15.12.2022

A bogus imperialist narrative

Many people imagine Israel as the natural representative of Jewish memory. Nothing could be further from the truth. Tony Greenstein introduces his new book Zionism during the holocaust

Why did I decide to write this book? Because the holocaust narrative has been adopted by the imperialist powers. In the process they have rewritten the history of the holocaust. Israel, obviously, and the United States; and Germany in particular has its own narrative.

Israel is the state that Zionism created, and it is seen as the natural representative of the memory of the Jews who died in the holocaust. Most people imagine that, during the war the Zionist movement was trying to save as many Jews as possible, opposing what Hitler was doing and getting involved in the anti-fascist resistance.

It will come as a surprise to learn that during World War II, and before it, the Zionists were desperate to ensure that the plight of Jews under the heel of the Nazis would not divert attention from the main goal of Zionism: to build a Jewish state after the war. Everything else was secondary to this goal.

A quick example. In May 1942 the Zionists held a large conference in America - the Biltmore conference, named after the hotel where it was held - where the demand was formulated for the first time for a Jewish commonwealth, ie, a Jewish state. There was absolutely no mention of the victims of the holocaust or of holocaust refugees. They were simply not on the agenda.

People might think that the most immediate concern of the Zionist movement as soon as the war ended would have been the holocaust. But this was not true. In Israel itself, the murder of six million Jews was regarded as a mark of shame. The ideal held up to the younger generation was the zealots who held out against the Romans at Masada in 73-74 CE. When the Romans were about to storm the fortress the sicari zealots committed collective suicide.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the holocaust was barely mentioned in Israel. A 220-page history textbook published in 1948 devoted just one page to the holocaust, and 10 pages to the Napoleonic wars.¹ When the holocaust was added to the syllabus in 1953, just two hours were devoted to it.

The holocaust only assumed any significance in Israeli or Zionist propaganda after the Eichmann trial in 1961. Adolf Eichmann was captured in Argentina in 1960, taken to Israel and later executed. The Eichmann trial was a show trial, a propaganda trial. No one doubted that he was guilty. He bore a great deal of the responsibility for directing and organizing the holocaust. The judges seemed to hold him solely responsible for the holocaust, almost acquitting Hitler in the process. But the trial was not really about Eichmann. As Tom Segev has explained, the Eichmann trial was important to Israel in order to wipe out the stain of the Kasztner trial.

The Rudolf Kasztner case came to court in 1954 after the Israeli government sued Malchiel Gruenwald for libel. He had publicly accused Kasztner - the Zionist leader in Hungary during World War II and in Israel a prominent member of Mapai - of collaborating with the Nazis. The trial exposed not just the truth about Kasztner, but Zionism too. The judge found in favour of Gruenwald. Kasztner was later assassinated.

Hannah Arendt reported on the Eichmann trial for the New Yorker. Her book, Eichmann in Jerusalem, is based on these reports. She referred to the Kasztner trial and put what was happening in the Eichmann trial in context. The Zionist movement exploded with fury. The Eichmann trial had been designed to erase the memory of the Kasztner trial. Arendt had gone and raked up that which was supposed to be consigned to history. As a result she was subjected to vicious attacks. She was called a holocaust denier, a self-hater and many other things.

Arendt wrote that it was as though “the pieces written against the book (and more frequently against its author) came ‘out of a mimeographing machine’ … the clamour cantered on the ‘image’ of a book which was never written, and touched upon subjects that often had not only not been mentioned by me but had never occurred to me before.”

This is how those who question the Zionist narrative are treated. In Israel the holocaust was considered shameful, an example of how the diaspora Jew behaves, unlike the brave Israeli fighters. The murdered Jews were seen as examples of all that was worst in the diaspora. In the words of Gideon Hausner, the chief prosecutor in the Eichmann trial, “The Jews had gone like sheep to their slaughter.” They were the worst possible examples for a young defiant nation that was springing up, and that was why the example of Masada was so important.

David Ben-Gurion, the first Israeli prime minister, was notable in this regard. Let me quote from Ian Lustick. Ben Gurion had:

... a genuine disgust for Jewish life in the diaspora and a sense of distance between the defiant healthy nation of Jews gathering in the land of Israel and the misshapen impotence and craven mass of Jews who had remained in Europe to be slaughtered.

