r/JewsOfConscience • u/ArmyOfMemories Jewish Anti-Zionist • Sep 27 '24
History During the first few decades of Zionist immigration to Palestine, Zionist leaders rejected ~61% of immigrant applicants on the basis of their 'economic situation'.
https://x.com/_ZachFoster/status/183934055434727041528
u/specialistsets Non-denominational Sep 27 '24 edited Sep 27 '24
For context, this is from before WW1 and the era of mass Zionist immigration. But it also doesn't say anyone was rejected or prevented, basically any individual from anywhere was able to move to Ottoman Palestine in those times.
ETA: Zionists only had control over Jewish immigration to Palestine during the British Mandate beginning in 1920.
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u/Saul_al-Rakoun Conservadox & Marxist Sep 27 '24 edited Sep 28 '24
Ruppin would've been active post-1908, and Sheinkin post-1906. So this is smack dab in the middle of the "Second Aliyah", with the first Kishinev Pogrom being in Spring 1903, and the second in Fall 1905.
Spin it as much as you like, this is pretty clear evidence the Zionists weren't helping people flee persecution.
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u/specialistsets Non-denominational Sep 28 '24
I am not spinning anything, nor am I defending anyone. Factually, Zionists had no control over Jewish immigration to Ottoman Palestine, nor was there a plan or system for mass immigration at that point. The Jews of the Second Aliyah typically came as independent groups and associations, it was not centralized (and encouraged) like in the Mandate era.
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u/Saul_al-Rakoun Conservadox & Marxist Sep 28 '24
Ruppin started organizing Zionist immigration in Palestine in 1908. Sheinkin directed the Hovevei Tzion immigration office in Palestine starting in 1906.
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u/specialistsets Non-denominational Sep 28 '24
You are missing the point, the Second Aliyah (a retroactive term not used at the time) was not organized mass Zionist immigration. Most of the Jews of the Second Aliyah were not even motivated by Zionism or Zionist ideologies. Zionists had no control whatsoever over who immigrated to Palestine before the end of the Ottoman Empire. Immigration to Palestine then was wide open for anyone who wanted, Jewish or not, Zionist or not.
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u/Saul_al-Rakoun Conservadox & Marxist Sep 29 '24
Obviously there was a level of organization to it, or you wouldn't have two separate organizations both operating in Tel Aviv both at the same time, both having to do with organizing immigration.
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u/specialistsets Non-denominational Sep 29 '24
Tel Aviv was first founded in 1909. Ruppin and Sheinkin were not focused on organizing or funding mass immigration then, they were attempting to establish infrastructure to enable sustainable future immigration. By all accounts they were trying to discourage mass immigration in those days (and again, they had no control over immigration regardless of how they felt about it). There were also many different independent Jewish organizations and settlements active in Palestine with varying levels of connection the "official" Zionist movement, it was quite decentralized until the British Mandate.
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u/ArmyOfMemories Jewish Anti-Zionist Sep 27 '24
Interesting read.
Another user also mentioned this:
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u/Klutzy-Pool-1802 Ashkenazi, atheist, postZ Sep 27 '24
Wondering what the context was for a policy like this. I haven’t learned much about how Israel absorbed all the refugees in the 50’s. Do you have resources about that?
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u/Saul_al-Rakoun Conservadox & Marxist Sep 27 '24
In the early 1950s they put the Arab Jews in concentration camps while they figured out what to do with them. When they eventually came up with a plan, it was to disperse them to border kibbutzim to act as a human shield wall against the Palestinians.
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u/ArmyOfMemories Jewish Anti-Zionist Sep 28 '24
it was to disperse them to border kibbutzim to act as a human shield wall against the Palestinians.
Have you read Yigal Levy's book, 'Israel’s Death Hierarchy: Casualty Aversion in a Militarized Democracy'?
I wrote about it here:
https://np.reddit.com/r/socialism/comments/1d8ruj2/israels_death_hierarchy_casualty_aversion_in_a/
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u/Saul_al-Rakoun Conservadox & Marxist Sep 29 '24
I haven't yet. I guess I have yet another book to add to my increasingly infinite reading list.
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u/ArmyOfMemories Jewish Anti-Zionist Sep 29 '24
I highly recommend it. I posted some interesting passages in my write-up.
