Showing posts with label Mildenstein. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mildenstein. Show all posts

26 November 2023

The Metropolitan Police Have Taken it Upon Themselves to Decide What We Can & Can’t Read as Books are Seized & Those Selling It Are Arrested

 It Must Have Been Something I Said! Jo Wadsworth of the Anti-Palestinian Brighton and Hove News Threatens to Report Me to the Police!


The Met arrest stall holders selling a book with a Swastika and Zionist Star of David Intertwined - Who the Hell are These Thick Bastards to Decide What We Can and Cannot Read?

All I did was to send Jo Wadsworth of Brighton and Hove News an email giving a link to my blog. True I headed it ‘ENJOY RACIST SCUMBAG’ but that was no reason to respond in the way she did:

Oh no, Tony "notorious antisemite" Greenstein has called me a bad name. How will I ever recover?

To which I responded that this was a good question.  I suggested that the answer lay in Wadsworth ‘Probably (by) gorging on the blood of the children in Gaza.  I should think that would be good recipe for you to try’.

 She had after all been perfectly happy with a multitude of comments defending Israel’s bombardment of hospitals, ambulances, homes and schools, its food, water and fuel  blockade and the murder of over 6,000 children and thousands of adults. In other words collective punishment, a flagrant breach of international law.

Orthodox anti-Zionist Jews in Jerusalem's Mea Sharim Display the Palestinian Flag - If they had been Palestinians the Police would have opened fire

It appears however that Ms Wadsworth is a more sensitive soul than I had given her credit for. She didn’t seem to take my comment that she was wallowing in the blood of thousands of children at all well.

Okay Tony I usually find your insults entertaining in a pathetic kind of way. But that's crossed a line. I'm now asking you not to contact me again and if you persist I will report you to the police.

It seems to have become the latest fashion amongst Zionists to report anything I say to the police. In fact I’m thinking of saving them the trouble and time by designing a handy form which they can email to the Police explaining why they have problems with freedom of speech.

First there was Heidi Bachram and now Jo Wadsworth. Who will be next?

At the same time the Metropolitan Police have decided that they have the right to decide what literature can be openly sold on Zionism at today’s demonstration and what posters can be displayed. According to the Met:

Images were shared on social media showing literature being distributed which featured a swastika inside a Star of David. Officers later spotted the same literature at a stall in Whitehall and arrested four people on suspicion of distributing material likely to stir up racial hatred.

The people they arrested were from the Communist Party of Great Britain Marxist Leninist  [@cpgbml]

I wasn’t aware that intertwining a Swastika and a Zionist Star of David graphically was a criminal offence. As I wrote in my book, Zionism During the Holocaust:

In the spring of 1933, Baron Leopold von Mildenstein, a member of the SS, and Kurt Tuchler of the ZVfD [German Zionist] Executive and their wives, boarded a train at Berlin to travel to Palestine. Tuchler had tried to persuade Mildenstein to write ‘something positive’ about Palestine in the Nazi press. Mildenstein agreed, provided that he was able to visit Palestine first. He stayed for six months and was clearly impressed by the “new Jew.

On his return, Mildenstein published a series of 12 articles in Joseph Goebbels’ paper, Der Angriff, from 26 September to 9 October 1934 under the by-line von Lim’ [Jacob Boas, ‘A Nazi Travels to Palestine’]. This trip was the subject of an article in the eminently respectable History Today of January 1980. Mildenstein served as head of Abteilung 112/II, the Jewish department (Judenreferat) of the Sicherheitsdienst, [SD] from the summer of 1935 to August 1936. Indeed so pleased were the Nazis with the trip that they struck a medal to commemorate the trip.

It is perfectly legitimate to argue that Zionist ideology and Nazi ideology share a lot in common. The Zionists admitted this themselves. On 21 June 1933, the German Zionist Federation wrote a letter to Hitler in which they explained that:

Zionism has no illusion about the difficulty of the Jewish condition which consists above all in an abnormal occupational pattern and in the fault of an intellectual and moral posture not rooted in one’s own tradition… an answer to the Jewish question truly satisfying to the national state can be brought about only with the collaboration of the Jewish movement that aims at a social, cultural and moral renewal of Jewry… 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.’

The full letter can be found in Lucy Dawidowicz, A Holocaust Reader, pp. 150-153.  Who the hell are the Metropolitan Police to decide we can and cannot read? Of course it will give offence to Zionists to be reminded of the times when they had close fraternal relations with the Nazi State. However this is part of the historical record and only in Police States do thick coppers decide what people can and cannot read and see.


11 March 2020

The Truth That Labour Dare Not Speak - Zionism has always worked with anti-Semites - From the Czarist Regime to the Nazis, the Argentinian Junta to Trump and Orban

Zionism and anti-Semitism -Siamese Twins – Joined at the Hip

Stanley Heller 'Zionist betrayal of Jews, from Herzl to Netanyahu' self-published, 2019, pp147. Available from Middle East Crisis Committee, Box 3626, Woodbridge CT, 06525, USA, for a donation of $10 or more.

If you want to order a hard copy of the book then sending it by mail would be $15 in postage to the UK (& presumably Europe too).

