In my Vimeo video about Israel I mentioned a letter written in the Times of London on June 6, 1961 about how the Zionist leadership in Great Britain opposed efforts to rescue European Jews from the Holocaust. I neglected in my video to say that the author of this letter was Rabbi Dr. Solomon Schonfeld, Chairman of the wartime Rescue Committee established by the Chief Rabbi of Britain. Read more about this letter below.
www.NewDemocracyWorld.org
Zionism is an ATTACK on ordinary Jews (as well as Palestinians).
Anti-Zionists need to explain that IT IS ANTI-SEMITIC (MEANING ANTI-ORDINARY-JEWISH-PEOPLE) NOT TO OPPOSE ZIONISM.
Here are key articles that will help you attack Zionism in a way that is a) truthful and b) impossible to portray as anti-Semitic:
1. Read in Class Inequality in Israel why it is no favor to Jews to support Israel, how Israel has third highest gap between rich and poor in the world and how 21 percent of Israelis live below the poverty line, making Israel the country with the highest percentage in the west, and how
Zionism Is About Making Sure The Movement Of Ordinary Israeli Jews For Economic Equality Fails.
2. Read "The Israeli Ruling Class is No Friend of Ordinary Jews." Here are some excerpts from it:
Israeli Jews Fight Back Against the Government
In July of 2011 the people in Israel (mainly, but not only Jews) launched a huge wave of protests against the Israeli government over the issue of their economic impoverishment. The movement kept growing and growing, with mass demonstrations and people pitching tents on Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv. “On Saturday, September 3, an estimated 450,000 people participated in several demonstrations which were held over various locations across Israel and which were referred to by protest organizers as ‘The March of the Million.” People were demanding basic economic things, such as affordable housing. Many Israelis could no longer afford to pay their rent.
“The cost of living in Israel is horrendous,” said Daniel Levy, a senior fellow and director of the Middle East Policy Initiative at the New America Foundation. “It’s hellishly expensive compared to what people earn and the inequality gap has only gotten wider.” [ http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/world-july-dec11-israel_08-19/ ]
What did Prime Minister Netanyahu do? Did he grant the demands of “his people”? No! He killed the movement by demanding that the people in it (the Jews, at least) act patriotically (i.e., support their government) in the fight against “the real enemy”: Palestinians in Gaza, some of whom had fired rockets into Israel (and thereby helped Netanyahu get out of a bad spot!) Until Israel Jews see that Palestinians are not their enemy but indeed their ally against their real enemy, they will continue to remain oppressed by the Israeli ruling class.
Israel's ruling class is rich and powerful
"Israel's richest families control 34 percent of top income. Nineteen businessmen and their families control more than third of income of Israel's 500 leading companies." [ https://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3427561,00.html ]
"The income of the 18 wealthiest families in Israel is equivalent to 77 percent of Israel's national budget, which is NIS 256 billion a year, and constitutes 32 percent of the country's revenues, according to a survey conducted by the Business Data Israel company published Monday." [Haaretz, 13/02/2006, article posted by Ora Coren and Lilach Weissman, Haaretz Correspondents]
The Israel Ruling Class is Oppressing Ordinary Jewish Israelis
The French Le Monde diplomatique in 2003 wrote an article titled, “Israel’s age of austerity” reporting the following:
There is another campsite of the unemployed and homeless in Tel Aviv. It was set up in August 2002 in one of the richest districts on Kikar Medina (State Square), which the protesters call Kikar HaLehem (Bread Square). Dozens live there, with their children, in old buses or tents. So far, all attempts by the local authority and property owners to have them removed have failed.
“The choice of place is no accident,” says Israel Twito, 38, a divorcee who is bringing up three daughters alone. “The contrast between our miserable campsite and the neighbourhood’s luxury shops and apartment blocks symbolises the ever-widening abyss between rich and poor.”
On 28 August the popular Hebrew daily Yediot Aharonot ran the front-page headline “A million Israelis are hungry”. Earlier this year researchers at the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee’s Brookdale Institute, in collaboration with the Ministry of Health, reported that 400,000 Israeli families - 22% of the total - were suffering from “nutritional insecurity”, since they could not provide their children regularly with the food they need for proper growth.
Some ate smaller portions, others skipped meals. In the worst cases, they ate nothing all day. Meals were monotonous and poor in meat, dairy products, fruit and vegetables. Four out of five of these families said things have worsened in the past two years and their economic situation is more precarious: 5% admitted seeking food aid from soup kitchens or charities. According to another poll published by the humanitarian charity Latet (Giving), the number of Israelis applying for food aid jumped by 46% in a year. The main applicants are single-parent and large families.
