Antisemitism

Attached: 1 image Did Zionists collaborate with Nazis? Yes, they did. In one example, the Haavara Agreement between Nazi Germany and German Zionists (1933), made possible the migration of 60,000 German Jews to Palestine between 1933 and 1939 and to bring with them a portion of their assets. Widespread persecution of the Jews had already begun in Germany by 1933. The mass migration was considered part of the ethnic cleansing the Nazis initiated against the Jews, but it also benefited the Yishuv (Jewish community under the British Mandatory Palestine) by bringing in needed immigrant labor and economic support, and increasing the numbers of Jews living there. It also saved the lives of thousands of Jews who would have likely been slaughtered in the concentration camps. Then there was Rudolph Vrba, who escaped from Auschwitz in 1944, along with Alfred Wetzler, and tried to warn the Hungarian Jewry of the Nazis’ plans to exterminate the last major surviving Jewish community in Europe. The Vrba-Wetzler Report (the VWR) that they wrote immediately after their escape revealed for the first time to the general public that Auschwitz was not, as was widely believed, simply a concentration and labor camp, but a death camp. The VWR was also so accurately detailed that it could be used to help liberate the camp. However, Vrba and Wetlzer were betrayed by European leaders of the Zionist movement, who silenced them and suppressed the report, putting at risk the lives of hundreds of thousands of Jews in exchange for the hope of getting Nazi support for the continued transfer of Zionists to Palestine. In 1961, The Daily Herald published the following from Vrba’s memoir: “I am a Jew. In spite of that, indeed because of that, I accuse certain Jewish leaders of one of the most ghastly deeds of the war. This small group of quislings knew what was happening to their brethren in Hitler’s gas chambers and bought their own lives with the price of silence … I was able to give Hungarian Zionist leaders three weeks’ notice that Eichmann planned to send a million of their Jews to his gas chambers … Kasztner [leader of Hungary’s Zionist movement] went to Eichmann and told him, ‘I know of your plans; spare some Jews of my choice and I shall keep quiet.’” #nazis #antisemitism #holocaust #zionism #palestine #israel #genocide #concentrationcamps #ruldophvrba #eichmann #hungary #auschwitz #hitler

We reject antisemitism in all its forms, including when it masquerades as criticism of Zionism or Israel’s policies. We also recognize that, as journalist Peter Beinart wrote in 2019, “Anti-Zionism is not inherently antisemitic—and claiming it is uses Jewish suffering to erase Palestinian experience.”