cross‐posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/3294394

Pictured: An advertisement (in German & Hebrew) from the 1930s encouraging German Jews to use Ha’avara.

Quoting Edwin Black’s The Transfer Agreement: The Dramatic Story of the Secret Pact Between the Third Reich and Jewish Palestine, page 379:

In the period between late 1933 and 1941, over $30 million had been transferred directly via Haavara. Perhaps another $70 million had flowed into Palestine via corollary [Fascist] commercial agreements and special international banking transactions, this during a period when the average Palestinian Jew earned a dollar a day.

Some of [Zionism’s] major industrial enterprises were founded with those monies, including Mekoroth, the national waterworks; Lodzia, a leading textile firm; and Rassco, a major land developer. And vast quantities of material were stockpiled, including coal, irrigation pipes, iron and metal products for companies and enterprises not yet in existence.

From 1933 to 1941, approximately one‐hundred immigrant settlements were established along strategic corridors in western Galilee, the coastal plan, and in the northern Negev. About sixty of these settlements were established between 1936 and 1940. Most were possible only because Haavara or Haavara‐related funds flowed to Zionist agencies for land purchase and development.

And the settlements were made possible in large part because the Haavara economy had expanded the worker immigrant quota, allowing the influx of halutzim and German settlers. In 1948, the outline of these strategic settlements approximated the borders of the [neocolony], for each settlement was not only a demarcation of Jewish life, each was an outpost of [Zionist] defense where battles were fought and a boundary line was ultimately drawn.

Between 1933 and 1941, 20,000 German Jews directly transferred to Palestine via Haav[a]ra. Many of them never collected their money, and often when they did, it was only partially in cash and mostly in mandatory stocks and mortgages. Another 40,000 German Jews emigrated to Palestine during this period via the indirect and corollary aspects of transfer. Many of these people, especially in the late 1930s, were allowed to transfer actual replicas of their homes and factories—indeed rough replicas of their very existences.

(Emphasis added.)

Cheer to PalestineRemembered.com for leading me to this.

  • Anarcho-Bolshevik@lemmygrad.ml
    ·
    10 months ago

    They added,

    The way you frame the transfers - without mentioning the alternative of death etc. - is the big problem.

    This is mostly anachronistic. While there were isolated homicides of Jews in the 1930s under Fascism (most infamously during Kristallnacht), the attempt at systematic extermination hadn’t begun until the early 1940s. Either way, though, participating in neocolonialism was not the answer to antisemitism:

    In defense of Zionism, Isaac Deutscher, a pained but ambivalent Zionist, soberly asserted that what happened to the Palestinian people as a result of Zionist colonialism cannot “in fairness” be blamed on the Jews: “People pursued by a monster and running to save their lives cannot help injuring those who are in the way and cannot help trampling over their property.”19 Deutscher, it would seem, never stopped to consider that European Jews could have still fled as refugees without becoming colonists. He never investigated the transformation of European Jews from refugees into colonial soldiers.20

    (Emphasis added. Source.)