Drawn to the Promised Land E-Book

Tim Benson

• Herausgeber: Halban
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 163

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

Drawn to the Promised Land charts the dramatic history of Palestine from the Balfour Declaration to the creation of the state of Israel. Through the acerbic wit of leading political cartoonists from Britain, the United States and other countries, we see how Britain's policies changed repeatedly after it captured Palestine from the Ottomans in 1917. From the Arab riots through to the Nazi persecution of European Jews and the unspeakable horrors of the Holocaust, cartoonists captured every painful twist and agonising turn of events. The first book of cartoons to be published on this contentious subject, Drawn to the Promised Land offers a truly unique visual insight into a period of history that still reverberates to this day.

Leseprobe

Tim Benson

Dr Tim Benson is Britain’s leading authority on political cartoons. He runs the world’s largest gallery for original pen-and-ink political and satirical cartoons. He has produced numerous books on the history of cartoons, including David Low Censored, Suezcide: A Cartoon History of the Suez Crisis, Giles’s War, Churchill in Caricature, Low and the Dictators, The Cartoon Century: Modern Britain through the Eyes of Its Cartoonists, Drawing the Curtain: The Cold War in Cartoons, Over the Top: A Cartoon History of Australia at War, How to be British: A Cartoon Celebration, Churchill: A life in Cartoons and over ten volumes of Britain’s Best Political Cartoons.i

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DRAWN TO THE PROMISED LANDiii

This book is dedicated to my great-great-grandfather Peysach Czyzyk who was orphaned at the age of three as a result of a Russian Pogrom.iv

DRAWN TO THE PROMISED LAND

A CARTOON HISTORY OF BRITAIN, PALESTINE AND THE JEWS: 1917–1949

TIM BENSON

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Ebook first published in Great Britain by Halban Publishers Ltd. 2024

www.halbanpublishers.com

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the Publishers. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 9781 912 600 168 Copyright © 2024 by Tim Benson Tim Benson has asserted his right under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

Cartoons by David Low and Leslie Illingworth © Solo Syndication Cartoons by Herbert Block ‘Herblock’ © Herblock Foundation Cartoons by Ernest H. Shepard © Punch Cartoon Library Cartoons by Philip Zec © Daily Mirror Cartoons by Sidney Strube © Daily Express

The author wishes to thank Warren Bernard and Dr Ulrich Schnakenberg for their help in researching images for this anthology. The author would also like to thank Steve Bright for colourising the cartoon on the front cover and restoring two of the cartoons.

Book design by Dan Yatesvi

INTRODUCTION

From the end of the eighteenth century, the vast majority of European Jews were restricted to living in what was known as the ‘Pale of Settlement’ under Russian rule. This was a stretch of land, mainly in western Russia, central and eastern Poland, the Baltic States and Ukraine, which spread from the Baltic Sea down to the Black Sea. Although Jews were allowed to live and trade in the ‘Pale’, they were still subject to severe restrictions and suffered under antisemitic policies. Tensions escalated with the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881, for which many falsely blamed the Jews. Three years of violent pogroms ensued. Thousands of Jews were killed and their homes destroyed. In response, thousands more Jews left for Western Europe, South Africa and the United States, and some to Palestine. The Austrian journalist Theodor Herzl believed only a Jewish national state would allow Jews to live in peace and security. In 1897 he assembled

the first Zionist Congress in Basel, which agreed that Zionism would create ‘for the Jewish people a home in Palestine secured by public law’. As a consequence, greater numbers of ideologically driven younger Jews emigrated to Palestine, spurred on by the dream of establishing a Jewish state in their ancestral homeland.

Until its capture by the British during the latter stages of the First World War, Palestine had proved itself of little interest to political cartoonists. The obvious deduction is that they believed the Ottoman’s four-century rule was unimportant to their readers either within the British Empire or in the United States. This is surprising, considering Britain was then very much a practising Christian country and Palestine had always been of great religious significance not only to Muslims and Jews, but also to Christians. Consequently, I struggled to source cartoons on the subject of Palestine prior to November 1917 – that also

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Stop Your Cruel Oppression of the Jews

President Theodore Roosevelt reprimands Tsar Nicholas II:‘Now that you have peace without, why not remove his burden and have peace within your borders?’