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u/Klutzy-Pool-1802 Ashkenazi, atheist, postZ Sep 28 '24
Why do you choose the term “concentration camp” instead of “refugee camp”?
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u/Saul_al-Rakoun Conservadox & Marxist Sep 29 '24
Probably because of the barbed wire, guards, and dogs.
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u/Adept_Thanks_6993 Orthodox Sep 27 '24
I don't even know what to say here. I'm genuinely shocked.
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u/Undividedinc Anti-Zionist Ally Sep 27 '24
Only if you not aware that wealthy Zionist made deals with Nazis to transfer their wealth to Palestine, even as other Jews were being led to the gas chambers
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u/specialistsets Non-denominational Sep 27 '24
This was pre-WW1, before Zionism in Palestine was even considered viable or sustainable.
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u/Adept_Thanks_6993 Orthodox Sep 27 '24
Yeah but there was still plenty of reason for certain Jews to get the hell out of the places there were. Russia, Yemen, etc. I'm sure the Yishuv was well aware of that
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u/Saul_al-Rakoun Conservadox & Marxist Sep 27 '24
The Zionist Organization had already begun using JNF funds for indirect land confiscations (pay the Effendis 80x the property value to induce them to evict the Fellahin tenants; we've seen what happens in major American cities when the multiple is only 2x or 3x). So yes, the Zionists were well aware of what was going on and they simply didn't care.
Things like Ben Gurion's Children of Germany remarks a month after Kristallnacht, or Weizmann's lobbying the British government to turn back the kindertransports, aren't aberrations, they're continuous with the entire Zionist project.
Of Arthur Ruppin, the second man mentioned here, Wikipedia's article begins:
Arthur Ruppin (1 March 1876 – 1 January 1943) was a German Zionist proponent of pseudoscientific race theory and one of the founders of the city of Tel Aviv.
There is an entire section dedicated to his race theory. Circumstantially apropos of what we're talking about, because it's evocative of his worldview:
Ruppin wrote that Jewish race should be "purified", and he stated that "only the racially pure come to the land." After becoming head of the Palestine Office of the Zionist Executive (later the Jewish Agency for Israel), he argued against immigration of Ethiopian Jews because of their lack of "blood connection" and that Yemenite Jews should be limited to menial labor.
And lest you wonder, yes, he did measurements with skull calipers. Indeed, was a Social Darwinist, and one of the things Social Darwinists believe is that the poor are poor because they're dysgenic, and their bad genes have to be bred out of the population. So to tie this back to the beginning, Ruppin -- who was responsible for organizing Zionist immigration to Palestine -- had the means to help poor Jews flee persecution but he did not do so because their poverty and persecution was proof of their biological inferiority.
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u/Adept_Thanks_6993 Orthodox Sep 27 '24
I knew that Ruppin was a monster but damn
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u/Saul_al-Rakoun Conservadox & Marxist Sep 27 '24
I don't know why I'm surprised by this still, but it's almost like every time someone tells me "You're overreacting, it wasn't that bad, the Zionists weren't doing what they really wanted to do in their heart of hearts" I do five minutes of cursory research to disprove them and I find out that no, I'm under-reacting, the truth is actually so much worse, and they did what they wanted to do.
Good God.
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u/specialistsets Non-denominational Sep 27 '24 edited Sep 27 '24
This was still the Old Yishuv era, where most Jews in Palestine lived in poverty and subsided on charity from Jews abroad (which included the "old" Old Yishuv population as well as recent immigrants from the First Aliyah who were in over their heads). During those years many from Old Yishuv communities emigrated to the US due to the devastation of WW1. The Zionist infrastructure that enabled mass immigration was established later after the end of the Ottoman Empire.
there was still plenty of reason for certain Jews to get the hell out of the places there were. Russia, Yemen, etc.
And many of these Jews still did move to Palestine at this time despite the known challenges. There was a particularly significant wave of Yemeni Jewish immigration to Palestine in the 1890s.
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u/Saul_al-Rakoun Conservadox & Marxist Sep 27 '24
This would've been no less than five years after the JNF began disbursing funds to fuel the mass-eviction project. They had the funds. They didn't care.
