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 Wordsby 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 19th 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 areso 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 Zionistsdid 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
Last
summer I was contacted by Hossam Sarhan who asked if I would agree to be
interviewed for a program on Yair Stern, the founder of the Stern Gang
or Lehi, Loḥamei Ḥerut Yisrael (Fighters
for the Freedom of Israel).
The
Zionists have done their best since the Hitler era to suggest, on the basis of
the undoubted collaboration of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj al-Amin
Husseini with the Nazis, that whereas they supported the
Allies the Palestinians supported Hitler.
In
fact there is no truth in this. It was the ardent Zionist British High
Commissioner Herbert
Samuel who appointed Husseini as Mufti despite the fact that he came fourth in
the elections to the post in 1921.
Stern did his best to form a pact with the above
The
British and the Zionists always preferred reactionary, feudal leaders of the
Palestinians to secular nationalists like the Istiqlal
Party which was severely repressed.
Husseini
was a minor war criminal compared to Walter
Rauff, the inventor of the gas truck which was used at
the first extermination camp Chelmno.
Rauff became an Israeli agent after the war.
This
did not stop the Mufti
playing a ‘starring role’ in Yad Vashem'sEncycolpedia of
the Holocaust. The article on the Mufti is longer
than the articles on Himmler and Heydrich combined and longer than the article on
Eichmann. It is only
slightly exceeded in length by the entry for Hitler. [Peter Novick, The Holocaust in
American Life p. 158].
The
Stern Gang was founded in 1940 from a split in another terrorist group, Irgun,
which was commanded by former Israeli Prime Minister, Menachem
Begin. Lehi was a Blood and Fire Zionist group and its
rehabilitation in Israel today says everything about the Zionist attitude to
genuine terrorism.
Ilan Pappe
I
had just written a book, Zionism During the Holocaust, which contains
a section on The Zionist Group that was
openly pro-Nazi. This was probably why I was interviewed.Also interviewed by the program makers were Ilan
Pappe, the foremost historian of Zionism and its misdeeds
and Tom Suarez
who has written a couple of very interesting books on Zionism and its
antecedents, including its terroristic
proclivities. Another person who was interviewed was Yair Stern, the son of
Abraham Stern, the founder of the Stern Gang.
The
Stern Gang distinguished itself in 1940 by its offer, not once but
twice to Nazi Germany to form a military pact. The idea was for them to recruit
40,000 European Jews and thence, with help from Nazi Germany, to invade
Palestine and set up a Jewish State under the auspices of Nazi Germany. Stern was convinced at that point that
Germany was going to win the war and he wanted to be on the winning side.
The Program Interviewed Yair Stern, the son of Abraham Stern
Naftali
Lubenchik, from the Stern Gang met a senior representative of
the German Foreign Ministry, Otto von Hentig and Alfred Roser, a Military
Intelligence agent, in Beirut on 11 January 1941. Lebanon at that time was
under the control of Vichy France. The Nazis however ignored the proposal. The
Stern Gang had previously sought to work with Mussolini although they were not
alone in this.
Covering letter attached to proposed agreement between Stern Gang and Mussolini
The
Irgun’s youth wing, Betar,
had trained at the Italian naval base of Civitavechia as a result of an agreement with Mussolini, as had some of
Lehi’s cadre. The President of the Zionist Organisation, Chaim
Weizmann had made no less than 4 trips to see Mussolini. The
Zionist Organisation made it clear, in the words of Weizmann’s predecessor Nahum
Sokolow, who also visited Mussolini, that the Zionists had no
problems with fascism, just anti-Semitism (or rather too much anti-Semitism!).
In
December 1941 Nathan
Yellin Mor was sent on another trip to Beirut to meet the
Nazis but this time he was intercepted in Syria by the British and arrested.
Thus ended the dreams of a greater Zionist and Nazi Reich. In February 1942 Stern
was killed by the British Major Morton.
The
Stern Gang became notorious for its bank robberies and assassinations. It had
an eclectic political philosophy which combined extreme racism (Arabs were to
become slaves under a Jewish master race) and yet an orientation to the Soviet
Union at one time and what was termed ‘National Bolshevism’.
In
November 1944 Lehi also assassinated the resident British Minister in Cairo, Lord
Moyne, who was a personal friend of Churchill. The
assassins were quickly caught and hanged.
A wanted poster for Stern
Churchill
had been a long-term friend of the Zionists and he declared that:
If our dreams
of Zionism are to end in the smoke of assassins’ pistols and our labors for its
future are to produce a new set of gangsters worthy of Nazi Germany, many like
myself would have to reconsider the position we have maintained so
consistently.
In
fact this is exactly what has happened. Zionism has indeed produced a new set
of gangsters and they are led by the Al Capone of Zionism, Benjamin
Netanyahu. However this has not stopped
British or American imperialism from supporting the Israeli state unconditionally.
