Looking Back at 2024 - Some Of The Interviews I Gave & the Speeches I Made

 For those who don’t like to compare Israel & Nazi Germany my message is ‘Compare, Compare, Compare’ – At A Time Of Extermination it's Important to Understand Just What Kind of State Israel Is

Demonstration Outside Westminster Magistrates Court

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lv2lxMBpW-0&t=235s

Crispin Flintoff & Tony Greenstein Outside Westminster Magistrates Court

2024 has been a very busy year for me and below are some of the things that I did.  I had a tour of Scotland and speaking engagements in Ireland and the Netherlands as well as speaking at demonstrations in Glasgow, Liverpool and my home town Brighton.

I continued to promote my book which came out at the end of 2022. Quite remarkably sales were higher by far in the first half of 2024 than in the first half of 2023. You don’t get to learn of the sales figures until about 3 months after the end of the half year but I expect they will have increased again.

I did a wide range of interviews and talks, only some of which are below with audiences in the United States, South Africa and Australia. The theme of my book can be summed up in that Jewish Chronicle headline ‘Infamous anti-Israel activist Tony Greenstein called Jewish state 'Hitler's bastard offspring’. Israel has demonstrated that the only thing it learnt from Nazi Germany was how to emulate them.

On 21^st December Katie Halper and I finally managed to arrange an interview. Katie was a stand-up comedian before taking to podcasts and political commentary. She runs her own Katie Halper Show and is co-host of the podcast Useful Idiots with Aaron Maté.

Katie was a very challenging interviewer and I was pleased with the outcome. Recorded separately were interviews with Jenny Manson, the co-chair of Jewish Voices for Labour and Rabbi Herschel Gluck.

On November 7 I was invited to Cork in Ireland to speak. The atmosphere in Ireland is totally different from that in Britain where the State is breathing down our necks and harassing our marches. Ireland doesn’t have a genocidal supporting government supplying Israel with more weaponry to murder civilians and destroy hospitals.

I spoke in a hotel on the evening of the November 7 and the room was packed and I nearly sold out of books. At the end of the meeting I was taken aback when I was given a standing ovation. It shows the enthusiasm and solidarity of the Irish with the Palestinians.

On the Friday night I spoke at a bar in a small town in West Cork, Skibbereen. I’d never heard of the place before but again the room was packed to the rafters. The following day I took part in a march in the town and afterwards spoke at the rally.

This was in the middle of the Irish General Election. There were sarcastic comments about the Social Democrats taking part in the march having never done previously! The experience of British colonialism has ensured that the Irish understand what is happening and it is no surprise that Israel has closed its Embassy in Ireland.

My relationship with Electronic Intifada has been for over 15 years. It has been a very productive and comradely one. EI first asked me to write an article Histadrut: Israel's racist "trade union" in March 2009. I have since written a number of articles. Their podcast How Zionists collaborated with the Nazis, in conversation with Tony Greenstein has gained over 320K views and is one of their most highly viewed. Asa Winstanley also reviewed my book under the title How Zionism helped the Nazis perpetrate the Holocaust.

Asa himself has recently written the most comprehensive account of anyone of the anti-Semitism smear campaign under Jeremy Corbyn, Weaponising Anti-Semitism: How the Israel Lobby Brought Down Jeremy Corbyn.

I was therefore pleased to be invited to an interview with EI on my birthday, 30 December! It was a very useful and productive interview. Electronic Intifada is the premiere Palestine Solidarity website. Having written for many papers, journals and sites I have to say that no one gives you such a hard time as EI! They check virtually every word and quote to see that you can back it up.  Nothing escapes the scrutiny of their fact checkers. Would that the British tabloids or Elon Musk had to undergo the same level of scrutiny!

Another interview, in fact two interviews was with Rania Khalek, a young Lebanese woman who runs Breakthrough News. Rania is a feisty interviewer who clearly feels the pain of what has happened in Lebanon with Israel’s savage bombing of its civilian population.

Rania first interviewed me in Budapest on 10 April, where I had gone for dental implant surgery.  However the Internet connection was not good and my computer had problems so we completed the interview on 15 April back in Brighton. This is the full interview and this is the cut down version.

