1. Israel to Legislate Tyranny

2. The Transfer Agreement

Both articles written by the Israeli journalist, Barry Chamish

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ISRAEL TO LEGISLATE TYRANNY

by Barry Chamish

JERUSALEM - Look at the upcoming laws being debated in the current session of the Knesset:

  1. A Revised Gun Law, which will severely restrict gun ownership. The proposed legislation means tens of thousands of firearm licenses will not be renewed nor new permits issued, if the applicants do not fall into strict categories of absolute need for protection.

   2. An updated Administrative Detention Law. The previous law, adopted during the British Mandate, permits arrest and detention without charge. During the previous government, it was applied vigorously to residents of the Administered Territories, both Jew and Arab, but especially Jew. The new law will expand on the old one allowing such unjust arrests to be applied throughout Israel with detainees to be held for up to nine months, without any legal recourse, on mere suspicion of dastardly thoughts.

   3. The final proposed law is the most sinister of all, in part, because it was drafted by barely known outsiders. Fourteen Labor members of the Knesset have introduced advanced anti-incitement legislation. If the proposal becomes law, anyone who makes a public statement that "may cause others to commit violent or illegal acts" will sit in the slammer for up to five years. Anyone who merely condones such a criminal in public, gets two years in the big house.

 The draft legislation was prepared for the Labor Party members by a barely known institute called The Center For Israeli Democracy and was written by a Jew and an Arab, Prof. Mordecai Kremnitzer and Halad Gnaim. Who these people are and why they have been summoned to prepare legislation are both shady questions so far.

 It doesn't take much thought to understand the danger of the proposed legislation. Disarming Israelis flies in the face of recent Jewish history. The Nazis made certain Jews were disarmed and for good reason. Barely a handful of remaining survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto held off a German armored division for three weeks with only a few dozen primitive weapons. Had the Jews of Europe been properly armed, the history of the Holocaust would have been very different. This lesson was well learned when Israel was founded and the basic principle of self-defense has existed until this session of the Knesset.

 Once disarmed, it will be no problem overwhelming all citizens opposed to the government's policies. They will be arrested without charge, held for nine months without any legal protection, finally tried and sentenced to five years in prison, all for daring to publicly utter what can be construed as statements that will cause others to enter into illegal acts. And if anyone dares come to the defense of his fellows so imprisoned, he risks two years inside himself.

 Why the horrific all-out attack on basic civil rights? That's not hard to figure out. Netanyahu and Foreign Minister David Levy, both thoroughly corrupted by the Council on Foreign Relations and their emissaries in the State Department, are planning to carry out the Oslo Accord to its bitter conclusion. This time, the government does not want to be caught off guard by massive public protest of the kind which ruined the previous government's plan to weaken the country to a state of defenselessness.

 The public is already being prepared for the new legalized tyranny if there is any objection to the next pullback from Judea and Samaria, probably to take place this month. A known Shabak provocateur, Avigdor Eskin, was arrested this week with a crony for planning to throw a pig's head into the El Aqsa mosque during Ramadan prayers, an act, a police spokesman claimed throughout the Israeli media, which would "set off World War Three."

 The whole drama is being staged managed, as usual. Eskin had previously committed real crimes but was not arrested. One example: On Yigal Amir's (Rabin's wrongly convicted murderer) birthday, he went to his prison with a birthday cake and while the cameras were clicking, beat up a 68-year old cab driver who objected to his performance.

 This time he was arrested before committing any crime because "the security implications were so urgent." By arresting this Shabak agent, the public was being primed for more arrests of "radicals" planning to ignite world conflagration, coincidentally, just as the government gives away more territory to the benign peace partners of the PLO.

 This is a mere taste of what will be when the final stages of Oslo are concluded, which will include the division of Jerusalem. By then, if the proposed legislation is passed, no citizen will be allowed to object publicly to the end of his nation.

Barry Chamish is an Israeli journalist. E-Mail: chamish@netmedia.net.il

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THE TRANSFER AGREEMENT

by Barry Chamish

JERUSALEM - It has been called, along with Ben Hecht's Perfidy, the most controversial book about Israel ever written. Unlike Perfidy, The Transfer Agreement by Edwin Black (MacMillan, 1985) never had an audience. It was taken off the shelves quickly and surreptitiously and is almost impossible to find. I thank David Perkins for traveling to Washington and making copies at the Library of Congress.

       What Black's book painstakingly proves is that in 1933, while the rest of World Jewry was organizing an economic boycott of the new Nazi regime in Germany in the hope of breaking it before it could mount the Holocaust, the Mapai (Labour Party) faction of the Zionist Organization based in Jerusalem decided to make Nazi Germany Palestine's chief trading partner.