There is also a digital edition.  It is $7.50 from Lulu.com

Why is it that when world Jewry were boycotting everything made in Germany the Zionists struck up a trading agreement (Ha'avara) with them? 
Why did Ben Gurion say, after Kristallacht and the agreement by Britain to accept 10,000 German Jewish children 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.’[i]
Why did Ben Gurion’s official biographer, Shabtai Teveth write 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.’
When the Holocaust was taking place, Zionism's attention was focussed on achieving statehood not on rescuing refugees
Why in a memo to the Zionist Executive did Ben Gurion write that:
‘if the Jews are faced with a choice between the refugee problem and rescuing Jews from concentration camps on the one hand, and aid for the national museum in Palestine on the other, the Jewish sense of pity will prevail and our people's entire strength will be directed at aid for the refugees in the various countries. Zionism will vanish from the agenda and indeed not only world public opinion in England and America but also from Jewish public opinion. We are risking Zionism's very existence if we allow the refugee problem to be separated from the Palestine problem.’[ii]
The answers and more are in this short book by Stanley Heller. This review was printed in Weekly Worker
Review by Tony Greenstein
This book is really just a sampler with a fairly arbitrary selection of topics about Zionism’s relationship with its Siamese twin, anti-Semitism. Without anti-Semitism there would have been no Zionism and that is why the Zionist movement has always considered anti-Semitism as a kind of ‘distant relative’.
The founder of political Zionism, Theodor Herzl, in his pamphlet The Jewish state, compared the Zionist use of anti-Semitism to the use of steam as a source of power. Zionism sought not to fight anti-Semitism, but to harness it.
There are, however, large gaps in Heller’s brief account and his selection of topics is somewhat arbitrary. Why choose the visit of the Nazis, Adolf Eichmann and Leopold von Mildenstein, to Palestine as guests of the Labour Zionists, when there are so many worse examples of Nazi-Zionist collaboration? Why omit completely the story of Kasztner and the collaboration of Hungarian Zionism with the Nazis, which cost thousands of lives?
Yet these are minor points. Heller has done us a service with this book in reminding us, in the days when Zionist accusations of ‘anti-Semitism’ are rife, that, when it comes to genuine anti-Semitism, you will not see the Zionist movement for dust.
One of the most remarkable things about the fake ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign waged against Jeremy Corbyn for the past four years - what Justin Schlosberg has called a “disinformation paradigm1 - is the absence of evidence: hence why such a high percentage of those suspended and expelled have been Jewish anti-Zionists.
Herzl made it clear that opposition to anti-Semitism was “futile”, before going on to “pardon” it.2 He believed anti-Semitism contained a “divine will to good”.3 One of the most remarkable aspects of the false anti-Semitism campaign is that even the truth can be anti-Semitic!
By ‘anti-Semitism’ I mean what the man on the Clapham Omnibus understands by it, which the Oxford English Dictionary defines as “hostility to or prejudice against Jews”. Because Zionism has no interest in opposing genuine anti-Semitism it has tried to foist the IHRA definition of it onto public bodies. Anti-Semitism has been redefined as hostility to Israel and Zionism.
It was Ken Livingstone’s propensity for blurting out the truth - namely that the Nazis ‘supported’ Zionism - which was responsible for the vitriolic attacks on him. A little known fact is that Labour’s disciplinary process excluded, from the start, any examination of the truth of what Livingstone had said. What mattered was that he had said it. The sole concern of Labour’s witch-hunters was that Ken had ‘given offence’ to the ‘Jewish community’.
In the wake of the Charlie Hebdo murders in France, The Guardian and others supported freedom of speech. An op ed in The Guardian by Jodie Ginsburg thundered: “The right to free speech means nothing without the right to offend.”4 Perhaps she should have added: ‘except if they are Zionist Jews or their non-Jewish supporters’.
Not one British newspaper, not even The Guardian or The Independent supported Livingstone’s freedom of speech. They demanded his expulsion from Labour. He was sacked by LBC radio, which was happy to employ neo-Nazi Katie Hopkins and the far-right Nigel Farage.
But targeting Muslims, as Charlie Hebdo did, was acceptable. One front page called the Koran “shit”, because anti-Muslim racism is consistent with imperialist discourse. However, speaking the truth about the record of Zionism during the Nazi era is not covered by freedom of speech. Zionism is the ideology that gave birth to and governs the Israeli state. What is at stake is not a quibble about the truth, but very real political, strategic and economic interests. Jews have been summoned as the first line of defence of western strategic and economic interests. Jews are the shield for western imperialism.
Heller’s description of how Zionism has betrayed the Jews, from the days of its founder, Theodor Herzl to Netanyahu is a gripping one. One theme runs through the book: Zionism sought to utilise, never to oppose, anti-Semitism. When a conflict arose between the needs of Jews and building the ‘Jewish’ state, then the latter always won out.


