cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/2351966

I thought that the Ashkenazi–Sephardi encounters described in Sephardic Jews in America: A Diasporic History were sad, but they’re humbling compared to everything in this!

Excerpt:

>Lest one imagine this discourse to be the product of the delirium of an isolated retrograde journalist, we have only to quote then Prime Minister David Ben Gurion, who described the Sephardi immigrants as lacking even “the most elementary knowledge” and “without a trace of Jewish or human education.”⁴ Ben Gurion repeatedly expressed contempt for the culture of the Oriental Jews: “We do not want Israelis to become Arabs. We are in duty bound to fight against the spirit of the Levant, which corrupts individuals and societies, and preserve the authentic Jewish values as they crystallized in the Diaspora.”⁵ > >Over the years [neocolonial] leaders constantly reinforced and legitimized these prejudices, which encompassed both Arabs and Oriental Jews. […] Ben Gurion, who called the Moroccan Jews “savages” at a session of a Knesset Committee, and who compared Sephardim, pejoratively (and revealingly), to the Blacks brought to the United States as slaves, at times went so far as to question the spiritual capacity and even the Jewishness of the Sephardim.⁹ > >[…] > >Ethnic discrimination against Sephardim began with their initial settling. Upon arrival […] the various Sephardi communities, despite their will to stay together, were dispersed across the [neocolony]. Families were separated, old communities disintegrated and traditional leaders were shorn of their positions. Oriental Jews were largely settled in ma'abarot, remote villages, agricultural settlements and in city neighborhoods some of them only recently emptied of Palestinians. > >As the absorption facilities became exhausted, the settlement authorities constructed “Ayarot Pituha” (“Development Towns”) largely in rural areas and frontier regions, which became, predictably, the object of [anticolonial] attack. > >The declared policy was to “strengthen the borders” implying not only against [anticolonial] military attacks but also against any attempt by Palestinian refugees to return to their homeland. Although [neocolonial] propaganda lauded the better‐protected Ashkenazi Kibbutzim for their courage in living on the frontiers, in fact their small number (about 3% of the Jewish population, and half that if one considers only border settlements) hardly enabled them to secure long borders, while the settlement of the more numerous Sephardim on the borders did ensure a certain security. > >Sephardi border settlements lacked, furthermore, the strong infrastructure of military protection provided to Ashkenazi settlements, thus leading to Sephardi loss of life. The ethnic segregation which tends to characterize [the neocolony’s] housing also dates from this period. While Ashkenazim tend to live in the more prosperous northern zones, Sephardim are concentrated in the less wealthy Southern zones. > >Despite this quasi‐segregation, the two communities are generally linked in a relation of dependency, whereby the poor neighborhoods serve the privileged neighborhoods, a relational structure that mirrors that between the […] Kibbutzim and the neighboring Development Towns. > >[…] > >Although the official melioristic discourse suggests a gradual lessening of the gap between Sephardim and Ashkenazim, in fact the inequalities are more glaring now than they were two generations ago.⁵¹ The system continues to reproduce itself, for example, in the differential treatment accorded to present‐day European immigrants versus that accorded to veteran Oriental settlers. > >While second‐generation Sephardim stagnate in substandard housing in poor neighborhoods, newly‐arrived Russian immigrants (with the exception of the Sephardi Georgians) are settled by the government into comfortable housing in central areas. > >[…] > >The largely segregated and unequal educational system in [the neocolony] also reproduces the ethnic division of labor through a tracking system which consistently orients Ashkenazi pupils toward prestigious white‐collar positions requiring a strong academic preparation while pointing Sephardi pupils toward low‐status blue‐collar jobs. Ashkenazim have double the representation in white‐collar occupations. The schools in Ashkenazi neighborhoods have better facilities, better teachers, and higher status. > >Ashkenazim have on the average three more years of schooling than Sephardim. Their attendance rate in academic high school is 2.4 times as high, and it is 5 times as high in universities.⁵² Most Oriental children, furthermore, study in schools designated by the Ministry of Education as schools for the “teunei tipuah” (literally, “those who need nurture,” or "culturally deprived"), a designation premised on the equation of cultural difference with inferiority. > >The educational system functions, as Shlomo Swirski puts it, as “a huge labelling mechanism that has, among other things, the effect of lowering the achievement and expectations of Oriental children and their parents.”⁵³ > >On whatever level—immigration policy, urban development, labor policy, government subsidies—we find the same pattern of a discrimination which touches even the details of daily life. The government, for example, subsidizes certain basic dietary staples, one of them being European‐style bread; the pita favored as a staple by both Sephardim and Palestinians, meanwhile, is not subsidized. > >These discriminatory processes, which were shaped in the earliest period of Zionism, are reproduced every day and on every level, reaching into the very interstices of the [neocolonial] social system. As a result, the Sephardim, despite their majority status, are under‐represented in the national centers of power; in the Government, in the Knesset, in the higher echelons of the military, in the diplomatic corps, in the media, and in the academic world, and they are over‐represented in the marginal, stigmatized regions of professional and social life.

