17 June 2016

Why Ken Livingstone Got It Right Over Nazi Support for Zionism

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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
Ken Livingstone - pilloried for telling the truth about Nazi support for the Zionist movement
When Ken Livingstone remarked that Hitler supported Zionism, he set the cat among the Zionist pigeons, who squawked and tweeted.  Minor errors apart (it was Palestine then not Israel and the year was 1933 not 1932) his remarks were essentially correct.  He used ‘Hitler’ when it would have been more correct to have referred to the Nazi party, but there is no disputing that the German Zionist movement were the Nazis’ favourite Jews.
Ha'avara Certificate
Fathom, the journal of BICOM, has attempted to rebut the historical and factual basis of the allegation of collaboration between the Zionist and Nazi movements.  The problem is however 2 fold for them.
a.       Paul Bogdanor is probably the least qualified person to do so as he knows next to nothing of the period.  He is not a historian but a self-publicist and has no obvious qualifications apart from being a rabid anti-communist.
The coin which the Nazis struck after the tour of von Mildenstein to Palestine - with the Swastika on one side and the Star of David on the other
b.      He is a rabidly libellous and dishonest commentator.  He makes stripping out sentences and half-sentences out of context into an art form and comes a cropper as a result.  He alleges is a worthless article that I supported the collaboration of Stalin with Hitler and the appeasement of the German Community Party of the Nazis’ anti-Semitism after 1930.  Both these are demonstrable lies but so pathologically demonic is Bogdanor that he has probably convinced himself of his wilder allegations.
c.       The fact that Fathom has been forced to rely on him is in itself a demonstration that the factual basis of Nazi-Zionist collaboration and the wider allegations that the Zionists consciously obstructed rescue to anywhere that didn’t involve Palestine cannot be challenged.
Tony Greenstein
Boats from Germany would fly both the Swastika and the Star of David - the Zionist flag was the only flag legally entitled to be flown under the Nuremberg Laws

Reply to Paul Bogdanor’s 

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.[1]  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
When 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.[2], 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’ [3]
Vladimir Jabotinsky, founder of the Revisionist Zionist movement (Likud/Herut) was once called Vladimir Hitler by Ben-Gurion
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.[4]
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.[5]  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.[6]
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.’ [7]
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” [8]  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.’ [9]
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. 

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.[10].  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.[11]  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.

(i)           ‘Over-concern for the fate of German’s Jews

As Bogdanor admits, negotiations between the Zionists and the Nazis concluded in August 1933 with the Ha’avara (Transfer) trade agreement.  It involved the liquidation of the assets of rich Jews in the form of frozen Reich Marks (Speermarks) and the purchase of goods in Germany with those RMs.  When those goods were exported and sold in Palestine the owners received a proportion of the purchase price.   The problem was that this broke the Jewish Boycott of Nazi Germany and Jews all over the world reacted furiously to this treachery.

It is worth quoting Elie Wiesel, who is an ardent Zionist propagandist.  Unlike Bogdanor he is a survivor of Auschwitz, and knows full well the full extent of Zionist indifference during the holocaust.  In a review of Tom Segev’s The 7th Million he wrote, regarding Ha’avara:
Surely, Jewish Palestine… needed money to finance its development, but this brazen pragmatism went against the political philosophy of a majority of world Jewry. There developed a growing perception that instead of supporting and strengthening the boycott, Palestine was, in fact, sabotaging it.

There were justifications. Yes, the country was poor and needed financial input and yes, this course of action provided a chance to save German Jews who might otherwise have decided to "wait and see" and let the last possible opportunity of salvation go by.

But Segev goes on to show, supported by devastating evidence, that later, even as Germany carried out its Final Solution--liquidating one ghetto after another, one community after another--the Jewish leaders of Palestine never made the rescue of European Jews into an overwhelming national priority. We know that Zionist leader Itzhak Gruenbaum, a future Minister of the Interior in David ben Gurion's first cabinet, considered creating new settlements more urgent than saving Jews from being sent to Treblinka and Birkenau.

Read Segev's heartbreaking conclusion:

"There had been about nine million Jews in Europe on the eve of the war; about six million were killed, leaving three million alive. Most of them were saved by Germany's defeat in the war. Some were spared thanks to the help they received from various governments and organizations such as the Joint Distribution Committee and from thousands of good-hearted people in almost every country--the "righteous Gentiles." There were dramatic rescue operations such as the flight across the Pyrenees from France to Spain and the convoys of Jews that sailed from Denmark to Sweden. Only a few survivors owed their lives to the efforts of the Zionist movement." [12]

Bogdanor, as an amoral propagandist, is having none of this.  He says that ‘the moral dilemma facing the Labour Zionists was whether to help German Jews leave with a fraction of their funds or to join a futile boycott of Germany.’ 

The Labour Zionists had no ‘moral dilemma’.   They were eager to conclude a trading agreement with Nazi Germany even if it meant that pressure was lifted from the Nazis.  The Boycott, which Bogdanor describes as ‘futile’ forced the Nazis to call off their siege of Jewish shops on April 1st 1933 after one day.

No less than 60% of investment capital in the Jewish Palestine economy between 1933 and 1939 came from Ha'avara.[13]  The Zionist movement wasn’t so much interested in saving German Jewish lives as ‘saving the wealth’ of the Jews and ‘rescuing the capital from Nazi Germany.’ [14]  What mattered, as the Jewish Chronicle noted, was not the loss of wealth to Germany so much as the need to keep the economic wheels turning.[15]  ‘

Bogdanor says that to Brenner the Labour Zionists of the 1930’s who disagreed with his pronouncements… were guilty of ‘boycott scabbing and outright collaboration.’’ Not so.  It was the labour movement and Jewish proponents of boycotting everything German who called the Zionists scabs. 