Repeated murderous pogroms by Tsar Nicholas II increasingly angered American opinion. President Roosevelt forwarded a petition to the Tsar calling on him to stop the persecution of Jews. The Tsar rejected it and the pogroms continued. Consequently, hundreds of thousands of Jews continued to flee Russia.

Emil Flohri, Judge (United States) September 1904

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being the month when the British government announced the Balfour Declaration. On 2 November 1917, in a letter to Lord Rothschild, British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour pledged to help establish a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine. This momentous statement of intent would soon have wide-ranging repercussions for Britain and the Middle East. However, like Palestine, the ‘Declaration’ was also considered at the time un-newsworthy by most cartoonists, who simply ignored it. This was understandable as the British public was preoccupied by what was happening on the Western Front, the war now being in its fourth earth-shattering year. Ever-increasing casualty lists and little to no sign of a significant breakthrough meant that the priority for cartoonists was to give the ‘Hun’ and the ‘Turk’ a good daily bashing in order to raise their readers’ morale. Not one cartoon on the Balfour Declaration appeared in any of the main national dailies. The only two references I found were after Jerusalem had been captured by the British in December 1917. One appeared in the Western Mail, published in Cardiff (p.7), and the other in the British Sentinel, a minor publication (right). The press in the United States were even less interested, with none of the national or state newspapers commenting either. However, I did miraculously find two cartoons on the subject from the New York Jewish press, which at the time

was published in Yiddish. Interestingly, the cartoons were both suspicious of British intentions rather than celebratory.

In mitigation, and in contrast to North America, very few British newspapers of 1917 carried daily political cartoons. The broadsheets such as TheTimes, the Manchester Guardian and the Daily Telegraph

The War, ‘A Door of Hope’ to the Wandering Jew

Cartoonist Unknown, British Sentinel December 1917

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did not have cartoons because they considered them too frivolous an item for a serious newspaper. It was not until the 1960s that the broadsheets began to employ political cartoonists. By contrast, the national tabloids, such as the Daily Mail, Daily Dispatch, Daily Graphic, Western Mail, News of the World and the DailyExpress, did employ full-time cartoonists, as did a number of the London evening papers. However, by 1917, three national tabloids had stopped carrying cartoons because their staff cartoonists had enlisted in the army. Strube at the Daily Express and Wyndham Robinson at the Morning Post had both joined the Artists Rifles in 1915, and by 1917 were serving on the Western Front. In May 1917, the Daily Herald’s Will Dyson was commissioned and became Australia’s first official war artist attached to the Australian Imperial Force in France. Political cartoons could also be found at the time in satirical magazines such as Punch, The Bystander, John Bull, London Opinion and Passing Show, to name but a few. They all had regular contributions by established artists. Like their counterparts on the newspapers, Punch cartoonists Ernest Shepard, Burt Thomas, Kenneth Bird (‘Fougasse’) and Bruce Bairnsfather, who drew for The Bystander, had also enlisted in the British Army and were fighting in France.

In comparison to the lack of coverage given to the Balfour Declaration, the British Army’s exploits

in kicking the Turks out of Palestine and the capture of Jerusalem were, as you will see, well covered by cartoonists both in Britain and in the United States. Despite the promise of a Jewish homeland made just weeks prior to the liberation of Jerusalem, the event was very much seen from a Christian perspective rather than a Jewish one. The majority of cartoonists depicted this as a continuation of the crusades from the Middle Ages, attempting to rid the Holy Land of the ‘infidels’. Cartoons alongside editorials now showed this achievement in symbolic Christian terms. For instance, according to the Philadelphia Evening Public Ledger:

‘Christian soldiers stand in possession of the ground in which the Cross was set up. At the darkest hour of the war, the capture of Jerusalem is a trumpet call to Christian civilisation to fight on until the Turko-Prussian foe, who would tear down the edifice of humanity which it has taken 2,000 years to build, is himself rendered harmless.’

This and similar editorials in other papers emphasised that Palestine had been liberated for Christian civilisation. General Allenby was seen as a modern-day Richard the Lionheart for having completed the unfinished crusade which his predecessors had failed to accomplish. No mention or reference was given to the Balfour Declaration. According to the New York Evening Mail:

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‘The taking of Jerusalem by the British marks a new epoch in the history of the holiest shrine of two great religions. It is also a dramatic illustration of the continuity of history. The task that baffled Richard Coeur de Lion in the twelfth century has been accomplished by General Allenby in the twentieth.’

