in a continuing state of déjà vu. Look around yourself-western colonialism, ethnic subjugation, coloured reporting, hollow statements, and protests (while they continue to be trendy). But what is almost wholly amusing is how the current world stage has turned out to be a tawdry production of the 1998 Hollywood classic: The Truman Show.
The stage is set. The main protagonist is on the stage. He believes he knows, though all is controlled – movements gauged, reactions enticed, with only enough nominal, impotent hope to prevent the very fabric of society from descending into chaos.
There is a saying that goes, “suffering is personal,” alluding to the idea that it is only joy, celebration, and victory that are communal. But tonight, as I find myself sitting here, scribbling across this paper and writing on very said, very heard stories of people treated as lesser children of Adam, I can’t help but stare into a gilded mirror of moral vanity.
The commentary could go on and on, but the bottom line is that the Jewish question was a Western problem.
The fraught silence on the grisly details of human sacrifice, explained under the lurid halo of Western mind-numbing simplicity, if anything, makes any suffering wholly communal. But really, for how long would Truman have continued to be deceived, played, and used, if not for him starting to think, notice, and ask – and eventually escape? The seven decades spent by the West in rebuilding trust with the Global South, through the good-for-nothing prettified UN supplemented by the convenience of international law, does it amount to anything?
Perhaps, best said by Shakespeare in Hamlet, do you think we are easier to be played on than a mere pipe?
Let me take you down your memory lane a little.
It’s 1947. Western colonizers are too weak to stay – owing to the Germans and Japanese. New countries are coming to be. One of which happened to be Pakistan. Another one, a tad bit farther east, across the Jordan River – an earlier British mandate – was Palestine.
It might not sit well with many, but a majority of the persistent issues are a direct result of Western guilt. Even so, a very hypocritical kind of guilt, where the West wanted to absolve itself of any political, social, or economic implications. Thereby exporting the Jewish question, itself to the Arab world.
In its final breaths, the Ottomans tried to bring in a notion of common citizenship by adopting the 1908 constitution. Imagine: a region not divided by religion, but providing equal citizenship for Muslims and non-Muslims, with language as one of the main articulators. It was only when the British mandate set in that a gulf started to encapsulate the entire political ecosystem. For instance, the British framework provided for three official languages: Arabic, English, and Hebrew.
Similarly, the British mandate styled itself in a fashion to set the groundwork for the creation of the State of Israel. It conferred upon the Zionist organization the authority to represent the Jews, and it was perceived as a self-governing body. Whereas the Palestinians were referred to in the negative as “non-Jewish communities.” What is almost wholly amusing is that the Sephardic Jews who were native to the land were critically resentful of the Zionist agenda, as they believed it was creating divisions within the region.
The question of International Law, in its manifestation through the League of Nations, by virtue of which the British were able to create a mandate in the first place, was blatantly disregarded by the British. It had little to no weight, which became crystal clear when the British unilaterally altered their status from military occupiers to civil administrators. It seems that Palestine, in the last hundred years, has always been treated as the legal exception.
With this background, a question has to be asked: could this have been averted?
Or else, an even better question, did the West accept Hitler’s thesis that there was no room for Jews in Europe, as pointed out by Lord Halifax, the United Kingdom’s Ambassador to the United States, to Secretary of State James Byrnes, when his government did not want to put itself “into a position of accepting a Hitler thesis that there is no room for Jews in Europe.” Well, as history stands, there was minimal to no mobilization for Jewish refugees in Britain.
In fact, Britain convened two programs: Westward Ho! and the Balt Cygnet Scheme. With their self-anointed gilded halos, the British motivation for these programs was not to alleviate the Jews of their miseries but to compensate for labour shortages in their agricultural and industrial ventures. What were the British looking for? Healthy and strong Christians. As a matter of fact, David Nasaw, an American historian, recalls in The Last Million: Europe’s Displaced Persons from World War to Cold War that when a London doctor noticed a Latvian man’s blood group tattooed on him, he quickly figured this man, and others like him, to be former members of the S.S. (a Hitler paramilitary organization). Nasaw recounts that the British authorities were quick to act, as the National Coal Board authorized these men to be given jobs that did not require them to take off their shirts.
What truly exposes the West’s moral bankruptcy is the fact that these were not stand-alone occurrences, but part of a deliberate British policy. For instance, Attlee’s foreign secretary, Mr. Ernest Bevin, was afraid that “if the Jews, with all their sufferings, want to get too much at the head of the queue, you have the danger of another anti-Semitic reaction.”
Noel Russell’s latest book, The Saved and the Spurned: Northern Ireland, Vienna and the Holocaust, explains in length the account of Jewish people who responded to a news headline that appeared in a Jewish newspaper in Vienna: “Jewish artisans for Northern Ireland.” However, out of the 730 people who applied, 630 were rejected – many of whom went on to be exterminated in Nazi camps.
American policy was no different. Even when the Americans were confronted with tangible evidence of a genocide unfolding, they did not consider intervention a key priority. Similarly, as discussed by Nasaw, the American Jewish Committee wanted to bring in Jewish refugees in a way that would not be construed as “too visibly Jewish.” Later, Congress lobbying culminated in the Displaced Persons Act of 1948. However, in an insincere effort, provisions were deliberately added to bar the maximum number of Jews from qualifying as displaced persons. One such provision was to disqualify anyone who entered the western zones after December 22, 1945 – mostly Jews who had fled Polish pogroms. Perhaps the worst of all was the Bermuda conference in April 1943, where even after substantial pressure, there was no visible increase in the Jewish refugee quota. The conference served only for media antics.
At this point, it might not even come as a surprise, but this ingrained sense of Western antisemitism did not restrict itself to Western homelands but swept into the territories the West was controlling or had colonized. In the 19th and 20th centuries, the West tried to provide for a Jewish homeland in parts of Argentina and Chile, the island of Tasmania off the southern coast of Australia, as well as Madagascar. All efforts were in vain. The final call was to create a Jewish homeland in East Africa. However, so it happened that the main source of resistance came from, not the locals, but British settlers, who regarded Kenya “as their rallying ground for a British settlement for men of sinew, nerve, and knowledge.” Similarly, the East African Standard took the mass immigration of Jews as a threat to transform the country into “Jewganda.”
The commentary could go on and on, but the bottom line is that the Jewish question was a Western problem. Blighted by it, and pandering rather than solving, it was exported out of the West. In fact, had it not been for the British mandate, perhaps the landscape and scope of the problem would have been very different since it was in the British interest to draw deeper divides to secure personal motives.
From the start, Palestine was treated as the legal exception, and now, especially after the ongoing genocide in Gaza, it has become ever clearer. Terms such as “Wounded child, no surviving family” (WCNSF) have hollowed out the very fabric of international human rights and international law. It already took way too long for the West to build that trust with the Global South; it’s hard to say if it will ever reconcile again.
But, to remember: Call us what instrument you will, though you fret us. You cannot play upon us.
The writer is a lawyer and columnist based in Lahore.