In a debate between Berl Locker of the Zionist Executive and Baruch Vladeck, a Bundist and editor of the Yiddish Forward and Chairman of the Jewish Labor Committee, Vladeck described how ‘The whole organized labor movement and the progressive world are waging a fight against Hitler through the boycott.  The Transfer Agreement scabs on that fight.’ Vladeck contended that ‘The main purpose of the Transfer is not to rescue the Jews from Germany but to strengthen various institutions in Palestine.’  Vladeck termed Palestine ‘the official scab agent against the boycott in the Near-East’ because ‘without the worldwide effort to topple the Third Reich, Hitler would have never agreed to the Transfer Agreement.[16]

The Boycott ‘forced the Third Reich to vigilantly restrain anti-Jewish violence in Germany since each incident helped intensify the anti-Nazi movement.’[17]  The Boycott had the potential to destabilise Hitler in the early period when he had not consolidated his strength.  Ha'avara came to the rescue of the Hitler regime

As Zionist historian Edwin Black, who has written the most comprehensive book on the Boycott, wrote Ha’avara was directly responsible for preventing the anti-Nazi crusade succeeding.[18]  The actions of the ZO had allowed Hitler to drive a wedge into the world-wide boycott of German goods.[19]

The leaders of Germany realized that the anti-Hitler boycott was threatening to kill the Third Reich in its infancy, either through utter bankruptcy or by promoting an imminent invasion of Germany…’ [20]

The 20,000 German Jews who were able to go to Palestine under Ha'avara were the richest German Jews.  They had to have £1,000 to enter on ‘capitalist certificates’.  They were the ones who could have most easily gained refuge elsewhere.  Zionism sacrificed the poorer Jews for the elites.  Ha'avara also led to the Zionists being the main export agents of Nazi Germany as they sold goods throughout the Middle East.

Not only did the Zionist movement oppose ‘refugeeism’, saving Jews regardless of the destination, but they tried to persuade the Gestapo, the very agency charged with implementing the Nazis’ anti-Jewish policy, to ensure that German refugees could only go to Palestine. The Gestapo “did everything in those days to promote emigration, particularly to Palestine.” [21]

Bogdanor suggests that ‘Brenner’s trump card in his attack on the Transfer Agreement was the fact that two-thirds of German Jews seeking Palestine certificates in the years between 1933 and 1935 were turned down.’  But this is not true.  A total of 119,315 immigrants entered Palestine between 1933-35, of whom 18,206 were German Jews.  6,307 entered from the US, Britain and the Western Hemisphere who weren’t in any danger.  Those who were admitted were Zionists.  Communists and anti-Zionists were excluded.

ii.       Zionists who agreed with Nazi ideology

Bogdanor takes Brenner to task for his statement that the German Zionists agreed with two fundamental elements in Nazi ideology,’ namely ‘that the Jews would never be part of the German volk and, therefore, they did not belong on German soil’. This being the case, ‘it was inevitable that some Zionists would believe an accommodation possible.’ (Brenner 1983: 35)

Bogdanor cites a historian Poppel to refute Brenner’s thesis but Poppel did no such thing.  Unfortunately Bogdanor is so rabid that he cannot read a text and properly comprehend it. 

But leaving aside Brenner’s quoting of Poppel the assertion that Jews could never be part of the German volk is basic to Zionism.  Zionism holds that Jews in any country cannot be full members of that national collectivity.   As Francis Nicosia, a Zionist historian,  observed ‘Zionism (was) a volkisch Jewish nationalist ideology and movement that started from some of the same philosophical premises as German nationalism…[22] 

Joachim Doron noted that It cannot be denied that the Jewish self-criticism so widespread among the German Zionist intelligentsia often seemed dangerously similar to the plaints of the German anti-Semites. The Zionists were keenly aware of this problem but they were not deterred by it.’
An example of how the Zionists adapted to the Weltanschauung was the behaviour of Kurt Blumenfeld, the Secretary of the ZVfD [German Zionist Federation].  In a letter to Walter Rathenau, a German foreign minister who was assassinated in 1922,  Blumenfeld stated:  ‘Under no circumstance does a Jew have the right to represent the affairs of another people.’ [23]

Bogdanor deliberately fails to mention the memo that the ZVfD sent to Hitler on 21st June 1933, which clearly demonstrates the ideological agreement between the German Zionists and the Hitlerites.  It’s not difficult to imagine why!

‘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.’  [24]
Of course the Zionists are consistent.  They opposed a boycott of Hitler and they oppose a boycott of the Israeli state.  However they are not opposed to an enforced boycott of Gaza or Iran.

iii       ‘Favoured’ children of the Nazi

It’s difficult for Bogdanor to deny that the Zionists were the favourite children of the Nazis.  He therefore resorts to nit picking and logic chopping.  Brenner quoted an article by the Rabbi Joachim Prinz, a prominent German Zionist and later Deputy Chairman of the World Jewish Congress.  In it Prinz wrote:
‘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!…’ [25]
Bogdanor quotes a further passage from the same article in which Prinz said that nonetheless the Zionists were ‘miserably treated’, that they were  still called in to the Gestapo and treated in ‘not very polite terms’. That is often how the more powerful party treats collaborators, but these same officials didn’t experience the concentration camps like Communists and Socialists.

