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

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

Rania Khalek Interviews Tony Greenstein

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How Israel Weaponizes the Holocaust to Justify Killing Palestinians

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If I knew that it would be possible to save all the children in Germany by bringing them over to England, and only half of them by transporting them to Eretz Yisrael, then I would opt for the second alternative. For we must weigh not only the life of these children, but also the history of the People of Israel.

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

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

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

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

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

Noah Lucas, a critical Zionist historian wrote that

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

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

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

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

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

Emil Ludwig was another Zionist who welcomed Hitler to power

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

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

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

On June 21 1933 the Zionist Federation of Germany [ZVfD] wrote in to Hitler saying that

On the foundation of the new state, which has established the principle of race... fruitful activity for the Fatherland is possible…. Our acknowledgement of Jewish nationality provides for a clear and sincere relationship to the German people and its national and racial realities. Precisely because we don’t wish to falsify these fundamentals, because we, too, are against mixed marriage and are for maintaining the purity of the Jewish group… The realization of Zionism could only be hurt by resentment of Jews abroad against the German development. Boycott propaganda… is in essence unZionist, because Zionism wants not to do battle but to convince and to build.

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

I recommend that you listen to the interview with Rania.

Tony Greenstein

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

You will also get a signed copy!!

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

tonygreenstein104@gmail.com

Zionism - an Antidote to Socialism (von Plehve – Czarist Interior Minister)

Despite its Pretensions Socialist Zionism was simply an an attempt to reconcile the irreconcilable – Colonisation and Socialism

On Sunday at 5 pm, I will be giving a talk on my book Zionism During the Holocaust to the Communist Party of Great Britain and I intend to focus in particular on the reactionary and counter-revolutionary role of Zionism amongst the Jews of Europe. You can join using this link

I grew up in a Zionist household with all the myths of Zionism. I learnt that what we now call the Nakba (a word never used) was the Palestinians voluntarily leaving in order to make way for the invading Arab armies.

We were told that far from expelling the Arabs, the Zionists had begged them to stay! What was never mentioned was the use of barrel bombs against the Arab population of Haifa and the fact that they were forced to board ships to flee. Far from wanting to ‘drive the Jews into the sea’ the opposite was the case. It was the Palestinians who were driven into the sea, many of whom drowned.

The Idealised View of the Kibbutzim

Israel was seen as an oasis of socialism in a backward, feudal Arab Middle East. The Kibbutzim were held out as socialism in action and many were the times I was told that far from taking part in struggles here I should go and live on a Kibbutz. Of course I was never told that the Kibbutz was a racially pure institution, which no Arab could become a member of or that they were established as stockade and watchtower settlements on confiscated Arab land.

The myths of Zionism could, by themselves, fill a whole volume.  Today of course people are wiser as the true nature of Zionism has revealed itself with the ascent to power of the Jewish Nazi Jewish Power (Otzma Yehudit) and the assorted freaks of Israel’s far-Right.

What is interesting is how it began. Is it true that when Zionism began amongst the Jewish masses in Czarist Russia that it was a progressive movement that over time has moved to the right? Was Zionism a good idea that turned out badly or was it born with the Mark of Cain?

The strategy of the founder of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, was a simple one. He wanted to establish a Jewish State and from the start he sought to find a partner from one of the imperialist powers. This was a strategy that the Zionist movement never deviated.

In 1917 Great Britain agreed to sponsor the Zionist colonisation of Palestine and it formalised its agreement in the Zionism Haifa Otzma Yehudit Balfour Declaration but before then Herzl had traipsed round the rulers of Europe – from the Ottoman Sultan, the German Kaiser, the Pope, Hungary’s King Victor Emmanuel and the Ministers of Czarist Russia.

Before the advent of Hitler and the Nazis the Czar of Russia was seen by most Jews as the symbol of murderous anti-Semitism. Pogroms against the Jews were seen as a means of diverting the wrath of the masses away from the Czarist regime and towards Jews living in the Pale of Settlement where they were confined.

Vyacheslav von Plehve

To this end Czarist Interior Minister Vyacheslav von Plehve organised the Black Hundreds, a group of reactionary, counter-revolutionary, anti-Semitic groups during and after the Russian Revolution of 1905. They were responsible for hundreds of pogroms against Russian Jews and the death of thousands. They were supported by Czar Nicholas II who instructed his ministers to support and fund them.

The Bolsheviks and Russian workers were forced to fight them militarily. Lenin called them ‘tramps, rowdies, hawkers, and similar disreputable characters’. See The Black Hundreds and the Organisation of an Uprising

Brendan McGeever - Revisionist anti-Communist Historian

Russia had been plagued by pogroms against the Jews. Anti-Semitism was seen as the way of dividing the opposition to the Czarist regime. This was why, contrary to revisionist academics such as Brendan McGeever’s Bolsheviks and Anti-Semitism, the Bolsheviks took anti-Semitism very seriously as it was a weapon posed over the heart of the revolution.

The most famous pogrom was in Kishinev on 19- 20 April 1903. Nearly 50 Jews were killed and 92 were severely injured. ‘No Jewish event of the time would be as extensively documented.’ [Zipperstein, Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History]  Reports in the New York Times and The Times ensured that it had an unprecedented impact internationally. [See Jewish Massacre Denounced’. NYT April 28 1903].

The attitude of the Hayim Nahman Bialik, the Zionist national poet, “In the City of Killing” was to talk of the ‘disgraceful shame and cowardice’ of the Jewish victims of the pogrom. The Zionists of course had done nothing to organise self-defence.

The Czarist regime refused to intervene except when the Jews defended themselves. The international and the liberal press in Russia were outraged by stories of rape, mutilation and the murder of children. The anti-Zionist Jewish Bund organised self-defence units here and elsewhere.

