Why Ken Livingstone Got It Right Over Nazi Support for Zionism

Read the article in full here.

Tony Greenstein replies to Paul Bogdanor’s An Antisemitic Hoax: Lenni Brenner on Zionist ‘Collaboration’ With the Nazis’.

Fathom is the on-line journal of BICOM, the Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre.  Its editorial advisory board is a who’s who of Zionist academics, journalists and ex-military personnel.  It is a good example of how Zionist academics seamlessly intertwine with Israel’s military industrial complex.  Fathom’s editor is the right-wing British academic Professor Alan Johnson

ken livingstoneWhen Ken Livingstone stated, during the course of defending Naz Shah MP against accusations of anti-Semitism, that ‘when Hitler won his election in 1932, his policy then was that Jews should be moved to Israel. He was supporting Zionism – this before he went mad and ended up killing six million Jews., the Zionists and their sycophants were outraged.  How could anyone make such an accusation?  Livingstone’s statement focused attention on the murky history of Zionist relations with Nazi Germany.

The hypocrisy of  Zionism’s defenders is breathtaking.  Zionists never tire of wheeling out the holocaust whenever it suits them.  It was Abba Eban, the Labour Zionist Foreign Secretary who called the Green Line between pre-1967 Israel and the West Bank the ‘Auschwitz borders’.  Netanyahu compared the Boycott of Israeli Goods to the holocaust:

‘We have a historical recollection of what happens when Jewish products are marked’

Nor is it just the Israeli Right.  Veteran Israeli holocaust historian, Saul Friedlander, who no longer calls himself a Zionist because of the way Zionism has been captured by people like Paul Bogdanor, stated that he ‘regrets that his colleagues in the Israeli left prefer not to base their arguments more on the lessons of the Holocaust.

“It’s a mistake of the left to keep clear from such a major part of our history. They are afraid of dragging the Holocaust into the political game but we can turn around the way the right uses it.”’  

Cardboard cutouts of Yitzhak Rabin, the assassinated Israeli Prime Minister used to be dressed up in Nazi uniform by his opponents.

In short those western Zionists who pretend that the holocaust has no lessons for today are not merely mistaken but hypocritical too, since the holocaust is almost the standard metaphor in debate in Israel.

The holocaust has served as the primary justification for Israel ideologically.  It has been the alibi for every atrocity of a state based on ethno-religious supremacy.  When Israel lay siege to Beirut and bombed it, Israeli Prime Minister Begin justified it by comparing Yasir Arafat to Hitler in his bunker.  Israel’s enemies, such as Nasser and Ahmedinajad were the new Hitler.  The Palestinians have been transformed into the new Nazis.  We even had the spectacle of Benjamin Netanyahu, at the 2015 World Zionist Congress, seeking to exculpate Hitler for the extermination of European Jewry.  According to this revisionist version of history, it was the Palestinian Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, who was responsible for the Nazis adopting extermination rather than expulsion as the solution to the Jewish Question.

Zionism arose as a reaction to anti-Semitism which accepted the assumptions of the anti-Semites, viz. that Jews did not belong in other peoples’ territories – they were strangers.  Zionism understood anti-Semitism and saw it as a perfectly justifiable and understandable movement.  As the founder of political Zionism, Theodor Herzl noted:  ‘In Paris…, I achieved a freer attitude towards anti-Semitism, which I now began to understand historically and to pardon. Above all, recognise the emptiness and futility of trying to ‘combat’ anti-Semitism.’

It is equally a surprise to people that the Zionists had no principled objection to the Nazis Nuremberg laws, “the most murderous legislative instrument known to European history”  Who would believe that the Zionist movement was in agreement with the Nazis over the need to for racial separation?  As the Introduction to the Nuremberg Laws of 15th September stated:  

‘If the Jews had a state of their own in which the bulk of their people were at home, the Jewish question could already be considered solved today, even for the Jews themselves. The ardent Zionists of all people have objected least of all to the basic ideas of the Nuremberg Laws, because they know that these laws are the only correct solution for the Jewish people too.’

It was because of their ideological congruity that collaboration between the Zionists and the Nazis came easily.  The Zionists were focussed on building their state, not saving Jews.  

