Capitalizing on the Past

In April 1945, two weeks before the surrender of the Reich, the United Nations’ first conference opened in San Francisco. Jews the world over wanted this successor to the obsolete League of Nations to ensure that the British honor their commitment to creating a Jewish homeland in Palestine. A delegation of eminent Jews, including the Canadian magnate Samuel Bronfman and American Zionist rabbi Israel Goldstein, descended on the conference to lobby as many countries as they could. Mindful of Cohen’s relationship with the Chinese, Bronfman and Goldstein arranged for him to attend, hoping he could influence the Chinese delegation to support a motion establishing a Jewish state in Palestine. T. V. Soong and Chinese ambassador Wellington Koo greeted him as an old friend. Cyril Sherer claims that Cohen produced Sun Yat-sen’s letter expressing his sympathy for Zionism, and that clinched their support. 

By January 1946, Cohen was back in China looking for his niche. He spoke to the Jewish Agency about importing potash from the Dead Sea as fertilizer for China, delivered Zionist lectures among Betar supporters in Shanghai, and intervened to save a Jewish merchant from Tianjin who was being prosecuted for collaborating with the Japanese. But no business materialized, and he had a wife waiting back in Montreal. China was in turmoil, with Chiang’s nationalists battling Mao Zedong’s communists for control of the nation. Cohen was convinced that his nationalist friends would win out. “Communism is an aberration in the Chinese character,” he asserted, but circumstances soon proved him wrong.

In the tense period before Israel’s independence in 1948, on one of his many trips to Shanghai, Cohen was introduced to two Irgun agents who were planning attacks on British installations in south-east Asia – the dry docks of Singapore and the Hong Kong airport – should the British not leave Palestine as planned in May. Cohen helped them plan the onslaught and supplied them with rifles, machine guns and identity papers, but thankfully the British left and the plans never came to fruition.