Holocaust Memorial Day 2026 – Record Attendance For Our Call To DENAZIFY THE ISRAELI STATE

Not One Holocaust Memorial Organisation Worldwide Has Condemned the Genocide in Gaza or Said That 'Never Again' Applies to the Palestinians

Holocaust Memorial Day 2026 – DeNazify Israel

The Holocaust Memorial Day commemoration we have just held is the fourth to be organised by Jewish Network for Palestine.  It also had a record attendance. 624 people registered for the meeting and 420 attended with a maximum of 357 at any one time.

The meeting was chaired by Haim Bresheeth, an Israeli anti-Zionist academic and author of ‘An army like no other’. The speakers were:

Ø Rania Khalek, a Lebanese-American journalist who  hosts Breakthrough News.

Ø Ghada Karmi, the author In Search of Fatima and many other books. Ghada is one of the original 1948 Palestinians, who and Professor of History at Exeter University and author of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine.

Ø Suzanne Weiss is a child  survivor who was hidden by the Communist Resistance in France. Suzanne’s memoir, From Holocaust to Resistance – my journey is well worth getting.

Ø Stephen Kapos is  a child survivor of the Hungarian holocaust who was hidden by the Holy Family Church in Budapest. Stephen is a well known figure on Britain’s Palestine solidarity demonstrations who was questioned by the Metropolitan Police about a public order offence!

Ø Lastly Tony Greenstein, is author of Zionism During the Holocaust and a long-standing Jewish anti-Zionist .

Bruce Springsteen - Streets Of Minneapolis (Official Audio) - The Fight Against ICE is the Fight for Palestine

The theme of this year’s Holocaust Memorial Day webinar was The Nazification of Israel. When I chose this title I wasn’t aware of an article by Orly Noy, in Israel’s +972 Magazine . Orly wrote:

Gaza City is engulfed in flames, as the Israeli army embarks on its long-threatened ground offensive after weeks of relentless bombardment.... I urge you to watch the footage streaming out of Gaza, and see what this euphemism really means.

Look into the eyes of people gripped by a terror unmatched even in the darkest moments of this two-year genocide. See the rows of ash-covered children lying on the blood-soaked floor of what was once a medical center — some barely alive, others wailing in pain and fear — as desperate hands try to comfort them or treat them with whatever medical supplies remain. Hear the screams of families fleeing with nowhere to run. Witness parents scouring the inferno for their children; limbs protruding from beneath the rubble; a paramedic cradling a motionless girl, pleading with her to open her eyes, in vain.

What Israel is doing in Gaza City is not the tragic byproduct of chaotic events on the ground, but a well-calculated act of annihilation, executed in cold blood by “the people’s army” — that is, the fathers, sons, brothers, and neighbors of us Israelis. 

How is it that, despite the mounting testimonies from Gaza’s concentration and extermination camps, no mass refusal movement has taken root in Israel? That after two years of this carnage barely a handful of conscientious objectors sit in prison is truly inconceivable....

Israel is unleashing a holocaust in Gaza, and it cannot be dismissed as the will of the country’s current fascist leaders alone. This horror runs deeper than Netanyahu, Ben Gvir, and Smotrich. What we are witnessing is the final stage in the nazification of Israeli society.

The urgent task now is to bring this holocaust to an end. But stopping it is only the first step. If Israeli society is ever to return to the fold of humanity, it must undergo a deep process of denazification....

Denazification must also include the recognition that what was cannot remain. It will not be enough to simply replace the current government. We must abandon the myth of Israel’s “Jewish and democratic” character — a paradox whose iron grip helped pave the way to the catastrophe we are now immersed in. 

This deception must end with the clear recognition that only two paths remain: either a Jewish, messianic, genocidal state, or a truly democratic state for all its citizens.

Orly concludes her article by saying that ‘Zionism, in all its forms, cannot be cleansed of the stain of this crime. It must be brought to an end.’ There is no room for accommodation with Zionism. There is no ‘left-wing’ or ‘right-wing’ Zionism. They are the same creatures.

