Brief thread based on some actual historical evidence about who was preventing Jews escaping from Europe at the start of the Second World War. (Spoiler - it's not the Zionist movement) /1
September 1939: Chaim Weizmann wrote to the British Foreign Office informing them that the Polish Consul had approached the Palestine Administration with a proposal to rescue 20,000 Jewish children from what had just become Nazi-occupied Poland. /2
Weizmann's letter to the Foreign Office concluded with the following emotional appeal: "It therefore depends upon your decision alone whether the lives of Jewish children shall be saved or not" /3 
Here is the Foreign Office’s consideration of that appeal. There were “technical difficulties". The situation in the Middle East was too "delicate". Rescuing Jews would "simplify the German economic problem". The "distress weighed equally on Christians and Jews alike".
Result? Weizmann's appeal was rejected. The opportunity to rescue the 20,000 Jewish children was turned down. They stayed where they were in Nazi-occupied Poland.