Ben Gurion believed that Jewish distress could serve as political leverage and that “It is in our interest to use Hitler for the building of our country”². That was really why the Eichmann trial was held.

Another example would be Hanzy Brand, the wife of Joel Brand, Kasztner’s deputy in Hungary and his lover. She described what happened when she came to Israel and settled on the Gvata Haim kibbutz. Other members “talked about their war [Israel’s 1948 war] to avoid hearing about hers”. Israelis listened to the survivors’ stories with a “forced patience” that was soon exhausted, as Yisrael Gutman, a holocaust historian, noted. If Israelis were ashamed of the diaspora then of course many holocaust survivors bitterly resented the Yishuv (the Zionist settlement in pre-1948 Palestine). To quote Yosef Rosensaft, a displaced persons leader at Belsen-Bergen concentration camp who settled in America, “You danced the hora while we were being burned in the crematoriums”.

So the holocaust was a very contested narrative and indeed in America Jewish leaders did not speak about it. There was a very good reason for this. If you mentioned the holocaust and what had happened, you were seen as being akin to a communist. In the McCarthy era that was not something people wanted.

During the 1953 funeral for the Rosenbergs, who were murdered by the American state, mourners sang the Song of the Warsaw Ghetto. It was the communists and the left who went on about the holocaust, not the Zionists.

Later, the holocaust developed into an important weapon of imperialism, but in the immediate wake of the holocaust, it was not often talked about. The reason was simple. An anti-fascist narrative did not accord with US imperialist interests.³

Deals

Yitzhak Laor, Israel’s most famous poet, described how the holocaust came to be used ideologically post-Eichmann. The holocaust consolidated a new ideology of exclusion. The Jews were now the insiders. The genocide of the Jews served in the construction of a European identity.

Israel is now seen as a legitimate heir to those who died. The way the holocaust was interpreted was very important when there was great hostility to the idea of German rearmament - not only in Israel, but amongst Jews in the west, and not just Jews.

Israel and Federal Germany struck a deal: Israel got reparations - not to the holocaust survivors but to Israel collectively. Thus Germany rearmed Israel, providing it with nuclear technology, submarines and so on, in return for which Israel koshered West Germany, which became an integral part of Nato. This was very important in the Cold War. So the holocaust was used and manipulated in aid of the construction of the new western alliance. West Germany became a central core of that alliance and history was rewritten so that an inter-imperialist war became an anti-fascist war.

For example there was no mention of the artificially engendered famine in Bengal in 1942, when up to 3 million Indians died. Britain was exporting food at the same time as people were starving. No mention is made of the British ministry of information suggestion that leaflets be distributed about the abhorrent racism of the Nazis. The foreign and colonial office objected. Parallels would be drawn with the way the British empire treated its colonial peoples. Extremely embarrassing to say the least.

Another example of rewriting history is the role of the Zionists in the Jewish resistance. According to mainstream narratives, the Zionists played the major, if not the sole, role; yet in fact the Zionists played very little part.

Indeed those Zionist fighters who fought in the war, such as Hayka Klinger, were instructed by the leadership of their youth movements in Palestine not to take part in the resistance. Instead they were to try to get to Palestine where they were needed. To their credit they refused. My book gives details.

Klinger went to Palestine in 1944 and made a speech to the executive of Histadrut (the Zionist so-called trade union federation). She was bitterly critical of the role that the Zionists played in the ghettos. Dinah Porat, the chief historian of Yad Vashem, Israel’s holocaust propaganda museum, mentions Klinger’s speech in her book The blue and yellow stars of David: The Zionist leadership and the holocaust - but carefully omits her criticism of the Zionists.

Klinger described members of the Jewish council as having become “tools of suppression in the hands of the authorities”. They had played an “abject” role in the destruction of the Jews. Although members of the council had not at first known what the Nazi’s intentions were, “There were instances of clear knowledge and they lied knowingly to the deportees”. She told the Histadrut executive that:

[the] various Jewish communities [in Europe] were headed by members of the Zionist movement and most of them understood that if [the Nazis] said A they would need to continue and [do] B. And after they began assisting the Nazis to collect gold and furniture from Jewish homes, they had no choice but to go on to help them prepare lists of Jews for labor camps ... And precisely because those who stood at the head of most of the communities were Zionists, the psychological effects on most of the Jewish masses vis-à-vis the Zionist idea was devastating, and the hatred towards Zionism grew day by day ... One bright day we will need to try these people. It must be said clearly and publicly that many Zionists betrayed [their people].⁴

Something like 34 resistance fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto escaped through the sewers to the Aryan part of Warsaw. Some of them got to Palestine and what was remarkable was that their memoirs, their diaries, their writings were doctored or changed out of all recognition.