The process of deNazification must begin with the recognition that Israel does not inherit the memory of the Jews who died in the holocaust. On the contrary, Israel mirrors the Nazi racial supremacy that led to the holocaust.

We must stop bowing our heads in solemn acquiescence when the Zionists invoke the memory of the 6 million as justification for the annihilation of the Palestinians. We must not repeat the slogan ‘Never Again’ without emphasising that today this slogan applies to the Palestinians above all.

The Silence of the Holocaust Memorial Organisations

Yad Vashem is Israel’s holocaust memorial organisation. Yad Vashem’s purpose was never to draw universal lessons from the holocaust. For Zionism the Jewish holocaust was unique and if its unique then how can one draw universal lessons applicable to all?

Yad Vashem’s aim has always been to harnesses the memory of the holocaust dead to the Zionist project and the building of a ‘Jewish’ state. How could it therefore condemn that very state for perpetrating its own genocide?

Yad Vashem was never intended as an anti-racist or anti-fascist institution. It was a Zionist organisation. It has rebuffed many invitations in the past to widen its remit and condemn particularly flagrant examples of Israeli and Zionist racism.

Yad Vashem had no intention of changing its past practice now that Israel was becoming an openly genocidal state. So when 50 holocaust researchers asked Yad Vashem to condemn the genocidal statements made by Israeli politicians, military and other public figures, including Israeli government ministers and Prime Minister Netanyahu himself, its Chairman, Dani Dayan refused.

Where Yad Vashem led, the world’s holocaust memorial organisations followed. Not one holocaust organisation has condemned Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Not one has declared that the lesson of the Nazi holocaust was that the slogan ‘Never Again’ applied to all people, Jewish and non-Jewish, Palestinians included.

When the Los Angeles Holocaust Museum posted a graphic on Instagram with the message ‘Never again can’t only mean never again for Jews’ there was a backlash from Zionist organisations. Their complaint, that the statement might be interpreted as referring to Israel’s genocide in Gaza, resulted in the post being deleted. The museum issued a new statement:

We recently posted an item on social media that was part of a pre-planned campaign intended to promote inclusivity and community that was easily open to misinterpretation by some to be a political statement reflecting the ongoing situation in the Middle East. That was not our intent.

The LA Holocaust Museum promised to ‘do better’ next time. Thus proving that ‘Never Again’ in the eyes of Zionists excludes Palestinians and those that the West considers its enemies. Never Again is only applicable to the Jews.

Karen Pollock of Britain’s Holocaust Education Trust went even further. She condemned the ‘shameful’ comparisons between the holocaust in Gaza and the Nazi genocide.

We should take on board what Primo Levi and his interviewer concluded in an interview in 1982 after the massacre of Palestinians in the Sabra and Chatilla refugee camps.

Joan Acocella, writing in the New Yorker in April 2013 recalled how Primo Levi, the famous Italian Jewish survivor of Auschwitz told a reporter, Filippo Gentiloni, from the Italian newspaper Il Manifesto, that

“Everybody is somebody’s Jew,”.... At that point in the interview, printed on June 29, 1982, Gentiloni closed the Levi quote and added a sentence of his own: “And today Palestinians are the Jews of the Israelis.” 

Although Primo Levi didn’t actually say the words they were clearly in accord with his views and he never raised an objection to them.

Today the Palestinians are suffering at the hands of Israel what Jews experienced at the hands of European anti-Semites.

Comparisons Between Nazi Germany and Israel

The IHRA misdefinition of anti-Semitism states that ‘Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis’ is anti-Semitic.

It is instructive therefore to list a few comparisons between Nazi Germany and Israel today and then ask ourselves whether the truth itself is anti-Semitic.

1.          A good place to start with is Arwa Mahdawi article ‘Gaza must be eliminated’: Israel’s airwaves are filled with pro-genocide propaganda.’ She quotes Nissim Vaturi, the Deputy Speaker of the Knesset stating that

“The children and women must be separated and the adults in Gaza must be eliminated. We are being too considerate,” 

Vaturi said this during an interview with Kol BaRama radio in February 2025, when he also called Palestinians “subhumans” and said the West Bank would be turned into Gaza next.

