What Kind of Person Writes a Biography With the Intention of Distorting What Their Subject Said & Justifying their Silencing? Step forward the Guardian’s Freedland
Rudolf Vrba interviewed by Claude Lanzmann
about Rudolf Kasztner & Rabbi Weissmandel
In The Art of Biography Virginia Woolf described how the
biographer
must ‘detect(ing) falsity,unreality... His sense of truth must be alive and on
tiptoe.
By telling us
the true facts, by sifting the little from the big, and shaping the whole so
that we perceive the outline, the biographer does more to stimulate the
imagination than any poet or novelist save the very greatest.
Jonathan Freedland in The Escape
Artist, set out to do the exact opposite of what Woolf advised. Freedland
was determined that the ‘true facts’ wouldn’t interfere with his narrative.
In a letter to Arnold Zweig, Freud wrote that ‘To be a biographer you must tie yourself up in lies,
concealments, hypocrisies.’ It was as if Freud’s prescient
passage was written with Freedland in mind!
Freedland’s
concern when he wrote his biography was not to explain why Vrba was hostile to
Zionism. He sole concern was to appropriate Vrba’s record of heroism whilst divorcing it from his
anti-Zionism. So much so that at one point in his book we are told that Vrba ‘rooted for Israel’
A
good biography must do more than just tell a story, it must bring to life the
person who is the subject, warts and all. It must delve into what made them
tick. Otherwise it is just a recitation of who did what and when.
I
confess that when I first learnt that Freedland was bringing out a book on
Rudolf Vrba I smelt a rat. Freedland is someone who could see ‘anti-Semitism’
in his grandmother’s grave. It was no surprise therefore when I read his book.
Below is the blog that Jonathan Cook, a prize-winning ex-Guardian journalist wrote about my article in Electronic Intifada and my last blog
Freedland
caricatures Vrba’s views and erects straw men in order to demolish them. Vrba
was someone I knew quite a lot about, having written a chapter about him in my
own book. Freedland’s behaviour simply confirms my previous description of him as
Britain’s
most dishonest journalist, in a field which is crowded with
competitors.
Freedland’s
purpose was not to research and explain the background to Vrba’s criticism of
Zionism but to impose his own views on Vrba and pretend that his anti-Zionism
was just an aberration, a misunderstanding that could be excised without
harming the heroic narrative that Freedland wanted to construct.
However
this caused a dilemma because how could Freedland explain why Vrba was unknown
in Israel and why he had been removed by Zionism’s holocaust historians from
the history of the holocaust if not because of his anti-Zionist views?
In
the end Freedland ends up justifying the silencing of the very person he is
writing his Hollywood-style biography about. As Jonathan Cook says,
now that Vrba has been politically neutered and made acceptable, he is fit to
star in a Hollywood movie that will enrich Freedland.
Freedland
struggles to justify the deliberate and conscious decision of Yehuda Bauer and
the stable of Yad
Vashem’s holocaust historians to erase all trace of Vrba. But
he tries!! Vrba was
‘not an easy
sell in Israel or in the mainstream Jewish diaspora.’
He was an
awkward witness... (as) was his tendency to refer to
the Jews whom he blamed as ‘Zionists.’”
‘handing a platform to Rudolf Vrba may have come to
seem like a risk.’
Even worse Vrba
refused to
“soften his message to make it more palatable.”
And Vrba even believed
that Zionists
“like Hitler believed in a ‘master race.’”
What
is noticeable is that Freedland doesn’t actually quotes Vrba’s views on
Zionism. Such as when he wrote, in his
memoirs in the Daily Herald in
February 1961 of the Hungarian Zionists that they were a
small group of quislings (who)
knew what was happening to their brethren in Hitler's gas chambers and bought
their own lives with the price of silence.
Such
views must have been painful for Freedland to read and listen to (there are
many long recordings of Vrba). The problem for Freedland was that Zionism has
no equivalent heroes to Vrba and Marek Edelman. If anyone else had said half
the things that Vrba said about Zionism and its collaboration with the Nazis during
the Corbyn era, Freedland would have instantly called them ‘anti-Semitic’ and
demanded their expulsion. It was indeed a dilemma.
Rudolf Kasztner - the Zionist Collaborator with Eichmann Who Kept Quiet About Auschwitz in Return for a Train Carrying Leading Zionists and Rich Jews Out of Hungary - Freedland naturally defended him
Vrba
was unknown until Claude Lanzmann, who I also have a section on in my book,
interviewed him at length for his film Shoah.
