Zionism friend of fascism

From the book: Yuri Ivanov. Caution: ZIONISM! M., Politizdat, 1969.
The third step was to obtain the support of fascists.
Zionist intelligence having made a few deep probes and found that the omens were favourable, in November 1934 Goldmann (a former staff adviser on Jewish affairs, Ministry of Foreign Affairs to the Kaiser of Germany, a leader of the World Jewish Congress – note by Editor.) hastily left for Rome. A great deal depended on the outcome of his meeting with Mussolini. The fascist dictator's reaction to the Zionist project was a matter of great concern not only to Goldmann, but to all Zionist leaders, and they followed the mission of the former German diplomat with close attention.
Mussolini received Goldmann on November 13, 1934, and their thirty-minute talk passed in an atmosphere of good will and mutual understanding. Mussolini approved of the idea of founding a World Jewish Congress and promised his support. The Goldmann mission was a success and signified a great deal for him personally. On November 14, 1934, his name appeared for the first time in the biggest European newspapers next to the name of "one of the most powerful personalities of the Western World."
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“Haganah” - the so-called armed forces of the Jewish settlers. One of the top commanders of the Haganah, as these detachments were called, was Feivel Polkes who was also the chief resident agent of the nazi Intelligence Service in Palestine and Syria. The following appeared on the pages of the West German Der Spiegel on December 19, 1966: "Agent Reichert of the German Information Bureau in Palestine was in contact with a leading functionary of a secret Zionist organisation which more than anything else (with the exception of the British Intelligence Service) captured the imagination of German Intelligence. This organisation was called Haganah. In the general headquarters of this secret army worked . . . Feivel Polkes. . . . He was in charge, according to von Mildenstein's successor as Chief of the Division for Jewish Affairs 11.112 of the intelligence head-quarters, Hagen, of the administration of the entire security apparatus of the Palestinian Jews" [28] (emphasis added—Y.I.).
While Feivel Polkes with his cutthroats ministered to nazi Germany's external "needs," Dr. Nossig, the same Dr. Nossig who in the reign of Wilhelm II upheld the project of settling the Jews in the Ottoman Empire outside of Palestine, was equally zealous in ministering to the "domestic needs" of the nazis. “Zionist leader, writer, sculptor and politician in whose Berlin office such prominent Zionists as Arthur Ruppin and Jacob Thon” had worked in their time, [29] Nossig together with the nazis designed the plan for destroying aged and needy German Jews. Nossig lived to the age of eighty, when, according to Moshe Sneh, he was executed by the fighters of the Warsaw ghetto who had found out about his crimes. Such was the degree of this prominent Zionist leader's loyalty to German imperialism, Sneh added. [30]

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Goldmann, Polkes, Nossig, these direct links with fascism, were by no means exceptions. "Zionists," wrote Heinz Höhne, a German journalist, "viewed the consolidation of the nazis in Germany not as a national calamity, but as a unique historical opportunity for achieving their Zionist objectives." He asserted that "since the Zionists and the National Socialists had elevated race and nation to the scale of all things, it was inevitable that a common bridge should have appeared between them." [31]
US columnist Morris Cohen seconded this view, stressing that "Zionists fundamentally accept the racial ideology of these anti-Semites, but draw different conclusions. Instead of the Teuton, it is the Jew that is the pure or superior race." [32]
In 1933, the 238,000 Jews living in Palestine accounted for about 20 per cent of the country's total population. By 1936 their number had risen to 404,000, i.e., by more than 50 per cent. [33] And it would be naive to think that this considerable influx of newcomers was due to the "triumph" of Zionist ideas. It was fascist atrocities which forced Jews to seek a haven, and Palestine was merely one of the numerous regions where they found it. Forced to admit this fact, the Zionist Edelman wrote that the Jews went to Palestine “not with the express intention of setting up a Jewish national home there, but simply to save their lives.” [34]
At that period the so-called Palestine Office supported by the nazis was busy "selecting" refugees with the direct participation of the former Israeli Prime Minister Levi Eshkol. In their book The Secret Roads, David and Jon Kimche wrote: "Jewish emissaries had not come to Nazi Germany to save German Jews. . . . They were looking for young men and women who wanted to go to Palestine and were prepared to pioneer, struggle and . . . fight for it." [35]
Quoting documentary evidence Heinz Höhne wrote: ". . . von Mildenstein, Chief of the Division for Jewish Affairs of the intelligence headquarters did all he could to assist Zionist organisations in the establishment of re-education camps where young Jews were trained for work in kibbutzes in Palestine. He carefully followed the activity of the Zionists, and ordered his Division to draft maps showing the progress of Zionism among German Jewry." [36]
These re-education camps were set up in nazi Germany following an agreement between Zionist emissaries and Adolf Eichmann. Disclosing Eichmann's attitude to the Zionists, Israeli journalist Hannah Arendt wrote that the latter "unlike the Assimilationists, whom he always despised, and unlike Orthodox Jews, who bored him, were 'idealists' like him." [37]
Zionists, as we know, have always favoured anti-Semitism in which they openly placed all their hopes for the future. Therefore the conclusion of a secret alliance between Zionism and fascism was not at all unnatural. Intent on achieving their goals, the Zionists reacted in a most peculiar fashion to the anti-Semitic orgies of the nazis. The British Zionist Lord Melchett wrote in a book published in 1937 that the persecution of the Jews in Germany was an obstacle to closer relations between the German and other European nations. To improve the situation Melchett recommended a mass and complete evacuation of German Jews to Palestine. His book can in no way be qualified as an indictment of nazi outrages. [38]
Chaim Weizmann (president of the World Zionist Organisation) viewed the developments in Germany with still greater equanimity and tolerance. In reply to a query of the Palestine Royal Commission about the possibility of transferring 6,000,000 West European Jews to Palestine, he said: "No, the old will go. . . . They are dust, economic and moral dust of the world. . . . Only the branch will remain."
Twenty-one years after the rout of nazi Germany, Zionist leaders let slip the causes of their loyal neutrality. "If we [Zionists—Y.I.] had regarded the saving of the maximum number of Jews as our basic task [emphasis added—Y.I.]," declared Eliezer Livneh, a prominent Zionist, "then we would have had to co-operate with the partisans. There were partisan bases in Poland, Lithuania, in the nazi-occupied parts of Russia, in Yugoslavia and later in Slovakia. If our main task [emphasis added—Y.I.] was to prevent the liquidation (of the Jews) and if we had entered into contact with the partisan bases, we could have saved many lives." [39]
Zionist leader Chaim Landau made public the views entertained on this issue by Yizchak Gruenbaum, who in the period of the fascist atrocities headed the Zionist “Salvation Committee”. "When I was asked," wrote Landau quoting Gruenbaum, "whether I would give money from the Karen Haechod [Zionist fund—Y.I.] to save the Jews of the Diaspora, I said 'no.' And now, too, I shall say 'no.' I consider that we have to withstand this wave, otherwise it will engulf us and push our Zionist activity into the background." [40]
The Zionists' policy towards the fascists was one of tacit consent (on the basis of the deal between the Zionist emissaries and Eichmann) and helped create the conditions which enabled the persecution of the Jews in Germany to attain the maximum possible proportions; this policy also consisted in the post-factum organisation of noisy protests to gain political and other capital.
Pointing to the main consequences of the "mutually highly satisfactory agreement between the Nazi authorities and the Jewish Agency for Palestine" Hannah Arendt writes: "The result was that in the thirties, when American Jewry took great pains to organise a boycott of German merchandise, Palestine, of all places, was swamped with all kinds of goods ‘made in Germany.'" [41]
David Flinker, an American journalist, noted on May 24, 1963, in the Tog Morgen Journal that "Ben-Gurion, as head of the Jewish Agency in Jerusalem in the thirties, concluded what was known as a transfer-deal with the Hitler government under which the assets of the Jews who had left the country were transferred in the form of German goods and thus prevented the institution of a boycott of the nazis. . . ." Moreover, writer Ben Hecht publicly accused Ben-Gurion of deliberately keeping silent in the period when the world public was already informed of the nazi atrocities.