Elad Barashi, a TV producer with Channel 14, wrote on 27 February 2025.

Gaza deserves death. The 2.6 million terrorists in Gaza deserve death! … Men, women, and children – in every way possible, we must simply carry out a Holocaust on them – yes, read that again – H-O-L-O-C-A-U-S-T! For me, gas chambers. Train cars. And other cruel forms of death for these Nazis. Without fear, without hesitation – simply crush, eradicate, slaughter, flatten, dismantle, smash, shatter …. Gaza deserves death. Let there be a Holocaust in Gaza 

2.          On 1 August 2025 Shimon Elkabetz, Chairman of the Israel Film Council, urged the extermination of the Palestinians ‘it’s just like using a lice comb’. Hitler in Mein Kampf compared Jews to lice.

Gallant on Palestinians as human animals

3.          Israel’s Defence Minister, Yoav Gallant, on 9^th October 2023, described Palestinians as ‘human animals’. On October 4, 1943 Himmler had described the Untermenschen in exactly the same terms.

Heinrich Himmler Addressing the SS Generals

Gallant went on to say that

I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed.

“That we sentence 1.2 million Jews to die of hunger should be noted only marginally,” Hans Frank, the Nazi governor of occupied Poland, wrote in a diary entry. Today, more than two million Palestinians in Gaza are being forced, by design, into famine.”https://t.co/6ITI8Fh5Ih pic.twitter.com/OlEThwtEIM

— Middle East Eye (@MiddleEastEye) June 3, 2025

In June 1941, as Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union, began the Nazis implemented Der Hungerplan, the starvation of those they conquered.  4.2 million Soviet citizens died as a result.

In his diary Hans Frank, the Nazi Governor-General of Poland, wrote, that ‘we sentence 1.2 million Jews to die of hunger should be noted only marginally.’

Destroying food and the production of food was core to Israel’s strategy from the start. ‘Israeli bulldozers and heavy machinery have systematically razed fields, reducing them to dirt.’ See ‘How Israel destroyed Gaza's ability to feed itself’. More than 90% of cattle and more than half of sheep and goat herds in Gaza were killed whilst more than three-quarters of Gaza’s orchards have been destroyed. A UN survey in September 2024 found that 70% of agricultural land had been destroyed or damaged according to an analysis of satellite imagery.

4.          Rabbi Eliyahu Mali, head of the pre-military Bnei Moshe Yeshivah in Jaffa,  told a conference of yeshivas on 27 March 2024 that:

Today's terrorists are the children of the prior [military] operation that left them alive.... It's not only the 14- or 16-year-old boy, the 20- or 30-year-old man who takes up a weapon against you but also the future generation. 

5.          Tzemach Yehudah Richter wrote in the Times of Israel about Himmler’s second speech at Poznań on 6 October 1943 along exactly the same lines.

I ask of you that that which I say to you in this circle be really only heard and not ever discussed. We were faced with the question: what about the women and children? – I decided to find a clear solution to this problem too. I did not consider myself justified to exterminate the men – in other words, to kill them or have them killed and allow the avengers of our sons and grandsons in the form of their children to grow up. The difficult decision had to be made to have this people disappear from the earth.

And so we see how the ‘logic’ of extermination in Nazi Germany has made its way over into the thinking of Israel’s rabbis and soldiers.

6.          The most popular car bumper stickers in Israel are those urging the IDF to ‘finish them,’

Friendship Song 2023 - Israeli Schoolkids Sing of the Annihilation of Palestinians in Gaza – Public broadcaster Kan TV Played the Video

7.          Israel’s public broadcaster Kan showed a video of a group of school children urging the ‘annihilation’ of the people in Gaza.

Israeli politician says ‘any child’ born in Gaza is ‘already a terrorist’

Nissim Vaturi, said every child born in Gaza is “already a terrorist, from the moment of his birth” and that Gaza must be erased from the face of the earth.

