23.06.2016
Why Ken Livingstone was right
Who exactly is making ‘factual misrepresentations’? Tony Greenstein replies to Paul Bogdanor
Ken Livingstone set the cat among the Zionist pigeons when heremarked: “When Hitler won his election in 1932, his policy then was that Jews should be moved to Israel. He was supporting Zionism - this before he went mad and ended up killing six million Jews.”1 Minor errors apart (it was Palestine then, not Israel, and he did not get to power until 1933), his remarks were essentially correct. He used ‘Hitler’ when it would have been more correct to have referred to the Nazi Party, but there is no disputing that the German Zionists were the Nazis’ favourite Jews.
Fathom, the journal of the Britain-Israel Communications and Research Centre, and an Israeli propaganda outfit, has attempted to rebut the historical and factual basis of the allegation of collaboration between the Zionist and Nazi movements. However, Paul Bogdanor, the author of ‘An anti-Semitic hoax: Lenni Brenner on Zionist ‘collaboration’ with the Nazis’, which appears on the Fathom website,2 is probably the least qualified person to rebut anything to do with the holocaust, since he knows next to nothing of the period. He is not a historian, but a self-publicist, and has no obvious qualifications, apart from being a rabid anti-communist. His speciality is as a rabidly libellous and dishonest commentator.
The fact that Fathom has been forced to rely on Bogdanor is in itself a demonstration that the factual basis of Nazi-Zionist collaboration - and the wider allegations that the Zionists consciously obstructed rescue to anywhere that did not involve Palestine - cannot be challenged. Bogdanor writes for the Islamophobic Frontpage.com, which boasts columnists such as Melanie Phillips, Oliver Kamm and Nick Cohen.
Bogdanor has a fixation with his supposed enemies that belongs to the realm of psychology. In his ‘Tony Greenstein and the Nazi apologists’, he states, concerning myself: “He defends communist collaboration with the Nazis, but denounces Zionists as joint perpetrators of the holocaust.”3
This ignores the minor fact that I criticised the German Communist Party’s ‘third period’ policy of equating social democracy with fascism and its appeasement of the Nazis’ anti-Semitic policies. Nor have I written anything which would suggest that the Zionists were “joint perpetrators of the holocaust”.
Propaganda
Zionism never tires of using the holocaust as a propaganda weapon. Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu has compared the boycott of Israeli goods to the holocaust: “We have a historical recollection of what happens when Jewish products are marked.”4 The holocaust has been the alibi for every atrocity of a state based on ethno-religious supremacy. When Israel lay siege to Beirut and bombed it, the prime minister at the time, Menachem Begin, justified it by comparing Palestine Liberation Organisation leader Yasser Arafat to Hitler in his bunker.5 The Palestinians have been transformed into the new Nazis.
Zionism arose as a reaction to anti-Semitism which accepted the assumptions of the anti-Semites. Both agreed that Jews did not belong in ‘other people’s countries’. Zionism understood anti-Semitism and saw it as an understandable reaction to the Jewish stranger. As the founder of political Zionism, Theodor Herzl noted: “In Paris ... I achieved a freer attitude towards anti-Semitism, which I now began to understand historically and to pardon. Above all, I recognise the emptiness and futility of trying to ‘combat’ anti-Semitism.”6
The Zionists had no principled objection to the Nazis’ Nuremberg laws - “the most murderous legislative instrument known to European history”.7 The Zionist movement was in agreement with the Nazis over the need for racial separation. As the introduction to the Nuremberg Laws stated,
If the Jews had a state of their own in which the bulk of their people were at home, the Jewish question could already be considered solved today, even for the Jews themselves. The ardent Zionists of all people have objected least of all to the basic ideas of the Nuremberg laws, because they know that these laws are the only correct solution for the Jewish people too.8
It was because of their ideological congruity that collaboration between the Zionists and the Nazis came easily. The Zionists were focussed on building their state, not saving Jews.
Although not mentioning her by name, Bogdanor suggested that Jackie Walker, the vice-chair of Momentum, was suspended for suggesting that “the Jews were behind the slave trade”. Not so - she talked of the involvement of some Jews in financing the slave trade. An entirely different matter. More to the point, it was a private conversation between friends, not a policy statement. Unsurprisingly Bogdanor failed to mention that Jackie is half-Jewish herself.