After the visit for 6 months of the head of the Gestapo's Jewish desk, Baron von Mildenstein in 1933, Goebbel's paper Der Angriff ran a series of 12 articles on how wonderful the new Jews in Palestine were
After the visit for 6 months of the head of the Gestapo’s Jewish desk, Baron von Mildenstein in 1933, Goebbel’s paper Der Angriff ran a series of 12 articles on how wonderful the new Jews in Palestine were

Fathom therefore decided to commission an article from Paul Bogdanor, son of the eminently sane, if somewhat boring British constitutionalist Vernon Bogdanor.  Unfortunately the same cannot be said of his son.  Paul Bogdanor is a far-Right Zionist who writes for the Islamaphobic Frontpage.com edited by David Horowitz.  It boasts columnists such as Melanie Phillips, Oliver Kamm and Nick Cohen.  You get some idea of Frontpage’s bona fides from the Jihad Watch section with columnists like Pamela Geller, who even managed to get herself banned by Theresa May because of the virulence of her Islamapobia.

Bogdanor is a strange choice of writer for a magazine which has pretensions to academic respectability.  Bogdanor is not only someone who cannot see anything wrong with Israel and its treatment of the Palestinians, he is unusual, even by Zionist standards, in that he pens pathologically demented diatribes against his many enemies, all of them Jewish.  His writing style is like the screeching of a hanging door.  An anti-Communist who belongs to the McCarthy era, he combines venom, distortion and malice in equal measure. It is defamation by example.  Bogdanor is incapable of discerning subtlety or shades of difference.  Nuance is not a word in his vocabulary.  He has a fixation with his supposed enemies that belongs to the realm of psychology.  How else to explain the article ‘Tony Greenstein and the Nazi Apologists’  where he states that I ‘defend(s) communist collaboration with the Nazis but denounce(s) Zionists as joint perpetrators of the Holocaust.

Anyone actually reading the excerpts which I am held to to have written would note that I criticise the German Communist Party’s 3rd Position policy of equating social democracy with fascism and its appeasement of the Nazis anti-Semitic policies.  Neither is there anything I have written which would suggest that the Zionists were ‘joint perpetrators of the Holocaust.’  Lying and distortion come easily to Bogdanor.  Fathom’s choice of a frothing at the mouth Zionist to defend Zionism’s record during the holocaust suggests a measure of desperation.  There are a number of critical Zionist historians who could have undertaken the task of rebutting allegations of Zionist-Nazi collaboration.  The choice of Bogdanor is bizarre and can only be put down to the politics of Fathom’s editor.

Despite having nothing in common politically with Fathom I had no difficulty in commenting favourably on Sarah Brown’s article Antisemitism and Oren Ben-Dor in Fathom. When Fathom says that Bogdanor ‘skewers’ the author Lenni Brenner, it is engaging in wishful thinking.  It is also an unfortunate metaphor for a journal with academic pretensions.  

Bogdanor’s Introduction gives some indication of his style.  He writes that ‘Britain was rocked’ by the anti-Semitism witch hunt in the Labour Party.  No the pundits, Labour right-wingers and Zionist ideologues were ‘rocked’.  It made next to no impression on public opinion. Bogdanor describes as examples of this anti-Semitism the fact that Vicky Kirby was quoted as talking about ‘big (Jewish) noses’.  This is a good example of Bogdanor’s sloppy and lazy distortion.  This comment was contained in one of a series of tweets of quotes from the 2010 comedy film The Infidel.  The film’s write David Baddiel is Jewish and the film describes itself as ‘An identity crisis comedy centred on Mahmud Nasir, successful business owner, and salt of the earth East End Muslim who discovers that he’s adopted – and Jewish.’  Hardly the equivalent of the Nazis’ Jud Suss.  

Although not mentioning her by name, Bogdanor suggests that Jackie Walker was suspended for suggesting that ‘the Jews were behind the slave trade’.  Not so, she talked of the involvement in financing the slave trade of some Jews.  An entirely different matter.  More to the point it was a private conversation between friends not a policy statement.  If Bogdanor had an ounce of integrity he would have mentioned that Jackie is half-Jewish herself.