       The vehicle for trade was The Transfer Agreement. The Nazis and Labour Zionists had one very important thing in common: The Nazis wanted Germany ridded of Jews and the socialist Zionists did too, so long as they emigrated to Eretz Yisrael. To accommodate such a transfer of Jews, an agreement was arranged whereby each Jew wishing to leave Germany for Palestine would have to use his capital to purchase German goods there. Thus, while world Jewry was busy fighting Nazi Germany economically, the Mapai Zionists were saving Germany from financial ruin.

       In short, the Labour Zionists assured the survival of the Nazis. To do so, it was essential that their rivals, the Revisionist Zionists (Likud) were eliminated from the power structure of the impending state of Israel. The murder of Labour Zionist leader Chaim Arlozoroff, who was a chief negotiator of the Transfer Agreement, was the means to totally discredit the opposition and get on with the task of doing business with the Nazis and in doing so, create a state in the socialist image.

       I admit, Black does not paint things quite so black and white. However, I'm certain most readers would be left with this impression. Black does conclude, "Could the boycott really have overturned the Hitler regime? I believe the answer is that for a short period of time, the anti-Nazi boycott did have an excellent chance of toppling the Third Reich. The boycott's greatest momentum occurred just after April 1, 1933. Had the world's Jewish and Zionist organizations unified behind the boycott at that point, they probably could have mobilized much of the Christian population and many governments into joining...In their first few months of power, the Nazis would not have been able to maintain control."

       However, a veritable who's who of early Zionist heroes sabotaged the boycott. In Part One of my review, I will follow the story of the secret agreement in Black's own words. While I will not slow down the narrative with explanations of every Jewish leader and organization, those fighting the boycott allied themselves with the Labour Zionists of Palestine.  Then, instead of negotiating with the Jew-hating Nazis, the same Labour Zionists exploited a political murder to promote their pacts with the Jew killers of the PLO by eliminating Revisionist (Likud) objections through deliberate, wrongful blame.

The Transfer Agreement, pp 107- Locker advised the Jewish Agency in Jerusalem that for tactical reasons, Zionists in all countries should avoid participating in the struggle against Hitler. Locker feared that open criticism of Hitler would precipitate crackdowns on German Zionism... Zionists were seeking détente with an enemy to achieve Jewish nationalism...But the American Jewish Committee's antagonism to anti-Nazi activity defied even their own definition of Jewish defense.

pp 127- By linking the purchase of German goods to the settling of German Jews in Palestine...the Zionist movement would be obliged not only to refrain from and oppose any boycott, they would be obliged to aggressively sponsor German exports.

pp 134/135- The German government felt certain it had triggered the breakup of the boycott because the Zionist movement would now be in the German export business...The Jews of the world would now have to choose between fighting Hitler and building Palestine...the plan was not a rescue or relief project. If it was, the Zionists would have labored for an agreement for Jews fleeing Germany without regard to where they sought refuge.

pp 201- Yet at a Mid-July rally held at the height on London's anti-Nazi agitation, Nahum Sokolow, in his capacity as Federation president, advised an anti-Nazi rally to forgo boycott plans. And Chaim Weizmann and other key Zionist figures repeatedly advised the Deputies to persist in their non-boycott policy.

pp 293- Chaim Weizmann, a General Zionist, boycotted the session and requested his name be removed from the Congress speaker list altogether because the Revisionists had been allowed to participate.

pp 301- The same afternoon as Revisionist leader Jabotinsky was exhorting his followers to postpone their political grievances in favor of the war against Nazism, Labor leader David Ben Gurion, speaking to the Mapai strategy conference, demanded that his followers do the opposite. The most important task of the movement, Ben Gurion declared, was to cleanse the movement of Revisionism and extend Mapai's political borders to cover the entire Zionist Organization.

pp 306- Dr. Ruppin saw to it that most drafts of his speech deleted any reference to the Transfer Agreement. Dr. Ruppin apparently preferred history to believe he had never even mentioned the subject.

pp 308- The Revisionist argument would never be heard. Motzkin announced that after the resolutions were presented, there would be no debate, this by the decision of the Mapai-dominated presidium...Nahum Goldmann urged that the Congress show unity by considering only the Mapai-based resolution.

pp 310/311- Holders of German bonds, loans and investments around the world had been implored to forgo the material gain of trafficking in Nazi wares...But now the Zionist Organization was willing to betray the boycott in exchange for the same economic stimulus many in the world were being urged to relinquish.