According to Zionist holocaust historian, Lucy Dawidowicz, Reinhardt Heydrich, the ‘engineer of the Final Solution’ and deputy head of the RHSA, the combined Police and SS, issued a directive that:
‘the activity of the Zionist-oriented youth organizations that are engaged in the occupational restructuring of the Jews for agriculture and manual trades prior to their emigration to Palestine lies in the interest of the National Socialist state’s leadership.’  These organisations therefore ‘are not to be treated with that strictness that it is necessary to apply to the members of the so-called German-Jewish organizations (assimilationists)’.[26]
In May 1935 Schwarze Korps, paper of the SS, wrote in a similar vein that 'the Zionists adhere to a strict racial position and by emigrating to Palestine they are helping to build their own Jewish state.... The assimilation-minded Jews deny their race and insist on their loyalty to Germany or claim to be Christians because they have been baptised in order to subvert National Socialist principles.'  [27]

The evidence is so clear I don’t know why Bogdanor bothers.

iv.        The Hagannah’s offer to spy for the SS

This revolves around a secret agent Feivel Polkes.  His file in Israel is closed but thanks to a Freedom of Information request in the USA an SS Report was gleaned.  If the Zionists have nothing to hide why, nearly 80 years after the event is it not opened to the scrutiny of academics?  Bogdanor quotes from Brenner thus:

‘A Haganah agent, Feivel Polkes’ reached Berlin in February 1937 and opened negotiations with Adolf Eichmann;… Polkes invited Eichmann to visit Palestine (Brenner 1983: 93-4, 98-9). As Brenner put it, ‘Polkes had proposed that the Haganah act as spies for the Nazis’, and ‘The Labour Zionists were receiving Adolf Eichmann as their guest in Palestine and offering to spy for the SS.’ (Brenner 1983: 99, 176)

Bogdanor’s attempt to rebut the allegations is ludicrous.  He argues that the SS report of Polke’s visit exposes Brenner’s claim as a falsehood.  The SS report stated that ‘In the beginning, [Polkes] didn’t know that he was dealing with a [Nazi] Security Service agent… He stated that he is ready to serve Germany and supply information as long as this does not oppose his political goal… His standing promises that important information and material will reach us regarding world Jewry’s plans.’ (SS 1937: 113-14).

This apparently is damning information!  Does it matter if Polkes believed that he was dealing with the SD as opposed to another German government department?  The fact is that he was a Hagannah agent and he offered to spy for Nazi Germany. 

Bogdanor engages in the worst type of pedanticism.  Apparently Polkes could not have been sent by the Haganah to contact the Nazis, as he did not at first know that he was in contact with the Nazis. Bogdanor claims that ‘as the report makes clear, Polkes was offering to become a Nazi spy against his fellow Jews, not for the Haganah.’  Well this changes the situation entirely.  Offering to spy against German Jews rather than for Haganah was, according to Bogdanor acceptable! 

v.         Lehi’s Collusion with the Fascists and the Nazis

Again it is difficult to know why  Bogdanor even bothered tries to defend Lehi and its offer, not once but twice, of a military pact with the Nazis in  January and December 1941.  Yes Lehi was a minority within the Zionist movement, though its sentiments went far wider.  Did not Ben-Gurion promises to fight the 1939 White Paper restricting Jewish immigration as if there were no war?  What is interesting is that the fascist/pro-Nazi sentiments of this group were no obstacle to one of the triumvirate who led the organisation after the death of Yair Stern, Yitzham Shamir, eventually becoming Prime Minister of Israel, not once but twice, serving from 1983-4 and 1986-92.
The full measure of how pathetic Bogdanor’s defence of Lehi is can be measured by the fact that he says that because ‘no reply ever came from the Nazis, so there was never any actual collaboration.’ 
vi.        Ben-Gurion and the Holocaust
Bogdanor’s attempted defence of David Ben-Gurion, Chairman of the Jewish Agency and first Prime Minister of Israel is, to quote his own words, ‘a masterpiece of deceptive phrasing.’  Ben-Gurion was at the forefront of the refusal of the Zionist movement to engage in rescue work and its obstruction of rescue by anyone else where the destination wasn’t Palestine. 
When news of the holocaust seeped out of Europe and the British government issued a statement on December 17 1942 acknowledging the holocaust, there was a surge of public support for rescuing those Jews who could be rescued.  The Zionists were not happy about this.  They were determined to fuse rescue of Jews with emigration (aliyah) to Palestine.  Moshe Sharrett, a member of the Jewish Agency Executive made the Zionist position clear:

“We were told that as long as we were asking for rescue we had everyone’s assent. But the moment we demand that the survivors go to Eretz-Israel we split the British public and hamper the government in wartime. We did not accept this argument, and neither did many of our British friends.”  [28]
The Zionist movement went on to deliberately sabotage the growing movement among British parliamentarians to find a place of refuge in the colonies for those who could escape the hell of Nazi occupied Europe.  Rabbi Dr Solomon Schonfeld, who was Chairman of the Chief Rabbi’s Rescue Committee wrote, in a letter to The Times that:

My experience in 1942-43 was wholly in favor of British readiness to help, openly, constructively and totally, and that this readiness met with opposition from Zionist leaders who insisted on rescue to Palestine as the only acceptable form of help…. 
At the Parliamentary meeting held on January 27, 1943, …. a spokesman for the Zionists announced that the Jews would oppose the motion on the grounds of its omitting to refer to Palestine. Some voices were raised in support of the Zionist view, there was considerable debate, and thereafter the motion was dead. Even the promoters exclaimed in desperation: If the Jews cannot agree among themselves, how can we help?
It was useless to argue with a then current Zionist argument: 'Every nation has had its dead in the fight for its homeland the sufferers under Hitler are our dead in our fight'. [29]
Ben-Gurion was the foremost opponent of ‘refugeeism’.  After Krystallnacht the state-sponsored pogrom, on November 9-10 1938, pressure built for the civilised nations to do something to rescue German Jews.  In Britain the Kindertransport was organised enabling 10,000 Jewish children to be brought to England.  The Zionists opposed this too.  The children should be taken to Palestine not Britain, even though they knew that this was impossible as Jewish immigration was now severely curtailed.  The Zionists wanted to use the plight of German Jewry in order to batter open the gates of Palestine to Jewish settlement as part of their settler colonial enterprise.

Ben-Gurion wrote to the Zionist Executive that:
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.[30]
Christopher Sykes, a pro-Zionist historian and son of Sir Mark Sykes, observed that “From the very beginning of the Nazi disaster, the Zionist leadership determined to wrest political advantage from the tragedy.” [31]
Noah Lucas, another Zionist historian, reached similar conclusions:
While hopes and efforts for the rescue of Europe's Jews continued, the struggle for a Jewish state became the primary concern of the (Zionist) movement.[32]
Shabtai Teveth, Ben-Gurion’s official biographer, was bitterly critical of his subject.  He wrote that:

‘For nearly 2 years… Ben-Gurion was more concerned for the fate of the Yishuv than for that of European Jewry.  Ben-Gurion repeatedly stressed that the importance of the Yishuv went far beyond the individual Jews of Palestine.’  Why?  Because ‘the Yishuv was a  “great and invaluable security, a security for the hope of the Jewish people.’  [34] 
To Ben-Gurion it was imperative to ‘turn a disaster… into a productive force’ and he argued that ‘distress’ could also serve as ‘political leverage’.  Ben-Gurion told the JAE, “The harsher the affliction, the greater the strength of Zionism.”  It is little wonder that Teveth concluded that 
‘If there was a line in Ben-Gurion’s mind between the beneficial disaster and an all-destroying catastrophe, it must have been a very fine one.’  [35]
Teveth observed that ‘The war and the Holocaust were not in his power to control, but he again resolved to extract the greatest possible benefit from the catastrophe.’   Ben-Gurion summed up the Zionist  philosophy thus:
‘Zionism in the stage of development is not primarily engaged in saving individuals.  If along the way it saves a few thousand tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of individuals so much the better.  But in the event of ‘a conflict of interest between saving individual Jews and the good of the Zionist enterprise, we shall say the enterprise comes first.’  [36]
Ben-Gurion’s position was reflective of the broad position of the Zionist movement.  Sharrett argued that the Zionist movement had predicted the holocaust decades ago.  The implication was that European Jewry had brought the holocaust upon itself.  Davar, the paper of the Histadrut, printed an article describing the Holocaust as ‘punishment from heaven’ for not having come to Palestine.[37]  

To Ben-Gurion  the disaster facing European Jewry is not directly my business….Although I was then chairman of the Jewish Agency executive, the enlistment of the Jewish people in the demand for a Jewish state was at the center of my activity.   

A five page memorandum for the Jewish Agency Rescue Committee ‘Comments on Aid and Rescue’ by Apolinary Hartglas, a Zionist activist from Poland spelt out their attitude to rescue. 

‘Purely philanthropic rescue, such as the rescue of German Jewry… can only cause damage from a Zionist perspective.’ [38] As Segev commented ‘The leaders of the Jewish Agency generally agreed with the principle that the few that could be saved should be selected in accordance with the needs of the Zionist enterprise in Palestine.’ [39]

S Beit Zvi noted how, in almost all his speeches, Ben-Gurion ‘speaks about the prospects the Holocaust may open up for Zionism.’  Ben-Gurion, speaking in Rehovot in 1941 pointed to the fact that ‘all the significant steps in the progress of Zionism were always related to the intensification of Jewish distress.’ [40]  Ben-Gurion explained that ‘The tragedy of millions is also the redemptive power of millions.  And it is the word of Zionism.... to cast the great Jewish tragedy in prodigious moulds of redemption.’ [41]  

Bogdanor, who is not unaware of Ben-Gurion’s record prefers to concentrate on the issue of a Jewish army, a complete irrelevancy in terms of the war situation and whose only purpose was to create an armed Zionist militia, who could continue the fight after the war. 
vii.     The Gruenbaum Speech
Yitzhak Gruenbaum was Chairman of the Jewish Agency’s Rescue Committee in Palestine during the war.  The Committee had been established in January 1943 after the Jewish Agency statement declaring that the holocaust was being perpetrated on November 23 1942.  Bogdanor cites the speech of Gruenbaum to the Jewish Agency Executive in early 1943:  
‘We have to stand before this wave that is putting Zionist activity into the second row… we do not give priority to rescue actions… Zionism is above all – it is necessary to sound this whenever a Holocaust diverts us from our war of liberation in Zionism.’  
Bogdanor  takes Brenner to task for the fact that he did not point out the ‘Zionist reaction to Gruenbaum’s remarks’.  Bogdanor notes that only one member backed him and 11 members rejected his views.[42]
This is true, Gruenbaum was heavily criticised by fellow Zionists for his statement.  But his critics consoled their consciences whilst knowing that the logic of Zionism would not allow for rescue to be prioritised. 
‘Gruenbaum did not backtrack one iota from his opinion regarding the subordinate place of the rescue enterprise as compared with the “war of redemption.”  Following the detailed discussion in the Zionist Executive Committee and Gruenbaum’s concluding remarks, the Zionist leadership was confronted with a choice: to disqualify Gruenbaum as a candidate for the head of the Rescue Committee because of this abhorrent outlook, or to accept his ideological deficiency and let him remain as chairman. As we know, the latter option won the day.’ [43]