(Emphasis added.)

> Those strikes come with a significant price tag. In some cases, U.S. forces have used Tomahawk missiles, which can cost about $2 million each. But even beyond the costs themselves, analysts warn that the U.S. is quickly depleting its weapons stockpiles, which were already running thin after years of military support for Ukraine in its war with Russia.

> “The price of the munitions themselves may be pennies to the Pentagon financially, but using so many of them amounts to a significant blow to our actual stockpiles of these weapons,” said Mr. DiMino, the Defense Priorities analyst. “By some estimates, the Navy has already used more than a year’s worth of [Tomahawk missile] production in Yemen. It takes time to build these things. So, the costs are not just sticker price. It can set back our production by years in some cases.”

https://archive.is/2024.02.13-203740/https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2024/feb/13/running-tab-us-clash-with-houthis-costs-taxpayers-/

> Quoting Tom Segev’s The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust, page 29: > > >Others said that there was no reason not to negotiate with Adolf Hitler to save German Jews and bring them to Palestine; after all, Moses had had no qualms about negotiating with Pharaoh to take the children of Israel out of Egypt.⁶⁴ > > > >In this struggle for control of the Zionist movement, the proponents of the haavara agreement prevailed. The next Zionist Congress, meeting in Lucerne in 1935, reaffirmed the policy. The Vaad Leumi, in the end, also rejected the boycott.⁶⁵ > > > >The haavara agreement would in the end shore up the Jewish Agency—then almost bankrupt—and grant it renewed momentum. But this victory was not without cost; it effectively isolated the yishuv from the dominant current of world Jewish response to the rise of the [Third Reich]. Nevertheless, the pragmatists were convinced that the boycott of [the Third Reich] could not advance the interests of Palestine, that their ends could best be accomplished through contact with the [Reich]. > > > >Thus the leaders sought to keep relations with [the Third Reich] as normal as possible: Two months after Hitler came to power the Jewish Agency executive in Jerusalem had sent a telegram straight to the Führer in Berlin, assuring him that the yishuv had not declared a boycott against his country; the telegram was [supposedly] sent at the request of German Jewry in the hope of halting their persecution, but it reflected the Jewish Agency's inclination to maintain correct relations with the [Fascist] government. > > > >Many years later, Menahem Begin revealed that the Zionist Organization had sent Hitler a cable of condolence on the death of President Hindenburg.⁶⁶ > > > >There were further contacts with the [Fascists] over the years. Working in cooperation with the [Reich’s] authorities, the Jewish Agency maintained immigration agents in [Fascist] Berlin.⁶⁷ Georg Landauer, for example, carried a letter, in German, certifying that the Jewish Agency had authorized him to conduct negotiations with the Third Reich about vocational training for prospective immigrants and arrangements for the transfer of their capital. The letter was signed by Arthur Ruppin and David Ben‐Gurion.⁶⁸ > > (Emphasis added. Cheers to PalestineRemembered.com for showing me this.) > > --- > :::spoiler Click here for events that happened today (February 3). > 1889: Risto Ryti, Fascist collaborator, was born. > 1937: Spanish Nationalist and Fascist volunteer forces reached the outskirts of Malaga. > 1938: Japanese Special Naval Landing Force troops captured Yantai, Shandong Province, and Imperial gunboats immediately entered the harbor to help eliminate the last pockets of Chinese resistance. > 1940: The first Fascist aircraft to crash in England was a Heinkel He 111 aircraft shot down near Whitby, North Yorkshire, and two of the four Fascist crewmen died. On the other hand, Fascist submarine U‐58 chased Estonian vessel Reet for thirteen(!) hours, then sunk her with torpedoes in the North Sea halfway between Stavanger, Norway & Aberdeen, Scotland, and slaughtered eighteen folk. Likewise, three Fascist aircraft assaulted Norwegian steam ship Tempo as she passed close to the Longstone Lighthouse. > 1941: Rome sent Fascist Party leaders to the Albanian front to bolster morale as Fascist troops in Eritrea withdrew into towns in