Menachem Begin - Irgun leader
As
I argued in the film Lehi was not a break with Zionism anymore than Begin’s
Irgun had been. Their differences with the mainstream Labour Zionists were ones
of tactics not principles. Indeed at times they were very useful for the Labour
Zionists who could at one and the same time dissociate themselves from Lehi’s
actions whilst at the same time supporting them.
This
was true of the first and most famous massacre of Palestinians in the Nakba, in
the village of Deir
Yassin (now Givat Shaul) which lies literally a stone’s
throw away from the Zionist holocaust propaganda museum, Yad Vashem.
Although
Haganah
dissociated itself from the massacre of over 100 Palestinians in a forerunner
of what is happening in Gaza today, to the extent of David Ben-Gurion sending
a letter of apology to Transjordan’s King Abdullah, they had in fact secretly
agreed to the massacre, as Ilan Pappe explained in the program.
Supporter of the Stern Gang
Haganah
had also agreed to the assassination
of UN mediator Count Folk Bernadotte in 1948 although in public they had
condemned it to the point of making Lehi a banned organisation, describing it
as a terrorist group.
The
Zionists today say that it was the Palestinians who had rejected the UN
Partition Plan of November 29 1947 (UN Resolution 181). But this is one more
Zionist lie. Not only did they expand beyond the boundaries of the Jewish State
that the UN had agreed before May 1948 but they had also rejected the UN
proposal that Jerusalem, being the home of all 3 religions, should be
internationalised.
After Stern's death, the Stern Gang was led by a triumvirate including Yitzhak Shamir
This
was rejected by all wings of the Zionist movement, hence the assassination of
Bernadotte.
As
Tom Suarez pointed out in the programme Bernadotte has personally saved
20,000 Jews from the concentration camps when he reached an agreement with
Himmler that 100 white buses with Red Crosses on their roofs took Jews and
other prisoners from the concentration camps in February 1945.
How
you might ask has Israel remembered the Stern Gang and its founder Yair Stern.
Bearing in mind that Israel considers itself at the forefront of the fight
against ‘terrorism’ you would be forgiven for assuming that mention of his name
would be verboten in Israel
today.Not a bit of it.
Abraham Stern Who Was Killed by the British
The
street where Stern was killed by the British has been renamed Stern Street. "Avraham Stern” streets are ubiquitous across Israel. The town of Kochav Yairwas established in his memory. Even the IsraeliPostal Service got in on the act issuing a stamp commemorating him with
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu naming his firstborn son Yair.
In
How should Avraham Stern be remembered? Mark Regev, the former Israeli Ambassador to
London, noted that the first Israeli Prime Minister,
Ben-Gurion found some positive words with which to describe Lehi’s founding
commander:
There is no
doubt that Avraham Stern was one of the greatest and most admired people to
emerge during the Mandate. I venerate… his steely courage and boundless dedication
to Israel’s liberation.
Regev
wrote‘the once Zionist renegade is now Israeli
mainstream’.
So
when Zionists tell you that they oppose terrorism, it is worth remembering that
they only oppose ‘terrorism’ when it comes to Palestinian violence. Terrorism
committed by Zionists is fine because it serves their objectives, notably the
ethnic cleansing of Palestine.
Yitzshak Shamir
The
fact that Stern had tried to negotiate a military pact with Nazi Germany, of
which Ben-Gurion was all too aware, was irrelevant. The fact that he was a
racial supremacist was even more irrelevant. Regev asks innocently if
Ben-Gurion was ‘
retrospectively
whitewashing a Zionist terrorist merely because Stern was a committed Jewish
patriot, seemingly confirming the dictum that “one man’s terrorist is another
man’s freedom fighter”?
Regev’s
conclusion was that
Stern’s
attacks against the organs of British subjugation – officialdom, military and
police – should be viewed as justified insurgency. Even in the politically
questionable case of Lord Moyne, was not Lehi’s chosen victim the senior
representative of British colonial rule?
Being
a myopic Zionist Regev is unable to see why Palestinian ‘terrorism’ is equally
justified if not more so since the Zionists were the catspaws and creation of
the British state. Their fight against the British was not about a fight for
freedom but about their right to expel and subjugate the Palestinians.
This
is the hypocrisy that is now playing out in Gaza where Palestinian
organisations like Hamas are deemed ‘terrorist’ but the actions of bombing
schools and hospitals, cold-bloodedly killing civilians including children is
seen as justified.
Zionism
was born in blood and fire and it is likely to end that way too.
