#Holocaust / On how Zionist leaders blocked refugee havens for German and Austrian Jews to prioritize Palestine colonization
Israel appropriating and weaponizing the holocaust and #antisemitism against the Palestinians is cynical and indefensible. Zionist leadership’s ignorance of reports about the extermination of European Jews until November 23, 1942, the refusal to create an organizational infrastructure dedicated to rescue, and the earlier opposition to plans for settling Jewish refugees in territories other than Palestine, were all consequences of what Dr. Avi-ram Tzoreff calls "Post-Uganda Zionism."
[…] The agreement of countries participating in the conference [Évian Conference of 1938] to accept Jewish refugees was not seen as a point in their favor, but rather as an obstacle to achieving Zionist goals. In another meeting of Zionist leadership held after Kristallnacht, Moshe Sharett determined that the Jewish Agency cannot "participate in action for immigration to other countries" but only "increase pressure on the government to increase immigration to Palestine."
[…] Despite this, most governments that committed to this stood by their commitments and absorbed about 200,000 Jewish refugees during 1938 and early 1939. If initially the Zionist movement merely avoided cooperation with these trends, the enthusiastic agreement of the Dominican Republic to accept about 100,000 Jewish refugees—an agreement that remained in effect even with the beginning of the war throughout 1940-1941—was met with actual opposition from the Zionist movement, as well as from the Joint Distribution Committee. This was, again, due to the same concern, as described by Arieh Tartakower, who was involved in immigration affairs, in an interview conducted with him by Beit-Zvi—"that any plan for Jewish settlement is directed against settlement in the Land of Israel." This opposition was expressed through colonial-racist rhetoric, which saw in the plan also a danger of Jews changing from white to colored, a process that was claimed to be the fate of white populations in the Caribbean islands."
Tzoreff notes that these policies established the pattern of creating dependency between #Jewish rescue and the exclusive #Zionist territorial project in #Palestine that continued throughout the #Holocaust period. This dependence became formalized in the 1942 Biltmore Program, which insisted on a Jewish state in Palestine as the only solution to Jewish persecution.
Hebrew https://www.mekomit.co.il/%D7%A9%D7%95%D7%90%D7%94-%D7%A6%D7%99%D7%95%D7%A0%D7%95%D7%AA-%D7%95%D7%94%D7%A9%D7%99%D7%9E%D7%95%D7%A9-%D7%91%D7%90%D7%A1%D7%95%D7%9F-%D7%9B%D7%9B%D7%9C%D7%99-%D7%A4%D7%95%D7%9C%D7%99%D7%98%D7%99/
Dr. Avi-ram Tzoreff is a historian specializing in modern Jewish history, with a particular focus on the cultural and political history of Jews in Late Ottoman and Mandatory Palestine, Ottoman Iraq, and Habsburg Galicia. His research explores the intersections of religion and secularism, colonialism, nationalism, sovereignty, and subjectivity.
The Évian Conference of 1938 mentioned in the article was convened to discuss the fate of Jewish refugees (both actual and potential) from #Germany and #Austria, who numbered around 500,000 people at that time.
@histodons
@palestine
@israel
#zionism #holocaust #neveragain
#racism #colorism