When referring to Ken Livingstone’s comments about Hitler ‘supporting’ Zionism, Bogdanor notes that this was based on Lenni Brenner’s book, Zionism in the age of the dictators. In his normal moderate style, Bogdanor suggests that the book is a favourite amongst those who believe that ‘Zionists’ are to blame for all evil in the world. It is such hyperbole which renders Bogdanor’s article more of a propaganda text than a serious academic article. Another example of the fantasy nature of Bogdanor’s criticisms is his suggestion that Brenner attributed the “collapse of the Weimar Republic” to the Zionists. No reference was given.
Bogdanor sees Brenner’s criticisms of Nazi-Zionist collaboration as originating in Soviet propaganda, which apparently held that the Zionists were jointly responsible with the Nazis for the extermination of the Jews in the holocaust. Even assuming that some Soviet propagandists said this, to suggest that “far-left falsifiers accuse a group of Jews of perpetrating the holocaust in collaboration with the Nazis” is simply a propagandistic lie.
But that collaboration was real. Ben Hecht was a revisionist Zionist, not a Stalinist - one of a group of dissident Zionists in the United States who were so appalled by the hostility of the Zionist establishment to doing anything concrete to help rescue Jews from the holocaust that they organised their own lobby group and campaigns.
As a result of his activities and those of the Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish People of Europe, in January 1945, in the teeth of Zionist opposition the Roosevelt administration established the War Refugee Board, which is credited with saving 200,000 Jewish lives. Wise and the other Zionist leaders believed that their diplomatic struggle to establish a Jewish state took priority over everything, including saving Jewish lives. For the Zionists saving Jews was conditional on those Jews going to Palestine.
Bogdanor cites 12 instances of Brenner’s “factual misrepresentations”. I will examine some of them below.
‘Over-concern’
Negotiations between the Zionists and the Nazis concluded in August 1933 with the Ha’avara (transfer) trade agreement. It involved the use of the frozen assets of Jews to purchase goods in Germany. When those goods were exported and sold in Palestine, the owners received a proportion of the purchase price. Ha’avara broke the Jewish boycott of Nazi Germany and Jews all over the world reacted furiously to this treachery.
Bogdanor says that “the moral dilemma facing the Labour Zionists was whether to help German Jews leave with a fraction of their funds or to join a futile boycott of Germany”. The boycott, which Bogdanor describes as “futile”, forced the Nazis to call off their siege of Jewish shops on April 1 1933 after one day.
The Labour Zionists had no “moral dilemma”. They were eager to conclude a trading agreement with Nazi Germany, even though it meant that pressure to stop the anti-Jewish atrocities was lifted. No less than 60% of investment capital in the Jewish Palestine economy between 1933 and 1939 came from Ha’avara.9 The Zionist movement was not so much interested in saving German Jewish lives as “saving the wealth” of the Jews and “rescuing the capital from Nazi Germany”.10 Because of Ha’avara whole industries, such as print and brewing, were established in Palestine.
For Nazi Germany Ha’avara helped undermine and destroy the boycott movement. Even though Germany gained no foreign currency (at first anyway) and suffered a loss of capital, what mattered, as the Jewish Chronicle noted, was not the loss of wealth to Germany, but the need to keep the economic wheels turning.11
Bogdanor quotes disparagingly Brenner’s comment regarding the Labour Zionists, that they were guilty of “boycott scabbing and outright collaboration”.In fact it was the labour movement and Jewish boycotters who called the Zionists scabs.
In a debate between Berl Locker of the Zionist Executive and Baruch Vladeck, chairman of the Jewish Labor Committee, Vladeck described how “The whole organized labor movement and the progressive world are waging a fight against Hitler through the boycott. The transfer agreement scabs on that fight.” Vladeck contended that “The main purpose of the transfer is not to rescue the Jews from Germany, but to strengthen various institutions in Palestine”.Vladeck termed Palestine“the official scab agent against the boycott in the Near East”, because “without the worldwide effort to topple the Third Reich, Hitler would have never agreed to the transfer agreement.”12
The boycott “forced the Third Reich to vigilantly restrain anti-Jewish violence in Germany, since each incident helped intensify the anti-Nazi movement”.13 The boycott had the potential to destabilise Hitler in the early period when he had not consolidated his strength. Ha’avara and the Zionist movement came to the rescue of the Hitler regime at its lowest point.
