In Review

Why the Holocaust made the creation of Israel inevitable

February 3, 2025
Sept. 7, 1947, protest in British-run Bergen-Belsen Jewish displaced persons camp after British navy rammed and boarded the ship Exodus, forcing Jewish passengers trying to reach Palestine back to Europe.
Yad Vashem Archive, JerusalemSept. 7, 1947, protest in British-run Bergen-Belsen Jewish displaced persons camp after British navy rammed and boarded the ship Exodus, forcing Jewish passengers trying to reach Palestine back to Europe.

Underground to Palestine by I.F. Stone. Hassell Street Press. 264 pages. $26.06. Reprinted 2021.

BY SETH GALINSKY

Leading up to and during World War II, Adolf Hitler’s Nazis murdered 6 million Jews. That was two out of every three Jews in Europe, 40% of the entire Jewish population in the world.

Underground to Palestine by I.F. Stone, tells the powerful story of how Jews who survived the Holocaust organized themselves, and overcame the obstacles put in their way by the capitalist rulers in Europe to make their way to Palestine. Reading this book will deepen your understanding of the conditions that made the creation of Israel as a refuge for Jews inevitable.

Journalist Stone wrote the book in 1946 after flying to Europe and meeting and traveling with Jews seeking to emigrate. He visited several of the displaced persons camps where 250,000 Jewish survivors had been herded after the war — in Germany, Austria and Italy, often on the sites of the concentration camps where the Nazis had imprisoned them. And he set sail with them on an overcrowded ship to Palestine.

“Like most American Jews, I was neither a Zionist nor an anti-Zionist,” Stone writes. “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 [displaced person], ragged and homeless like those with whom I traveled.”

Imperialist powers turned Jews away

Leading up to and during the Holocaust the capitalist rulers of the United States, the U.K., Canada and other countries turned away Jews attempting to flee the Nazi terror, sending them back to their deaths. After the war they still kept the doors closed.

Hundreds of thousands of Jews — concentration and death camp survivors; those who managed to hide out till the war was over; and others who had joined the partisan bands or the Russian army to fight the Nazis — were left in limbo.

For most it was impossible to go “home,” even if they wanted to. In Poland, more than one anti-Jewish pogrom made that clear. In Germany, like Poland, Jew-hatred was still widespread.

With the capitalist governments of the world turning their backs on Jews, many survivors decided that to have a life of dignity, they had no choice but to emigrate to Palestine, where Jews had historic roots going back 3,000 years.

On the ship Stone boards to Palestine he reports that two-thirds were men, “for more men than women survived the Nazi terror.” Only 196 out of the 1,000 passengers were over 30. Most had lost their entire family in the Holocaust. What struck him was their resilience.

He tells the story of Sarah, a woman who survived the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. As the U.S. army got closer, the German guards — still intent on the “Final Solution” — put the Jews on a forced march, claiming they were going somewhere safer. When they stopped for a rest, the guards started shooting at them from all sides.

“I was one of the lucky few who escaped,” she told Stone. After the war ended, Sarah headed back to Poland, on foot. “There were hundreds of us on the roads, making for home. But when I got back to Lodz I found I had no home. The house we lived in had been burned to the ground,” she said. “Most of the Poles I encountered hated the Jews more than ever.” Sarah learned Hebrew and tailoring — in classes organized in the camps — so she could start a new life in Palestine.

Stone describes life in the camps. The Holocaust survivors planted gardens, raised cattle and set up trade schools. But even the best of the camps were still surrounded by barbed wire.

Without visas or exit permits, they had to bribe or sneak their way across borders, sometimes beaten and driven back as they traveled from Poland to Czechoslovakia, from Austria to Italy. They found themselves blocked by British, Italian and other troops as they tried to make their way to a port where they could board a ship.

In secret, they crowded onto ships clandestinely bought by the Zionist movement. They were packed like sardines. Once at sea they tried to avoid warships deployed by the British rulers, who had set up a naval blockade to prevent them from getting to Palestine.

The boat Stone was on made it through and arrived in Haifa. Its passengers were some of the lucky few. Other ships, like the Exodus in 1947, were rammed and boarded by the British forces who then assaulted passengers, forcing them back to Europe or into camps in Cyprus.

Stone pretties up Washington’s role

Stone’s book has a weakness. While describing the role of British imperialism in trying to block the Jews from making it to Palestine, he pretties up the role of U.S. imperialism.

He points out that conditions for the Jewish displaced persons were freer in the American-controlled zones than in the British-controlled ones. And it was the British navy, not the U.S. Navy, that was preventing them from reaching the shores of Palestine.

But that’s because Palestine was under British colonial rule, and London saw Jewish immigration to Palestine as an obstacle to its financial, oil and political interests and to developing good relations with the newly or soon to be independent Arab governments.

Washington had its own imperialist designs on the Middle East, and the U.S. rulers were debating the best course so they would prevail. Their biggest concern was to keep Jews from heading to the U.S. in large numbers. From 1944 to 1959 there are only two years when more than 19,000 Jews were allowed into the U.S. and nine years when it was less than 10,000.

Ultimately the Jewish refugees found a way and made it to Palestine. And in May 1948 when the new state of Israel was declared they helped defend it arms in hand.

Underground to Palestine doesn’t tell the whole story, including how the Stalinist Communist parties in Europe betrayed revolutionary struggles that exploded in the 1930s and ’40s. In Germany the Communist Party let Hitler walk into power without a fight, saying that after he took power they would come next. This opened the road to the Holocaust.

That betrayal, along with the Nazi murder machine, the refusal of the imperialist powers to open their doors to the Jews, and the refusal of millions of Jews to accept those devastating consequences without a fight made the creation of Israel as a refuge for Jews inevitable. And today, in a world where there are Nazi-like forces that are trying to inflict a new Holocaust, that refuge must be defended.

But Israel’s existence is not a permanent solution. A road forward requires building the kind of revolutionary working-class parties that can put an end to Jew-hatred forever. Read The Fight Against Jew-Hatred and Pogroms in the Imperialist Epoch: Stakes for the International Working Class by V.I. Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Farrell Dobbs, James P. Cannon, Jack Barnes and Dave Prince, available from Pathfinder Press.