Why has Israel Become a Mirror Image of Nazi Germany and why has Yad Vashem, the Zionist holocaust memorial museum, joined the ranks of holocaust deniers?

Who would have believed that Israel would set about creating a ‘humanitarian’ concentration camp in Gaza?

Israel, Gaza, and the Empire of Lies: Dr. Gabor Maté on Truth and Trauma 

When I brought out Zionism During the Holocaust in 2022, the central theme of which was Zionist collaboration with the Nazis, many people, even some Palestine supporters, thought I was going too far in my comparisons of the Zionist movement with the Nazis.

In 2019 when I declared that Israel was Hitler’s Bastard Offspring, the Jewish Chronicle reported it as ‘Infamous anti-Israel activist Tony Greenstein called Jewish state 'Hitler's bastard offspring'. Owen Jones responded to the arguments about Zionist collaboration by saying ‘No, Jews did not collaborate in their own genocide’ which is of course true. But the Zionists certainly collaborated and worse.

"They're Arresting You For THOUGHTS": The UK's Descent into a Police State – Deep Dive Perspective

At that time Jones equated Zionists and Jews as one and the same.  I hope that today, after having opposed Israel’s genocide and being called an anti-Semite himself, Jones has had second thoughts.

Katie Halper interviews John Mearsheimer About His Statement  That Israel is Behaving Like the Nazis

Today comparisons between Israel, Zionism and the Nazis are commonplace. When John Mearsheimer, the Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, was interviewed by Katie Halper, he confessed that

the more time goes by... the Israelis look like the Nazis, their rhetoric, their behaviour is truly appalling. The Jewish State is behaving like the Nazis did.

Everything I’ve been saying for years has suddenly become commonplace, respectable even. How has this come about? Why is it that I saw in Israel an incipient Nazism that people have only just started to recognise with the Genocide in Gaza?

My awakening was my realisation that the Zionist narrative which placed them at the centre of resistance to the Nazis was one long lie. Whereas most Jews were horrified at the rise of the Nazis and immediately launched a Boycott of Nazi Germany, the Zionists were gleeful. Their movement could only profit at the expense of the Jews.

That was why the Zionists were so vehemently opposed to the Boycott. As the German Zionist Federation wrote in a letter to Hitler, on 21 June 1933, ‘Boycott propaganda… is in essence unZionist, because Zionism wants not to do battle but to convince and to build’.  This letter can be found in Lucy Dawidowicz’s Holocaust Reader.

No-one forced the Zionists to write this obsequious letter. It was purely voluntary, an attempt to get themselves in the good books of the Nazis. The Zionist leadership saw the rise to power of the Nazis as a ‘golden opportunity’ that must not be wasted.

Noah Lucas, a critical Zionist and a lecturer at Sheffield University wrote in Modern History of Israel that:

 ‘As the European holocaust erupted, Ben-Gurion saw it as a decisive opportunity for Zionism... Ben-Gurion above all others sensed the tremendous possibilities inherent in the dynamic of the chaos and carnage in Europe…. In conditions of peace,… Zionism could not move the masses of world Jewry. The forces unleashed by Hitler in all their horror must be harnessed to the advantage of Zionism. ... By the end of 1942… the struggle for a Jewish state became the primary concern of the movement.’ 

In October 1942, at the height of the Holocaust, Ben-Gurion surveyed the prospects for Zionism remarking to the Zionist Executive that:

Disaster is strength if channelled to a productive course. The whole trick of Zionism is that it knows how to channel our disaster, not into despondency or degradation, as is the case in the Diaspora, but into a source of creativity and exploitation.

Ben-Gurion and the Zionist leadership prioritised building a ‘Jewish’ state over rescuing Jews. They went so far as to sabotage rescue attempts that didn’t involve Palestine as a destination. If the Zionists could do this to Jews it doesn’t take much imagination to understand what they are capable of with respect to the Palestinians.

Little Nazi Becky Explaining the Need to Destroy Palestinian Children

And what is worse is that the Nazi holocaust has become the justification for Gaza’s holocaust. The Palestinians of Gaza are described by Israelis as Nazis as justification for the genocide they are perpetrating. A moment’s reflection would show how absurd this is.

It was the Nazis not their victims who had heavy weapons, aircraft and bombs. It was the Nazi military and the SS formations that carried out the most brutal of atrocities not civilians. Yet Palestinian civilians are routinely called ‘Nazis’ as a justification for their murder and obliteration. Zionism depoliticises Nazism and reduces it simply to is anti-Semitic components. Fascism is left absent.

In 1948 Ben-Gurion and his compatriots coldly planned the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians in order that they could create a Jewish state. Even in the 55% of the portion of Palestine the UN had allotted to the Zionists there was a rough parity of Jews and Arabs. For a Jewish state to remain ethnically Jewish it was essential to expel the Palestinians. Ethnic cleansing and massacres were their only choice.

