Zionism – During & After the Holocaust - How Zionism Fought to Prevent Jews Being Rescued During the Holocaust

 Israel has Weaponised the Nazi Genocide of Jews to Justify its Genocide of Palestinians

 Zionism – During & After the Holocaust

Thursday 18 January 7.00 p.m.

Speakers:

Tony Greenstein & Tom Suarez

Register here: 

https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_AplKR6yjRimAcaO9o2GZ4w

Hin & Ajam - Two Israeli Captives Who Said They Were Treated Like Queens - Compare that to Palestinian Prisoners Who Speak of Beatings and Torture 

Almost immediately after the October 7 breakout of the Palestinian resistance from Gaza and the death of 1,139 Israelis [695 civilians, 373 military and 71 foreigners], we were told that October 7 was the biggest loss of Jewish life since the Holocaust. This was wrong on two levels.

Factually it was wrong. It was the cold-blooded murder of up to 3,000 Argentinian Jews under a neo-Nazi Junta (1976-83) that was the largest loss of Jewish life. However mentioning this would be inconvenient since Israel had a close relationship with the Junta, supplying it with weapons and training whilst ignoring the plight of Argentina’s Jews.

But secondly it is wrong because Israelis died on October 7, not because they were Jews but because they were occupiers. There is therefore not only no comparison but to even make the comparison trivialises and minimizes the Holocaust itself.

It was in Argentina that Jews died because they were Jews but about this Israel was remarkably unconcerned, refusing point blank to condemn the Junta’s anti-Semitism even to the extent of turning away Jews trying to escape to Israel (so much for Israel as a Jewish refuge from anti-Semitism)

None of this should come as any surprise to those acquainted with Zionism and the Holocaust. When I brought out my book Zionism During the Holocaust – The Weaponisation of Memory in the Service of State and Nation a year ago little did I know that Israel would launch a genocidal attack on Gaza using the Holocaust as its pretext.

Tomorrow I will give a talk alongside Tom Suarez, author of Palestine Hijacked and A State of Terror on Zionism and the Holocaust.  Whereas 99% of Jews saw the rise of Hitler as an unmitigated disaster and immediately launched a Boycott of Nazi Germany, the Zionist leaders saw events in Germany as a manifold blessing and were determined to get the most out of it. The first thing they did was to conclude, in August 1933, a trade agreement, Ha’avara with the Nazis

Noah Lucas, a perceptive Zionist historian noted in his book The Modern History of Israel (pp. 187-8) that:

‘As the European holocaust erupted, Ben-Gurion saw it as a decisive opportunity for Zionism... In conditions of peace,… Zionism could not move the masses of world Jewry. The forces unleashed by Hitler in all their horror must be harnessed to the advantage of Zionism. ... By the end of 1942… the struggle for a Jewish state became the primary concern of the movement.’  

According to Yechiam Weitz, an Israeli historian, in the eyes of  David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister, the war was ‘a rare opportunity to achieve the “Zionist solution”... to the problem of the Jewish people.’ [Jewish Refugees and Zionist Policy during the Holocaust, p. 355].

This meant for example that in Hungary the leader of the Zionist movement, Rudolph Kasztner, chose to suppress the Auschwitz Protocols, a document that proved that the deportation trains were not going to a fictitious resettlement area, Kenyermeze but to an extermination  camp Auschwitz.

This later became the subject of a libel trial in Israel when Kasztner sued someone who accused him of collaboration, losing badly. In the words of Attorney-General Chaim Cohen, who was also Kasztner’s lawyer:

If in Kasztner’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 ... that was his duty… 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? [Ben Hecht, Perfidy, p.159]

Eichmann, the chief exterminator, knew that the Jews would be peaceful and not resist if he allowed the Prominents to be saved, that the Train of the Prominents was organized on Eichmann’s orders to facilitate the extermination of the whole people. … if all the Jews of Hungary are to be sent to their death he is entitled to organize a rescue train for 600 people. He is not only entitled to it but is also bound to act accordingly.

Throughout the world, attempts at rescue met with obstruction by Zionist leaders who would cry ‘what about Palestine’ knowing full well that the British were barring Jews from entering Palestine. To the Zionists the Jewish refugees from Hitler were a battering ram to open the gates of Palestine to Jewish settlers.