The Governor of Bessarabia, whose capital was Kishinev, was replaced by Prince Serge Urusov, a ‘severe critic of autocracy’. Urusov’s study of the massacre confirmed that it had been instigated by Plehve.

On August 8 1903, barely four months after the Kishinev pogrom, Herzl visited Russia, meeting with Plehve. Herzl was concerned that Zionism should retain its legal status. As he began explaining the merits of Zionism Plehve interrupted him: ‘You don’t have to justify the movement to me. Vous prêchez un converti.’ [You are preaching to a convert].’ [Herzl Diaries, pp. 1522-1525, 10.8.1903]

What was the response of the Zionists?  Did they condemn the Czarist regime?  Not at all. The 6^th Zionist Congress which met on 23 August 1903 said nothing just as 30 years later in Prague, it would remain silent about the Hitler regime. It was more concerned with the Uganda Project.

Herzl asked Plehve: ‘Help me to reach land sooner and the revolt will end. And so will the defection to the Socialists.’ [Complete Diaries, p. 1526] Plehve approved the holding of the second Russian Zionist Conference, the publication of a Zionist daily, Der Fraind and the legalisation of the Zionist movement at a time when all other political organisations were banned.

The Jewish Bund

Herzl promised that the revolutionaries would stop their struggle in return for a charter for Palestine in 15 years. The Bund were outraged. [Henry Tobias, The Jewish Bund in Russia – From Its Origins to 1905, p. 252] Kishinev created a crisis for the fledgling Labour Zionist groups, who realised that they could not ignore the struggle against anti-Semitism.

Herzl had earlier written to the Kaiser describing how:

our movement… has everywhere to fight an embittered battle with the revolutionary parties which rightly sense an adversary in it. We are in need of encouragement even though it has to be a carefully kept secret. [Complete Diaries, p. 59, October 17 1897]

Lucien Wolf - Anti-Zionist Spokesman of the Board of Deputies

Later when he came to London, in an interview with Lucien Wolf of the Board of Deputies, Plehve spoke favourably of Zionism as an encouragement to Jewish emigration. For ‘non-emigrants’ he thought that ‘Zionist ideas... might be useful as an antidote to Socialist doctrines.’ [The Times 6.2.04, ‘Mr Lucien Wolf’s Interview with M. de Plehve’].

Sixteen years later, in February 1920 Winston Churchill wrote in Zionism v Bolshevism of a ‘worldwide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilisation’ by Jewish revolutionaries. In 1935 Ben-Gurion described Zionism as a ‘bulwark against assimilation and communism.’ [ https://tinyurl.com/y269wb72]

Socialist Zionism arose out of the contradiction between the needs of Jewish workers in Russia to fight anti-Semitism where they were and the dream of Palestine. Although Zionism had foresworn the struggle in the here and now, it couldn’t ignore the fact that Russian Jews were the oppressed of the oppressed.  Socialist Zionism arose as a result of the conflict between Zionism’s support for the existing order and the Jewish proletariats' class interests. [Lucas, Modern History of Israel, p. 35]

The myth of Zionist socialism in Palestine rested on the belief that the kibbutzim were socialist. In reality the kibbutzim were the result of an alliance between the Zionist labour movement and the Zionist financial institutions. The socialism of the pioneers did not prevent them from entering into an alliance with the Jewish bourgeoisie.

Collective colonisation was the most efficient and cost effective means of colonising Palestine. They were not a means of changing society. They were ‘tools in forging national sovereignty.’ [Ze’ev Sternhell, Founding Myths of Israel, p. 325] They fooled though westerners like Hannah Arendt who described them as ‘the most promising of all social experiments made in the 20^th century.’  [Hannah Arendt, The Jew As Pariah, p. 185].

The internal social structure of the kibbutzim reflected their political role. Personal space was eliminated in favour of collectivism. They were a Zionist Sparta intended to produce fighters without personal attachments of affection to each other or their children. ‘Everything was the property of the collective including the individual’s thoughts.’ [Bloom, ‘What “The Father” had in mind,’ p. 346].

The kibbutzim were Jewish-only stockade and watchtower settlements, marking out the borders of a future Jewish State. They provided the organisational backbone of Haganah, the pre-state army and Palmach, the Zionist shock-troops. Although never more than 5% of Israel’s population, the kibbutzim produced a disproportionately high number of Israel’s officer corps.

As the pogroms intensified, Labor Zionist parties were drawn into the fight against anti-Semitism. In Poland Poale Zion split into a Right and Left at its February/March 1919 conference, with Left Poale Zion emerging as much the stronger. This was the forerunner of the split at the World Union of Poale Zion’s fifth world congress in Vienna in 1920. LPZ supported the Bolshevik revolution and attended the second and third congresses of the Communist International as observers. LPZ opposed the decision by PZ to rejoin the World Zionist Organisation [WZO], viewing it as bourgeois.

But in Palestine it was the right-wing of PZ which was stronger. Because of the rhythms of colonisation Palestine PZ gravitated to the right whereas Poale Zion’s diaspora sections were pulled to the left as a result of the class struggle and the fight against anti-Semitism.

In Russia the success of the revolutionaries in overthrowing the Czarist regime in February 1917 lessened the attraction of Zionism. At their conference in Petrograd in June 1917 the Russian Zionists omitted all mention of British sponsorship of the Zionists settlement in Palestine. [Leonard Stein, The Balfour Declaration. p. 437].

According to the Labor Zionists, the Jewish and Palestinian workers would unite against the Jewish bourgeoisie at the very same time that they were calling for a Boycott of Arab Labour! We can see the results in Israel today where the Israeli Labor Party and Meretz (Mapam) entered into a coalition government with the far-right. Far from achieving socialism, the ‘left’ Zionists have almost disappeared.