. ” ---Edward Said, “
Via Jews For Justice at If America Knew
The Holocaust is often used as the final argument in favor of Zionism, but
is this connection justified? There are several aspects to consider in answering
that question honestly. First, we will examine the historical record of what the
Zionist movement actually did to help save European Jewry from the Nazis.
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)…[Their proposal
stated:] ‘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 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 ‘negligable.’ ” Allan
Brownfield, “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 re-settlement
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 Chal-lenge
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 wor-ried
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, “Jew-ish
State or Israeli Nation?”
Main goal of Zionism – continued
“[Ben-Gurion stated,] ‘If I knew that it was possible to save all the children
in Germany by transporting them to England, but only half of them by trans-porting
them to Palestine, I would choose the second—because we face not
only the reckoning of those children, but the historical reckoning of the Jew-ish
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
“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 in Alaska 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 mate-rial,
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
“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 Gruenbam, who [stated]. . . ‘They
will say that I am anti-Semitic, that I don’t want to save the Exile, that I don’t
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 immigration to Palestine) the mass meetings of protest against
the murder of European Jewry will have to be dropped. We do not have suffi-cient
manpower for both campaigns.’ ” Peter Novick, “The Holocaust in American
Life
Main goal of Zionism – continued
“I have already gone exhaustively into the reason for our being here, rea-sons
that I as a pioneer of 1906 can affirm have nothing to do with the
Nazis!…We are here because this 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 Eu-rope
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.