Greenstein has painstakingly transcribed what was slightly more than an hour’s interrogation, on bank holiday Monday, having been suspended from the Labour Party on March 18. Read the transcript in full here.
Excerpt:
Harry Gregson – Labour’s SE Regional Organiser: … second item which was raised in the original complaint. It was about Zionist collaboration with the holocaust. Following on from the original thing I sent you I have also found this article which the original comments referred to Zionism and the Holocaust
Tony Greenstein: Yes that’s an article I probably produced in the Weekly Worker. It’s quite a long article do you want to comment on any particular aspect since you are worried about it?
HG There’s quite a few things in it that I think that I think some people may find
TG What is the question?
HG One of the comments which is highlighted on page 6 is ‘all wings of the Zionist movement played down reports of annihilation and obstructed the rescue efforts of others’. That suggests that everybody who was in favour of Zionism at the time played down the holocaust [I ask HG to point out exact reference, which I then quote from]
TG ‘Why did all wings of the Zionist movement play down reports of annihilation and obstruct the rescue efforts.’ and then I quote Nathan Schwalb. In fact the quotes from Nathan Schwalb were from a letter sent to Rabbi Weissmandel who was a leader of Slovakian Jewry. Slovakia was a separate Nazi puppet state which was created out of the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Hitler in March 1939. He was sent a letter by the leader of Hehalutz Nathan Schwalb, in Switzerland. He actually denied sending it at the time of Perdition [a play in London about 25 years ago which dealt with the collaboration of Hungarian Zionism with the Nazis] I don’t suppose you remember the play Perdition about some of those events. It was a controversy in Britain when the play was banned by the Royal Court [Theatre]. He brought legal action for libel and he lost it because he was unable to provide legal proof from his own archives as to whether he had sent the letter.
[The letter from Schwalb was reproduced in the article that HG quotes from: It reads:
“After the victory [of the Allies], they will once again divide up the world between the nations, as they did at the end of the first war,¦ we must be aware that all the nations of the Allies are spilling much blood and if we do not bring sacrifices, with what will we achieve the right to sit at the table when they make the distribution of nations’ territories after the war? … Because only through blood will the land be ours. And so it would be foolish and impertinent on our side to ask the nations whose blood is being spilled for permission to send money into the land of their enemies in order to protect our own blood. Because “rak b’dam tihyu lanu haaretz” (only through blood will the land be ours). “[S. Beit Zvi, Post-Ugandan Zionism on trial, Tel Aviv 1991, pp.295-96].
The evidence is quite clear. In your researches you probably didn’t come across a book by Shabtai beit Zvi ‘Ugandan Zionism in the Crucible of the Holocaust’. It’s a book by a Zionist, an ultra-Zionist, who went through the papers of the Jewish Agency and the Palestinian press at the time, all of whom played down reports of the holocaust. The Jewish Agency, the Zionist government-in-waiting in Palestine repeatedly denied that there was a holocaust or extermination of the Jews up until its admission on November 23 1942 that there was a holocaust. But even after that they reverted to type and said ‘yes many thousands of Jews were being killed but there was no extermination. The Jewish Agency and the Palestinian press repeatedly did that and they quoted from Nazi papers. This is a matter of historical fact and what I find strange about this suspension process is that what you are questioning me about are matters of history. History which might be disputed but there is no doubt that the Zionist movement obstructed rescue because the Zionist position at the time was a very simple one. They wanted Jews to go to Palestine and there is a famous quote from David Ben-Gurion [the Chairman of the World Zionist Organisation at the time and later first Prime Minister of Israel] that if he had the choice between saving half Germany’s Jewish children in Palestine or all of them in England, this is at the time of the Kindertransport. I don’t know whether you know anything about the Kindertransport when 10,000 Jewish children were taken to England from the Greater German Reich in 1938-9, [repeat of quote]. That was the Zionist policy throughout the war. It’s a fact.
[the full quote was: ‘If I knew that it would be possible to save all the children in Germany by bringing them over to England, and only half of them by transporting them to Eretz Yisrael, then I would opt for the second alternative. For we must weigh not only the life of these children, but also the history of the People of Israel.’ The Burning Ground 1886-1948, p.855 Shabtai Teveth, official biography of Ben-Gurion]
HG: But my point was that you contend that there was collaboration between the Nazis and the Zionists
TG: Well there was, it’s not what I contend
HG: But that point in the article suggests that all wings of the Zionist movement….
TG: All wings did but not all Zionists did. There is a complete difference. I’m talking about the leadership of the Zionist groups. Do you know anything about ….? The problem is that you don’t know a great deal about this. The Warsaw ghetto resistance included Zionists in it, leaders of the Zionist youth movements. It was led by the Bund, the major anti-Zionist Jewish group (which in the last free elections in Warsaw in 1938 gained 17 out the 20 Jewish council seats compared to one for the Zionists) but the Zionist youth led by Mordechai Anielwicz they had to rebel against their own Zionist parties, all of whom opposed the resistance. [I could have added the Zionist parties in Palestine sent orders not to take part in further resistance!] So yes, Zionists participated in resistance without a doubt, but the leaders of those movements, without exception, collaborated.