As
a result of reading this blog, a viewer sent me a copy of the latest issue of
the British Palestine Police Association magazine. In it there are two
interesting articles on Stern from the Palestine Police's perspective. You can
access these articles here
If Jews Are Concerned About Anti-Semitism Then They Should Stop Acting As
a Moral Alibi for Extermination, Torture and Famine
There can be no greater
obscenity than using the Nazi Holocaust to justify Gaza’s Holocaust
Joint statement with the @JLC_uk: “We are concerned that the cumulative effect of these announcements, in quick succession, signal a significant shift in policy, away from Israel being a key UK ally. This would not only be a strategic error but a moral one.” pic.twitter.com/pu8tRin5Gd
— Board of Deputies of British Jews (@BoardofDeputies) July 26, 2024
One
of the most embarrassing things when speaking at a Palestinian demonstration is
when people applaud simply because you are Jewish. People take it for granted
that most Jewish people support Israel’s war crimes.Unfortunately this is true.
It’s
not that Jewish anti-Zionists deserve praise so much as Jews who support genocide
carried out in their name deserve condemnation.
That
was why I objected to a contest on
Twitter to find the top 10 Jews ‘who
don’t hate themselves’, the Nazi-style accusation that Zionists deploy
against anti-Zionist Jews. It should not be remarkable that Jews should condemn
a state which has turned Gaza into a death camp.
It
is a symptom of the amorality of most British Jews that they don’t protest when
their self-proclaimed leaders protest in their name against Britain resuming
its funding of UNWRA, the UN Agency charged with preventing famine in Gaza. These
wretches even complained that Britain was withdrawing its objection at the
International Criminal Court to the issuing of arrest warrants for Israel’s war
criminal Prime Minister, Netanyahu and Defence Minister Gallant.
Rosenberg
warned
that prosecuting war criminals would pose a threat to British national security
and that feeding Palestinian children by funding UNWRA would cause irreparable
harm to the Zionist cause. ‘Most
worryingly of all’ Rosenberg said, ‘is
the speculation that Britain may impose an arms embargo on Israel this
week.’
Imagine
what might happen. Israel wants to bomb one of the few remaining schools left
in Gaza and all of a sudden Israel’s Chief of Staff discovers that they’ve run
out of bombs. Palestinian children are likely to run amok unless you can
smother them with White Phosphorous. God forbid Israel might not be able to
massacre women and children at the drop of a hat. It would be an ‘astonishing decision to take against a key
UK ally and security partner’ Rosenberg proclaimed.Yet the sound of British Jews dissociating
themselves from these scoundrels is deafening in its silence.
For
all their memorials most Jews have learnt nothing from the Holocaust. This is Zionism.
Drawing universal lessons such as anti-racism might interfere with their
settler colonial project. If non-Jews in Europe had behaved in the same way as
Jews do today, then not 6 but 7 or 8 million Jews would have perished in the
Holocaust.
Labour Friends of Israel, funded by the Israeli Embassy, leapt into action at the prospect of Netanyahu facing the International Criminal Court for War Crimes
Support
for Israel, right or wrong, is a reflex action of most Jews. By their silence
British Jews are complicit in the genocide in Gaza. Unlike Germans under
Hitler, British Jews do not have the excuse of living in a state based on
police terror.
When
Britain’s Suella Braverman and Rishi Sunak claimed that marches against
genocide were anti-Semitic and that Jews were fearful
of entering inner London where were the protests? Most British Jews went along
with this nonsense and in the process what they did was to cement the
identification in the public mind between Israel’s atrocities and ordinary
Jews.
Jewish Bloc on Palestinian Demonstrations
That
these claims were evidence free, all the demonstrations had a Jewish bloc,
didn’t deter them in the slightest.Anti-racist
Jews are invisible to the British Establishment and their Zionist monkeys.
The
time has long gone when Jews could sit on the fence and proclaim their
indifference to what is done in their name. To be an onlooker when a Holocaust
is being perpetrated in your name is to take sides. As Archbishop Desmond Tutu said,
‘If you are neutral in situations of
injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.’
Most
British Jews know little about the holocaust. They rely on Simon Schama’s
coffee table books. They know even less about the Zionist record, not only
collaboration with the Nazis but their blocking of escape routes for Jews who tried
to get out of Europe.
As
in Gaza, the Warsaw Ghetto was subject to a siege. Some 92,000 Jews died as a
result of hunger even before the deportations. In Lodz, the second largest
ghetto, about 45,000 Jews died. In all some half a million Jews died of
hunger or starvation. This was deliberate Nazi policy. ‘Death by Hunger’ as
Hans Frank, the Nazi Governor General of Poland said. This is Israel’s template
today in Gaza.
In
July 1941 Zionist activists picketed
the offices of Agudat Israel in the USA in protest at them sending food parcels
to starving Jews in the Polish ghettos. Joseph Tenenbaum, a former
Vice-President of the American Jewish Committee, wrote that Jews must not
interfere with Britain’s war needs, ‘even
if this comes at the expense of victims in Poland or elsewhere.’ Zionists have
form in this sort of thing.