Public opinion was shocked by the simultaneous announcement of the huge profits made by Israel’s banks. The largest, Bank Hapoalim, announced net profits of 335m shekels ($75m) for the second quarter of 2003, an increase of 59%. Israel Discount Bank’s profit rose to 116m shekels ($26m) for the same period, 36.5% more than in 2002. The combined profits of the five largest banks (Hapoalim, Leumi, Discount, Hamizrahi and BenLeumi) for the first half of 2003 are 1,400m shekels ($314m), 130% higher than the first half of 2002.
Sh’ma, A Journal of Jewish Ideas in 2003 wrote in an article titled, “Penury and Hunger in Israel,” how:
"[V]ociferous segments of the public are demanding that governmental resources be channeled to welfare and other domestic resources, rather than to strengthening settlements beyond the green line." [ http://shma.com/2003/05/penury-and-hunger-in-israel/ ]
Challenge magazine in 2005 wrote :
"Recent measures taken by Israel’s government to undermine the welfare state have harmed women first of all, both Arab and Jewish. Of the Jewish, many who in the past had gained a foothold in the middle class find themselves shunted to the margins of society. The income supplements they depended on have been whisked out from under them. The same cuts have worsened the plight of Arab women. Despite the fact that both groups, indeed the lower classes in general on both the Arab and Jewish sides, suffer from an erosion in living-standards – and often for identical reasons – there is an utter lack of dialogue between them." [ http://www.challenge-mag.com/91/Poverty-Arab-Jewish-women.htm ]
The Jewish Daily Forward in 2006 reported :
"Israel’s growing population of retirees has been reduced to a state of profound economic insecurity in recent years, as self-styled economic reformers have hollowed out the Jewish state’s time-honored system of care for the elderly. Pensions have been frozen. Social security payments, known in Israel as national insurance, have been relentlessly whittled away — cut by 35% in a single decade. Health care and prescription drug coverage have been slashed, along with funds for senior housing and assisted living. It’s part of a deliberate move by Jerusalem policy-makers to modernize Israel’s economy, by which they mean to remodel it along American lines. Determined to bury the socialist ethos of Israel’s founders, successive governments since the mid-1980s have slashed income supports and welfare payments even as they’ve privatized and deregulated industries, opened capital markets to international competition and reduced workers’ job security (they call it “liberalizing labor laws”). Over the past three years, under the economic leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu, the reforms have been ramped up to a revolution."
The Forward explains the "meteoric rise of the Pensioners' Party" in the April, 2006 election this way:
"And then there was the simple, glaring fact of poverty. Too many Israelis had reached the point where their own personal security seemed more precarious than their country’s." [ http://forward.com/opinion/editorial/1202/the-passion-of-the-pension/ ]
In June of 2015 rt.com titled an article, “Israel’s poor getting poorer, income gap among largest in developed world – study” that reported :
Israel remains among the poorest performing countries in terms of economic equality, while poverty depth, that is how poor the poor are, has worsened, a new study says. A big cutback in government social welfare programs is one of the causes.
The study of Israel’s economic life, “A Picture of the Nation 2015,” was published Thursday by the Jerusalem-based Taub Center for Social Policy Studies in Israel. The study compared Israeli numbers to those of other 33 members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).
In terms of inequality, Israel remains among the worst in the OECD, the report said. It is on par with the US and bests only Mexico in this regard. The Taub Center’s researchers blame demographic differences, large income gaps in the labor market, and the low effectiveness of the governmental social programs for the situation.
The income gap was pushed wider by how Israelis own real estate and pay rent, with the wealthier segments of society getting most of the rental income. The richest 20 percent receive twice as much from rent as the 80 percent does. [ http://forward.com/opinion/editorial/1202/the-passion-of-the-pension/ ]
In May of 2017 rt.com titled an article, “Israel’s economy heading for disaster, experts warn” which said:
A report released by the Taub Center for Social Policy Studies in Israel shows the country has the highest poverty rates among OECD countries and faces “worrisome trends” that could have disastrous effects on its growing population…
The country ranks 22nd out of 34 of the OECD (The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) regarding GDP and takes the 24th spot within the market income poverty rate. Among developed countries, Israel has the highest percentage of its population living below the poverty line. [ https://getpocket.com/a/read/1763072169 ]
3. Read "Evidence that Israeli/Zionist Leaders Want Jews to Die at the Hands of Apparent Anti-Semites" and have done so since the days of the Holocaust. Here is one excerpt from it:
1943
What did the Zionist leadership do to rescue Jews during the actual years of the Holocaust?
