Zionism and the Holocaust:
cactus48.com
"Shamir proposes an alliance with the Nazis
"As late as 1941, the Zionist group LEHI, one of whose leaders, Yitzhak Shamir,
was later to become a prime minister of Israel, approached the Nazis, using the name
of its parent organization, the Irgun(NMO)..[The proposal stated:] 'The establishment
of the historical Jewish state on a national and totalitarian Pd bound by a treaty with
the German Reich would be in the interests of strengthening the future German nation
of power in the Near East...The NMO in Palestine offers to take an active part in the
war on Germany's side'...The Nazis rejected this proposal for an alliance because, it
is reported, they considered LEHI's military power 'negligible.' " Allan Brownfield
in "The Washington Report on Middle Eastern Affairs", July/August 1998.
Wasn't the main goal of Zionism to save Jews from the Holocaust?
"In 1938 a thirty-one nation conference was held in Evian, France, on resettlement of
the victims of Nazism. The World Zionist Organization refused to participate, fearing
that resettlement of Jews in other states would reduce the number available for
Palestine." John Quigley, "Palestine and Israel: A Challenge to Justice."
Main goal of Zionism - continued
"It was summed up in the meeting [of the Jewish Agency's Executive on June 26,
1938] that the Zionist thing to do 'is belittle the [Evian] Conference as far as possible
and to cause it to decide nothing...We are particularly worried that it would move
Jewish organizations to collect large sums of money for aid to Jewish refugees, and
these collections could interfere with our collection efforts'...Ben-Gurion's statement
at the same meeting: 'No rationalization can turn the conference from a harmful to a
useful one. What can and should be done is to limit the damage as far as possible.'"
Israeli author Boas Evron, "Jewish State or Israeli Nation?"
Main goal of Zionism - continued
"[Ben-Gurion stated] 'If I knew that it was possible to save all the children of
Germany by transporting them to England, but only half of them by transporting them
to Palestine, I would choose the second - because we face not only the reckoning of
those children, but the historical reckoning of the Jewish people.' In the wake of the
Kristallnacht pogroms, Ben-Gurion commented that 'the human conscience' might
bring various countries to open their doors to Jewish refugees from Germany. He
saw this as a threat and warned: 'Zionism is in danger.'" Israeli historian, Tom
Segev, "The Seventh Million."
Main goal of Zionism-continued
"Even David Ben-Gurion's sympathetic biographer acknowledges that Ben-Gurion
did nothing practical for rescue, devoting his energies to post-war prospects. He
delegated rescue work to Yitzak Gruenbaum, who [stated]...'They will say that I am
anti-Semitic, that I don't want to save the Exile, that I don't have a varm Yiddish
hartz...Let them say what they want. I will not demand that the Jewish Agency
allocate a sum of 300,000 or 100,000 pounds sterling to help European Jewry. And
I think that whoever demands such things is performing an anti-Zionist act.'
"Zionists in America...took the same position. At a May 1943 meeting of the
American Emergency Committee for Zionist Affairs, Nahum Goldmann argued, 'If a
drive is opened against the White Paper (the British policy of restricting Jewish
immigrants to Palestine) the mass meetings of protest against the murder of European
Jewry will have to be dropped. We do not have sufficient manpower for both
campaigns.'" Peter Novick, "The Holocaust in American Life."
Main goal of Zionism - continued
"The Zionist movement...interfered with and hindered other organizations, Jewish and
non-Jewish, whenever it imagined that their activity, political or humanitarian, was at
variance with Zionist aims or in competition with them, even when these might be
helpful to Jews, even when it was a question of life and death...Beit Zvi documents
the Zionist leadership's indifference to saving Jews from the Nazi menace except in
cases in which the Jews could be brought to Palestine...[e.g.] the readiness of the
dictator of the Dominican Republic, Rafael Trujillo, to absorb one hundred thousand
refugees and the sabotaging of this idea - as well as others, like proposals to settle
the Jews inAlaska and the Philippines - by the Zionist movement...
"The obtuseness of the Zionist movement toward the fate of European Jewry did not
prevent it, of course, from later hurling accusations against the whole world for its
indifference toward the Jewish catastrophe or from pressing material, political, and
moral demands on the world because of that indifference." Israeli author Boas
Evron, "Jewish State or Israeli Nation?"
Main goal of Zionism - continued
"I have already gone exhaustively into the reason for our being here, reasons that I as
a pioneer of 1906 can affirm have nothing to do with the Nazis!...We are here
because the land is ours. And we are here because we have again made it ours in this
time with the work we have put into it. Nazism and our history of martyrdom abroad
do not concern our presence in Israel directly." David Ben-Gurion, "Memoirs."
In hindsight, it is easy to say that the millions of Jews who were murdered in the
Holocaust could have been saved if Palestine had been available for unlimited
immigration. The history of this period is not so simple, however. First, keep in mind
that other realistic resettlement plans were proposed but actively opposed by the
Zionist movement. Second, the great majority of Jews in Europe were not Zionists
and did not try to emigrate to Palestine before 1939. Third, after the start of the war,
as the Nazis occupied various countries, they refused to let the Jews leave, making
emigration virtually impossible. And Palestine, as we have shown, was already
occupied; the indigenous Arabs had more valid reasons than any other country for
wanting to limit Jewish immigration. Read on:
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Emigration to Palestine before World War II
"In 1936, the Social Democratic Bund won a sweeping victory in Jewish kehilla
elections in Poland...Its main hallmarks included 'an unyielding hostility to Zionism'
and to the Zionist enterprise of Jewish emigration from Poland to Palestine. The Bund
wished Polish Jews to fight anti-semitism in Poland by remaining there...The Zionist
goal was also opposed, as a matter of principle, by all the major parties and
movements among pre-1939 Polish Jewry..."Elsewhere in eastern Europe...Zionist
strength was weaker still." Prof. William Rubinstein, "The Myth ofRescue."
Emigration to Palestine before World War II - continued
"In fact, Zionism suffered its own defeat in the Holocaust; as a movement, it failed. It
had not, after all, persuaded the majority of Jews to leave Europe for Palestine while
it was still possible to do so." Israeli historian, Tom Segev, "The Seventh
Million." |