Zionist historian Edwin Black, who has written the most comprehensive book on the boycott, noted that Ha’avara was directly responsible for preventing the anti-Nazi crusade succeeding. It had allowed Hitler to drive a wedge into the world-wide boycott of German goods.
The 20,000 who were able to go to Palestine under Ha’avara were the richest German Jews. They were the ones who could have most easily gained refuge elsewhere. Zionism sacrificed the poorest Jews for the elite. Ha’avara led to the Zionists being the main export agents of Nazi Germany, selling goods throughout the Middle East.
Not only did the Zionist movement oppose “refugeeism” - saving Jews regardless of the destination - but it tried to persuade the Gestapo, the very agency charged with implementing the Nazis’ anti-Jewish policy, to allow Jewish refugees to go only to Palestine.
Zionists and Nazis
Bogdanor takes Brenner to task for his statement that “the German Zionists agreed with two fundamental elements in Nazi ideology”: namely that “the Jews would never be part of the German Volk and, therefore, they did not belong on German soil”. This being the case, “it was inevitable that some Zionists would believe an accommodation possible”.14
The assertion that Jews could never be part of the German Volk is basic to Zionism. Zionism holds that Jews in any country cannot be full citizens because they form a separate Jewish nation. As Francis Nicosia, a Zionist historian, observed, “Zionism [was] a volkisch Jewish nationalist ideology and movement that started from some of the same philosophical premises as German nationalism”.15
An example of how the Zionists adapted to the Nazis’ Weltanschauung was the behaviour of Kurt Blumenfeld, secretary of the Zionist Federation of Germany (ZVfD). In a letter to Walter Rathenau, a German foreign minister who was assassinated in 1922, Blumenfeld stated: “Under no circumstance does a Jew have the right to represent the affairs of another people.”16
Bogdanor deliberately fails to mention the memo that the ZVfD sent to Hitler on June 21 1933, which clearly demonstrates the ideological agreement between the German Zionists and the Hitlerites:
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 marriages and are for maintaining the purity of the Jewish group … The realisation of Zionism could only be hurt by resentment of Jews abroad against the German development. Boycott propaganda … is in essence fundamentally unZionist, because Zionism wants not to do battle, but to convince and to build.17
The Zionists are, of course, consistent. They opposed a boycott of Hitler and they oppose a boycott of Israel. However, they are not opposed to an enforced boycott of Gaza or Iran.
‘Favoured’
Bogdanor denies that the Zionists were the “favourite children of the Nazis”. The record is quite clear. In an article by rabbi Joachim Prinz, a prominent German Zionist and German Jewish leader and later deputy chairman of the World Jewish Congress, he wrote:
Everyone in Germany knew that only the Zionists could responsibly represent the Jews in dealing with the Nazi government. We all felt sure that one day the government would arrange a round-table conference with the Jews … there was no country in the world which tried to solve the Jewish problem as seriously as did Germany … It was our Zionist dream! … Dissimilation? It was our own appeal!18
Bogdanor quotes a further passage from the same article, in which Prinz said that nonetheless the Zionists were “miserably treated” in “not very polite terms”. That is often how the more powerful party treats collaborators, but these same officials did not experience the concentration camps like communists and socialists.
According to Zionist holocaust historian, Lucy Dawidowicz, Reinhardt Heydrich, the “engineer of the final solution” and deputy head of the RHSA, the combined police and SS, issued a directive that “the activity of the Zionist-oriented youth organizations that are engaged in the occupational restructuring of the Jews for agriculture and manual trades prior to their emigration to Palestine lies in the interest of the National Socialist state’s leadership”. These organisations therefore “are not to be treated with that strictness that it is necessary to apply to the members of the so-called German-Jewish organizations (assimilationists).”19
In May 1935 Schwarze Korps, paper of the SS, similarly stated:
the Zionists adhere to a strict racial position and by emigrating to Palestine they are helping to build their own Jewish state ... The assimilation-minded Jews deny their race and insist on their loyalty to Germany or claim to be Christians because they have been baptised in order to subvert National Socialist principles.20
The evidence is so clear it is difficult to know why Bogdanor bothers.
