Middle East Archive | Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism Ralph Schoenman The Hidden History of Zionism Chapter 6 Zionism and the Jews 5. Seizure of the Land | 7. Myth of Security of Palestine has series of a take moment to examine the attitude of the Zionist movement not only toward its Palestinian victims (to which we shall Jews Herzl himself wrote of the Jews in the following fashion: “I achieved a anti-Semitism, understand historically and to pardon. Above all, I recognized the emptiness and futility of trying to ’combat’ anti-Semitism.” of the (young Guard) published the following: “A Jew is a caricature of a normal, natural physically and spiritually. As an individual in society he revolts and throws off the harness of social obligations, knows no order Jewish people,” wrote Jabotinsky in the same its people; neighbors hate it and rightly so ... its general immigration to the land of Israel.” [78] The founders of Zionism despaired of and, anti-Semites themselves as allies, because of a shared desire to remove the Jews from the countries in which they lived. assimilated the anti- movement anti-Semites reliable none Plehve, the author of the worst pogroms in Russia – the pogroms of Kishinev with the me to reach the land [Palestine] sooner and the revolt [against Czarist rule] will end.” [79] Von Plehve agreed, and he Zionist movement. He was later to complain to Herzl: “The Jews have been joining the were sympathetic to your Zionist movement toward emigration. You don’t have to justify You are preaching to a convert.” [80] Herzl and Weizmann offered to help guarantee Czarist interests in Palestine and to rid Eastern Europe and Russia of those Anarcho- As we have noted, the same appeal was made by the Zionists to the Sultan of Turkey, the Kaiser in Germany, to French imperialism and to the British Zionism and Fascism largely Mussolini set up squadrons of the movement, Betar, in black shirts in emulation of became chief of Betar, he preferred the brown shirts of the Hitler gangs, a uniform Begin and Betar members wore to all meetings and rallies – at which they greeted each other and opened and closed meetings with the fascist salute. Ukrainian directed pogroms which killed 28,000 Jews in Jabotinsky negotiated an alliance with Petilura, force to accompany Petilura’s forces in their counter-revolutionary fight against the Bolshevik Revolution – a process involving the worker and of the Collaborating with the Nazis Europe’s of aligning with the most vicious movements and military patrons of a Zionist colony in Palestine, The Zionist Federation of Germany sent a memorandum of support to the Nazi Party on June 21, 1933. In it the ... a rebirth of national life such as is occurring in German life ... must also take place in the Jewish national group. On the foundation of the new [Nazi] state which has established the principle of race, we wish so to fit our community into the total structure so that for us, too, fruitful us, in the sphere assigned to activity for the Fatherland is possible ... Far from repudiating this policy, the World Zionist Organization Congress in 1933 defeated a resolution calling for action against Hitler by a vote of Hitler announced a trade agreement with the WZO’s Anglo-Palestine Bank, breaking, thereby, the Jewish boycott of the Nazi regime at a time when the German economy was extremely vulnerable. It was the height of the Depression and people were wheeling barrels full of worthless German Marks. The World Zionist Organization broke the Jewish principal distributor of Nazi goods throughout the Middle East and Northern Europe. They established the Ha’avara, which was a bank in Palestine designed to German-Jewish bourgeoisie, with which sums Nazi goods were purchased in very Embracing the SS brought the SS Security Service to Palestine for a six-month visit in support of Zionism. This visit led to a twelve-part report by Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s Minister of Angriff (The Zionism. Goebbels ordered a medallion struck with the Swastika on one side, and on the other, the Zionist Star of David. In Heydrich, the chief of the SS Security Service, wrote an article in which he separated Jews Jews he favored were the Zionists: “Our good wishes together with our official good will go with them.