Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews, Volume 1 (31 page)

Much closer to it, the truth, is that a serious intention to rescue Jews and give them sanctuary in countries other than Palestine was frustrated—I think sabotaged is not too strong a word—by Zionism. And there is no mystery about why.

Zionism’s most zealous and uncompromising leaders saw the Nazi holocaust as the event that would give them the number of Jewish immigrants they needed to create and sustain their state. From 1939 Zionism’s first objective was to cancel Britain’s policy, declared in the White Paper of that year, of restricting and effectively ending after five years further Jewish immigration to Palestine. The orgy of Nazi anti-Semitism gave Zionism’s zealots the battering ram they needed to achieve their objective.

As a matter of indisputable historical fact Zionism’s Big Idea of using Hitler’s anti-Semitism for the purpose of creating a Jewish state in Palestine predates the Nazi holocaust.

It was Herzl who pointed the way. As he confided to his diary and may well have said to some of his close associates (emphasis added):
“
Anti-Semitism is a propelling force which, like the wave of the future, will bring Jews into the promised land
...
Anti-Semitism has grown and continues to grow—and so do I.”
¹
He also made this prediction: “The governments of all countries scourged by anti-Semitism will be keenly interested in assisting us to obtain the sovereignty we want.”
²

One strategy of Zionists in Palestine was to send
shliachim
(emissaries) to develop contacts with the up-and-coming totalitarian forces and parties of Europe, in particular Hitler’s National Socialists and Mussolini’s Fascists. The main function of the
shliachim
was to cultivate the totalitarian forces and parties and to find out what accommodations Zionism could make with them.

Brenner’s book is an incredibly well-documented exposé of the full extent of Zionism’s collaboration with both the Nazis and Italy’s Fascists, and the tensions this collaboration led to within the WZ0 at the highest leadership level.

The main deal Zionism struck with the Nazis was enshrined in the infamous
Ha’avara
(Transfer)
Agreement
. In return for being allowed to send money and people to Palestine and having some Jewish property in Germany protected, Germany’s Zionists agreed to take no part in, and actually to oppose, an international boycott of Nazi Germany’s exports. In the world, and in America especially, many Zionist and other Jewish organisations wanted a boycott of Nazi Germany’s exports, but it was eventually German Zionism’s policy of collaborating with the Nazis that prevailed. German Zionism’s institution was the ZVfD,
Zionistische Vereinigung fur Deutschland
(Zionist Federation of Germany).

As part of the same deal the ZVfD also agreed not to resist the Nazis.

Brenner is among those who believe it is possible that Hitler might not have achieved power if, at an early enough stage, the ZVfD had sided with those in Germany who opposed Hitler and all he stood for.

One of the most celebrated members of the
shliachim
cast was Enzo Sereni, a Zionist Jew of Italian origin. He was the emissary to Germany in 1931–32. As Brenner noted, Sereni was one of those who saw Hitler as a scourge driving Jewry toward Zionism. Sereni once told Max Ascoli, an Italian anti-Fascist activist, “Hitler’s anti-Semitism might yet lead to the salvation of the Jews.”
³
Subsequently, to a Zionist Congress. Sereni said: “We have nothing to be ashamed of in the fact that we used the persecution of the Jews in Germany for the up-building of Palestine—that is how our sages and leaders of old taught us... to make use of the catastrophes of the Jewish population in the diaspora for up-building.”
⁴

Of even greater significance is a statement made by Ben-Gurion to a meeting of his Jewish Agency’s Executive in Palestine on 17 December 1938. He was warning his leadership colleagues about something that could not be allowed to happen. He said this:

If Jews (of the diaspora) have to choose between refugees—saving Jews from concentration camps, and assisting a national museum in Palestine, mercy will have the upper hand and the whole energy of the people will be channelled into saving Jews from various countries. (He meant that Jews would be rescued and given sanctuary in lands other than Palestine). Zionism will be struck off the agenda not only in world public opinion, in Britain and the United States, but elsewhere in Jewish public opinion. If we allow a separation between the refugee problem and the Palestine problem, we are risking the existence of Zionism.
⁵

The principal architect of the first plan to rescue Europe’s uprooted Jews was America’s 32nd President, Franklin Delano Roosevelt or FDR as he was known. Some Americans regard him as the most effective and the greatest of all American presidents to date. He was certainly the longest serving president, the only one to be re-elected three times. He was in office from 1933 until he died of a massive cerebral haemorrhage during his fourth term in 1945.

Shortly before he entered the White House for the first time Roosevelt made this statement: “The presidency is… pre-eminently a place of moral leadership.”
⁶

When he became aware of the Jewish refugee problem, President Roosevelt, on purely humanitarian grounds, set his mind to work on devising a rescue plan. The scheme he favoured was “generous worldwide political asylum”. He established that Canada, Australia and some South American countries might open their doors. And he believed that if good examples were set by other nations, the American Congress could be “educated to go back to our traditional position of asylum.” The quotations in this paragraph are from a conversation the President had with his friend and confidant Morris Ernst, a Jewish American and New York Attorney.
⁷

Going back to “our traditional position of asylum” meant changing the immigration laws passed in 1921–4 during what Brenner described as a “wave of xenophobia” when anti-Semitism was quite widespread in America.
⁸

Roosevelt knew that the key to his rescue plan was in London and he sent Ernst there to sound out the British and ask if they were prepared to take in 100,000 or even 200,000 of Europe’s uprooted Jews. Ernst arrived in London during the second blitz (all night raids by German bombers). Partly on account of the pounding London and other parts of Britain were taking he was impressed by the British response. According to what Ernst himself told a Cincinnati audience in 1950, and as noted by Lilienthal, the following is part of the conversation Ernst had with President Roosevelt when he returned from London:

ERNST: We are at home plate. This little island on a properly representative program of a World Immigration Budget will match the United States up to 150,000.

