Gaza’s Genocide Proves that the Terms ‘Liberal’ & ‘Right-wing’ Zionist are a Distinction Without a Difference

What Kind of Person Writes a Biography With the Intention of Distorting What Their Subject Said & Justifying their Silencing? Step forward the Guardian’s Freedland

Rudolf Vrba interviewed by Claude Lanzmann about Rudolf Kasztner & Rabbi Weissmandel

In The Art of Biography Virginia Woolf described how the

biographer must ‘detect(ing) falsity,unreality... His sense of truth must be alive and on tiptoe.

By telling us the true facts, by sifting the little from the big, and shaping the whole so that we perceive the outline, the biographer does more to stimulate the imagination than any poet or novelist save the very greatest.

Jonathan Freedland in The Escape Artist, set out to do the exact opposite of what Woolf advised. Freedland was determined that the ‘true facts’ wouldn’t interfere with his narrative.

In a letter to Arnold Zweig, Freud wrote that ‘To be a biographer you must tie yourself up in lies, concealments, hypocrisies.’ It was as if Freud’s prescient passage was written with Freedland in mind!

Freedland’s concern when he wrote his biography was not to explain why Vrba was hostile to Zionism. He sole concern was to appropriate Vrba’s record of heroism whilst divorcing it from his anti-Zionism. So much so that at one point in his book we are told that Vrba ‘rooted for Israel’

A good biography must do more than just tell a story, it must bring to life the person who is the subject, warts and all. It must delve into what made them tick. Otherwise it is just a recitation of who did what and when.

I confess that when I first learnt that Freedland was bringing out a book on Rudolf Vrba I smelt a rat. Freedland is someone who could see ‘anti-Semitism’ in his grandmother’s grave. It was no surprise therefore when I read his book.

Below is the blog that Jonathan Cook, a prize-winning ex-Guardian journalist wrote about my article in Electronic Intifada and my last blog

Freedland caricatures Vrba’s views and erects straw men in order to demolish them. Vrba was someone I knew quite a lot about, having written a chapter about him in my own book. Freedland’s behaviour simply confirms my previous description of him as Britain’s most dishonest journalist, in a field which is crowded with competitors.

Freedland’s purpose was not to research and explain the background to Vrba’s criticism of Zionism but to impose his own views on Vrba and pretend that his anti-Zionism was just an aberration, a misunderstanding that could be excised without harming the heroic narrative that Freedland wanted to construct.

However this caused a dilemma because how could Freedland explain why Vrba was unknown in Israel and why he had been removed by Zionism’s holocaust historians from the history of the holocaust if not because of his anti-Zionist views?

In the end Freedland ends up justifying the silencing of the very person he is writing his Hollywood-style biography about. As Jonathan Cook says, now that Vrba has been politically neutered and made acceptable, he is fit to star in a Hollywood movie that will enrich Freedland.

Freedland struggles to justify the deliberate and conscious decision of Yehuda Bauer and the stable of Yad Vashem’s holocaust historians to erase all trace of Vrba. But he tries!! Vrba was

‘not an easy sell in Israel or in the mainstream Jewish diaspora.’

He was an

awkward witness... (as) was his tendency to refer to the Jews whom he blamed as ‘Zionists.’”

‘handing a platform to Rudolf Vrba may have come to seem like a risk.’

Even worse Vrba refused to

“soften his message to make it more palatable.”

And Vrba even believed that Zionists

 “like Hitler believed in a ‘master race.’”

What is noticeable is that Freedland doesn’t actually quotes Vrba’s views on Zionism.  Such as when he wrote, in his memoirs in the Daily Herald in February 1961 of the Hungarian Zionists that they were a

small group of quislings (who) knew what was happening to their brethren in Hitler's gas chambers and bought their own lives with the price of silence.

Such views must have been painful for Freedland to read and listen to (there are many long recordings of Vrba). The problem for Freedland was that Zionism has no equivalent heroes to Vrba and Marek Edelman. If anyone else had said half the things that Vrba said about Zionism and its collaboration with the Nazis during the Corbyn era, Freedland would have instantly called them ‘anti-Semitic’ and demanded their expulsion. It was indeed a dilemma.

