PALESTINE Memories of 1948 - Photographs of Jerusalem | Page 64

Hitler’s Germany and he from Poland. Both of them,
faithful to the Soviet party line, had advocated for the
creation of two states, Israel and Palestine, in 1947,
which at the time had been rejected by the Palestinian
leaders. Both of them had told me how their families,
poor people, had been able to leave for Palestine thanks
to substantial help from the Jewish Agency, 14 which
had paid for their boat journey as far as Haifa and their
settlement in a flat in the Halisa quarter, where they
had lived with other five Jewish immigrant families,
one family per room. According to Yukhavit, the Hol-
ocaust played a major role in the actions of European
governments after the Second World War: they felt
extremely guilty to have allowed it to happen and in
order to appease the general feeling of guilt, the victors
of the war decided by mutual agreement to allow the
Jews to create what they had wanted for a long time –
their own state.
Flight of fancy in a side street
62
Memories of 1948
Listening to her I understood that these were circum-
stances that had made it possible to never question the
catastrophe that would be inflicted on the Palestinians.
Europe was washing clean its conscience while sacrific-
ing and denying us.
Benyamin remembered that it had been the Soviet
Minister of Foreign Affairs, Andrey Gromyko who,
in April 1947, had set the tone at the United Nations
General Assembly by insisting on the ‘disaster and suf-
fering without precedent’ endured by the Jewish people
during the Second World War 15 and on the need to cre-
ate two states in Palestine. Next, he insisted, both the
strength of the Zionist movement in Palestine since the
late nineteenth century and the weakness of the Arab
countries – even their appetite for dividing amongst
themselves what remained of Palestine – had allowed a
ridiculous idea to develop: that of a “land promised to
the Jews by God”. According to Yukhavit, 16 that slogan