 

On 14 June Rania interviewed me about my book and this time it was completed in one session. I found it a fascinating interview and thanks to Rania for the time she took over this. Subsequently Rania was invited to speak at a meeting of the Socialist Labour Network and Jewish Network for Palestine on a Jewish or a Democratic State and on January 27 she will speak at our Holocaust Memorial Day meeting. You can go here for the full length interview.

I have never been attracted to the idea of an autobiography or even a biography. Life is too short to waste time describing what you have done with your life and its bound to be partial and self-exculpatory. However I was happy to work with Helen Aksentijevic to produce a short, half hour film summarising some of the things I’ve tried to do.

Helen has produced similar films on other Jewish anti-Zionist  such as Moshe Machover, Haim Bresheeth and Sabby Sagall so I was very flattered to be asked.

Tony Greenstein - An Ordinary Rebel plus Question & Answer Session at the P21

At the end of October I was invited to the wedding of an old friend, a long standing Palestine solidarity activist, Susan  Blackwell.  She lives in the Netherlands and so I said that I would be happy to do a meeting whilst there.

Sue got in touch with students at the main technical university in the Netherlands, Delft University, and I was invited to speak to a meeting. The only problem was that the university, which was happy to invite Admiral Ellis, a representative of US arms company Lockheed Martin to campus and a ghoul of many US wars, they didn’t want me to speak because I might hurt the feelings of those students who supported the genocide in Gaza.

Of course when you contrast the hurt feelings of Zionists with the dead bodies of Palestinian children there is no contest.  So I wrote to the Rector His Magnificus (yes that’s his title) Timothy van der Hagen suggesting that freedom of speech is worth preserving. After all Hagen had written on the university website that

‘The most important task of TU Delft is to make a contribution towards building a better society’.

Yet Magnificus Hagen’s idea of a better society and mine were not the same. Hagen is just another ruling class hypocrite.

However the students had other ideas. Although I was banned from campus I turned up anyway and with just 2 hours notice over 100 students gathered to listen to me on the steps of the library. Not only had the stupid Magnificus built my meeting for me but by his own actions he had ensured that my message went out to thousands.

The Rector of Delft University - the Magnificus Timothy van der Hagen

The security, although watching, did not intervene.  A magnificus victory! I did write to Magnificus Hagen afterwards but he seems to be a man of few words and even fewer thoughts!

Tony Greenstein's Speech at Delft University Which the Administration Tried to Ban

As readers of this blog will know I was arrested a year ago on ‘terrorism’ charges and my last court appearance was on 19 December at Westminster magistrates court. There was a demonstration outside and I will be next appearing at the Old Bailey on 31 January where I hope people will also demonstrate their opposition to the use of terrorism legislation to silence Palestine solidarity activists.

Tony Greenstein's speech outside Westminster Magistrates Court

On the 4 August  I came back from my holiday in the Outer Hebrides and stopped off in Liverpool, where I spent my childhood, to speak to the Palestine demonstration outside the Roman Catholic Cathedral. I always enjoy going back to Liverpool with its magnificent waterfront and city buildings.

On 3 December I spoke on behalf of Jewish Network for Palestine at a seminar organised by the Open University Palestine group. Other speakers were Tony Lerman, an expert in anti-Semitism and former Director of the Institute of Jewish Policy Research, Barnaby Raine, a Ph D student and young firebrand and Michael Richmond who spoke about philosemitism, the other side of the anti-Semitism coin. The title was ‘How anti-Semitism has complemented Zionism’.

How antisemitism has complemented Zionism – Tony Greenstein

(for the full video go to here)

The JNP and SLN organised a seminar on the 12 November in the wake of my review of Jonathan Freedland’s dishonest biography of Rudolf Vrba, The Escape Artist, about the anti-Zionist Jewish hero who escaped, with Alfred Wetzler, from Auschwitz in order to warn Hungarian Jews of preparations being made to exterminate them.

Speakers included Stephen Kapos, a survivor of the Hungarian holocaust, Haim Bresheeth, an anti-Zionist Israeli and member of JNP and Tom Suarez, author Palestine Hijacked and State of Terror. Below is my contribution. A comprehensive website on Vrba has been set up by Alan Twigg, a journalist who knew him.

