Zionist FAQs: Projecting the Present onto the Past: How "Nakba Consciousness" Reshaped the History of Wealthy Jews and Zionism?

Remind us, please: Who shall push whom into the sea? Jaffa, May 1948, Palestinians were being pushed into the sea by Zionist Jewish forces.

Many historical researchers and political analysts today fall into a cognitive trap known as "Anachronism". This means judging past events through the lens of the present and projecting today's reality onto historical paths that were highly complex and contradictory. The inevitable outcome and absolute support that wealthy Western Jews and organizations provide to Israel today were only the result of very late transformations. The historical reality confirms that Zionism did not resolve this matter and impose full control over Jewish financial decision-making until a decade or two after the Nakba. Before World War I and even World War II, however, the scene was completely different.

Suspicion and Skepticism: The Stance of Elite Wealthy Families Toward Herzl

June 17, 1967: Israeli officer, to the left, directing Palestinians out of their village 'Imwas.

When Theodor Herzl launched his Zionist project at the end of the nineteenth century, he not only found the doors of sultans and emperors closed in his face, but also encountered even harsher rejection and alienation from the major Jewish financial families in Europe, most notably the Rothschild and Warburg families.

These wealthy individuals were not Zionists in an ideological sense; rather, most of them viewed the nascent Zionist movement with suspicion and skepticism. The driving motivation for these financiers was based on two things:

David Ben-Gurion envisioned that the Nazis' Nuremberg Race Laws would become the LEVER that would end up creating the "Jewish state," but how? Click the image for the details

1. Fear for their status: They feared that Zionist calls to establish a "national home" would lead to accusations of "Dual Loyalty" in their European home countries (France, Britain, Germany), where they were striving for full integration.
2. Elitist and racial bias: Wealthy Jews in Western Europe looked with a sort of condescension and social racism at the Jews of Eastern Europe (Russia and Poland) fleeing Tsarist massacres. The motivation of the wealthy was not "nationalist", but rather "relief-oriented", mixed with a strong desire to settle these poor immigrants anywhere in the world, provided they did not come to Western Europe or America and disrupt the social and economic stability of the wealthy there.

The Balfour Declaration and the Rothschilds: Common Exaggeration and Historical Injustice to Facts

The residents of al-Ramla were being ethnically cleansed based on the orders of David Ben-Gurion and Yitzhak Rabin in July 1948

The peak of "anachronism" and historical confusion lies in the prevailing reading of the Balfour Declaration of 1917. Many believe that addressing the letter to "Lord Lionel Walter Rothschild" reflects complete ideological complicity and deeply rooted Zionism within the family, or that the family "bought" this promise with its money. This is a reading that does injustice to historical facts and ignores the sharp division within the family and the British Jewish community at the time.

JTA Sept. 3rd, 1933 Quoting Nahum Sokolow: "Hitlerism enables us to convert all Jews to Zionism."

The truth is that Walter Rothschild, who received the letter, was an exception within his family and did not represent the general direction of the financial institution of the Rothschild family. This promise was met with fierce and violent opposition from broad sectors within the family and the ruling British Jewish elite. Chief among these opponents was Edwin Montagu, Walter Rothschild's cousin and the only Jewish minister in the British government at the time (Secretary of State for India).

Montagu wrote a famous memorandum to the British government describing Zionism as a "mischievous political creed" that establishes anti-Semitism and makes the Jew a stranger in his native country. The British government did not issue the promise to please the Rothschilds, but rather used the name of Walter Rothschild as a facade and a communication channel to serve the interests of the British colonial empire east of the Canal, exploiting its desire to win the support of Jews in Russia and America during World War I, bypassing the absolute refusal of the majority of the Rothschild family and the wealthy elite toward Zionist politics.

The Geography of Rescue: From Argentina and Ukraine to Turkey

Albert Einstein's letter dated April 10th, 1948, predicted that the Zionists who committed the massacre at Deir Yassin would bring a Nakba upon Jews

The movement of historical funds proves that the destination of wealthy Jews was not Palestine as a sole or preferred option. Baron de Hirsch and the Rothschild family supported major settlement projects to resettle Jews in Argentina through the Jewish Colonization Association. They also sought to settle other groups in the territories of the Ottoman Empire (Turkey) outside Palestine.

In a related context, the famous Warburg banking family, through the Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), focused tremendous efforts and millions of dollars on settling and developing hundreds of thousands of Eastern European Jews within agricultural projects in Ukraine and the Crimea peninsula during the 1920s and 1930s. Palestine was merely a "subsidiary project" among multiple geographical alternatives, and very few among them politically supported the Zionist movement, deviating from the general line of wealthy families.

Early Settlements: The Model of Jaffa and Its Environs

Palestinian Replacement In A Single Picture: al-Tira's school before and after Nakba. The same place but different people

Even the investments and lands purchased in Palestine before World War I carried a purely agricultural and commercial settlement character, and did not aim at that time to erase or annihilate the indigenous population of the Arabs of Palestine.

Those early settlements closely resembled the Christian German settlements established by the Templars in Jaffa and Haifa (such as the villages of Sarona and Wilhelma in Jaffa). The Jewish settlers at that early stage dealt with the Arab surroundings as a demographic and economic reality; they did not hesitate to work with Arabs, trade, and hire local labor. Although relations were not 100% friendly and experienced field tensions, they were not eliminationist and hostile as became the case later after the dominance of Zionist military thought.

The Brink of Financial Collapse and the "Haavara" Deal

Fake Valor: Why Did Zionist Jews Hoist Nazis Flag on Their Ships in the 1930s?

The major historical paradox manifests in the 1930s: with the rise of Nazism in Germany, the Jewish Agency and the Zionist movement faced a stifling financial crisis that almost wiped out the entire project and led to its actual collapse. The reason for this was that American Jews and their wealthy elite stopped or sharply reduced their financial support due to the Great Depression on one hand, and their lack of conviction in the feasibility of the Zionist project on the other.

Fake Valor: Why did two of Israel's future PMs, Menachem Begin and Yizhak Shamir, bomb WWII war efforts while their families were being gassed in Poland?

At this critical moment, financial rescue for the Zionist project came from a dark historical paradox: the "Haavara Agreement" in 1933 between the Zionist Agency and the Nazi government led by Hitler. Under this deal, the Nazi regime allowed German Jewish emigrants to transfer part of their wealth to Palestine in the form of German goods and commodities, in exchange for the Zionist movement restraining the international economic boycott movements organized by Jews of America and Europe against Nazi Germany. Hitler--not wealthy Jews--saved the nascent Zionist economy through this deal, providing it with a financial lifeline and scientific capacity at a time when traditional wealthy Jews were turning their backs on the project.

Conclusion

Why did Hayim Greenberg describe American Jewry as "morally bankrupt" in early 1943?

To say that wealthy Jews were always the masterminds and absolute funding for Zionism is a flat reading that projects contemporary "financial Zionism" onto a history in which these wealthy individuals were the biggest skeptics of Zionism. The scene did not shift in favor of full Zionist hegemony over Jewish financial institutions until about two decades after the Nakba, after World War I crushed other alternatives, and Zionism reshaped the historical narrative to make it appear as though it had been the sole goal of Jewish money from the very beginning.

Related Links

• A Must Read: Why did Hitler hate the Jews? Did a Failure to Update Information Cause the Holocaust?