Rudolf Kasztner - the Zionist Collaborator with Eichmann Who Kept Quiet About Auschwitz in Return for a Train Carrying Leading Zionists and Rich Jews Out of Hungary - Freedland naturally defended  him

Vrba was unknown until Claude Lanzmann, who I also have a section on in my book, interviewed him at length for his film Shoah. Lanzmann was a Zionist and he tried to shut down Vrba when he expressed his detestation of Zionism and its Kasztners.

As we know only too well, when it comes to what is happening in Gaza the Israeli state and Zionists lie, lie and lie again. However this is not always true when it comes to the history of Zionism and the holocaust. For many Zionists writing about their own record is cathartic even if they end up excusing it. What they say to themselves in their own journals is different from their propaganda to the world. Most of my book uses Zionist not anti-Zionist sources.

For example Shabtai Teveth, the official biographer of David Ben-Gurion, the first Prime Minister of Israel and the Chair of the Jewish  Agency before that, was extremely honest about Ben-Gurion’s attitudes during the holocaust in the final chapter ‘Disaster Means Strength’of his book Ben-Gurion: The Burning Ground 1886-1948 he explained Ben-Gurion’s attitude to the holocaust..

The very title of the chapter was indicative. The disaster he referred to was the holocaust itself and for Ben-Gurion its meaning was the strengthening of the Zionist movement. 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. (p.851)

Freedland however is not a historian, he is a propagandist.  He fronted, via his Guardian columns, the dishonest attacks against Corbyn. Freedland never failed to invent a pretext for alleging that Corbyn was anti-Semitic or, at the very least, tolerated anti-Semites.

Freedland decried those who alleged that ‘anti-Semitism’ was being weaponised. He argued that questioning Jews about allegations of anti-Semitism was like doubting women or Black people of if they alleged rape or racism.

Freedland asked whether any other minority would have had their allegations called into question, thus avoiding the substance of the doubts themselves. Being a minority is one thing but being an oppressed minority is quite another but for Freedland Zionist Jews had the ‘right to define their own oppression’ even if it meant justifying the oppression of the Palestinians.

The fact that a substantial minority of Jews were not Zionists and did not agree with the way anti-Semitism was being weaponised on behalf of Israeli apartheid did not bother him.

Not once did Freedland ever spell out what this ‘anti-Semitism’ meant practically. We know that Black people in this country experience economic discrimination, police violence and imprisonment, racist attacks etc. but what was it that Jews, almost entirely White and middle class, experienced?  Freedland never said because he dealt in abstractions and false analogies.

Likewise with Israel. For Freedland this was a Jewish state. Jews in Britain identified with it (but not all) therefore it was anti-Semitic to challenge that identity. It is an argument that has no intellectual or moral basis. Is a challenge to someone’s identity racist? What about reactionary, sexist or racist identities? 

Netanyahu & Viktor Orban have a bromance - Orban believes that Admiral Horthy who presided over the deportation of nearly half a million Jews was an 'exceptional statesman'

Hindu men used to identify with Sati, the practice of burning widows on the funeral pyre of their husbands. One wonders whether Freedland would consider an attack on this custom as racist per se? There are those whose identity is bound up with female genital mutilation? Should criticism of that also be considered racist since it is practised still in many African countries? Why should the identification of some Jews with Apartheid in Israel be any different?

Of course all historians approach their subject with preconceived ideas and prejudices. Neutrality is a rare commodity. However honesty dictates that people should be open about where they are coming from rather than adopt a stance of Olympian neutrality.

Freedland did not merely criticise Vrba for the views he held, he distorted them, lied about them and then, to cap it all, he justified the attempts to silence them.

When I wrote Zionism During the Holocaust I had already concluded that Zionism was a reaction to anti-Semitism that accepted the conceptual framework of anti-Semitism. I made no pretence to neutrality but nor did I seek to distort or manipulate what advocates of Zionism who I quote say. I wanted them to condemn themselves out of their own mouths.

Freedland is different. Ostensibly he was writing a biography about someone who everyone accepts was an incredibly brave hero. Freedland accumulated the evidence, mainly papers from his family and was set to write the story. But instead of honestly setting out his stall he constantly ran up against the fact that politically he disagreed with Vrba on Zionism. So instead of calling out the censorship that Zionism’s holocaust historians had practised and at which Zionism is so good he ended up justifying it.

