The best of intentions. Surely people will care more about fighting the Nazis if it's not specifically framed as helping a tiny group like the Jews, who were only 0.74% of the global population.
(Today, Jews are only 0.2% of the world.)
Surely, giving Jews a big reason to... Wait, what was the Zionist moment in the U.S. doing in the 1930s and early 40s?
After the Ottoman Empire fell in World War One, the League of Nations divided its lands up to create Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine.
Its Mandate for Palestine said, in "recognition of the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine and to the grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country,"
* Jews should be not only allowed but encouraged to keep immigrating;
* Everyone must have equal rights;
* The Jewish and Arab communities there would largely self-govern;
* And both communities would collaborate on the federal government.
With the Zionist movement seemingly having accomplished its primary objectives, American Jewish interest in Zionism waned, and membership levels of all U.S. Zionist factions plummeted during the early 1920s....
In any event, the Palestinian Arab pogroms [against Jews in] 1929 and the rise of Hitler in 1933 resulted in increased membership for all American Zionist organizations during the 1930s.
On October 7, 2023, a pogrom took place in Israel for the first time since the creation of the Jewish state.
Some Zionist organizations were teaching younger Jews agricultural work, so they could go help on socialist farms called kibbutzim. But that was the minority:
Most American Zionists were “stam Zionists.” They were convinced of the need for a Jewish homeland in Palestine, but not wedded to any particular vision of that homeland’s future economic, social, or religious contours.
Mostly, they spent the 1930s raising money to help Jewish refugees, especially children.
I'm curious about how Arthur Hays Sulzberger was an antizionist. I found an article about a statement he made in 1946:
"I fear that there are places in Europe in which no sensitive Jew of this generation can live content. In my judgment, it will not be possible for them to readjust psychologically to environments polluted by so many crimes. or to former neighbors corrupted as the witnesses of so many wrongs."
Addressing himself to the plight ot the Jewish refugee, the worst sufferer as a group but a minor percentage among displaced persons, Mr. Sulzberger said he got from Philip S. Bernstein of Rochester. adviser on Jewish affairs to Gen. Joseph T. McNarney, an overall total estimate of between 300,000 and 350,000.
With most of them desirous of going to Palestine, Mr. Sulzberger declared that the entry of even the maximum figure would not find the Arabs outvoted and that Arab objections might have been removed with an assurance of sovereignty.
But the clamor for statehood, Mr. Sulzberger asserted, "introduced an insoluble political element into a manageable, social and economic problem." "I cannot rid myself of the feeling," he added, "that the unfortunate Jews of Europe's D. P. camps are helpless hostages for whom statehood has been made the only acceptable ransom."
"I acknowledge," he continued, "that those who view Jews as a race instead of as a faith, and a faith only, as I do, have reasons for national aspirations which I do not share.
"I acknowledge that those to whom a Jewish state has been a life-long goal can be expected to pursue it even when the costs are high, but it seems to me that the costs of statehood today in terms of human suffering are greater than people can be asked to bear."
In short: a major reason for his antizionism was that he was wrong.
He thought there was something the Jews of Palestine could do to make Britain allow Jewish refugees in.
He was, apparently, unaware that Britain had effectively ended Jewish immigration to Palestine in 1939, to meet the demands of the Arab Revolts. Which had killed 415 Jews, and 5,000 Arabs. It targeted moderate Arab Palestinian figures who supported coexistence.
There were, Mr. Sulzberger said, countless Arabs "who would admit that there is room at the moment in Palestine for 350,000 Jewish refugees, but not room for a Jewish state."
Yeah, of course there were. But they weren't the ones in charge.
Britain had put a lil fascist in charge of Arab Palestine. Amin al-Husseini.
At the point that Sulzberger was writing, that lil fascist had become an actual Nazi War Criminal.
Even if he hadn't: 350,000 Jewish refugees would have brought the Jewish population of Palestine almost equal to the Arab one. There were about 1,200,000 Arab Palestinians, and about 650,000 Jewish Palestinians. The refugees would have brought the Jewish population to 1,000,000.
Part of al-Husseini's objection to the Mandate was that the land had been Arab-owned for 1,300 years, and should continue being Arab-owned by right of conquest.
He hated the idea of sharing equally in government.
He wanted, at a bare minimum, a representative parliament where Jews would have a minority of the seats, in proportion to the size of their community. He preferred outright fascism. He was not about to accept a huge influx of 350,000 Jewish refugees.
Surely, telling people the Nazis were stripping citizenship and civil rights away from Jews, barring them from most industries, taking their businesses and bank accounts, enslaving them, and later, killing them on an industrial scale, would only give them ideas.
So basically, his antizionism was very different from American antizionism today.
Today, American antizionism is pretty much identical to Arab antizionism a century ago. (Which is pretty much identical to Arab antizionism today.)
But his actions were very similar to the actions of the New York Times, and antizionism in general, today.
When Jews talk about the incredibly graphic violence of October 7 - or even when Jews simply called for the hostages to be returned - they're "accused of mass hysteria, warmongering, or inventing false atrocities."
The New York Times declined to get the new report on that sexual violence, from an independent feminist nonprofit, ahead of time. To get the "scoop" and report on it before anyone else.
Instead, it tried to drown out the report, by publishing that utterly unhinged "dog rape" editorial the night before the report was published.
Somewhere, someone looked at the report and said, "This is gonna be bad. We need to come up with something even worse to say Israel does."
And yeah.
"It definitely probably trains dogs to rape Palestinians" is about the right level for that.
I can't even describe how damaging this level of rape denial has been, just for me personally as a rando in the United States.
Literally, for nearly three years people have loudly and actively denied there was any sexual violence on October 7.
Report after report has described the evidence. At least 15 released hostages, men and women, have also described the sexual violence they themselves experienced in captivity. Even the UN has stared at the ground awkwardly while muttering, "yeah, it probably did happen."
People push back against this information so hard, it seems like they think it would change their entire opinion on what's happening... and like they're terrified of their opinion changing.
There were probably a lot of people who felt that way about the Holocaust.
There are certainly a lot of people now who talk as if the Holocaust once affected the way they see Jews, and they're mad about it.
