cross‐posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/3272753

Pictured: The Anglo‐Palestine Bank in Tel Aviv.

Quoting Edwin Black’s The Transfer Agreement: The Dramatic Story of the Secret Pact Between the Third Reich and Jewish Palestine, pages 121–2:

[Occupied] Palestine was vital to [Fascist] economic strategy. […] In the decade since the Jewish Agency had been established, [occupied] Palestine had flourished, even amid a worldwide Depression. While this tiny corner of the Mideast by 1933 accounted for only 0.1 percent of Germany’s overall exports, it was a disproportionally important customer for certain vital Reich industries such as fertilizer, farm equipment, and irrigation pipes.⁵

Far beyond its own consumption, however, Palestine was now the crucial gateway to expanding German exports throughout the emerging Mideast market: Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, North Africa. This market was deemed essential by the Reich if certain strategic raw materials [that the Fascist bourgeoisie] craved for war were to be acquired via bilateral trade agreements.

Pages 373–4:

As Jewish existence was dismantling in Germany, however, it was reconstructing in [occupied] Palestine. The Haavara brought in many of the fundamentals: coal, iron, cement, fertilizer, seed, hammers, saws, and cultivators. Haavara also brought in the capital: cash, loans, mortgages, deposits, and credits. All this produced an economic explosion in [occupied] Palestine, requiring companies to be formed, investments to be made, and most of all, jobs to be filled.

Palestine’s economic absorptiveness tripled, perhaps quadrupled, within a year or so of the Transfer Agreement. Economic opportunity translated into a dramatic increase in immigration certificates under the twice‐yearly “worker quota.” Most of these certificates were awarded to Mapai’s halutzim, the young pioneers eager to plant the seed, dig the ditches, and trowel the cement.

As more buildings were erected, more kibbutzim established, and more small factories founded, ever more job openings were created for halutzim. The spiral of economic expansion increased the flow of worker immigrants from just a few thousand yearly before the Transfer Agreement to more than 50,000 during the two years following. Most were Mapai halutzim, and only about 20 percent of them were from [the Third Reich].

[Occupied] Palestine’s rapidly expanding economy brought more than worker and commercial opportunities. There also developed a need for more doctors, lawyers, engineers, teachers, hoteliers, restaurateurs, and entrepreneurs. Many of these niches were filled by the several thousand German Jews who came over on unlimited capitalist certificates by virtue of Haavara.

By 1935, Palestine’s need to sell German merchandise to offset Jewish deposits in transfer accounts became greater than anyone expected. The Palestinian market was becoming saturated. So the Zionist Organization established another transfer corporation, this one called the Near and Middle East Commercial Corporation, assigned the acronym NEMICO.

(Coincidentally, nemico is Italian for ‘enemy’.)

NEMICO operated a regional sales network in Iraq, Egypt, Syria, Cyprus, and elsewhere in the region, coordinating mainly through Bank Zilkha of Beirut. Mideast markets were opened for a vast array of key German exports, from Volkswagens to municipal bridgeworks. This worked in tandem with Hjalmar Schacht’s New Plan of exchanging German goods for the raw materials of underdeveloped nations.

As NEMICO was opening new markets to German commerce, so too was the Palestinian citrus industry. Year after year, growers were increasingly compelled to become purveyors of German goods to guarantee vital Reich purchases of orange and grapefruit crops. Most of [occupied] Palestine’s commercial relationships with [the Third Reich] remained a secret from the Jewish world, but several deals came to light. Trade statistics published by the British could not hide the unparalleled increase in German exports to [occupied] Palestine.

The Third World Jewish Conference held in Geneva in 1934 finally passed a resolution condemning Palestinian–German trade and demanding [that] the Zionist Organization terminate all such contacts. Pressure within the Zionist world to disavow the Transfer Agreement and its complex of collateral undertakings became so intense by mid‐1935 that the Anglo‐Palestine Bank announced it was no longer willing to front for the Zionist Organization.

(Emphasis added in all cases. I replaced the author’s instances of “Jewish Palestine” with “occupied Palestine” because the settlers’ heritage is irrelevant and, furthermore, it incorrectly implies that the precolonial Jewish population willingly formed a part of this occupation.)

Cheers to PalestineRemembered.com for leading me to this.