Ben-Gurion
Bogdanor’s attempted defence of David Ben-Gurion, chairman of the Jewish Agency and first prime minister of Israel, is, to quote his own words, “a masterpiece of deceptive phrasing”.Ben-Gurion was at the forefront of the refusal of the Zionist movement to engage in rescue work and its obstruction of rescue by anyone else where the destination was not Palestine.
The leader of Mapai, the Israeli Labor Party, Dov Hoz, in early August 1940, reported on the “destruction of the people of Israel in many countries”. This was before the holocaust had yet begun, yet no Zionist body in Palestine saw fit to discuss these reports or the situation of Jewry in Europe. Dina Porat, a historian at Yad Vashem, the Zionist holocaust museum, admitted that “these questions are hard to answer” because “Ben-Gurion’s concentration on post-war goals shifted attention away from the present plight of Europe’s Jews”.21
When news of the holocaust seeped out of Europe and the British government issued a statement on December 17 1942 acknowledging this, there was a surge of public support for rescuing those Jews who could be rescued. The Zionists were not happy about this. They were determined to fuse rescue of Jews with emigration to Palestine. Moshe Sharrett, a member of the Jewish Agency Executive said:
We were told that as long as we were asking for rescue we had everyone’s assent. But the moment we demand that the survivors go to Eretz-Israel we split the British public and hamper the government in wartime. We did not accept this argument, and neither did many of our British friends.22
The Zionist movement went on to deliberately sabotage the growing movement among British parliamentarians to find a place of refuge in the colonies for those who could escape the hell of Nazi-occupied Europe. Rabbi Dr Solomon Schonfeld, who was chairman of the Chief Rabbi’s Rescue Committee, wrote in a letter to The Times:
My experience in 1942-43 was wholly in favour of British readiness to help, openly, constructively and totally, and that this readiness met with opposition from Zionist leaders who insisted on rescue to Palestine as the only acceptable form of help …23
In Britain the Kindertransport was organised, enabling 10,000 Jewish children to be brought to England. The Zionists opposed this too. The children should be taken to Palestine, not Britain, even though they knew that this was impossible, as Jewish immigration was now severely curtailed. The Zionists wanted to use the plight of German Jewry in order to batter open the gates of Palestine to Jewish settlement. Ben-Gurion wrote:
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.24
Shabtai Teveth, Ben-Gurion’s official biographer, was bitterly critical of his subject. He wrote:
For nearly two years… Ben-Gurion was more concerned for the fate of the Yishuv [Jewish population of Palestine] than for that of European Jewry. Ben-Gurion repeatedly stressed that the importance of the Yishuv went “far beyond the individual Jews of Palestine”. Why? Because the Yishuv was a “great and invaluable security, a security for the hope of the Jewish people.”25
Shabtei Beit-Zvi noted how, in almost all his speeches, Ben-Gurion “speaks about the prospects the holocaust may open up for Zionism”. Speaking in Rehovot in 1941, Ben-Gurion pointed to the fact that “all the significant steps in the progress of Zionism were always related to the intensification of Jewish distress”.26
Gruenbaum
Yitzhak Gruenbaum was chairman of the Jewish Agency’s Rescue Committee in Palestine during the war. The committee had been established in January 1943 after the Jewish Agency stated on November 23 1942 that the holocaust was being perpetrated. Bogdanor cites the speech of Gruenbaum to the Jewish Agency executive in early 1943:
We have to stand before this wave that is putting Zionist activity into the second row… we do not give priority to rescue actions… Zionism is above all - it is necessary to sound this whenever a holocaust diverts us from our war of liberation in Zionism.27
Bogdanor takes Brenner to task for the fact that he did not point out the “Zionist reaction to Gruenbaum’s remarks”. Bogdanor notes that only one member backed him and 11 members rejected his views.