the mountains. Berlin appointed General Erwin Rommel as the head of an unit temporarily named ‘German Army Troops in Africa’. Meanwhile, Axis submarine U‐107 sank British ship Empire Citizen south of Iceland, massacring seventy‐seven but leaving five alive, and later she struck HMS Cirspin, slaughtering twenty but leaving 121 alive. > 1942: Axis forces counterattacked toward Vyazma, encircling several Soviet divisions, and He 111 bombers of the Luftwaffe I./KG 4 assaulted Soviet rail stations in central Russia during the night. Axis submarine U‐103 sank Panamanian freighter San Gil twenty‐five kilometers away from Virginia, and six Axis flying boats from Rabaul, New Britain bombed the Seven Mile airfield near Port Moresby, British Territory of Papua at 0300 hours, killing one Australian Army sergeant, but the damage done to the airfield was minor. > 1943: Twelve He 111 aircraft, with supplies on board, flew over the northern pocket of Stalingrad before dawn. Of the eleven aircraft that reached the intended drop zone, only three dropped some of their cargo, as they found no Wehrmacht activity. During the day, the OKW issued an announcement to inform the German public of the defeat at Stalingrad. (The message, read over the radio, was preceded by a solemn drum roll and was followed by the twoth movement of Ludwig van Beethoven’s 5th symphony.) > 1944: The Axis closed the concentration camp at Szebnie, Poland, and Amon Göth assumed responsibility for deporting or executing its prisoners. against any acts of resistance. Meanwhile, Axis Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt issued additional orders that supported swift severe reprisals against any acts of resistance. The orders also explicitly attributed any potential innocent civilian casualties the fault of resistance group and not of the Axis occupation. Additionally, the Fascists violated Vatican City sovereignty by dispatching troops to arrest several Jews hiding within Vatican City borders, and the Drancy concentration camp in Paris sent its 67th transport for Auschwitz concentration camp with more than one thousand Jews. > 1945: The Axis lost Landsberg while Axis troops in Manila had to fight with the Western Allies. Meanwhile, Judge Roland Friesler, the fanatical Fascist who condemned to death the July plotters against his Chacnellor, died from an air raid on Berlin. > 1946: The Soviets found Friedrich Jeckeln guilty and executed him in Riga. > 1951: Hubert Lanz’s fellow anticommunists released him from prison even though he had only served three years of his twelve‐year sentence. > :::

> Quoting Tom Segev’s The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust, page 29: > > >Others said that there was no reason not to negotiate with Adolf Hitler to save German Jews and bring them to Palestine; after all, Moses had had no qualms about negotiating with Pharaoh to take the children of Israel out of Egypt.⁶⁴ > > > >In this struggle for control of the Zionist movement, the proponents of the haavara agreement prevailed. The next Zionist Congress, meeting in Lucerne in 1935, reaffirmed the policy. The Vaad Leumi, in the end, also rejected the boycott.⁶⁵ > > > >The haavara agreement would in the end shore up the Jewish Agency—then almost bankrupt—and grant it renewed momentum. But this victory was not without cost; it effectively isolated the yishuv from the dominant current of world Jewish response to the rise of the [Third Reich]. Nevertheless, the pragmatists were convinced that the boycott of [the Third Reich] could not advance the interests of Palestine, that their ends could best be accomplished through contact with the [Reich]. > > > >Thus the leaders sought to keep relations with [the Third Reich] as normal as possible: Two months after Hitler came to power the Jewish Agency executive in Jerusalem had sent a telegram straight to the Führer in Berlin, assuring him that the yishuv had not declared a boycott against his country; the telegram was [supposedly] sent at the request of German Jewry in the hope of halting their persecution, but it reflected the Jewish Agency's inclination to maintain correct relations with the [Fascist] government. > > > >Many years later, Menahem Begin revealed that the Zionist Organization had sent Hitler a cable of condolence on the death of President Hindenburg.