During the first few decades of Zionist immigration to Palestine, Zionist leaders rejected ~61% of immigrant applicants on the basis of their 'economic situation'.

[u/ArmyOfMemories]

https://x.com/_ZachFoster/status/1839340554347270415

[u/Adept_Thanks_6993]

I don't even know what to say here. I'm genuinely shocked.

[u/Undividedinc → u/Adept_Thanks_6993]

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

[u/specialistsets → u/Adept_Thanks_6993]

This was pre-WW1, before Zionism in Palestine was even considered viable or sustainable.

[u/Adept_Thanks_6993 → u/specialistsets]

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

[u/Saul_al-Rakoun → u/Adept_Thanks_6993]

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.

[u/Adept_Thanks_6993 → u/Saul_al-Rakoun]

I knew that Ruppin was a monster but damn

[u/Saul_al-Rakoun → u/Adept_Thanks_6993]

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.

[u/specialistsets → u/Adept_Thanks_6993]

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.

[u/Javrambimbam → u/specialistsets]

And a Russian Jewish immigration in the 1900s post-Kishniev

[u/Saul_al-Rakoun → u/specialistsets]

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.