Heller builds on Lenni Brenner’s books, Zionism in the age of the dictators and 51 Documents - Zionist Collaboration with the Nazis, which exposed some of the sordid details of the Zionist movement’s relationships with fascism. This despite serious problems with Brenner’s understanding of events and analysis.5 It would though have been useful to have provided, if not an index, at least a contents page!
Heller begins his journey with Herzl - “the Jewish man who thought that anti-Semitism was natural”. The belief that anti-Semitism was a natural phenomenon was common to all Zionists. Chaim Weizmann, president of the Zionist Organisation and first president of Israel (his name does not appear in the book once) wrote in his autobiography:
Whenever the quantity of Jews in any country reaches saturation point, that country reacts against them ... The determining factor in this matter is not the solubility of the Jews, but the solvent power of the country.6
Collaboration
Heller rightly points out that Herzl’s conversion to Zionism occurred not as a result of the Dreyfus affair, but the election of Karl Lueger as mayor of Vienna in 1897. Lueger’s election was a shock to both the Jews and emperor Franz Joseph, who only confirmed him in office after the fifth election. The last thing Joseph wanted was anti-Semitism in his multi-national empire.
Hitler at Nuremberg
Whilst Hitler praised Lueger as his inspiration, he was no Hitler himself. Lueger was an opportunist, who realised that without the spice of anti-Semitism he could not win over the artisan vote in Vienna. He was more in the tradition of ‘municipal socialism’. Lueger also had many Jewish friends and, when reproached about this, famously declared: “I decide who is a Jew.
What Heller does not mention is that Herzl created a myth, claiming that it was the Dreyfus affair that had been the cause of his conversion to Zionism. Any objective examination shows that Herzl was not interested in Dreyfus and almost certainly believed in his guilt. This was why Herzl and Bernard Lazare, the earliest campaigner for Dreyfus, parted company in 1899.
Heller describes how early Zionists were willing to work with the worst anti-Semites. Herzl met with Vyacheslav von Plehve, the Russian interior minister responsible for the pogrom at Kishinev in 1903. In return for the legalisation of the Zionist movement, he agreed not to criticise the Russian government. Vladimir Jabotinsky, the founder of revisionist Zionism, reached an agreement with the White Russian leader, Symon Petliura, who had the deaths of up to 50,000 Jews to his credit. But that did not stop Jabotinsky holding hands with him.
Heller looks at the Zionist sabotage of the Jewish boycott of Nazi Germany through its negotiation of a trade agreement, Ha’avara, with the Nazis. The Zionists saw the rise of the Nazis as an opportunity: “The last thing they considered was mobilising world opinion against the brownshirt menace.”
Israel supplied weaponry to Guatemala under Rios Montt when the USA stopped shipments. The Guatemalan Junta butchered 200,000 Mayan Indians thanks to Israeli arms and training.
The Zionists broke the boycott, even though it held out the only possibility of leading to the overthrow of Hitler. In practice they were writing off German Jewry. Today the Zionists claim that Ha’avara was about saving Jews, but this is a lie. It was about saving German Jewish wealth: 60% of capital investment in Jewish Palestine between 1933 and 1939 came from Nazi Germany.7 According to Edwin Black, a rightwing Zionist and author of The transfer agreement, “the Nazi party and the Zionist Organisation shared a common stake in the recovery of Germany. If the Hitler economy fell, both sides would be ruined.”8
An article on the Jewish Telegraph Agency site is headed ‘Reich on verge of collapse’.9 This was on account of the Jewish boycott. The sabotage of the anti-Nazi boycott by Zionism was an example of prioritising the interests of the ‘Jewish state’ over the lives of living Jews. Although the Zionists claimed that no-one in 1933 could predict the extermination of the Jews, this is untrue. Samuel Untermayer, organiser of the boycott, did just that.
As Edwin Black pointed out, the boycott forced Hitler to restrain anti-Jewish attacks. It denied Germany foreign exchange and the ability to “acquire the raw materials needed to rebuild its war machine”. None of this mattered to the Zionists.
Heller rightly concentrates on the situation in Poland, where after the death of Józef Piłsudski in 1935, the level of anti-Semitism soared. Jewish benches were introduced in the universities. Attacks on Jews massively increased and the government introduced anti-Semitic legislation, such as forcing businesses to carry the name of the owner on their sign (thus making it clear which shops were Jewish).
Jabotinsky’s supporters, who were strong in Poland, collaborated first with the Piłsudski regime and then the colonels’ government. They believed that Poland could take over the Palestine mandate from the British. They also had cordial relations with Mussolini’s fascists, training at the Italian naval station of Civitavecchia. In 1938 Mussolini introduced anti-Semitic racial laws and started persecuting Italian Jews. In 1943 during the Salo republic, Italian fascists collaborated in the deportation of 8,000 Italian Jews to Auschwitz.
It was in this situation of increasing anti-Semitism that Polish Jews turned to the Bund, an anti-Zionist socialist organisation. As Shmuel Merlin, a revisionist leader in Warsaw, told Lenni Brenner,
It was absolutely correct to say that only the Bund waged an organised fight against the anti-Semites. We did not consider that we had to fight in Poland. We believed the way to ease the situation was to take the Jews out of Poland. We had no spirit of animosity.
Priority
Heller quotes the notorious speech of Ben Gurion of December 9 1938 to the central committee of Mapai, the centre-left party (in response to the Krystallnacht, the British had offered to admit 10,000 unaccompanied Jewish children from Germany):
If I knew that it was possible to save all the children in Germany by transporting them to England, or only half by transporting them to Palestine, I would choose the second, because we face not only the reckoning of those children, but the historical reckoning of the Jewish people.
If Jews were to be rescued, according to their twisted logic, it had to be to Palestine. Otherwise what purpose was there to this “national museum”, as Ben Gurion described it?
Whereas world Jewry viewed the rise of Hitler with foreboding, to the Zionist leaders Hitler’s rise presented “unprecedented historical opportunities”. Heller quotes Tom Segev’s Seventh million as claiming that for Ben Gurion the extermination of the Jews was “above all else a crime against Zionism”.
Heller’s short section on ‘rescue plans’ skirts over three that were abortive - the rescue of 70,000 Jews from Transnistria in Romania, the delayed deportation of Jews from Slovakia and the ‘Blood for Trucks’ proposal to the allies from Adolf Eichmann in May 1944. Heller does justice to none of these proposals.
He follows in Brenner’s footsteps in seeing the offer of a million Jews in exchange for 100,000 winterised trucks as genuine. That the Zionists took it seriously, when it was obviously designed to split the Allies, is entirely to their discredit - especially as they refused to publicise the plight of Hungarian Jews, who Eichmann had already started deporting from Hungary on May 15, two days before this so-called offer had been made.
Heller also makes the mistake of attributing the stopping of the deportation of 30,000 Jews from Slovakia in October 1942 as due to a bribe. Slovakia was the first country in Europe whose Jews were deported. In fact it was Vatican pressure on the puppet leader, Josef Tiso, a Catholic priest, which was responsible for the calling off of the deportations.
Heller quotes Tom Segev as saying, “Only a few survivors owed their lives to the efforts of the Zionist movement.” Not only is this true, but thousands more lost their lives because of the Zionist movement’s campaign against rescue to anywhere but Palestine.
The author quotes Segev as saying that “the Jewish leaders of Palestine never made the rescue of European Jews into an overwhelming national priority”. This was an understatement. The Zionist leaders focussed almost exclusively on building their state, to the exclusion of the holocaust. But this did not stop Zionism from using the holocaust as a propaganda weapon. Heller mentions the 32 members of Haganah, the Jewish paramilitary group in Palestine, who were parachuted into Europe in 1944 and accepts the story that they were sent to fight the Nazis. He writes: “All praise must be given to these heroes.”
But this is not true. According to the memoirs of Yoel Palgi, the only Hungarian parachutist to survive, the aim was “to reconstruct the crumbling Zionist youth movements there after the war”. Yechiam Weitz wrote: “While the parachutists outwardly defined theirs as a rescue mission, ... their primary goal was in effect to influence the survivors to choose Palestine as their ultimate destination.”10
Heller mentions the Livingstone affair, when Ken stated that Hitler supported Zionism. Heller says that “Livingstone’s wording was regrettable” and that “Hitler certainly didn’t believe in Zionism: his agents only worked with Zionists in the 30s to get Jews out of Germany.” Livingstone, who has been repeatedly misquoted by the bourgeois press, is misquoted again here. He said that Hitler ‘supported’, not ‘believed in’, Zionism.
And it is not true that Nazi agents only worked with the Zionists in order to get rid of Germany’s Jews. There was also an ideological congruity, which was expressed in the Ha’avara agreement. The collaboration was wider. The Zionist leaders welcomed Hitler and the Nazis to power, believing that they would benefit. This was what became known as ‘cruel Zionism’.
Zionism never hesitates to mention the collaboration of the mufti of Jerusalem, but omits to mention the “loathsome offer to collaborate with Hitler” of the Stern Gang - one of whose leaders, Yitzhak Shamir, twice became Israel’s prime minister. The Stern Gang “under Stern’s inspiration praised the Nazis extravagantly for locking the Polish Jews into the ghettos, contrasting this favourably with the conditions of Jewish life in Poland before the Nazi invasion”. Was there any greater example of the madness of the Zionist fringe?
Heller gives us a taste of a number of subjects that require much greater in-depth study. He describes how the leadership of American Jewry betrayed the Jews of Europe. In the section, ‘Arthur Goldberg whitewashes the passivity of the Jewish elite’, Heller tells the story of the bad conscience of the leadership of American Jewry.
In the 1980s “the American Jewish Commission on the Holocaust” was set up, chaired by Arthur Goldberg. It was initially financed by Jack Eisner, a former Warsaw ghetto fighter. Part of its draft, which was leaked to the New York Times, stated:
In retrospect, one incontrovertible fact stands out above all others: In the face of Hitler’s total war of extermination against the Jews of Europe, the Jewish leadership in America at no stage decided to proclaim total mobilisation for rescue.
It said that the Zionists’ “exclusive concentration on Palestine as a solution” made them unable to work for any other alternative.
Heller cites the dissident revisionist, Peter Bergson, who told Stephen Wise, the leader of American Zionists: 
If you were inside a burning house, would you want the people outside to scream, ‘Save them’, or to scream, ‘Save them by taking them to the Waldorf Astoria’?”
The Zionists literally sabotaged rescue to anywhere but Palestine. Not content with this, they spearheaded a campaign against those who did want to do something - notably the Emergency Committee to Rescue Europe’s Jews. Stephen Wise and Nahum Goldman advised the Roosevelt administration to deport the committee’s two leaders, describing them as “worse than Hitler”.
Not surprisingly, the Zionists did not like the draft report of the Commission and it never saw the light of day. Eisner withdrew his financial backing when he saw that the vested interests would not allow the truth to emerge. Nahum Goldman, who was president of the Zionist Organisation, admitted that he and Wise received a telegram from Jewish Resistance in Europe exhorting “12 top American Jews to go and sit night and day on the steps outside the White House until the Allies are moved to bomb Auschwitz and Treblinka”.
The US airforce had the capacity to bomb Auschwitz, because it was already bombing Buna/Auschwitz III, where the rubber factories were based. Indeed they bombed one of the gas chambers by accident. Yet the American leaders refused to do anything other than make polite requests. As Heller notes, on June 11 1944, the Jewish Agency executive committee refused to call for the bombing of Auschwitz.
Israel’s Nazis
In chapter 5, Heller focuses on ‘Israel - employing German Nazis’. This is the remarkable story of how the Israeli state employed leading Nazis after the war as agents. The most notorious was Walter Rauff, who had personally designed the ‘Black Raven’ mobile gas chambers that were first used between 1939 and 1941 to murder up to 100,000 handicapped Germans. These same gas trucks made their way to Poland, where they formed the first extermination camp at Chełmno at the beginning of December 1941. Thousands of Jews and gypsies from Łódź - the second major ghetto in Poland - were murdered there.
Rauff’s New York Times obituary states: “Nazi hunters and governments that sought his extradition, however, estimated that as many as 250,000 people - most of them east European Jews - died in the vans.” However, this did not deter the Israeli government from employing him. Israel not only paid Rauff, but also arranged for an Italian visa. Rauff and his family sailed from Genoa to South America courtesy of the Israeli state.
Another agent was the swashbuckling Otto Skorzeny. He was responsible for helping install the Nazi Arrow Cross regime in Hungary. Heller states that the result of this for Hungarian Jews was the resumption of the deportations, with the loss of 100,000 lives. I disagree. About 50,000 Jews were murdered, primarily as a result of gang attacks by Arrow Cross thugs and in the forced march of Jews to Vienna on November 8 1944.
It is untrue that deportations were resumed. I have seen no evidence of this. A report on the deportation of Hungarian Jews to Austria by Eleonore Lappin confirms this. After the overthrow of regent Miklós Horthy and prime minister Géza Lakatos on October 15, Eichmann returned two days later to Budapest:
However, by this juncture in mid-October, the machinery of annihilation in Auschwitz had already been disrupted and shut down. On October 7 1944, prisoners in the Sonderkommando had destroyed at least one of the gas chambers. A short time later, gassings were halted and Himmler gave the order to tear down the gas chambers and crematoria. This was carried out in November and December 1944.
This is why, when SS Brigadeführer Hugo Blaschke, mayor of Vienna, begged for labour to help build anti-tank fortifications, Jews were forced to travel by foot until Arrow Cross leader Ferenc Szálasi halted the march. The rail network had all but collapsed.
Skorzeny had kidnapped Horthy’s son, rolling him up in a carpet and threatening to execute him if Horthy did not resign. Skorzeny bore a major responsibility for the murder of Jews which followed, but this did not stop Israel from recruiting him as a spy. Although Israel made great play of its capture of Adolf Eichmann in Argentina in 1960, Heller shows how it was not interested in the capture of any other Nazis, such as Josef Mengele, the notorious SS doctor in Auschwitz.
Israel and anti-Semites
The final three chapters bring us up to date, beginning with chapter 6: ‘Selling guns to Nazi-admiring juntas’. The Bolivian junta under Hugo Banzer was hiding Klaus Barbie, head of the Gestapo in Lyons:
In August 1973, Israeli foreign minister Abba Eban visited Bolivia and was asked at a press conference whether he had spoken to its dictatorial leader, Hugo Banzer, about Barbie. Eban responded that it was an internal matter of the Bolivian legal system, and that it would be up to Bolivia to decide whether or not to extradite Barbie to France.
What kind of ‘Jewish’ state refuses to call for the extradition of a Nazi responsible for the murder of at least 4,000 Jews?
When Luis García Meza seized power in Bolivia in 1980, aiming to create a Pinochet-style government, US president Jimmy Carter refused to recognise his regime. Israel, however, had no such scruples. As Heller observes, “The Carter administration applied sanctions against Meza. In contrast Israel gave Meza economic and military aid.”
John Brown in Ha’aretz described how
Israel also armed Bolivia’s military regimes, knowing that Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie was part of the regime. Legal documents used to convict the head of the junta also showed that Barbie’s death squads used Israeli Uzis [submachine guns].
What was Israel’s motive? A few million in arms sales! As Israel Shahak, the Israeli human rights activist and holocaust survivor said in 1984, it was “beyond shame”. He added: “During this time the Israel of prime ministers Rabin and Begin did nothing - actually less than nothing - as they aided the fascist regime.”
People should bear this in mind when they consider the ‘anti-Semitism’ attacks on Jeremy Corbyn. Heller describes Israeli relationships with Paraguay under the dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner, an open Nazi admirer. Paraguay played host to Mengele. When the Israeli ambassador, Benjamin Varon was asked about Mengele, his standard answer was: “The Israel government is not searching for Dr Mengele - the Federal Republic of Germany is.”
The seventh chapter, ‘Modern-day collaboration with Jew-haters’, includes Viktor Orbán, prime minister of Hungary, who is intent on rehabilitating admiral Horthy, the pro-Nazi leader of Hungary during the war, whom he described as an “exceptional statesman”.
Heller says that Horthy set up the ‘labour service system’ for men considered ‘unworthy’ of being in the military, such as Jews. Heller says that 45,000 Jews served in it. My own understanding is that the figure was double this and that half of them survived. Ironically the labour service became a source of refuge and rescue.
Heller describes how in 2019 Netanyahu gave a warm welcome to the premier of Lithuania, Saulius Skvernelis. A year earlier Netanyahu had praised Skvernelis for fighting anti-Semitism despite the fact that Lithuanian schools make into heroes the anti-Soviet nationalists who were involved in the mass killing of Jews. 95% of Lithuanian Jews were exterminated - the highest proportion in Europe.
Israel has cultivated warm relationships with a whole series of racist regimes and figures, such as Austria’s neo-Nazi leader, Heinz Christian Strache, and India’s Hindu nationalist leader, Narendra Modi. Israel even supplies weapons to Ukraine’s neo-Nazi militia, the Azov Battalion .
The final chapter is on ‘Trump, Netanyahu and the eruption of US anti-Semitism’. Trump is an ideal example of how an anti-Semite can, at the same time, be the most ardent Zionist. The man for whom neo-Nazis at Charlottesville were “fine people” invited the anti-Semitic pastor, John Hagee, who believes that Hitler was a “half-breed Jew”, to preside at the opening of the US embassy in Jerusalem.
In short, when Zionists talk about ‘anti-Semitism’, it is a camouflage to hide their own collaboration with genuine anti-Semites.
Heller has done us a great service in writing this all too short book. I can heartily recommend it as an hors d’oeuvres. However it is only a taster. The full story of Zionist collaboration with anti-Semites, the Nazis included, will take up a much larger volume.
Tony Greenstein



