Capitalism in Decay

Pictured: ‘Transfer agreement used by the Palästina Treuhandstelle ("Palestine Trustee Office"), established specifically for Jews wishing to emigrate from Nazi Germany under the Haavara Agreement, to recover some assets when they arrived in Palestine.’ (Source.)

Quoting Lenni Brenner’s Zionism in the Age of the Dictators, chapter 6:

The debate over the Zionist–Nazi pact continued angrily until 1935. The Haʻavara rapidly grew to become a substantial banking and trading house with 137 specialists in its Jerusalem office at the height of its activities. The regulations were always changing in response to [Berlin’s] pressure, but in essence the agreement was always the same: German Jews could put money into a bank inside Germany, which was then used to buy exports which were sold outside Germany, usually but not exclusively in Palestine.

When the émigrés finally arrived in Palestine, they would receive payment for the goods that they had previously purchased after they had finally been sold. Fiscal ingenuity extended Haʻavara’s operations in many directions, but throughout its operation its attraction to German Jews remained the same: it was the least painful way of shipping Jewish wealth out of [the Third Reich].

However, the [Third Reich] determined the rules, and they naturally got worse with time; by 1938 the average user was losing at least 30 per cent and even 50 per cent of his money. Nevertheless, this was still three times, and eventually five times, better than the losses endured by Jews whose money went to any other destination.^132^

The top limit through the Haʻavara scheme was 50,000 marks ($20,000 or £4,000) per emigrant, which made the Haʻavara unattractive to the richest Jews. Therefore only $40,419,000 went to Palestine via Haʻavara, whereas $650 million went to the United States, $60 million to the United Kingdom and other substantial sums elsewhere. Yet if, in terms of German Jewry’s wealth, Haʻavara was by no means decisive, it was crucial to Zionism.

Some 60 per cent of all capital invested in Palestine between August 1933 and September 1939 was channelled through the agreement with the [Third Reich].^133^ In addition, the British set the annual Jewish immigrant quota, using the weak economic absorptive capacity of the country to limit their number; however, ‘capitalists’ — those bringing in over £1,000 ($5,000) — were allowed in over quota.

The 16,529 capitalists were thus an additional source of immigrants as well as an economic harvest for Zionism. Their capital generated a boom, giving Palestine a wholly artificial prosperity in the midst of the world‐wide Depression.

At first the WZO tried to defend itself against the charges of boycott‐scabbing and outright collaboration by insisting that the Haʻavara transfers did not really break the boycott, since [the Third Reich] did not receive foreign currency for its goods as they were all purchased inside the country for marks.

However, Berlin soon demanded part payment for some of the commodities in foreign currency and soon, too, the WZO started soliciting new customers for [the Third Reich] in Egypt, Lebanon, Syria and Iraq. Eventually the Zionists began exporting oranges to Belgium and Holland using [Fascist] ships.^134^ By 1936 the WZO began to sell Hitler’s goods in Britain.^135^

(Emphasis added. Note that ‘Haʻavara’ refers to a trading company that the World Zionist Organisation established to trade with the Third Reich.)

An example of this investment was the ‘Agreement for Transferring Property from Germany to Palestine: Details of the Three Million Mark Agreement’, which is available in the Zionist Record. Excerpt:

The Ministry of Economic Affairs has today published the full text of the decree providing for the transfer of Jewish property from Germany to Palestine.

The decree, which is numbered 54, and is dared August 28th, states that an agreement was concluded “with the Jewish bodies concerned,” for “promoting Jewish emigration to Palestine by releasing the necessary sums without putting excessive strain upon the foreign currency funds of the Reichsbank, and at the same time for increasing German exports to Palestine.”

The Reichsbank is for this purpose opening two special accounts for the Bank of Temple Society, it states, in favor of the Anglo‐Palestine Bank.

See Lenni Brenner’s 51 Documents: Zionist Collaboration With the Nazis for the full text.

Lastly, while I hate to state the obvious, I am afraid that it is now justified since there are more neoliberals than usual on this website, so I’ll go ahead and say it: no, demonstrating Zionism’s links with Fascism does not mean that I have anything against Jews. Zionism has nothing to do with protecting Jewish people, unless it intends to protect them by ensuring that thousands of Palestinian civilians won’t be able to breathe anymore, let alone meet Jews. So don’t pretend that a pseudodemocracy that lets dozens of thousands of its own citizens waste away in poverty can possibly hope to represent millions of people from around the world. If Zionism were about caring for Jewish people, its earliest head of state would never have said that he would rather have half a million Jews gone and half a million serving Zionism than both halves living safely in another part of the world:

A month after the [Fascist] pogrom against Germany’s Jews, famously known as Kristallnacht, [David Ben Gurion] stated on December 7, 1938: “If I knew it was possible to save all [Jewish] children of Germany by their transfer to England and only half of them by transferring them to Eretz‐Yisrael, I would choose the latter—because we are faced not only with the accounting of these [Jewish] children but also with the historical accounting of the Jewish People.”

(Source.)