8.          Amichai Eliyahu, the Heritage Minister, openly called for the starvation of the population.

9.          Rabbis like Dov Lior, the spiritual mentor of Israel’s neo-Nazi Police Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, during Operation Protective Edge in 2014, published a letter saying that Jewish law permitted destroying the entire Gaza Strip to bring peace to the south of Israel. Lior also praised the ISIS attacks on Paris in 2015 when 137 people died.

"Other findings were grim: A majority of 56% of Jews supported the "transfer (forced expulsion) of Arab citizens of Israel to other countries." To put this in perspective, a 2015 large Pew poll in Israel found 48% of Jewish Israelis supported expelling Arab citizens from Israel. https://t.co/wYCgDifERw

— Shibley Telhami (@ShibleyTelhami) June 4, 2025

10.    A poll Professor Tamir Sorek of Pennsylvania State University in May 2025 82% Israeli Jews supported the transfer (expulsion) of residents of the Gaza Strip, 56% supported the expulsion of Palestinian citizens of Israel and nearly half, 47% supported killing all Palestinians in Gaza, rising to 60% when a further question about the relevance of Amalek was asked.

What are we to make of this? It is clear that all the holocaust education in the world has had no effect whatsoever in Israel. On the contrary, holocaust education has enabled Israelis to see themselves as victims at the very time that they are enforcing an apartheid system and committing genocide. Holocaust education has reinforced their sense of righteousness and entitlement. Israeli settler colonialism is unique in the settlers seeing themselves as the victims of those they are exterminating.

‘Never Again’ has enabled Israelis to see the Palestinians as the Nazis and to therefore justify all measures, including genocide, taken against them.

And this is the mark of the stupidity of left groups like the Socialist Workers Party who mouth the same slogans here without ever asking themselves why it is that the supporters of genocide in Gaza also mouth ‘never again’ and what that might mean in the mouths of racists and genocidaires. This why I have sent an open letter to the local SWP/SUTR.

I hope that Tuesday night’s HMD webinar went some way to helping people understand that holocaust memorial remembrance, which does not include the Palestinians and other victims of holocausts and take a clear position against Zionism, ends up reinforcing the Zionist victimisation complex that enables genocide to take place.

Tony Greenstein

According to the Guardian, Independent and NYT, Holocaust Survivors Who Condemn Israel’s Genocide Are The ‘Wrong Sort of Holocaust Survivor’

 Interviews with Stephen Kapos, Suzanne Weiss and Rene Lichtman - all Child Survivors of the Holocaust in France and Hungary

Interview with Rene Lichtman

Ten holocaust survivors have just published a letter in 'Mondoweiss', condemning Genocide in Gaza. It was originally sent to the Guardian, Independent and New York Times. Not surprisingly these ‘liberal’ outlets weren’t interested in anything which strays from the accepted Zionist narrative which says that the only lesson of the Holocaust is that Israel has the ‘right to exist’ as a Jewish Supremacist state and the ‘right to self-defence’ i.e. commit genocide’ against the Palestinians.

Stephen Kapos and fellow holocaust survivors and children at London demonstration against Genocide in Gaza

Stephen Kapos, who has led the protest of holocaust survivors in London, was supposed to be interviewed by the Guardian but three times it cancelled the appointment. Clearly he and the other signatories are the Wrong Type Of Holocaust Survivor.

Stephen and his comrades draw the lesson that racism is wrong whoever the perpetrator is and whoever the victims are, whereas US imperialism and its Israeli client state concludes that Israel’s racism is justified by the Holocaust.

As Moshe Feiglin, former Likud member of the Knesset, in an interview with Israel’s Channel 12 explained:

As Hitler said, 'I can't live if one Jew is left,' we can't live here if one 'Islamo-Nazi' remains in Gaza'

The fact that leading Zionists like Feiglin and Yoav Gallant (who described the Palestinians as ‘human animals’ just as Himmler described the Jews) shows the depths to which Zionism has sunk.

Ten Holocaust survivors condemn Israel’s Gaza genocide

The co-founder of Human Rights Watch, Aryeh Neier, has recently said that Israel is engaged in genocide in Gaza. He’s also said that using accusations of antisemitism to attack Israel’s critics “debases the whole concept of antisemitism.” As Holocaust survivors, we are writing to agree wholeheartedly with Professor Neier — who himself only survived the Holocaust by escaping Nazi Germany as a child in 1939.