  1. . J Schlosberg Labour, anti-Semitism and the news: a disinformation paradigm: www.mediareform.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Labour-antisemitism-and-the-news-FINAL-PROOFED.pdf.
  2. . www.marxists.org/history/etol/document/mideast/toi/chap3-11.html. In his diaries (p6) he wrote: “In Paris, as I have said, I achieved a freer attitude towards anti-Semitism, which I now began to understand historically and to pardon. Above all, I recognised the emptiness and futility of trying to ‘combat’ anti-Semitism.”
  3. . T Herzl The complete diaries of Theodor Herzl New York 1960, p231.
  4. . The Guardian February 16 2015.
  5. . See my article, ‘Zionist-Nazi collaboration and the holocaust - a historical aberration? Lenni Brenner revisited’ Journal of Holy Land Studies November 2014’.
  6. . C Weizmann Trial and error pp90-91.
  7. . D Rosenthal, ‘Chaim Arlosoroff, 65 years after his assassination’ Jewish Frontier May-June 1998. In 1937 over 31 million Deutsche Mark were transferred (FR Nicosia The Third Reich and the Palestine question London 2000, p213).
  8. . E Black The transfer agreement Washington 2009, p253.
  9. . http://pdfs.jta.org/1935/1935-12-10_105.pdf
  10. . Y Weitz, ‘Jewish refugees and Zionist policy during the holocaust’ Middle Eastern Studies Vol 30, No2, April 1994, p359. Lenni Brenner in Zionism in the age of the dictators (1983) made the same mistake.