I
can remember debating with those on the Left who argued that it was
anti-Semitic to expect someone, just because they were Jewish, to take a
position on Zionism. Today when the so-called leaders of British and French
Jews openly
support what Israel is doing in Gaza, it is incumbent on Jews to speak out.
Silence is complicity.
The
Catholic Church was bitterly criticised for not having openly opposed the Nazi
Holocaust despite having been aware of it from an early stage. This was crystallised
in The
Deputy, the 1963 play by Rolf Hochhuth which portrayed Pope Pius XII as
having been indifferent to the extermination of the Jews.
What
then is one to make of Jews who remain silent when the Zionist puppet Ephraim
Mirvis openly supports the extermination of the Palestinians of Gaza and
protests against funding UNWRA?
The
situation today is that Palestinians are not only dying from bombs and bullets
but from Israel’s deliberate encouraging of the spread of disease.The Blocking of aid convoys means that Israel
is deliberately creating a famine and the conditions for disease to spread. Medical
researchers in the Lancet estimated that not 50,000 but 187,000
people – a tenth of Gaza’s population – have died. Jonathan Cook has suggested
that unless immediate action is taken then 600,000 will die. 600,000 is the figure
that Israel’s Ambassador in London, Tzipi Hotoveli, looked
forward to in an interview with Piers Morgan.
Despite
the Zionist outrage when I described Israel in 2019 as ‘Hitler’s Bastard Offspring’, my words have been proved correct. When
Israel’s war against the Palestinians began last October, ‘Defence’ Minister
Yoav Gallant called
the Palestinians ‘human animals.’
There were no protests at this by Mirvis or the Board despite it being first coined
by Heinrich Himmler, to describe Jews in in a speech to senior SS Officers in Poznań
on October 4 1943.
"The People of Israel Live, Finish Them" is a bumper sticker prominently seen on Israeli cars across occupied Palestine, which has recently exploded in popularity, explicitly calling for the genocide of the Palestinian people. #ICJ#southafrica#crimes#israel#gazapic.twitter.com/vkYaoUgAWL
Nor
was Gallant alone in identifying with the Nazis. ‘Finish them’ is the most popular car bumper sticker in Israel
today. When the war began Tel Aviv was flooded with stickers ‘exterminate now’. Former Likud MK
Moshe Feiglin compared
Hitler’s desire to annihilate every last Jew with Israel’s need to eliminate
every last Palestinian.
Israel
has based its claim to reparations from Germany on the fiction that it inherits
the memory of the Jews who died in the holocaust. The reality is that it
inherits the memory of those who killed the 6 million.
How
many Jews have walked out of a synagogue sermon when the rabbi defends what
Israel is doing? How many have openly criticised the Board of Deputies when
they justify Israel’s policy of starvation and its repeated massacres of a
civilian population?
Of
course there are many thousands of Jews who have refused to remain silent such
as those who participate in the Jewish bloc on the
demonstrations in London. But it has to be faced that the few thousand British
Jews who have participated in solidarity actions with the Palestinians are
still a small percentage of Britain’s Jews.
Zionism
and its interpretation of the holocaust have become, for most Jews a substitute
religion. From not wanting to know about the holocaust immediately after the
war, American Jews embraced holocaust theology at the same time as the United
States openly backed Israel post-67. During the McCarthy era mention of the
holocaust was seen as evidence of communist leanings.
How
is it that worship of god has been transformed into worship of real estate, the
preposterous claim that god gave the land of Palestine to the Jews? The
Prophets would have called this idolatry, a Golden Calf?
How
is it that Jews, who were once synonymous with the Left and subversion of the
established order - trade unionist, anarchists, socialists and communists – have
become the dupes and pawns of the Islamophobic far-Right?
The
unspoken assumption is that Jews today have nothing in common, apart from
religious rituals, with their counterparts in Eastern Europe a century ago. British
Jews today are completely dissimilar to Jews in the East End of the 1930s. When
anti-Semitism was a problem in Britain Jews naturally turned to the left – the Communist
Party and Independent Labour Party and assorted groups. The Labour Party dissociated
itself from the anti-fascist struggle.
In 1945 the only Communist
MP ever to have been elected in England, Phil Piratin, was elected for Mile End in the East End.Over half his votes were estimated to come from
Jews. When Geoffrey Alderman surveyed Jewish voters in Hackney for the 1979
general election, some 1.8% of Jews said they were voting for the neo-Nazi
National Front but none said they were voting for the CommunistParty.In other words not only have Jews become more
prosperous but they have moved to the right politically.
Anti-Semitism
– the False Anti-Racism of the Right
As
traditional anti-Semitism has disappeared so, in the minds of many Jews, anti-Zionism
is seen as opposition to their identity as Jews and anti-Semitism. But
opposition to identity is not racism. There are many groups in which female
genital mutilation [FGM] is seen as part of their culture. By this reasoning
opposition to FGM is also racism.
