Every once in a while I see a new libel against Israel and Zionism. This one is particularly vile:
Based on a Counterpunch article, the claim that Jews were willing to kill other Jews rather than have them find asylum outside Israel is disgustingly false.
The SS Patria (which had nothing to do with Leon Uris’ Exodus story) was a ship that the British filled with 1800 Jewish refugees who had “illegally” immigrated to Israel in 1940, with the intent to send them to camps in Mauritania. The Jewish leadership did everything they could to convince the British to allow the Jews to stay, but the British refused.
The full story of what happened didn’t get publicized until 1957, but the Haganah decided to disable the ship by attaching a small explosive to the side, to buy time to try to convince the British to let the Jews stay. The bomb itself fit into a leather lunch bag. But because the ship was not nearly as sturdy as it appeared, the bomb blew a six square meter hole in the side of the ship, and the SS Patria sank within 15 minutes. About 200 Jews were killed. (The British counted over 270, but many managed to slip onto land without being detected.)
The person who set the bomb in place was Monya Mardor, who emphasizes in his account that “there was never any intent to cause the ship to sink. The British would have used this against the Jewish population and show it as an act of sabotage against the war effort." They certainly did not intend for there to be any casualties.
The idea that Zionists preferred that Jews die to being saved from the Holocaust is a most sickening and repulsive lie.