Lanzmann was a Zionist and he tried to shut down Vrba when he expressed his detestation
of Zionism and its Kasztners.
As
we know only too well, when it comes to what is happening in Gaza the Israeli
state and Zionists lie, lie and lie again. However this is not always true when
it comes to the history of Zionism and the holocaust. For many Zionists writing
about their own record is cathartic even if they end up excusing it. What they
say to themselves in their own journals is different from their propaganda to
the world. Most of my book uses Zionist not anti-Zionist sources.
For
example Shabtai Teveth, the official biographer of David Ben-Gurion, the first
Prime Minister of Israel and the Chair of the Jewish Agency before that, was extremely honest
about Ben-Gurion’s attitudes during the holocaust in the final chapter ‘Disaster Means Strength’of
his book Ben-Gurion: The Burning
Ground 1886-1948 he explained
Ben-Gurion’s attitude to the holocaust..
The very title of the chapter was indicative. The
disaster he referred to was the holocaust itself and for Ben-Gurion its meaning
was the strengthening of the Zionist movement. Teveth concluded that:
If
there was a line in Ben-Gurion’s mind between the beneficial disaster and an
all-destroying catastrophe, it must have been a very fine one. (p.851)
Freedland
however is not a historian, he is a propagandist. He fronted, via his Guardian columns, the dishonest
attacks against Corbyn. Freedland never failed to invent a pretext for alleging
that Corbyn was anti-Semitic or, at the very least, tolerated anti-Semites.
Freedland
decried those who alleged that ‘anti-Semitism’ was being weaponised. He argued
that questioning Jews about allegations of anti-Semitism was like doubting women
or Black people of if they alleged rape or racism.
Freedland
asked whether any other minority would have had their allegations called into
question, thus avoiding the substance of the doubts themselves. Being a
minority is one thing but being an oppressed
minority is quite another but for Freedland Zionist Jews had the ‘right to
define their own oppression’ even if it meant justifying the oppression of the
Palestinians.
The
fact that a substantial minority of Jews were not Zionists and did not agree
with the way anti-Semitism was being weaponised on behalf of Israeli apartheid did
not bother him.
Not
once did Freedland ever spell out what this ‘anti-Semitism’ meant practically.
We know that Black people in this country experience economic discrimination,
police violence and imprisonment, racist attacks etc. but what was it that
Jews, almost entirely White and middle class, experienced? Freedland never said because he dealt in
abstractions and false analogies.
Likewise
with Israel. For Freedland this was a Jewish state. Jews in Britain identified
with it (but not all) therefore it was anti-Semitic to challenge that identity.
It is an argument that has no intellectual or moral basis. Is a challenge to
someone’s identity racist? What about reactionary, sexist or racist identities?
Netanyahu & Viktor Orban have a bromance - Orban believes that Admiral Horthy who presided over the deportation of nearly half a million Jews was an 'exceptional statesman'
Hindu
men used to identify with Sati,
the practice of burning widows on the funeral pyre of their husbands. One
wonders whether Freedland would consider an attack on this custom as racist per
se? There are those whose identity is bound up with female genital mutilation? Should
criticism of that also be considered racist since it is practised still in many
African countries? Why should the identification of some Jews with Apartheid in
Israel be any different?
Of
course all historians approach their subject with preconceived ideas and
prejudices. Neutrality is a rare commodity. However honesty dictates that
people should be open about where they are coming from rather than adopt a
stance of Olympian neutrality.
Freedland
did not merely criticise Vrba for the views he held, he distorted them, lied
about them and then, to cap it all, he justified the attempts to silence them.
When
I wrote Zionism During the Holocaust I
had already concluded that Zionism was a reaction to anti-Semitism that
accepted the conceptual framework of anti-Semitism. I made no pretence to
neutrality but nor did I seek to distort or manipulate what advocates of
Zionism who I quote say. I wanted them to condemn themselves out of their own
mouths.
Freedland
is different. Ostensibly he was writing a biography about someone who everyone
accepts was an incredibly brave hero. Freedland accumulated the evidence, mainly
papers from his family and was set to write the story. But instead of honestly
setting out his stall he constantly ran up against the fact that politically he
disagreed with Vrba on Zionism. So instead of calling out the censorship that Zionism’s
holocaust historians had practised and at which Zionism is so good he ended up
justifying it.
