Continued:
I want to make a very important point. Zionism and Judaism are not the same. In my opinion, Zionism is actually the primary creator of anti-Semitism in the world today, though, by having successfully created the illusion in the minds of most people that they are the same. I will explain in a moment. First, some facts.
Israel?s founding is justified as a response to the horrors of the Nazi holocaust against the Jews. But here?s a fact: the Zionists frequently collaborated with fascism. In 1933, the Zionist Federation of Germany sent the Nazi Party a memorandum of support that read, in part: ?On the foundation of the new [Nazi] state which has established the principle of race, we wish to fit our community into the total structure so that for us, too, in the sphere assigned to us, fruitful activity for the Fatherland is possible.?
One could argue that this was a survival move, but the truth is that while Jews fought the Nazis in underground armies and in the Warsaw Ghetto over the next years, Zionists did not.
Also in 1933, the congress of the World Zionist Organization defeated a resolution for action against Hitler. The vote was 240 to 43.
Joseph Goebbels wrote several articles praising Zionism. The Nazis funded some Zionist leaders. In 1937, a member of the Haganah, a Zionist militia in Palestine, delivered the following message to the German SS: ?Jewish nationalist circles ... were very pleased with the radical German policy, since the strength of the Jewish population in Palestine would be so far increased thereby that in the foreseeable future the Jews could reckon upon numerical superiority over the Arabs.?
The Zionist movement in the United States, and Britain openly opposed changes in the immigration laws that would have permitted more Jews to find refuge in those countries. The rationale? The fewer other places Jews could flee to, the more likely they would go to Palestine. If more Jews died in the process, so what! In 1938, future Israeli prime minister David Ben-Gurion wrote: ?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 [greater Israel], then I would opt for the second alternative.?
As Jewish organizations in Western Europe and the United States in the late 1930s and early 1940s cried out for help, for public campaigns, for organized resistance, for demonstrations to force the hand of the allied governments to stem the tide of Hitler?s Jewish extermination (which the West was aware of), the Zionists were silent. They sabotaged efforts to save Jews from Hitler. They did not want to rock the boat of the countries that supported converting Palestine to a colonial-settler state for Jews.
Meanwhile, the British colonial regime gave Jews in Palestine privileged status over the indigenous Palestinian Arabs. Jewish capital got 90 percent of all economic concessions. Jews were paid higher wages than Arabs for equal work. This had begun in the 1920s. The British used Jewish settlers to help suppress mass demonstrations by Arabs against landlessness (sales of their homes by absentee landlords, and forced expulsions) and unemployment. From 1936 to 1939, there was a sustained Palestinian uprising, including a general strike that lasted several months. The British relied on Zionist militias to execute leaders and help round up thousands for imprisonment. Thousands of Arab homes were physically demolished, and then the Zionists would step in and stake a ?claim? to the then-unoccupied land.
After World War II, the Brits had to leave Palestine; the UK was tremendously weakened by the war. The other leading powers, including the United States and the Soviet Union, decided to partition the country into separate Jewish and Palestinian section. The Jews at the time were 31 percent of the population; they were given 54 percent of the fertile land. But the Zionist acceptance of this was just to play along, and those who sponsored them knew it. Ben-Gurion had written, in 1938: ?The boundaries of Zionist aspiration include southern Lebanon, southern Syria, today?s Jordan, all of Cis-Jordan [the West Bank] and the Sinai. .... After we become a strong force as the result of the creation of the state, we shall abolish partition and expand to the whole of Palestine. The state will only be a stage in the realization of Zionism and its task is to prepare the ground for our expansion. The state will have to preserve order ... with machine guns.
Well, how do you accomplish that? You?d have to expel the Arabs, by force if necessary. Joseph Weitz, head of the Jewish Agency?s Colonization Department, wrote in 1940: ?There is no room for both peoples together in this country ... We shall not achieve our goal of being an independent people with the Arabs in this small country ... And there is no other way than to transfer the Arabs from here to the neighboring countries. To transfer all of them; not one village, not one tribe should be left.
The ?Koenig Report,? a Zionist document of the time, was even more direct: ?We must use terror, assassination, intimidation, land confiscation and the cutting of all social services to rid the Galilee of its Arab population.?
I ask ila, in the context of what he wrote, do the Arabs, who also trace the ?common ancestry back to Abraham,? have any claim on the land of Palestine?
[TO BE CONTINUED]
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