Jews of Conscience

Survivor of the Kindertransport asks if the world has learnt nothing of Guernica

Three excellent letters in the Guardian yesterday,
even if I did help write one of them!  38 people of Jewish origin (& a number of others who wished to sign but missed the deadline) made it clear that Israel doesn’t speak for us.  And 2 other excellent letters, including one from   Emeritus Professor Leslie Baruch Brent, a survivor of the Kindertransport, 10,000 Jewish children brought over from Germany just before the start of the war.

The Zionists were opposed to this and other examples of ‘refugeeism’.  If Jews were to be rescued then it was to Jewish Palestine they should go.

Eine in der so genannten "Reichskristallnacht" (9. November 1938) zerstörte Synagoge in Berlin. (Bild: AP)

Professor Brent, unlike the fake Jews College professor March Saperstein, a product of the Washington University circuit, had something real to say.  Guernica was where the Nazis bombed the town in Spain producing Picasso’s most famous painting.  It wasn’t the first such bombing of civilians, the British under Winston Churchill can claim that accolade, in Iraq in 1921.  Whereas the idiot ‘professor’ Saperstein believed that Hamas were the ones who target children whereas Israel concentrates on military target (strange that only Israel has killed children then!) blaming as per usual the victims, Professor Brent hit the nail on the head, even if he went a bit wrong in thinking that the bombings of Gaza were a reaction to the rockets from Gaza.

Emeritus Professor Leslie Baruch Brent

But Saperstein was furious enough at the blow to his own dignity to write back to me denying that which he had written and complaining about my ‘vicious ad-hominems’.  Proof that he is a fake professor, he couldn’t even spell correspondence correctly!  But as David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister and the then Chair of the Jewish Agency said about this and other rescue attempts:

‘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.

Yoav Gelber, Zionist Policy and the Fate of European Jewry (1939-42), Yad Vashem Studies, vol. XII, p.199. cited in Lenni Brenner, Zionism in the Age of the Dictators, Croom Helm, 1982.