It was not until Britain was granted a mandate for Palestine on 2 April 1920 at the San Remo Conference that the subject reappeared in cartoons. Even then it was invariably linked to Britain’s other mandate in the Middle East: Mesopotamia (Iraq). At this juncture in time, Lloyd George’s government was struggling with Britain’s post-war economic downturn. Unemployment was rising while spending cuts were hitting the most vulnerable in society. With the state of Britain’s finances in mind, many cartoonists, from around 1921, began to depict the overburdened British taxpayer as having to bear the full brunt of the financial outlay required to maintain the mandates.

Unsurprisingly, Palestinian Arabs were unhappy with the Balfour Declaration from the outset, despite the reassurances that it would safeguard their civil and religious rights. Increasing Arab opposition towards the mandate also failed to attract the attention of cartoonists. For instance, the Arab riots in Palestine that took place in 1920 and 1921 against the likelihood of a Jewish homeland did not feature in any cartoons in either Britain or the United States.

George E. Studdy, Passing Show 12 May 1917

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By the mid-1920s, encouraged by the terms of the mandate, Jewish immigration into Palestine ran at a rate of almost 10,000 a year. This increased tensions, and swelled hostility from the Arab population. In the summer of 1929, Arab massacres of Jewish communities in Jerusalem, Hebron, Safed and Jaffa did prompt cartoonists to start covering the developing conflict between Jew and Arab in Palestine. From then on, until British forces left Palestine in 1948, poor old John Bull was regularly depicted as a beleaguered hapless policeman doing his best, trying to prevent Jew and Arab from harming each other. As exemplified by Strube’s cartoon of 9 April 1930, (p.39) Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald was struggling with a plethora of overseas commitments. From an imperialistic standpoint, many politicians at Westminster viewed the inhabitants of Palestine in what today would be considered a racist and condescending manner. Successive Colonial Secretaries such as Winston Churchill, Lord Passfield and Malcolm MacDonald thought they knew what was best for the indigenous population, believing them too primitive and childlike to run their own affairs. In a speech before an imperial conference in June 1921, Churchill had explained why the British were not granting Palestinian Arabs the benefits of self-rule, stating:

‘There is no doubt that these turbulent peoples are apt to get extremely bored if they are

subject to a higher form of justice and more efficient administration than those to which they have for centuries been accustomed. At any rate, we have reverted perforce, and by the teaching of experience, to more primitive methods.’

At the time India was viewed in similar terms in regard to ethnic conflict and ‘natives’ agitating for political rights. The then Conservative Party chairman, Leopold Amery, remarked how the violence in Palestine would be ‘familiar to most Indian administrators’. Cartoonists seem to have been heavily influenced by such views and, as a consequence, depicted Jews and Arabs as squabbling children or innocents with consecutive British Colonial Secretaries trying their paternalistic and patronising best to keep the peace between the two warring factions.

The demand for Jewish immigration into Palestine might have settled down had Hitler not become German chancellor in early 1933. The Nazis quickly introduced legislation in Germany which made day-to-day life for Jewish people impossible. In the face of increasing legal oppression and physical violence, many Jews tried desperately to flee Germany. While American cartoonists focused on the Nazi repression of Jews, their British counterparts emphasised the desperate struggle fleeing Jewish refugees faced in finding countries that would take them. Among those refugees who were successful in escaping were

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Jewish cartoonists Victor Weisz (‘Vicky’), Joseph Flatter, Stephen Roth and Walter Trier. Vicky, who was born in Berlin in 1913, had joined the graphics department of the radical anti-Hitler journal 12 Uhr Blatt, and by 1929 was sports and theatre cartoonist on the paper. He produced his first anti-Nazi cartoon that year, but in 1933 the paper was taken over by the Nazis and by 1935 Vicky had fled to London. Joseph Flatter left Austria for London in 1934. Despite his anti-Nazi stance, he was arrested and interned as an ‘enemy alien’ on the Isle of Wight when war broke out in 1939. Once released, he drew cartoons for theSpectator and at the Ministry of Defence. Among his work was Mein Kampf, which parodied Hitler’s book by combining actual quotes from the text with mocking illustrations. Flatter wrote: ‘I drew many hundreds of cartoons during the war and, to my surprise, ideas never failed me. The moving force was hatred, it took concrete shape before my eyes. And my hatred of those responsible for the wanton cruelty done to so many innocent victims was boundless. I went about in the shape of my adversaries. I crept into their skin. I drew, hanged and quartered them.’ In 1931, Stephen Roth moved to Prague, where he drew sports cartoons, joke illustrations and portraits for various papers and magazines, signing his work ‘Stephen’. In 1935, he became cartoonist on the anti- Nazi weekly Demokraticky. In 1938, he was forced to

flee Czechoslovakia prior to the Nazi occupation. He settled in London and contributed political cartoons to the Sunday Pictorial. In 1936, Walter Trier escaped Germany with his family and settled in England.

