I've been reading Zionist Relations with Nazi Germany, a fascinating book that makes an extremely compelling argument[1] that the Zionist cause as well as many individual Zionists threw European Jewry as a whole under the bus during the Nazi years and particularly during the holocaust in order to eke out the highest possible number of Jews emigrating to Palestine in particular. The book emphasizes the solidarity between Palestinian and Jewish liberation, by framing the Zionist philosophy as collaborationist not just in practice but at its roots: Zionism is fundamentally the agreement with the antisemitic trope that Jews are a separate nation who do not belong in solidarity with the other inhabitants of the countries they have made their diasporic homes.
What the book doesn't point out explicitly, but I've realized while reading it, is another aspect to why Zionists seemed so blasé about averting or mitigating the murder of six million Jews[2]. Because who were the six million Jews who died in Europe? They were specifically those Jews who did not immigrate to Palestine. The holocaust was, by and large, a slaughtering of one of the most potent threats to Zionist ideology: non-Zionist and anti-Zionist Jews. And Zionists demonstrated (and stated outright) again and again that their first priority was establishing a Jewish state, not the welfare of actual Jews, so of course they didn't lift a finger to stop it. The Nazis were doing them a favor.
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Pointedly using only Jewish-authored sources to avoid charges of antisemitism! ↩︎
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This is abundantly clear in both their actions and in Zionist primary sources during and immediately after the holocaust. Zionists only started accurately portraying it as the massive culture-defining tragedy that it is once it was safely ensconced in the past—and even then, actual survivors were reportedly look down on in Israel as weak and pathetic. ↩︎
