Why, Really, Zionist Leaders Have Always Wanted a State of Their Own

It was NOT because of any concern for the welfare of ordinary Jews

David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister: No friend of ordinary Jews!​

"If I knew that it would be possible to save all the [Jewish] children in Germany by bringing them over to England and only half of them by transporting them to Eretz Israel, then I opt for the second alternative. For we must take into account not only the lives of these children but also the history of the people of Israel." [26] —David Ben-Gurion, 1938

"Ben-Gurion and other Zionist leaders vetoed the immigration of 1,000 [Jewish] orphans, who were in physical and emotional danger as a result of the harsh winter of 1945, from the camps in Germany to England, where the Jewish community had managed to secure them permits. Another group of roughly 500 children of camp inhabitants was barred, after Zionist intervention, from reaching France, whose rabbinical institutions had offered them safe haven." [20] The reason for this cruelty? To send the children to Palestine to fight Palestinians so that people like David Ben-Gurion could have a “state of their own” to rule over. [from Baruch Kimmerling’s review of Yosef Grodzinsky's In the Shadow of the Holocaust: The Struggle Between Jews and Zionists in the Aftermath of World War II [20]

The policies of top Zionist leaders during and immediately after the Holocaust are not at all well-known to most people, not even to most ordinary Jews who are passionately pro-Israel. When examined, as will be done here, these policies make it clear that the goal of top Zionist leaders such as Israel's first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, has always been to have a state--a "Jewish state" in Palestine--in which they would be the privileged and powerful upper class ruling over, dominating and oppressing for enormous economic profit a Jewish class of have-nots, a Jewish working class. Read here how this is exactly what is happening now in Israel.

These Zionist leaders wanted for themselves what non-Jewish upper classes have always had: a working class of their own over which to rule, "a state of their own." That's only fair, right? To deny them this would be wrongful antisemitism, right? Such is the thinking of oppressive ruling, or wannabe ruling, elites.

Zionism's hostility to Jews trying to survive anywhere other than Palestine goes back at least to 1938 when, at a meeting of Labor Zionists in Great Britain, David Ben-Gurion, argued: 

"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 Israel, then I opt for the second alternative. For we must take into account not only the lives of these children but also the history of the people of Israel." [26]

These are the words of a fanatic, obsessed with the dream of becoming a ruler of a "state of his own" no matter how many innocent Jewish lives must be sacrificed for that end. One might dismiss Ben-Gurion's words about Jewish children as merely rhetoric unconnected to real-life decisions, but as we will see, it turns out that Zionist leaders during the Holocaust did indeed act in accordance with Ben-Gurion's insistence that Jewish lives -- hundreds of thousands of Jewish lives -- are less important than achieving a Jewish state.  Zionist leaders sabotaged efforts to rescue Jews in Europe during the Holocaust because they felt that the rescue of Jews threatened their goal of becoming masters of a "state of their own."​

Every ethnic/racial group contains individuals who aspire to be part of an elite ruling class, enjoying great privileges and power over "their own people." The Zionist movement enabled people like David Ben-Gurion, Golda Meier, Menachem Begin and Ariel Sharon, among others, to rise in the world and become elite rulers of a state which now possesses nuclear weapons and one of the most powerful armies in the world. To achieve this end, Zionist leaders have sacrificed the welfare of ordinary Jews at every opportunity. They point to anti-Semitism (or what they speciously label as anti-Semitism) in order to justify a Zionist project which has nothing to do with helping ordinary Jews achieve a safe and secure and happy life free from real anti-Semitic attacks.

THE EVIDENCE

During the Holocaust, top Zionist leaders opposed any plan to rescue Jews from the Nazis if that plan did not sent the rescued Jews to Palestine (to become the new Jewish working class in the eventual "Jewish state" to be created there.)

