Underground to Palestine

A moving and unforgettable eyewitness account of the courageous exodus of Holocaust survivors from post–World War II Europe to the Promised Land, now expanded with Stone’s frontline reporting on the Arab-Israeli crises of 1948–49 and the Suez War of 1956, and with a new foreword by D. D. Guttenplan

In the spring of 1946, American journalist I. F. Stone embarked on an incredible adventure, accompanying Holocaust survivors as they made their historic voyage from Eastern Europe to the biblical Promised Land. Undertaken in secrecy against the strict orders of Palestine’s British colonial governors, this harrowing escape began in the displaced persons camps of Germany and Poland. An illegal convoy of the homeless, proud, and determined, these refugees traveled by train and by foot across the European continent before boarding the ship that would carry them past the British blockade to their ancient, ancestral home.

No account of the historic twentieth-century exodus is as poignant, powerful, exhilarating, and dramatic as this acclaimed first-person narrative. Through the words of author I. F. Stone, one of America’s most provocative and revered investigative reporters, these courageous men, women, and children live again. Largely implicit but nevertheless unyielding is Stone’s belief in a binational Arab-Jewish state, a creed unacceptable to the Zionist movement of the time.

Included are essays written in the years following Israel’s establishment, reflecting on the state of the newly reborn nation and the volatile situation in the Middle East thirty years beyond the establishment of Mandatory Palestine. Caught between the immediate, innate sense of belonging he felt in Palestine and his own developing critique of Zionism, Stone wrote into each of these works a personal struggle, a question of justice unsolved today.

With a new introduction by D. D. Guttenplan, this edition reveals a perspective indispensable to understanding past and present tensions in the Middle East.