In the last years of the Second World War, the public in all countries was widely informed about the nazi atrocities.
But the Zionists, accessories to numerous brutal crimes, remained in the shadows. Availing themselves of the opportunities and means provided by their allies, they evaded retribution leaving a maze of twisted paths behind them.
At that time the so-called Salvation Committee appointed by the Zionist Jewish Agency was functioning in Hungary. It was headed by one Rudolf Kastner who had maintained very close ties with Eichmann. "The greatest 'idealist' Eichmann ever encountered among the Jews," wrote Hannah Arendt, "was Dr. Rudolf Kastner . . . with whom he came to an agreement that he, Eichmann, would permit the 'illegal' departure of a few thousand Jews to Palestine (the trains were in fact guarded by German police) in exchange for 'quiet and order' in the camps [in Hungary—Y.I.] from which hundreds of thousands were shipped to Auschwitz." Hannah Arendt pointed out that “prominent Jews and members of the Zionist youth organisations who were saved by the agreement "were, in Eichmann's words, 'the best biological material'; Dr. Kastner, as Eichmann understood it, had sacrificed his fellow-Jews (half a million people-Y.I.) to his 'idea.' . . ." [51]
Arriving safely in Palestine, Dr. Kastner changed his name from Rudolf to Israel and became a prominent functionary of the Zionist Mapai Party headed by Ben-Gurion, Golda Meir and others. Later he was secretly liquidated by the Israeli political police [52] for admitting that the Hungarian Zionist centre had had a hand in the liquidation of hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews.
It was 1944. The German army was retreating under the blows of the Soviet troops. Its losses in men and materiel were telling heavily on Germany. To transfer its troops and concentrate them as swiftly as possible on the most vulnerable sectors of the Eastern Front the nazi command needed transport facilities—thousands of lorries.
At the beginning of May 1944, Eichmann was ordered to obtain 10,000 lorries through the Zionists for dispatch to the Eastern Front in exchange for a promise to liberate the Jews from German camps for shipment to Palestine. (By then the Jews comprised about 30 per cent of the total population of Palestine.)
Eichmann met with Joël Brandt, a Hungarian Zionist leader, who promptly communicated the nazi proposal to the Zionist Committee. The latter sent Brandt to Constantinople to discuss the matter with representatives of the Jewish Agency. [53]
The Zionist leaders, headed by Chaim Weizmann, unhesitatingly agreed to supply the nazi command of the Eastern Front with 10,000 lorries. [54] The Zionists had always regarded the Soviet Union and its armed forces as their direct enemy, and the decision was therefore a perfectly natural one for them to take.
Zionist politicians and dealers, who to this day claim to be the "defenders and benefactors" of Jews in all countries, suffered absolutely no remorse about the fact that besides Russians, Ukrainians, Byelorussians and men of all the other nationalities of the Soviet Union, there were Jewish soldiers, sailors, officers and generals fighting with the troops whose advance the nazis wanted to stop at any price. For all of them, whether members of the Communist Party or not, there was only one homeland—the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics—and they defended it with honour. That they might die in circumstances which the Zionists were ready and willing to create did not worry the latter in the slightest. Morris Ernst, a US journalist, was perfectly right when he wrote that the Zionists "are little concerned about human blood if it is not their own." [55]