Zionism & the Holocaust – Tony Greenstein

The Complete Seminar – Rewriting the Holocaust

To commemorate the one year anniversary of October 7, the SLN and JNP organised a seminar to discuss the Gaza holocaust. Speakers included Ghada Karmi, a refugee from 1948, Rania Khalek, Haim Bresheeth and myself. Below is my speech but people can go to the SLN’s Youtube channel to listen to the complete seminar, ‘A Jewish State or a Democratic State’. Most most people agree that it was an extremely good seminar and I highly recommend listening to the whole seminar as I do the previous one on Vrba.

For One Democratic State

In the wake of Starmer’s election, the SLN organised a star studded panel including myself! Speakers included Ian Hodson, General Secretary of the Bakers Union,  Graham Bash – founding editor of National Labour Briefing, David Miller – who was sacked for his anti-Zionist views by Bristol University and who later won a landmark employment tribunal, Chris Williamson, the former Labour MP who was forced out of the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn and Crispin Flintoff, presenter of the Not the Andrew Marr show and latterly the Crispin Flintoff show which has a regular attendance of 500 every Sunday morning. You can hear the full video on the SLN Youtube channel here.

SLN Tony Greenstein – Where to for the Left 12 07 24

Every year for the past 2 years the SLN and the JNP have organised a meeting on Holocaust Memorial Day, January 27. As the Zionists weaponise the holocaust we have to be prepared to stand up and say ‘Never Again Means Never Again for Everyone’. For the Zionists of course, Never Again means never again only for Jews, or the right kind of Jew.

On January 27 2024 we had an excellent line up including Professor Ilan Pappe, Ghada Karmi, Ronnie Kasrills – the former head of Umkonte We Sizwe, the ANC’s military wing as well as former South African Police Minister , Stephen Kapos – a child holocaust survivor from Budapest, Suzanne Weiss – a child survivor from France and myself. Again a remarkable meeting. For the full meeting go here or here.

When Israel had been a month into the genocide in Gaza the JNP and SLN organised a webinar on the theme of stopping Israel’s onslaught. Speakers included Huda Ammori from Palestine Action, Asa Winstanley of Electronic Intifada, Stephen Kapos, Ronnie Barkan – an Israeli anti-Zionist activist and Tony Greenstein. You can watch the complete video here.

Stop the Genocide in Gaza 10.11.23

Last January I undertook a tour of Scotland at the invitation of Scottish PSC. I spoke in Glasgow, Edinburgh and Dundee. I also spoke at a large demonstration in Glasgow city centre.

Tony Greenstein speaking at Palestine Demonstration in Glasgow January 6 2024

Two months later I was back in Glasgow. It was March 16, UN Anti-Racism Day and the SWP’s  Stand Up to Racism were also holding a march. On the tiny SUTR march was none other than Glasgow Friends of Israel. Ever since 2017 the SWP/SUTR have insisted on marching with Zionists against racism! It’s like campaigning against rape alongside rapists.

This has been the subject of heated controversy in Scotland and the Police were always willing to lend a helping hand to ensure that the Zionists could march. This year, at a time of genocide in Palestine, the SWP’s decision to march with Zionists was particularly disgraceful.

Tony Greenstein speaking at the Anti-Racism Demonstration in Glasgow March 16 2024

On October 4^th, the 88^th anniversary of the Battle of Cable Street, when the Police unsuccessfully tried to batter a way through the East End of London for the British Union of Fascists. The same Metropolitan Police arrested me after a picket of racist Israeli Ambassador Tzipi Hotoveli for comparing Israel’s genocide in Gaza to the Nazi holocaust. Their pretext was that I had committed a ‘racially aggravated offence’ under the Public Order Act. After being held for 7 hours I was released from  Holborn Police Station. A few weeks later I was informed that I would not be charged with any offence.  This is the speech that so annoyed the Met!