Zionism has always been something of a Nazi reprise. Did not Hitler start off with ethnic cleansing? Contrary to the Zionist belief that Nazism was solely about murdering Jews, it was dedicated to the racial resettlement of the whole of Europe and the colonisation of the East with German settlers. Just like the Nazis, the Zionists talk of  ‘lebensraum’ or living space.

For 19 years Israel was able to sell itself as a western social democratic state in the Middle East. It could do this because it had reduced the Arabs in Israel to less than 20% of the population. But with the 6 Days War in 1967 and the occupation of Gaza and the West Bank the demons were released. Labour Zionism had been wedded, no less than the Revisionists, to the idea of a Greater Israel.

It was Israeli Labor politicians who promoted the first settlers in the West Bank. Yigal Allon, the leader of the Palmach shock troops, Yisrael Galili and Yitzhak Tabenkin, all from the left of the Zionist movement helped found the Greater Israel movement.

It was but a matter of time before the settlers gained a critical mass in the West Bank. Zionism is a form of political messianism which seeks the End Days every bit as much as the Christian Evangelicals. To the messianic right in Israel’s government, the Ben Gvirs and Smotrichs, the days of redemption and the return of the Messiah are at hand.

All that is needed is the building of the Third Temple and the resumption of animal sacrifices to complete the task. Of course that means the demolition of Al Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock. That will also come to pass unless Zionism is stopped in its tracks.

Up till 1967 Israel was able to hide its apartheid nature behind a facade of granting its Palestinian citizens a vote knowing full well that in an ethnocracy they would be permanently excluded from power. Today they can’t hide it nor do they want to.

In 2015 Isaac Herzog, the then leader of the Israeli Labor Party and now President, told a gathering at Herzliya that

In about a decade, the Arabs between the Jordan and the Mediterranean will be a majority and the Jews a minority. The Jewish national home will become the Palestinian national home. We will be again, for the first time since 1948, a Jewish minority in an Arab state. I want to separate from the Palestinians. I want to keep a Jewish state with a Jewish majority. I don’t want 61 Palestinian MKs in Israel’s Knesset. I don’t want a Palestinian prime minister in Israel. I don’t want them to change my flag and my national anthem. I don’t want them to change the name of my country to Isra-stine. (my emphasis)

And there you have it. When it comes to racism, the Labour Zionism of Herzog is no different from that of Netanyahu. Perhaps it’s just that Netanyahu is more honest when he says that ‘Israel is a state of its Jewish citizens not a state of all its citizens.’

Ethnic cleansing is as integral to Zionism as water is to life. You cannot have one without the other. When ethnic cleansing is no longer feasible then Zionism, like Hitler, turns to genocide. Genocidal views of the Palestinians are shared by the majority of Israeli Jews.

The question is why the Israeli state has become the Nazi state of the 21^st century. The answer is simple. Israel was founded on the same principles that the Nazis espoused.

Zionism sought to establish a racially based Jewish state. The definition of ‘Jew’ that Israel uses in the Law of Return is almost identical to the 1935 Nuremberg Laws. The Nuremberg Laws banned Jews and non-Jews from marrying and having sexual relations. In Israel too it is impossible for Jews and non-Jews to marry.

New Israeli ambassador Tzipi Hotovely supports Lehava, an anti-miscegenation organisation whose head is being tried for terrorism & anti-Arab incitement.

Their website says they aim to "save Jewish girls" relationships with "Arabs, non-Jews, & foreign workers"

#TzipiTalk pic.twitter.com/nzMWMuvNgV

— Palestine Solidarity Campaign (@PSCupdates) June 15, 2020

Although Israel doesn’t outlaw sexual relations between Jews and Arabs, Jews who have a relationship with an Arab are ostracised. The present Israeli Ambassador to the UK, Tzipi Hotoveli, was particularly concerned to combat intermarriage or miscegenation. It is called ‘national treason’. When a Jewish woman and an Arab man had a wedding there were demonstrations outside the reception. 

It should have been obvious that in a Jewish state, anyone who isn’t Jewish was going to be seen as an outsider. Israeli Palestinians are not even second class citizens. According to opinion polls the majority of Israelis, including most members of the present government, would like to expel them.

Israel likes to portray itself as the ‘only democracy in the Middle East’ but following the Jewish Nation State Law of 2018 Israel is officially a state of its Jewish not all its citizens.

The most enthusiastic participants in the Nazi holocaust were the Christian ethno-nationalist states of Eastern Europe, like Romania, Slovakia and Croatia. Why expect Israel to be any different?

Given the right set of circumstances any group of people can become extreme racists and genocidaires. Why should Jewish people be any different?  Racism isn’t something that is biologically inherited.