When
my father took part in the Battle
of Cable Street he didn’t need a definition of anti-Semitism. He knew what anti-Semitism
meant from daily life. The mere fact that the British and US governments have
pushed the definition so hard upon universities and other public bodies
testifies to its fraudulent and phony nature.
From
2015 onwards the CAA produced
an ‘Anti-Semitism Barometer’ which was criticised
even by other Zionists for its sloppy methodology.
Writing about this survey Anshel Pfeffer
accused
the CAA of an ‘eagerness
to see the anti-Semitism in Britain, which inarguably exists, as much more
widespread than it really is’. Pfeffer is a mainstream Zionist. About the finding that 56% of Jews
agree that “the recent rise in anti-Semitism in Britain has some echoes of
the 1930s.” Pfeffer remarked that:
If
the majority of British Jews and the authors of the CAA report actually believe
that, then it’s hard to take anything they say about contemporary anti-Semitism
in their home country seriously.... To compare today’s Britain, for all its
faults, with the Jews’ situation in 1930s exhibits a disconnect from reality
which borders on hysteria.
Since
the CAA, CST and the Metropolitan Police all use the IHRA
misdefinition of anti-Semitism then any statistics they produce can be
discarded as not merely unreliable but meaningless.
Last weekend an intimidating mob marched through London chanting “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” - a slogan that is widely understood as a demand for the destruction of Israel. Attempts to pretend otherwise are disingenuous. 1/3
Concern
about ‘anti-Semitism’ by racists like Suella Braverman has been used to both
flatter and frighten British Jews with the express purpose of claiming that
opposition to a key plan of British foreign policy, support for Israel, derives
from anti-Semitism.
Why
else would Sunak rush out of Downing Street when George Galloway was elected MP
to profess his concern
that ‘Jewish students were fearful to
wear their school uniforms’?The man
who made support for the Rwandan scheme for refugees his flagship policy.
What
is it about Jews that touches the depths of Braverman’s black heart when she
expressed no such concerns about the attacks on mosques and Muslims following
the murder of 3 girls in Southport?
Or
put it another way? Would Braverman, Jenrick and the rest of the Tory slime
have extended their support for Jewish refugees fleeing the pogroms at the end
of the 19th century?
According
to Matthew Hendley [Anti-alienism and the Primrose League, 250]
the late nineteenth
century critics of sweating "indulged in blatant racism, blaming foreign
immigrants (mainly East European Jews who settled in the principal industrial
areas) for causing sweating through their competition and low living standards.
In
the debate
on the Immigration of Destitute Aliens on 29 January 1902, William Evans-Gordon
MP had this to say:
"The main
cause of the present unpopularity of aliens in East London remains to be
stated. The inflow of the foreign Jew has brought with it an immense amount of
overcrowding, the direct and indirect effects of which have been alike
injurious. The number of families occupying one-roomed tenements is very great,
too many lodgers are received and illegally occupied basements are far too
common."
Mr
Forde Ridley followed up:
All they [British workers] know
is that they are being turned out of their homes and the neighbourhoods in
which they are obliged to live, in order to carry on their work, and that their
places are being taken by Russian and Polish Jews, and you cannot persuade them
that it is not a racial question. They naturally take a hatred to the Jewish
people.... It is argued by some that if a foreigner can live on so much less
than an Englishman, then it is high time that the British working man went to
the wall.
William Evans-Gordon,
the Tory MP for Stepney, formed the British
Brothers League in 1901 in order to keep Jewish immigrants out. In 1903,
Evans-Gordon wroteThe Alien Immigrant, in which he asserted that "the settlement of large aggregations of
Hebrews in a Christian land has never been successful", and that the
"Hebrew
colony ... unlike any other alien colony in [Great Britain], forms a solid and
permanently distinct block – a race apart, as it were, in an enduring island of
extraneous thought and custom", to the extent that "east of Aldgate one walks into a foreign
town".
Sound
familiar? This is what is said today about Muslims. The target may have changed
but the argument about different ‘races’ not mixing remains the same. In his
autobiography Chaim Weizmann, the future President of Israel wrote favourably
of Evans-Gordon:
our people
were rather hard on him. The Aliens Bill in England and the movement which grew
around it were natural phenomenon which might have been foreseen... Sir William
Evans-Gordon had no particular anti-Jewish prejudices... He acted as he
thought, according to his best lights and in the most kindly way, in the
interests of his country… he was sincerely ready to encourage any settlement of
Jews almost anywhere in the British Empire, but he failed to see why the
ghettos of London or Leeds or Whitechapel should be made into a branch of the
ghettos of Warsaw and Pinsk [Trial and
Error, pp. 90-91)
Stuart
Samuel, the Liberal MP for Whitechapel was opposed in 1900 by a Conservative,
David Hope-Kydd, who had the support of the English Zionist Federation.