At a recent Holocaust memorial, Netanyahu declared: “We’ll defeat our genocidal enemies. Never again is now!”

Meanwhile, at another memorial, Biden warned of a “ferocious surge of antisemitism” on college campuses.

In our opinion, to use the memory of the Holocaust like this to justify either genocide in Gaza or repression on college campuses is a complete insult to the memory of the Holocaust.

The dehumanization of Palestinians, describing them as “human animals,” the killing of tens of thousands of civilians, indiscriminate bombing, the destruction of universities and hospitals, and the use of mass starvation — these are clearly stages of ethnic cleansing and genocide. They cannot be defended any more than sending weapons to commit this genocide or refusing funding to UNRWA. With no better arguments, our politicians have resorted to misusing the memory of the Holocaust while claiming that protesting against Israeli genocide is somehow antisemitic.

As Holocaust survivors, we have no special authority on the Middle East but we do know about antisemitism. It’s simply wrong to claim that it’s antisemitic to oppose Israeli genocide. It’s also wrong to claim that calling for equal rights for Jews and Arabs “from the river to the sea” is antisemitic.

As Holocaust survivors, we are just a few individuals but we want to add our voices to the growing global movement to demand a permanent ceasefire, an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, and for the West to stop arming and supporting genocide.

Signatories

Jacques Bude (Brussels Belgium), survived in hiding in Belgium, parents killed in Auschwitz.

Marione Ingram (Washington DC), survived in hiding in Nazi Germany. 

Stephen Kapos (London UK), survived the Budapest ghetto.

H. Richard Leuchtag (Houston TX), escaped Germany in 1938.

Rene Lichtman (Southfield MI), survived in hiding in France.

Adam Policzer (Vancouver BC), survived in hiding in Hungary.

Lillian Rosengarten (Cold Spring NY), escaped Germany in 1936.

Suzanne Ross (New York), escaped Nazi-occupied Belgium

Suzanne Berliner Weiss (Toronto Ont.), survived in hiding in France, mother killed in Auschwitz.

Ervin Somogyi (Oakland, CA), survivor from Hungary.

Rene Lichtman

An article in The Forward describes how Rene Lichtman 86, laid down in the road outside the Zekelman Holocaust museum in the Detroit area to protest Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

With members of Jewish Voice for Peace Lichtman held up a sign which read: “Jews and allies say never again for anyone.”

After the protest, Lichtman got a call from Rabbi Eli Mayerfeld of the The Zekelman Holocaust Center who told him that the board had voted to remove him as a speaker in its Survivor Talk Sundays series.

For 10 years, Lichtman had spoken to school and other groups about his childhood in France during the Holocaust and how his mother had left him with a Communist Catholic family outside Paris to hide him from the Nazis.

The reason for his removal was his views on the war in Gaza.

“What’s going on in the museums today, in the universities, is McCarthyism — Jewish McCarthyism. Voices that are pro-Palestinian will get destroyed. You will lose your livelihood. The teachers will be thrown out. That’s the world we’re living in.”

The Zekelman Holocaust Center naturally did not respond to requests from The Forward for comment because it knows that its reasons for doing what it did cannot be justified.

But the decision of the Zekelman proves one thing. That its purpose is not to use the Holocaust to warn about the dangers of racism and where it can lead. The purpose of these holocaust centres is altogether more sinister.

The Zekelman and bodies like the Holocaust Educational Trust exist to propagandise a narrative that reinforces Zionist racism and ethnic cleansing. They depoliticise the holocaust, divorcing it from the actual political conditions that led to the Nazis exterminating Jews and many others.

Suzanne's mother who died in Auschwitz

For these Zionist re-education centres, only the Jews experienced holocaust. All other groups were mere victims of war and random killings. This narrative derives from Israel’s Yad Vashem which, since 1953, has crafted a holocaust historiography to accord with its belief that the Holocaust justified the creation of a ‘Jewish’ state based on the same principles of purity of race as Nazi Germany. This is one of the key themes of my book, Zionism During the Holocaust.