When referring to Ken Livingstone’s comments about Hitler supporting Zionism, he notes that Livingstone referred to Lenni Brenner’s book, Zionism in the Age of the Dictators.  In his normal moderate style Bogdanor suggests that the book is a favourite amongst those who believe that  ‘Zionists’ are to blame for all evil in the world.  Really?  I guess it would be churlish to provide an example of such a belief outside of the anti-Semitic far-Right with whom Bogdanor has so much in common.  It is his hyperbole which renders Bogdanor’s article more of a propaganda text than a serious academic article.

In a personal attack on Brenner we are told that he spent several (3) years in prison for activities in the civil rights movement and smoking cannabis.  Most people would hold that spending time in prison for campaigning for civil rights in America was a mark of honour.  Not Bogdanor whose sympathies are with the segregationists – be they in the USA or Israel.  There is nothing shameful in spending time inside for possession of cannabis.  It is an outrage that people are still locked up for possession of the drug.  Today many states like Oregon and Colorado and countries like Portugal have decriminalised possession.

Another example of the fantasy nature of Bogdanor’s criticisms is his suggestion that Brenner attributed the ‘collapse of the Weimar Republic’ to the Zionists.  Given that the Zionists were only 5% or less of the German Jewish population, this is highly unlikely!  I note that no reference is given.

Being a paranoid anti-Communist, Bogdanor sees Brenner’s criticisms of Nazi-Zionist collaboration as originating in Soviet propaganda which apparently held that the Zionists were jointly responsible with the Nazis for the extermination of the Jews in the Holocaust.  Even assuming that some Soviet propagandists did say this, and there is little Bogdanor says that can be taken on trust, to therefore suggest that ‘far-left falsifiers accuse a group of Jews of perpetrating the Holocaust in collaboration with the Nazis’ is simply a propagandistic lie and an implausible one too.  

If Bogdanor wants to know what the origins of Nazi-Zionist collaboration is then he needs only read Ben Hecht’s Perfidy.  Perfidy described the libel trial that Rudolph Kasztner, a senior official in Mapai, the Israeli Labour Party and the former leader of Hungarian Zionism, brought against those who accused him of collaboration.  Zionist activists in Cluj, Kasztner’s hometown, persuaded Jews to get on the trains because they would be ‘resettled’ in a fictional place, Kenyermeze.  The people who brought the accusations against Kasztner weren’t Soviet agents but Hungarian Jewish refugees.  The Kasztner trial led to the fall of the second Israeli government of Moshe Sharrett in 1955 when Judge Halevi of the Jerusalem District Court found that Kasztner had ‘sold his soul to the Devil’.

Ben Hecht was a Revisionist Zionist, a supporter of Vladimir Jabotinsky but he was one of a group of dissident Zionists in the United States who were so appalled by the indifference indeed hostility of the Zionist establishment under Stephen Wise to doing anything concrete to help rescue Jews from the Holocaust, as opposed to ritual protests, that they organised their own lobby group and campaigns.  

Hecht was a famous Hollywood screenwriter and adept at gaining publicity.  The result of his activities and those of Peter Bergson and Shmuel Merlin of the Emergency Committee to Save Jewry was that in January 1945, in the teeth of Zionist opposition the Roosevelt Administration established the War Refugee Board, which is credited with saving 200,000 Jewish lives.  Wise and the other Zionist leaders believed that their diplomatic struggle to establish a Jewish state took priority over everything including saving Jewish lives.  Saving Jews for the Zionists was conditional on those Jews going to Palestine.

Bogdanor chose 12 particular instances of Brenner’s ‘factual misrepresentations’.  I will examine them below.

Continue reading here

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5 thoughts on “Why Ken Livingstone Got It Right Over Nazi Support for Zionism”