“ [82] In 1937, the militia, the Haganah (founded by Jabotinsky) sent Berlin Security Service in exchange for the release of Jewish wealth for Zionist colonization. invited to Palestine as the guest of the Haganah. Feivel Polkes informed Eichmann: circles were very pleased with the radical German policy, Jewish the of population in Palestine would be so far increased thereby that in the foreseeable could reckon upon numerical superiority over the Arabs. The list of acts of Zionist collaboration with the Nazis goes on and on. What incredible willingness of Zionist leaders to betray entire rationale for the state of Israel offered by its apologists has been that it was of Jews The Zionists, to the contrary, saw any effort to rescue Europe’s Jews not political purpose but as a threat to their entire were to go elsewhere and the rescue operation would have nothing to do with the Zionist project of conquering Palestine. Sacrificing Europe’s Jews acts of Nazis throughout the 1930’s was that when change the immigration laws of the United States and Western Europe were contemplated in order to provide token refuge for persecuted Jews of Europe, it was the Zionists who actively organized to stop these efforts. Ben Gurion informed a meeting of Labor Zionists in Great Britain in 1938: “If I knew that it would be possible to save all the children in Germany by bringing them over to England and only half of them by transporting them for the This Palestine and overwhelming the Arabs led the oppose any facing extermination, because the ability to deflect select manpower to Palestine would be impeded. From 1933 to 1935, the WZO turned down two-thirds of all applied for Berel Katznelson, editor of the Labor “cruel German Jews children in Palestine, lacked trades for building a Zionist colony, didn’t speak Hebrew and weren’t Zionists. In place of these the WZO trained young Zionists from the United States, countries. Worse than this, the WZO not merely failed to seek any alternative for the Jews facing the Holocaust, the Zionist belligerently all efforts to find refuge for fleeing Jews. As late as 1943, while the Jews of Europe were being exterminated in Congress proposed to set up a commission to Rabbi Stephen Wise, who was the principal American came to against the divert of colonization This is the same Rabbi Wise who, in 1938, in his capacity as leader of the wrote a letter in which he opposed any change in US immigration laws which would enable Jews to find refuge. He stated: It may interest you to know that some weeks ago the representatives of all the organizations met in It was decided that no Jewish organization would, at this time, sponsor a bill which would in any way alter the immigration laws. [85] Fighting Asylum The entire Zionist establishment made in its response to a motion by 227 British members of Parliament calling on the asylum in British territories for persecuted Jews. The meager undertaking which was His Majesty’s Government issued some Mauritius and other in favor of threatened Jewish families. [86] measure was opposed by the Zionist leaders. At a Parliamentary meeting on January 27, 1943, when the next steps were being hundred Parliament, a Zionists opposed this contain colonization of Palestine. This was a consistent stance. Chaim Weizmann, the Zionist leader Balfour Declaration and was to become the made this The hopes of Europe’s six million Jews are centered on emigration. I was asked: million Jews to Palestine?” I replied, “No.” ... From the depths of the tragedy I want to save ... young people [for Palestine]. The old ones will pass. They will bear their fate or they will not. They are dust, economic and moral dust in a cruel world ... Only the branch of the young shall survive. They Yitzhak Gruenbaum, the chairperson of the committee set up by the Zionists, nominally to investigate the condition When they come to us with two plans – of the masses of Jews in Europe or the redemption of the land – I vote, without a second thought, for the redemption of the land. The more said about the slaughter of our people, the greater the minimization of our efforts to strengthen and promote the Hebraisation of the land. If there would be a possibility today of buying packages of food with the money of the Karen Hayesod [United Jewish Appeal] to send it through Lisbon, would we do such a thing? No. And once Betraying the Resistance Jewish Michael Zionist “rescue a series of measures to save the Jews scheduled Auschwitz. He offered exact mappings of the railways and urged the bombing of the tracks on which the Hungarian Jews were being transported to the crematoria. He appealed for the bombing of the the for parachuting of ammunition to 80,000 parachuting of saboteurs to blow up all the means of end the cremation of 13,000 Jews every day. refuse the organized and public demand by the Weissmandel proposed that the Zionists, who had obtain volunteers alone. thirties and spokespersons in Europe cried out for help, for public campaigns, for organized resistance, for demonstrations to force the hand of allied Govemments – only to be met not merely by Zionist silence but by active Zionist sabotage of the meager proposed or and the of Rabbi Weissmandel. Writing to the Zionists in July 1944 he asked incredulously. Why have you done nothing until now? Who is guilty of this frightful negligence? Are you not guilty, our Jewish brothers: you who have the greatest good fortune send you – Rabbi Weissmandel wrote again – this special message: to inform you that yesterday the Germans deportation of Jews from deported ones go to Auschwitz to be put to death by cyanide gas. This is the schedule, of Auschwitz from yesterday to the end: and women – men, thousand Jews children, old men, infants, healthy and sick ones, are to be suffocated