Zionist sabotage of rescue efforts was an established policy as early as 1942. In a letter to The Times (of London), June 6, 1961, Rabbi Dr. Solomon Schonfeld, Chairman of the wartime Rescue Committee established by the Chief Rabbi of Britain, describes how the Zionist leadership in Great Britain opposed efforts to rescue European Jews from the Holocaust. He writes that, contrary to the claims that the British government was "largely indifferent to and unwilling to take action in defense of the European Jews who were being massacred daily by the Nazis in spite of efforts by Zionist leaders to persuade the British Foreign Office to rouse itself into action on behalf of the victims...My experience in 1942-43 was wholly in favour of British readiness to help, openly, constructively and totally, and that this readiness met with opposition from Zionist leaders who insisted on rescue to Palestine as the only acceptable form of help."

Rabbi Schonfeld goes on to describe how, in December, 1942, he and others formed a Council for Rescue from the Nazi Terror which initiated a Parliamentary Rescue Committee supported by leading members of both Houses, and how they submitted a motion to Parliament calling for the government "to declare its readiness to find temporary refuge in its own territories or in territories under its control for endangered persons who are able to leave those countries; to appeal to the governments of countries bordering on enemy and enemy-occupied countries to allow temporary asylum and transit facilities for such persons; to offer to those governments, so far as practicable, such help as may be needed to facilitate their cooperation; and to invite the other Allied governments to consider similar action." But this is what happened, according to the rabbi's letter:

"As a result of widespread concern and the persistence of a few, this motion achieved within two weeks a total of 277 Parliamentary signatures of all parties. This purely humanitarian proposal met with sympathy from government circles, and I should add that H.M.Government did, in fact, issue some hundreds of Mauritius and other immigration permits -- indeed, in favour of any threatened Jewish family whom we could name. Already while the Parliamentary motion was gathering momentum, voices of dissent were heard from Zionist quarters: 'Why not Palestine?' The obvious answers that the most urgent concern was humanitarian and not political, that the Mufti-Nazi alliance ruled out Palestine for the immediate saving of lives and that Britain could not then add to her Middle East problems, were of no avail.

"At the Parliamentary meeting held on January 27, 1943, when the next steps were being energetically pursued by over 100 M.P.s and Lords, a spokesman for the Zionists announced that the Jews would oppose the motion on the grounds of its omitting to refer to Palestine. Some voices were raised in support of the Zionist view, there was considerable debate, and thereafter the motion was dead. Even the promoters exclaimed in desperation: If the Jews cannot agree among themselves, how can we help? It was useless to argue with a then current Zionist argument: 'Every nation has had its dead in the fight for its homeland -- the sufferers under Hitler are our dead in our fight'."

Why did Zionist leaders sabotage rescue efforts? The answer is spelled out very clearly in a dramatic letter. In the autumn of 1942 Nathan Schwalb (Dror) was representative of the Zionist He-Halutz (The Pioneer) organization in Geneva. At this time a Jewish rescue Working Group in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia, was sending desperate appeals to He-Halutz for money to bribe senior Nazi officials to delay or prevent the transport of Czechoslovakian Jewry to Auschwitz and other death camps. Schwalb replied, in his letter to the rescue group, as follows:

"Since we have the opportunity of this courier, we are writing to the group that they must always remember that matter which is the most important, which is the main issue that must always be before our eyes. After all, the allies will be victorious. After the victory, they will once again divide up the world between the nations as they did at the end of first war. Then they opened the way for us for the first step [the British Balfour Declaration of 1917 supporting a Jewish homeland in Palestine -- JS] and now, as the war ends, we must do everything so that Eretz Yisroel [the Land of Israel -- JS] should become a Jewish state. Important steps have already been taken in this matter. As to the cry that comes from your country, we must be aware that all the nations of the Allies are spilling much blood and if we do not bring sacrifices, with what will we achieve the right to sit at the table when they make the distribution of nations and territories after the war? And so it would be foolish and impertinent on our side to ask the nations whose blood is being spilled for permission to send money into the land of their enemies in order to protect our own blood. Because 'rak b'dam tihyu lanu haaretz' ('only through blood will the land be ours'). As to yourselves -- members of the group -- 'atem taylu' ('you will get out'), and for this purpose we are providing you with funds by this courier." [22]

