Sam Beckett

"Zionism is vast, enormous unbelievably successful rescue project." -Haviv Rettig Gur This is a lie. It's the single biggest lie Zionists tell about Zionism. Zionism was never about rescue. Zionism would be more accurately described as an anti-rescue movement. Zionists sabotaged countless rescue efforts & condemned hundreds of thousand of Jews to death in their greatest hour of need throughout the 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. Let's dive in. 1890s-1914: Before 1914, the Zionist leadership rejected 61% of Jews hoping to colonize Palestine. They were rejected because they were too poor, too persucted. The Zionists wanted wealthy Jews who could bring capital to Palestine to infuse in the Jewish colonies' flailing enterprises. And so, the Jews most likely to suffer from pogroms in the 1880s, 1890s, 1900s and 1910s doubled as the Jews most likely to be rejected by the Palestine Office in Jaffa, led by Menachem Sheinkin & Arthur Ruppin. It was essentially an anti-rescue office sup.org/books/jewish-studies… 1918-1922: hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian Jews fled their homes after the deadliest wave of pogroms to date, leaving tens of thousands killed. Many were looking to Palestine as a safe haven. The Zionist movement categorically rejected them all. The Zionists wanted builders of a nation, not refugees “weak in body and soul.” publish.iupress.indiana.edu/… As Chaim Weizmann said: “Even one percent that’s bad will spoil a great many good people,” He was so worried about the influx he actually persuaded the British authorities to reduce Jewish immigration quotas in the early 1920s, just as Ukraine’s Jews were in their greatest hour of need. haaretz.com/israel-news/2021… 1922: In Urmia, Iran, Jews faced anti-Jewish violence and famine, forcing thousands to seek refuge in Baghdad during & after World War I. The Zionist office in Baghdad wrote to Jaffa that these refugees needed a safe haven. The Zionist leadership said no: They wanted pioneers, not refugees. They were all rejected publish.iupress.indiana.edu/… 1920s-1930s: The Zionist immigration policy was highly selective: immigrants were screened for health, skills, capital & ideological fitness. Sick & diseased Jews were rejected. Orphans, widows, rape victims, famine survivors & bankrupted Jews were “wounded in body or spirit” & therefore rejected. Those seeking to immigrate to Palestine for reasons other than ideological commitment to the cause, such as in search for a safe haven, were rejected. Those who could not afford to pay large sums of money for their immigration certificate or who could not bring enough capital to sustain themselves in Palestine for a year or more or whose skill sets were not relevant in Palestine’s economy were also rejected. publish.iupress.indiana.edu/… and cambridgescholars.com/produc… In 1933, despite Hitler’s rise to power, and despite the increasingly dire situation faced by Europe’s Jews, most Zionist factions continued to support a highly selective immigration policy -- i.e. young, healthy "pioneers", capitalists and professionals -- no refugees. publish.iupress.indiana.edu/… As Ben-Gurion put it in 1933, the Zionist movement was “not primarily engaged in saving individuals … in the event of a conflict of interest between saving individual Jews and the good of the Zionist enterprise … the enterprise comes first.” researchgate.net/publication… Between 1933-1939, two-thirds of German Jewish applicants were rejected, while those accepted were lamented as low quality “human material.” books.google.com.mx/books/ab… During the late 1930s and 1940s, it got worse: For decades, tension had simmered between Jewish Zionists and Jewish humanitarians. For the former, the goal was a Jewish State in Palestine. For the latter, the goal was Jewish safety and prosperity, be it in Palestine, Argentina or Mauritius. In other words, there were the Jews who focused on rescue, on the one hand, and there were the Zionists, on the other. The Zionists were on the anti-rescue side. That's because the Zionists were worried the Jewish donor class would fund rescue efforts over colonization of Palestine. And so the Zionists insisted that the two goals were actually just one goal, that the only way to rescue Jews was to rescue them to Palestine, even if that meant a lot less rescue. The mental gymnastics went something like: in the future, hypothetical Jews would be in need of hypothetical rescue and that the hypothetical Jewish State would be hypothetically focused on that, and that goal trumped the real rescue needs of real Jews today. And so Zionists around the world squashed rescue effort after rescue effort, because these were efforts to rescue Jews to places other than Palestine. At the Evian Conference held in France in 1938, the Dominican Republic President Rafael Trujillo offered to issue up to 100,000 visas for Jewish refugees from Central Europe and settle them in an agricultural colony that became known as the Sosúa settlement. The Zionist movement quickly shot down the idea. dukeupress.edu/tropical-zion and palestineremembered.com/down… In 1938, when British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain suggested Tanganyika in Africa as a possible site for German Jewish refugees, Reform Rabbi and president of the AJC, Stephen Wise, said “I would rather have my fellow Jews die in Germany.” books.google.com.mx/books/ab… Zionist representatives also shot down a British proposal for a settlement of five hundred Jews in British Guiana. dukeupress.edu/tropical-zion 1940: When President Roosevelt proposed a joint plan with Britain in 1940 to admit 150,000 refugees into the US, Zionist leaders opposed it as "treason." Roosevelt ultimately scrapped the initiative, admitting to British officials, “we cannot put it over because the dominant Jewish leadership won’t stand for it.” jstor.org/stable/23881817?se… and archive.org/details/whatpric… 1943: British Zionists sabotaged a motion signed by 277 Members of Parliament calling on the Government to provide asylum in British-controlled territories for victims of Nazi persecution. Both the president of the [Jewish] Board of Deputies, Selig Brodetsky, and the general secretary of the Zionist Federation, Lavy Bakstansky, worked to collapse the initiative on the grounds that the rescue effort omitted any reference to Palestine. google.com/books/edition/Zio… Zionist leaders in the United States also pushed for a Palestine or nothing policy. They rejected a piece of legislation known as the Alaskan Colonization Act, which would have settled ten thousand refugees a year in Alaska over a five-year period, including many Jewish refugees. dukeupress.edu/tropical-zion The Zionist focus on statehood rather than rescue did not come without controversy, even if some Zionists were happy to say the quiet part out loud. As the chairman of the Jewish Agency’s Rescue Committee in Palestine Yitzhak Gruenbaum put it in 1943, “we have to stand before this wave that is putting Zionist activity into the second row… we do not give priority to rescue actions… Zionism is above all - it is necessary to sound this whenever a holocaust diverts us from our war of liberation in Zionism.” researchgate.net/profile/Ton… He repeated the point in 1946. “I will not demand that the Jewish Agency allocate a sum of 300,000 or 100,000 pounds sterling to help European Jewry,” he wrote. “Let them say that I am anti-Semitic… I think that whoever demands such things is performing an anti-Zionist act.” No wonder the Zionist “rescue” committee was given little in terms of resources, funds or personnel, and even declined to accept funds contributed by the United Jewish Appeal for the rescue of Jews in Europe. Its leader thought saving Jewish lives was anti-Zionist. books.google.com.mx/books/ab… Most efforts to rescue Jews to safer places abroad during WWII were sabotaged by the Zionists, who insisted on a Palestine or death policy. After WWII, it got worse. I've written about that here: palestinenexus.com/articles/… Most everyone understands that Zionism was catastrophic for the Palestinians. But, for Jewish supremacists like Haviv, Palestinians do not matter, so they have to invent other feel-good if fictional stories about what the Zionist movement was. Haviv -- do you still believe in other fairy tales you were told as a kid like Santa Clause and the tooth fairy? I've summarized some of these points in this piece below. For more content like this, subscribe to my substack: zacharyfoster.substack.com/p…