Nobody Wanted Jews - Fact or Fiction?

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The obvious question is this:
Why, in the early to late 1930s, when the circumstances and conditions on the ground were more favorable for the Jews of Europe to move to Palestine, did the majority not go?
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Having declared that “Berlin is our Jerusalem!” and “France is our Zion,” there was no way that assimilated European Jews who could afford to relocate would move from such comfortable, cultured, cosmopolitan cities as Berlin, Prague, Budapest, Paris, and Vienna to malaria-infested swamps and sand dunes with hostile Arab neighbors.

Meanwhile, Orthodox European Jews, who, by-and-large, had no financial means to go even if they wanted to, were in any event discouraged from leaving by their rabbanim for four main reasons:
1) It was not “spiritually” safe to leave established religious environments.
2) Chassidic Jews tended to move en masse as a cohesive community, which was an impossibility during those times. (Those Orthodox Jews who did flee and survive, did so as individuals or in small family units.)
3) Palestine was under the control of anti-religious Zionist Jews, and moving there would only strengthen them and “their heresy.”
4) Finally, faithful Jews were required to wait patiently in exile until the arrival of the Messiah, when all Jews would be transported to a newly-created Torah-based state in the Holy Land.

The result? The overwhelming number of secular and Orthodox Jews chose to stay in Europe. By the time they realized their mistake, it was too late; their communities were about to be transformed into mountains of human misery.
To Flee Or To Stay? by Joe Bobker

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It had been a Zionist strategy from April I933 to divert relief donations for constructive work in Palestine. Chaim Weizmann had delivered a number of speeches to Jewish groups in this vein, urging them to look only to Palestine and relinquish any serious effort to maintain refugees in Europe.
One such speech on May 29 in Paris was printed verbatim in Jewish and Palestinian newspapers for weeks thereafter. At a time when Nazi racial scientists were accusing Jews of being or transmitting an infectious racial disease, Weizmann's choice of words was ironic:
''And here I must speak frankly of a very painful and delicate subject: these refugees are themselves the germ-carriers of a new outbreak of anti-Semitism."

Focusing on Palestine as the only legitimate destination for large-scale emigration, the Zionist Organization rejected opportunities to resettle German Jews in havens or homes other than Eretz Yisrael.
For example, in mid-July Australia announced a willingness to accept thousands of German Jewish families for settlement in the northern region around Darwin.
Longtime Jewish colonization organizations had successfully settled a thousand Jewish families in the Crimea and another thousand in the Ukraine during the first half of 1933, and a proposal for an actual Jewish homeland in Manchuria had come from Japan.
For years, thousands of Russian Jews and British Jews had been living in Shanghai and other Asian cities. Most had arrived after the Russian Revolution; others represented British commercial interests.
Japanese leaders controlling Manchuria well remembered the help of Jewish financier Jacob Schiff in defeating the Russians during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905. So they responded favorably to ideas advanced by Shanghai Zionists to convert part of Manchuria into a Jewish homeland.

But the Australian, Russian, and Manchurian settlement opportunities were rejected by the Zionist Organization. Resettlement meant further dispersion and little more than another scenario for persecution, as Jews would again become guests of a host nation. A return to their own land in Palestine constituted the only end to centuries of catastrophic nomadism.

The Zionist stance made it clear: Palestine or nothing. Now or never.
The Transfer Agreement by Edwin Black

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The leaders of the Jewish Agency generally agreed with the principle that the few that could be saved should be selected in accordance with the needs of the Zionist enterprise in Palestine.
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Almost everyone agreed that preference should be given to children and youth, since the chances were good that they would remain in the country.
The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust by Tom Segev

In 1943, Yitzhak Gruenbaum (the head of the Jewish Agency Rescue Committee, and the first Interior Minister of the State of Israel) said:

I think it is necessary to state here – Zionism is above everything.

I will not demand that the Jewish Agency allocate a sum of 300,000 or 100,000 pounds sterling to help European Jewry. And I think that whoever demands such things is performing an anti-Zionist act.
The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust by Tom Segev

One cow in Palestine is worth more than all the Jews in Poland.
If I am asked, "Could you give from the UJA money to rescue Jews, 'I say, NO! and I say again, NO!

(to be continued)

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Ben-Gurion ... :
“If I knew that it was possible to save all the children in Germany by transporting them to England, but only half of them by transporting them to Palestine, I would choose the second—because we face not only the reckoning of those children, but the historical reckoning of the Jewish people.”

In the wake of the Kristallnacht pogroms, Ben-Gurion commented that “the human conscience” might bring various countries to open their doors to Jewish refugees from Germany.
He saw this as a threat and warned: “Zionism is in danger!”
The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust by Tom Segev

Ben-Gurion hoped the Nazis’ victory would become “a fertile force” for Zionism.
Writer and Mapai activist Moshe Beilinson went to Germany and reported back to Berl Katznelson, editor of Davar and one of the leaders of Mapai,
“The streets are paved with more money than we have ever dreamed of in the history of our Zionist enterprise. Here is an opportunity to build and flourish like none we have ever had or ever will have.”
The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust by Tom Segev