Zionism, anti-Semitism and colonialism - Opinion - Al Jazeera English
►http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/12/201212249122912381.html
State-sponsored anti-Semitism would prove most helpful to Zionism. Indeed, Zionist leaders consciously recognised that state anti-Semitism was essential to their colonial project. Herzl did not mince words about this. He would declare in his foundational pamphlet that “the Governments of all countries scourged by Anti-Semitism will be keenly interested in assisting us to obtain [the] sovereignty we want”; and indeed that not “only poor Jews” would contribute to an immigration fund for European Jews, “but also Christians who wanted to get rid of them”.
Follow the latest developments in the ongoing conflict
Herzl would conclude in his Diaries that “the anti-Semites will become our most dependable friends, the anti-Semitic countries our allies”. These were not slips or errors but indeed a long-term strategy that Zionism and Israel continue to deploy to this very day.
That Arthur Balfour was a well-known Protestant anti-Semite who in 1905 sponsored a bill (The Aliens Act) to prevent East European Jews fleeing pogroms from immigrating to England was not incidental to the fact that the Zionists rushed to court him, let alone to his own support of the Zionist project through the “Balfour Declaration”, which would reroute Jews away from England.
When the Nazis took over power in Germany, the Zionists, sharing Herzl’s understanding that anti-Semitism is the ally of Zionism, were the only Jewish group who would collaborate with them. In fact, contra all other German Jews (and everyone else inside and outside Germany) who recognised Nazism as the Jews’ bitterest enemy, Zionism saw an opportunity to strengthen its colonisation of Palestine.
In 1933, Labour Zionism signed the Transfer “Ha’avara” Agreement with the Nazis, breaking the international boycott against the regime: Nazi Germany would compensate German Jews who emigrate to Palestine for their lost property by exporting German goods to the Zionists in the country thus breaking the boycott. Between 1933 and 1939, 60 percent of all capital invested in Jewish Palestine came from German Jewish money through the Transfer Agreement. Thus, Nazism was a boon to Zionism throughout the 1930s.
