The Time Has Come to Say It Out Loud - The Comparisons Between Israel and Nazi Germany Are Unmistakeable
Israel's Behaviour in Gaza Is Remniscent of the Nazi Occupation of Poland and Its Treament of the Jews
REMINDER - How Germany Transfers its Holocaust Guilt to the Palestinians
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In popular myth Israel was founded as compensation for the annihilation of 6 million Jews by Hitler. In fact the Zionist settler colonial project had been going in earnest ever since 1904 and was called the Labour Zionist second aliyah (wave of emigration).
What is undoubtedly true is that Israel was formed in the image of Nazi Germany though many Western socialists fooled themselves for a long time that Israel, with its kibbutzim and strong labour movement, was a social democratic state.
Zionism sought to create a Jewish state and no-one asked what such a state meant. Was it simply a Jewish majority state or a refuge for Jews or was it something more sinister, a Jewish supremacist state.
There were many clues. One such clue was the statement attributed to Israel Zangwill that Palestine was ‘a land without a people for a people without a land.’ This was classic settler colonialism, terra nullis. The indigenous Palestinians were invisible just as they were in Australia.
Another clue was that the Zionist labour movement followed a policy of Jewish labour, land and produce. This meant a boycott of Arab labour by Jewish employers, the eviction of Arabs from ‘Jewish’ land and a boycott of Arab grown produce.
Although preaching peace and amity between nations, the Zionist ‘socialists’ were busy creating an apartheid economy as the prelude to the dispossesion and expulsion of the Palestinian Arabs. The Report which best describes the Zionist intentions and hypocrisy was that of Sir John Simpson , the Hope Simpson Report of 1930 into the causes of the 1929 riots in Palestine. It described how the lease given to Jewish leaseholders stipulated that
‘The lessee undertakes to execute all works connected with the cultivation of the holding only with Jewish labour.’
The Zionist leadership in fact welcomed the Nazis to power as they saw great advantage for their movement in developments in Germany. Their sole concern was building a Jewish state and anti-Semitism provided the stimulation to Jewish emigration to Palestine.
Berl Katznelson, a founder of Mapai, the Israeli Labor Party and editor of its paper, Davar, as well as Ben-Gurion’s effective deputy, saw the rise of Hitler as ‘an opportunity to build and flourish like none we have ever had or ever will have.’ [1] David Ben-Gurion, the Chairman of the Jewish Agency (the state-in-the-making) and Israel’s first Prime Minister was even more optimistic. ‘The Nazis’ victory would become “a fertile force for Zionism.”’[2]
Rabbi Joachim Prinz, one of the leader of the German Zionist Federation and later Deputy President of the World Jewish Congress admitted that:
It was morally disturbing to seem to be considered as the favored children of the Nazi Government, particularly when it dissolved the anti-Zionist youth groups, and seemed in other ways to prefer the Zionists. The Nazis asked for a ‘more Zionist behaviour’. [3]
Bloom quoted Emil Ludwig (1881-1948), the world-famous biographer, ‘who expressed the general attitude of the Zionist movement’:
Hitler will be forgotten in a few years, but he will have a beautiful monument in Palestine. You know, the coming of the Nazis was rather a welcome thing. … Thousands who seemed to be completely lost to Judaism were brought back to the fold by Hitler, and for that I am personally very grateful to him.[4]
Nahman Bialik, the Zionist national poet, volunteered that ‘Hitlerism has perhaps saved German Jewry, which was being assimilated into annihilation.’[5] Germany’s remaining Jews were of course annihilated, but not by assimilation.
Although the Zionists welcomed the stimulus to emigration that Hitler provided, it was vehemently opposed to Jewish refugees going to any other country bar Palestine, despite the fact that the British were restricting the number of immigrants into Palestine.Ben-Gurion was explicity about this. After the Nazi Pogrom Kristallnacht (November 9-19 1938 the British agreed to admit 10,000 German Jewish children to England. The Zionists, instead of welcoming this were furious. Ben Gurion, in a speech to Mapai’s Central Committee on 9 December 1938 explained why:
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 to Eretz Yisrael, then I would opt for the second alternative. For we must weigh not only the life of these children, but also the history of the People of Israel.[6]
The Zionists even went to the lengths of petitioning the Gestapo not to let Jews out of Germany unless they were going to Palestine!
The Zionists were seen as the ‘racial’ Jews by the SS, which was in charge of Jewish policy.
On 28 January 1935 Reinhard Heydrich, the ‘real engineer of the final solution’ [7] issued a directive stating that:
The activity of the Zionist-oriented youth organisations that are engaged in the occupational restructuring of the Jews … lies in the interest of the National Socialist state’s leadership. (These organizations) are not to be treated with that strictness that it is necessary to apply to the members of the so-called German-Jewish organizations (assimilationists).[8]
The result was that the activities of Zionist groups were supervised with ‘more benevolence’ than comparable activities by non-Zionist Jewish groups. The Gestapo and the SD ‘place(d) no restrictions on Zionist organisations.’ [9]
In May 1935 Schwarze Korps, paper of the SS, wrote that:
the Zionists adhere to a strict racial position and by emigrating to Palestine they are helping to build their own Jewish state.... The assimilation-minded Jews deny their race and insist on their loyalty to Germany or claim to be Christians because they have been baptized, in order to subvert National Socialist principles.[10]
Throughout the pre-war period, 1933-1939 and even after it the Zionists were the favoured children of the Nazis. So when the German state today supports Israel’s wars against the Palestinians they are behaving no differently to the Nazi predecessors.
[] Nicosia, ZANG, p. 91. Segev, The Seventh Million, p. 18 attributes this quote to a report by Moshé Beilinson, a cofounder of Davar, to Katznelson.
[2] Segev, The Seventh Million, p. 18.
[3] Joachim Prinz, ‘Zionism under the Nazi Government,’ Young Zionist (London, November 1937), p. 18 cited in Lenni Brenner, 51 Documents, p. 101.
[4] Bloom, Arthur Ruppin and the Production of the Modern Hebrew Culture, p. 417. See also https://tinyurl.com/y4bqt3wf
[5] Bloom, p. 417.
[6] Gelber, ‘Zionist policy and the Fate of European Jewry, (1939-42)’, p. 199; see also Segev, The Seventh Million, p. 28; Shabtai Teveth, The Burning Ground pp. 855-6;
[7] Gerald Reitlinger, The Final Solution, p. 13.
[8] Dawidowicz, War Against the Jews, pp. 118, citing Mommsen 'Der Nationalsozialistische Polizeistaat’ pp. 78/9 and Nicosia, ZANG, pp. 118/119. Nicosia gives the date of its issue as 17.1.35.
[9] Herbert Strauss, pp. 352-3., ‘Jewish Emigration from Germany: Nazi Policies and Jewish Responses’.
[10] Dawidowicz, ‘War Against the Jews’, p. 118.