Zionist Colonization of Palestine

The modern history of Jews in Palestine began as far back as 1905 when Theodor Herzl¹² (1860-1904), the founder of Zionism¹³ began buying land in the territory. Theodor Herzl authored a pamphlet in 1896 that advocated the establishment of der Judenstaat¹⁴ (the Jewish State). Jews had begun buying land in Palestine as early as 1901. Later the Zionists decided to take advantage of the Balfour Declaration that was promulgated by the British in 1917 and "promised committing Turkish Palestine to a Jewish homeland should the Allies win [World War I]." 

With Arab help, the British took Palestine from the Ottomans at the end of World War I in 1917-18. The Arabs willingly helped the British because they had been promised independence after the war. Unfortunately, Britain had also made promises to the Jews – and the two sets of promises were scarcely compatible. In the Sykes-Picot agreement made with France and Russia in 1916, Britain had promised to divide the regions and rule it with its allies. In 1917 in the notorious Balfour Declaration, Britain promised, in exchange for Jewish help, a Jewish 'national home' in Palestine.^15a

The contradiction between the letter of the Covenant and the policy of the Allies is even more flagrant in the case of the independent nation of Palestine than in that of the independent nation of Syria. For in Palestine we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country, though the American [King-Crane] Commission has been going through the form of asking what they are. The four great powers are committed to Zionism and Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long tradition, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder impact than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land (Chomsky, op. cit., p. 90).

Following the outbreak of the Second World War it was almost impossible to leave Germany [or any of its occupied territories], . . . and shortly thereafter emigration was officially prohibited. . . . At the end of the war there were many thousands of freed concentration camp prisoners wandering across Europe. Many of those who had survived the Nazi terror had the sole wish to reach Palestine. Thousands of Jewish refugees arrived in ports on the Mediterranean Sea seeking the possibility of sailing to Haifa. The most famous of the numerous ships that attempted to break the British blockade was the Exodus 1947. . . . The British authorities, who had from 1922 onwards, administered Palestine under a League of Nations mandate, wanted to prevent any more Jewish refugees entering the country as they feared an aggravation of the Jewish-Palestinian conflict. The ship was intercepted and boarded with force before it reached the coast of Palestine. Instead of interning the refugees in camps on the island of Cyprus, as was customary, the British sent the "Exodus" refugees back to France, via a troop transport ship. The ship lay three weeks outside a French harbour in the Mediterranean heat as the French authorities stubbornly refused to allow the British to land the refugees. Thereupon the ship sailed for Hamburg which at this time lay in the British occupied zone of Germany. On 8th September 1947, the refugees were forcibly disembarked in Hamburg, and interned in a fenced camp near Lübeck. It was not until the state of Israel was founded in 1948 that the way was opened for them to enter . . . their ["promised land."]¹⁶

In 1931 the Irgun Zvai Leumi¹⁷ (National Military Organization) was founded in Jerusalem. It was led by Avaraham Tehomi and Advocated armed Jewish insurrection against the British and war against Palestinian Arabs. Menachem Begin,¹⁸ the former prime minister of the theocratic Zionist state of Israel, became the leader of this terrorist organization in 1943. In 1946 the Irgun, commanded by Begin bombed the King David Hotel in Jerusalem where the British offices were. This attack killed 91 people; 17 of whom were Jews. Another terrorist act perpetrated by the Irgun was the bombing of the British Embassy in Rome. The British regarded Menachem Begin as the primary Zionist terrorist and posted in the 1940s a reward of £100,000 pounds sterling for his capture. During the Zionist Organization's collaboration with the Nazis, Begin was instrumental in moving East European Jews confined in concentration camps out of Poland via Cyprus and illegally into Palestine. In the course of history, Begin (1977-1983) was preceded as prime minister by other Zionists – David Ben-Gurion (1948-1953 and 1955-1963), Moshe Sharett (1954-1955), Levi Eshkol (1963-1969) and Golda Meir (1969-1974). Golda was born in the Ukraine and raised in Milwaukee, WI. Begin was succeeded by Yitzhak Shamir (1983-1984 and 1986-1992), Yitzhak Rabin (1974-1977 and 1992-1995). During his second term as prime minister, Rabin was assassinated by an Israeli extremist. Rabin was followed by Shim'on Peres (1984-1986 and 1995-1996), Benjamin Netanyahu (1996-1999), and Ehud Barak (1999-2001). Ariel Sharon, the butcher who brutally oversaw the 1983 massacre of hundreds of Palestinians living in Sabra and Shatila – two Beirut refugee camps – by Lebanese Christian militiamen (Phalangists) under Israeli command,^{19a, 19b} is elected prime minister in 2001. All of these prime ministers were and the living still are committed to the militant creation and preservation of the Jewish state even if they have to resort to murder, crimes against humanity, and state terrorism.

