Advance warning: there is nothing original here. It has all been well document and stated for many decades. The only reason I am invoking it here is because despite having been concerned about Palestine for over 40 years (NB: since the Sabra and Shatila Massacres in Lebanon (when the IDF allowed “Christian” Phalangist militias access to the camps), that started on September 16 1982 and took place over three days, in which thousands of Palestinian refugees were murdered), I had not heard of this agreement. It was never part of my Holocaust Remembrance Education.
The Haavara Agreement was a controversial agreement between Nazi Germany and Zionist representatives in Palestine. It allowed German Jews emigrating to Palestine to transfer a portion of their assets out of Germany despite the strict capital controls and anti-Jewish legislation already emerging under Hitler’s regime. It operated from August 1933 until it was effectively terminated in 1939, shortly before the outbreak of World War II. Involved in it were – on the German side – the Reich Ministry of Economics and the Zionistische Vereinigung für Deutschland (Zionist Federation of Germany). On the Zionist side, the agreement was negotiated in part by Chaim Arlosoroff, head of the Jewish Agency’s Political Department in Palestine (he was assassinated shortly after, under mysterious circumstances). David Ben-Gurion supported the agreement as a pragmatic necessity – or as a serendipitous opportunity, who knows – to rescue Jews and build a Jewish nation Palestine.
The Haavara Agreement created a mechanism whereby German Jews sold their property and assets in Germany. The proceeds were deposited into a special account controlled by the Haavara Trust. These funds were then used to purchase German-manufactured goods, which were exported to Palestine. When the emigrants arrived in Palestine, they received the equivalent value of their original assets (minus fees) in goods, such as building materials, farming tools, or household items.
Whereas it may seem a reasonable solution for many Jews in Germany, who were already suffering under national-socialist anti-Semitism in the Third Reich, this scheme effectively subsidized both emigration and German exports, despite the emerging global boycott of Nazi goods. It is therefore equally important to know, that the Jewish Anti-Nazi boycott movement (especially in the U.S. and Britain) denounced the agreement as a betrayal. That is, even in the face of institutionalized anti-Semitism in the Third Reich, not every Jewish Group agreed with the Zionist approach, also because it undermined international efforts to weaken and contain the Third Reich economically.
This peculiar historical event has not been widely addressed in historical accounts of either anti-Semitism in the Third Reich or the history of Zionism. An estimated 50,000 to 60,000 German Jews emigrated to Palestine as part of this agreement. The total capital transferred was about 100 million Reichsmarks (about $40 million USD in 1930s currency). What has also been completely ignored by the apologetics of Zionist collaborations with Nazis is the fact that only wealthy people had enough capital to afford to emigrate under this scheme. Zionism is not an emancipatory movement based on social justice, but an ideology that served the wealthiest few. Before the expansions into Austria, the Czech Republic and Poland, there were an estimated 523,000 Jews living in Germany. That means that the scheme only applied to 10% of the total Jewish population.
By the end of 1938 (the year of Kristallnacht), the Haavara scheme had already been slowed down and partly blocked, as the radicalization of anti-Semitism in the Third Reich shifted from an emphasis on ethnic cleansing through forced migration to internment in concentration camps that later facilitated the genocide of the Shoah. On top of this, the British government issued a White Paper in 1939, in which it imposed limitations on the immigration of German Jews to Palestine (which was a British Mandate at that time). This was at least partly due to legal commitments that the British Government had itself entered as part of the Balfour Declaration of 1917.
In the Balfour Declaration of 1917 it was stated that: “His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.” The White Paper of May 1939 thus did not violate Balfour Declaration of 1917, as Zionist protagonists have claimed, as it never stated that it supportzed the creation of a Jewish State. In fact, the White Paper supported the intention of the Declaration that it should not be used to justify forced expulsions of Jews from Europe.
