Learn about the history of the Palestinian struggle for freedom, equality and justice by exploring major events in the history of their oppression on this day of the year.
12 February
LEHI OFFER OF ALLIANCE TO NAZI GERMANY
On this day in 1942, British police killed Avraham Stern, Leader of Jewish terrorist group LEHI, which frequently massacred Palestinians. LEHI proposed an alliance to Nazi Germany in January 1941, to "actively take part in the war on Germany's side" against Britain. During the war Sternists openly celebrated Nazi victories on the battlefield. Despite denials, there was close cooperation among Irgun, Lehi and the Haganah underground army. LEHI leader Yitzhak Shamir later became Israeli Prime Minister - 1983-84 and 1986-92.
عرض ليهي (المنظمة الصهونية الارهابية) للتحالف مع ألمانيا النازية
12 فبراير
في مثل هذا اليوم من عام 1942 ، قتلت الشرطة البريطانية أفراهام ستيرن ، زعيم الجماعة الإرهابية اليهودية ليحي ، التي ذبحت الفلسطينيين بشكل متكرر. اقترحت ليحي تحالفًا مع ألمانيا النازية في عام 1941 ، "للمشاركة بنشاط الحرب إلى جانب ألمانيا" ضد بريطانيا. خلال الحرب ، احتفل اعضائها المتشددون علانية بالانتصارات النازية في ساحة المعركة. على الرغم من النفي ، الا انه كان هناك تعاون وثيق بين منظمة إرغون وليحي وجيش الهاغاناه السري. أصبح زعيم ليحي يتسحاق شامير فيما بعد رئيس وزراء إسرائيل - 1983-1984 و1986-92.
In settler-colonial projects, a break between the imperial protector and the settler community occurs when the settlers feel strong enough to control the natives idependently. This was successful in North America in 1776, unsuccessful in Rhodesia in 1965, successful in Palestine in the years leading up to 1948.
The Zionist militias were looking for help in seizing Palestine from the British, so it made sense to the Sternists to align themselves with Hitler. They offered to help fight on Germany’s side, in exchange for the transfer of Europe’s Jews to Palestine and Hitler’s support of a ‘totalitarian’ Jewish state. As Tel Aviv University history professor Yaacov Shavit writes, when a Lehi representative met with a Nazi diplomat in Beirut in January 1941, “he proposed a political as well as military cooperation leading to the establishment of a Jewish state on a nationalist and totalitarian footing, that would be linked by a treaty to the German Reich.”
According to the Los Angeles Times in March 1989, Israel’s Jerusalem Post broke a national taboo today by writing of a 1941 link between Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir’s Stern Gang guerrillas and Nazi Germany.
In the Journal of Palestine Studies, Klaus Polkehn notes in The Secret Contacts; Zionism and Nazi Germany 1933-1941:
"Anti-Semitism became official German government policy when Hitler was named Chancellor of the German Reich on January 30, 1933. The spring of 1933 also witnessed the beginning of a period of private cooperation between Zionism and the German fascist regime to increase the inflow of German Jewish irnmigrants and capital to Palestine. The Zionist authorities succeeded in keeping this cooperation a secret for a long period, and only since the beginning of the 1960's have criticisms of it been expressed here and there. The Zionist reaction has usually consisted of declarations that their onetime contacts with Nazi Germany were undertaken solely to save the lives ofJews. But the contacts were all the more remarkable because they took place at a time when many Jews and Jewish organizations demanded a boycott of Nazi Germany."
Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 5, No. 3/4, pp. 54-82
Lenni Brenner in Zionism in the Age of the Dictators reproduces the Stern Gang proposal to the Nazis:
"They could not defeat Britain with their own puny forces, so they looked to her enemies for salvation...After the war a copy of the Stern proposal for an alliance between his movement and the Third Reich was discovered in the files of the German Embassy in Turkey. The Ankara document called itself A Proposal of the National Military Organisation (Irgun Zvai Leumi) Concerning the Solution of the Jewish Question in Europe and the Participation of the NMO in the War on the side of Germany...In it the Stern group told the Nazis:
"The evacuation of the Jewish masses from Europe is a precondition for solving the Jewish question; but this can only be made possible and complete through the settlement of these masses in the home of the Jewish people, Palestine, and through the establishment of a Jewish state in its historical boundaries ...
"The NMO, which is well-acquainted with the goodwill of the German Reich government and its authorities towards Zionist activity inside Germany and towards Zionist emigration plans, is of the opinion that:
1. Common interests could exist between the establishment of a New Order in Europe in conformity with the German concept, and the true national aspirations of the Jewish people as they are embodied by the NMO.
2. Cooperation between the new Germany and a renewed volkish-national Hebrium would be possible and
3. The establishment of the historical Jewish state on a national and totalitarian basis, and bound by a treaty with the German Reich, would be in the interest of a maintained and strengthened future German position of power in the Near East.
Proceeding from these considerations, the NMO in Palestine, under the condition the above-mentioned national aspirations of the Israeli freedom movement are recognised on the side of the German Reich, offers to actively take part in the war on Germany’s side.
“The NMO is closely related to the totalitarian movements of Europe in its ideology and structure.”
Netanyahu much later tried to blame the Palestinians for the Nazi Holocaust and was universally ridiculed and condemned, but LEHI worked to forge an alliance with the Nazis as late as 1941.
The Haganah had earlier offered to cooperate with Nazi Germany.
The mainstream Haganah sent a representative, Feivel Polkes, to Berlin four years earlier to negotiate with the SS, who were represented by Eichman. Their conversations were recorded and were found in the SS files captured by the American Army at the end of the Second World War:
"He [Polkes] declared himself willing to work for Germany in the form of providing intelligence as long as this does not oppose his own political goals. Among other things he would support German foreign policy in the Near East. He would try to find oil sources for the German Reich without affecting British spheres of interest if the German monetary regulations were eased for Jewish emigrants to Palestine."