Two respected Jewish scholars provide relevant information on Zionist collaboration with the Nazis: (1) Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem, A Report on the Banality of Evil, Chapter IV (pp. 56-61) and (2) Edwin Black's The Transfer Agreement: The Dramatic Story of the Pact between The Third Reich and Jewish Palestine.²⁰ In their books, written in 1963 and 1984 respectively, one learns just how scheming and cold-blooded the Zionists can be when it comes to establishing and preserving the state of Israel even if it may mean the elimination of thousands, if not millions of Jews, Africans, Gypsies, and Jehovah's Witnesses in concentration camps in Germany and Poland. In this context, we should also mention the practically unknown Rublee-Wohlthat Jewish emigration treaty formulated with the Third Reich in 1939. Of great importance here is the probability that the Israelis WILL NOT be diffident over eliminating the 3 million or so Palestinians currently residing in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, especially if Israel's existence is threatened. 

[Author's Note: See note 22 for a free but textually correct English translation of Ingried Weckert's (1996) Die Auswanderung der Juden aus dem Dritten Reich, "KRITIK," ISBN 3-88037-068-0, Kritik-Folge 88, Nordwind Verlag, Molevey 12," DK - Kollund, Denmark. This piece contains a general account of how the "transfer agreement" actually worked financially; how it, the Zionists, and the Irgun movement – the forerunner of the Mossad (Israel's Central Institute for Intelligence and Security, i.e., secret state police) – collaborated with and aided the Nazis in their war with Britain, particularly in North Africa, and how the agreement contributed in no small way to the economic development and population expansion of present-day Israel.]

     A letter from a survivor of Theresienstadt, [a concentration camp in Poland,] a German Jew, relates that all leading positions in the Nazi-appointed Reichsvereinigung were held by Zionists, . . . because Zionists, according to the Nazis, were "the `decent' Jews since they too thought in `national' terms." . . . There existed in those first years a mutually highly satisfactory agreement between the Nazi authorities and the Jewish Agency for Palestine – a Ha'avarah, or Transfer Agreement, which provided that an emigrant to Palestine could transfer his money there in German goods and exchange them for pounds upon arrival. It was soon the only legal way for a Jew to take his money with him (the alternative then being the establishment of a blocked account, which could be liquidated abroad only at a loss of between fifty and ninety-five per cent). The result was that in the thirties, when American Jewry took great pains to organize a[n international] boycott of German merchandise, Palestine, of all places, was swamped with all kinds of goods "made in Germany" [emphasis added]. 
      . . . the emissaries from Palestine . . . [c]ould approach the Gestapo and the S.S. on their own initiative, without taking orders from either the German Zionists or the Jewish Agency for Palestine. They came in order to enlist help for the illegal immigration of Jews into British-ruled Palestine, and both the Gestapo and the S.S. . . . even provided them with farms and facilities for setting up vocational training camps for prospective immigrants. ("On one occasion, [the Germans] expelled a group of nuns from a convent to provide a training farm for young Jews" . . . According to the story told by Jon and David Kimche, with "the full and generous cooperation of all the chief actors" (The Secret Roads: The "Illegal" Migration of a People, 1938-1948, London, 1954), these Jews from Palestine . . . had been sent to Europe by the communal settlements in Palestine, and they were not interested in rescue operations: "That was not their job." They wanted to select "suitable material," and their chief enemy, prior to the extermination program, was not those who made life impossible for Jews in the old countries, Germany or Austria, but those who barred access to the new homeland; that enemy was definitely Britain, not Germany. Indeed, . . . they were probably among the first Jews to talk openly about mutual interests and were certainly the first to be given permission "to pick young Jewish pioneers" from among the Jews in the concentration camps. Of course, they were unaware of the sinister implications of this deal, which still lay in the future; but they too somehow believed that if it was a question of selecting Jews for survival, the Jews should do the selecting themselves. It was this fundamental error in judgment that eventually led to a situation in which the non-selected majority of Jews inevitably found themselves confronted with two enemies – the Nazi authorities and the Jewish authorities [emphasis added] (Arendt, pp. 60-61).

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