On December 11, 1943, the Jewish Forward, largest Yiddish newspaper in the world, criticized the Zionist leaders, writing,
"The Jewish Conference [a Zionist organization] is alive only when there is something in the air which has to do with a Commonwealth in Palestine, and it is asleep when it concerns rescue work for the Jews in the Diaspora." [19]
Baruch Kimmerling, in his review of Yosef Grodzinsky's In the Shadow of the Holocaust: The Struggle Between Jews and Zionists in the Aftermath of World War II, writes:
"Ben-Gurion and other Zionist leaders vetoed the immigration of 1,000 orphans, who were in physical and emotional danger as a result of the harsh winter of 1945, from the camps in Germany to England, where the Jewish community had managed to secure them permits. Another group of roughly 500 children of camp inhabitants was barred, after Zionist intervention, from reaching France, whose rabbinical institutions had offered them safe haven." [20]
The head of the World Zionist Organization's Zionist Rescue Committee in Budapest during the war, Rudolf Kastner, later a prominent member of Israel's government under Prime Minister Ben-Gurion, collaborated with the Nazis. In the years 1944-45, Kastner was made a V.I.P. by the Nazis and not required to wear a yellow Star of David because, in exchange for being allowed to hand pick 1600 prominent Jews, including his own relatives and friends, to emigrate to Palestine, he helped Adolf Eichmann lure a half million Hungarian and Transylvanian Jews to their death without a fight by arranging for phony postcards "from other Jews" to convince them that the trains to the death camps were merely taking them to be "resettled." The betrayal was especially horrible because Eichmann only had "150 men and only a few thousand Hungarian soldiers at his disposal" and the Jews, had they known the truth, could have easily carried out a mass escape to territory that the Nazis did not occupy. These facts came out in a famous 1954 Israeli libel trial in which Kastner initially thought he could silence his accuser but, as the trial developed and witness after witness came forward to confirm the accusations, he began to shift his defense to the claim that he had only done what all top Zionist leaders of the time advocated. At this point Kastner was "conveniently" assassinated by persons unknown. [21]
1942
[from http://newdemocracyworld.org/old/War/Should-People.htm ]
Zionist sabotage of rescue efforts was an established policy as early as 1942. In a letter to the Times (of London), June 6, 1961, Rabbi Dr. Solomon Schonfeld, Chairman of the wartime Rescue Committee established by the Chief Rabbi of Britain, describes how the Zionist leadership in Great Britain opposed efforts to rescue European Jews from the Holocaust. He writes that, contrary to the claims that the British government was "largely indifferent to and unwilling to take action in defense of the European Jews who were being massacred daily by the Nazis in spite of efforts by Zionist leaders to persuade the British Foreign Office to rouse itself into action on behalf of the victims...My experience in 1942-43 was wholly in favour of British readiness to help, openly, constructively and totally, and that this readiness met with opposition from Zionist leaders who insisted on rescue to Palestine as the only acceptable form of help." Rabbi Schonfeld goes on to describe how, in December, 1942, he and others formed a Council for Rescue from the Nazi Terror which initiated a Parliamentary Rescue Committee supported by leading members of both Houses, and how they submitted a motion to Parliament calling for the government "to declare its readiness to find temporary refuge in its own territories or in territories under its control for endangered persons who are able to leave those countries; to appeal to the governments of countries bordering on enemy and enemy-occupied countries to allow temporary asylum and transit facilities for such persons; to offer to those governments, so far as practicable, such help as may be needed to facilitate their cooperation; and to invite the other Allied governments to consider similar action." But this is what happened, according to the rabbi's letter:
"As a result of widespread concern and the persistence of a few, this motion achieved within two weeks a total of 277 Parliamentary signatures of all parties. This purely humanitarian proposal met with sympathy from government circles, and I should add that H.M.Government did, in fact, issue some hundreds of Mauritius and other immigration permits -- indeed, in favour of any threatened Jewish family whom we could name. Already while the Parliamentary motion was gathering momentum, voices of dissent were heard from Zionist quarters: 'Why not Palestine?' The obvious answers that the most urgent concern was humanitarian and not political, that the Mufti-Nazi alliance ruled out Palestine for the immediate saving of lives and that Britain could not then add to her Middle East problems, were of no avail.