daily. And you, our brothers in Palestine, in all freedom, and you ministers of all the Kingdoms, how do you keep silent in the face of this great Silent while thousands upon thousands, reaching now to six million Jews, are murdered? And silent now, while tens of thousands are still being murdered and waiting to be murdered? Their destroyed hearts cry out to you for help as they Brutal, you are and murderers, too, you are, because of the coldbloodedness of the silence in which you watch, because you sit with folded arms and do nothing, although you could stop or delay the murder of Jews at this very hour. You, our brothers, sons of Israel, are you insane? Don’t you know the hell around us? For whom are you saving your money? Murderers! Madmen! Who is it that gives charity: you who toss a few pennies from your safe homes, or we who give our blood in the depths of hell? supported his request, nor did the Western capitalist regimes bomb a single concentration A Pact Against Hungary’s Jews betrayal was the sacrifice of Hungary’s Jews in a series of agreements between the Zionist movement and Nazi Germany which first became known in 1953. Dr. Rudolph Kastner of the Jewish Agency Rescue Committee in Budapest signed a secret pact with Adolf Eichmann to question” in Hungary. This took place in 1944. The pact sealed the fate of 800,000 Jews. later that Kastner was under the direction of the Zionist leaders abroad when he made The Eichmann. agreement entailed the saving of six on the condition that silence was maintained about the fate of Hungarian Jewry. Malchiel pact and Nazi collaborator whose “deeds in Budapest cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of Jews”, [91] Greenwald was sued by the Israeli government, whose leaders had drawn up the terms of the Kastner to the The sacrifice of the majority of the Jews, in order to rescue the prominents was the basic element in the agreement between Kastner and the Nazis. This agreement fixed the division of the nation into two small fragment of prominents, whom the Nazis promised Kastner to save, on the one hand, and the great majority of Hungarian Jews whom the Nazis designated for death, on the The court declared that the imperative condition of this pact was that neither Kastner nor the Zionist leaders would interfere in the action of the Nazis leaders eschew agreed they would not, in the words of the Israeli the in Collaboration between the Jewish Agency Rescue Committee and the exterminators of the Jews was solidified in Budapest and Vienna. Kastner’s duties were part and parcel of the SS. In addition to its Extermination Department and Looting Department, the Nazi SS opened a Rescue Department headed by Kastner. [93] Saving Nazis, Not Jews It is not surprising that it was to be revealed that Kastner intervened to from Becher being tried for war crimes. Becher was one of the leading negotiators of the deal with the Zionists in 1944. He was also an SS Major in Poland, a member worked around the clock killing Jews.” “Becher a Jew slaughterer in Poland and Russia.” [94] He was appointed Commissar of all Nazi concentration camps by Heinrich What happened to him? He became president of many corporations and headed up the sale of wheat to Israel. Cologne-Handel business A Military Pact with Nazism On January 11, 1941, Avraham Stern military pact Military Organization (NMO), of which Yitzhak Shamir, the current Prime Minister of Israel, was a prominent leader, and the proposal Ankara discovered after the war in the files of the German states the The evacuation of the Jewish masses from Europe is a precondition for solving the Jewish question; but this can only be made possible and complete through the settlement of these masses in the home of the Jewish people, Palestine, and through the establishment of a Jewish state in its well-acquainted with the goodwill of the German Reich government and its authorities towards Germany and towards Zionist emigration plans, is of 1. Common interests could exist between the establishment of a New Order in Europe in conformity with the German concept, and the true national aspirations of the Jewish people as they are embodied by the NMO. 2. Cooperation between the new Germany and renewed folkish-national Hebraium would be 3. The establishment of the historical Jewish state on a national and totalitarian basis, and bound by a treaty with the German Reich, would be in the interest of a maintained and strengthened future German position of power these considerations, Palestine, under the above-mentioned Israeli the of freedom movement are recognized on the side of the German Reich, offers to in the war on Zionism’s Perfidy Zionism’s perfidy – the betrayal of the of the Holocaust – was the culmination of their attempt to identify the interests of the Jews with those of Today, the to the enforcement arm of US imperialism – Latin America to the covert operations of the This sordid history is rooted in the founders of Zionism, who rejected the possibility of through popular struggle and social revolution. Moses