pp 361- As such, leadership of the worldwide boycott was being consigned to Zionist officials and Zionist organizations. This was the fate of the international boycott nurtured by the Jews of the world. The boycott would be led by the leaders who, in fact, opposed it.

pp 373- By 1935, Palestine's need to sell German merchandise to offset Jewish deposits in transfer accounts became greater than anyone expected. So the Zionist Organization established another transfer corporation (which) operated a regional sales network in Iraq, Egypt, Syria and elsewhere in the region. Mid-east markets were opened for a vast array of German exports, from Volkswagens to municipal bridge works.

pp 375- By 1936, the Jewish population had doubled...The town of Haifa had grown into a bustling German immigrant city. Palestine was on its way to a Jewish majority, on its way to Jewish statehood.

pp 382- The haunting question is: Was the continuing economic relationship with Germany an indispensable factor in the creation of the State of Israel? The answer to that is yes.

    Thus ends Black's disturbing book. Labor Zionism got its way: it created a state in its image. And the cost was only 6 million dead. The same state could have been created by the Revisionists had they been allowed to fight. And the price in dead would have been high but, in retrospect, far more reasonable.

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AUTHOR'S POST SCRIPT - "TRANSFER AGREEMENT II"

   I received numerous objections to the above part of my review of Edwin Black's book, "The Transfer Agreement." Two arguments were repeated. First, who is Edwin Black and why should we trust him? Mr. Black was a longtime reporter for the Chicago Tribune and the son of Holocaust survivors. His book was published by no less than MacMillan and was delayed for many months until its editor, Ned Chase was satisfied that every point was proved conclusively.

   The second objection is just as easy to answer. Numerous correspondents complained about dredging up fifty year old history and asked what the point of it is. The point is that the mentality of the socialist Zionists has not changed and few Israelis learned the lesson the first time around.

   In 1933, the vast majority of Palestinian Jews showed their righteous anger at the Nazis by boycotting German goods. At the same time, the Labor Zionist leadership scoffed at majority opinion and conducted secret negotiations with Hitler's regime of terror which lead to a wide ranging economic pact.

   In 1993, the vast majority of Israeli Jews showed their righteous anger at the PLO by refusing to recognize them as remotely potential diplomatic partners. At the same time, the Labor Zionist leadership scoffed at majority opinion and conducted secret negotiations with Arafat's regime of terror which led to a wide ranging diplomatic pact.

   In 1933, the chief negotiator with the Nazis, Chaim Arlosoroff was murdered and though the perpetrators of the deed did not come from the political opposition and the Labor Zionist leadership knew it, they exploited the murder to push through their immoral pact when objections to it became overwhelming.

   In 1995, the chief negotiator with the PLO, Yitzhak Rabin... finish the previous sentence.

   Now let Edwin Black tell the story with some commentary by me intruding on his narrative.

 pp 137- (The) first task was to circulate word that the official proposal of Zionism was in the hands of Chaim Arlosoroff, head of the Political Department of the Jewish Agency..."This leads me to a central question...the liquidation of capital and holdings belonging to German Jewish emigrants," Arlosoroff explained..."It makes no sense to ignore it or think it can be solved without an agreement with the German government."

 pp 148- Chaim Arlosoroff was one of the most provocative thinkers of his day... His Jewish friends began to fear and hate him. Arlosoroff was a top Mapai (Labor) leader, but the Labor-aligned moderates could hardly contain their fury that the prodigy of the Zionist movement was abandoning all Zionist discipline. Unilaterally he was formulating and executing policy- bilateral breakthroughs with the Arabs and controversial trade-offs with the Nazis. Arlosoroff was by himself engineering the fate of societies and nations, not in theoretical, discreet ways but by one stunning fait accompli after another. He was giving away the Promised Land to the Arabs, and in doing so giving away the Zionist elections to the Revisionists (Likud). Arlosoroff would have to be stopped.

  His enemies among the Jews were convinced there was no greater nemesis. Arlosoroff was a special foe of Revisionism. It was Arlosoroff who in late 1931 conceived the decree against membership in Jabotinsky's Revisionist Union. The calls for his assassination were so commonplace during early 1933 that it was rumored Revisionist circles were merely debating whether to kill him before or after the Eighteenth Zionist Congress.

pp 150- On June 9, the Palestinian Revisionist newspaper Hazit Haam declared, "At a time when the people of Israel in Palestine and abroad are in a defensive war of honor against Germany...an official of the Jewish Agency, (Arlosoroff) suggests not only a cancellation of the boycott but also a promise of a market for German imports..." The animosity of the Jewish masses... cast Arlosoroff in a deep depression.

 pp 151- Arlosoroff at first refused protection saying, "No Jew would kill me."

 pp 152- At the hospital, the doctors were ill prepared and indecisive...there was no surgeon on duty...With the last air in his lungs he turned toward the mayor of Tel Aviv and whispered, "Look what they have done to me." And then he died.

 pp 157- Quickly the Revisionists emerged as the logical, and to a larger extent, the most suitable culprits. Police squads raided the apartments of leading Revisionist figures, including Abba Achimeir, the editor of Hazit Haam...There they found a Betar activist named Abraham Stavsky...Sima Arlosoroff identified Stavsky as the man who held the flashlight and Polish Revisionist Avi Rosenblatt as the one who fired the pistol. Some weeks later Achimeir was accused of masterminding the plot.

