Zionism has never been about protecting Jewish people, but is about transforming Palestine into a Jewish ethno-state, even if that endangers Jewish people
https://x.com/History__Speaks/status/1998532585337794830
Zionism has never been about protecting Jewish people, but is about transforming Palestine into a Jewish ethno-state, even if that endangers Jewish people. Pic related is a striking example.
In early 1944, the British authorities in Palestine decided that 100% of the visas allocated to Jews— numerically limited under the White Paper—would only be given to those living under Nazi occupation, i.e. to Jews under threat of extermination.
The Jewish Agency—led by Ben-Gurion, which became the government of the State of Israel in 1948—objected to the policy on the grounds that it wouldn't save Jews, as they wouldn't make it to Palestine. Thus, at the height of the Holocaust, they advocated allocating visa spots to "Zionist Veterans" (living in safety in places like New York City or Latin America) instead of exclusively reserving them for Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe.
Pic related comes from a memorandum written by Bernard Joseph of the Jewish Agency, describing a discussion he had with British authorities on 28 February 1944, in which he objected to the new policy of reserving all visas for Jews under Nazi occupation.
The Jewish Agency for Palestine's argument that granting Palestine visas to Jews under Nazi occupation was a futile exercise, and couldn't save Jews, was utterly false by the way. While Jews could not escape Nazi-occupied Europe, the Palestine visas often enabled Jews to avoid deportation to death camps, as my own research in the British archives proves.
How did the Palestine visas save Jews? The Nazis after all did not respect the Palestine visas—they didn't respect any British-issued visas after the UK declared war in 1939.
However, the Nazis did respect visas from Turkey, a neutral country that they desperately wanted to join the war on their side. And the Palestine visas were a means of acquiring Turkish visas. (Once a Jew got a Palestine visa for him and his family, he could potentially go to his local Turkish Embassy and get Turkish transit visas for them.) And many Jews with Turkish visas were able to avoid deportation when they presented them to the Nazi authorities.
For obvious reasons, the chance that a Jew under Nazi Occupation with a Palestine visa would still be murdered was extremely high. There was so much that could go wrong. (Jews might be deported to death camps before they got their Palestine visa; they might never make it to the Turkish embassy due to the conditions of living under German occupation; they might not understand that they needed Turkish visas, not just the Palestine one, to potentially protect themselves; the Turks themselves refused transit visas in a number of cases; and the SS often disregarded the Turkish visas as mere transit visas, and deported the Jews to extermination factories anyway.)
But the issuance of Palestine visas to Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe during the Holocaust absolutely saved lives, my research has found. Many lives.
Isn't a viable, if small, chance at saving Jewish kids from gas chambers, medical experiments, and slavery more important than facilitating the immigration of a "Zionist Veteran" ideologue from New York City? It seems that the Jewish Agency thought not.
By the way, the foregoing isn't the worst of what I've found regarding Jewish Agency immigration policy - the Jewish Agency and the British authorities both had the power to veto potential potential migrants to Palestine - during the Nazi Holocaust. I have found something worse than this in the Jewish Agency archives (or more specifically a partial copy of those archives hosted by the US Holocaust Memorial Museum's archives.*). Infinitely worse. It shocked even me. In view of my biases and the historical importance of what I've found, I am going to be vetting it with historians of different biases before speaking on it publicly.
* most of the original documents is in English as these documents were written by the JAP guys working with the British, and much of the non-English text is translated into English
posted by Satish Sharma at
08:16
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