This is true - Gruenbaum was heavily criticised by fellow Zionists for his statement. But his critics consoled their consciences, whilst knowing that the logic of Zionism would not allow for rescue to be prioritised.
In short Gruenbaum’s attitude - that rescue was not something with which the Zionist movement should concern itself (other than having a symbolic Rescue Committee that did nothing) - prevailed. Indeed Porat suggests that “A critical question is whether the chairman of the Rescue Committee believed that rescue was at all possible.”28
Bogdanor quotes from Shabtai Beit-Zvi’s two-volume Post Ugandan Zionism on trial. Beit-Zvi, although a Zionist, was bitterly critical of the Jewish Agency’s attitude to rescue during the holocaust. He documents at tedious length how the Zionist movement and its press obstructed rescue and played down the holocaust, in some cases pouring scorn and ridicule on those who challenged its lethargy. Bogdanor accuses Brenner of selective quoting, when he himself is shameless in this respect.
Plans
I agree with Bogdanor that the Europa plan of Rabbi Weissmandel and Gizi Fleischmann (a Zionist leader in Slovakia), which aimed to offer the Nazis huge sums in order to stop the holocaust, was, in the words of the Jewish holocaust escapee, Rudolf Vrba, “a hare-brained scheme”.
I reject, however, Bogdanor’s bile that Brenner “twisted the facts” - some historians do subscribe to the view that the bribe paid in Slovakia ($200,000) was responsible for the halting of the deportations from October 1942 till the summer of 1944. The other way that Brenner is alleged to have “twisted the facts” is in supporting the belief that Nathan Schwalb, the Hehalutz representative in Switzerland, sent a letter saying that “Only with [Jewish] blood shall we get the land [of Israel].”
Schwalb denies having sent the letter, but, given his suppression of the Auschwitz Protocols, which revealed the existence of Auschwitz as a death camp, on balance rabbi Weissmandel is the more believable. There is no reason why Weissmandel should have lied. The letter itself read:
We are writing to the group that they must constantly have before them that in the end the Allies will win. After their victory they will divide the world again between the nations, as they did at the end of the first world war ... and now, at the war’s end, we must do everything so that Eretz Yisrael will become the state of Israel … we should know that all the Allied nations are spilling much of their blood, and if we do not sacrifice any blood, by what right shall we merit coming before the bargaining table when they divide nations and lands at the war’s end? Therefore it is silly, even impudent, on our part to ask these nations who are spilling their blood to permit their money into enemy countries in order to protect our blood. For only with blood shall we get the land.
Kasztner trial
This was initially a libel action brought by Rudolf Kasztner, the Jewish Hungarian lawyer, against his detractor, Malchiel Greenwald, who alleged that Kasztner had betrayed the Hungarian Jewish masses with his agreement with top Nazi Adolf Eichmann. Bogdanor plays down the fact that the Zionists organised a train for 1,684 Jewish bourgeois and Zionists.
Although Bogdanor does not reveal this, one of the understandings between Eichmann and Kasztner was that the Auschwitz Protocols would be kept secret. Kasztner collected the Protocols, but instead of seeing that they were disseminated throughout Hungary and internationally, he suppressed them in order to abide by the agreement with Eichmann. Even professor Yisrael Gutman of Yad Vashem conceded that Kasztner had already made a decision, with other Jewish leaders, “not to disseminate the report in order not to harm the negotiations with the Nazis”.29
Details of the relationship between Kasztner and Eichmann were contained in two articles published in Life Magazine in 1960. But Bogdanor describes the Eichmann interviews as “atransparently worthless source”, because they were from a Nazi war criminal. However, what makes them credible is that the interviews were conducted freely in 1955 with Dutch Nazi journalist, William Sassen, when Eichmann was hiding in Argentina. They are an extremely valuable record of what happened from the Nazi vantage point - Eichmann freely admits to his part in the holocaust.
Eichmann also discussed Palestine. On the kibbutzim in 1937, he saw enough to be very impressed with the way the Jewish colonists were building up their land: “I admired their desperate will to live, the more so since I was myself an idealist.” He described Kasztner as a fanatical Zionist:
He agreed to help keep the Jews from resisting deportation - and even keep order in the collection camps - if I would close my eyes and let a few hundred or a few thousand young Jews emigrate illegally to Palestine. It was a good bargain ... And because Kasztner rendered us a great service by helping keep the deportation camps peaceful, I would let his groups escape.
