Historical Perspectives of Jewish Presence: World War II Refugees and the British Detention Camps in Cyprus

This recording from the conference Historical Perspectives of Jewish Presence presents three papers on refugees in Cyprus during and after the Second World War and the British detention camps for Jewish immigrants on the island between 1946 and 1949.

In the first paper, Iakovos Margaritis examines the movement of displaced persons and Greek Christian refugees during the Second World War. Tracing two waves of flight from occupied Greece and the Dodecanese between 1941 and 1944, he outlines the routes taken through Turkey and Syria to camps in the Middle East, Egypt and Africa, and the arrival of more than 5,000 Greek civilian refugees in Cyprus. The British colonial administration settled these refugees mainly at Zygi, Xeros, Skouriotissa and Mavrovouni. Margaritis details a late 1943 dispute between British authorities in Cyprus under Governor Charles Woolley and those in Mandatory Palestine over a plan to transfer Greek refugees from Cyprus to the Atlit camp near Haifa. Because Palestine officials insisted on reserving Atlit for Jewish immigrants, the British agreed instead to keep the roughly 4,000 Greeks in Cyprus while transferring 250 Jewish refugees already on the island to Palestine.

In the second paper, Aryeh Kochavi of the University of Haifa analyses British policy against clandestine Jewish immigration to Palestine from 1945 to 1948. Drawing on British Cabinet and Colonial Office records, he traces the debate between military commanders, the Colonial Office and Prime Minister Clement Attlee over how to deter refugee ships without provoking an Arab uprising or alienating the United States. Following the King David Hotel bombing and the rejection of the Morrison-Grady plan, Britain announced on 13 August 1946 that intercepted Jewish immigrants would be deported to detention camps in Cyprus. Kochavi tracks the repeated expansion of the Cyprus camps under Woolley and his successor Lord Winster to a capacity of 34,000, the failed attempt by Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin to return the passengers of the Exodus 1947 to France, and the deportation of around 50,000 Holocaust survivors to Cyprus before the end of the Mandate.

The third speaker, Branka Rivet of INALCO in Paris, investigates why roughly 12,000 Jewish detainees remained held in Cyprus for eight months after the British Mandate ended on 15 May 1948. She shows how Britain used United Nations Security Council Resolution 50 to ban the departure of men of military age (18 to 45) from Cyprus, examining the exchanges between camp commissioner Godfrey Collins, Rabbi Schreiber and UN mediator Folke Bernadotte. Rivet also discusses debates in Israel over whether Cyprus detainees could vote in the first Knesset elections, an unsuccessful legal challenge to the Cyprus detention law brought by lawyer Lawrence Weston in August 1948, and the release of the remaining detainees on 11 February 1949 following the Rhodes armistice talks.

In the discussion that follows, the speakers and audience address wartime British evacuations of civilians and Jewish families from Cyprus to East Africa in 1941, Israeli party politics behind the question of detainee voting rights, and the roles of American electoral politics and Soviet policy in post-war Jewish migration.