Shabtai beit Zvi, who Bogdanor quoted, explained, Gruenbaum at the same time having his hands full as head of the Works Department, as one of the heads of the Jewish Agency’s Organization Department, and also as director of the Bialik Institute.  No “Ministry for Rescue” was established in the Jewish Agency. The Rescue Committee, … was not within the purview of the Jewish Agency and was not attached to it, but existed as a separate entity devoid of any organizational base, and lacking its own bureaucratic machinery and budget. For a long time it lacked even an official permanent name.

In short Gruenbaum’s attitude, that Rescue was not something that the Zionist movement should concern itself, other than having a symbolic Rescue Committee that did nothing, prevailed.   Bogdanor quotes from Shabtai Beit Zvi’s 2 volume Post Ugandan Zionism on Trial.  Beit Zvi although a Zionist was bitterly critical of the Jewish Agency and the Zionist movement’s attitude to rescue during the holocaust.  He documents at tedious length how the Zionist movement obstructed rescue and played down the holocaust, but Bogdanor doesn’t quote any of this.  Bogdanor accuses Brenner of selective quoting when he is shameless in this respect.

For example Beit Zvi describes how
On March 23, 1943, Davar was reprimanded by Yosef Gravitzky, the managing editor of the Jewish Agency’s Palcor news agency, for copying from a Nazi paper, Ostland, a “report” that two million Jews remained in Poland, after the paper had reported one day earlier, on the same page, that no more than two hundred thousand Jews were still alive in all of Poland.[44] 
Gravitzky wrote.
“They themselves announce the liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto but at the same time circulate reports that two million Jews are still alive in Poland. But why should we assist them in this work?” [45]
Bogdanor is forced to resort to these cut and paste tactics because the historical record is so clear concerning Zionist-Nazi collaboration.

viii.      Zionist collaborators in Nazi Europe

Bogdanor complains that ‘Brenner’s attempts to incriminate Zionism included an examination of Jewish leaders in Nazi occupied Europe.’  Bogdanor appears to doubt that the Judenrat,  the Nazi appointed Jewish Councils, were led by Zionists.  However Isaiah Trunk, the author of the most detailed study on the Judenrat describes how ‘Over two-thirds of the Judenrat (67.1%) consisted of Zionist supporters of all factions.’ [46] 

Bogdanor attempts to make something of the apparent fact that two Judenrat leaders, Adam Czerniakow of the Warsaw Judenrat and Chaim Rumkowski  no longer belonged to the Zionist movement.  However  Rumkowski was an active member of the General Zionist party.  He was banished from the party in 1938 because of a tactical difference with his Zionist colleagues, but he was reinstated in 1939.[47]   
Whether or not Czerniakow formally distanced himself from the Zionist movement is irrelevant.  He was a General Zionist and when the Bund won a majority in the Jewish Kehilla in Warsaw in 1936, the government refused to let it take office.  It put in office Czerniakow “with whom it was more comfortable.” [48]  There is no reason to believe that Czerniakow had abandoned Zionism and more to the point he was part of the milieu of Zionists who believed in co-operation and collaboration with the Nazis rather than resistance.  Throughout the Warsaw ghetto there were Zionists such as Abraham Gancwajch who collaborated with the authorities.

ix         The Slovakia and Europa Plans

Surprising as it may seem I actually agree with Bogdanor that the Europa plan was, in the words of Rudolf Vrba ‘a hairbrained scheme’.   Unlike traditional anti-Semites the Nazis weren’t going to allow themselves to be bribed into stopping the deportations.[49]
I reject however Bogdanor’s bile that Brenner ‘twisted the facts’.  Some historians do subscribe to the view that the bribe paid in Slovakia was responsible for the halting of the deportations from October 1942 till the summer of 1944.
The other way that Brenner is alleged to have ‘twisted’ the facts is in supporting the belief that Nathan Schwalb, the Hehalutz representative in Switzerland sent a letter saying that ‘Only with [Jewish] blood shall we get the land [of Israel].’
Since Schwalb denies having sent the letter it is one person’s word against another, but given Schwalb’s suppression of the Auschwitz Protocols, which revealed the existence of Auschwitz as a death camp, on balance Rabbi Weissmandel is the more believable.  There is no reason why Weissmandel should have lied.  When the letter was included in the Perdition play, Schwalb sued Jim Allen the playwright.  Schwalb however refused an order for disclosure requiring him to open up his archives for inspection.  He therefore withdrew the case, suggesting that he had quite a lot to hide.  The letter itself read:
Since we have the opportunity of this courier, we are writing to the group that they must constantly have before them that in the end the Allies will win. After their victory they will divide the world again between the nations, as they did at the end of the first world war…. and now, at the war’s end, we must do everything so that Eretz Yisrael will become the state of Israel… About the cries coming from your country, we should know that all the Allied nations are spilling much of their blood, and if we do not sacrifice any blood, by what right shall we merit coming before the bargaining table when they divide nations and lands at the war’s end? Therefore it is silly, even impudent, on our part to ask these nations who are spilling their blood to permit their money into enemy countries in order to protect our blood.  For only with blood shall we get the land.
x.         The Brand Mission
Apart from saying that Brenner should have been aware of Brand’s confession at the end of his life that the Nazis’ Blood for Trucks offer, 1 million Jews for 10,000 winterised trucks was a trap, I am in agreement with Bogdanor that the Brand mission was an act of deception by the Nazis designed to split the allies and enable the Nazis to continue the war against the Soviet Union alone on the Eastern front.  Unfortunately the Zionists actually did take the offer seriously.  Rather than publicising the Auschwitz Protocols of the escapees Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler and publicising the deportations to Auschwitz they got enmeshed in a diplomatic game.