One might dismiss this cruel letter from Nathan Schwalb as an aberration, unrepresentative of the Zionist leadership at higher levels. But it turns out that Schwalb was acting in accordance with the views of his superiors in the Zionist movement. In his book, In Days of Holocaust and Destruction, Yitzchak Greenbaum, Chairman of the (Zionist) Jewish Agency's Rescue Committee in Jerusalem, wrote, "when they asked me, couldn't you give money out of the United Jewish Appeal funds for the rescue of Jews in Europe, I said, 'NO!' and I say again, 'NO!'...one should resist this wave which pushes the Zionist activities to secondary importance." In February, 1943, Greenbaum gave a speech in Tel Aviv on the subject, "The Diaspora and the Redemption" in which he said:

"When they come to us with two plans -- the rescue of the masses of Jews in Europe or the redemption of the land [settling Jews in Palestine -- JS] -- I vote, without a second thought, for the redemption of the land...If there would be a possibility today of buying packages of food with the money of the Keren Hayesod (United Jewish Appeal) to send it through Lisbon, would we do such a thing? No! and once again No!" [23]

On December 11, 1943, the Jewish Forward, largest Yiddish newspaper in the world, criticized the Zionist leaders, writing,

"The Jewish Conference [a Zionist organization] is alive only when there is something in the air which has to do with a Commonwealth in Palestine, and it is asleep when it concerns rescue work for the Jews in the Diaspora." [19]

Baruch Kimmerling, in his review of Yosef Grodzinsky's In the Shadow of the Holocaust: The Struggle Between Jews and Zionists in the Aftermath of World War II, writes:

"Ben-Gurion and other Zionist leaders vetoed the immigration of 1,000 orphans, who were in physical and emotional danger as a result of the harsh winter of 1945, from the camps in Germany to England, where the Jewish community had managed to secure them permits. Another group of roughly 500 children of camp inhabitants was barred, after Zionist intervention, from reaching France, whose rabbinical institutions had offered them safe haven." [20]

The head of the World Zionist Organization's Zionist Rescue Committee in Budapest during the war, Rudolf Kastner, later a prominent member of Israel's government under Prime Minister Ben-Gurion, collaborated with the Nazis. In the years 1944-45, Kastner was made a V.I.P. by the Nazis and not required to wear a yellow Star of David because, in exchange for being allowed to hand pick 1600 prominent Jews, including his own relatives and friends, to emigrate to Palestine, he helped Adolf Eichmann lure a half million Hungarian and Transylvanian Jews to their death without a fight by arranging for phony postcards "from other Jews" to convince them that the trains to the death camps were merely taking them to be "resettled." The betrayal was especially horrible because Eichmann only had "150 men and only a few thousand Hungarian soldiers at his disposal" and the Jews, had they known the truth, could have easily carried out a mass escape to territory that the Nazis did not occupy. These facts came out in a famous 1954 Israeli libel trial in which Kastner initially thought he could silence his accuser but, as the trial developed and witness after witness came forward to confirm the accusations, he began to shift his defense to the claim that he had only done what all top Zionist leaders of the time advocated. At this point Kastner was "conveniently" assassinated by persons unknown. [21]

1947-50

Just after World War II many Jews were in Displaced Persons [DP] camps in Europe trying to make a new life for themselves somewhere where they could be safe. Conditions in the camps were so bad that survival itself was in question. Malnutrition and disease were severe, while shelter and heating in the winter were extremely inadequate. Making matters even worse for Jews was the fact that antisemitic German police raided the camps more and more frequently as local government was transferred by the Allies to Germans.​

As late as 1948 there were "between 100,000 and 114,000 displaced Jews in the American Zone of Germany. From among that group, more than 55,000 applications for emigration to the United States had been filed by the fall of 1947; and a majority of these people specified a preference of going anywhere but Palestine." About this time, Rabbi Klausner, a U.S. Army rabbi, gave a report about the Jews in the DP camps to "the Zionist-controlled American Jewish Conference" in which he stated:

