Haavara FAQs: Ben-Gurion declared in late 1939 that the yishuv would fight both the White Paper and Hitler, did they fight both at once?

NY Times Magazine, April 18, 1982: Zionist leaders admitted there wasn't enough bandwidth to fight the White Paper of 1939 and Hitler. Thus, fighting the Nazis was left to the Gentiles so they could focus on defeating the White Paper.

The 1939 White Paper represented an existential crisis for the Zionist movement just months before the start of World War II. From the Zionist perspective, this rendered the Nazis a secondary concern. The severity of the crisis mirrored the movement's near-bankruptcy between 1930 and 1933, a financial desperation that drove the Jewish Agency (JA) to sign the Haavara Agreement with Hitler.

Consequently, Zionist leadership reacted with frantic urgency, feeling the movement was facing imminent collapse. Every Zionist group, including the Haganah, mobilized and took up arms against the British. This anti-British campaign, in some cases, continued throughout WWII, even as the Holocaust was underway. Notoriously, terror groups like Stern, Lehi, and the Irgun even attempted to form an alliance with Hitler ten months before the Mufti Hajj Amin did in 1941.

Since the White Paper severely restricted future Jewish immigration to Palestine, its defeat became the paramount objective for the entire Zionist movement. All other concerns, including the rescue of European Jews, were subordinated. A stark example of this priority occurred during the American Jewish Conference in September-October 1943, where American Jewry voted to table rescue efforts in favor of focusing on state-building --a decision made while the last two million victims of the Holocaust were still alive.

Could The Zionists Fight The Nazis And The White Paper At The Same Time?

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

After WWII was underway in Oct. 1939, David Ben-Gurion coined his famous slogan of:

We shall fight with Great Britain in this war as if there were no White Paper, and we shall fight the White Paper as if there were no war.

On paper, this slogan sounded patriotic, and it had a nice ring. On the other hand, in practice, all Zionists knew well it was complete nonsense; fighting the Nazis was never even considered. Don't take our word for it; read it from the heads of the Zionist movement in the US (Nahum Goldman and Rabbi Stephen Wise) in May 1943. What both said was and still is an open secret in the Zionist movement:

We cannot press the Hitler button and the British and Palestine buttons at the same time! (NY Times, April 18th, 1982: AMERICAN JEWS AND THE HOLOCAUST By Lucy S. Dawidowicz and The Abandonment of the Jews by David S. Wyman, p. 176)

What the Zionist leadership outlined here actually reflected the Jewish Agency's budget during the war. There was nothing allocated to fighting the Nazis, and most importantly, very little was spent on rescue efforts! This alone should make you question everything about the Zionist narrative. The Zionists' budget during the war spoke volumes.

Did Zionists Have Enough Bandwidth To Fight Both Hitler & The While Paper?

Were the British so STUPID as to promise COMPLETE INDEPENDENCE to Palestinians in 1939 (who, of course, "didn't exist") while the Indians had been DREAMING of such a thing for 400 years?

To put it simply, Nazis weren't THE enemy of the yishuv, and Rabbi Wise was 100% correct: Hitler and the White Paper cannot be fought at once; one of them had to give. In layman's terms, there was not enough bandwidth to fight both, and fighting Hitler (which is directly correlated with supporting rescue efforts) was left to the Gentiles at best. Actually, in practice, when you look at the evidence closely, you shall find that the Zionists hindered rescuing Europe's Jews (except if their destination was ONLY Palestine). According to Ben-Gurion, such a policy maximized the Zionists' leverage to defeat the White Paper of 1939.

Therefore, at the moment of crisis, Europe's Jewry was left high and dry in the process of becoming the LEVER that ended up creating the "Jewish state." Many Jews foresaw this coming way before WWII, when Ben-Gurion & Co. helped Nazis to break up the anti-Nazi boycott in 1933. Here is Edwin Black nailing it on the head much better than we did:

Kastner Saved Lives Too: How does justifying Haavara after the fact not resemble Kastner's defense of what happened on his infamous train, but at a much larger scale? Kastner too saved Live!