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u/ArmyOfMemories Jewish Anti-Zionist Sep 27 '24
More excerpts:
The letters sent to the Zionist information bureaus enable us to gain a better understanding of the considerations involved in immigration to Palestine. The representatives’ answers, on the other hand, reveal the Zionist policy with regard to immigration to Palestine and the kind of immigrants that the Zionist movement wanted. Until the outbreak of World War I, the Zionist movement did not have an official policy with regard to immigration, but an earnest debate took place within it on the question of “the good of the people” versus “the good of the land.” Those that favored the good of the people desired a mass migration of the Jews to Palestine to rescue them physically and spiritually, while those who favored the good of the land claimed that the country was unable in a short time to absorb masses of Jews seeking to emigrate. They therefore claimed that people with capital or people able to work should be given preference to poor immigrants or those with limited capacities who had little to contribute to the Yishuv. In 1882, for instance, the secretary of the Hibbat Zion movement, Moshe Lieb Lilienblum, said that “if we want to settle the land, we can only consider the rich, who can buy property at full price and prepare all the instruments at their own expense, but there is no room for the poor in Palestine.”73 However, Theodor Herzl, in his book The Jewish State (1896), took the opposite approach: “We must not visualize the exodus of the Jews as a sudden one. It will be gradual, proceeding over a period of decades. The poorest will go first and cultivate the soil. They will construct roads, bridges, railways and telegraph installations, regulate rivers, and provide themselves with homesteads.”74
- Alroey, Gur. An Unpromising Land (Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture) (pp. 96-97). Stanford University Press. Kindle Edition.
The answers of Sheinkin and Ruppin, the directors of the information bureaus, to those who approached them, show that both of them favored a selective immigration of capitalists first and preferred “the good of the land” to “the good of the people.” In their opinion, Palestine was unable to absorb immigrants without capital, because they would be unable to subsist there. So if poor immigrants did come, they might endanger the whole settlement enterprise. Palestine, said Ruppin, was not a land of refuge, and it was incapable of absorbing unsuitable immigrants. The natural goal of immigration was therefore the United States and not Palestine.75 Menahem Sheinkin said similar things when stating the policy of the information bureau on taking up his post:
The information bureau for Palestinian affairs declares the following: the present situation in the country is that new migrants with no means have no chance of subsisting. The other type of people, who can come without asking if they have a place here, is those with capital, with larger or smaller financial resources. For these, conditions in Palestine are very good, even if they are not specialists in any field.76
In a letter to Otto Warburg, a member of the executive committee, Sheinkin told him “that the Yishuv in Palestine is growing by thousands, and they want to come here and make a living from their work. The bureau must tell them once again that insofar as the Yishuv can absorb artisans, it has almost absorbed as many as it needs, for there are artisans for whom there is already no room in Palestine.”77 Even at the end of the period, Sheinkin continued to be of the opinion that only healthy immigrants with the financial means to set themselves up were needed in the country. If immigrants of the other kind arrived, the whole Zionist enterprise would be endangered. We all have one aspiration and objective, said Sheinkin,
which is to strengthen and improve it through the entry into the country of an abundance of healthy and strong elements that have the means to strike roots, to live and to give life. We also know that, as against this, it would be a great danger to the Yishuv and all our work if, as a result of our advice and directives, undesirable elements—that is to say, ones that have no chance of managing here—would come to settle, because, in returning to the countries they came from, they have the power to destroy in one hour what we have built over a considerable length of time. We all know that it is much easier to destroy than to build or to reconstruct.78
Sheinkin claimed that “the undesirable elements” would not only be a burden on the Yishuv but also, in returning to their countries of origin because of their inability to support themselves, they would give Palestine a bad name. In this way, he said, they would prevent the arrival of immigrants with means and the capacity to pay their way who could contribute to the development of the Yishuv.
- Alroey, Gur. An Unpromising Land (Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture) (p. 98). Stanford University Press. Kindle Edition.
[...]that 61 percent of the applicants received negative answers from Sheinkin and Ruppin. About 18 percent of the replies had conditions attached, such as: come, investigate, and then decide; come only if you have enough money; or come only if you are prepared to manage with little. About 21 percent of the applicants received positive replies without conditions or restrictions. The criteria for recommendation were fixed according to the economic situation of the applicant, and there was a correlation between his capital and the answer he received.
- Alroey, Gur. An Unpromising Land (Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture) (p. 99). Stanford University Press. Kindle Edition.
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