"I am convinced that the people must be forced to go to Palestine...By 'force' I suggest a program...The first step in such a program...is the adoption of the principle that it is the conviction of the world Jewish community that these people must go to Palestine...Those who are not interested are no longer to be wards of the Jewish community to be maintained in camps, fed and clothed without their having to make any contribution to their own subsistence. To effect this program, it becomes necessary for the Jewish community at large to reverse its policy and instead of creating comforts for the Displaced Persons to make them as uncomfortable as possible." [15]

In 1948 the Zionist military force, the Haganah, tried to recruit Jewish DPs to go to Palestine and fight Arabs. At first they tried a voluntary recruitment drive, which was a failure, in part because "[T]he elevated tensions in the Arab-Jewish conflict increased doubts about 'aliyah [immigration to Palestine], and as a result, more camp dwellers distanced themselves from the Zionist movement, and became reluctant to be drafted or immigrate to Palestine." Yehuda Ben-David, the Haganah deputy commander in Germany, reported back to his superiors that "the Jews of the camps" were, themselves, the problem:  "Their acquaintance with Zionist values is limited and superficial." In Austria, the Zionist Gordonia-Young Maccabean youth movement was charged with recruiting  for the Haganah and they reported, "the mobilization operation among camp Jews is unsuccessful...There are some volunteers among the Romanian refugees...but for Polish Jews there is hardly any hope. The corruption of these Jews is so great that they are totally uninterested in the people's campaign [in Palestine]. Recently, the JDC [American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee] began registering people who would like to go to America, and hundreds of camp Jews have registered." [16]

Next, the Haganah switched to a compulsory draft, which they were able to do because they had the backing of the Americans running the camps. In an operation that was "approved by Ben-Gurion" each camp's governing body  (known by their Yiddish name as the Zentral Komitet ) "used all the power it had: Employees were fired, residents were evicted from their apartments, others were fined or denied the supplementary food rations that the JDC was distributing to all camp Jews; others were simply beaten up...Violent incidents were numerous. The archives are replete with hundreds of official documents describing brutal methods and actions carried out in an identical manner in a large number of camps in Germany and Austria, taking place mostly between March and August 1948...The archives also contain testimony about 'waves of Zionist harassment' in the camps..." The compulsory conscription was a success, because in the conflict between the Zionists and "thousands of Displaced Persons who make immigration plans to target countries other than Palestine" there "could only be one winner -- the side capable of using institutional violence."  [17]

The Yiddish Bulletin on May 19, 1950 wrote:

"By pressing for an exodus of Jews from Europe; by insisting that Jewish D.P.s do not wish to go to any country outside of Israel; by not participating in the negotiations on behalf of the D.P.'s; and by refraining from a campaign of their own -- by all this they [the Zionists] certainly did not help to open the gates of America for Jews. In fact, they sacrificed the interests of living people -- their brothers and sisters who went through a world of pain -- to the politics of their own movement." [18]

Read here Morris L. Ernst's account of how FDR wanted to allow all the Jewish displaced persons in Europe to come live in the United States and when he asked Ernst to bring this offer to Zionist leaders the Zionist leaders opposed it totally and angrily.

Read Stanley Heller's "An Especially Shameful Episode in Zionist History" about how Zionist leaders collaborated with the Nazis.​

Read this review of Thomas Suarez's book, Palestine Hijacked, confirming the assertions I make above about Zionist leaders' contempt for the welfare of ordinary Jews. 

