Description
Zionist Relations with Nazi Germany by Faris Yahya, drawing solely on Jewish historians, examines the historical anti-Semitism within Zionism. Zionist reasoning held that an anti-Semitism seeking the expulsion of Jews from Europe, whether from the Tsar or any other reactionary, was rational and justified, and that Jews had to reverse this logic by directing their aims toward establishing a new homeland in Palestine.
In this context, the 1933 Ha’avara Agreement between Zionists and Nazis enabled Jewish emigration to Palestine, funded through the Anglo-Palestinian Bank. The pact reinforced earlier logic, and partly as a result of it, Zionism regarded the rise of Nazism as a reasonable development and as the end of Jewish assimilationism. Zionist leaders then pursued this to its conclusion by cooperating with the Nazis, acting, Yahya argues, against European Jewry. They believed this would allow their elite to select the “best of the race” of the “chosen people” for settlement in Palestine, dismissing the rest as “dry branches.”
This racist, anti-Jewish foundation forms the historical basis of Zionism, and as it now seeks to dominate another people, it is not only useful to challenge the claim that anti-Zionism equals anti-Semitism, but also to recall the argument that Zionism itself embodies anti-Semitism.