Tony Greenstein Speech Which Led to his Arrrest at Picket of Tzipi Hotoveli 4 Oct 2024

At 8 a.m. on the 26 November 2024 I gave a talk to listeners in Australia about my book, Zionism During the Holocaust. It was 7 pm there!

In this interview with Crispin Flintoff I tried to explain why people believe I’m outspoken and what motivates me

Interview Tony Greenstein on the Crispin Flintoff Show - Why I'm Outspoken

On 23 November 2023 I spoke to a meeting of the Labour Left Alliance in the wake of October 7. There was then an extensive Question & Answer session.

LLA meeting 23 November 2023

On 15 November I spoke at a demonstration organised by the Trades Council outside Hove Town Hall

And finally the one time I appeared on Question Time at Sussex University’s Gardener Centre. It was when Norman Tebbit, the Chingford skinhead was on the panel. I spoke from the audience attacking him for his racist cricket test directed against immigrants from the Indian sub-continent. Also on the panel was Clare Short. Peter Sissons was in the Chair. I don’t think I would have got away with it with today’s far-right Fiona Bruce!

Tony Greenstein on Question Time

A Democratic or a Jewish State? Webinar from Jewish Network for Palestine & the Socialist Labour Network

Sky News conducts an investigation into Israel’s murder of Hind Raja – something the BBC would never dream of

Tonight Jewish Network for Palestine and the Socialist Labour Network held a joint webinar attended by 320 people.  Nearly 500 registered for the meeting. Above is the recording.

Ghada Karmi

Tony Greenstein was the first speaker followed by British Palestinian Ghada Karmi who lived through the Nakba in 1948, then Haim Bresheeth, an Israeli anti-Zionist and JNP Steering Committee member.  Last to speak was Rania Khalek from Breakthrough News. Rania is from Lebanon although she was speaking from the United States. Rania, gave a brilliant description of the situation.

Haim Bresheeth

The quality of all the speakers was very high. Unfortunately Ali Abunimah from Electronic Intifada was not able to be present because he has gone down with food poisoning.  I wish him a speedy recovery.

Israel's Murder of Hind Rajab

Sky News Programme on the Murder of Hind Rajab

Tonight Sky News, unusually for the British media, did what the BBC has never done, which is to conduct an investigation into one of Israel’s worst atrocities, the murder of a 5 year old girl and the paramedics sent to rescue her, after the Israeli military had given the ambulance clearance.

Tony Greenstein

This has been a repeated phenomenon of Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza. So often has it happened, most famously with the murder of the 7 members of the World Food Kitchen, that one can now say with certainty that Israel’s ‘deconfliction’ mechanism is used as a deliberate means of entrapping its victims.

When health workers were asked whether they would prefer to sleep in an area that the Israeli military had been given the co-ordinates for and agreed with, they said ‘no’.

The short video into the murder of Hind Rajab in the Tel al-Hawa district of Gaza City demonstrates that despite the evidence – satellite photos showing the position of the Israeli tanks, a press release on the military’s own website admitting they were in the area, which they then deleted when it incriminated them and the recordings of the Hind and her sister speaking to the Red Crescent, the Israeli military simply denied what was plainly obvious.

This is the press release that Israel issued boasting of its operations in the Tel al-Hawa area

When the press release showed the Israel army to be a liar they simply deleted it - yet the US is happy for Israel to conduct its own investigations

And why shouldn’t the Israeli military lie. It knows that whatever happens, however many it murders, the United States Administration has its back. There is no war crime, no atrocity that the Biden regime won’t turn a blind eye to. And why not?  Did they not persecute Julian Assange for revealing a fraction of their war crimes in Iraq?  Why should the United States not tolerate similar behaviour in its favourite attack dog? That is why when the US says its passed the investigation  to the Israeli authorities we can take it as read that they aren’t in the least concerned.

To those who say that the BBC is more progressive because it is state owned my answer is that this only means it reflects more accurately the genocidal views of our rulers. Although it occasionally has better stuff on its website, none of this leaks into its mainstream news or current affairs broadcasts.

Almost obscenely, for the anniversary of Israel’s genocide in Gaza the BBC commissioned a special tribute film Surviving October 7th: We Will Dance Again. It’s not the story of how Palestinians have survived the genocide of the past year, but the Israeli victims of the breakout from Israel’s open air prison in Gaza.