[i]            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. 
[ii]           Memo of 17.12.38 to Zionist Executive cited by Machover-Offenburg Khamsin 6, p. 58, Arie Bober, The Other Israel, p.171 https://tinyurl.com/y692ngan, John Quigley, The Case for Palestine: An International Law Perspective, pp. 26-27, Duke University Press, 2005. See also New Premises for a False Conclusion ‒ Moshe Machover, Matzpen, 10.5.67., https://tinyurl.com/y6rtdzsw for a longer quotation by Yigal Elam in “New Premises for the Same Zionism” in Ot, No. 2 Winter 1967, which puts this in perspective.

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24 November 2017

Why we should not hesitate to compare Zionism and the Israeli state with the Nazis

Challenging the Zionist & its Abuse of the Holocaust


‘Write and Record’ were the last words of Jewish historian Simon Dubnow as he was murdered by the Nazis in the Riga ghetto on December 8th 1941.  It is an injunction we should take to heart and add a third imperative – we should Write, Record and Compare.

If there is one thing that Zionists hate, it is when analogies are made between Israel, Zionism and the Nazis or conclusions are drawn from the Holocaust.  It is a cast iron rule that only the Zionist movement is entitled to compare or equate its opponents with the Nazis.

This Zionist attitude is backed up by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of anti-Semitism, which was adopted by the governments of 31 countries, including the anti-Semitic governments of Poland and Hungary, in May 2016. According to the IHRA, anti-Semitism ‘could, taking into account the overall context, include... drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.’  The IHRA definition of anti-Semitism is almost identical to the EUMC Working Definition on Anti-Semitism which was dropped by the EU's Fundamental Rights Agency in 2013.
The report in Der Angriff, Goebbel's paper, about the 1933 trip to Palestine at the guest of the Kibbutzim, of Baron von Mildenstein, the of the Jewish section of the Gestapo
Following the recommendation of the Anti-Semitism in the UK Report of the Home Affairs Select Committee in October 2016, Theresa May adopted, this ‘non-legally binding definition’ of anti-Semitism in December 2016.  Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party subsequently adopted the IHRA but without its 11 examples as was confirmed in the Party’s Race and Faith Manifesto.
The IHRA definition was severely criticised by Hugh Tomlinson QC for being  ‘unclear and confusing’.  Sir Stephen Sedley, a Jewish former Court of Appeal Judge was scathing about the definition in Defining Anti-Semitism.  It fails the first test of any definition: it is indefinite.’  Sedley characterised the purpose of the IHRA as being to ‘permit perceptions of Jews which fall short of expressions of racial hostility to be stigmatised as anti-Semitic.’
The coin the Nazis struck in celebration of Baron von Mildenstein and his wife's travel to Palestine in 1933
In the spring of 2016 Jeremy Corbyn commissioned a Report by the former Director of Liberty, Shami Chakrabarti. In the wake of Corbyn’s election as leader of the Labour Party the Guardian, the tabloids and various Zionist organisations launched a campaign whose premise was that anti-Semitism was endemic in the Labour Party.
Ruth Smeeth MPs 'anti-semitic' tantrum

The Chakrabarti Report was published on 30 June 2016. At its press conference Ruth Smeeth MP gave an excellent demonstration of how to manufacture a fake incident of anti-Semitism when she accused Marc Wadsworth, a Black anti-racist activist, of anti-Semitism. A cursory look at the film shows that there were no tears and no anti-Semitism. What we had was a Zionist MP, who was challenged for exchanging notes with a Telegraph journalist, shrieking ‘how dare you’. Marc didn't didn’t even know even know she was Jewish. His primary offence was one of lèse-majesté but it was a good example of how the media can create fake news, distorting and changing reality until it accords with an establishment narrative..