It is understandable that Bogdanor tries to discredit all this. Certainly it is embarrassing to have one of the worst Nazi war criminals praise the Zionist movement and say how much he sympathised with it. But if Bogdanor is right about the interviews being “worthless”, we should eschew all Nazi sources - the memoirs of Rudolph Höss, commandant of Auschwitz, the diaries of Goebbels, etc. In fact plenty of historians of high repute cite Eichmann’s interviews in their own work.
Bogdanor objects to Brenner’s description of “the sanctification of the betrayal of the many, in the interest of a selected immigration to Palestine”. ‘Selectivity’ was a cardinal feature of Zionist policy: selecting the few Jews out of the many. It was Kasztner’s legal representative, Chaim Cohen, the attorney general, who presented exactly this defence at the appeal to the supreme court. Cohen argued:
If in Kasztner’s opinion, rightly or wrongly, he believed that one million Jews were hopelessly doomed, he was allowed not to inform them of their fate; and to concentrate on the saving of the few. He was entitled to make a deal with the Nazis for the saving of a few hundred and entitled not to warn the millions ... It has always been our Zionist tradition to select the few out of many in arranging the immigration to Palestine ... Are we to be called traitors?30
Of course, none of those actually affected by the deportations was ever consulted about Kasztner’s failure to publicise the Auschwitz Protocols. For Kasztner to have taken it upon himself to suppress that information made him an accessory to the murder.
In the view of Eliyahu Dobkin, head of the Jewish Agency’s immigration department during the war, German Jews who were given immigration certificates “merely as refugees” were “undesirable human material”. Selectivity was a fundamental feature of Zionist immigration controls.
The Zionist movement itself set up rigid standards for prospective immigrants, which excluded anti-Zionists as applicants for certificates. “Persons with capital” were the preferred candidates.31
Rudolf Vrba, the Auschwitz escapee, made his views about the Zionists well known:
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.’32
After the war, Kasztner went to Nuremberg to give testimony in favour of no less than seven major Nazi war criminals. He did this as a representative of the Jewish Agency and on behalf of the World Jewish Congress.
Paratroopers
Bogdanor claims that Brenner used misleading tactics to conceal the Zionist rescue efforts in Hungary. He referred to the three paratroopers from Palestine - Hannah Szenes, Joel Palgi and Peretz Goldstein - who arrived in Budapest during the Nazi occupation, hoping to organise Jewish resistance: “Through deceptive phrasing, Brenner implied that the paratroopers were sent by the British alone. In fact the British army sent them at the instigation of the Jewish Agency in Palestine.”
What does Brenner actually say?
Kasztner was also involved in the affair of Hannah Szenes which was described at the trial. Szenes was a brave young Zionist from Hungary, whom the British finally allowed, together with 31 others, to parachute into occupied Europe to organise Jewish rescue and resistance.33
The words in italics demonstrate that Bogdanor was lying. Clearly Brenner was not implying that the paratroopers were sent by the British alone.
The three parachutists who made it to Hungary were undoubtedly brave, but they were sent towards the end of the war, when most Jews had already been exterminated. Members of the resistance with whom they met were contemptuous of their ability to provide any help. What we do know is that they were betrayed by Kasztner, who tricked two of them into handing themselves over to the Gestapo. Only Palgi survived, by sawing through the bars of the train taking him to Auschwitz.
Bogdanor suggests that, although the paratroopers failed in their mission, “other Zionist rescue efforts in Hungary succeeded”. He refers to Moshe Krausz, who sent the Auschwitz Protocols to Switzerland. A number of people and groups circulated the Protocols. Only Kasztner’s Va’ada (Rescue Committee) suppressed them. Most likely it was Georges Mantello, first secretary of the El Salvador consulate in Geneva and a Hungarian Jew, who sent it to politicians, academics and journalists immediately, who ensured that the publicity surrounding the deportations was such that Horthy, the Prince Regent of Hungary, was persuaded to call the deportations off.34
However, it was not Moshe Krausz who was the main representative of the Jewish Agency, but Kasztner, whose Rescue Committee had been founded by and financed by the agency. Krausz was very much out on a limb.