There was a major trial in Israel, are you aware of the Kasztner trial? 1954-58, when the leader of Hungarian Zionism [Rudolf Kasztner] brought a libel action against someone [Malchiel Greenwald, a Hungarian Jew and survivor of the holocaust] who had accused him of collaboration, he was the leader of the Jewish Agency in Hungary. He lost the libel action in the lower courts. It was reversed on what was a technical legal point in the Supreme Court on appeal, by which time Kasztner was dead because he was assassinated. Kasztner made a deal with Eichmann and the deal was to take the elite Jews out of Hungary, 1684 to be precise, out of Hungary, out of Budapest on the night of July 1st 1944. In exchange he [Kasztner] kept silent about where the trains were going because most Jews believed they were being ‘resettled’. That’s what it was called, resettlement in the East. They believed they were being taken to a fictitious place called Kenyermeze.
This is all a matter of history. The people who made the allegations against the Labour Zionists, because the Labour Zionists were worse than the right-wing Zionists, the Revisionists, now Likud, were the survivors of the Hungarian holocaust who’d been tricked to going on the trains , who had been rounded up by the Jewish Councils in Hungary. Zionism is a movement of collaboration based on the idea that you can’t fight anti-Semitism.
‘Anti-Semitism’ now is a different creature from what anti-Semitism was traditionally understood as. Yes it’s a matter of fact, but do I say all Zionists collaborated, absolutely not. No.
HG I assume that these are your comments and that you stand by them. [TG confirms that is the case] Thank you very much. So if we move on to the next comment which is made on a Monday by Scotnet that Zionism is a form of anti-Semitism. That follows on from what you were just saying.
18.30 TG If I said Jewish people were vermin do you think that would be anti-Semitic?
HG It’s not for me to answer comments at this point
TG If I said that someone Jewish was a piece of vermin, would that be anti-Semitic?
HG: And I’m saying that if this were to go to the NCC then you would have every right to ask me as many questions as you like.
TG I’m asking you now, do you think that a comment such as are Jewish people vermin anti-Semitic? Yes or no?
Christine Shawcroft of Labour’s National Executive Committee (silent witness) Harry can’t answer the question.
TG: Fine, you won’t answer. Was Zionism a form of Jewish anti-Semitism? Yes of course I stand by that.
HG: Has it always been so?
TG: Yes it always has been. It was always seen by Jewish people as a form of anti-Semitism.
HG: Can you elaborate on that?
TG: I will quote from this article. It’s in the Journal of Israeli Studies (Studies in Zionism – I show HG the article) where Pinhas Rosenbluth who became the first Israeli Minister of Justice, says ‘Palestine is an institute for the fumigation of Jewish vermin.’ Hence why I asked you that question. He wasn’t idiosyncratic, he wasn’t alone in that. The whole attitude of Zionism towards Jewish people outside of Israel or Palestine as it was at that time, was that they were sinful creatures who deserved everything they got because they were living in exile. They refused to go to Palestine and reclaim their national soil etc. It was a blood and soil movement. So Zionism was seen by most Jewish people as a form of anti-Semitism.
Although you probably won’t know of it, the only Jewish member of Lloyd George’s war cabinet in 1917 was Sir Edwin Montague, who later became the Secretary of State for India, and he was also the only person to oppose the Balfour Declaration, in which British imperialism promised Palestine to the Zionist movement over the heads of the people who lived there. The Palestinians. Montague said, [in a paper] that this was a form of anti-Semitism by his fellow cabinet members. They didn’t want Jews in Britain so they wanted to send them to Palestine
That was how it was seen by the vast majority of Jewish people. So when I said that Zionism was a form of Jewish anti-Semitism, yes, that’s a matter of record.
Today we see that Zionist groups often work with, are allied with and welcome to Israel people who are anti-Semites. Herr Strache, the leader of the Austrian Freedom Party, has only just come back from a visit to Jerusalem and Israel invited by Likud. Even though he was a leader of a party set up by neo-Nazis.
If someone tells me today that I don’t belong in England and that I should either go to Israel or Palestine they are either an anti-Semite or a Zionist .
HG Is there no difference between saying that you should move to Israel or that you have the option of moving to Israel?
TG No there isn’t because Israel is a Jewish state. Do you know what a Jewish state means? The Zionist ideology. A Jewish state, as Netanyahu made clear when he came to Paris in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo murders, is a state that claims rights and responsibilities over all Jews. There isn’t an Israeli nationality. Israel is unique in not having a nationality of its own citizens. That is because Israel is a Jewish state of not only Jewish citizens of Israel but Jews living outside Israel. Therefore I am a potential national of the Israeli state as is every other Jewish person living outside Israel. This is the situation as it exists so clearly Zionism makes that claim and that’s what Netanyahu said in Paris that your true homeland is in Israel not in France. That is an anti-Semitic position.
HG So obviously you admit saying it and you stand by your comments?
TG Yes, absolutely.
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