Geoffrey Alderman described how Kydd
cleverly
coupled his desire for an aliens’ immigration bill with heart-rending support
for the infant Zionist movement.’Hope-Kydd referred to Jewish immigrants (aliens) as‘the
very scum of the unhealthiest of the Continental nations.’[The Jewish Community in British Politics,
pp. 68, 75]
The
BBL was instrumental in securing the passage in 1905 of the Aliens Act which aimed
to stop the entry of Jewish refugees from Czarist Russia.. Richard Thurlow wrotethat
If
Braverman and Sunak had been living at the beginning of the 20thcentury then the hostility they display to
refugees today would have been directed with equal venom against Jewish
refugees.
Today
British Jews are the most prosperous segment of the White population and also
the most reactionary and racist. If a survey was conducted of attitudes of Jews
to Moslems it would show that Islamaphobia and anti-Arab racism was off the
scale.
Even
without a scientific survey there are intimations of this. In January 2022 the
Senior Vice-President of the Board of Deputies, Gary Mond, was forced
to resign. Mond had written
on Facebook and tweeted
that ‘all
civilization’ is ‘at war with Islam.’
Mond is also a trustee of the Jewish National Fund-UK, as is Gideon Falter, its
Vice Chair and CEO of the Campaign
Against Anti-Semitism.
In July
2018 the BOD suspended
Roslyn Pine for describing Arabs as “the
vilest of animals.” Three years previously Pine had said that it was a pity
that the pro-Palestinian Swedish foreign minister was “too old to be raped.” She has also called fellow deputies “kapos.”
Jewish
News reported
that ‘the Board’s executive ruled that
she could return early if she apologised, showed contrition and expressed
remorse’. Contrast that with the life-time expulsions that the BOD demanded
for Labour members expelled for ‘anti-Semitism’.
What was
the reaction of Finchley United Synagogue? Did it change its representative? It
was reported
that
Finchley Synagogue will look into the
plight of its suspended deputy Roslyn Pine as a matter of “urgency”.
Note that
word ‘plight’.
There
are many reasons for the changing political allegiances of British and European
Jews. One of the most important is socio-economic. Jews have almost entirely
emigrated from the East End of London to the north London suburbs such as
Golders Green.
According
to Alderman by 1961, over 40% of Anglo-Jewry was to be found in the upper two
social classes compared to less than 20% of the general population.’ William
Rubinstein, a past President of the Jewish Historical Society, wrote
that:
The rise of
Western Jewry to unparalleled affluence and high status has led to the
near-disappearance of a Jewish proletariat of any size; indeed, the Jews may
become the first ethnic group in history without a working class of any size. [The Left, the Right and the Jews. p.51]
It has long been the
practice to accuse supporters of the Palestinians and opponents of Zionism,
including Jewish anti-Zionists of 'anti-Semitism'.... Today the
New Right claim to be opponents of anti-Semitism. ... Reagan's Republican Party... voted at its 1984
Party Convention to condemn anti-Semitism unanimously. Even neo-fascist groups,
eg. the French cultural and academic racist group, GRECE, opposes
'anti-Semitism'.’
Anti-Semitism was the new and false anti-Semitism
of the Right and one reason for this is because it barely exists.
Anti-Semitism is an extremely useful weapon with which to attack the Left and
the Palestine Solidarity Movement and that is what we are experiencing
today.
Many
on the left, were slow to understand this. It became clearer when
‘anti-Semitism’ became the main weapon used against Jeremy Corbyn as leader of
the Labour Party.
How
was this possible? Quite simply as Jews changed so did anti-Semitism. Racism changes
its contours. It doesn’t stand still. Yesterday’s victims of racism may be
today’s racists.
We
can see that clearly with people like Priti Patel and Braverman, both of whose
parents were immigrants. When the Jews of the East End faced the violent
anti-Semitism of Moseley and the British Union of Fascists, their allies were
the left and ordinary workers. In
October 1936 at the Battle
of Cable Street an estimated 200,000 demonstrators successfully defied the
attempts of the Metropolitan Police to force a path through the East End for
the fascists. The march had been approved by the Tory Home Secretary Sir John
Simon.
Today
the Met purport to oppose anti-Semitism but at that time their ranks were full
to the brim with BUF sympathisers. Racism towards Jews has been replaced by
hostility to Muslims in police ranks.
The
same is true of the Tory Party. Until recently the Tory Party was infested by
anti-Semitism.Zionism’s hero, Arthur James
Balfour was a dedicated racist and anti-Semite. As Prime Minister he introduced
the Aliens Act 1905.
During
a conversation with Weizmann, Balfour recalled an exchange with Cosima Wagner,
the widow of Richard Wagner. Balfour explained that ‘he shared many of her anti-Semitic postulates.’ Instead of
protesting Weizmann
‘pointed out
that we, too… had drawn attention to the fact that Germans of the Mosaic
persuasion were an undesirable and demoralizing phenomenon…’ [Leonard Stein, The Balfour Declaration p. 154].
