Haganah

Haganah appears in the book as a Zionist secret organization whose political aims intersected, in one striking 1937 episode, with the Nazi effort to remove Jews from Western Europe. The account centers on senior member Feivel Polkes’s invitation to Adolf Eichmann to discuss facilitating Jewish emigration to Palestine, and uses the encounter to examine the troubling overlap between their immediate objectives.

Identity and Political Aim

The book identifies Haganah as a Zionist secret organization and Feivel Polkes as one of its senior members. In the episode described, the movement’s aim is represented in demographic terms: the Zionists wanted the Jewish population in Palestine to outnumber the Arabs as quickly as possible. The passage offers no broader account of Haganah’s structure or activities; its portrait is concentrated on this political objective and the initiative Polkes undertook.

The 1937 Initiative

On September 26, 1937, Adolf Eichmann and an assistant boarded a train in Berlin to travel toward Palestine. Polkes had invited Eichmann to visit Tel Aviv and discuss coordination between German and Jewish organizations to facilitate Jewish emigration. The account distinguishes their motives: the Germans wanted Jews out of Western Europe, while the Zionists sought to increase the Jewish population in Palestine. Their immediate aims therefore converged around migration, even as they arose from sharply different political projects.

The Meeting and Its Limits

Violent unrest led the British to block access to Palestine, so Eichmann’s visit there did not proceed as planned. He and Polkes nevertheless met days later in Cairo and discussed coordinating German and Zionist activities. The episode thus records an attempted visit, a thwarted destination, and a meeting that still took place elsewhere; it does not establish that the proposed coordination produced a lasting arrangement.

The Episode’s Significance

The book presents the encounter as an unsettling instance of Nazis and radical Zionists sharing an immediate interest in changing the ethnic balance of a population, while emphasizing that their reasons differed. It interprets the convergence as a form of demographic engineering and uses it to complicate any simple account of political opposition. Haganah’s role in this passage is specific: through Polkes’s invitation and participation in the Cairo meeting, it becomes part of a controversial discussion about emigration and population change, not evidence that the organization shared Nazi ideology.