Ethno-religious states are a relic of feudalism which is why Zionism hated Jewish Emancipation. Zionism was a Jewish Supremacist settler colonial movement. It used to be able to pass itself off as having a left-wing and a right-wing but during the genocide we have not had a peep out of the ‘left’ Zionists in the Jewish Labour Movement.

The goal of Netanyahu and the Israeli government, aided by Trump, is the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. However whether they are able to get away with it remains to be seen. Hitler also began with wanting to expel the Jews and ended up exterminating them. 

The IDF is deliberately killing as many Palestinians as possible. Which is why Bobby Vylan was absolutely right to say ‘Death to the IDF’.  Those who object would have objected to ‘Death to the SS’.

Zionism was in essence a Jewish Racial Preservation Project that sought the equivalent of the thousand years Reich. It was prepared to sacrifice millions of Jews during WW2 in order to ensure the permanent life of the Jewish people-race. Ben-Gurion explained his thinking in January 1933 when he warned that

Zionism… is not primarily engaged in saving individuals’ and that if there was ‘a conflict of interest between saving individual Jews and the good of the Zionist enterprise, we shall say the enterprise comes first. [Shabtai Teveth, The Burning Ground 1886-1948), p. 855]

Chaim Weizmann, the President of the Zionist Organisation and the first President of the Israeli state was explicit in his speech to the 20^th World Zionist Congress (1937) in Zurich that

The old ones will pass, they will bear their fate or they will not. They are dust, economic and moral dust, in a cruel world…. Two millions, and perhaps less She’erith Hapletah- ‘only a remnant shall survive.’ We have to accept it.

In the Autumn 1937 issue of New Judea Weizmann elaborated:

We want only the best of Jewish youth to come to us. We want only the educated to enter Palestine for the purpose of increasing its culture. The other Jews will have to stay where they are and face whatever fate awaits them.  These millions of Jews are dust on the wheels of history and they may have to be blown away. We don’t want them pouring into Palestine.

When Roosevelt called the Evian Conference in July 1938 to try and find a solution to the Jewish refugee problem the Zionists were worried, lest the conference might succeed!

Ben-Gurion at a meeting of the Jewish Agency Executive on 26 June 1938 was unremittingly hostile to Evian:

‘No rationalizations can turn the conference from a harmful to a useful one. What can and should be done is to limit the damage as far as possible.'

At the same meeting Menachem Ussishkin, a member of the Zionist Executive  said that:

He hoped to hear in Evian that Eretz Israel remains the main venue for Jewish emigration. All other emigration countries do not interest him… The greatest danger is that attempts will be made to find other territories for Jewish emigration.

If Zionism was prepared to sacrifice Jews to the Nazis to achieve its aims then it isn’t likely to have much difficult in killing Palestinians.

Last week it seemed as if the world woke up to Israel’s lies and realised that what we have been saying for nearly two years was true. Israel is perpetrating a genocide in Gaza and that includes starving the population, including children.

People are beginning to realise just what monsters Zionism has produced. The Heidi Bachrams and Victoria Bhogals of this world, with their self-serving lies and Netanyahu with his description of the SS, sorry IDF, as ‘the most moral army in the world’ are now seen for what they are – supporters of the new Auschwitz that is Gaza today.

There are even Israelis who talk of introducing gas chambers to complete the job. This is where Zionism has ended up.

Noone cut a more absurd figure than that prime piece of gammon, David Mencer, with his absurd statement that it was Hamas that was starving the people of Gaza and that the IDF was doing its best to act as wet nurse to Gaza’s babies.

When the Daily Express of all papers leads on successive days with pictures of the emaciated bodies of Palestinian babies even the most stupid Zionist knows or should know that the game is up.

Alistair Campbell admits that its genocide in Gaza & says false accusations of antisemitism are preventing debate!

Even people like Piers Morgan and Alistair Campbell now accept that Israel is carrying out a genocide and are beginning to understand that they have been on the wrong side of history.

No one should doubt that it is a holocaust in Gaza. When the dust settles on the rubble, it is likely that the number of deaths will be in the hundreds of thousands.

The only people who are unmoved are Starmer and Trump.  Trump is still blaming Hamas for what is happening in Gaza but the United States too is losing. The leader of the ‘free world’ is actively complicit in a Nazi-style genocide and yet Trump and Starmer, to say nothing of the Germans, are still supplying Israel with weapons.

Israeli leaders have been open about their intentions. It is the intention to wipe out and destroy a people that made this a genocide.

Israel Deliberately Burns the Food That It Prevented From Being Distributed

It is not as if the genocide deniers weren’t warned. On 9^th October Defence Minister Yoav Gallant spelled out exactly what Israel’s strategy was going to be when, in an an echo of Himmler’s description of the untermenschen he declared:

“I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed, ... We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly

Gallant was not alone. Netanyahu compared the Palestinians to Amalek, who God commanded the Israelites to wipe out – to the very last child and suckling infant. President Isaac Herzog stated that there were no innocents in Gaza and Rabbi Eliyahu Mali, of the Bnei Moshe yeshiva openly advocated  the murder of Palestinian children because they are the future generation of Palestinian fighters.