⁶⁶ > > > >There were further contacts with the [Fascists] over the years. Working in cooperation with the [Reich’s] authorities, the Jewish Agency maintained immigration agents in [Fascist] Berlin.⁶⁷ Georg Landauer, for example, carried a letter, in German, certifying that the Jewish Agency had authorized him to conduct negotiations with the Third Reich about vocational training for prospective immigrants and arrangements for the transfer of their capital. The letter was signed by Arthur Ruppin and David Ben‐Gurion.⁶⁸ > > (Emphasis added. Cheers to PalestineRemembered.com for showing me this.) > > --- > :::spoiler Click here for events that happened today (February 3). > 1889: Risto Ryti, Fascist collaborator, was born. > 1937: Spanish Nationalist and Fascist volunteer forces reached the outskirts of Malaga. > 1938: Japanese Special Naval Landing Force troops captured Yantai, Shandong Province, and Imperial gunboats immediately entered the harbor to help eliminate the last pockets of Chinese resistance. > 1940: The first Fascist aircraft to crash in England was a Heinkel He 111 aircraft shot down near Whitby, North Yorkshire, and two of the four Fascist crewmen died. On the other hand, Fascist submarine U‐58 chased Estonian vessel Reet for thirteen(!) hours, then sunk her with torpedoes in the North Sea halfway between Stavanger, Norway & Aberdeen, Scotland, and slaughtered eighteen folk. Likewise, three Fascist aircraft assaulted Norwegian steam ship Tempo as she passed close to the Longstone Lighthouse. > 1941: Rome sent Fascist Party leaders to the Albanian front to bolster morale as Fascist troops in Eritrea withdrew into towns in the mountains. Berlin appointed General Erwin Rommel as the head of an unit temporarily named ‘German Army Troops in Africa’. Meanwhile, Axis submarine U‐107 sank British ship Empire Citizen south of Iceland, massacring seventy‐seven but leaving five alive, and later she struck HMS Cirspin, slaughtering twenty but leaving 121 alive. > 1942: Axis forces counterattacked toward Vyazma, encircling several Soviet divisions, and He 111 bombers of the Luftwaffe I./KG 4 assaulted Soviet rail stations in central Russia during the night. Axis submarine U‐103 sank Panamanian freighter San Gil twenty‐five kilometers away from Virginia, and six Axis flying boats from Rabaul, New Britain bombed the Seven Mile airfield near Port Moresby, British Territory of Papua at 0300 hours, killing one Australian Army sergeant, but the damage done to the airfield was minor. > 1943: Twelve He 111 aircraft, with supplies on board, flew over the northern pocket of Stalingrad before dawn. Of the eleven aircraft that reached the intended drop zone, only three dropped some of their cargo, as they found no Wehrmacht activity. During the day, the OKW issued an announcement to inform the German public of the defeat at Stalingrad. (The message, read over the radio, was preceded by a solemn drum roll and was followed by the twoth movement of Ludwig van Beethoven’s 5th symphony.) > 1944: The Axis closed the concentration camp at Szebnie, Poland, and Amon Göth assumed responsibility for deporting or executing its prisoners. against any acts of resistance. Meanwhile, Axis Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt issued additional orders that supported swift severe reprisals against any acts of resistance. The orders also explicitly attributed any potential innocent civilian casualties the fault of resistance group and not of the Axis occupation. Additionally, the Fascists violated Vatican City sovereignty by dispatching troops to arrest several Jews hiding within Vatican City borders, and the Drancy concentration camp in Paris sent its 67th transport for Auschwitz concentration camp with more than one thousand Jews. > 1945: The Axis lost Landsberg while Axis troops in Manila had to fight with the Western Allies. Meanwhile, Judge Roland Friesler, the fanatical Fascist who condemned to death the July plotters against his Chacnellor, died from an air raid on Berlin. > 1946: The Soviets found Friedrich Jeckeln guilty and executed him in Riga. > 1951: Hubert Lanz’s fellow anticommunists released him from prison even though he had only served three years of his twelve‐year sentence. > :::

cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/3415556

