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"The Basketball Game" is a graphic novel adaptation of the award-winning National Film Board of Canada animated short of the same name – intended for audiences aged 12 years and up. It's a poignant tale of the power of community as a means to rise above hatred and bigotry. In the end, as is recognized by the kids playing the basketball game, we're all in this together.

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Tag: British Mandate

Past leads to present

Past leads to present

For many of us, it is hard to get excited about a subject until we can experience it, or meet someone who has. Historical fiction can bridge the gap between simply memorizing dates and names to empathizing with those affected and taking what we learn into our lives.

Two recent Second Story Press publications do an excellent job of teaching and engaging younger readers. They also provide a starting point for these readers and their parents, family, friends and educators to discuss difficult and sensitive topics that not only relate to the past, but to current situations, as well.

The Ship to Nowhere: On Board the Exodus by Rona Arato (for ages 9 to 13) tells the story of the ship Exodus 1947 through the eyes of 11-year-old Rachel Landesman. I Am Not a Number by Jenny Kay Dupuis and Kathy Kacer and illustrated by Gillian Newland (for ages 7 to 11) tells the story of 8-year-old Irene Couchie, who is forcibly taken from her First Nations family and home to live in a residential school in 1928. Both Rachel and Irene are real people.

Sadly, their stories are representative of what also happened to countless others. And, even more sadly, what continues to happen. The Ship to Nowhere could lead to a conversation about the Syrian refugee crisis and antisemitism in Canada and elsewhere. I Am Not a Number brings to mind some parallels between the Holocaust and the attempted genocide of Canada’s First Nations, as well as the inequalities that still exist in Canada, the treaties that have not been ratified, the reconciliation over the residential schools that is long overdue and has barely begun.

Given the ages of their intended readers, both of these books tread lightly – that said, they deliver powerful messages and succeed in their missions to educate.

book cover - I Am Not a NumberThe illustrations in I Am Not a Number, a hardcover picture book, are as revealing as the text. Irene and her siblings, as they huddle behind their father when the government agent comes to take her and two of her brothers away; the sadness on Irene’s face as a nun cuts her hair, the anger as she sits in church; and the unbridled joy when she and her brothers are back at home after a tortuous year – these are just some of the emotions Newland movingly captures.

And Kay Dupuis tells her grandmother’s story with such love. This was a family that was strong and, in the end, luckier than many, in that Irene and her brothers didn’t return to the residential school – when they came home for the summer, their family kept them hidden from the government agent.

I Am Not a Number includes a brief overview of the residential school system, and mention of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Kay Dupuis also tells readers a bit more about her grandmother in an afterword, where there are a few photos of the Couchie family.

The Ship to Nowhere has photos throughout, and Arato uses the author’s note at the end to let readers briefly know what happened to Rachel, Rachel’s mom and sisters (her dad was killed in the Holocaust), the ship’s captain, Yitzhak Aronowicz (known as Captain Ike) and one of the journalists who doggedly reported to the world the Exodus’s journey, Ruth Gruber.

Since it is for older young readers, there are parts of The Ship to Nowhere that are quite graphic – the incredible brutality of the British is well-depicted, as are Britain’s efforts to prevent the ship’s 4,500-plus Holocaust survivors from knowing what the media were reporting on their treatment. Even with the passage of time, the anger boils in reading about how these survivors were tear-gassed and beaten (in some cases to death) on the Exodus, forced to live as captives on three other ships after they were turned out of Palestine, and again beaten and manhandled if they refused to leave their ships in Germany, where the British took them eventually, to live in refugee camps.

There are many touching moments between the crew and their passengers and between fellow refugees. It is important to be reminded that France offered to take in all of the refugees; an offer that was declined. And it would be nice to think that, at the least, the Exodus’s plight positively influenced some United Nations members to vote in favour of the creation of Israel.

Format ImagePosted on March 31, 2017March 31, 2017Author Cynthia RamsayCategories BooksTags British Mandate, Exodus 1947, history, Israel, reconciliation, residential schools, youth

Can terrorism deliver results?

Does terrorism work? This is the question that opens Anonymous Soldiers: The Struggle for Israel, 1917-1947 (Alfred A. Knopf, 2015). Western leaders insist that the work of terrorists will never lead to the ends they seek, but one of the lessons from this book is that this may well be wishful thinking.

image - Anonymous Soldiers  book coverAnonymous Soldiers – the title is from the anthem of the Irgun, the Zionist paramilitary force led by Menachem Begin – is the latest book by Bruce Hoffman, an expert on terrorism.

In the aftermath of the First World War and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, Britain came to control the region known as Palestine, a victory that would prove confounding and tragic. Hoffman’s book is a story of endless miscalculations, under-preparedness and overreactions on the part of the British military and police.

