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black_badger wrote

"Zionists really exploit the Holocaust to justify the occupation of Palestine"

this is true from the time of the declaration of the State of Israel, but has nothing to do with policies of the Jewish Agency or the other political zionist organizations during WWII.

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kano OP wrote (edited )

Not exactly sure what you mean here, it's not true that the rise to power of the Nazis in Germany and the Holocaust didn't have anything to do with policies (or view points of people in) of the Jewish Agency during ww2. And I think that when talking about how Zionist exploitation of the Holocaust, it is of course completely relevant to talk about what they were saying and doing when it was happening.

Can give some quotes from another essay I seen about this too if you are interested.

Edit: I guess what I'm trying to say is that Zionists now engage in some historical revisionism with regard to the Holocaust, to help justify the zionist project in palestine, so going over affinities and collaborations etween Zionism and European fascism during the time of the Holocaust are relevant and of interest.

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black_badger wrote

Sure I'm interested. But the issue isn't what the Jewish Agency was doing in Palestine during WWII; the link states that "the Zionists" helped "perpetrate the Holocaust," which is on a totally different level of political action.

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kano OP wrote

The link says "Zionism" and not "the Zionists" unless am really missing something. Anyway dk if you read the article or not, but examples are being given there. Here's some quotes from Jewish Agency people during the time of Nazi Germany. Found these all in Palestine - A Socialist Introduction

“There is something positive in their tragedy and that is that Hitler oppressed them as a race and not as a religion. Had he done the latter, half the Jews in Germany would simply have converted to Christianity.”

Menacem Ussishkin president of the Jewish National Fund

Whom to save: Should we help everyone in need, without regard to the quality of the people? Should we not give this activity a Zionist national character and try foremost to save those who can be of use to the Land of Israel and to Jewry? I understand that it seems cruel to put the question in this form, but unfortunately we must state that if we are able to save only 10,000 people from among 50,000 who can contribute to build the country … as against saving a million Jews who will be a burden, or at best an apathetic element, we must restrain ourselves and save the 10,000 that can be saved from among the 50,000—despite the accusations and pleas of a million.

1943 private memo of the Rescue Committee of the Jewish National Agency

“It is the job of Zionism not to save the remnant of Israel in Europe but rather to save the land of Israel for the Jewish people and the Yishuv.”

David Ben Gurion

The hopes of Europe’s six million Jews are centered on emigration. I was asked: “Can you bring six 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 have to accept it

Chaim Weizmann

Toward the end of the war a staunch anti-Zionist, Rabbi Dov Michael Weissmandel, met with high-level Nazi officials to make a desperate deal. The Nazis knew they were losing the war and needed cash. They told Weismandel that the remaining Jews could buy their freedom for a large sum of money. The Nazis gave Weissmandel a deadline to come up with that money. Weissmandel flooded the Zionist organizations with his pleas, but they chose to do nothing. The deadline passed. In an agonizing letter to the Jewish Agency, Weissmandel wrote:

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 in the world—liberty? … Twelve thousand Jews—men, women, and children, old men, infants, healthy and sick ones, are to be suffocated daily…. Their destroyed hearts cry out to you for help as they bewail your cruelty.40

And the whole thing with Rudolph Kastner is gone over in the article, so I ain't gonna go over it again here.

to be clear I'm just trying to show here that the policies of the Jewish Agency were not completely unrelated to the Holocaust.

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black_badger wrote

What these citations show is the realpolitik of rescue and immigration, not "helping" to "perpetuate the Holocaust." Plus the context of the British Mandate -- the actual location for immigration policy -- is missing from the discussion; even if the Jewish Agency had wanted to bring rescued European Jews to Palestine, they'd have had to defy their wartime alliance with the Brits (as they did after the war). All of these debates and gotchas are pointless.

What all zionists militias (from left to right) did from November 1947 through the final ceasefire in 1949 (and the military ever since) -- killing civilians, destroying homes, mass expulsions -- is horrible enough without (falsely) making them complicit in "perpetuating the Holocaust."

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