xi.        The Kasztner Trial

This was initially a libel action brought by Kasztner against his detractor Malchiel Greenwald, a Hungarian Jew, who alleged that Kasztner had betrayed the Hungarian Jewish masses with his agreement with Eichmann.  Bogdanor plays down the fact that the Zionists organised a train of 1,684 Jews, with hundreds, not a few, of Kasztner’s relatives consisting of the Jewish bourgeoisie and the Zionists.

Although Bogdanor doesn’t reveal this in his hatchet job, one of the understandings between Eichmann and Kasztner was that the Auschwitz Protocols would be kept secret.  The Protocols were the written testimony of Vrba and Wetzler that they gave to the Slovakian Judenrat when they reached Slovakia, approximately April 25 1944.  Kasztner collected them at the end of April and instead of seeing that they were disseminated throughout Hungary and internationally, he suppressed them in order to reach agreement with Eichmann. 

Even Professor Yisrael Gutman of Yad Vashem conceded that Kasztner had received a copy of the Protocols on 29 April but that he had already made a decision, with other Jewish leaders, ‘not to disseminate the report in order not to harm the negotiations with the Nazis.’[50] 

Details of the relationship between Kasztner and Eichmann were contained in 2 articles published in Life Magazine ("Eichmann Tells His Own Damning Story," Life [28 November 1960], and ("I Transported Them to the Butcher," Life [5 Dec. 1960],   Bogdanor describes the Eichmann interviews as ‘a transparently worthless source”.  Why?  Just because they are from a Nazi war criminal does not make them invalid.  The Israeli Police interviewed Eichmann at length.  Clearly they believe that they would obtain something of value.

What makes them credible is that the interviews were conducted freely in 1955 with Dutch Nazi journalist William Sassen, when Eichmann was hiding in Argentina.  Eichmann discussed Palestine and Kasztner on tape. After his capture in 1960, Life magazine published excerpts. On the kibbutz in 1937, he did see enough to be very impressed with the way the Jewish colonists were building up their land. ‘I admired their desperate will to live, the more so since I was myself an idealist. In the years that followed I often said to Jews with whom I had dealings that, had I been a Jew, I would have been a fanatical Zionist. I could not imagine being anything else. In fact, I would have been the most ardent Zionist imaginable.".

Eichmann described Kasztner as a fanatical Zionist. ‘He agreed to help keep the Jews from resisting deportation -- and even keep order in the collection camps -- if I would close my eyes and let a few hundred or a few thousand young Jews emigrate illegally to Palestine. It was a good bargain. For keeping order in the camps, the price of 15,000 or 20,000 Jews -- in the end there may have been more -- was not too high for me. And because Kastner rendered us a great service by helping keep the deportation camps peaceful, I would let his groups escape"). 

Certainly it is embarrassing to have one of the worst Nazi war criminals praise the Zionist movement and say how much he sympathised with it. 

If Bogdanor is right, we should eschew all Nazi sources, the memoirs of Rudolph Hoss, Commandant of Auschwitz, the diaries of Goebbels etc.  This is patently absurd.  Plenty of historians of high repute such as Randolf Braham cite Eichmann’s interviews in their own work. 

Bogdanor falls back on his favourite sport of nitpicking.  Thus he objects to Brenner’s description of ‘the sanctifiation of the betrayal of the many in the interest of a selected immigration to Palestine.’  ‘Selectivity’ was a cardinal feature of Zionist policy.  Selecting the few out of the many.  It was Kasztner’s legal representative Chaim Cohen, the Attorney General, who presented exactly this defence at the appeal to the Supreme Court.  Cohen argued that:

“If in Kastner's opinion, rightly or wrongly, he believed that one million Jews were hopelessly doomed, he was allowed not to inform them of their fate; and to concentrate on the saving of the few. He was entitled to make a deal with the Nazis for the saving of a few hundred and entitled not to warn the millions ... It has always been our Zionist tradition to select the few out of many in arranging the immigration to Palestine ... Are we to be called traitors?"[i] 

In the view of Eliyahu Dobkin, head of the Jewish Agency’s immigration department during the war German Jews who were given immigration certificates “merely as refugees” were ‘undesirable human material’.[51]

The Zionist movement itself set up rigid standards for prospective immigrants, which … excluded anti-Zionists as applicants for certificates. …persons with capital were the preferred candidates for Aliyah …the needs and interests of Palestine took precedence over a strategy of rescue. [52]
Judge Halevi was a right-wing Zionist judge.  He was not a historian.  His suggestion that the Zionists were the ‘activist’ element in the Jewish population needs to be taken with a hefty dose of salt given that the Zionist leaders under Kasztner had reached a deal with Eichmann.