 Sima Arlosoroff was under tremendous pressure from Mapai leaders to maintain her damaging testimony despite doubts. In the months that followed, the murder investigation was besieged by bought-and-paid-for Arab confessions, false witnesses, manufactured evidence, bizarre theories, dramatic revelations and unanswerable questions. Within a year Rosenblatt and Achimeir were both acquitted due to conflicting evidence...Stavsky was finally released on an evidence technicality...Mapai leaders, satisfied that Revisionism was implicated- whether or not juridically guilty- would refuse to discuss the case even decades later.

 pp 158- Jabotinsky was often held personally responsible. Pamphlets call him "a bloodthirsty beast." David Ben Gurion admitted he "was less interested in whether Stavsky is the murderer than Jabotinsky." Ben Gurion declared that Jabotinsky bore full responsibility because he was Revisionism's "Commander,leader and mentor."

 Hostilities continued as Mapai forces hammered away at Revisionism, labeling it a Fascist misfit of Zionism, and harassing Jews who supported Jabotinsky. Jabotinsky himself was portrayed as the Jewish Hitler, commanding forces analogous to Nazi Storm Troopers. And yet in truth, it was not the stalwarts of Jewish militancy, the Revisionists, who had constructed avenues of commercial and political détente with the Third Reich. It was the forces of Mapai.

    The stage of the Rabin murder was constructed of precisely the same material and starred the same actors. Sima Arlosoroff, like Leah Rabin knew more than she was permitted to tell and under duress, blamed the political opposition. Yigal and Hagai Amir, played Stavsky and Rosenblatt in the latest production. Netanyahu made a fine Jabotinsky, Barak, a less convincing Ben Gurion. Arafat played a most persuasive Hitler. The props changed but almost no alterations were made in the script.

       Now the scene changes to the 18th Zionist Congress in Prague. Word has leaked about the secret Transfer Agreement. Labour Zionism must deflect criticism of their immoral pact and to do so, they play the Arlosoroff card just as effectively as today's Labor Party played the Rabin card to keep its immoral deals with the PLO on track.

 pp 314- When the session finally resumed, Revisionists were anxious to demand more details of the Transfer Agreement. But the proceeding was interrupted by what many believed was a staged emergency. Someone dramatically handed Motzkin a telegram: Motzkin reacted with a look of shock. The presidium passed the telegram around and announced this session would be adjourned at once...word quickly spread that the cable had come from Palestine. It claimed one of the Revisionists on trial for the murder of Arlosoroff had confessed to the crime...The next day, the Congress delegates quickly learned the "confession cable" was a fake. Still, the false alarm had served to foreclose debate one more day on the truly pressing issue: The Transfer Agreement.

 pp 330/331- Now that representatives of all parties had heard Political Committee testimony about at least the superficial aspects of the agreement, the Revisionists believed they could appeal to the delegates for a resolution of nullification. As expected, the only way Mapai could block this was by intensifying their allegations that Revisionists killed Arlosoroff...Hitting hard with the murder accusation, Katznelson cried, "Only one of us has been slaughtered so far..." This is how it went. Hour after hour, night after night. The crisis in Germany was omitted from the agenda. The menace of Hitlerism was bypassed. The Nazis must have been smiling.

 pp 334- Mapai had finally succeeded in scheduling a special session devoted exclusively to the question of violence... The Actions Committee was then empowered "in the most effective manner...to remove from the Zionist Organization those elements responsible for violence."

     It's as if whoever plotted the murder of Rabin said, "Let's do Arlosoroff all over again." Once Rabin was out of the way, all debate about the Oslo Accord was hushed in precisely the same manner. Anyone who dared oppose the accord was labeled an assassin and that justified carrying on with the nefarious agreement.

     To my critics I say, read "The Transfer Agreement" by Edwin Black. Learn from history. The same mentality of the same people are at work in our time. We cannot allow them to lead us to slaughter again.

 Barry Chamish is an Israeli journalist. E-Mail: chamish@netmedia.net.il

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