A Liberal Zionist is simply a Right-wing Zionist on a Journey of Self-Discovery

Freedland is nothing if not a ‘liberal’ Zionist and is a good example of the hypocrisy of this breed.  In Israel liberal Zionists are a rare breed. Ethnic Cleansing and Extermination are all the fashion. In Britain they are more numerous because Britain’s political climate is different. So what is their role? 

The function of ‘liberal’ Zionists in the West is to beautify what Ben Gvir, Smotrich and the Kahanists seek to achieve, even whilst they attack them personally. Their job today is to rationalise and justify the genocide and ethnic cleansing. October 7, when the Palestinian resistance fought back, is their rationale.

The ‘liberal’ Zionists go along 100% with the false narrative about a slaughter of the innocents and the equally false rape narrative.

The most left-wing and liberal Zionist group in Britain today is Yachad. They have issued a statement ‘Why the war must end and what comes next.’ Members of Yachad include Mike Katz, Chair of the Jewish Labour Movement  which led the ‘anti-Semitism’ attack against Corbyn in the Labour Party.

Nowhere in the statement is there any call for an arms embargo. Quite the contrary they supported Israel’s attack on Gaza saying that

The atrocities committed by Hamas on October 7^th precipitated a response by Israel, with the stated aim of removing Hamas from power, in order to prevent a repeat atrocity against Israelis.

Nowhere do they acknowledge the right of the Palestinians to resist the occupation. It calls for the removal of Hamas from power in Gaza because ‘no long-term ceasefire can hold whilst Hamas remains in power.’ They go on to say that

‘the tens of thousands of Israelis displaced from the Gaza border won’t be able to return home without a cast iron assurance that they will be safe.’

I may have missed it but there is no call for the removal of Ben Gvir, Smotrich, Gallant, Netanyahu et al. from Israel’s government because otherwise Palestinians won’t feel safe. There is no call to disarm the Israeli army because Palestinians aren’t safe.

It is an entirely chauvinist document from a coloniser’s perspective that presumes that Israel has the right to dictate who is allowed to rule in Gaza.

They go on to say that ‘The reality is that too many Palestinians are paying the price for Hamas’ crimes.’ thus ignoring 57 years of occupation in Gaza. Are Palestinians in the West Bank also paying the price of Hamas’ crimes one wonders?

How about reversing this and saying that the Israelis who died on October 7 paid the price of a suffocating siege for 17 years, an occupation for 57 years and the regular slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza as in Operation Protective Edge when twice as many Palestinians died as Israelis on October 7.

The statement was issued on December 12 last year and has not been updated since. It is as if the chain of torture camps such as Sde Teiman didn’t exist. The destruction of Gaza’s health sector, its universities, bombing of schools was just a figment of our imagination. There is no call for Israel to be sanctioned for genocide. All that matters is the safety of Israeli colonists and settlers.

This is quintessential ‘liberal’ Zionism. The only difference between ‘right-wing’ and ‘liberal’ Zionists is that at least the former are not hypocritical. They don’t pretend that they support equality and harmony. They are unabashed Jewish Supremacists. They don’t pretend that there is such a thing as a Jewish Democratic State.

The reality is that at the end of the day all Zionists agree on the necessity of a Jewish Supremacist ethno-nationalist state. They may disagree on tactics and questions like the judicial reforms but on the necessity of ethnic cleansing they are as one. Not even the most left-wing Zionist calls for the return of the Palestinian refugees who were expelled in 1948. Quite the contrary the JLM is absolutely opposed to this because you can’t have a Jewish state if the majority of inhabitants are not Jewish.

Whereas the JLM and Yachad support a two-state solution i.e. a Palestinian Bantustan, the Right in Israel has a simpler solution – expel the Palestinians. When you establish a state based on Jewish racial purity then the simpler, more violent solutions will win out.

The job of liberal Zionists is to kosher the Kahanists, fascists and open racists in the Israeli government. No liberal Zionist says that the racists must be removed from Israel’s government because there would be no one left. Palestinian safety is not their concern.

