2023-08-06 07:00:10
In this year of the seventy-fifth anniversary of the State of Israel, there is a commemoration that will certainly not take place. It has been ninety years since, on August 7, 1933, the Zionist movement concluded with Hitler’s Germany an agreement of “transfer”, designated by its Hebrew term of ” court ».
Read the 1988 archive: Article reserved for our subscribers The 40th anniversary of the State of Israel – A history written by the sword
The Nazi regime gained a valuable means of circumventing the international boycott campaign that its anti-Semitic policy had provoked. The Jewish Agency oversaw a “transfer”, both of people and capital, to British Mandate Palestine, where Jewish immigrants recovered the value of their property placed in Germany in an escrow account and made in return for German goods. export.
The Zionist movement, which had become the only authorized Jewish organization in Nazi Germany, was thus able to “transfer” approximately 53,000 Jews to Palestine, thereby protecting them from persecution.
A highly disputed agreement
The Zionist movement recorded its first historic victory in 1917, when Britain supported ” the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine “. This commitment, known as the “Balfour Declaration”, was, five years later, incorporated into the charter of the mandate entrusted by the League of Nations to the United Kingdom over formerly Ottoman Palestine.
While the Jews then represented only one in ten inhabitants of Palestine, this proportion had, because of the Zionist voluntarism encouraged by the British authorities, more than doubled in 1933. Palestine now had approximately 235,000 Jews for 900,000 Arabs. Jewish immigration was supervised, on behalf of the World Zionist Organization, by the Jewish Agency, established in Palestine and mandated to issue residence visas.
The arrival of Adolf Hitler in power in Berlin, on January 30, 1933, was soon followed by a wave of anti-Semitic measures, which aroused, among others on the part of Jewish organizations, an international boycott campaign. But Haïm Arlosoroff, the “political director” of the Jewish Agency, therefore in charge of international relations, on the contrary advocates negotiations with the Nazis, with a view to the “transfer” of the greatest possible number of German Jews to Palestine.
Haïm Arlosoroff, head of the political department of the Jewish Agency. ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
After a secret mission to Berlin, this Labor leader elaborates, on May 19, an equally secret plan in this direction. While the Labor left, led by David Ben Gurion, is the majority in the Zionist movement, its rivals on the revisionist right condemn the very principle of talks with Berlin. Arlosoroff was assassinated on June 16, in Tel Aviv, a murder that has not yet been elucidated, which aroused deep emotion (with tens of thousands of people at his funeral), but also numerous incidents between Labor and revisionist militants.
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