> Pictured: The Zionist in question. > > Quoting Faris Yahya’s Zionist relations with Nazi Germany, pages 57–8: > > >The agreements between the Zionist movement and [the Third Reich] were a well‐kept secret for many years. But once the scandal known as the Kastner case broke in 1953, the details began to come to light gradually. > > > >The first secret agreement to be fully revealed was the one reached between Dr. Rudolf Kastner of the Jewish Agency Rescue Committee in Budapest and Colonel Adolf Eichmann (who had signed the 1938 emigration agreement with Moshe Bar‐Gilad), the official responsible for settling the “Jewish question” in Hungary, in 1944. The Kastner–Eichmann agreement concerned the fate of some 800,000 Jews in Hungary. > > > >“The great bulk of Hungary’s Jews were without organisation. They belonged neither to Zionism nor the Jewish Agency. They belonged only to Hungary, its homes, streets, workshops, sports fields, cafés. Who could speak for these assimilated Jews, these Jews without chairmen? […] The organised Jews took over the entire rescue work for the whole 800,000 doomed.”⁷⁵ > > > >The organised Jews were the Zionists, who set up the Jewish Agency Rescue Committee. Kastner and the other officials of this Committee, like Ginsberg and Bar‐Gilad, were officially recognised by the [Third Reich] as negotiators and representatives of the Zionist movement. > > > >The truth about the activities of this so‐called “Rescue Committee” did not begin to come out until [a Jewish] writer named Malchiel Greenwald publicly denounced Kastner as a collaborator with [Fascism], maintaining that “Kastner’s deeds in Budapest cost us the lives of hundreds of thousands of Jews.”⁷⁶ Greenwald was sued for libel not by Kastner but by [Zionism’s] Government, whose leaders had been Kastner’s superiors and had drawn up the policy he had implemented. > > > >The trial did not go well for the [neocolonial] Government. Greenwald was cleared of the charge of libel, indicating that there was a firm basis for his accusation that Kastner’s Rescue Committee had collaborated with the [Fascists] and helped them to exterminate the bulk of Hungarian Jewry in exchange for being allowed to save more than 600 prominent Zionists and take them to Palestine. > > :::spoiler (Emphasis added. Click here for more details.) > Pages 58–60: > > >According to the Judge in the Kastner case, Benjamin Halevi: “The Jews of the ghettoes would not have trusted the [Axis] rulers. But they had trust in their Jewish [but Zionist] leaders. Eichmann and others used this known fact as part of their calculated plan to mislead the Jews. They were able to deport the Jews to their extermination by the help of [Zionist] leaders… Those of the Jews who tried to warn their friends of the truth were persecuted by the Jewish leaders in charge of the local ‘rescue work’. The trust of the Jews in the misleading information and their lack of knowledge that their wives, children and themselves were about to be deported to the gas chambers of Auschwitz led the victims to remain quiescent in their ghettoes… The [Fascists’] patronage of Kastner, and their agreement to let him save 600 prominent Jews, were part of the plan to exterminate the Jews… The opportunity of rescuing prominent people appealed to him greatly. He considered the rescue of the most important Jews as a great personal success and a success for Zionism… > > > >“The sacrifice of the vital interests of the majority of the Jews, in order to rescue the prominents, was the basic element in the agreement between Kastner and the [Axis]. This agreement fixed the division of the nation into two unequal camps, a small fragment or prominents, whom the [Axis] promised Kastner to save, on the one hand, and the great majority of Hungarian Jews whom the [Axis] designated for death, on the other hand. An imperative condition for the rescue of the first camp by the [Axis] was that Kastner will not interfere in the action of the [Axis] against the other camp and will not hamper them in its extermination. Kastner fulfilled that condition… Collaboration between the Jewish Agency Rescue Committee and the exterminators of the Jews was solidified in Budapest and Vienna. Kastner’s duties were part and parcel of the SS. In addition to its Extermination Department and Looting Department, the […] SS opened a Rescue Department headed by Kastner.”