Today's terrorists are the children of the prior [military] operation that left them alive. The women are essentially the ones who are producing the terrorists,... 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. There's really no difference

Mali and Israel’s other Nazi Rabbis have long been making the same argument that Himmler made about  Jewish children. At Posnan on October 6, 1943 Himmler told the SS Generals:

For I did not consider myself justified in exterminating the men—in other words, killing them or having them killed—and then allowing their children to grow up to wreak vengeance on our children and grandchildren.

Bob Geldof Asks How Israel Can Betray Its History by Starving Children - But This is Its History

When Bob Geldof was quizzed by Trevor Philips on Sky about the claims of Netanyahu that there was no famine he simply responded ‘he’s a liar’. One suspects that the BBC, which would have both sided the Nazi holocaust, would have edited it out.

The tide has turned, at least for now, as Israel’s Nazi leaders realise that their lies are no longer believed. Perhaps the final straw was setting up the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, run by mercenaries, who killed those seeking food along with the IDF.  The GHF is a death trap run by a Christian Evangelist, the Rev. Johnnie Moore.

Over one thousand Palestinians were murdered in their attempt to stave off starvation yet still the Zionists and Mencer blamed Hamas which was doing its best to protect the food from the criminal gangs Israel had armed, as Netanyahu has admitted.

Although food has begun to enter Gaza Israel has not let up on its bombardment of civilians. Compared to the IDF, Hamas are the equivalent of Sunday school teachers. They have sought, against the odds, to protect the people of Gaza from the Nazi wolves that have descended upon the Gaza Strip. Their proscription is an outrage.

It is no wonder that Starmer’s Labour has plumbed new depths of unpopularity. It has nothing to say, still less do because it is tied at the hip to Trump’s lawless regime in the US. Starmer’s promise to recognise a Palestinian state by September is an empty gesture. There is no Palestinian state so how can one recognise one? It is symbolic at best. If he were serious he would stop the supply of arms.

However even the more intelligent sections of the British ruling class realise that whereas Blair was, at least until the Iraq war, a sophisticated advocate of their interests, Starmer and his clique of self-serving careerists are both inarticulate and corrupt. Starmer managed to secure the most freebies despite being a millionaire.

Yvette Cooper’s proscription of Palestine Action is also beginning to haunt her.  If she had heeded the advice of Home Office officials she would have ignored the pressure of the Israeli government and the Zionist lobby. Yvette Cooper is a stupid woman, a rich, white ‘feminist’ who hypocritically identifies with the Suffragettes, who not only damaged property but also had a bombing campaign. They were called criminals and terrorists in their time.

Such is the groundswell of opposition to the ban that the heavy handed tactics of the Metropolitan Police and the Liverpool Police, far from frightening people off are causing them to defy this law in ever greater numbers.  It will be interesting to see whether Judge Chamberlain has a sensitive antennae or whether he will do what judges often do which is to rail at anything approaching subversion.

Either way August 9^th on which date Defend Our Juries have called for 500 people to hold signs supporting Palestine Action is likely to be oversubscribed. Police this week in Totnes, Devon and Edinburgh decided not to arrest the ‘terrorists’ including George Monbiot.

When a law lacks public support and is seen to attack the most basic of all liberties, the right to protest, people have no option to break the law. The law has become an instrument of coercion and oppression and it is an illegitimate law as Martin Luther King called it.  Or in the words of Dame Heather Hallett it is an oppressive law.

Israel may think it has won a military victory but the reality today is that it has drained away its support. It has shown that it is a failed, genocidal state which no more deserves to exist than the Nazi state or the Apartheid South African state.

Perhaps the final straw is the plan of the Israeli state and its Defence Minister, to establish what even Ehud Olmert, a former Prime Minister has described as a concentration camp.

The holocaust in Gaza has exposed like nothing before it the moral vacuum and sheer hollowness of the Holocaust industry. All its clichés about learning from the holocaust are seen to be nothing but empty words aimed at legitimising Zionism and its bastard child.

The former Chair of Yad Vashem, Avner Shalev, denied that Israel was perpetrating a genocide in Gaza. The present Chair of Yad Vashem, the former fascist and member of the anti-Arab Tehiya party, Dani Dayan, doubled down on this claiming that such a comparison ‘desecrates the memory of the victims.’

What desecrates the memory of Jewish holocaust victims is shooting children in the head and starving them to death, creating torture camps and razing Gaza to the ground in the same way as the Nazis raised the Warsaw Ghetto to the ground. What really defiles the memory of the holocaust victims is when one in two Jewish Israelis, indeed more than that, support the extermination of all Palestinians.