The fact that Jewish neo-Nazis like Ben Gvir, Smotrich, Chikli and all the others are in Israel’s government is simply a consequence of Israeli ‘democracy’ to them. The fact that Hamas was also democratically elected by Palestinians is irrelevant. Democracy only belongs to the coloniser never the colonised. This is the logic of settler-colonialism and it is this that Freedland signed up to with his weaponisation of ‘anti-Semitism’.

Yachad and Freedland don’t support the issuing of arrest warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant because there is a broad consensus that Israeli war crimes against Palestinians are not crimes. Some two-thirds of Israelis are opposed to the prosecution of the soldiers who sodomised Palestinian prisoners.

Instead Yachad talked about Hamas atrocities on October 7. Now I’m sure there were some atrocities such as shooting civilians in cold blood but they pale in comparison with Israel’s mass slaughter. For Yachad and Freedland Jewish blood is all that matters.

Hamas did not bomb schools with the express intention of killing children. It did not snipe children in the head. It did not bomb and attack hospitals. Any organisation that has any pretence at being ‘liberal’ would call for the overthrow of a state that allows these atrocities to be passed off as normal.

 ‘Liberal Zionist’ is an oxymoron. It is not possible to be a liberal and a Zionist. Which is why, at the end of the day, given the choice, Yachad will always line up with the Ben Gvirs and Smotriches than Jewish anti-Zionists. Even Jewish Nazis are preferable to anti-Zionists as long as they are Zionists.

Yachad has gone along, as has Freedland and other ‘liberal’ Zionists, with the narrative that came out of Netanyahu’s government that Hamas engaged in mass rape on October 7. This was after the 40 Beheaded Babies lies were discredited. I mention this because on October 8, before Israel’s propaganda narrative had got off the ground, the Times of Israel posted an article by a mother, Reut Karp, about

‘an alarming testimony from her children about the murder of their father, Dvir Karp, and his partner Stav in Kibbutz Re’im.’

Both the father and his partner were killed when a Hamas gunman broke into a house in the Kibbutz. There were also two children there by themselves. If the ‘beheaded babies’ and all the other atrocity propaganda was correct then one would assume that the gunman would have done what Israel’s soldiers have done in Gaza and that is murder the children too.  Not a bit of it. The Times of Israel describes how:

The terrorist calmed down my Daria and Lavi, covered them in a blanket, took lipstick and wrote on the wall: ‘The al-Qassam [Brigades] people don’t murder children.’

This is somewhat at odds with the Zionist narrative that The Times, the Guardian, Independent  and the rest of the British press were happy to run with of terrorists seeking to kill Israeli children. But when it comes to Palestinian children then the yellow press are silent.

There have been no front page headlines about Palestinian children being killed. Virtually every newspaper, including The Times and Independent splashed the ’40 Beheaded Babies’ on their front pages. Even now the Independent has a story ‘Kfar Aza smells of death’ which alleges that ‘babies were slaughtered’ in Hamas attack'. No babies were slaughtered that day. Just two died, accidentally. But of course if you engage in colonial tropes about savages then you must fit the facts to the perception and liberal Zionists are adept at this.

At the end of the day Yachad, the Union of Jewish Students, JLM and the other ‘liberal’ Zionists organisations all agree with the Ben Gvirs and Smotriches in a Jewish State. That is why they will never ally with anti-Zionists against right-wing Zionists. Zionism Uber Alles.

That is a lesson that the Palestinians have painfully learnt after the demise of the Oslo Accords. It is also something that the Palestine solidarity movement has to learn. The two-state solution is not only not desirable it is not going to happen and those who plug it are in reality pushing for the one-state solution that already exists – the State of Apartheid Greater Israel.

Tony Greenstein

Below I post correspondence from the Jewish Chronicle in 1943 about the successful attempt by the Zionist President of the Board of Deputies to sabotage the attempts of Rabbi Schonfeld to rescue Jewish refugees from Nazi occupied Europe - the Zionists wanted Jews to go to Palestine or nowhere - that meant they went to their deaths.

50 years later Marcus Retter, an Assistant to Rabbi Schonfeld, the Chair of the Chief Rabbi's Rescue Committee Wrote Explaining How the Zionists Preferred Jews to Go to the Gas Chambers than Seek Refuge in any Country Bar Palestine