Chakrabarti was a mixed bag.  Its sections dealing with Labour Party procedure, natural justice and
the right of the accused to be accorded due process were good. Where Chakrabarti fell down was on the question of racism. It substituted the subjective for the objective, the personal for the political. Chakrabarti treated Zionism as a manifestation of Jewish identity rather than a racist and reactionary colonial ideology which led to the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. [Chakrabarti – A Missed Opportunity to Develop an Anti-Racist Policy for Labour] The Labour Party has now removed the Report from the Internet but I have restored it!
dozens of Israeli Police are used to ensure the demolition of the Bedouin village of Umm al-Hiran - one Palestinian school teacher was murdered by the Police
Despite knowing nothing about Zionism or the Holocaust Chakrabarti proceeded to give her opinions on the use of Holocaust comparisons or metaphors in a section entitled ‘Insensitive and incendiary language, metaphors, distortions and comparisons’: 

‘it is always incendiary to compare the actions of Jewish people or institutions anywhere in the world to those of Hitler or the Nazis or to the perpetration of the Holocaust. Indeed such remarks can only be intended to be incendiary rather than persuasive. Why? Because the Shoah is still in people's living family experience and because, if every human rights atrocity is described as a Holocaust, Hitler's attempted obliteration of the Jewish people is diminished or de-recognised in our history as is the history of a global minority that has had cause to feel, at worst, persecuted and, at best, vulnerable for thousands of years. Other hideous human rights atrocities from African slavery to the killing fields of Cambodia, the Armenian and Rwandan genocides are all of course to be remembered and described, but diluting their particularity or comparing degrees of victimhood and evil does no service to anyone.
The American-Jewish comedian Jon Stewart
Apart from conflating criticism of Israel with ‘the actions of Jewish people’ Chakrabarti was oblivious to the fact that it is the Israeli state and its supporters who routinely compare their opponents with the Nazis. Chakrabarti also assumed that the Holocaust was a Jewish only affair and she subscribed to the myth of the Jew as the eternal victim (‘vulnerable for thousands of years’).  A myth whose counterpart was Goebbel’s Eternal Jew.
Even the Jewish Chronicle opposed the Zionists Transfer Agreement with the Nazis
The Holocaust in the service of Israel

The Holocaust has been employed shamelessly by Israel. The extermination of European Jewry is the principal argument that is used to justify the creation of the State of Israel. If it were not for the Holocaust how would it be possible to justify a situation where Israel has ruled over 5 million Palestinians for half a century, without according them either political or civil rights?  In ‘Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood’ Idith Zertal wrote that

There has not been a war in Israel from 1948 till the present ongoing burst of violence which began in October 2000, that has not been perceived , defined and conceptualised in terms of the Holocaust.’ (p.4)

In every war Israel imagines itself as the collective Holocaust victim facing annihilation, even though it has always possessed a vast military superiority.  Even in its blitzkrieg on Gaza in 2014, with a kill ratio of 30-1, nearly all of whom were civilians, Israel portrayed itself as fighting a war of ‘self-defence.’ The Holocaust has enabled a nuclear state, armed to the teeth to create an image of itself as the perpetual victim.

It is Israelis themselves who have compared their behaviour to that of the Nazis. In order to create a Jewish state Zionist militias, the Labour Zionist Haganah and Palmach in particular, ethnically cleansed Palestine of ¾ million inhabitants. This involved a series of massacres, the most famous of which was Deir Yassin in April 1948. 
A Jewish-Nazi settler in Hebron attacks a Palestinian woman as troops look on with approval
In November 1948, Eliezer Peri, the editor of Mapam’s paper Al Hamishmar, received a letter describing a massacre at al-Dawayima. Benny Morris estimated that ‘hundreds’ were killed. Agriculture Minister, Aharon Cisling referred to a letter he had received about the atrocities declaring: ‘I couldn’t sleep all night ... This is something that determines the character of the nation ... Jews too have committed Nazi acts.’ [The Birth of the Palestine Refugee Problem Revisited, p.488., Benny Morris, Cambridge University Press, 2004]. 

Similar comments were made by Yosef Nahmani, a senior officer of Haganah. He was stunned by the cruelty of Israeli troops towards Arab villagers. He described how in Safsaf, the villagers raised the white flag but 60-70 men and women were massacred and asked: ‘where did they learn cruel conduct such as that of the Nazis?’ According to one officer, ‘the most eager were those who had come from the [concentration] camps… [Zertal, p.171].
Thousands turned out for the Jewish War Veteran's demonstration against the Nazis

70 years ago at least some Zionists were capable of appreciating the depths to which they had sunk in their desire to achieve a racially pure state.  When, in 2016, an Israeli soldier Elor Azaria shot in cold blood a severely wounded Palestinian, 57% of Israelis supported his actions compared to just 20% who opposed him.  At a  large Tel Aviv demonstration in his support, which mobilised under a banner ‘Kill them all’ the mob began chanting that favourite slogan of Israel’s Right - ‘Death to the Arabs’ - Ma’avet La’aravim.  There was also a poster bearing the slogan ‘My honour is my loyalty’, the slogan of the SS.

When thousands of settler youth run rampage through the Arab section of Jerusalem on Jerusalem Day, under the protection of the Police, chanting ‘Death to the Arabs’ you would have to be blind to the fact that similar chants were heard in Germany and Poland 80 years ago – except that then they were chanting ‘Death to the Jews’.

As Zertal noted whilst Zionism nationalised the Holocaust harnessing it to the chariot of racism ‘it excluded the direct bearers of this memory – some quarter of a million Holocaust survivors who had immigrated to Israel.’  (p.5) The impoverishment of the actual Holocaust survivors in Israel, despite the billions Israel received by way of reparations is a scandal.  Israel Is Waiting for Its Holocaust Survivors to Die.

Zionism assimilates the Holocaust as part of its seamless narrative of victimisation yet Chakrabarti held that if the critics or victims of Zionism respond in kind then that is anti-Semitic. For example:

The term ‘kapos’ is wielded by Zionists against critics of Israel (not even anti-Zionists). It was popularised by Trump’s appointment of David Friedman as Ambassador to Israel who used it against the liberal Zionists of J-Street. It is a particularly obnoxious accusation. Kapos were people who were themselves concentration camp prisoners.  They had no choice but to act as the Nazis’ foremen. Their life expectancy was little more than those they supervised.  Some behaved decently whilst others were without doubt cruel but no kapo had any choice about their role.  To have refused the role meant instant death. 