However Yad Vashem was not founded to draw universal lessons from the Nazi holocaust. Its purpose was to use the holocaust in order to justify the establishment of a racist Jewish state. It would appear that its attempts to defend the indefensible are coming apart at the seams. Those who deny the genocide in Gaza are no better than those who deny the Nazi holocaust.

Zionism, like Nazism and Apartheid belongs in the dustbin of history.  It is based on the subjugation of the other and it is to be hoped that Jews outside Israel will shake off the lobby and its rabbinical clique and join the human race again.

Tony Greenstein

Socialist History Society Talk on Zionism During the Holocaust 19.1.23

Zionist Historiography & the Distortion of the Lessons of the Holocaust 

Many people have asked me why did I write Zionism During the Holocaust? My answer is simple - Because the history of the Nazi holocaust and its place in history needs rescuing from Zionist falsifications, myths and distortions.

I am not of course disputing the fact that millions of Jews were exterminated by the Nazis, including half in gas chambers. That is for the political equivalent of flat earthers. What I am referring to is the role of the Jewish Resistance, their defence of the Judenrate (Jewish Councils which collaborated with the Nazis), the erasure of anti-Zionist Jews in the Resistance, the rewriting of the memoirs of even the Zionist fighters in the ghettos and the absence of any mention of Zionist collaboration and their obstruction of rescue attempts.

Yehuda Bauer - Zionist first, historian second

All this has been achieved by the Zionist holocaust historians based in Yad Vashem, led by Yehuda Bauer and Dina Porat, in order that the holocaust can accord with a Zionist national narrative.

The Zionist holocaust narrative has drawn a straight line between the fight against the Nazis and Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. In his address to the 2015 World Zionist Congress, Netanyahu attempted to transfer the blame for the holocaust from Hitler to the Palestinian Grand Mufti, Haj al Amin Husseini.

Nothing better illustrates this than the annual visit of thousands of Israeli school children to Auschwitz. Instead of being a profound educational event, that teaches the dangers of a resurgence of racism and fascism, it has become an orgy of Israeli national chauvinism.

It is no wonder that Israeli teenagers are even more racist than their elders. Or Kashti in Ha’aretz Israeli Teenagers: Racist and Proud of It quoted a 10^th grade high school girl as declaring:

“For me, personally, Arabs are something I can’t look at and can’t stand. I am tremendously racist. I come from a racist home. If I get the chance in the army to shoot one of them, I won’t think twice. I’m ready to kill someone with my hands, and it’s an Arab. In my education I learned that ... their education is to be terrorists, and there is no belief in them…. every day I see these Ishmaelites, who pass by and whistle. I wish them death.”

Israeli teenagers annually walk from Auschwitz to Birkenau covered in Israeli flags, the message being one of Jewish militarism. Their visit to Auschwitz actually reinforces their racism. As Gideon Levy observed

I have yet to hear a single teenager come back from Auschwitz and say that we mustn’t abuse others the way we were abused. There has yet to be a school whose pupils came back from Birkenau straight to the Gaza border, saw the barbed-wire fence and said, Never again. The message is always the opposite. Gaza is permitted because of Auschwitz.

Anti-fascists in the 70s campaigned around the slogan ‘Never Again’ meaning that never again must any people experience genocide. Yet to the Zionists Never Again meant it must not happen to Jews again. To Zionism the lesson of the Holocaust entitles Jews to be genociders.

Zionist Historiography and Yad Vashem

Zionism has constructed a Holocaust historiography which is based on a rejection of any universal lessons from the holocaust. At the forefront of this hegemonic narrative stands Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Propaganda Museum in Jerusalem.

When a guide, Itamar Shapira, referred to the proximity of Deir Yassin in a talk to visitors to YV, where in April 1948 Zionist militias slaughtered over 100 Palestinian villagers, he was sacked.

When Netanyahu attempted to deport up to 60,000 African refugees for the ‘crime’ of not being Jewish. Ha'aretz journalist Nir Gontarz described his reception when he rang YV and asked them to publicly condemn Netanyahu’s attempt to deport the refugees:

One after the other of the senior staff there, including Mr. Avner Shalev [the director], slammed the phone down on me when I asked to speak to them.

Yad Vashem has played host to a variety of neo-Nazis and anti-Semite such as Viktor Orban, John Vorster, Premier of South Africa and the  Hitler loving Presidents Bolsonaro and Duterte of Brazil and the Philippines respectively. Daniel Blatman, a Holocaust historian at the Hebrew University described YV as a

‘hard-working laundromat, striving to bleach out the sins of every anti-Semitic, fascist, racist or simply murderously thuggish leader or politician.’