The idea of conducting a serious investigation into e.g. the bombing of Al Ahli hospital when 500 Palestinians were murdered as Israel began to target hospitals or the story of the destruction of Al Shifa Hospital never occurred to the BBC because Palestinians are less than human.

It is as if, in the wake of a slave revolt in the Caribbean the BBC had made a film about how traumatic it was for the slave holders. If the BBC had existed at the time it probably would have.  The BBC consciously provides the narrative to enable Israel and the United States to continue the genocide. It has the blood of thousands of Palestinians on its hands as surely as those who pulled the trigger.

My Open Letter to the BBC's Complaints Department

The least people can do is to refuse to pay their BBC license. There is nothing the BBC can do. Its investigators have no power of entry. All you need is a minimal amount of courage. You don’t have to announce it to anyone. Just do it and ignore the 3 monthly reminders the BBC sends out. That way you won’t have to contribute to Hugh Edwards £200,000 pay-off. If a million people in Britain were to no longer pay their license fee to the genocide enablers at the BBC they would soon get the message. You don’t have to enter an Elbit arms factory or do anything risky, just stop paying the bastards.

Tony Greenstein

Israel Claims it Inherits the Memory of the Jews Who Died in the Holocaust – The Reality is that it Inherits the Memory of Those Who Killed Them

Interview with Rania Khalek of Breakthrough News about my book Zionism During the Holocaust

Rania Khalek Interviews Tony Greenstein

Zionism Before, During and After the Nazis: A History of Collusion, w/ Tony Greenstein

I’ve been interviewed twice by Rania Khalek this year. The first time, in early April, took place partly in Hungary and then in the UK. It was based on an article I wrote for Electronic Intifada about how the lazy explanation for the genocide in Gaza is the myth of ‘holocaust trauma’.

I explained that Israelis were suffering, not from holocaust trauma, but settler colonial trauma. Their reaction was typical of the slaveholders in the Caribbean who, faced with uprisings by their Black slaves, reacted with unbridled violence. It was the reaction of those who have their foot on the neck of the slave or subjugated and then react violently to any rebellion. It is always the nightmare of the oppressor that their victims will rise up and take revenge.

That was what October 7 was about. That was why almost immediately after October 7 Israel began fashioning a narrative about the terrible cruelties and atrocities of the Palestinian resistance attack.

First we had the stories of the 40 beheaded babies, the baked baby and even the baby hung up to dry on a clothing line.

The problem was that none of this was true. Only 2 of the 1139 Israelis who died that day were babies. The 2 babies who did die were killed accidentally. Compare this with Israel’s slaughter of 20,000+ Palestinian children.

Then we had the ‘rape narrative’ which the New York Times did so much to give legs to with its now discredited article Screams Without Words by an Israeli reporter Anat Schwartz, a supporter of Israel’s genocide, and two others. It has since been comprehensively discredited by The Intercept and other publications.

This fabricated narrative was the justification for the genocide that followed in Gaza.

My second interview a month ago, was about my book Zionism During the Holocaust.

How Israel Weaponizes the Holocaust to Justify Killing Palestinians

The interview about my book was a very wide-ranging interview, much like my interview a year ago by Asa Winstanley and Nora Barrows Friedman, which has attracted over 300,000 views.

We started out with an overview of pre-holocaust anti-Semitism and I made the point that in the feudal era anti-Semitism was a popular movement from below against the role that Jews played, the agents of money in an economy based on use values. It was the indebted peasants who reacted at times violently to the Jews.

But in the modern era, from around the last third of the 19^th century anti-Semitism took on a different character from Christian anti-Semitism. It was no longer based on religion, i.e. the economic role that Jews played in society but on race.

For Martin Luther once a Jew had converted to Christianity that was the end of the matter. Their soul was saved. For Hitler it was of no account if a Jew had been baptised. Once a Jew always a Jew. It was Wilhelm Marr, the founder of the League of Anti-Semites, who, in 1879 coined the term ‘anti-Semitism’. It was based on the false premise that Jews were Semites, that is they didn’t belong in Europe but were really from the Middle East. Semite was a linguistic not a racial term.

