Adolf Eichmann—Feivel Polkes: Palestine Meeting

The contact between Adolf Eichmann and Feivel Polkes in 1937 joined two organizations with sharply different political purposes around a limited, practical objective: facilitating Jewish emigration to Palestine. An attempted visit to Palestine was blocked by the British, but the two men met days later in Cairo to discuss coordinating German and Zionist activities. The episode is presented as a disturbing example of how opposing movements could share an interest in changing the region’s population balance.

Invitation and attempted visit

On September 26, 1937, Eichmann and an assistant boarded a train in Berlin to travel to Palestine. Reinhard Heydrich had authorized the trip after Feivel Polkes, a senior member of Haganah, invited Eichmann to visit Tel Aviv. The proposed discussions concerned coordination between German and Jewish organizations to facilitate Jewish emigration to Palestine.

The journey did not bring Eichmann and Polkes together in Palestine. Violent unrest led the British to block access, and the visit failed. The interruption altered the location, but not the stated purpose of the contact: days later, Eichmann and Polkes met in Cairo and discussed coordinating their respective activities.

Shared objective, different purposes

The account distinguishes the motives behind the proposed coordination. German officials wanted Jews to leave Western Europe; Zionist leaders wanted the Jewish population in Palestine to outnumber the Arabs as quickly as possible. Both sides therefore had an interest in moving as many Jews as possible to Palestine, despite pursuing that outcome for different reasons.

That convergence should not be mistaken for a shared political program. The evidence describes a practical overlap in aims concerning emigration and population proportions, not an equivalence between the parties’ ideologies or a general alliance. Its significance lies in the way separate projects could meet at a specific point of policy: the movement of Jews out of Western Europe and into Palestine.

Political significance

The book treats the incident as an especially stark example of a shared interest between Nazis and radical Zionists in changing the relative proportions of ethnic groups in a population. It frames that common objective as a form of ethnic cleansing, while the specific episode it recounts concerns an invitation, an obstructed journey, and a subsequent discussion in Cairo—not a completed operation described in detail.

The discussion also leads into the book’s broader framing of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It characterizes Palestinians as occupying an obstructive position between Israelis and Arabs, describing them as the Jews among the Arabs and relating that position to the difficulty of peace. This is the author’s political interpretation of the episode’s wider implications; the documented encounter itself remains the 1937 contact between Eichmann and Polkes over coordinating emigration-related activities.