A Liberal Zionist is simply a
Right-wing Zionist on a Journey of Self-Discovery
Freedland
is nothing if not a ‘liberal’ Zionist and is a good example of the hypocrisy of
this breed. In Israel liberal Zionists
are a rare breed. Ethnic Cleansing and Extermination are all the fashion. In
Britain they are more numerous because Britain’s political climate is
different. So what is their role?
The
function of ‘liberal’ Zionists in the West is to beautify what Ben Gvir,
Smotrich and the Kahanists seek to achieve, even whilst they attack them
personally. Their job today is to rationalise and justify the genocide and
ethnic cleansing. October 7, when the Palestinian resistance fought back, is
their rationale.
The
‘liberal’ Zionists go along 100% with the false narrative about a slaughter of
the innocents and the equally false
rape narrative.
The
most left-wing and liberal Zionist group in Britain today is Yachad. They have
issued a statement ‘Why the war must end and what comes next.’
Members of Yachad include Mike Katz, Chair of the Jewish Labour Movement which led the ‘anti-Semitism’ attack against
Corbyn in the Labour Party.
Nowhere
in the statement is there any call for an arms embargo. Quite the contrary they supported Israel’s
attack on Gaza saying that
The atrocities
committed by Hamas on October 7th precipitated a response by Israel,
with the stated aim of removing Hamas from power, in order to prevent a repeat
atrocity against Israelis.
Nowhere do they acknowledge the right of the Palestinians
to resist the occupation. It calls for the removal of Hamas from power in Gaza
because ‘no long-term
ceasefire can hold whilst Hamas remains in power.’
They go on to say that
‘the tens of
thousands of Israelis displaced from the Gaza border won’t be able to return
home without a cast iron assurance that they will be safe.’
I
may have missed it but there is no call for the removal of Ben Gvir, Smotrich, Gallant,
Netanyahu et al. from Israel’s government because otherwise Palestinians won’t
feel safe. There is no call to disarm the Israeli army because Palestinians
aren’t safe.
It
is an entirely chauvinist document from a coloniser’s perspective that presumes
that Israel has the right to dictate who is allowed to rule in Gaza.
They
go on to say that ‘The reality is that
too many Palestinians are paying the price for Hamas’ crimes.’ thus
ignoring 57 years of occupation in Gaza. Are Palestinians in the West Bank also
paying the price of Hamas’ crimes one wonders?
How
about reversing this and saying that the Israelis who died on October 7 paid
the price of a suffocating siege for 17 years, an occupation for 57 years and
the regular slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza as in Operation
Protective Edge when twice as many Palestinians died as
Israelis on October 7.
The
statement was issued on December 12 last year and has not been updated since.
It is as if the chain of torture camps such as Sde
Teiman didn’t exist. The destruction
of Gaza’s health sector, its universities, bombing of schools
was just a figment of our imagination. There is no call for Israel to be
sanctioned for genocide. All that matters is the safety of Israeli colonists
and settlers.
This
is quintessential ‘liberal’ Zionism. The only difference between ‘right-wing’ and
‘liberal’ Zionists is that at least the former are not hypocritical. They don’t
pretend that they support equality and harmony. They are unabashed Jewish
Supremacists. They don’t pretend that there is such a thing as a Jewish
Democratic State.
The
reality is that at the end of the day all Zionists agree on the necessity of a
Jewish Supremacist ethno-nationalist state. They may disagree on tactics and
questions like the judicial reforms but on the necessity of ethnic cleansing
they are as one. Not even the most left-wing Zionist calls for the return of
the Palestinian refugees who were expelled in 1948. Quite the contrary the JLM
is absolutely opposed to this because you can’t have
a Jewish state if the majority of inhabitants are not Jewish.
Whereas
the JLM and Yachad support a two-state solution i.e. a Palestinian Bantustan,
the Right in Israel has a simpler solution – expel the Palestinians. When you
establish a state based on Jewish racial purity then the simpler, more violent
solutions will win out.
The
job of liberal Zionists is to kosher the Kahanists, fascists and open racists
in the Israeli government. No liberal Zionist says that the racists must be
removed from Israel’s government because there would be no one left. Palestinian
safety is not their concern.