THE CONFLICT IS NOT BETWEEN "THE JEWS vs THE PALESTINIANS" BUT RATHER BETWEEN THE HAVE-NOTS (BOTH PALESTINIANS AND JEWS) vs THE HAVES (BOTH PALESTINIANS AND JEWS)

The entire Zionist (Israeli) narrative is a lie, a cover up. Ordinary Jewish working class people in Israel are oppressed, not protected, by their Zionist (Israeli) ruling class. The policies of Zionist (Israeli) leaders for the last seven decades have been for the purpose of using the Palestinians as a bogeyman enemy to frighten working class Israelis into obedience to their Israeli ruling class, which pretends to be their protector against their "real enemy." The purpose of these seven decades of violent ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians (read the details here) has been to make of Palestinians and their natural anger at Israel a bogeyman enemy. Indeed, as I prove here, Israel has been funding Hamas for decades and working to keep it in power (as Israeli bombing of people in Gaza does just that, according to all knowledgable observers regardless of whether they sympathize with Israel of Palestinians.) Why? Precisely because Hamas commits terrorism (violence against non-combatant civilians): in order to make the bogeyman enemy maximally frightening. Note that Hamas does exactly what Zionist leaders want it to do. If Hamas, on the contrary, waged not a terrorist war against "the Jews" but rather the class war against the oppressors (I discuss what that would look like here), then this kind of righteous--non-terrorist--violence would WEAKEN, not strengthen, the Zionists.)​

Keeping Israeli Jewish working class people mortally fearful of Palestinians ("the Arabs") has been, from the beginning, the Israeli ruling class's key strategy of social control of Jewish working class people and wealth aggrandizement at their expense. This explains why, way back in 1961, Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben Gurion, lied to Israeli Jews by declaring with no evidence whatsoever that Arab armies intended to “push all the Jews into the sea, dead or alive.”

IT IS ANTISEMITIC NOT TO OPPOSE ZIONISM

Contrary to the Zionist lie, anti-Zionists, in opposing Zionist violence against Palestinians, are on the side not only of ordinary Palestinians but ALSO on the side of ordinary Israeli Jews (whether those Jews understand this or not; note that many poor whites in the USA South did not understand that those opposing the racist Jim Crow laws were on the side not only of blacks but also of the poor whites, as MLK, Jr. carefully explained in his 1965 Selma, Alabama speech that you can read and listen to here.) 

Opposing Zionist violent ethnic cleansing of Palestinians means opposing what the Israeli billionaire ruling class does to create a bogeyman enemy with which to control and oppress Jewish Israeli have-nots. In fact, it is antisemitic NOT to oppose Zionism!

THERE IS A SOLUTION TO THE CONFLICT THAT MOST ISRAELIS AND MOST PALESTINIANS WOULD LOVE, BUT THEIR RULERS WON'T HEAR OF IT, NATURALLY

Read here about a solution to the conflict that most ordinary people, Jews and Palestinians both, would love. It is a just solution to the chief grievances of the Palestinians, namely a) their being denied their Right of Return to the 78% part of Palestine now called Israel, from which they (or their parents or grandparents) were violently driven out by Zionists, and b) their having had their land and homes stolen by Zionists and handed over to ordinary Jews. The ruling elites love to point to the intractability of this problem, how (supposedly!) there is no just solution to it that could gain sufficient support from both Palestinians and Israeli Jews to be implemented. They are wrong! Read the solution, again linked to here.

Instead of calling for this just solution to the conflict, ALL (yes, all!) leaders of nations on the planet pretend not to know about it and instead advocate the absolutely unjust so-called "two-state solution." This "two state solution" is, as discussed further here, immoral because instead of ending the ethnic cleansing it makes it permanent. All the world's national leaders love the "two-state solution" because it maintains the conflict. These leaders don't want peace, they want conflict because this is how they control their own have-nots, as discussed in great detail here.

None of the world’s leaders, therefore, ever express the most basic and obvious truth: ​If the Israeli ruling  class stopped treating Palestinians like dirt, then most Palestinians would view Hamas's violent terrorism against ordinary noncombatant Jews--and any advocacy whatsoever of violence against people just because they are Jews--as criminally immoral behavior.

AFTER THE HAMAS OCTOBER 7 TERRORIST ATTACK, WHAT?

The Israeli ruling class (which probably doesn't care a bit about Netanyahu's personal prospects in life for better or for worse) wants to keep the Israeli Jewish working class in mortal fear of a Palestinian bogeyman enemy. This is its #1 top priority.