Count von Plehve - instigated pogroms in Czarist Russia including at Kishinev in 1903 - but as an anti-Semite he also supported the Zionist movement 

From this point onwards, anti-Semitism was a movement from the top not the bottom. It was the ruling class who used anti-Semitism as a weapon to divide the working class and oppressed. After the assassination of Czar Alexander II in 1881 the Czarist regime under Interior Minister Vyacheslav von Plehve consciously sought to promote pogroms and anti-Semitism as a means of dividing the enemy. That was why the Bolsheviks held that anyone who was an anti-Semite was a supporter of the Czar.

For Hitler it was ‘Marx the Jew’. Jews were the biological parents of Bolshevism/socialism. Zionism was a reaction to the support of Jews for the revolutionary and socialist groups. Zionism was a consciously counter-revolutionary current. It accepted the characterisation of Jews as foreign interlopers who didn’t belong and they sought instead the creation of a Jewish state mirroring that of the anti-Semitic countries. In this they have succeeded. Israel is, as I once said, Hitler’s Bastard Offspring.

The Zionists often outdid the anti-Semites in their description of the diaspora Jew who they hated. They accepted the caricatures and stereotypes of the anti-Semites. Being separated from what they saw as their ancient land the Jews had developed asocial tendencies. Zionism, especially in Germany, was of the Blood and Soil type, mirroring as they did German nationalism. With ‘national’ soil under them the Jews would be like all others, only more so.

In the words of the founder of Revisionist Zionism, Vladimir Jabotinsky, the Jews were ‘a very nasty people and its neighbours hate it and they are right.’  If one didn’t know that the speaker was a Zionist one would assume that they were a typical non-Jewish anti-Semite. As Joachim Doron, an Israeli political scientist wrote in an article, Classic Zionism and Modern Anti-Semitism – Parallels and Influences:

rather than take up arms against the enemies of the Jews, Zionism attacked the ‘enemy within’, the Diaspora Jew himself and subjected him to a hail of criticism…. Indeed a perusal of the Zionist sources reveals a wealth of charges against the Diaspora Jew, some of which are so scathing that the generation that witnessed Auschwitz has difficulty comprehending them. (my emphasis)

Zionism was seen by the ruling class as, in the words of Count Vyacheslav von Plehve, as an ‘antidote to socialism’. It was a reactionary nationalist diversion. Churchill in 1920 wrote a famous article for the Illustrated Sunday Herald Zionism vs Bolshevism. Support for Zionism was seen as a way of weaning Jews off their revolutionary habits.

Zionism always had one and only one objective. The creation of a Jewish State and it didn’t mind how it got there. Although whilst they were weak they didn’t openly call for such a state, relying on euphemisms such as a ‘Jewish Homeland’, the Zionists had one and only one objective in mind.

It is crucial that people understand, because of the myths that abound about Zionism. There was never any difference between the ‘left-wing’ and the ‘right-wing’ of Zionism. Both wings agreed on the need for a Jewish state.

In May 1948 Ben Gurion instructed the Israeli Army to fire on the Revisionist arms boat, the Altalena - here burning off the Tel Aviv shoreline

Their only differences and sometimes these were quite violent, were about tactics and on occasion blood was spilt as with the shelling of the Revisionist boat Altalena.

Although the holocaust is an essential part of the Zionist narrative today, when the holocaust was actually happening the Zionists did not want to know. It was a distraction from their project of state building. Even worse it threatened to disrupt their funding because Jews were more likely to give money to saving refugees and keeping them alive than a nationalist project in the Middle East.

The Zionists worked hard to tie the refugee problem to Zionism. If refugees were to be saved anywhere it had to be in Palestine. All other places were to be opposed because if you could save Jews elsewhere what was the point in having a Jewish State? They disparagingly talked of ‘refugeeism’.

This was the ‘logic’ behind the obstruction of any and all attempts to rescue Jews if the destination was not Palestine. It was summed up by David Ben-Gurion, the Chairman of the Zionist Organisation and first Prime Minister of Israel. When Britain offered to accept 10,000 Jewish children in the wake of Kristallnacht, the Nazi pogrom in November 1938, Ben-Gurion was outraged. In a speech to the Central Council of Mapai (Israeli Labor Party) in December 1938, he said:

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.

