Zionists and Nazis Friends with Mutual Benefits $$

What came to be known as Cultural Zionism encouraged further Jewish links to the Holy Land but vehemently opposed establishing a Jewish-privileged state there. It’s important to note here that other Jewish groups of the time, like the Bund, wanted nothing to do with the Zionist project. Some warned of the dangers inherent in it, or of its undermining cherished Jewish values. To many it was another false messiah.

Then came the 1930s. As the fate of Europe’s Jewry became ever more dire, Political Zionism gained traction, not only among Jews but Nazis as well, as evidenced in the infamous Haavara Agreement, through which some 60,000 German Jews migrated to Palestine between 1933 and 1939. It was an early German ‘solution’ to the so-called Jewish question. The scheme was problematic, to say the least. The Zionists in Palestine used it to increase their numbers, but only Jews who could pay to go did. For Germany the arrangement served to break the 1933 anti-Nazi boycott while getting rid of some of its Jews. Yet European and American organisations condemned the arrangement (as did, interestingly enough, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the most militant Zionist of his day), and as with the current crisis, the Haavara, or Transfer Agreement, tore the Jewish world apart.

How Zionism proselytises