During
the 1930s the Tory Party was riddled with anti-Semitism. The pro-Nazi Anglo-German
Fellowship claimed
among its members, fifty members of both Houses of Parliament and ‘many
generals, admirals, bishops and bankers.’
This
was why The Times (along with most of
the British press including the pro-Hitler Daily
Mail) and the BBC refused to allow criticism of Hitler’s anti-Semitism to
interfere with their coverage of German affairs. When anti-Semitism was a
genuine form of state racism, the mainstream press weren’t interested. Today
when ‘anti-Semitism’ means criticism of Israel then the media are all over it.
One
of the most ardent pro-Zionist politicians was Winston Churchill.Apart from warm words of sympathy he did
nothing to help alleviate the plight of Jews under Nazi occupation, still less
to admit to British territories Jewish refugees who had escaped the Nazis.
In
a speech in Sunderland in January 1920 Churchill spoke
of ‘the international Soviet of the
Russian and Polish Jew’. Churchill
was espousing a version of the international Jewish conspiracy theory.
Churchill followed this up in 1920 with Bolshevism v
Zionism in the Illustrated Sunday
Herald where he stressed how important it was
that the
national Jews in every country who are loyal to the land of their adoption
should come forward on every occasion, as many of them in England have already
done, and take a prominent part in every measure for combating the Bolshevik
conspiracy.
Churchill’s
answer to the support among Jewish people for socialism was Zionism. The Nazis
too saw Zionism, in Hitler’s words, as ‘a
great movement’. (Mein Kampf, p.41).Zionism has always been a racist and counter-revolutionary movement.
Long
before Zionism took hold amongst British Jews it had become the adopted policy
of the British Establishment. The only
member of the Lloyd George War Cabinet to oppose the Balfour Declaration
was Sir Edwin Montagu, its only Jewish member.
The organisation that is charged with monitoring and
collating statistics of anti-Semitism is the Mossad Project, the Community
Security Trust. As Tony Lerman documented in his essay Antisemitism Redefined in the 1990’s the Israeli state moved to
take over the monitoring of statistics on anti-Semitism. Lerman wrote
I had
close personal experience of the role the Mossad played in establishing Israeli
hegemony over the monitoring and combating of antisemitism. While I was
director of the Institute of Jewish Affairs (IJA)... in the 1990s, I founded
and was principal editor of the annual Antisemitism World Report, the
first objective, independent , country-by-country survey of anti semitism
worldwide. The London Mossad representative dealing with antisemitism made it
clear to me that they were very unhappy about our independent operation and
then tried to pressure us into either ceasing publication or merging our report
with one that the then new Project for the Study of Antisemitism at Tel Aviv
University, headed by Professor Dina Porat and part-financed by the Mossad, was
beginning to produce. [On Anti-Semitism,
p.12].
Every
year the CST produces Anti-Semitism
Incident Reports and every year it documents a continuing increase in anti-Semitism.
This fits in well with Zionist ideology that holds that Jews will never be safe
living outside Israel which is their ‘real home’.
Sure
enough their report
for 2023 found that ‘anti-Jewish hate
recorded across the UK in 2023... is the highest annual total ever reported to
CST.’ What even the CST could not avoid is the conclusion that it is
Israel’s attacks on Palestinians which is responsible for this increase. In
other words the ‘Jewish’ State is the main cause of anti-Semitism today. They
wrote that:
These spikes
(in anti-Semitism) also reflected the surge in anti-Jewish reactions to the
escalation of conflicts involving Israel. In 2023, the increase in antisemitism
following 7 October occurred on a larger scale. Between 1 January and 6
October, CST had recorded an average of five antisemitic incidents per day;
from 7 October to 31 December, this rose to an average of 31 antisemitic
incidents per day.
Note
how the reaction of people to Israel’s genocide is termed ‘anti-Jewish’. I
shall leave a detailed analysis of their figures to Alan Maddison’s article
for JVL ‘Will the latest CST report do more to protect British Jews or Israel?’ I have just one observation.
The CST report recorded
266 incidents of Assault in 2023, a rise of 96% from the 136 incidents reported
in 2022. They tell us that this was ‘the
most ever recorded in a year.’So if
the CST are right then two Jewish people will be attacked every three days.
This figure is, in itself, quite strange because the CST tells us that there
were 4,103 incidents of anti-Semitic hate in 2023.
Normally,
for other examples of racism, assault forms about a third of total incidents
which suggests that the CST are vastly over inflating the number of
anti-Semitic incidents and padding them out with social media posts which are
unquantifiable.What is even stranger is
that not one ‘of these incidents was
severe enough to be classed as Extreme Violence, compared to one incident in
2022.’ Extreme violence is where there is a case of actual or grievous
bodily harm. In other words not one Jewish person was actually hurt in 2023 and
just one was hurt in 2022.Compare these
figures to attacks on Muslims.