"At the Parliamentary meeting held on January 27, 1943, when the next steps were being energetically pursued by over 100 M.P.s and Lords, a spokesman for the Zionists announced that the Jews would oppose the motion on the grounds of its omitting to refer to Palestine. Some voices were raised in support of the Zionist view, there was considerable debate, and thereafter the motion was dead. Even the promoters exclaimed in desperation: If the Jews cannot agree among themselves, how can we help? It was useless to argue with a then current Zionist argument: 'Every nation has had its dead in the fight for its homeland -- the sufferers under Hitler are our dead in our fight'."
Why did Zionist leaders sabotage rescue efforts? The answer is spelled out very clearly in a dramatic letter. In the autumn of 1942 Nathan Schwalb (Dror) was representative of the Zionist He-Halutz (The Pioneer) organization in Geneva. At this time a Jewish rescue Working Group in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia, was sending desperate appeals to He-Halutz for money to bribe senior Nazi officials to delay or prevent the transport of Czechoslovakian Jewry to Auschwitz and other death camps. Schwalb replied, in his letter to the rescue group, as follows:
"Since we have the opportunity of this courier, we are writing to the group that they must always remember that matter which is the most important, which is the main issue that must always be before our eyes. After all, the allies will be victorious. After the victory, they will once again divide up the world between the nations as they did at the end of first war. Then they opened the way for us for the first step [the British Balfour Declaration of 1917 supporting a Jewish homeland in Palestine -- JS] and now, as the war ends, we must do everything so that Eretz Yisroel [the Land of Israel -- JS] should become a Jewish state. Important steps have already been taken in this matter. As to the cry that comes from your country, we must be aware that all the nations of the Allies are spilling much blood and if we do not bring sacrifices, with what will we achieve the right to sit at the table when they make the distribution of nations and territories after the war? And so it would be foolish and impertinent on our side to ask the nations whose blood is being spilled for permission to send money into the land of their enemies in order to protect our own blood. Because 'rak b'dam tihyu lanu haaretz' ('only through blood will the land be ours'). As to yourselves -- members of the group -- 'atem taylu' ('you will get out'), and for this purpose we are providing you with funds by this courier." [22]
One might dismiss this cruel letter from Nathan Schwalb as an aberration, unrepresentative of the Zionist leadership at higher levels. But it turns out that Schwalb was acting in accordance with the views of his superiors in the Zionist movement. In his book, In Days of Holocaust and Destruction, Yitzchak Greenbaum, Chairman of the (Zionist) Jewish Agency's Rescue Committee in Jerusalem, wrote, "when they asked me, couldn't you give money out of the United Jewish Appeal funds for the rescue of Jews in Europe, I said, 'NO!' and I say again, 'NO!'...one should resist this wave which pushes the Zionist activities to secondary importance." In February, 1943, Greenbaum gave a speech in Tel Aviv on the subject, "The Diaspora and the Redemption" in which he said:
"When they come to us with two plans -- the rescue of the masses of Jews in Europe or the redemption of the land [settling Jews in Palestine -- JS] -- I vote, without a second thought, for the redemption of the land...If there would be a possibility today of buying packages of food with the money of the Keren Hayesod (United Jewish Appeal) to send it through Lisbon, would we do such a thing? No! and once again No!" [23]
4. Read in "Why U.S. Billionaires Could Destroy the Israel Lobby, But Don't" how American billionaires (non-Jewish and Jewish alike!) have a very real (though evil) self-interest in supporting Israel and do so for THAT reason, not because of any mysterious power of Jews to control non-Jews. In fact, a single billionaire could destroy the Israel lobby (AIPAC) easily by just telling the American public the sordid truth about how Zionists have only contempt for ordinary Jews and betrayed them during the Holocaust years. Read "The Israel Lobby's Power Comes from The American Ruling Class."
5. Read how ordinary Americans are harmed by Zionism too, in "Why Our Government Supports Israel's Government and Why We Shouldn't" (pdf)
6. Click here to see a 5+ minute video of John Spritzler saying how and why anti-Zionists must take the offensive in saying why it is anti-Semitic NOT to oppose Zionism.
Please read my book: The Israeli Ruling Class Exposed: It Oppresses Ordinary Jews as Well as Palestinians. (You can borrow it for free from your local library too!)
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