According to their ‘logic’ if Jews could find an escape somewhere else, what was the point of a Jewish state. As a pro-Zionist historian Christopher Sykes, son of Sir Mark Sykes of the Sykes-Picot treaty wrote ‘from the very beginning of the Nazi disaster, the Zionist leadership determined to wrest political advantage from the tragedy.’ (Crossroads to Israel p.137).

In July 1938 President Roosevelt called a conference at Evian to discuss the Jewish refugee question. It was more a face saving operation by Western leaders than a serious attempt to find a solution to the danger that Germany’s remaining Jews were in. But the Zionists were afraid that the conference might find a solution. Sykes wrote:

Sykes wrote:

From the start they regarded the whole enterprise with hostile indifference... If the 31 nations had done their duty and shown hospitality to those in dire need then the pressure on the National Home and the heightened enthusiasm of Jews with Palestine would both have been relaxed. This was the last thing that the Zionist leaders wished for…. Even in the more terrible days ahead they made no secret of the fact, even when talking to Gentiles, that they did not want Jewish settlements outside Palestine to be successful... The Zionists wanted to do something more for Jews than merely help them to escape danger…. that such was the basic Zionist idea is not a matter of opinion but a fact abundantly provable by evidence...[ Crossroads to Israel, pp. 188-9. [my emphasis]

From Jewish State or Israeli Nation, Boaz Evron

A meeting of the Jewish Agency Executive on June 26, 1938 decided to:

belittle the [Evian] Conference as far as possible and to cause it to decide nothing…. We are particularly worried that it would move Jewish organizations to collect large sums of money for aid to Jewish refugees, and these collections could interfere with our collection efforts.

Boas Evron, Jewish State or Israeli Nation, fn 3, p. 260 quoting letter by Georg Landauer to Stephen Wise, 13.2.38. This shocking letter was written at the behest of Chaim Weizmann, the Zionist Organisation and Israel’s first President.

Ben-Gurion pulled no punches at the meeting:

‘No rationalizations can turn the conference from a harmful to a useful one. What can and should be done is to limit the damage as far as possible.'  

Menachem Ussishkin of the Zionist Executive at the same meeting cited the fears of the future Chairman of the JA Rescue Committee, Yitzhak Gruenbaum:

He hoped to hear in Evian that Eretz Israel remains the main venue for Jewish emigration. All other emigration countries do not interest him… The greatest danger is that attempts will be made to find other territories for Jewish emigration. (my emphasis)

The JA was worried that Evian might succeed. ‘Its wish was for the conference to fail abysmally.’[Shabtai Beit Zvi, p.166, Post Ugandan Zionism on Trial] In a letter to Stephen Wise of 13 June 1938, George Landauer, later Director of the JA’s Central Bureau for the Settlement of German Jews, wrote of his concern that:

Even if the Conference will not place countries other than Palestine in the front for Jewish immigration, there will certainly be public appeals which will tend to overshadow the importance of Palestine.... it may bind Jewish organizations to collect large sums of money for assisting Jewish refugees, and these collections are likely to interfere with our own campaigns.

Yet despite having done its best to obstruct rescue of Jewish refugees during the war, the Zionist movement hasn’t hesitated to   exploit the holocaust since then for the purpose of creating a racial supremacist state based on the same principles as Nazi Germany. That is why I stated four years ago, to the Jewish Chronicle’s fury, that Israel was Hitler’s bastard offspring.

In a long letter to the Jewish Chronicle of 5 February 1993, Marcus Retter, a close associate of Rabbi Dr Solomon Schonfeld, who was Chair of the Chief Rabbi’s Rescue Committee, described the ‘tireless efforts’ of Selig Brodetsky, President of the Board of Deputies and Lavy Bakstansky, General Secretary of the Zionist Federation of Britain, to sabotage   Dr Schonfeld’s rescue efforts.

Dr Schonfeld, in a letter to the Jewish Chronicle of 29 January 1943 described how his efforts to mobilize MPs, Peers and Bishops were met by the ‘persistent attempt on the part of Professor Brodetsky and some of his colleagues to sabotage the entire move.’ 

The next week Brodetsky replied. Far from denying Schonfeld’s allegations Brodestsky justified them because

‘The intervention of an unauthorized individual, however well intentioned, in a situation of this sort, naturally brings confusion and may have damaging effects…’

What these damaging effects were Brodetsky didn‘t inform the JC's readers but we can guess.

It is no surprise that those who scabbed on the Jewish Holocaust should now draw the conclusion that one holocaust justifies another.

See you tomorrow at 7 pm.

 

Tony Greenstein