This year, which marks the 75th anniversary of the state of Israel, there is one commemoration that certainly will not take place. Ninety years ago, on August 7, 1933, the Zionist movement finalized a "transfer" agreement, known in Hebrew as haavara, with Adolf Hitler's Germany.
The Nazi regime gained a valuable means of circumventing the international boycott campaign that its antisemitic policies had provoked. The Jewish Agency supervised a "transfer" of both people and capital to British Mandate Palestine, where Jewish immigrants would recover the value of their assets placed in an escrow account in Germany and exchanged for exported German goods.
The Zionist movement, which had become the only authorized Jewish organization in Nazi Germany, was thereby able to "transfer" around 53,000 Jews to Palestine, saving them from persecution.
The Zionist movement had scored its first historic victory in 1917, when Great Britain pledged its support for "the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people." Five years later, this commitment, known as the Balfour Declaration, was incorporated into the charter of the mandate over former Ottoman Palestine entrusted to the United Kingdom by the League of Nations.
While Jews represented only one in 10 of Palestine's inhabitants then, this proportion had more than doubled by 1933, as a result of Zionist voluntarism encouraged by the British authorities. Palestine had approximately 235,000 Jews and 900,000 Arabs at that time. Jewish immigration was supervised, on behalf of the World Zionist Organization, by the Jewish Agency, based in Palestine and appointed to issue residence visas.
Adolf Hitler's accession to power in Berlin on January 30, 1933, was soon followed by a wave of antisemitic measures, prompting Jewish organizations and others to launch an international boycott. But Haim Arlosoroff – who, as the Jewish Agency's political director, was in charge of international relations – advocated negotiations with the Nazis, with a goal of "transferring" as many German Jews as possible to Palestine.
After a secret mission to Berlin, this Socialist leader drew up an equally secret plan to this effect on May 19. While the Labor left, led by David Ben-Gurion, had a majority in the Zionist movement, their rivals on the Revisionist right condemned the very principle of talks with Berlin. Arlosoroff was assassinated in Tel Aviv on June 16, a still-unsolved murder that aroused deep emotion (with tens of thousands of people attending his funeral), as well as numerous incidents between Labor and Revisionist activists.
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