The Balfour Declaration of 1917 was a statement of intent by the British government to create a Jewish national homeland in Palestine and the Jewish people there and elsewhere saw this as a sign that Britain would be their fiercest ally. However, almost from the moment the British Mandate began, until the forces of the empire departed with their tails between their legs three decades later, Palestine was riven with not only violent clashes between its Arab and Jewish residents, but by both those parties against the British and, as brutally detailed by Hoffman, fraternal conflict between Jewish militias.

The Haganah was the “establishment” militia, associated with the Jewish Agency and intended as a self-defence organization after the British proved incapable of or unwilling to protect the Jews of Palestine. In 1929, Arab riots led to mass killings of Jews and, while British police killed almost as many Arabs as the Arabs killed Jews, the balance demonstrated an inability of the British police and military to control the area. The diplomatic response was to attempt to appease the Arabs, which appears to be the first example in the book to prove that terrorism works.

The riots led to an investigative commission, a white paper and another British obfuscation on Zionism. The white paper blamed Arab violence on “excessive” Jewish immigration to the area in the mid-1920s and the purchases of land by Jews. This led some Zionists – notably those of Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s Revisionist party – toward the idea that Britain may not be a reliable ally. In 1931, Revisionists defected from the Haganah and formed Haganah-bet (later the Irgun), which did not see itself solely as a self-defence force but opened the door to “sabotage, bomb making and hit-and-run attacks – in other words, the core tactics of terrorism.”

From 1936 to 1939, Palestine was in a state of near civil war in the form of an uprising by the Arab populations against the British and the potential of more Jewish migration. At precisely this time, the fate of Jews in Europe was being sealed and countries, including Canada, were slamming shut the gates.

Clouds of war in Europe were accompanied by fear of Muslim uprisings in the vast British Empire. The priority, in the words of foreign secretary Lord Halifax, was to avoid “arousing antagonism with the Arabs.” Neville Chamberlain, the prime minister at the time, said it was “of immense importance to have the Muslims with us. If we must offend one side, let us offend the Jews rather than the Arabs.”

This, too, was a miscalculation that did not take into account the determination of the Irgun. British caving in the face of Arab violence was taken by the Irgun as proof that terrorism works.

And a third group, which had broken away from the Irgun – Lehi, also known as the Stern Group (or the Stern Gang by the British) – went further. They attempted an alliance with the Axis, viewing Hitler as “just another antisemite” and proposing a mutually beneficial partnership based, the author writes, “on the fatally erroneous assumption that for Hitler the crux of the Jewish problem in Europe could be solved by evacuation, not annihilation.”

Meanwhile, as terror was rocking the Middle East, Chaim Weizmann, the Zionist leader who was plugged into the British establishment, was mending fences in London and urging the Haganah to crack down on the Irgun and Lehi.

Weizmann was warned by then prime minister Winston Churchill that if the violence didn’t end, “we might well lose interest in Jewish welfare.”

Of course, the Irgun did not expect to defeat the British Empire militarily. “History and our observation,” Begin later said, “persuaded us that if we could succeed in destroying the government’s prestige in Eretz Israel, the removal of its rule would follow automatically.”

Weizmann’s diplomacy and the cooperation of the Haganah with the British forces in Palestine regained the trust of Churchill, but that was of limited value after the war leader lost the 1945 election and the Labor party came to power at Westminster.

The new prime minister, Clement Atlee, inherited a paralyzed Palestine, in which there seemed to be no winning position. At a 1947 conference, the British tried to share the mess with the United States, but that failed and they eventually dumped the problem at the podium of the new United Nations.

So, does terrorism work? In the Palestine example, Hoffman demonstrates that the Arab riots of 1921 resulted in restrictions on Jewish immigration to Palestine and the 1929 riots resulted in Britain backpedalling from its commitment to Zionism. The Arab Rebellion, from 1936 to 1939, resulted in a huge reconsideration of Britain’s policy in Palestine and, though the author doesn’t make this explicit, possibly the deaths of millions of European Jews.

On the Jewish side, violence seems to have had its intended effect, as well. “By September 1947, the Irgun had achieved its objective,” Hoffman writes. “Each successive terrorist outrage illuminated the government’s inability to curb, much less defeat, the terrorists. Already sapped by World War II, Britain’s limited economic resources were further strained by the cost of deploying so large a military force to Palestine to cope with the tide of violence submerging the country.”

The author sees the Irgun’s campaign as critical to understanding the evolution and development of terrorism in the second half of the 20th century and the already bloody 21st century. “Indeed, when U.S. military forces invaded Afghanistan in 2001, they found a copy of Begin’s seminal work, The Revolt, along with other books about the Jewish terrorist struggle, in the well-stocked library that al-Qaeda maintained at one of its training facilities in that country.”

Posted on September 11, 2015September 9, 2015Author Pat JohnsonCategories BooksTags Arabs, British Mandate, Israel, Menachem Begin, terrorism
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