Suzanne Weiss

The Zionist use of the Holocaust to justify genocide demonstrates its contempt for the Jews who died in Auschwitz. It tramples over their memory. These holocaust memorial centres serve not to enlighten but to indoctrinate. Zionism holds that Israel inherits the memory of the Jews who died in the holocaust whereas Israel is the successor to those who killed the Jews. Gaza today is a death camp like Auschwitz except that instead of poison gas, high explosives are used to murder the inmates.

Rene was repeatedly told not to connect the holocaust with contemporary events because that would be ‘political’. His function when lecturing to students was to emphasise the horrors of the holocaust. It was to be left to others, the professional holocaust mongers and Zionist historians to draw the necessary conclusions. Only they could be relied on.

An interview that Rene did for the Zekelman Centre is still on their website. Perhaps even they haven’t had the gall to take it down – at least not yet.  It dwells on the time he spent in hiding in France with the Lepage family who ‘were both Christians, Catholic, and left-wing, communist.’ It covers his struggle to regain  his lost Jewish identity, which he had to lose when in hiding and it ends with this paragraph:

Rene's story is also important in another sense. When Jews were trying to survive the Nazi occupation in France, it wasn't the French nationalists or right-wing that sheltered Jews but the Communists and the Left.  We should bear that in mind today when 'anti-Semitism' is the badge of the right-wing as they defend Israel.  It is the Left they accuse of anti-Semitism. This, more than anything, shows the bogus nature of the false anti-Semitism narrative.

Rene explained that for young people,

“The Jewish values that you should be proud of have to do with social justice. If you’re going to be a social justice warrior or fight for social justice, you’re not going to be popular. The people who did the rescuing in those days were not popular with their neighbors because they were endangering the neighbors by hiding Jews. So, by fighting for your social justice values, you’d better have some allies to support you.”

Ironic really in view of what the Zekelman Centre did when Rene put into practice the Jewish values that he talked about above. There is also another interview that Rene did with US Holocaust Museum.

Interview with Suzanne Weiss

Suzanne Weiss, an 83 year-old Holocaust survivor, is still active in the fight for justice. Suzanne was a full-time worker and former activist with the American organisation the Socialist Workers Party, when that group was still sane. Today it defends Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Suzanne cut her teeth in campaigns for solidarity with Cuba and the anti-war campaign over Vietnam.

Suzanne as a young girl in 1949

During the present genocide she succeeded, despite efforts by the University of Toronto to obstruct her, to speak to the student encampment. The students are demanding that the University of Toronto disinvest its funds from Israel.

The Ontario Federation of Labour (OFL) called on its members to defend Palestinian freedom and student rights to demonstrate. Below are some of Suzanne’s remarks:

Suzanne speaking at a rally in support of Gaza

"As a survivor of the Nazi holocaust. I know that unity and solidarity is crucial to survival and freedom. Many individuals and a whole community saved me and thousands of Jews and others fleeing Nazi execution.

"The presence today, of unionized workers organized by the Ontario Federation of Labour, is an outstanding example of solidarity. The world’s people want and need this infusion of solidarity.

"Your encampment is a threat to the global witch hunt campaign (IHRA) to change the meaning of anti-Semitism (Being against Jews because they are Jews). The IHRA campaign attacks you as anti-Semitic because you criticize Israel’s racist apartheid. The IHRA opposes the wearing of the Keffiyeh and persecutes all defenders of Palestinian freedom.

Suzanne with her life long lover John

"Your three demands for the University to disclose its investments; divest from Israel apartheid, and put an end to all academic partnership with Israeli are in line with the world Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement. The BDS world movement is a road forward to victory for Palestinian freedom.

"Our demonstrations persist in demanding that our Canadian government, although itself complicit, acts for an immediate and unconditional cease fire to stop the genocide, to send food, and medical aid to the besieged Palestinians in war torn Gaza.

The UofT academic administration should make these demands as well."