⁷⁷ > > > >Greenwald’s lawyer Shmuel Tamir (who as a member of the Herut party was hoping to topple the government of the Mapai party to which Kastner belonged) next sought to bring Kastner to trial for collaboration with [Fascism]. For this, Tamir collected “a suitcase full of new evidence against Dr. Kastner, and God knew whom else.” > > > >Before this second trial could be held, however, Kastner was assassinated by Zeev Eckstein, formerly “a paid undercover agent of the [neocolonial] government’s Intelligence Service”, thereby putting an end to the danger that his appearance in court might reveal more embarrassing details.⁷⁸ > > > >At the same time that Kastner was carrying through his deal with the [Axis], Rabbi Weissmandel wrote to the Zionist movement: “We send you this special message to inform you that yesterday the [Axis] began the deportation of Jews from Hungary… The deported ones go to Auschwitz to be put to death by cyanide gas… This is the schedule of Auschwitz. from yesterday to the end: 12,000 Jews—men, women and children, old men, infants, healthy and sick ones — are to be suffocated daily… > > > >“And you, our brothers in Palestine, in all the countries of freedom, and you, ministers of all the Kingdom, how do you keep silent in the face of this great murder? Silent while thousands on thousands, reaching now to 6 million Jews, were murdered. And silent now while tens of thousands are still being murdered and waiting to be murdered? Their destroyed hearts cry out to you for help as they bewail your cruelty. Brutal you are and murderers too you are, because of the cold‐bloodedness of the silent in which you watch. Because you sit with folded arms and you do nothing, although you could stop or delay the murder of Jews at this very hour… You, our brothers, sons of Israel, are you insane? Don’t you know the hell around us? For whom are you saving your money ? Murderers. Madmen. Who is it that gives charity? You who toss a few pennies from your safe homes ? Or we who give our blood in the depths of hell?”⁷⁹ > > (Emphasis added.) > ::: > > --- > :::spoiler Click here for events that happened today (January 23). > 1937: Heinrich Himmler disclosed that about eight thousand prisoners were in concentration camps across the Third Reich for protective custody. Coincidentally, Orso Mario Corbino, Fascist Italy’s Minister of National Economy in 1923–24, expired. > 1940: Fascist submarine U‐19 discovered a group of twenty unescorted steamers off Northumberland. With one torpedo each, she sank Norwegian ship Pluto at 0843 hours and British ship Baltanglia at 0855 hours. > 1941: Charles Lindbergh testified before the US Congress, recommending that the United States negotiate a neutrality pact with the Third Reich. Although the Axis lost Tobruk, Libya, fighting would continue at outposts outside the city for another day. In Europe, six hundred Polish prisoners arrived at Flossenbürg Concentration Camp from Auschwitz Concentration Camp, and Rome made Commander Vittorio Moccagatta the head of the Special Weapons Section of 1a Flottiglia MAS at La Spezia. Likewise, Axis Fw 200 aircraft bombed British ship Lurigethan west of Ireland, leaving sixteen dead, and the Kingdom of Romania’s Capital Military Command mopped up the last pockets of Legionary resistance, but the pogrom still officially left 118 dead (with unofficial estimates counting 630 dead and 400 missing). > 1942: The Battle of Rabaul commenced the Eastern Axis’s invasion of Australia’s Territory of New Guinea, and Imperial bombers attacked Palembang, Sumatra for the first time. In Yugoslavia, Western Axis troops massacred 2,462 Serbs and 700 Jews over six days in retaliation for partisan activity. > 1943: The Axis lost Tripoli, Libya; Armavir, Russia; and the Gumrak Airfield on the western side of Stalingrad to the Allies. The Axis submarine facilities at Lorient, France also suffered an Allied bombing raid. > 1944: The Axis executed 180 prisoners deemed ‘invalid’ by gunfire at Majdanek Concentration Camp in occupied Poland. > 1945: Axis admiral Karl Dönitz launched Operation Hannibal; Kriegsmarine units began the evacuation of German civilians from Ostpreußen (East Prussia) and Danzig. The Axis lost the Oder River in the Silesia region of Poland, and the last Japanese survivors of Myinmu, Burma drowned themselves in the Irrawaddy River to avoid capture while the Axis lost a patrol boat off the Bonin Islands. > 1946: The hearing against Hans Fritzsche began in Nürnberg. > :::

cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/3415556

