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Like Herzl, anti-Semitic European elites viewed a Jewish state as a convenient means for reducing the Jewish population within their societies. "The anti-Semites will become our most dependable friends, the anti-Semitic countries our allies," Herzl declared.
The alliance deepened during World War Two, as the Zionist movement broke the international Jewish boycott of Nazi Germany to embark on a lucrative Transfer Agreement with Hitler's government that exchanged Jewish property for the bodies the Zionists needed to colonize Palestine. As Massad pointed out, when the fugitive Nazi functionary Adolph Eichmann was captured in 1960 and brought to Israel for trial a year later for war crimes, it was his second visit to the Holy Land. Indeed, Eichmann had been a guest of the Zionist movement in 1937, hosted for a tour of kibbutzim in historic Palestine by a double Zionist-Nazi agent named Feibl Folkes."Anti-Semites saw in Zionism a kindred spirit and they shared with other Zionists the understanding that getting rid of European Jews somewhere else is a goal that they share," Massad stated.
"Eichmann quoted Folkes to the effect that Zionist leaders were pleased by the persecution of European Jewry, since it would encourage emigration to Palestine," the Israeli historian Tom Segev noted in his book The Seventh Million.
When anti-Semitism reared its head in US-aligned nations after the war, the state of Israel generally kept quiet. The disturbing silence was vividly illustrated during the liberal rebellion that momentarily seized power in Hungary in 1956. With assistance from the CIA, which aimed to wrest the country from the Warsaw Pact, the former commanders of Horthy's collaborationist army were returned to Budapest, where they inspired widespread violence against Hungarian Jews.
As the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported, "the fact that Hungary's top four Communist leaders were of Jewish origin -- including the dictator Matyas Rakosi, who reigned at the height of the Communist terror in the early 1950s -- lent credibility to the idea of communism as Jewish revenge for the Holocaust." (Herbert Aptheker's 1956 book The Truth About Hungary is one of the most thorough chronicles of the return of fascism to the country during its anti-Soviet revolt, and can be read here for free).
While Soviet tanks put an end to the crisis, Israel drew critical benefits from its fallout. Thousands of Jewish refugees streamed out of Hungary and into the hands of an Israeli government desperate for fodder in its demographic trench war against the indigenous Palestinian population. It was not the first time that an eruption of anti-Semitism would serve the interests of the Zionist movement, and it would hardly be the last.
"That strategy would continue from Herzl on," said Massad. "It was a continuing ideological cornerstone of Zionism, it has never stopped -- we are speaking about something that is simply continuous."
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