Ha'aretz: Book review, Holocaust history at eye level - By Aviva Halamish

European Jews voted with their feet & immigrated to the Americas; that is why Ben Gurion airlifted Mizrahi Jews via 1st class ticket; 1st of its kind for refugees

The conventional thinking is that the Holocaust and the establishment of the State of Israel were inextricably linked, and that Zionism exploited the Holocaust for its own purposes. These documents, however, show that during the war, when the dimensions of the horror came to light, the Yishuv and its leaders were worried that the Holocaust would deal a death blow to Zionism. After the annihilation of European Jewry, the fear was that there would be no one to found a Jewish state - and no one to found it for. A feverish search thus began for an alternative population to build the country and create a Jewish majority.

Since the mid-1980s, Yehiam Weitz has studied the Zionist movement's turn to Jews from Muslim countries as a possible alternative, to fill the void left by European Jewry. In this book, he presents some of the documents upon which he bases his conclusions. At the end of November 1942, soon after receiving credible reports of the systematic murder of the Jews of Europe, Eliyahu Dobkin, head of the Jewish Agency Immigration Department, informed the Mapai secretariat that "our job is to increase the size of the Jewish community in Palestine in every possible way." Since there was no knowing when immigration emissaries could reach the Jews of Europe, he advocated sending emissaries to North Africa, Egypt, Iraq and the surrounding countries.

Dr. Aviva Halamish teaches history at Netanya Academic College's School of Communications, and at the Open University.
https://www.haaretz.com/life/books/2002-11-29/ty-article/holocaust-history-at-eye-level/0000017f-dc3d-df62-a9ff-dcff6d6a0000