> Pictured: The Zionist in question. > > Quoting Faris Yahya’s Zionist relations with Nazi Germany, pages 57–8: > > >The agreements between the Zionist movement and [the Third Reich] were a well‐kept secret for many years. But once the scandal known as the Kastner case broke in 1953, the details began to come to light gradually. > > > >The first secret agreement to be fully revealed was the one reached between Dr. Rudolf Kastner of the Jewish Agency Rescue Committee in Budapest and Colonel Adolf Eichmann (who had signed the 1938 emigration agreement with Moshe Bar‐Gilad), the official responsible for settling the “Jewish question” in Hungary, in 1944. The Kastner–Eichmann agreement concerned the fate of some 800,000 Jews in Hungary. > > > >“The great bulk of Hungary’s Jews were without organisation. They belonged neither to Zionism nor the Jewish Agency. They belonged only to Hungary, its homes, streets, workshops, sports fields, cafés. Who could speak for these assimilated Jews, these Jews without chairmen? […] The organised Jews took over the entire rescue work for the whole 800,000 doomed.”⁷⁵ > > > >The organised Jews were the Zionists, who set up the Jewish Agency Rescue Committee. Kastner and the other officials of this Committee, like Ginsberg and Bar‐Gilad, were officially recognised by the [Third Reich] as negotiators and representatives of the Zionist movement. > > > >The truth about the activities of this so‐called “Rescue Committee” did not begin to come out until [a Jewish] writer named Malchiel Greenwald publicly denounced Kastner as a collaborator with [Fascism], maintaining that “Kastner’s deeds in Budapest cost us the lives of hundreds of thousands of Jews.”⁷⁶ Greenwald was sued for libel not by Kastner but by [Zionism’s] Government, whose leaders had been Kastner’s superiors and had drawn up the policy he had implemented. > > > >The trial did not go well for the [neocolonial] Government. Greenwald was cleared of the charge of libel, indicating that there was a firm basis for his accusation that Kastner’s Rescue Committee had collaborated with the [Fascists] and helped them to exterminate the bulk of Hungarian Jewry in exchange for being allowed to save more than 600 prominent Zionists and take them to Palestine. > > :::spoiler (Emphasis added. Click here for more details.) > Pages 58–60: > > >According to the Judge in the Kastner case, Benjamin Halevi: “The Jews of the ghettoes would not have trusted the [Axis] rulers. But they had trust in their Jewish [but Zionist] leaders. Eichmann and others used this known fact as part of their calculated plan to mislead the Jews. They were able to deport the Jews to their extermination by the help of [Zionist] leaders… Those of the Jews who tried to warn their friends of the truth were persecuted by the Jewish leaders in charge of the local ‘rescue work’. The trust of the Jews in the misleading information and their lack of knowledge that their wives, children and themselves were about to be deported to the gas chambers of Auschwitz led the victims to remain quiescent in their ghettoes… The [Fascists’] patronage of Kastner, and their agreement to let him save 600 prominent Jews, were part of the plan to exterminate the Jews… The opportunity of rescuing prominent people appealed to him greatly. He considered the rescue of the most important Jews as a great personal success and a success for Zionism… > > > >“The sacrifice of the vital interests of the majority of the Jews, in order to rescue the prominents, was the basic element in the agreement between Kastner and the [Axis]. This agreement fixed the division of the nation into two unequal camps, a small fragment or prominents, whom the [Axis] promised Kastner to save, on the one hand, and the great majority of Hungarian Jews whom the [Axis] designated for death, on the other hand. An imperative condition for the rescue of the first camp by the [Axis] was that Kastner will not interfere in the action of the [Axis] against the other camp and will not hamper them in its extermination. Kastner fulfilled that condition… Collaboration between the Jewish Agency Rescue Committee and the exterminators of the Jews was solidified in Budapest and Vienna. Kastner’s duties were part and parcel of the SS. In addition to its Extermination Department and Looting Department, the […] SS opened a Rescue Department headed by Kastner.”