There are many responses on the left to Ken Livingstone’s intervention – from outrage to frustration to admiration. There is no doubt he failed to accurately convey the historical facts. So what are they?
Revealing and illuminating, is the almost apologetic understanding a prominent Zionist leader shows for Nazism in 1934:
(The Jews) have been drawn out of the last secret recesses of christening and mixed marriages. We are not unhappy about it. In their being forced to declare themselves, to show real determined courage, to stand by their community, we see at the same time the fulfilment of our desires. […] The theory of assimilation has collapsed. We are no longer hidden in secret recesses. We want to replace assimilation by something new: the declaration of belonging to the Jewish nation and the Jewish race. A state, built according to the principle of purity of the nation and race [ie the ThirdReich – editor’s note], can only be honoured and respected by a Jew who declares his belonging to his own kind.
[This quotation comes from a book which appeared in Berlin in 1934. The author was at that time one of the leading Zionists in Germany and became a leading Zionist in the USA and chairman of the international leadership of the – Zionist controlled – World Jewish Congress. Cf. J. Prinz, Wir Juden, Berlin 1934 p.154 (emphasis in original).]
The introduction to the infamous racist Nuremberg Laws of 15 September 1935 says among other things:
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 […].
[Cf. Die Nürnberger Gesetze, 5. Auflage, Berlin 1939, pp.13-4 f]
Further reading:
- The lessons of Zionists and the Nazis
- KEN LIVINGSTONE: GOBSHITE YES, ANTISEMITE NO
- When the Zionist movement chose between the Jews and the Jewish State
- Whilst most Jews were boycotting Nazi Germany the Zionists traded with it
