· judaism vs zionism · 4 min read
Jewish Heroes Opposing Zionism
Famous Jews who resisted the Holocaust were opposed to Zionism.
Judaism vs Zionism
Summary
Zionism is a form of Jewish nationalism reliant on the establishment of a Jewish majority within Palestine. It was marginal belief amongst the Jewish people until very recently in Jewish history.
Marginal Belief
Some of the most prominent Jews in history rejected the colonial-settler conception of Zionism. From Albert Einstein to Hannah Arendt
Zionist Attack of Jews
Non-Zionist Jews have been actively undermined by and even murdered for opposing Zionists, including Jews who had been living in Palestine for centuries.
Article Contents
Jewish Heroes Opposing Zionism
The Hero of Auschwitz — Dr. Rudolf Vrba
Dr. Rudolf Vrba (11 September 1924 - 27 March 2006) is a Jewish hero. He was a survivor of Majdanek concentration camp, and was one of the first Jews to escape from Auschwitz in 1944. He raised the alarm to warn the Hungarian Jews and the Allied Powers about the Nazi extermination programme. His actions helped halt the Holocaust, he said save more than 200,000 Jewish lives.
Through his powerful campaign, he helped save hundreds of thousands of Jewish lives. The horrors of the Holocaust were cut short through his intervention and that of the Allied Powers. Dr Vrba argues that the Zionists were in fact the enemies of the Jewish people and enabled rather than saved Jews from the horrors of the Holocaust:
I am a Jew. In spite of that — indeed because of that — I accuse certain Jewish leaders of one of the most ghastly deeds of the war. This small group of quislings knew what was happening to their brethren in Hitler’s gas chambers and bought their own lives with the price of silence.
Dr. Rudolf Vrba, Daily Herald, February 1961 (cited in Ben Hecht, Perfidy, 1962, p. 231).
Rudolf Vrba being interviewed in November 1978 for the documentary Shoah (1985).
Dr Vrba further argues:
The Zionist movement of Europe played a very important role in the mass extermination of Jews. Indeed, I believe that without the cooperation of Zionists it would have been a much more difficult task… So, on one platform, Nazism and Zionism had something in common: they both preached that Jews don’t belong to Europe but to Palestine. … And naturally, the Germans said: ‘You see the Jews may not trust us but they will trust you’, to the Zionists, ‘because they have seen that they have always told them actually the truth: that you belong to Palestine, that you are a foreign element here.’ . I considered them plain fascists and I considered them from the very start as despicable creatures who deal with the fascists and take profit out of it in order to be exempted from discrimination conducted against the others
Dr. Rudolph Vrba, ‘Oral history interview with Rudolf Vrba’, World at War TV Series, 1972, 1st section, extracts from 32 to 45mins.
Leader of the Warsaw Uprising — Marek Edelman
Marek Edelman was the one of the key leaders of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, an attempt by the Jewish resistance to fight back against the Nazis. The uprising was the largest single revolt by Jews during World War II. The Jews knew that victory was impossible and survival unlikely. According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the uprising was “one of the most significant occurrences in the history of the Jewish people”.
Marek Edelman (1919-2009), leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
Mark was the last surviving leader of the uprising. However, he was withering in his criticism of the settler colonial Zionists:
…the Zionists were deliberately remaining passive in regard to the physical destruction of the Jews in order to additionally justify the founding of the State of Israel… But today, even acknowledged historians speak out loud about the way that some of the Zionists living in Palestine exploited the Holocaust politically! … [The first Israeli Prime Minister] Ben Gurion believed that the worse it is for the Jews in Europe, the better for Israel. He put that into practice… Ben Gurion washed his hands of the Diaspora… As early as a Mapai party conference in December 1942, he said that the tragedy of the European Jews did not ‘directly concern’ them. Those were the words of a leader who was willing to sacrifice the lives of millions of Jews to the idea of a Jewish state. I’m not saying he could have saved thousands of people, but he could have fought for those thousands of people. He did not do so. I don’t know whether this was deliberate.
Dr. Marek Edelman, 2016. Being On the Right Side: Everyone in the Ghetto Was a Hero, pp. 223, 448.