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2809076477 REFERENCE ONLY UNIVERSITY OF LONDON THESIS Name of Author COPYRIGHT This is a thesis accepted for a Higher Degree of the University of London. It is an unpublished typescript and the copyright is held by the author. All persons consulting the thesis must read and abide by the Copyright Declaration below. COPYRIGHT DECLARATION I recognise that the copyright of the above-described thesis rests with the author and that no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without the prior written consent of the author. LOAN Theses may not be lent to individuals, but the University Library may lend a copy to approved libraries within the United Kingdom, for consultation solely on the premises of those libraries. Application should be made to: The Theses Section, University of London Library, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU. 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Bound By Blissett Bookbinc 020 8992 396f u/ww hlissetts.cc ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION TO PALESTINE 1945-1948: THE FRENCH CONNECTION ALAN SWARC UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON PhD DEGREE September 2006 UMI Number: U592432 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. Dissertation Publishing UMI U592432 Published by ProQuest LLC 2013. Copyright in the Dissertation held by the Author. Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. ProQuest LLC 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 UNIVERSITY OF LONDON Abstract of Thesis Author (Full names) : ALAN SWARC Title of thesis : Illegal Immigration to Palestine 1945-1948: The French Connection This thesis principally concerns the illegal immigration campaign launched by a secret organisation, the Mossad 1'Aliy ah Bet (The Mossad), to breach the British naval blockade of Palestine and thereby enable the entry of Jewish survivors of the Holocaust. My primary objective is to prove that from late 1945 to April 1948 this campaign was largely facilitated by the covert help of elements within the French coalition Governments, without which it would not have succeeded. Crucially, France takes centre stage because this was the location, par excellence, chosen by the Mossad from which to carry out its operational activities. Whilst the overall historiography of illegal immigration to Palestine is vast and has included many archival references to French involvement, this has not been clearly substantiated. On the basis of archive sources, some only recently made available, and despite the paucity of direct evidence of French complicity, I will illustrate that there is a wealth of documentation which, taken as a whole, provides compelling circumstantial evidence that this involvement was extensive. Furthermore, 1 will argue that French cooperation with Zionist leaders extended to political issues and military aid as well. Amongst other issues, I will focus on die rather free environment in France, in the post-war era, which proved to be so conducive to the operations of the Mossad. This includes considerations such as the political make-up of the French Government, the partisan approach of some of its ministers and civil servants, the Jewish community’s attitude towards Zionism and the work of intermediaries between certain Government ministers and the Mossad. I will also examine the effects of British diplomatic pressure on die French Ministries involved and the attempts of its Secret Service to prevent illegal ships leaving France. 2 Illegal Immigration to Palestine 1945-1948: The French Connection CONTENTS PAGE Introduction 4 Chapter 1. Jewish consciousness in post-war France 19 1. IThe Jewish community 20 1.2. French Zionist intermediaries 26 1.3 Other influential lobbyists 35 Chapter 2. Coalition politics in post-war France 37 2.1 The effects of Tripartism 38 2.2 Attitudes within the Socialist Party (SFIO) towards Zionism 40 Chapter 3. The activities of Palestinian emissaries in France 43 3.1 The Jewish Agency 43 3.2 Mossad/Haganah, Irgun Zvai Leumi and Stem Group 59 3 .3 Training and transit camps 71 Chapter 4. Other entities concerned with illegal immigration 84 4.1 The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (The Joint) 85 4.2 British Intelligence 92 Chapter 5. The French Connection 104 5.1 A question of motivation 104 5.2 Practical help 113 5.3 Inter-ministerial conflicts caused by British diplomatic pressure 123 Chapter 6. The sea journey to Palestine 148 6.1 Ships from France 150 6.2 Overall statistical results 166 6.3 Other perspectives on illegal immigration 168 Chapter 7. The Exodus Affair 177 7.1 The Exodus story 178 7.2 Public relations issues 186 7 .3 The political dimensions of the Affair 198 7.4 Prologue 209 Chapter 8. French military aid 210 8.1 Arms for the Provisional Government of the State of Israel 211 8.2 Arms for the Irgun Zvai Leumi 218 Conclusion 240 Abbreviations 245 Bibliography 247 Appendices 261 (N.B Whilst all French texts have been translated by the author, Hebrew texts have been translated by others) Introduction In Serge Klarsfeld’s book Vichv. Auschwitz there are graphic photographs of Jews being coerced onto railway cattle-wagons by the French Gendarmerie in the presence of German soldiers. Their destination, possibly unknown at the time to the Vichy authorities responsible for these actions, was Auschwitz. Deportations from France to this and other Nazi extermination camps in the East extended over a period from March 1942 to July 1944 and involved some 76,000 Jews, the majority of whom were immigrants to France during the inter-war years.1 The strange and unforeseen irony is that less than two years later in March 1946 the French police authorities, this time in a port near Marseilles, again found themselves processing foreign Jews for departure from France, but this time in a more sympathetic manner and, more importantly, to a destination of choice. Although, for sensitive political reasons, the passengers' visas indicated another country, the true destination, as many French officials privately knew, was Palestine where, despite British rule, there w as the hope of a new life. This phenomenon marked not only the sailing of the first so-called “illegal immigration ship” from France but also a level of complicity within post-war Government circles which made this andlater sailings from the French coast possible. The act of “illegal immigration” in relation to Jew's seeking to reach Palestine w as therefore not, by any means, regarded in and outside the French administration with the same intense disapproval as that displayed by the British Government. On the contrary, certain Ministers quietly disregarded the known quota-policy of their former ally and gave covert and extensive assistance to the Mossad FAliyah Bet (literally ‘Institute for Parallel Immigration') which facilitated the movement of Jewish refugees across France to the ports of embarkation. 2 Although this particular French involvement was ultimately recognised in the historiograph}' of Aliyah Bet, academic research into the underlying reasons for the Mossad's success in France, involving the extensive use of relevant archival documents, has been sparse. This study is an attempt to redress the balance by 1 Serge Klarsfeld, Vichv-Auschwitz: Le Role de Vichv dans la Solution Finale de la Question Juive en France-1942 (Paris, 1983), 7. 2Mossad FAliyah Bet was a secret body set up in Palestine 1938 by the Jewish Agency. It was staffed, in the main, by Labour-Zionists from the kibbutz (communal settlement) movement Whilst this organisation maintained only a functional link to the Jewish Agency’s para-military forces, the Haganah, its leader, Shaul Meirov, was one of its top officers. He was a close associate of David Ben Gurion, the Chairman of the Jewish Agency for Palestine. 4 reviewing sources used in the past and then bringing into play an interpretation of more recently available documentation from a number of foreign archives. By this means, the role of the various elements within France, who assisted the Mossad and other Palestinian agencies, will be better defined and explained than has hitherto been the case. To define the raison d’etre of the Mossad, one could point to its desire to circumvent the restrictive quota on the immigration of Jews into Palestine, w hich the British Government had imposed in May 1939.3 This prescribed that any Jew attempting to bypass the quota by unauthorised entry would be classed as an “illegal immigrant” and would be arrested and interned. The immediate reaction of the Jewish Agency, under David Ben Gurion, was to ignore this fundamental restriction on immigration at a time when, with the emergence of Nazi-inspired antisemitism, the existence of the Jews of Central and Eastern Europe appeared most at risk.