  1. THE COMMUNITY OF INTERESTS BETWEEN GERMANY AND ZIONISM 1918-39
    Two years after Lenni Brenner’s Zionism in the Age of Dictators, another book quoted by Tony appeared: Nicosia, Francis R., 1985. The Third Reich and the Palestine Question. U of Texas Press, Austin. The book is extremely well-documented and those interested in the truth or falsity of Ken Livingstone’s claim that “Hitler supported Zionism” would profit from reading it.
    As a guide I’ve put together the following quotations affirming the common interests and efforts of Zionism and the Nazi German government 1933-1939. Nicosia shows that even before 1933, the German government encouraged Zionism in order to lessen immigration from Eastern Europe into Germany.
    Unsurprisingly for an off-the-cuff remark, Livingstone’s statement is literally true but incomplete due to its brevity. If Nicosia is right, the Nazi government ‘supported Zionism’ in two respects: 1) Both regarded it as good and right that ethnic, ‘racial’ groups have their own states with as few citizens as possible who are not of the group: ‘nation-states’ are good, and therefore Jews should not even try to assimilate into Germany. 2) Both actively moved Jews out of Germany to Palestine.
    The part of Zionism about which the Nazis were ambivalent was the Jewish state in Palestine. But while they did not ‘support’ it, in the end they decided the advantages of getting rid of German Jews outweighed the dangers of such a state from which, argued for instance Alfred Rosenberg, the Jewish conspiracy to control the world could agitate from strength.
    Thus neither did they ‘oppose’ this Zionist goal. But Livingstone’s neglect of this aspect does not justify for instance Peter Beaumont’s Guardian claim that he is “muddying” history. His words are evidently far more true than not, leaving aside his reasons for saying them.

