Peloni: FDR provided a textbook example of what happens when the fate of Jews are left to those who despise them. Unlike in 1938, as men like Burnham tries to outdistance his predecessor on his policies of Jew Hatred to appease and distract the monsters in his constituencies, it is important to reflect and rejoice upon the fact that we Jews have reconstituted our own nation, which is recognized and founded with the support of sound international law and principles. Hence, the retort of those who would prefer, like FDR did and Burnham does, to see our people decimated and destroyed in a cauldron of evil will find that the fate of the Jewish people is no longer the exclusively the playthings of psychopaths who revel in our abuse.
by Rafael Medoff
President Franklin D. Roosevelt, signing H.R. 1776, the lend-lease bill to give aid to Great Britain, China and Greece. This image is available from the United States Library of Congress‘s Prints and Photographs division, Public Domain, Link
“You know there is not room in Palestine for many more people,” President Franklin D. Roosevelt told a prominent American Jewish leader in early 1938. “Perhaps another hundred or hundred and fifty thousand.”
At the time, there were about 400,000 Jews in British Mandatory Palestine.
The country’s annual population tally, issued this week by the Israeli government’s Central Bureau of Statistics, found that Israel now has 10,178,000 residents, of whom 7.3 million (72%) are Jews. The population increased by 124,000, or 1.2%, since last Rosh Hashanah.
More than 24,000 new immigrants arrived in Israel during the past year, coming from more than 100 different countries. The youngest was a two week-old infant whose family arrived from Mexico. The two oldest, both 102, came from France and Russia.
There are an estimated 16.5 million Jews in the world, 44% of whom live in Israel. That’s quite a contrast with the conventional wisdom in the 1930s.
The argument that there was no more room for Jews in the Holy Land was the excuse that the British government used to restrict Jewish immigration and land purchases during the Mandate years. London insisted that the country had no more “absorptive capacity.”
President Roosevelt’s chief adviser on population settlement issues, Isaiah Bowman, agreed. Bowman, who as president of Johns Hopkins University imposed a quota on the admission of Jewish students, claimed there were no countries anywhere, including Palestine, that could absorb “a large foreign immigrant group.” He advised FDR that it would be best to “keep the European elements within the framework of the Old World.”
Walter Clay Lowdermilk, an official in the Department of Agriculture, disagreed. In a powerful report that he issued in 1944, titled Palestine: Land of Promise, Lowdermilk argued that with proper cultivation, the country could absorb at least several million immigrants.
But the president chose to side with Bowman. When FDR suspected that First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt was receptive to Lowdermilk’s position, the president asked Bowman to have a talk with her. Bowman, annoyed that the “mischievous” Mrs. Roosevelt was meddling in “questions beyond her understanding,” lectured her on Palestine’s supposed inability to absorb more Jewish refugees.
FDR continued to echo Bowman’s line in meetings with Jewish leaders in the 1930s. The country had “reached the point of Jewish saturation,” FDR asserted. “Palestine possibilities are going to be exhausted….Your people [should] find some large areas [elsewhere in the world] as a second choice for the Jews.”
By the spring of 1938, David Ben-Gurion had heard enough private reports of these and other remarks by the president to conclude that for all practical purposes, FDR was “an anti-Zionist.”
President Roosevelt, who passed away in 1945, did not live to see how wrong he was about the Jews. By the time Israel was established in 1948, it had a population of 872,000—more than double the number who were there at the time he claimed it reached its “saturation point.” Within seven years, it had more than doubled again. And today, with a population that has increased more than ten-fold since its founding, Israel stands ready to absorb many more.
Dr. Medoff is director of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, and the author of more than 20 books about Jewish history, Zionism, and the Holocaust. Follow him on Facebook to read his daily commentaries on the news.
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