Other cartoonists chose the United States as a refuge. Like Vicky, Eric Godal was born in Berlin, and in 1933 only narrowly escaped the Gestapo, who had come to arrest him. His cartoons criticising the Nazis had quickly made him a marked man. Godal caught wind of the arrest and hailed a taxi that took him to Czechoslovakia. In Prague, he worked with many other German Jewish refugees to publish an anti-fascist satirical magazine. He then fled to New York City, eventually replacing Theodore Geisel (Dr Seuss) as the political cartoonist for P.M., a left-wing daily newspaper. His widowed mother, Mrs Anna Marien-Goldbaum, also attempted to flee Germany to join her son in New York, but travelled on the ill-fated cruise liner the S.S. St. Louis. The ship had set sail from Hamburg in May 1939, supposedly with visas to enter Cuba as a stopping point before those on board would be granted visas to enter the United States. Under pressure from the US and other quarters, the Cubans revoked the transit visas and the ship was denied entry to US ports. Two heartbreaking letters ‘from an aged mother on the wandering steamship to her son, an artist, in New York’ were published in the New York Daily Mirror. ‘It is so strange how near and yet how

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much cut off we really are,’ Mrs Goldbaum wrote. ‘I feel that you are backing me from far away, and that gives me courage to go on.’ She tried to put on a brave face: ‘I still have the hope that President Roosevelt and other influential people will help us … I shall not lose courage until the happy end is reached.’ Unfortunately, she and the 936 other German Jewish refugees aboard the ship were sent back to Europe. She was later murdered by the Nazis. Arthur Szyk’s mother would suffer the same fate as Godal’s. She was gassed at the Chełmno extermination camp in Poland in 1942.

Szyk, who had fled Europe in 1937 and settled in New York in 1940, felt that all cartoonists should speak out against the Nazi tyranny: ‘An artist, especially a Jewish artist, cannot be neutral in these times. He cannot escape to still lifes, abstractions, and experiments. Art that is purely cerebral is dead. Our life is involved in a terrible tragedy, and I am resolved to serve my people with all my art, with all my talent, with all my knowledge.’ Living in Connecticut, Szyk drew for the New York Post and contributed a steady stream of anti-Nazi cartoons. He saw himself as ‘Roosevelt’s soldier with a pen’ and wrote, ‘I consider myself as being on duty in my cartoons.’ The president’s wife, Eleanor Roosevelt, once remarked, ‘This is a personal war of Szyk against Hitler, and I do not think that Mr Szyk will lose this war!’

Szyk and Godal’s devotion to the Allied war

effort was matched by their growing concern for Jews stuck in Nazi-occupied Europe. In 1941, Szyk joined forces with the Bergson Group, a band of Jewish activists who lobbied the Roosevelt administration to rescue endangered Jews. After the war, the Bergsonites rallied American public support for the Jewish underground’s revolt against the British in Palestine. Szyk’s dramatic illustrations often featured in the full- page advertisements in American newspapers inciting violence against the perceived British occupiers. Many American cartoonists, Jewish and non-Jewish, supported opening the borders of Palestine to those fleeing from Europe. Britain’s outright refusal to do so created much anti-British sentiment in the United States.

Nazi cartoonists revelled in Britain’s troubles in Palestine in the late 1930s. Judging by their cartoons on the subject, the message was clear that Britain was using the Arabs and the Jews to bolster its own position in the Middle East. For instance, DasSchwarze Korps published a cartoon showing a British sergeant in colonial service uniform, splitting a piece of wood marked ‘Palestine’ with an axe. The cartoon is headed ‘Divide and Rule’. The caption read: ‘The British like dividing, but not with others’.

The Nazis, having dealt with dissent in their own country, did not appreciate criticism from abroad. In regard to the Nazi regime itself, all of

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Britain’s leading cartoonists were Germanophobic, many of whom, as already mentioned, had fought on the Western Front during the First World War. The