Why did Arab Palestinians have to pay because of anti-Semitism?

Mike Oettle completely misses the point in his critique of my view that there are similarities between the British settlement of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and the Zionist colonisation of Palestine (“Israel-Palestine crisis not comparable to Rhodesia”, The Herald, February 26).

In both cases, the vast-majority indigenous populations saw a foreign people with superior weapons and backed by powerful capital overrun and take control of their territories.

In Rhodesia’s case, the one major mitigating factor was that the indigenous population, as in SA, were still stuck in the late Iron Age.

There were no towns or cities, roads or railways, etc, when the whites settled north of the Zambezi in the 1890s.

But in Palestine, Arab ports like Haifa and Jaffa had been around for millennia.

Palestinians were an integral part of the eastern Mediterranean economy and ports, roads and railways were part of their rapidly modernising economy in 1910.

But the First World War put paid to that development.

With the British persuading Arab Palestinians to assist it in defeating the Ottoman Turks, under whose empire they had fallen, the reward was meant to be a guarantee of Arab Palestinian statehood after the war.

The 1917 Balfour Declaration, in which the British government told Zionist leader Lord Rothschild that Britain would support a Jewish homeland in Arab Palestine, reversed that commitment.

It led inexorably to massive Zionist settler-colonisation of the territory, not unlike the influx of hundreds of thousands of whites into Zimbabwe.

In the Nakba (Catastrophe) of 1947/1948, some 700,000 Arab and Christian Palestinians were expelled from 400 towns and villages to make way for the hundreds of thousands of new Zionist immigrants.

Oettle claims falsely that the 1933 Nazi-Zionist pact involved “a small Jewish faction in the Palestine Mandate”.

In fact, the deal was signed in Nazi Germany. The Zionist even welcomed the antisemitic laws Hitler’s regime passed as they persuaded more Jews to leave the Reich.

Wikipedia says, “the Haavara Agreement was an agreement between Nazi Germany and Zionist German Jews signed on 25 August 1933”.

“The agreement was finalised after three months of talks by the Zionist Federation of Germany, the Anglo-Palestine Bank (under the directive of the Jewish Agency) and the economic authorities of Nazi Germany.

“It was a major factor in making possible the migration of approximately 60,000 German Jews to Palestine between 1933 and 1939.”

The agreement enabled Jews fleeing persecution under the new Nazi regime to transfer some portion of their assets to British Mandatory Palestine.

Emigrants sold their assets in Germany to pay for essential goods to be shipped to Mandatory Palestine.

The agreement was controversial and was criticised by many Jewish leaders both within the Zionist movement and outside it, as well as by members of both the Nazi Party and the German public.

“For German Jews, the agreement offered a way to leave an increasingly hostile environment in Germany; for the Yishuv, the Jewish community in Palestine, it offered access to both immigrant labour and economic support; for the Germans it facilitated the emigration of German Jews while breaking the antiNazi boycott of 1933, which had mass support among European and American Jews and was thought by the German state to be a threat to the German economy.”

The question is: why did Arab Palestinians have to pay with their land and livelihoods because of European anti-Semitism? It was blatantly immoral.