ROOSEVELT: 150,000 to England—150,000 to match that in the United States—pick up 200,000 or 300,000 elsewhere and we can start with half a million of these oppressed people.

A week later Ernst and his wife visited the President again.

ROOSEVELT: Nothing doing on the [rescue] program.
We can’t put it over because the dominant vocal Jewish leadership of America won’t stand for it
(emphasis added).

ERNST: It’s impossible! Why?

ROOSEVELT: They are right from their point of view. The Zionist movement knows that Palestine is, and will be for some time, a remittance society. They know they can raise vast sums for Palestine by saying to donors, “There is no other place for this poor Jew to go.” But if there is a world political asylum... they cannot raise their money. Then people who do not want to give money will have an excuse to say, “What do you mean—there is no place they can go but Palestine? They are the preferred wards of the world.
⁹

Ernst was shocked and, without mentioning what Roosevelt had said, he approached his influential Jewish friends to try to get their support for a worldwide program of rescue. As he described it himself in his own book, this was the response he got. “I was thrown out of parlours of friends of mine who very frankly said, ‘Morris this is treason [
sic
]. You are undermining the Zionist movement.’”
¹⁰
He also said that he found, everywhere, “a deep, genuine, often fanatically emotional vested interest in putting over the Palestinian (Zionist) movement” in men “who are little concerned about human blood if it is not their own.”
¹¹

The obstacle Ernst and President Roosevelt had come up against was not only Zionism’s insistence on having Europe’s Jewish refugees directed to Palestine. There was also great fear on the part of America’s assimilated and prospering Jews that another big influx of Jewish refugees, particularly impoverished, embittered and radical Jews of Eastern European origin, might put their own security and well-being at risk by provoking anti- Semitism in America. It was the American version of the same fear that Britain’s assimilated Jews had had when three million of their co-religionists were abandoning Russia in the two decades prior to World War I. In 1938, because of the fear of provoking anti-Semitism in America, two bills proposed by Democratic congressmen to liberalise U.S. immigration laws were dropped.

Subsequently the guilt that many Jewish Americans felt for not doing enough to rescue Jews was the violin on which Zionism played to produce its sweetest background music.

With the start of World War II, Britain decided it had no option but to shelve its efforts to resolve the Palestine problem until the war was over. (I imagine British ministers and the civil service mandarins who advised them told each other they had better pray that the Arabs would show patience while Britain was engaged in the struggle against Hitler).

In America, neutral again until the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour in December 1941, Zionists stepped up their pressure to get President Roosevelt’s administration committed to supporting Zionism right or wrong, with an expanded set of demands for what it wanted in Palestine. For most of the period between the two world wars, and following President Wilson’s exit from the stage, America had been in a more or less isolationist mood and, perhaps understandably, mainly preoccupied with domestic affairs—the inflation of the 1920’s and the depression of the early 1930’s. The consequence was a policy vacuum with regard to international affairs in general and the Middle East in particular. And so far as the Middle East was concerned, it was America’s Zionists and their supporters (a steadily growing number of America’s pork- barrel politicians in both the Senate and the House of Representatives) who filled the policy vacuum. Starting in June 1922, support for Zionism was voiced in resolutions submitted to successive congresses.

By 1922 or thereabouts, competition began between Democrats and Republicans to see who could promise the Zionists most in return for votes and election campaign funds.

After President Roosevelt had picked up the pieces from the Wall Street crash and seen through his New Deal for Americans, the emerging Zionist lobby was learning how to co-ordinate its powerful muscles. America’s leading Zionists were, however, very much aware that Roosevelt was a politician
par excellence
, and that manoeuvring him into becoming the standard bearer for their cause was not going to be an easy task.

President Roosevelt did, in fact, take a leaf out of President Wilson’s book and sent his own man on a fact finding mission to the Middle East, to give him independent advice on how to respond to events there. (In Wilson’s case it was, as we have seen, two men, King and Crane). Roosevelt’s chosen man was Brigadier General Patrick J. Hurley, later Ambassador to China. Hurley was instructed to report directly and only to the White House.

From State Department documents that were declassified in 1964 we know what Hurley reported to his President and, more generally, what Roosevelt’s private position on Zionism was. Hurley said there was mounting opposition throughout the Arab world to Zionism’s insistence on increased Jewish immigration into Palestine and its concrete plans for expansionism. Hurley also noted that some “Palestinian Jews” were opposed to Zionism.

Hurley’s report to Roosevelt included this:

For its part the Zionist Organisation in Palestine has indicated its commitment to an enlarged program for:

 


1. a) A sovereign Jewish state which would embrace Palestine and probably Transjordan;
   

2. b) An eventual transfer of the Arab population from Palestine to Iraq;
   

3. c) Jewish leadership for the whole Middle East in the fields of economic development and control.
   ¹²
   

 

From what was revealed by the documents declassified in 1964 we know that President Roosevelt’s personal policy preference for a solution to the Palestine problem was “A trusteeship of the Holy Land with a Jew, a Christian and a Muslim as the three responsible trustees.”
¹³
Though he never said so in public, and despite the fact that he gave Zionist leaders the impression that he did support their cause—he gave this impression to protect his party from the firepower of the Zionist lobby—Roosevelt was not in favour of a Jewish state. He regarded the Zionist enterprise as a threat to America’s national interests. On that basis it is reasonable to assume that he was privately outraged by the substance of Hurley’s report on Zionism’s expanding ambitions.