Contrasts this with the voluntary and willing collaboration of the Zionist movement with the Nazis. No one forced the Jewish Agency to conclude Ha'avara, a trading agreement with the Nazi government, whose effect was to stave off a German economic crisis that threatened to bring down the Nazi regime in its infancy.  Edwin Black  noted that ‘the Jewish-led , world-wide anti-Nazi boycott was indeed the one weapon that Hitler feared.’ [The Transfer Agreement, 1999 p.21] At the same time as Jews were enthusiastically building the Boycott, the Zionists’ concern was that German Jewish ‘wealth had to be saved.’ [Black p. 226]  What mattered was the millions of frozen Reichmarks that belonged to Germany’s Jews. The result was that ‘the Nazi party and the Zionist Organisation shared a common stake in the recovery of Germany.  If the Hitler economy fell, both sides would be ruined.’ Black, p. 253]
The Sephardic Rabbi of Israel Ovadia Yosef who supported the genocide of Palestinians
The examples are legion of Zionist weaponisation of the Holocaust. Prime Minister Menachem Begin compared Yasser Arafat in Beirut to Adolf Hitler in his bunker. Ha’aretz observed that Calling your political rival a Nazi is a time-hallowed tradition in Israel

In 2008 Israeli Deputy Defence Minister Matan Vilnai warned Palestinians living in Gaza that they were bringing ‘a bigger Shoah’ on themselves.  Israeli minister warns of Holocaust for Gaza if violence continues.  It was ‘moderate’ Zionist Abba Eban who talked of the 1967 Green Line as the ‘Auschwitz border’.

Within the Jewish community in Israel the Holocaust and the Nazis function as a political metaphor. At times of conflict Secular Jews daub swastikas on the walls of synagogues and defile prayer books, religious scrolls etc. Orthodox Jews do likewise to their secular counterparts and religious fascists paint swastikas on Christian churches. Oriental Jews, for whom the Holocaust was a European affair, paint slogans such as "Ashkenazim - Back to Auschwitz" on the latters' cars and buildings. [Jewish Chronicle, 'Swastikas in Jerusalem', 19.3.82, 'Swastikas on Cars', 31.12.82, 'Israel mourns sacrilege', 20.6.86., Guardian 18.6.86, 'Synagogues burned in revenge', Socialist Organiser 'Why Zionists are daubing Swastikas in Tel-Aviv', 20.1.82]. 
It is not simply a question of our right to respond to the Zionists’ weaponisation of the Holocaust. There are good reasons in themselves for why we should compare Zionism to the Nazis. This is not in order to hurt or insult but to enable self-reflection. It is precisely because Zionism uses the Nazis and the Holocaust as the ultimate evil that we are duty bound to point out the similarity between the Nazis’ methods and those of the Zionists.
Contrasting dead Jewish children under Hitler with dead Palestinian children under Netanyahu
What Chakrabarti was effectively saying was that the Nazi era should be isolated from history. Part of this is sheer ignorance. Hitler and the Nazis ruled for over 12 years, the last four of which, from June 1941 onwards were the years of the Holocaust.  Chakrabarti conflated the Holocaust and Nazi domination whereas the Third Reich began in 1933 and the Holocaust started with the invasion of Russia in June 1941.

It may be a terrible thing to have to point out the similarities between the Zionism and Nazism ideologically but it wasn’t us but the Zionists who first drew such comparisons. On June 21st 1933 the German Zionist Federation sent a long memo to Hitler ‘outlining those Zionist tenets that were consistent with National Socialist ideology.’ [Black p. 175] The whole memo can be read in Lucy Dawidowicz’s, A Holocaust Reader, p.150-153.
Chakrabarti is also wrong to suggest that comparisons between Israel and the Nazis minimises or obliterates Jewish peoples’ experience of the Holocaust. On the contrary it seeks to draw lessons from that experience and to warn against any repetition. Holocaust analogies are the common currency of political debate in Israel. Zionism uses the slogan of ‘Never Again’. For anti-racists and anti-fascists this means never again for everyone, not just Jews. Is the lesson of the Holocaust going to be a racist or an anti-racist one?
Graffitti in Irael - Rivlin (Israel's President) is a Nazi
If we are to do justice to the memory of the victims of the Holocaust, Jewish and non-Jewish then far from refraining from drawing comparison with the Nazis we should be making them whenever Nazi-like behaviour surfaces. The Nazis were not an exception to but very much a part of history. They didn’t arise from nowhere.
The Nazi Metaphor
Taunts of ‘appeasement’ have been repeatedly made against those who oppose imperialism’s attacks on third world countries. Third world dictators have consistently been equated with Hitler. Those who opposed the invasion of Iraq were ‘appeasing’ a new Hitler. [The opponents of war on Iraq are not the appeasers, Seamus Milne, Guardian 13.2.03.]  A generation before, opponents of the Suez War were equated to those who appeased Hitler.  Nasser was the ‘Hitler of the Nile.’ 

There are clearly similarities between Israel today and Nazi Germany. This is not to say the two states are identical or that Israel is fascist or planning to exterminate the Palestinians (although genocidal ideas are common in Zionism today). Israel is a settler colonial state, the most racist state in the world. Israel calls itself a Jewish Democratic state, but in practice Israel is democratic for Jews and Jewish for Arabs.


In Israel a variety of legal devices such as the Reception Committees Act bars Arabs from 93% of Israeli land. Jews in Nazi Germany were also barred from ‘Aryan’ land.  Israel boasts that it calculates the calorific value of food allowed to enter Gaza. [Israel used 'calorie count' to limit Gaza food during blockade, critics claim]  Hans Frank, Governor General of the Generalgouvernment in Poland also strictly limited the number of calories allowed to the inhabitants of the Warsaw ghetto.  Granted the Israeli level is higher than that in Warsaw where over 80,000 Jews starved to death but the principle is the same.
US actors including Edward G Robinson supporting a Boycott of Nazi Germany
It is equally right to compare the sealing off of Gaza to the Warsaw Ghetto. Marek Edelman, the last Commander of the Jewish Resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto compared the Palestinian fighters to the Jewish resistance fighters. [Letter to 'Palestinian Partisans' Raises International Storm, Ha’aretz 9.8.02, bringing on his head a storm of Zionist outrage. 

Transfer

Ideologically there are many similarities between the attempt to make the German Reich Judenrein, free of Jews and the repeated attempts by Israel to ethnically cleanse Palestine of its Arab and non-Jewish inhabitants.  The Nazis pursued a goal of racial purification, of making Germany purely Aryan. It was blood and soil ethno-nationalism. How is this different from the Koenig Memorandum aimed at Judaifying the Galilee, or the Prawer Plan to Judaify the Negev? How is Zionism’s concern with the ‘demographic problem’, i.e. too many non-Jews in the Jewish state, different from Nazi racial ideas?