The Holocaust Educational Trust took a full part in the fake 'antisemitism' attack on Corbyn

Holocaust Uniqueness

Fundamental to the Zionist narrative is that the Nazi Holocaust was unique and that only the Jews experienced a holocaust. All other victims experienced genocide not holocaust. The Holocaust Memorial Day Trust describes the holocaust as an ‘attempt by the Nazis and their collaborators to murder all the Jews in Europe.’ There is no mention of Gypsies or the Disabled. They are genocides.

Yehuda Bauer, the most prominent Zionist holocaust historian, argued that holocaust only applied to Jews. Why? Because the "Roma were not Jews, therefore there was no need to murder all of them," [Sybil Milton, The Context of the Holocaust, p.270] Bauer’s assumption was that the Nazis’ sole concern was annihilating the Jews.

The Holocaust Educational Trust and its CEO Karen Pollock attacked Corbyn for chairing a meeting addressed by anti-Zionist Auschwitz survivor,  Hajo Meyer

Bauer didn’t see the extermination of the Jews as part of a wider eugenic policy to ‘purify’ the Aryan race, rassenchande (racial defilement) or rassenhygiene (racial hygiene). Bauer completely ignored the evidence that the Nazis criminalised sexual relations between all non-Aryans and Aryans, e.g. Gypsies and slave labourers. He also ignored the fact that before 1941 Nazi policy was expulsion of the Jews not extermination. Sybil Milton, senior resident historian at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) observed:

The emphasis on antisemitism and the exclusivity of the Jewish fate has, for obvious political reasons, also been the official Israeli interpretation and as such has profoundly influenced the historiography of the Holocaust. [Milton, Gypsies and the Holocaust, p. 377] 

Bauer argued that the Nazi extermination of the Gypsies was a product of their anti-social and criminal behaviour rather than their ‘race’. Milton witheringly observed:

Defining an entire ethnic group as anti-social and criminal is a classic example of racism. I do not know why Mr. Bauer does not understand this. Milton, Bauer Correspondence, Gypsies and the Holocaust, p. 517. 

Like most Holocaust organisations, the Holocaust Educational Trust and its CEO Pollock are Zionists first and foremost plugging away at Labour's anti-racist leader and ignoring Boris Johnson's genuine anti-Semitic outpourings in 72 Virgins

Milton noted that:

the current preoccupation with antisemitism and the "uniqueness" of the  Jewish Holocaust in historical literature has limited our ability to recognize the connections between Nazi ideology, German social policy, and Genocide. [Gypsies and the Holocaust, p. 382, 1991]

Drawing Universal Lessons from the Holocaust

For Zionism the Holocaust was the sole possession of the Jews. Drawing universal lessons from the Holocaust meant the ‘plunder of [Jewish] moral capital’’. [Peter Novick, the Holocaust in American Life, p.156] According to Gerhard Riegner, the representative of the World Jewish Congress in Geneva during the war, ‘Auschwitz was not only a national memory belonging to the Jewish people… it was also an important political asset.’ [Tom Segev, The Seven Million, p.474]

In March 1988 Yehuda Elkana, a child survivor of Auschwitz and Rector of the Central European University in Budapest, before being evicted by Netanyahu’s friend Viktor Orban, wrote an article for Ha'aretz, The Need To Forget citing Thomas Jefferson’s maxim that democracy and worship of the past are incompatible:

The very existence of democracy is endangered when the memory of the dead participates actively in the democratic process.

Elkana warned against the misuse of the lessons of the Holocaust:

a profound existential “Angst” fed by a particular interpretation of the lessons of the holocaust … that we are the eternal victim. In this ancient belief… I see the tragic and paradoxical victory of Hitler. Two nations, metaphorically speaking, emerged from the ashes of Auschwitz: a minority who assert, “this must never happen again,” and a frightened and haunted majority who assert, “this must never happen to us again.”

The Holocaust is inexplicable

Zionism holds that anti-Semitism has nothing to do with class relations or the socio-economic nature of society. It exists because the Jews exist, the product of the Jews presence as strangers in other people’s countries. For the Zionists the Holocaust was inexplicable, an irrational and demonic phenomenon.

For Elie Wiesel, a survivor of Auschwitz and an ardent Zionist, the Holocaust was beyond history. It was a ‘sacred and essentially incomprehensible event.’

The Holocaust and the Arabs

Idith Zertal, Professor of History at the Hebrew University described in Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood, how:

‘The transference of the holocaust situation on to the Middle East reality… not only created a false sense of the imminent danger of mass destruction. It also immensely distorted the image of the holocaust, dwarfed the magnitude of the atrocities committed by the Nazis, trivializing the unique agony of the victims and the survivors, and utterly demonizing the Arabs and their leaders.