⁷⁷ > > > >Greenwald’s lawyer Shmuel Tamir (who as a member of the Herut party was hoping to topple the government of the Mapai party to which Kastner belonged) next sought to bring Kastner to trial for collaboration with [Fascism]. For this, Tamir collected “a suitcase full of new evidence against Dr. Kastner, and God knew whom else.” > > > >Before this second trial could be held, however, Kastner was assassinated by Zeev Eckstein, formerly “a paid undercover agent of the [neocolonial] government’s Intelligence Service”, thereby putting an end to the danger that his appearance in court might reveal more embarrassing details.⁷⁸ > > > >At the same time that Kastner was carrying through his deal with the [Axis], Rabbi Weissmandel wrote to the Zionist movement: “We send you this special message to inform you that yesterday the [Axis] began the deportation of Jews from Hungary… The deported ones go to Auschwitz to be put to death by cyanide gas… This is the schedule of Auschwitz. from yesterday to the end: 12,000 Jews—men, women and children, old men, infants, healthy and sick ones — are to be suffocated daily… > > > >“And you, our brothers in Palestine, in all the countries of freedom, and you, ministers of all the Kingdom, how do you keep silent in the face of this great murder? Silent while thousands on thousands, reaching now to 6 million Jews, were murdered. And silent now while tens of thousands are still being murdered and waiting to be murdered? Their destroyed hearts cry out to you for help as they bewail your cruelty. Brutal you are and murderers too you are, because of the cold‐bloodedness of the silent in which you watch. Because you sit with folded arms and you do nothing, although you could stop or delay the murder of Jews at this very hour… You, our brothers, sons of Israel, are you insane? Don’t you know the hell around us? For whom are you saving your money ? Murderers. Madmen. Who is it that gives charity? You who toss a few pennies from your safe homes ? Or we who give our blood in the depths of hell?”⁷⁹ > > (Emphasis added.) > ::: > > --- > :::spoiler Click here for events that happened today (January 23). > 1937: Heinrich Himmler disclosed that about eight thousand prisoners were in concentration camps across the Third Reich for protective custody. Coincidentally, Orso Mario Corbino, Fascist Italy’s Minister of National Economy in 1923–24, expired. > 1940: Fascist submarine U‐19 discovered a group of twenty unescorted steamers off Northumberland. With one torpedo each, she sank Norwegian ship Pluto at 0843 hours and British ship Baltanglia at 0855 hours. > 1941: Charles Lindbergh testified before the US Congress, recommending that the United States negotiate a neutrality pact with the Third Reich. Although the Axis lost Tobruk, Libya, fighting would continue at outposts outside the city for another day. In Europe, six hundred Polish prisoners arrived at Flossenbürg Concentration Camp from Auschwitz Concentration Camp, and Rome made Commander Vittorio Moccagatta the head of the Special Weapons Section of 1a Flottiglia MAS at La Spezia. Likewise, Axis Fw 200 aircraft bombed British ship Lurigethan west of Ireland, leaving sixteen dead, and the Kingdom of Romania’s Capital Military Command mopped up the last pockets of Legionary resistance, but the pogrom still officially left 118 dead (with unofficial estimates counting 630 dead and 400 missing). > 1942: The Battle of Rabaul commenced the Eastern Axis’s invasion of Australia’s Territory of New Guinea, and Imperial bombers attacked Palembang, Sumatra for the first time. In Yugoslavia, Western Axis troops massacred 2,462 Serbs and 700 Jews over six days in retaliation for partisan activity. > 1943: The Axis lost Tripoli, Libya; Armavir, Russia; and the Gumrak Airfield on the western side of Stalingrad to the Allies. The Axis submarine facilities at Lorient, France also suffered an Allied bombing raid. > 1944: The Axis executed 180 prisoners deemed ‘invalid’ by gunfire at Majdanek Concentration Camp in occupied Poland. > 1945: Axis admiral Karl Dönitz launched Operation Hannibal; Kriegsmarine units began the evacuation of German civilians from Ostpreußen (East Prussia) and Danzig. The Axis lost the Oder River in the Silesia region of Poland, and the last Japanese survivors of Myinmu, Burma drowned themselves in the Irrawaddy River to avoid capture while the Axis lost a patrol boat off the Bonin Islands. > 1946: The hearing against Hans Fritzsche began in Nürnberg. > :::