‘Propaganda’
Having failed to mount any sort of critique of Brenner’s thesis, Bogdanor falls back on the laziest Zionist tropes: eg, Brenner’s work was welcomed by the holocaust-denying Institute for Historical Review. It is quite common for the far right to use the material of the left for their own nefarious purposes, but, since the IHR is dedicated to holocaust denial and Brenner’s book is written on the basis that the holocaust happened, one cannot take the IHR’s views seriously.
However, if Bogdanor wants to associate people with fascist and far-right organisations, then he should look closer to home. In Britain the English Defence League and the British National Party are both strong supporters of Zionism and Israel. In Europe it is the far-right and fascist parties - Austria’s Freedom Party, Vams Belang in Belgium, Le Pen’s Front National - who love Israel.
Bogdanor himself says that he was not responsible for David Horowitz’s Frontpage.com printing his articles. Using his logic, however, it is clear that rabid anti-Arab racists love Bogdanor. Does he draw any conclusions from that and if not why not?
His critique of Lenni Brenner and of Nazi-Zionist collaboration is shoddy and dishonest. One wonders why Fathom did not employ a historian, as opposed to a hasbarist, whose main gift is his resort to hyperbole. Bogdanor is the David Irving of Zionist propaganda - shrill, loud, but insubstantial.
Notes
1. www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/labour-anti-semitism-row-full-transcript-of-ken-livingstones-interviews-a7005311.html.
2. http://fathomjournal.org/an-antisemitic-hoax-lenni-brenner-on-zionist-collaboration-with-the-nazis.
3. www.paulbogdanor.com/antisemitism/greenstein/nazi.html.
4. www.richardsilverstein.com/2016/06/15/the-holocaust-and-zionisms-broken-oath.
5. ‘Calling your political rival a Nazi is a time-hallowed tradition in Israel‘Ha’aretz January 19 2014.
6. T Herzl Diaries of Theodor Herzl London 1958, p6.
7. G Reitlinger The final solution London 1998, p7.
8. Quoted at www.matzpen.org/docs/scarecrows-6.pdf.
9. See D Rosenthall, ‘Chaim Arlosoroff 65 years after his assassination’ Jewish Frontier May-June 1998, p28.
10. E Black The transfer agreement: the dramatic story of the pact between the Third Reich and Jewish Palestine New York 2009, pp257-58.
11. Jewish Chronicle December 27 1935.
12. Quoted in L Brenner 51 documents: Zionist collaboration with the Nazis’ London 1972, pp92-93.
13. E Black op cit pp250, 372.
14. L Brenner op cit p35.
15. F Nicosia Zionism and Anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany Cambridge 2010, p2.
16. N Weinstock Zionism: false messiah New York 1979, p135.
17. L Dawidowicz A holocaust reader New York 1976, pp150-53.
18. J Prinz, ‘Zionism under the Nazi government’ Young Zionist November 1937.
19. L Dawidowicz War against the Jews London 1991, p118.
20. R Braham The politics of genocide - the holocaust in Hungary Vol 1, Columbia 1981 p484.
21. D Porat An entangled leadership Tel Aviv 1986, pp10-11, 18.
22. S Beit-Zvi, ‘Post-Ugandan Zionism on trial’: www.vho.org/aaargh/fran/livres4/Beitzvi.pdf.
23. The Times June 6 1961.
24. J Bottum (ed) The Pius war London 2010, p85.
25. Op cit p849.
26. S Beit Zvi op cit p115.
27. Ibid pp95-101.
28. D Porat op cit pp68-70.
29. Cited in R Linn Escaping Auschwitz - a culture of not forgetting London 2004, p72.
30. Ibid p195.
31. L Dawidowicz War against the Jews London 1991, pp238-39.
32. Cited in B Hecht Perfidy New York 1961, note 68, pp261-62.
33. L Brenner Zionism in the age of the dictators London 2014, pp260-61.
34. See R Braham op cit p1120.