The Notorious Ben Hecht by Gorbach Julien;

Author:Gorbach, Julien;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Purdue University Press

The catastrophe wrought by National Socialism suggested that Hecht had been right to reject the rosy view of humankind and human progress so fundamental to liberalism. Humankind had proven not only flawed but murderous. Like Erich Fromm, Hecht understood Nazism as a case of mass psychopathy, while, in his view, the great governments “of the people,” built on the humanistic ideals of the Enlightenment, had been exposed as frauds. At best, Churchill and Roosevelt had responded to the challenge of Hitler by fighting not for ideals but for narrowly defined national interests, even though that had meant forsaking an entire population targeted for annihilation. Hecht had not only predicted the genocide four years before the first news of it arrived but painted a chillingly vivid panorama of what the world could expect. He had cried out for rescue early and often and had kept on doing so even when those cries fell upon deaf ears. History seemed to have proven him right; his so-called cynicism had in fact been realism—even, somehow, a truer humanism. Still, while there could be little confusion about what Hecht did not believe, the question remained, what did he believe in?

The managing editor of the Jewish Frontier, Ben Halpern, offered an answer in a lecture to fellow Labor Zionists of the Pioneer Women’s Organization, weeks after Hecht’s “Letter to the Terrorists of Palestine” appeared in newspapers. Halpern, a Harvard PhD and deeply engaged Zionist activist, explained Hecht, the Bergson Group, and the Irgun as an “irresponsible, undisciplined opposition” that sought to undermine the Jewish Agency’s strategy for statehood and usurp its power. Noting that the Irgunists and Sternists had ambitions to conquer not just Palestine but all of Transjordan and had vowed to resist partition, Halpern warned that the militants were prepared to defy the will of the Jewish majority, by force if necessary. “This is terrorism—terrorism directed against the Jewish community as much as against the British government,” he declared. The campaign of violence, he said, went beyond the notorious bombings of British installations: the aim was to rule the Yishuv through intimidation. Citing a recent news article in which the Stern Gang had claimed that “expropriations” accounted for 20 percent of its financing, he charged:

Whatever the percentage is, they engage in bank robberies and rob businesses in Palestine and they engage in extortions. They threaten people with bombing their business or beating them up if they don’t kick in the required sum.

They terrorize the Jewish community in many other ways. They seize taxi cabs and hold drivers prisoners so they can use them in their raids. They terrorize Jewish schoolteachers to force the children in classes to post their bills, to put up their billboards, their posters. They flog young boys for various reasons—sometimes because they have been members of the Stern Group and decided they don’t want to be any longer. And cases have been known where they killed young boys in public streets.47

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