Trudy Gold
Palestine, Britain and the Jews, Part 1
Summary
To what extent was the Shoah central to the creation of a Jewish State? These three presentations will examine the relationship between the various Jewish factions in Palestine and how they responded to British policy. We will also focus on the attitudes on the Jewish communities in Britain as a “state of war” developed between the Yishuv and the British Labour government.
Trudy Gold
Trudy Gold was the CEO of the London Jewish Cultural Centre and a founding member of the British delegation to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA). Throughout her career she taught modern Jewish history at schools, universities, and to adult groups and ran seminars on Holocaust education in the UK, Eastern Europe, and China. She also led Jewish educational tours all over the world. Trudy was the educational director of the student resources “Understanding the Holocaust” and “Holocaust Explained” and the author of The Timechart History of Jewish Civilization.
Aha. Look at the end of the first World War, you’ve got to remember it was still the age of empire. And the British dreamt of an empire that stretched from Suez to India and also they wanted to control the oil. They wanted to stop the French building empires. And after the first World War, because the Americans hated colonies, they created mandates. And the French had a mandate. There was no map of the Middle East as you know it today, Madeleine. Get hold of an Atlas, get hold of the Arab Israeli conflict in maps. It was all divided up. It was all part of the Ottoman Empire. And what happens is new countries are born, but they have very old histories. Damascus goes back to being the centre of one of the greatest Arab dynasties as does Baghdad, the omiad and the abesit. What happens is the French are given Syria by the League of Nations at the end of the first World War, the British Palestine in Iraq. In 1921, Churchill to try and solve the problem chops off one third of the mandate and gives two thirds to the Hashemite Abdullah who had done the British huge favors in the war. But I’ve lectured at this at length and there are so many books on it.