Zertal wrote how there hasn’t been a war involving Israel ‘that has not been perceived, defined, and conceptualized in terms of the Holocaust.’ Israel has mobilised the Holocaust ‘in the service of Israeli politics.’

Why the Contemporary Concern with the Holocaust

Holocaust Memorial Day was only established in 2001, more than half a century after the liberation of Auschwitz. The USHMM was first opened in April 1993. Why the delay?

As John Cummings noted

The U.S. has 35,000 museums. Why is only one about slavery? And that one was opened in December 2014.

Why is the Nazi holocaust considered more important, with a budget for the USHMM of over $100m, than slavery in which the United States was so heavily implicated that it fought a civil war over it?

The answer in a nutshell, is imperialism and in particular US imperialism. Adopting the holocaust narrative is part of the United States attempt to incorporate a sanitised version of its war against the Nazis into its imperialist narrative.

As Yitzhak Laor explained the current preoccupation with the holocaust is about

‘consolidating a new ideology of exclusion. Now it is the Jews who are the insiders… the genocide and the Jews served in the construction of a European identity

The version of history presented in the USHMM is a rewriting of American culpability. No mention is made of the role of the United States in turning away Jewish refugees from the Nazis, the most famous example being the St. Louis, a boat carrying Jewish refugees from Germany which was turned away from first Cuba and then the United States.

In the late 40s and 50s the Holocaust was barely mentioned in Israel. In a 220 page Israeli history textbook published in 1948, just one page was devoted to the holocaust compared to 10 pages on the Napoleonic wars. The first time the holocaust became part of the syllabus, in 1953, just two hours were devoted to it. The same was true in the US where mention of the holocaust indicated communist sympathies.

Erasing the Heroes of the Anti-Zionist Resistance

On April 10 1944 Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler escaped from Auschwitz and reached Slovakia on April 24. There they wrote the first first hand accounts of Auschwitz, the Auschwitz Protocols. Until then Auschwitz was believed to be a labour not an extermination camp. Yet when the Protocols were given to the leader of Hungarian Zionism, Rudolf Kasztner, he promptly suppressed them. Vrba wrote:

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.’ 

When Professor Jacob Talmon criticised Hannah Arendt for referring to the Kasztner Affair, Vrba asked:

Rudolf Vrba

Did the Judenrat (or the Judenverrat) in Hungary tell their Jews what was awaiting them? No, they remained silent and for this silence some of their leaders – for example Dr R Kasztner – bartered their own lives and the lives of 1684 other ‘prominent’ Jews directly from Eichmann.

These letters are not to be found in Hebrew history text books. The Protocols were erased from Zionism’s holocaust historiography because they did not accord with its narrative.

Vrba and Wetzler were rendered anonymous. Oskar Neumann, head of the Slovakian Judenrat referred to ‘two young Jewish chaps…’ in his 1956 memoirs. Oskar Krasniansky, his deputy referred to ‘two young people’ and Livia Rothkirchen, a Zionist holocaust historian, to ‘two young men’. In Bauer’s The Holocaust - Some Historical Aspects they are referred to as ‘two Slovak Jews’  Dina Porat wrote about ‘two young Slovak Jews…’ Porat cited Martin Gilbert’s Auschwitz and the Allies as her source, yet Gilbert named both.

In the 1990 edition of the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, Wetzler and Vrba are mentioned by name but in the 2001 edition they are referred to as ‘two Jewish prisoners.’ The USHMM and the inscription of the Auschwitz escape in YV refers to ‘two young Slovak Jews.’

Yehuda Elkana

The silencing of Vrba and Wetzler was exploited by holocaust deniers such as Arthur Butz. Butz argued that if the content of the Protocols were true, Israeli historians would certainly know their names and publicise their report.’ Butz alleged that the Protocols were invented by the War Refugee Board. Another holocaust denier who adopted this line of argument was Robert Faurisson.

In 1994, at a conference at the USHMM, Vrba asked who was the better historian? Those who had direct experience of the Nazis or those who wrote about them? Vrba’s crime was that he was neither a Zionist nor a historian.

Jewish child in terror of Nazi soldiers, Palestinian child in terror of Israeli soldiers

The same was true of the last Commander of the Warsaw Ghetto Resistance, Marek Edelman.

Like Vrba, Edelman never ‘ascended’ to Israel, refusing to become the ‘dead and obedient hero who could be moulded along with the political order of that time…. extremely inconvenient for the creation of a heroic Zionist condensing and compensating myth… Israel was not their home.’

Paul Foot wrote about how:

Mr Edelman … wrote in a spirit of solidarity from a fellow resistance fighter, as a former leader of a Jewish uprising …He addressed his letter to ‘commanders of the Palestinian military, paramilitary and partisan operations – to all the soldiers of the Palestinian fighting organisations.’ This set up a howl of rage in the Zionist press, who reminded their readers that Mr Edelman, despite his heroism in the 1940s, is a former supporter of the anti-Zionist socialist Bund and can therefore not be trusted.