The
fact that Jewish neo-Nazis like Ben Gvir, Smotrich, Chikli and all the others
are in Israel’s government is simply a consequence of Israeli ‘democracy’ to
them. The fact that Hamas was also democratically elected by Palestinians is
irrelevant. Democracy only belongs to the coloniser never the colonised. This
is the logic of settler-colonialism and it is this that Freedland signed up to
with his weaponisation of ‘anti-Semitism’.
Yachad
and Freedland don’t support the issuing of arrest warrants against Netanyahu
and Gallant because there is a broad consensus that Israeli war crimes against
Palestinians are not crimes. Some two-thirds
of Israelis are opposed to the prosecution of the soldiers who sodomised Palestinian
prisoners.
Instead
Yachad talked about Hamas atrocities on October 7. Now I’m sure there were some atrocities such as shooting
civilians in cold blood but they pale in comparison with Israel’s mass
slaughter. For Yachad and Freedland Jewish blood is all that matters.
Hamas
did not bomb schools with the express intention of killing children. It did not
snipe children in the head. It did not bomb and attack hospitals. Any
organisation that has any pretence at being ‘liberal’ would call for the overthrow
of a state that allows these atrocities to be passed off as normal.
‘Liberal Zionist’ is an oxymoron. It is not
possible to be a liberal and a Zionist. Which is why, at the end of the day,
given the choice, Yachad will always line up with the Ben Gvirs and Smotriches
than Jewish anti-Zionists. Even Jewish Nazis are preferable to anti-Zionists as
long as they are Zionists.
Yachad
has gone along, as has Freedland and other ‘liberal’ Zionists, with the
narrative that came out of Netanyahu’s government that Hamas engaged in mass
rape on October 7. This was after the 40
Beheaded Babies lies were discredited. I mention this
because on October 8, before Israel’s propaganda narrative had got off the
ground, the Times of Israel posted an article
by a mother, Reut Karp, about
‘an alarming testimony from her children about the murder of their father, Dvir Karp, and his partner Stav in Kibbutz Re’im.’
Both the father and his partner were killed when
a Hamas gunman broke into a house in the Kibbutz. There were also two children there
by themselves. If the ‘beheaded babies’ and all the other atrocity propaganda
was correct then one would assume that the gunman would
have done what Israel’s soldiers have done in Gaza and that is murder the
children too. Not a bit of it. The Times
of Israel describes how:
The
terrorist calmed down my Daria and Lavi, covered them in a blanket, took
lipstick and wrote on the wall: ‘The al-Qassam [Brigades] people don’t murder
children.’
This
is somewhat at odds with the Zionist narrative that The Times, the Guardian, Independent and the rest of the British press were happy
to run with of terrorists seeking to kill Israeli children. But when it comes
to Palestinian children then the yellow press are silent.
There
have been no front page headlines about Palestinian children being killed. Virtually
every newspaper, including The
Times and Independent
splashed the ’40 Beheaded Babies’ on their front pages. Even now the
Independent has a story ‘Kfar Aza smells of
death’ which alleges that ‘babies were
slaughtered’ in Hamas attack'. No babies were slaughtered that day. Just
two died, accidentally. But of course if you engage in colonial tropes about
savages then you must fit the facts to the perception and liberal Zionists are
adept at this.
At
the end of the day Yachad, the Union of Jewish Students, JLM and the other
‘liberal’ Zionists organisations all agree with the Ben Gvirs and Smotriches in
a Jewish State. That is why they will never ally with anti-Zionists against
right-wing Zionists. Zionism Uber Alles.
That
is a lesson that the Palestinians have painfully learnt after the demise of the
Oslo Accords. It is also something that the Palestine solidarity movement has
to learn. The two-state solution is not only not desirable it is not going to
happen and those who plug it are in reality pushing for the one-state solution
that already exists – the State of Apartheid Greater Israel.
Tony
Greenstein
Below I post correspondence from the Jewish Chronicle in 1943 about the successful attempt by the Zionist President of the Board of Deputies to sabotage the attempts of Rabbi Schonfeld to rescue Jewish refugees from Nazi occupied Europe - the Zionists wanted Jews to go to Palestine or nowhere - that meant they went to their deaths.
50 years later Marcus Retter, an Assistant to Rabbi Schonfeld, the Chair of the Chief Rabbi's Rescue Committee Wrote Explaining How the Zionists Preferred Jews to Go to the Gas Chambers than Seek Refuge in any Country Bar Palestine
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