Your letter of the week (Correspondence, 10 December) made an excellent general point about the predicament facing refugees. One sentence, however, stands out like a sore thumb: “Zionists in Palestine agreed to accept wealthy Jews under the 1933 Haavara trade agreement with the Third Reich because they could share the economic spoils.” This is completely garbled. Palestine at the time was under British rule, not that of “Zionists”. The agreement presupposed British restrictions on the economic status of Jewish immigrants into Palestine. It followed a Nazi boycott of Jewish-owned businesses in Germany and it enabled around 60,000 German Jews, not all of them “wealthy”, to escape the approaching Holocaust. Even so, the agreement split Jews worldwide. In short, the topic is complex, the circumstances were dire in the extreme, and Zionists were deeply divided over negotiating with the devil. You do not have to be a Zionist to object to the distortions in this sentence, whose connotations, moreover, are toxic.
Brian Klug, emeritus fellow in philosophy, St Benet’s Hall, University of Oxford
Content from our partners