When Edelman died on 9 October 2009 he was honoured with a Polish state funeral and a fifteen-gun salute. Not even the lowliest clerk at the Israeli Embassy attended. Edelman received Poland's highest honour and the French Legion of Honour but he died unrecognised and forgotten in the ‘Jewish’ State of Israel.

The President of Poland spoke at his funeral… held in the old Jewish cemetery of Warsaw. Two thousand people attended the grave-side ceremony. But no one from the Israeli government attended… No official representative of any international Jewish organisation attended either: not even from the holocaust memorialisation organisations.

Israel even falsified the record of the Zionist fighters

Hayka Klinger, who fought in the Warsaw Ghetto, told the Histadrut Executive in March 1944 that ‘we received an order not to organize any more defence.’ [Porat, p.242] To the Zionist leadership the ghetto fighters were more valuable in Palestine. Klinger observed that

‘Without a people, a people’s avant-garde is of no value. If rescue it is, then the entire people must be rescued. If it is to be annihilation, then the avante-garde too shall be annihilated.’

Ronen, her second son, described how Klinger ‘was apparently not satisfied with the way they [her Diaries] were edited, shortened, and censored.’ In 1958, Hayke took her own life on the 15th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

Klinger couldn’t find anywhere in Israel to publish her experiences. When she died her Ghetto Diary was published. However it had so many changes and erasures that researchers were recommended to consult the originals which have now been published.

The Zionists ‘amended’ the writings of their own dead comrades. Tuvia (Tova) Altman, a leader of the Hashomer Hatzair underground in Poland, wrote in December 1942 that ‘Israel is dying before my eyes and I wring my hands and cannot help.’ What they didn’t publish was the following:

After all, you have erased me from your memory and what are we.... It takes all the restraint I can muster not to vent the bitterness that has accumulated for you and your friends for forgetting me so completely... Only the realization and the certainty that we will never again meet led me to write…. Do not give regards to anyone. I don’t want to know about them.

The Zionist Rehabilitation of the Judenrat

Hannah Arendt wrote in Eichmann in Jerusalem [p.125] that

Wherever Jews lived, there were recognized Jewish leaders, and this leadership, almost without exception, cooperated in one way or another, for one reason or another, with the Nazis… The whole truth was that if the Jewish people had really been unorganized and leaderless, there would have been chaos and plenty of misery but the total number of victims would hardly have been between four and a half and six million people.

Gideon Hausner

This caused a storm of protest by the Zionists. Gideon Hausner, the Prosecutor in the Eichmann Trial, described Arendt’s ‘vicious and compassionless attitude to the Judenrat’. But the Zionist fighters had a different story:

Zivia Lubetkin, a resistance fighter from Warsaw, told how:

The Germans issued decrees and their despised work was carried out by Jews from the Jewish Council... And in this way, each Jewish Council, without exception, in each and every town, played a treacherous part.’

A straight line was drawn between the Warsaw Ghetto & Palestine

Shneur Zalman Rubashov, at a Histadrut Executive Committee meeting, imagined that in the streets of the Warsaw Ghetto ‘the banner of Tel Hai was being raised.’ Moshe Dayan, Israel’s Chief of Staff, in his eulogy to Roi Rotberg, a settler who was killed by Fedayeen spoke of the

Millions of Jews, who were exterminated because they had no country, are watching us from the ashes of Israeli history and exhorting us to settle and to build up a land for our people.

According to Yitzhak Tabenkin,

‘The pre-5 June borders have brought down shoah on our heads, and this shoah is graver than the Nazi Holocaust…

When the holocaust survivors had first arrived in Israel they were treated with contempt and called ‘sapon’ (soap) after the myth that the bodies of murdered Jews were turned into soap.

But beginning with the Eichmann trial Zionist contempt for the Holocaust survivors was played down as the Holocaust became a foundational Zionist myth. Yitzhak Gruenbaum felt shame because ‘the Jews went to the slaughter without any zeal arising in any of them to defend himself.’  The emphasis in the trial was on Jewish resistance, the Warsaw Ghetto in particular. The message conveyed was that Israel’s war against the Palestinians was a continuation of this resistance. According to Israeli President, Yitzhak ben Zvi, ‘What a difference between those who died in combat and those killed in the Nazi ditches!’ According to Yitzhak Tabenkin, ‘The pre-5 June borders have brought down shoah on our heads, and this shoah is graver than the Nazi Holocaust…’ Zertal, p. 189.

But in reality the Zionist attitude to the holocaust survivors has not changed. Despite Israel spending the second highest amount on ‘defence’ Israel keeps the survivors in poverty and penury. See ‘Israel Is Waiting for Its Holocaust Survivors to Die,’