Quoting a letter that Norman G. Finkelstein wrote to the New York Times on July 12th, 1987:

In his review of Shabtai Teveth’s “Ben‐Gurion: The Burning Ground 1886–1948” (June 21) Martin Gilbert mistakenly reports that Mr. Teveth does not cite David Ben‐Gurion’s controversial remark to a 1938 Mapai Central Committee meeting: “If I knew that it was possible to save all the children of Germany by transporting them to England, and only half by transferring them to the Land of Israel, I would choose the latter, for before us lies not only the numbers of these children but the historical reckoning of the people of Israel.”

The quotation does appear (in a slightly different translation) on pages 855–56 of Mr. Teveth’s text. I might add that, given Ben‐Gurion’s Zionist convictions, there is nothing especially surprising about the sentiment he expressed on that occasion. Mr. Teveth rightly points out that, for Ben‐Gurion the Zionist, only a Jewish state could provide an enduring and authentic resolution to the Jewish question.

Any rescue operation outside the Zionist framework was — in Ben‐Gurion’s words — “witch doctor's medicine” that would only perpetuate the misery of the Jewish people. Indeed, at least in the early years of the [Third Reich], Ben‐Gurion actively opposed any such rescue efforts, precisely because they might have resolved — or from the Zionist perspective, might have appeared to resolve — the Jewish question without a Jewish state.

Unfortunately, on this crucial point Mr. Teveth repeatedly cites the failure of the 1938 Evian Conference to solve the problem of Jewish refugees as evidence that the West was indifferent to their fate, thereby confirming Ben‐Gurion’s Zionist convictions. But what was Ben‐Gurion's approach to Evian? Let me quote from another recent biography, Dan Kurzman’s “Ben‐Gurion: Prophet of Fire” (1983):

The Jews could have only one destination — Eretz Yisrael. So in June 1938, shortly before Allied representatives met in Evian, France, to seek ways of rescuing Jews, Ben‐Gurion frankly voiced his concern to colleagues in the Jewish Agency Executive.

He did ‘not know if the conference will open the gates of other countries. […] But I am afraid [that it] might cause tremendous harm to Eretz Yisrael and Zionism. […] Our main task is to reduce the harm, the danger and the disaster […] and the more we emphasize the terrible distress of the Jewish masses in Germany, Poland and Rumania, the more damage we shall cause.’ So be silent, Ben‐Gurion cautioned his comrades. […] And in the silence […] Evian failed.

An example from Avraham Burg’s The Holocaust Is Over; We Must Rise From its Ashes, pages 74–5:

The leaders of the pre‐[1948 occupation] paid lip service to the calamity in Europe. Segev draws a horrific picture of indifference:

Haaretz once published a news story on the atrocities of the occupation in Kharkov, Ukraine (“The Nazi oppressors pushed — in front of them half‐naked Jews and beat them along the city streets with whips and rifle stocks. Frail old people and children fell helpless on the way and died in purity…”). The story was run on page two of the paper, under a headline of one column. There were other stories in that column, and this was not at the top.

Above it appeared a story on a great football victory of Maccabee Damascus… In time the newspaper editors would claim that they did not believe the information that reached their desks… Therefore they published, but with reservation, for safety. They often used question marks: “Half a Million Jews Annihilated in Romania?” (Minor headline in Davar).²

Who can believe this today, when every alleged swastika makes a big headline? There are a number of Jewish organizations that make a living of reacting to expressions of hatred that are not so terrible, not so important, sometimes simply accidental or the product of a deranged mind. Can we imagine, today, a question mark in a headline about the death of half a million people?

This downplaying reflected the leadership’s position and was the filtered product of the political watchdogs at the news desks, and in any case it was the position of the majority of the people living in the pre‐[1948 occupation]. The local population was even more distant from the events in Europe than their leaders.

(Emphasis added in all cases.)

Cheers to PalestineRemembered.com for showing me this.