Vladimir Jabotinsky's Talks with Representatives of the Polish Government

Summary

In the second half of the 1930s a rapprochement took place between the New Zionist Organisation (Nowa Organizaqja Syjonistyczna) and representatives of the Government camp in Poland, on the basis of the idea of the mass emigration of Jews to Palestine, which had been formulated by J abotinsky. As a result, between the years 1936 to 1939, talks took place and initial agreements were reached. Joseph B. Schechtman, one of the participants in the talks and a close associate of Jabotinsky, has written about some of them.

J.B. Schechtman's book, which contains extremely interesting information, is however, in parts, polemical, whilst also being a tribute to Jabotinsky himself. What is more, the author has made too much of the value of the diplomatically courteous declarations of the Polish interlocutors. Fortunately, some of the documents dealing with the contacts between the Polish authorities and representatives of the New Zionist Organisation have survived in the Polish archives and they enable us to look at the events described by Schechtman from a different angle.

At that time, in Polish Government circles, or at any rate in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the view prevailed that a mass emigration of Jews from Poland should be organised. It should be noted here, that Polish diplomacy also endeavoured during these years to find emigration possibilities for other groups, such as Polish peasants. Jabotinsky's intentions, therefore, proved to be in harmony with the demands of the authorities and also with the programme of the extreme right-wing Polish nationalists, who were at this time in opposition.

The New Zionist Organisation, which attempted to supplant other Jewish groups of a liberal or left-wing character, also aroused the interest of Polish politicians for internal political reasons. In the opinion of an anonymous memorandum (which certainly was written in the Consular Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs at the end of 1938), in Poland ‘Jews fight on the internal arena for democracy, for a people's front’. ‘The struggle of Jews in Poland has the character of a struggle with the system’, so that their aims are contrary to the interests of Poland, where the ‘predominance of the national and authoritarian idea in dynamic political currents, even within the opposition’ is now clear.