Zionism was in essence a racial preservation project. The Zionist idea was based on race, not religion. Most of the early Zionists were atheists but they rested their claim to Palestine on the promise of a god they denied.

My book details how the Zionists wilfully obstructed the efforts of others to save Jews by always shouting ‘what about Palestine’ whenever alternative destinations were proposed. Saving Jews from the gas chambers always came second to building their state.

To the end, they opposed the setting up of Roosevelt’s War Refugee Board in January 1944, which was instrumental in saving some 200,000 Jews. In Hungary their deals with the Nazis amounted to the saving of 1684 Jews of the Zionist and Jewish elite in exchange for keeping quiet about and even misinforming the 437,000 Jews who were deported about where they were heading – Auschwitz.

All of this came out in Israel’s Kasztner trial when the leader of Hungarian Zionism during the war, Israel Kasztner, brought a libel trial against a Hungarian Jew who had called him a collaborator. He lost and was then assassinated by the Israeli secret service Shin Bet. Although acquitted on appeal the facts found by the lower court were not challenged and one charge of collaboration was upheld.

When the Nazis first came to power in January 1933 most Jews were horrified and they began boycotting Nazi German goods. It was a spontaneous Boycott that grew up which nearly all Jews, except the Zionists and the bourgeois Jews, supported. The Zionist leaders welcomed Hitler to power sensing that in the carnage that followed and the inevitable exodus of Jews from Germany and elsewhere in Europe, they could only prosper.

Noah Lucas, a critical Zionist historian wrote that

‘As the European holocaust erupted, Ben-Gurion saw it as a decisive opportunity for Zionism... Ben-Gurion above all others sensed the tremendous possibilities inherent in the dynamic of the chaos and carnage in Europe…. 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.’ 

In August 1933 they negotiated a trade agreement, Ha'avara, with the Nazis. For mentioning this Ken Livingstone was forced out of the Labour Party.

Hayim Nahman Bialik, the Zionist national poet, welcomed Hitler to power

Some Zionists openly welcomed the advent of Hitler. Hayim Nahman Bialik wrote that:

Hitlerism has perhaps saved German Jewry, which was being assimilated into annihilation

Emil Ludwig was another Zionist who welcomed Hitler to power

Emil Ludwig (1881-1948), the world-famous biographer, ‘who expressed the general attitude of the Zionist movement’ wrote that:

Hitler will be forgotten in a few years, but he will have a beautiful monument in Palestine. You know, the coming of the Nazis was rather a welcome thing. … Thousands who seemed to be completely lost to Judaism were brought back to the fold by Hitler, and for that I am personally very grateful to him

The more important point though is that the Zionists seriously believed that because they had no ideological differences with the Nazis, because they too accepted that German Jews did not belong in Germany, that they could do business with them. They even believed that the Nuremberg Race Laws of 1935, which established that German Jews were aliens and a separate race from Germans, established a basis for living side by side until the Jews could emigrate. In this they were to be proved wrong.

On June 21 1933 the Zionist Federation of Germany [ZVfD] wrote in to Hitler saying 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 marriage and are for maintaining the purity of the Jewish group… The realization of Zionism could only be hurt by resentment of Jews abroad against the German development. Boycott propaganda… is in essence unZionist, because Zionism wants not to do battle but to convince and to build.

What the ZVfD wrote was true. The Zionists also believed in race and nation, hence their desire to co-operate. Today they hold exactly the same beliefs and they are determined to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians because they are not of the same race, the Jewish race.

I recommend that you listen to the interview with Rania.

Tony Greenstein

I have recently taken stock of 300 paperbacks which are going fast.  They are selling for £12 inc. p&p in the UK, which is a third less than Amazon.  Unfortunately I have to charge for postage outside Britain (£15 tracked to Europe and nearly double that to the USA).

You will also get a signed copy!!

If you want to order one and avoid Amazon please email me at 

tonygreenstein104@gmail.com