Rudolf Vrba, the Auschwitz escapee made his views about the Zionists well known:
I accuse certain Jewish leaders of one of the most ghastly deeds of the war. This small group of quislings knew what was happening to their brethren in Hitler's gas chambers and bought their own lives with the price of silence. Among them was Dr Kasztner.

… I was able to give Hungarian Zionist leaders three weeks notice that [Adolf] Eichmann planned to send a million of their Jews to his gas chambers… Kasztner went to Eichmann and told him, ‘I know of your plans; spare some Jews of my choice and I shall keep quiet. [53]
After the war, Kasztner went to Nuremberg to give testimony in favour of no less than 7 major Nazi war criminals including Hermann Krumey, Eichmann’s deputy in Hungary and the man who oversaw the mechanics of the deportations.[54]

xii.       The Zionist Paratroopers
In this section, the dishonesty of Bogdanor is plain for all to see.  So transparent is his misquoting and misattribution that one wonders why he does it.

Bogdanor claims that Brenner used misleading tactics to conceal the Zionist rescue efforts in Hungary. He referred to the three paratroopers from Palestine, Hannah Szenes, Joel Palgi, and Peretz Goldstein, who arrived in Budapest during the Nazi occupation hoping to organise Jewish resistance.  … Through deceptive phrasing, Brenner implied that the paratroopers were sent by the British alone. In fact the British army sent them at the instigation of the Jewish Agency in Palestine.’

What does Brenner actually say?  

Kasztner was also involved in the affair of Hannah Szenes which was described at the trial.  Szenes was a brave young Zionist from Hungary, whom the British finally allowed, together with 31 others, to parachute into occupied Europe to organise Jewish rescue and resistance.  [55] 

The words in bold, demonstrate that Bogdanor was lying.  Clearly Brenner was not implying that the paratroopers were sent by the British alone.

The 3 parachutists who made it to Hungary, were undoubtedly brave but one wonders why they were sent towards the end of the war when most Jews had already been exterminated.  Members of the Resistance with whom they met were contemptuous of their ability to provide any help.  What we do know is that all 3 paratroopers were betrayed by Kasztner, who tricked 2 of them into handing themselves over to the Gestapo.  Only Palgi survived, by sawing through the bars of the train taking him to Auschwitz.

Bogdanor suggests that although the paratroopers failed in their mission ‘other Zionist rescue efforts in Hungary succeeded.’’ Hehalutz are believed to have saved 5,000 of their own cadres but that was not rescue of Hungarian Jews in general.  Bogdanor refers to Moshe Krausz of Mizrahi, who sent the Auschwitz Protocols to Switzerland.  A number of people and groups circulated the Protocols.  Only Kasztner’s Va'ada (Rescue Committee) suppressed them. Most likely it was Georges Mantello, first secretary of the El Salvador consulate in Geneva and a Hungarian Jew, who sent it to politicians, academics and journalists immediately, who ensured that the publicity surrounding the deportations was such that Horthy, the Prince Regent of Hungary, was persuaded to call the deportations off on July 7th.[56] 

However it wasn’t Moshe Krausz who was the main representative of the Jewish Agency but Kasztner whose Rescue Committee had been founded by and financed by the Agency.  Krausz was very much out on a limb.

Brenner’s Writings in anti-Semitic Propaganda

Having failed to mount any sort of critique of Brenner’s thesis Bogdanor falls back on the laziest Zionist tropes.  Brenner’s work was welcomed by the holocaust denying Institute for Historical Review.  It is quite common for the far-Right to use the material of the left for their own nefarious purposes, but since the IHR is dedicated to holocaust denial and Brenner’s book is written on the basis that the Holocaust happened one cannot take the IHR’s views seriously.

However if Bogdanor wants to associate people with fascist and far-right organisations then he should look closer to home.  In Britain the English Defence League and the BNP are both strong supporters of Zionism and Israel.  In Europe it is the far-Right and fascist parties – Austria’s Freedom  Party, Gert Wilder’s Freedom Party, Vams Belang in Belgium, Le Pen’s Front National who love Israel.

The attempt to portray Brenner as anti-Semitic because he is critical of the American Jewish leadership is absurd.  Perhaps Bogdanor could answer whether American Jews would protest if there was a Christian National Fund in the US which owned 93% of the land and from which Jews were barred?  I suspect so. 

Bogdanor’s critique of Lenni Brenner and of Nazi-Zionist collaboration is shoddy and dishonest.  One wonders why Fathom did not employ a historian as opposed to a hasbarist whose main gift is his resort to hyperbole. Bogdanor is the David Irving of Zionist propagandists, shrill, loud but insubstantial.

Tony Greenstein



[2]           Labour antisemitism row: Read the Ken Livingstone interview transcipts in full  http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/labour-anti-semitism-row-full-transcript-of-ken-livingstones-interviews-a7005311.html

[6]           See Tony Greenstein, Rewriting the Holocaust - Netanyahu’s attempt to shift the burden of Nazi atrocities to Palestinians is nothing new, https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/10/holocaust-denial-mufti-netanyahu-yad-veshem-hagee-palestine-zionism/

[7]           Diaries of Theodore Herzl, Gollancz, London 1958 p.6.
[8]           G. Reitlinger, p.7, The Final Solution Valentines Mitchell. London, 1998.
[9]           Khamsin 6, Zionism and its Scarecrows, Moshé Machover and Mario Offenberg https://libcom.org/library/zionism-its-scarecrows
[10]          He focuses on particular Jewish dissidents like Tony Judt, Norman Finkelstein, Noam Chomsky and myself.  He seems to resent the fact that some Jews do not wish to walk on the other side of the road when a state that calls itself Jewish treats non-Jews and Palestinians as the anti-Semites used to treat Jews.  See Jews Who Hate the Jewish State http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=2777

