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Remember Aliyah Bet

[New York Sun] Hillel Halkin - Murray Greenfield, an ex-American, first arrived in Israel as a sailor on an illegal immigrant ship named Hatikvah, which was apprehended by the British navy as it neared the coast of Palestine in May 1947. The Hatikvah, previously a St. Lawrence River icebreaker, was one of the ships, many largely manned by American sailors, that took part in the Aliyah Bet, the attempted running of the British blockade on Jewish immigrants to Palestine during, and especially after, World War Two. Each turned-back boatload of homeless Holocaust survivors, their families murdered by the Nazis, their tragedy-lined faces staring with longing at the land they were not allowed to enter; each doomed and sometimes violent struggle with the British shore police to reach that land, sometimes by jumping into the water; each newspaper photograph of the detainees in Cyprus, looking at the camera through barbed wire as if they had been returned to Auschwitz or Treblinka - was another blow struck in world public opinion against the continuation of the British Mandate and for the creation of a Jewish state.
2007-08-03 01:00:00
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