Hess, Theodor Herzl and Chaim Weizmann chose the wrong side of the barricades – that of state power, class domination and exploitative rule. They disjunction from persecution and the necessity of social change. They fully understood that the cultivation of anti-Semitism and the persecution of the Jews were the work of the very ruling class from whom of the anti-Semites themselves, they revealed several motives: the worship of power with which they associated strength; a desire to end Jewish “weakness” and vulnerability, ceasing to be perpetual This sensibility was a short step to assimilating the values and ideas of the Jew-haters themselves. The Jews, the indeed an dissident people, worthy of the scorn they had catered Jew-hatred. Worshipping power, they appealed to the von Plehves and the Himmlers to be rid of a victim people long radicalized by persecution, a people who filled the ranks of revolutionary movements and whose suffering drew their best minds offensive to The dirty secret of Zionist history is that Zionism was threatened by the Jews themselves. Defending the Jewish meant organizing resistance to the regimes these regimes embodied the imperial order which comprised the only social force settler people. needed the persecution of the Jews to persuade Jews to become colonizers afar, and they needed the persecutors to sponsor never manifested any interest in colonizing Palestine. Zionism remained a fringe Jews, who aspired to live in the countries of their or to escape persecution by emigrating to as perceived never answer the needs or aspirations of the Jews. The moment of truth came when physical extermination. Put to the ultimate and sole test of their real relationship to Jewish survival, the Zionists did not merely fail to lead resistance or defend sabotaged the Nazi economy. They sought, even then, the mass murderers themselves, not merely because the powerful enough to impose a Zionist colony, but were consonant with Zionist assumptions. ground between the Nazis and the Zionists, expressed not merely in the proposal Military state in Palestine on a “national totalitarian basis.” Vladimir Jabotinsky, in his last work, The Jewish War Front, (1940) wrote of his plans for the Palestinian Since we have this great moral authority the exodus of Arabs, we need not regard the possible departure of 900,000 with dismay. Herr Hitler has recently been enhancing the popularity of population transfer. [96] Jabotinsky’s remarkable declaration in synthesizes moral bankruptcy. The slaughter of the Jews gave Zionism “great moral authority”. – For what? “For calmly envisaging the exodus of Arabs.” The lesson of Nazi destruction of the Jews was that it was permissible now for Zionists to visit entire Zionists backing times achieved, and they covered bleeding Lidices [97], driving 800,000 people into exile. The Zionists approached the Nazis in the same spirit they had Von Plehve, acting on the perverse notion that Jew-hatred was useful. Their purpose was not rescue, but forced conscription of to be consigned to their agonizing fate. Zionism sought bodies with which to preferred Jewish corpses in their millions to any Jews If ever a people could be expected to grasp the meaning of persecution, the pain of being perpetual refugees and the humiliation of slander, it ought to In place of compassion, the Zionists celebrated the persecution of others, even as they first betrayed the Jews and then degraded them. They selected a victim people of their own on whom to inflict a conquering design. They aligned the surviving Jews with a new Palestinian themselves, with savage irony, in the collective shroud Top of the page Chapter 7 Notes 76. Marvin Lowenthal, ed., The Diaries of Theodor Herzl, p.6. Cited in Lenni Brenner, Zionism in the Age of the Lawrence 77. From Our Shomer “Weltanschauung”, 1936. Originally published in 1917, Brenner, 86. Rabbi Solomon Schonfeld, Britain’s chief Rabbi during World War II. Faris with Nazi Palestine Research Center, January 1978), p.53. 87. Chaim Weizmann reporting to the Zionist Congress in 1937 on his testimony before the Peel Commission in London, 88. Yitzhak Gruenbaum was chairperson of the Jewish Agency’s Rescue Committee. Excerpted from a speech made in 1943. 92. Judgment given on June 22, 1955, 124/53 in District Court, Jerusalem. Ibid., p.58. 94. Ben Hecht, Perfidy (New York: 1961), 95. Proposal of the National Military Zvai Leumi -Concerning the Solution of the Jewish and the Participation of the NMO in the War on the side of Germany. Original text found in David Yisraeli, The Palestine Problem in German Politics. 1889-1945. (Ramat Gan, Israel: Bar Ilan University, 1974), pp.315-317, Brenner. Zionism, p.267. 96. Brenner, The Iron Wall, p.107. 97. Lidice was a Czech village razed to the ground by the SS. It became a symbol of Nazi brutality and was singled out as a war crime during the Nuremberg Trials. Middle East Archive | Encyclopedia of Trotskyism Marxists’ Internet Archive Last updated on 5.5.2012
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