Zionism from its inception debated and pursued the ‘transfer’ of the Palestinians and non-Jews from Palestine and then Israel. Transfer did not begin in 1947-8, it was inherent in the very concept of a Jewish settler state in a land occupied by non-Jews.
In 1919 the King Crane Commission, which was appointed by Woodrow Wilson, reported that ‘The fact came out repeatedly in the Commission’s conference with Jewish representatives that the Zionists looked forward to a practically complete dispossession of the present non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine.’ [Tom Suarez, p.44 State of Terror] Transfer is still as relevant today as it was a hundred years ago. Transfer is Zionism’s ‘ideal’ solution to the ‘problem’ of 4 million Palestinians living in the West Bank. How is this different to the Nazi plans to settle ethnic Germans in an 'empty' Wartheland (Warthegau)?
The Holocaust
Henry Friedlander [The Origins of Nazi Genocide – from Euthenasia to the Final Solution, 1995] argued that the Holocaust began in 1939 in Hartheim Castle and the other five killing ‘hospitals’ of Germany. Hitler’s obsession with Eugenics, the ‘science’ of selective breeding resulted in the T-4 ‘Euthenasia’ Programme which murdered up to ¾ million disabled Germans. T-4 came from the example of the United States where forced sterilisations of women considered to be unfit to breed was the policy of many states. Hitler told his fellow Nazis that ‘I have studied with interest the laws of several American states concerning prevention of reproduction by people whose progeny would, in all probability, be of no value or be injurious to the racial stock’.
During the Reich's first 10 years, eugenicists in America welcomed Hitler's plans. Indeed ‘they were envious as Hitler rapidly began sterilising hundreds of thousands and systematically eliminating non-Aryans from German society.... Ten years after Virginia passed its 1924 sterilisation act, Joseph Dejarnette, superintendent of Virginia's Western State Hospital, complained in the Richmond Times-Dispatch: "The Germans are beating us at our own game." Edwin Black, Hitler's debt to America, Guardian 6 February 2004,
The Nazis’ forced sterilization program was partly inspired by that of California.  In 1927 in Buck v Bell, the US Supreme Court permitted the compulsory sterilisation of handicapped patients. Oliver Wendell Holmes, speaking for the 8-1 majority ‘presaged the arguments used later to justify eugenic killings in Nazi Germany.’  [Friedlander, p.8]  According to Chakrabarti’s 'logic' it would be ‘incendiary’ and cause offence to criticise supporters of eugenics and selective breeding by reference to the Nazis.
Professor Amos Funkenstein, former Head of the Faculty of History at Tel Aviv University, when referring to the controversy over the refusal of soldiers to serve in the Occupied Territories, compared them with soldiers in the German army who refused to serve in concentration or extermination camps. [Tony Greenstein, Holocaust Analogies - Repaying the Mortgage Return 2 March 1990] To those who asked how it was possible to compare the actions of Nazi soldiers with Israelis, Funkenstein replied
“As a historian I know that every comparison is limited. On the other hand, without comparisons, no historiography is possible. Understanding a historical event is a kind of translation into the language of our time. If we would leave every phenomenon in its peculiarity, we could not make this translation. Every translation is an interpretation and every interpretation is also a comparison."

Funkenstein reminded his critics that the leaflets and publications of the Zionist terror groups, Etzel, Lehi and Haganah, talked of the Nazi-British occupation.” [Tony Greenstein, Holocaust Analogies, citing Ha'aretz 9 December 1988, Ronit Matalon].

The Holocaust was the tipping point in the Jewish community world wide.  Before World War II Zionism was in a minority amongst Jews worldwide.  The Zionist idea that Jews did not belong in the countries of their birth, that they formed a separate nation from those they lived amongst was rejected by Jews as a form of anti-Semitism.  Lucien Wolfe, one of the leaders of the Board of Deputies of British Jews declared that:

I have spent most of my life in combating these very doctrines, when presented to me in the form of anti-Semitism, and I can only regard them as the more dangerous when they come to me in the guise of Zionism. They constitute a capitulation to our enemies. [B Destani (ed) The Zionist movement and the foundation of Israel 1839-1972 Cambridge 2004, Vol 1, p727].

It was Hitler who rescued the Zionist movement from obscurity.  It was the murder of 6 million Jews and the refusal of the Western powers to take in the Jewish refugees that made the Zionist argument that Jews could only rely on Jews seem plausible.  The creation of the Israeli state represented the posthumous triumph of the Nazis.

The leadership of the Jewish Agency understood this very well. From the outset of the war the Zionists took a conscious decision that their priority was the building of a Jewish state, not the rescue of Jews from Europe. They actively opposed Jews going anywhere but Palestine. When Britain agreed to the Kindertransport, the admission of 10,000 Jewish children from Germany after the Krystallnacht pogrom, David Ben Gurion was furious:

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. [Yoav Gelber, ‘Zionist policy and the fate of European Jewry 1939-42, p.199, Yad Vashem Studies,, Vol. 12].

Christopher Sykes, a pro-Zionist historian wrote that ‘“From the very beginning of the Nazi disaster, the Zionist leadership determined to wrest political advantage from the tragedy.” [Crossroads to Israel, p.137]

Even Shabtai Teveth, Ben Gurion’s official biographer 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.’ [Shabtai Teveth, The Burning Ground, p.851]
The chapter in Ben Gurion’s biography on the Holocaust was titled ‘Disaster Means Strength’. Teveth described how  

In spite of the certainty that genocide was being carried out, the Jewish Agency Executive did not deviate appreciably from its routine... Two facts can be definitively stated:  Ben Gurion did not put the rescue effort above Zionist politics and he did not regard it as a principle task demanding his personal leadership.’  [p. 848]

Ben Gurion was clear that 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.’ [p. 855]

The Zionist movement understood how the Holocaust could be exploited to serve Zionist purposes. As early as September 1942, when most of Europe’s Jews were still alive, the Zionists were thinking of creating a memorial to them. Mordechai Shenhavi of Kibbutz Mishmar Ha’emek proposed the creation of Yad Vashem which was seen as ‘the very last opportunity to score any financial success.’ [Tom Segev, The Seventh Million, p.430] At this time the JA had not even acknowledged that there was a Holocaust. Segev wrote:

There was no clearer, more grotesque, even macabre expression of the tendency to think of the Holocaust in the past tense: while the Yishuv discussed the most appropriate way to memorialise them, most of the victims were still alive.’ [The Seventh Million, p.141]

Gerhard Riegner, the World Jewish Congress representative in Geneva during the War articulated how the Zionist movement saw the Holocaust.  He believed that ‘Auschwitz was not only a national memory belonging to the Jewish people… it was also an important political asset. Among other things it served the diplomatic efforts of both the WJC and Israel.’ [Segev p.474]

For Zionism the proposed Jewish State was eternal. The Jews who died in the Holocaust would have died anyway.  This is not dissimilar to the fascist idea that the State is everything, the individual is nothing.  When they tell us we should not compare Zionism and Israel with the Holocaust we should ask, ‘why not, what have they got to fear’?