The CST's Opposition to 'anti-Semitism' didn't stop it inviting Britain's racist Home Secretary as its Guest of Honour
The CST’s decision to invite
Braverman as the guest speaker at its 2023 Annual Dinner, gives the lie to CST’s
claim to oppose racism.
In
a parliamentary
debate on Tackling Islamaphobia we learn that almost half of religiously
motivated attacks last year were against Muslims, a trend that has stayed
consistent for the last six years. 42% of mosques have experienced some form of
attack over the last three years (Andy Slaughter MP). I doubt if even 1% of
synagogues have been attacked. The scenes outside Southport, Hartlepool and
other mosques have never occurred outside synagogues yet the Home Office channels
£15m into the coffers of the CST, consistently greater than that to tackle
Islamaphobia. Why? Because the British State has an interest in promoting the
idea that ‘anti-Semitism’ is on the increase as a way of buttressing support
for Israel. Jews are the moral alibi for a central plank of British foreign
policy.
Although the BOD is very concerned about
‘anti-Semitism’ today it wasn’t always like that. In 1942 when news about the deportation
of Jews from Slovakia to Auschwitz emerged, the Federation of Czechoslovakian
Jews published a protest against what was happening. It asked the BOD to join
with them. The Board refused.
It
would seem that Brodetsky and his colleagues wished to maintain a distance
between themselves and the organisations of recent arrivals, whose demands went
against the grain of the BD policy which was to work ‘decently’ and refrain
from making noise.
In June 1942 the Federation held a
public rally. ‘Invitations were sent to
Brodestsky and Brotman but they declined to attend.’ Selig Brodetsky was
elected as the first Zionist President of the Board in December 1939 and Brotman
was its Secretary. Meier Sompolinsky wrote about how
‘the
shrewd action of the World Federation of Czechoslovakian Jews made a strong
impression and led to a conflict between the advocates of the quiet and the
public approaches....
At
the demonstration Rabbi Hertz, as chairman, expressed disappointment at
Brodetsky’s absence. Even (Anthony) Eden (Britain’s Foreign Secretary) and
Cardinal Hinsley, the Catholic primate had sent statements to be read in
public, but all the president of British Jewry did was to send an indirect
letter.
Sompolinsky comments that
The
way the Slovakian issue was handled was characteristic of the hesistant
approach of the JFC [Joint Foreign Committee of the Board of Deputies] in the
period before the Final Solution became public knowledge. [Meier Sompolinsky, The British Government and the Holocaust - The
failure of Anglo-Jewish Leadership, pp. 68-9, 1999]
When it came to opposing genuine anti-Semites the Board of Deputies has always run away from opposing them
This
has been the reaction of the BOD throughout its history. In 1936 it opposed Jews
taking part in the Battle of Cable Street. The BOD opposed the 43 Group of Jewish
ex-servicemen who physically put Moseley and his Union Movement to flight after
the war. During the 1960s and 1970s, when the NF was active, the BOD told Jews
to keep silent. The only form of ‘anti-Semitism’ that the BOD has ever been
prepared to be vocal about is opposition to Zionism and Israel.
The
first time the Board held a demonstration against ‘anti-Semitism’ was in 2018
when Corbyn was leader! Last year they also held a demonstration against
‘anti-Semitism’ – this time in support of genocide in Gaza. This is
the reality of the ‘anti-Semitism’ scare. It is about keeping British Jews as
their docile political pets.
It
means British Jews like Heidi Bachram, a Jewish Chronicle correspondent in
Brighton and Hove, acting as a spy for the British police against Palestinian
solidarity activists. This is a continuation of a long and inglorious Jewish tradition
which began when Haganah agent Feivel Polkes acted as a Gestapo agent informing
on the left. Thousands of Jews living under cover were betrayed to the Nazis by
Jewish informers, such as Icek
Glogowski (Fat Jacques). Jewish informers were far more effective than
their non-Jewish counterparts because many Jews in hiding trusted them. Zionism
informers today carry on the tradition.
French
Jews support for Le Pen
One
example of how Jews in Western Europe have moved to the right is the recent
elections in France. Contrary to all expectations the Left came out on top and
Marie Le Pen’s National Renewal came third. You might expect that French Jews
were overjoyed that a party founded by a holocaust denier and containing many
anti-Semites had been defeated. Not a bit of it. Many
French Jews voted for them and according to the Israeli press they were
most disappointed that the ‘anti-Semitic’ left came out on top.
Zionism
has managed to transform the far-right enemies of Jews into their friends and
the left, who hid Jews from the Nazis in France, into their enemies. Not only
are Western Jews the most racist, right-wing section of the White population,
they are also the most stupid.
