Lynne de Lassalle 🏳️‍⚧️🇬🇧

I hadn’t really thought about it that much whilst writing my book on Rhodesia, but I did notice that Jews seem to largely vanish from Rhodesian history after UDI It’s a fact that they largely opposed Ian Smith’s relatively hardline Rhodesian Front government (and thus largely opposed UDI), but what I didn’t know was that most Jews literally just left after UDI and especially during the bush war, but largely even before it even heated up and impacted the urban Jewish community in any way at all From a peak of around 7,000 Jews in 1961, the population slumped to 5,200 by 1969 (remember that UDI was in 1965 but the bush war only truly began in 1972 and heated up in 1976, everything went to shit in 78-79) By 1975 there was only 4,000 of them and by the time Rhodesia was falling in 1979 there was only 1,800 of them left! So Jews, as a community, didn’t really play any serious role in independent Rhodesia; they largely just packed up and left! White (incl. Jews) population as a whole: 1961 - 220,000~ 1969 - 230,000~ 1975 - 280,000-290,000~ 1979 - 210,000-220,000 So whilst the overall White population was about the same in 1961 and 1979, well over 70% of the Jewish community left! There was a saying in Rhodesia (paraphrasing) that Jews always left before it was too late but once the Indians started leaving you knew you were fucked There are interesting individual Jews earlier in Rhodesian history (Beit leaving a fortune to Rhodesia, Welensky and the Federation,and there were a few other lower profile decent politicians), and the chartered company had a significant proportion of Jewish investors, but they were hugely disproportionately anti-government later on, and the only anti-government White MP for the UDI years was a Jew, and Jews were disproportionately involved in the African nationalist movement both at home and abroad, just as in South Africa. It would be silly to view Rhodesia as a whole through a purely anti-Semitic lens though, as I’ve seen some people attempt to do under the original post here, this isn’t WW2 or whatever. They did not initiate the sanctions as I saw one account claim, and they did not ‘bring down Rhodesia’ as I saw another claim. You can just be accurate and cite the specifics above