Meanwhile, the German government felt certain it had triggered the breakup of the boycott because the Zionist movement would now be in the German export business. German Jewish wealth and emigrants would be transferred in a flow wholly dependent upon the purchase of German merchandise and commodities. The Jews of the world would now have to choose between fighting Hitler and building Palestine, preserving the old or securing the new. (The Transfer Agreement, p. 133-34)

Why did Great Britain indict two of Israel's future PMs on charges of terrorism? Those evil British must have been "Jew-hating" antisemites!

Conclusion

In a nutshell, the existential crisis that confronted Zionists in May 1939 intensified their fixation on Palestine as the ONLY solution to the so-called "Jewish problem", and those Jews who immigrated to other havens than Palestine meant nothing to them (Ben-Gurion called saving Jews outside Palestine "Witch Doctor's Medicine"). Thus, our analysis explains:

Why Ben-Gurion wished death upon those German Jewish children who immigrated to England soon after the Kristallnacht pogrom (and a month before Hitler's infamous hate speech at the Reichstag on Jan 30th, 1939)!

JFK said it BEST in 1939: Palestine Was Hardly Britain's to Give Away

Why did the Zionist leadership lobby against any haven for Jews except for Palestine?

Why did Zionist leaders hinder any rescue effort unless the destination was Palestine?

Why was much of the rescue fund stolen (Zionists would say "diverted" to the new state-to-be) during WWII?

Why did the so-called yishuv avoid fighting the Nazis to the bitter end? Well, to be fair to the so-called yishuv, they saw little action at the war's end and managed to snap a few selfies at the front!

Why did this evil policy continue even after WWII ended in the DP camps?

Why did Zionist leaders attempt to hoard much of the rescue funds that could have been available to viable rescue schemes?

In the Zionist leaderhsip circles the 1930s and 40s, why did the word "rescue" used to carry negative connotations? YES, Ben-Gurion's poor stomach used to turn when the subject of rescuing European Jewry used to come up!

Why did Zionist leaders suppress and play down news of the calamity from the beginning? Why did Palesrtine's and America's Jewry simply went a long?

Why were Zionist leaders against bombing the death camps and the railroads leading to them?

Why was Haavara shut down as late as December 1941 but not earlier? Why did the Jewish Agency's offices in Berlin remain open until May 1941, but were not closed much sooner?

Why were many Arab Jews terrorized into leaving their homes in the early 1950s? Is it possible that the same thing happened in Warsaw after WWII ended? Well, it is all good, guys. If you want the omelet, you must be willing to smash a few million eggs.

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

In the best of scenarios, Zionist leaders didn't care about Europe's Jews (irrespective of whether they knew that the Shoah would happen), not only during the pogroms in the 1930s but, most importantly, as the calamity was being executed and after the Shoahended in the displaced persons --DP camps. For Zionist leaders, Europe's Jews are alive only in "Eretz-Israel"; in the Zionist mind, Europe's Jews will be dead no matter where they go except in Palestine (i.e., Witch Doctor's Medicine); as if Ben-Gurion looked upon their rescue as a betrayal, too! In the Zionists' language, there is a name for this apocalyptic phenomenon: Catastrophic Zionism.

Why were most Kapos Zionist activists? Click the picture for the details.

Thus, why should the Jewish Agency "waste" its budget? On the other hand, we agree with Black's and Segev's earlier assessment: Zionists foresaw multiple Nakbas upon the Jews of Europe, played it safe with little to no risks, positioned themselves for maximum advantage, and all heeded Herzl's advice by turning the Jewish plight into the lever, weapon, and piggy bank that would build their "Jewish state".

In layman's terms, this is precisely how the Zionist leadership managed to monetize Jewish pain politically and economically. What has been sick is that many so-called "Jewish historians" perfectly know that our description of the events is accurate. Despite that, they've painted Zionists' policies as shrouded and pragmatic political calculations. Mazeltov, Jews, give yourself a big hand on this "wonderful" ideology!