Professor Avihu Ronen, Klinger’s second son, described how his mother “was apparently not satisfied with the way they [her diaries] were edited, shortened, and censored”. When Klinger went to Israel, she could not find anywhere to publish her experiences. When she died her Ghetto diary was published. However, it had so many changes and erasures that researchers were recommended to consult the original.

Klinger committed suicide in 1958, but it wasn’t until five or six years ago that her diaries were eventually published in their original form. This is just one example, but the whole history of the holocaust has been rewritten to accord with the Zionist narrative.

The way the holocaust has been used is quite shameful. For instance, when Israeli troops were surrounding Beirut in 1982, Yasser Arafat became Hitler in his bunker, according to prime minister Menachem Begin. Abba Eban, Israel’s former foreign minister, talked of the Green Line between the West Bank and Israel’s 1948 borders as being ‘Auschwitz borders’.

Refugees

There are many such examples of how the holocaust has been weaponized, not least the definition of anti-Semitism which has been used to conflate it with anti-Zionism. The Zionist definition of anti-Semitism promoted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance has nothing to do with hostility to Jews as Jews. Anti-Semitism has become opposition to what Israel does.

They are really quite brazen in using the holocaust as a weapon against anyone who criticises Israel. The Zionist movement claims a monopoly over the holocaust which is why I concentrate on the attitude and practice of the Zionist movement before and during the holocaust, because it differs markedly from what we are led to believe.

In essence, if I can summarize, the aim of the Zionist movement, which was a counterrevolutionary movement from the start, was to build a Jewish state. That was its primary aim and it saw the holocaust and the Nazi oppression of the Jews as a diversion, not something that concerned them.

The Zionist movement also feared that if there could be a solution to the refugee question that did not involve Palestine, if other countries accepted Jewish refugees from Germany or Poland, then what was the point of having a Jewish state in the first place?

It was also part of Zionist ideology. In Theodor Herzl’s Der Judenstaat (The Jewish state), the founding pamphlet of the Zionist movement, he writes that the Jews:

… naturally move to those places where we are not persecuted and there our presence produces persecution … The unfortunate Jews are now carrying anti-Semitism into England; they have already introduced it into America.

The Zionist solution to solve the Jewish question was to establish a Jewish state. Therefore any solution to the refugee question which did not involve Palestine was simply a palliative.

I will give some examples. In July 1938 US president Franklin D Roosevelt called a conference on Jewish refugees in Evian, a spa town in France. The Zionists were extremely upset. The conference was a face-saving exercise. It was held on the basis that those who attended did not have to change their refugee policies - and most of the participating countries had policies like the US, which prevented the immigration of all but a few refugees.

A meeting of the Jewish Agency on June 26 1938 decided to belittle Evian as far as possible and to try to get it to end in failure. George Landauer wrote to Stephen Wise, at the behest of Chaim Weizmann, president of the Zionist Organisation, declaring:

We are particularly worried that it [Evian] would move Jewish organisations to collect large sums of money for aid to Jewish refugees and these collections would interfere or could interfere with our collection efforts.

Ben Gurion pulled no punches. “No rationalisations can turn the conference from a harmful to a useful one. What can and should be done is to limit the damage as far as possible.” So a conference which might possibly have helped solve the Jewish refugee problem was seen by the Zionist movement as a threat.

Future chair of the Jewish Agency rescue committee, Yitzhak Gruenbaum, is cited, saying:

He hoped to hear in Evian that Eretz Israel remains the main venue for Jewish emigration … The greatest danger is that attempts will be made to find other territories for Jewish emigration.

