Comparing Zionists or Israel to Nazis is Anti-Semitic – Isn’t It?

One of the main crimes that I am apparently accused of in my suspension from the Labour Party [I haven't been informed of them by the Labour Party but by the Daily Telegraph and The Times] is that I compared Israel’s marriage laws to the Nazi Nuremberg Laws.  

The coin that the Nazis struck on the return from a 6 month visit to Palestine by Baron von Mildestein - head of the Jewish section of the Gestapo - he was a guest of the Labour Zionist kibbutzim

In Activist who derides critics as 'Zionist scum' admitted to Labour inlatest anti-Semitism scandal to hit Party The Telegraph wrote that I had written that ‘Jews supported the Nuremberg laws’.  The Telegraph had confused ‘Zionists’ with ‘Jews’.  There is no doubt historically that the German Zionist Federation did support the Nuremberg Laws.

In the printed version of the Telegraph it alleged that I had ‘compared Israel’s views on inter-racial marriage to the Nazi party’s Nuremberg laws on race.’

Daily Telegraph 2.9.16. 'Corbyn told to exorcise anti-Semitism in his party'

The  Times wrote that I had compared an Israeli soldier, who 50,000 Israelis had proposed for a military award to the honour attached to the SS.  

The Times, 2.4.16. 'Labour welcomes back blogger who compares Israelis to Nazis'

And telling the truth is anti-Semitic

Indeed I did both of these things.  The soldier, Elor Azarya, deliberately shot in the head a Palestinian who had stabbed a soldier, when he was lying wounded on the ground, already severely injured by a bullet.  The Palestinian had been shot but not killed.  Elor Azarya told another   soldier that he ‘deserved to die.’  Later inspection of the soldier’s Facebook page revealed he was a supporter of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane, who founded Kach, a neo-Nazi Jewish terrorist group.  Kach campaigns for the compulsory expulsion of Palestinians from Israel and for imprisoning Palestinian males who have sexual relations with Jews (just as with the Nazis, it isn’t an offence if it is a Jewish male having sex with a non-Jew). 

In Israel though the soldier is not considered a murderer, other than by 5% of the Jewish population.  A full 57% believe his actions, deliberately executing a wounded Palestinian, were justified, even though the soldier was in no danger.  50,000 people have signed a petition calling for him to be given a medal!

How do I plead to all these charges?  Absolutely guilty.  But it wasn’t me who compared Israel’s racial laws to the Nazi’s Nuremberg laws.  That honour belongs to the greatest political philosopher in the last century, a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany by the name of Hannah Arendt.  In her book Eichmann in Jerusalem – The Banality of Evil she compared Israel’s marriage laws, which prevent a Jew marrying a non-Jew (because there is deliberately no civil marriage in Israel) to the Nuremberg laws, which also forbade the marriage of a Jew with an ‘Aryan’.  She wrote:

Hannah Arendt - Eichmann in Jerusalem - The Banality of Evil p.7 compares the prohibition of marriage between Jew & non-Jew in Israel to the forbidding of marriage or sexual relations between Jew & 'Aryan' in Nazi Germany

 But it was even worse.  As Francis Nicosia, the Raul Hilberg Professor of Holocaust Studies at Vermont University noted, Berl Katznelson, a founder of Mapai and editor of Labour Zionism’s daily paper, Davar, second only to David Ben-Gurion, saw the rise of Hitler as “an opportunity to build and flourish like none we have ever had or ever will have”. [Zionism and Anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany, p.91]

Francis Nicosia, Zionism & Anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany, p. 91.

The Zionists were a tiny minority amongst German Jews, most of whom were horrified at the formation of a Nazi government on January 30 1933.   The reaction of Jews internationally was equally one of horror and they determined on an international Boycott of Nazi Germany.  The Zionists, both in Germany and internationally were fiercely opposed to a Boycott.  Instead they concluded, in August 1933, a trade agreement, Ha'avara with Nazi Germany.

The German Zionist Federation wrote to Hitler in June 1933 (they never got an answer)  that:

‘On the foundation of the new state, which has established the principle of race... fruitful activity for the fatherland is possible. Our acknowledgement of Jewish nationality provides for a clear and sincere relationship to the German people and its national and racial realities. Precisely because we don’t wish to falsify these fundamentals, because we too are against mixed marriages and are for maintaining the purity of the Jewish group…. The realisation of Zionism could only be hurt by resentment of Jews abroad against the German development. Boycott propaganda… is in essence fundamentally unZionist, because Zionism wants not to do battle but to convince and to build. [Lucy Dawidowicz, A Holocaust Reader, p.150-153]

Excerpts from letter the German Zionist Federation wrote to Hitler

Rabbi Joachim Prinz, the President of the ZVfD and later Vice-Chairman of the World Jewish Congress, wrote an article ‘Zionism Under the Nazi Government’ in The Young Zionist, November 1937 (cited in Lenni Brenner, Zionism in the Age of the Dictators, p. 52) that:

‘Everyone in Germany knew that only the Zionists could responsibly represent the Jews in dealing with the Nazi government.  We all felt sure that one day the government would arrange a round table conference with the Jews… there was no country in the world which tried to solve the Jewish problem as seriously as did Germany… It was our Zionist dream!… Dissimilation?  It was our own appeal!…’ [Joachim Prinz, ‘Zionism under the Nazi Government’, Young Zionist, London Nov. 1937 p.18].     

Rabbi Joachim Prinz, President of the German Zionist Federation and later Vice-Chairman of the World Jewish Congress

So my disciplinary hearing faces a problem.  Is it going to constitute itself as a historical investigation?  Surely not something it is equipped to do or is it going to make it an expulsion offence under the Labour Party's rules to tell the truth on a matter of historical fact?

Tony Greenstein