Without such a bogeyman enemy to control the Israeli have-nots, the Israeli ruling class will be at severe risk of being removed from power by ordinary Israelis. Israeli leaders therefore FEAR peace, and will do whatever they can to keep the conflict going.

But what form that bogeyman enemy takes need not necessarily be one controlled by Hamas nor even necessarily be one existing in Gaza. Does the Israeli ruling class want to substantially change the form of the bogeyman enemy? Perhaps. But it should be understood that the current form (i.e., Hamas ruling over Palestinians in Gaza made hyper-angry at Israel by periodic Israeli bombings to massacre men, women and children there, and Hamas launching periodic terrorist violence in one way or another at Israeli non-combatant civilians) has been virtually the perfect bogeyman enemy for Israeli rulers. Israel for this reason may want to keep the status quo, despite rhetoric to the contrary.

It's not possible to know what the Israeli rulers are going to do now, except to know that they do not aim to definitively eliminate a Palestinian bogeyman enemy and thereby give the Israeli Jewish working class a green light to finish the project they began with the huge anti-government demonstrations in 2011 that only failed to remove the Israeli ruling class from power because of its use of the bogeyman enemy (that are, again, discussed here.)

Anti-Zionists need to confront the issue of terrorism done in the name of Palestinian resistance head on.

I wrote this in 2005: "MY RESPONSE TO PALESTINIAN TERRORISM"; still true.

The point is that it is morally wrong to use the wrongful (terrorist) violence, done in the name of resistance to oppression, as an excuse for not condemning the fundamental wrongness of the oppression to which it is (perceived to be, whether accurately or not) a response. One can make this point while at the same time condemning terrorism. But to do this in a principled manner, in a way that cannot be persuasively accused of being either antisemitic or hostile to ordinary Palestinians, requires doing it from the point of view of CLASS. This requires explicitly rejecting the false Zionist narrative that frames the conflict as being between "the Jews" versus "the Palestinians."

This requires telling the general public the truth about the conflict, not endorsing the false Zionist narrative by waving the Palestinian flag and chanting "Palestine will be free" (which the Zionists want anti-Zionist to do.)

Anti-Zionists must state clearly that "Resistance is not terrorism; and terrorism is not resistance."

WHAT CAN WE ACTUALLY DO?

We need to remove the rich from power to have real, not fake, democracy with no rich and no poor. Here's how I suggest we begin to make that happen.

References: 

15. Alfred M. Lilienthal, What Price Israel?, 50th Anniversary edition, 2003, p. 148

16. Yosef Grodzinsky, In the Shadow of the Holocaust The Struggle Between Jews and Zionists in the Aftermath of World War II, Common Courage Press, Monroe, Maine, 2004,  pp. 193-4

17. Grodzinsky, pp. 199-200

18. cited by Lilienthal, p. 29

19. cited by Lilienthal,  p. 148

20. The Nation, January 10/17, 2005

21. Baruch Kimmerling, review of In the Shadow of the Holocaust: The Struggle Between Jews and Zionists in the Aftermath of World War II, by Yosef Grodzinsky, in The Nation, January 10/17, 2005. and Ben Hecht, Perfidy, Milah Press (Jerusalem, New London); ISBN: 0964688638; (April 1997)

22. http://www.fantompowa.net/Flame/kasztner_intro.htm http://www.israelversusjudaism.org/holocaust/chapter-2.cfm   http://www.jewsagainstzionism.com/onlinebooks/Holocaust _Victims_Accuse.pdf pp. 26-8 and also Uri Davis, Apartheid Israel, Zed Books, New York, 2003, pp. 14-15

23.http://www.marxist.com/israel-zionists-holocaust130603.htm also page 26 in the online book: The Holocaust Victims Accuse at http://www.truetorahjews.org/images/holocaustvictims.pdf

24. Chris McGreal in Jerusalem, Wednesday November 24, 2004, The Guardian

25. Benny Morris, Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict 1881-2001, Vintage Books, 2001, New York, pp. 676-7

26. Tom Segev, The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust, Henry Holt & Co., New York, First Owl Books Edition 2000, p. 28