Of course, legal arguments were only the veneer of the motivation to limit the emigration of Jews to Palestine. The most often cited political reason were civil unrests between Zionists and indigenous peoples (most commonly referred to as “Arabs” even though that itself might be due to racist semantics). The fact that the League of Nations Mandate Commission refused to endorse the British White Paper of 1939 was therefore not with reference to the Balfour Declaration but to the Mandate For Palestine of 1922, which itself was supposed to be the implementation of the Declaration, but had already incorporated a stronger Zionist ethos by referring to Palestine as a “home for the Jewish nation”. Especially Articles 2 “The Mandatory shall be responsible for placing the country under such political, administrative and economic conditions as will secure the establishment of the Jewish national home…” and Article 6: “The Administration of Palestine… shall facilitate Jewish immigration under suitable conditions and shall encourage… close settlement by Jews on the land…” must be understood as paving the way for Jewish settler colonialism to create an exclusively Jewish state, even if this was explicitly not endorsed in the Balfour Declaration.
The so-called “Arab Revolt” of 1936-1939 should thus also be understood as a form of resistance against the fact that – despite being a 90% majority of the population – Palestinians were completely omitted from the 1922 Mandate. It must also be noted, that the hearing of the League of Nations Mandate Commission on the British White Paper of 1939 only invited representatives of the Zionist Agency in Palestine and the British Government. No Palestinian political authorities were heard. Thus, the Nakba of 1948 was already prepared and performed within the institutions of international law in 1922 and affirmed in 1939. It was made possible because of British colonialism and its complete disregard to recognizing universal human rights.
Hence,what we are faced with is not some kind of extraordinary evil under the name of Zionism, but a logical extension of the sadistic barbarism and cruelty that of European Imperialism. Not only is the birth of Zionism a completely European product, which aligned its raison d’étre with the full acceptance of the false axioms of anti-Semitism, but also its establishment as a representative of the Jewish people world-wide in the first half of the 20th Century owes its exclusive existence to the cynical racist arrogance of European imperialism. Whereas the British government provided extensive support for infrastructural development for Jewish settlers, it did not grant anything of that kind to the indigenous Palestinian population.
The third axiom: the cynical or pragmatic appropriation of the opportunity to help the Third Reich in its ethnic cleansing of German Jews, by circumventing an international boycott, is merely the icing on the cake. It shows that even the most barbaric and hateful expressions of anti-Semitism can be made to serve the Zionist project. Zionism is the fulfilment and completion of European anti-Semitism that was radicalized but not invented by the Third Reich.
It would thus be historically wrong to point towards the Shoah as the sole justification of the existence of the State of Israel. The British Government and the League of Nations were already well on-board to make that a reality. What the Shoah did instead, was to delegitimate Palestinian opposition to the creation of a Jewish State, by projecting the long history of European anti-Semitism onto a population that were themselves Semitic (but referred to as Arabs to hide this fact). And today, it are the Palestinian people who are still paying the price. The fact that the European Union does not act is thus not surprising, given its historical and material deep roots of anti-Semitic political culture.
Hannah Arendt warned that a Jewish state that mimicked European ethno-nationalism would become ghettoized on a global scale, i.e. a permanent militarized fortress: “The ‘victorious’ Jews would live surrounded by an entirely hostile Arab population, secluded inside ever‑threatened borders, absorbed with physical self‑defence to a degree that would submerge all other interests and activities… Under such circumstances… a Jewish state can only be erected at the price of the Jewish homeland.” Even though I am not a big fan of Arendt, she prophetically hit the nailmon the head here.
Thanks to Europe and the USA, however, this logic has recently transformed into something far worse than Arendt could foresee. We now have an entire nation steeped in sadistic, barbaric, cancerous hatred corrupting due process, justice, equality and peace all across the world, being an instrument of the most cynical, vile expressions of the cyberfossil war machine. Selling its military R&D by stating “tested in Palestine” as a marketing ploy, is but one example. In such a reality, paying Jeffrey Epstein to use teenage girls to compromise rich and powerful men and extort them into supporting the complete demolition of the planet seems a very logical strategy rather than some kind of dark, perverse conspiracy theory.
The perversion of democracy, which is called kakistocracy, always doubles down on its own perversions. Zionism is not some secret global power. It is merely a parasitical tool deployed by the cyberfossil war machine to expand its entropic corruption, directing it against the web-of-life itself. It is the true death cult that Europe has embraced as part of its imperial-patriarchal-capitalist violation of life as we know it.
Disaffected Sociology 
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