    From Nicosia:
    I. During the pre-1933 period
    p 2 “The prospect of halting the flow of east European Jewish refugees into Germany, and redirecting it to Palestine, was greeted with enthusiasm by some German Jews and anti-Semites alike.”
    p 6 “The Deutsches Pro-Palästina Komittee [est. 1918]… attracted prominent Jewish and non-Jewish Germans of all political and ideological shades, brought together by the common conviction that German’s political, economic and strategic interests were best served by promoting the Zionist cause in Palestine. [It] described its convictions and task ‘to promote Zionist efforts to create a national Jewish Commonwealth in Palestine…. that the Jewish settlement of Palestine is a phenomenon of great historical significance that must be of extraordinary interest for German policy.’”
    pp 8-15 on ‘Imperial and Weimar Precedents’, summarising: “Zionism was a primary tool of German policy already as of 8 May 1922. Germany was treaty-bound to support the Balfour Declaration. Germany supported the Shaw Commission report of 1929 re-affirming the Jewish national home and the mandate.”
    II. Zeitgeist for ethnic states included Zionism/Jewish state
    p 17 “As one of the developing völkisch [racially defined] nationalisms of central and eastern Europe in the nineteenth century, and as a response to the anti-Semitic content and excesses of those national movements, Zionism has accepted the premise that the Jewish people, for racial, religious, cultural or historical reasons, should not be assimilated.”
    III. Antisemites natural supporters of Zionism (also e.g. of Balfour in Britain)
    p 19 “Recognizing a common aversion to the process of Jewish emancipation and assimilation, as well as the common view of the Jews as a distinct political entity, Theodor Herzl identified a community of interests between Zionists and anti-Semites and reasoned that the Zionist movement could expect considerable support from anti-Semite nationalists in central and eastern Europe.”
    p 21 “[Avowed antisemites Houston Stewart Chamberlain and Karl Eugen Dühring] were inclined to support the use of the Zionist movement for the practical aim of removing Jews from Germany.”
    p 25 “In Die Spur, written in late 1919 and published in 1920, [antisemite Alfred] Rosenberg concluded, ‘Zionism must be vigorously supported in order to encourage a significant number of German Jews to leave for Palestine or other destinations.’ He further singled out the Zionists from other Jewish organizations in Germany as a group with at least some potential for short-term cooperation with a future National Socialist Germany in halting Jewish assimilation and influence and in promoting Jewish emigration. Rosenberg’s argument that the Zionist movement could be utilized to promote the political, economic, social and cultural segregation of Jews in Germany, as well as their emigration, was eventually transformed into policy by the Hitler regime after 1933.”
    IV. During the period from 1933
    p x “Zionism and the Zionist movement became significant instruments in the implementation of Nazi Jewish policy, which sought the dissimilation and removal of the Jewish community from Germany, preferably to destinations outside Europe.”
    p xi “Palestine’s peculiar position in the Hitler regime’s approach to the Middle East during the 1930s stemmed in large measure from the domestic considerations of its Jewish policy, with the primary goal of forcing the rapid dissimilation and emigration/deportation of Jews from Germany, stripped of virtually all their assets. The German Zionist movement and Palestine played key roles in the pursuit of that goal during the six years preceding the outbreak of World War II.”
    p 28 “There is evidence that Hitler, like Rosenberg, found some utility in Zionism and was willing to encourage Jewish emigration from Germany to Palestine, in spite of the apparent ideological incompatibility engendered by the conspiracy theory.”
    p 28 “From 1933 through the early years of World War II, the Hitler regime favored and actively promoted Jewish emigration from Germany to Palestine through the German Zionist movement.”
    p 42 “Consul-General Wolff [in Jerusalem] reported on the practical attitude taken by many Jews in Palestine regarding the National Socialist phenomenon, noting: ‘Even here they have recognized… very quickly the opportunities for Zionism and the development of Palestine that have emerged from the misfortune of the Jews in Germany.’”
    p 42 [message from Zionistische Vereinigung für Deutschland to Hitler on 21/22 June 1933] “Zionism believes that the rebirth of the national life of a people, which is now occurring in Germany through the emphasis on its Christian and national character, must also come about among the Jewish people. For the Jewish people, too, national origin, religion, common destiny and a sense of its uniqueness must be of decisive importance to its existence. This demands the elimination of the egotistical individualism of the liberal era, and its replacement with a sense of community and collective responsibility.”
    p 46 “The circular [from the Economics Ministry 28 August 1933] explained Germany’s motives for concluding the [Haavara] agreement: ‘In order to promote the emigration of German Jews to Palestine through the allocation of the necessary amounts without excessive strain on the currency holdings of the Reichsbank, and at the same time to increase German exports to Palestine…’” [i.e. avoid capital flight]
    p 49 “Haavara represents a first step in an uneven six-year process whereby the Zionist movement and Palestine were used in varying degrees by the Hitler regime in its efforts to solve the so-called Jewish question in Germany through emigration.”
    p 52 [Vicco von Bülow-Schwante, head of the Foreign Office, 28 Feb 1934, to German consular missions] “There is that part of Jewry that rejects the possibility of assimilation of Jews into the host nation, and therefore promotes the emigration and in-gathering of Jews scattered all over the world in their own political community. This group, in the first instance Zionism, comes closest to the goals of German Jewish policy. The emigration of German Jews will be actively promoted from now on by the National Socialist government.”
    p 54 “In Bülow-Schwante’s circular of February 28, 1934, emphasis was placed on the apparent community of interests between the National Socialist Jewish policy and the Zionist movement…”
    p 57 “With the eventual dissolution of the liberal/assimilationist groups later that year [1935], Zionist groups were the only ones of a political nature that were allowed to continue functioning.”
    V. Summary
    p 194 “While [German policies towards Zionism] do stem from the earlier willingness of Hitler and Rosenberg to use Zionism as a means of encouraging Jewish emigration from Germany, they were also the result of economic realities that confronted the new regime in Germany. Moreover, Zionism held a certain appeal for many anti-Semites. Its völkisch concept of nationhood was at least related to the traditional German equivalent, a nationalist alternative to the nineteenth-century liberal ideal of a pluralistic society held by the great majority of Jews in Germany. It [Zionism] offered to assist in efforts to remove Jews from the political, social and cultural fabric of German society and to encourage their departure from Germany.”
    p 195 “The racial policies of the Hitler regime created a situation in which both German and Zionist authorities reluctantly recognized more advantage than disadvantage in a relatively high degree of cooperation.”
    p 201 [last sentence of book] “Between 1933 and 1940, German policy encouraged and actively promoted Jewish emigration to Palestine, recognized and respected Britain’s imperial interests throughout the Middle East and remained largely indifferent to the ideals and aims of Arab nationalism.”
    Thank you, Blake Alcott

    1. It’s all too much like the Hollywoodisation of WW2

      Which bit of Israel is an apartheid state doesn’t Bogdanor understand?

      1. ?? the original dispute wasn’t about Israel, it was about the interaction between Nazism and Zionism in the 30s and 40s.

        1. Wrong – the dispute is about supporters/apologisr for the ethnic cleansing of the indigenous population of Palestine creating mayhem within the Labour Party in the futherence of their cause against Palestinian Human Rights

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