Exodus (1947)

EXODUS (1947)

An illegal immigration ship carrying Holocaust survivors to British-ruled Palestine in 1947, which became a symbol of the Zionist struggle for a Jewish state.

The Exodus was purchased in the United States by the Mossad le-Aliyah Bet, a Zionist agency that organized the illegal immigration of Jews to Palestine. It set sail from France in July 1947 carrying 4,500 refugees from the displaced persons (DP) camps in occupied Germany. When the ship approached Palestine, the British attacked it. In the ensuing battle, three were killed and dozens were wounded. The damaged vessel, escorted by British warships, sailed to Haifa, Israel (then Palestine), where the passengers were transferred to three ships that deported them to France. Following their resistance to landing in France, culminating in a hunger strike, the British expelled them to Germany. From Germany they emigrated to Palestine within a year.

The "Exodus Affair" played a part in the propaganda war against the British. The arrival of the ship at Haifa during the widely publicized visit of the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) spread the story worldwide, and the ship's symbolic name drew attention, too: Originally named President Warfield, the ship was renamed after the second book of the Bible, which tells the story of the ancient exodus of the Jews from Egypt.

Since the 1990s, a post-Zionist trend in Israel has elicited a debate as to whether the Zionist leadership exploited the illegal immigrants in order to win points in the struggle for the foundation of a Jewish state or whether they acted in true partnership in the interests of the refugees and in pursuit of a common national goal.

Bibliography

Exodus. Directed by Otto Preminger. United Artists, 1960.

Halamish, Aviva. The Exodus Affair: Holocaust Survivors and the Struggle for Palestine, translated by Ora Cummings. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1998.

Uris, Leon. Exodus (1958). New York: Gramercy Books, 2000.

Zertal, Idith. From Catastrophe to Power: Holocaust Survivors and the Emergence of Israel. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.

rachel weissbrod