THE HAAVARA AGREEMENT
Immediately following Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, the Nazis wasted no time in passing antisemitic legislation, including a boycott of Jewish businesses, and, between 1933-1938, a process known as “voluntary Aryanization” (which later became “mandatory Aryanization”) transferred Jewish businesses and assets to Germans. German Jews became increasingly desperate to flee, but no countries wanted to take in Jewish refugees, and this economic marginalization made emigration virtually impossible.
In 1933, Eliezer Hoofein, the director of the Anglo-Palestine Bank, and the Reich Economics Ministry negotiated the Haavara Agreement. Under the terms of the agreement, Jews fleeing persecution in Germany could use their assets to purchase German goods for export, thus salvaging their assets and facilitating emigration to Palestine under the immigrant investor visa, in spite of severe British antisemitic immigration restriction policies.
Even so, the Haavara Agreement was met with staunch opposition, both among Zionist and anti-Zionist Jews. In response to the Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses, Jews worldwide enacted a boycott on German goods themselves. The Haavara Agreement was not in line with the Jewish anti-German boycott, as the Jewish community in both Germany and Palestine would be purchasing German goods. German public opinion also opposed the agreement. The Haavara Agreement was dissolved after World War II broke out in 1939.
The Haavara Agreement, though deeply controversial, ultimately saved the lives of some 60,000 German Jews. For context, the Haavara Agreement was similar to making a hostage deal with Hamas…making a deal with a hostile, genocidal enemy to save the lives of your own people. It wasn’t Zionist-Nazi “collaboration” by any stretch of the imagination.
LEHI-NAZI TIES
Lehi, pejoratively known as the “Stern Gang,” was an extremist right wing Jewish terrorist group in Mandatory Palestine. Believing that the British occupation of the Land of Israel was a much bigger threat to world Jewry than Nazism, they tried to establish contact with the Nazis twice, hoping to establish an alliance. The Nazis rejected them both times, because the Nazis would not ally with Jews, regardless of their views.
Lehi constituted no more than 300 members, whose views were fringe and non-representative of the Jewish community.
Ultimately, the Nazis never would’ve allied with any Zionist group.
In 1937, a Nazi document on foreign policy read, “(1) The formation of a Jewish state or a Jewish-led political structure under British mandate is not in Germany’s interest…(2) Germany therefore has an interest in strengthening the Arab world as a counterweight against such a possible increase in power for world Jewry.”
JEWISH PARTISANS
The organized Jewish resistance during the Holocaust was predominantly Zionist. In fact, Zionism was a major motivator for Jews joining the resistance.
In Poland, the main partisan organization, Żydowska Organizacja Bojowa (ZOB), meaning “Jewish Combat Organization,” was formed out of Zionist youth groups.
The first Jewish resistance organization in Nazi-occupied Europe, the Lithuanian Fareynikte Partizaner Organizatsye (FPO), meaning “United Partisan Organization,” had a strong Zionist presence. Two of its three leaders, Abba Kovner and Josef Glazman, were prominent figures in the Zionist movement.
In France, Jews, who comprised one percent of the total French population, formed between 15-20 percent of the resistance. In 1942, French Jewish partisans founded the Zionist Armée Juive, meaning “Jewish Army.”
Among the most recognizable Jewish partisan groups during the Holocaust were the Bielski brothers, who hid in the forest and rescued over a thousand Jews, and whose story was depicted in the film Defiance. The oldest Bielski brother and commander of the group, Tuvia, had long been interested in the Zionist youth movement.
WARSAW GHETTO UPRISING
The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, which lasted from April 16 to May 16, 1943, was the largest Jewish uprising against the Nazis during the Holocaust.
In March of 1942, a number of Zionist Jewish youth groups inside the Warsaw Ghetto first proposed the creation of a Jewish self-defense force.
After 250,000+ Warsaw Jews were deported to the Treblinka death camp in the summer of 1942, two Zionist organizations — the left-wing socialist Jewish Combat Organization and the right-wing Jewish Military Union — formed and began training.
The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was a last-ditch effort to resist the Nazi liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto — that is, the deportation of all of Warsaw’s Jews to extermination camps to be gassed or worked to death. The uprising was led by the Jewish Combat Organization and the Jewish Military Union, which, again, were both Zionist groups.
According to German records, the only German casualties in 29 days of fighting during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising were 17 Nazi soldiers. The Germans responded by burning the entirety of the ghetto, resulting in 13,000 Jewish deaths, most of whom suffocated to death or were burnt alive. Another 36,000 Jews were sent to death camps.
THE YISHUV
The Jewish community in British Mandatory Palestine fiercely opposed the Nazis, so much so that the Jewish paramilitaries, the Haganah and the Irgun, temporarily halted their resistance operations against the British and instead joined the British war effort against Germany. In 1944, the British established the Jewish Brigade, comprised of Jewish citizens of Palestine, seen in the above photo. Some 30,000 Jews volunteered to join the Brigade.
The Yishuv sent a number of paratroopers to Europe to rescue Jews from deportation to death camps, most notably Hannah Szenes, who was captured and executed.
Despite temporarily halting most anti-British operations, the Haganah continued carrying out Aliyah Bet to the best of their ability, illegally smuggling Jewish Holocaust refugees to Palestine with varying success.
Chaim Weizmann, the future first president of Israel, played an important role in convincing the British government to accept the Kindertransport, the organized rescue of 10,000 Jewish children, who were given refuge in the United Kingdom.
ORIGIN OF THE ZIONISM = NAZISM LIBEL
The accusation that Zionists are Nazis has its roots in the British Foreign Office during the period of the British Mandate of Palestine. In March of 1945 — about two months before the Nazis even surrendered — the High Commissioner of Palestine, Lord Gort, told the Colonial Secretary in London that “the establishment of any Jewish State in Palestine…will almost inevitably mean the rebirth of National Socialism [i.e. Nazism] in some guise.”
In 1969, the United Nations passed the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination. Both the United States and Brazil wanted to add a clause including antisemitism. The Soviet Union, which had been heavily oppressing its Jewish population, worried that such a clause would be used to rebuke them for persecuting Soviet Jews. As such, they included a counter proposal, which was a clause that equated Zionism to Nazism. That way, they could say they were persecuting Zionists, not Jews. Neither clause passed.
In 1985, the Anti-Zionist Committee of the Soviet Public published a propagandist brochure known as the “Criminal Alliance of Zionism and Nazism,” which claimed that there was irrefutable proof that the Zionists not only had collaborated with the Nazis, but were also responsible for the genocide of Jews, Slavs, and others in Europe. When Israel captured and tried Adolf Eichmann in the 1960s, the Soviets painted the Israel-West Germany relationship as “evidence” that the Zionists had colluded with the Nazis. Soviet anti-Zionist propaganda in the Arab world was so pervasive that it even influenced the dissertation of current so-called “moderate” Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, titled “The Other Side: The Secret Relationship between Nazism and Zionism.” According to Abbas, Israel captured Eichmann “to prevent the ‘sacred secrets’ of this [Zionist-Nazi] collaboration from becoming public.”
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