[11]          How Israel lobby manufactured UK Labour Party’s anti-Semitism crisis, Electronic Intifada, Asa Winstanley 28.4.16. https://electronicintifada.net/content/how-israel-lobby-manufactured-uk-labour-partys-anti-semitism-crisis/16481

[13]          David Rosenthall, Chaim Arlosoroff 65 Years After his Assassination, Jewish Frontier, May-June 1998, p. 28, New York http://www.ameinu.net/publicationfiles/Vol.LXV,No.3.pdf. https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B-DwJUnaW0sMb3dxRzd5NkExaEE accessed 13.11.15.  In 1937 over 31m RM was transferred. Nicosia, The Third Reich, p.213.
[14]          Black, pp. 257-258.
[15]          ‘The Unclean Thing’ JC, 27.12.35.
[16]          Lenni Brenner, pp. 92-93, 51 Documents: Zionist Collaboration with the Nazis’, Barricade Books, 1972.
[17]          Black, pp. 250, 372.
[18]          Black, pp. xiii, 181-2.
[19]          Nicosia, Zionism in National Socialist Jewish Policy, D1263, The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 50, 1978..
[20]          Black pp. xix, 110, 130.
[21]          Nicosia, TRPQ, p.57.
[22]          Nicosia, ZANG, p. 2.
[23]          N. Weinstock p. 135.
[24]          Lucy Dawidowicz, A Holocaust Reader, p.150-153.
[25]          Joachim Prinz, ‘Zionism under the Nazi Government’, Young Zionist, London Nov. 1937 p.18.
[26]          Lucy Dawidowicz, War Against the Jews, pp.118, citing Mommsen 'Der Nationalsozialistische Polizeistaat pp.78/9 and Nicosia, Anti-Semitism, p.119.
[27]          Randolph Braham, The Politics of Genocide – The Holocaust in Hungary, Vol. 1. Columbia University Press, 1981 p. 484, fn. 94., 5 May 1935, L. Dawidowicz, p.118, citing Karl Schleunes, The twisted road to Auschwitz – Nazi policy towards the Jews 1933-39, 1970.
[28]          Shabtai Beit Zvi, Post-Ugandan Zionism on Trial, p. 274.  Speech at a meeting of the Elected Assembly, Davar, May 4, 1943.
[29]          The Times, 6th June 1961.
[30]          Zionism and the Holocaust, http://www.cpgb.org.uk/home/weekly-worker/631/zionism-and-the-holocaust, Yoav Gelber, ‘Zionist policy, p.199, Segev, p.28.  Ben-Gurion at the Mapai CC, 7.12.38, Labour Party Archives, Bet Berl Tsofit., 22/38, Teveth, p.855, Piterberg, p.99. 
[31]          Sykes p.137.
[32]          Lucas p.188.
[33]          Shabtai Teveth, The Burning Ground 1886-1948, p.848, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1987.
[34]          Op cit, p. 849.
[35]          Op. cit. pp. 850, 851, 854
[36]          Op. cit. p.855.
[37]          Tom Segev, the 7th Million, p.98, Hill & Wang, 1993.
[38]          Segev, p.100.
[39]          Segev, p.103.
[40]          Shabtai Beit Zvi p. 115..
[41]          Ibid.
[42]          Shabtai Beit Zvi, Post-Ugandan Zionism, pp. 95-101.
[43]          Op. cit.  p.101.
[44]          S. Beit-Zvi, p. 78.
[45]          Shabtai Beit Zvi, pp. 78-9, citing CZA, File S26/1200.
[46]          I. Trunk, p.32 Judenrat: the Jewish councils in eastern Europe under Nazi occupation, New York 1972.
[47]          Michael Ungar, Reassessment of the Image of Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, Yad Vashem, Jerusalem 2004.
[48]          The Emergence of Modern Jewish Politics – Bundism and Zionism in Eastern Europe, Edited Zvi Gitelman, Ch. 3 The New Jewish Politics and Its Discontents – Anthony Polonsky

[49]          See ZIONIST-NAZI COLLABORATION AND THE
HOLOCAUST: A HISTORICAL ABERRATION? LENNI
BRENNER REVISITED, Tony Greenstein, Journal of Holy Land Studies, 13.2 (2014): 187–212 and subsequent debate.
[50]          Israel Gutman, Shoah Vezimaron, cited in Ruth Linn, Escaping Auschwitz – A Culture of Not Forgetting, Ithaca, London 2004. p.72.
[51]          Tom Segev, p.44, Dobkin to Martin Rosenblut. 15.1.36. CZA, S/6 3637.
[52]          Lucy Dawidowicz, pp.238-39.The 18th Zionist Congress 1933 established within the JA a Central Bureau for the settlement of German Jews and 4th council of the JA, July 1935;
[53]          The Daily Herald, February 1961, cited in Ben Hecht 1961: note 68, pp 261-2,.
[54]          See Barri (Ishoni), Shoshana (1997) 'The question of Kastner's Testimonies on behalf of Nazi war Criminals', Journal of Israeli History, 18: 2, 139 — 165
[55]          Brenner, Zionism in the Age of the Dictators, pp. 260-261
[56]          Braham  p. 1120.




[i]            Ibid., p.195.

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