Suzanne as a troubled teen

Stephen Kapos and Tony Greenstein Interview 9 November 2023 

Stephen Kapos is an 87 year old holocaust survivor. Stephen survived the death squads of the fascist Arrow Cross/Nyilas in Budapest in 1944 because he was hidden by the Protestant Good Shepherd Mission in church houses in Budapest. Of the quarter million Budapest Jews, some 50,000 were murdered. Nearly all the Jews living outside Budapest, some 437,000 were deported to Auschwitz where the vast majority were exterminated.

On 19 March 1944 the Nazis invaded Hungary. On 15 May the deportations to Auschwitz began and they lasted till July 7 when Admiral Horthy stopped them as a result of massive western pressure. Hungarian Jews had been given 3 weeks notice of what was going to happen when the Vrba Wetzler Report or Auschwitz Protocols were given to the leader of Hungarian Zionism, Rudolf Kasztner. [see VRBA ON THE REPORT]

A bus of the Good Shepherd carrying children in Budapest

Kasztner preferred to make a deal with Eichmann in which 600, later 1684 rich Jews, Zionists and his own family were able to leave Hungary on a sealed train in exchange for keeping quiet about the fate of the other half million Hungarian Jews. Kasztner and his henchmen actively misinformed Hungary’s Jews about where the deportation trains were going. Indeed Kasztner distributed postcards the deportees had been forced to write in Auschwitz which purported to come from the fictitious Waldsee saying how wonderful life was. As Vrba was later to write in the Daily Herald (February 1961)

I am a Jew. In spite of that – indeed because of that I accuse certain Jewish leaders of one of the most ghastly deeds of the war. This small group of quislings knew what was happening to their brethren in Hitler's gas chambers and bought their own lives with the price of silence. Among them was Dr Kasztner. … I was able to give Hungarian Zionist leaders three weeks’ notice that Eichmann planned to send a million of their Jews to his gas chambers… Kasztner went to Eichmann and told him, ‘I know of your plans; spare some Jews of my choice and I shall keep quiet.’

In Israel where Kasztner went after the war, those Hungarian Jews who survived Auschwitz accused him of collaboration with the Nazis.

This resulted in the Israeli state, on Kasztner’s behalf, suing one of his detractors, Malchiel Greenwald, for libel in 1954. After Kasztner was shown to have lied when he denied testifying at Nuremberg on behalf of Himmler’s personal emissary in Hungary Kurt Becher, the verdict against him was inevitable.

In 1955 Judge Benjamin Halevi concluded that Kasztner, on behalf of the Jewish Agency, had ‘sold his soul to Satan’. Kasztner had also gone to Nuremberg after the war to testify in favour of other major Nazi war criminals such as Hermann Krumey and Dieter Wisliceny. Krumey, Eichmann’s deputy, had personally supervised the mechanics of the Hungarian holocaust. Wisliceny had presided over the deportation of Slovakia’s Jews, the first Jews to be deported to Auschwitz as well as the annihilation of Greek Jewry.

The full story is best told in Ben Hecht’s Perfidy. Hecht was a Revisionist Zionist who allied with Peter Bergson’s Emergency Committee to Save the Jews of Europe which the Zionist leadership in the United States fought and tried to undermine. Bergson’s Committee led to the setting up of the War Refugee Board by Roosevelt which saved an estimated 200,000 Jews.

The second Israeli government of Moshe Sharrett fell as a result of the trial verdict but today the Zionists prefer not to mention the widespread collaboration of the Zionist movement during the war.

There has been a widespread attempt by the Zionist movement to rehabilitate Kasztner. See e.g. the Holocaust Educational Trust’s The Kasztner train – a personal perspective or Yad Vashem’s decision to accept his archives.

Stephen however did survive, not thanks to the Zionists but Christian rescuers. This episode forms the central part of my book. The Kasztner Affair was the main reason why Israel decided to stage the Eichmann Trial.

Today the Zionists have the chutzpah to call the Palestinians the New Nazis whereas in fact it is they who most resemble the Nazis. As I said in a speech in 2019, Israel is Hitler’s Bastard Offspring.

Tony Greenstein

See The Nazification of Palestinians in Israeli Schoolbooks  by Nurit Peled-Elhanan, November 1, 2023