Haavara FAQs: The Aliyah Bet Scandal, Statehood Over Survival

Fake Valor: Daddy, what did you do during the Holocaust while you were in Palestine?

The accepted history of Zionist rescue efforts during the Holocaust is one of heroic struggle against impossible odds. We are told that the Jewish Agency (JA), facing the British White Paper of 1939, which severely limited Jewish immigration, moved heaven and earth to smuggle Jews into Palestine through the clandestine "Aliyah Bet" program.

However, a forensic audit of the Jewish Agency’s own budgets during the most critical phase of the Holocaust (January 1943 – May 1945) reveals a devastatingly different reality. 

Hitler's Message To The West: If Jews are such noble citizens, how come you're not letting them in?

The Critical Window: 1943–1945

By early 1943, the scale of the Holocaust was confirmed. Yet, precisely when European Jewry was hanging by a thread, the Jewish Agency’s priorities shifted away from immediate rescue, see the Biltmore Program.

During the first years of the war, approximately 15,000 Jews were brought to Palestine via Aliyah Bet. But in the critical last 29 months of the war, the operation was, according to historical records, "virtually paralyzed".

• 1943: Zero successful Aliyah Bet ships arrived from Europe.

• 1944: Only a single convoy operation succeeded, saving approximately 700 people (while hundreds more died when the Mefküre was sunk).

• 1945 (War’s End): No arrivals until after V-E Day.

The Budgetary Scandal 

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

While Aliyah Bet was failing to move people, it was succeeding in consuming funds.

According to the Jewish Agency’s own records, analyzed by historian Dina Porat, the total expenditure on Aliyah Bet during this 29-month period was P£523,500 (Palestine Pounds). For more details, see Dina Porat's book, pp. 91, 92, and Table 2 on pp. 104.

Fake Valor: Jewish-Brigade, Italy April - 1945: The Impostering Hero, see me while I bomb Nazis ONLY a few weeks before WWII ended.

Consider the math of this allocation:

1. The Political Expense: The Agency spent P£523,500 on a political operation that managed to bring fewer than 1,000 people to Palestine, see Dina Porat, pp. 92.

2. The Humanitarian Expense: In the exact same period, the total amount JA spent on actual rescue measures in Europe (food, forged papers, hiding places, and bribes to save the remaining millions in the ghettos) was approximately P£669,500 --much of it donated by diaspora Jewry, see Dina Porat, Table 2 on pp. 104.

The Scandal: The Jewish leadership spent nearly as much on a symbolic, political operation to defy the British White Paper (saving ~700 people) as it did on the desperate attempts to keep millions of Jews alive in Hitler’s Europe. 

The "Traitor" Paid the Bill 

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Perhaps the most bitter irony is the source of the money. The Jewish Agency did not even fund the majority of its own flagship political operation.

Three-fifths (60%) of the Aliyah Bet budget (P£300,000) was provided by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), see Dina Porat, pp. 92. This was the non-Zionist "rescue-first" organization often reviled by Zionist hardliners for its refusal to prioritize statehood politics. The Jewish Agency leveraged humanitarian funds from the JDC to finance its political battle against the British, while saving its own "sacred" funds for land purchase.

In 1944 alone, while "starving" rescue operations, the Jewish National Fund and Foundation Fund spent over P£5.1 million on land acquisition and settlements, see Dina Porat's book, pp. 91, 92.

Kastner Saved Lives Too: How does justifying Haavara after the fact not resemble Rudolf Kastner's defense of what happened on his famous train but at a much larger scale? Kastner train passengers on their way to Switzerland, 1944

The "Peace-Time" Distraction 

Why did they do it? The archives provide a chilling answer. By February 1943, the Jewish Agency Executive (JAE) believed the war would be over within the year.

They explicitly allocated $1,000,000 --over 20% of their budget—not for rescue, but for "peace-time... colonization" and post-war planning.

David Ben-Gurion was busy employing hundreds of experts in a "Planning Committee" to design the future state in what became known as The One Million Man Plan, explicitly aiming to use the "terrible disaster" of the Holocaust as a "LEVER" for statehood. 

To put this number in perspective, this insane amount, P£1,000,000, was times and a half of what the Jewish Agency spent on rescuing Jews in the last two and a half years of the war! Spoiler Alert: this amount, P£1,000,000, is three times what was allocated for rescue (not spent) for the entire year of 1943! For more details, see Dina Porat's book, pp. 91, 92, and Table 2 on pp. 104.

Fake Valor: Jewish-Brigade, Italy April - 1945: The Impostering Hero, see me while I bomb Nazis ONLY a few weeks before WWII ended.

Conclusion 

This scandal is so big, we honestly thought there must have been a big mistake somewhere. It took us months before we published. Finally, we asked Google's AI Gemini to double-check our work. We fed Gemini the relevant chapters (8 & 9) from Dina Porat's book, and Gemini's findings were much more damning. Note that we got similar results with ChatGPT as well.

As we look back at the P£523,500 spent to transport ~700 people for political symbolism, we are left with the haunting question: How many thousands could have been saved if that money had been sent to the ghettos to buy bread, bribe guards, and forge passports for the living?