Christopher Sykes, a pro-Zionist historian, in his book Crossroads for Israel, confirms this:

From the start they regarded the whole enterprise with hostile indifference ... If the 31 nations had done their duty and shown hospitality to those in dire need then the pressure on the National Home and the heightened enthusiasm of Jews with Palestine would both have been relaxed. This was the last thing that the Zionist leaders wished for … Even in the more terrible days ahead they made no secret of the fact, even when talking to gentiles, that they did not want Jewish settlements outside Palestine to be successful ... The Zionists wanted to do something more for Jews than merely help them to escape danger … that such was the basic Zionist idea is not a matter of opinion but a fact abundantly provable by evidence ...

Robert Silverberg, another Zionist historian, in his book If I forget thee O Jerusalem, says this:

Truly dedicated Zionists hoped for the failure of Evian. How disastrous it would be for Zionism if Australia say were to agree to admit a million Jews at once.

There were a number of projects whereby Jews would go to Darwin and other places in Australia. Silverberg writes:

They did not want a Jewish colony in Australia; they wanted Europe’s suffering Jews to go only to Palestine, and if getting them there meant a prolongation of their suffering until the political climate was right, so be it.

That is not an anti-Zionist writing, it is a Zionist historian, albeit an honest one. It was with a marked indifference, if not hostility, that the Zionists viewed any other opportunity, any other solution, to the refugee question that did not involve Palestine.

There is a very famous quote from Ben Gurion on December 9 1938, a month after Kristallnacht (the night of the broken glass) - a Nazi pogrom in which nearly 100 Jews were killed and nearly every synagogue in Germany was burnt out. Thirty thousand Jews were put into concentration camps. Hitler’s intention for Germany’s Jews was clear. Ben Gurion, in a speech to the Mapai, stated that:

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.

Ben Gurion was worried that “the human conscience” might persuade countries to open their doors to Jewish refugees. He warned that Zionism was in danger. According to his logic, if other countries could save Europe’s Jews then what was the need for a Jewish Palestine? A week later, on December 17 1938, Ben Gurion wrote to the Zionist executive:

If the Jews are faced with a choice between the refugee problem and rescuing Jews from concentration camps on the one hand, and aid for the national museum in Palestine on the other, the Jewish sense of pity will prevail and our people’s entire strength will be directed at aid for the refugees in the various countries. Zionism will vanish from the agenda and indeed not only world public opinion in England and America but also from Jewish public opinion. We are risking Zionism’s very existence if we allow the refugee problem to be separated from the Palestine problem.

It was abundantly clear what the position of the Zionists was. When proposals were made in the US Congress to relax immigration controls, the Zionists refused their support. Indeed it was worse than that. The Zionists attempted to stymie the War Refugee Board, which was established very late in the day, in January 1944. It came about as a result of the campaigning of dissident Zionists: Shmuel Merlin and Peter Bergson. They were revisionist Zionists, incidentally. The Labor Zionists were implacably opposed to the rescue of the Jewish refugees.

In the UK, as we all know, the Board of Deputies was very concerned about anti-Semitism in the Labour Party when Jeremy Corbyn was leader. In March 2018, just before the local elections, the Board held its first ever demonstration against anti-Semitism, attended by well-known anti-racists like Norman Tebbit and Ian Paisley junior. I can find no other example of the Board ever having called a demonstration against racism in its 240-year history.

I came across another demonstration which occurred in the spring of 1942 when the first deportation of Jews to the extermination camps occurred. They were Slovakian Jews and it was Dieter Wisliceny, one of Eichmann’s henchmen, who organised it. Slovakia’s Jews were deported to Lublin in Poland and from there to either Sobibor or Auschwitz. In London, the Federation of Czechoslovakian Jews published a protest and asked for the Board’s help and cooperation.

What was the attitude of the Board of Deputies? Did they throw their weight behind it? Sompolinsky wrote how the Board refused to support the demonstration because its demands “went against the grain” of the Board’s passive attitude to news of the atrocities. The Federation went ahead and held a public demonstration and rally in early 1942. The Bishop of London spoke, as did two Christian MPs and the Czech interior and rehabilitation ministers. But not the Board. Both its secretary, Abraham Brotman, and its president, Brodetsky, refused to attend.

This gives us a clue about the real attitude of the Board to the fight against fascism and anti-Semitism. It is a matter of record that the Board, in October 1936, at the time of the Battle of Cable Street, when Mosley’s British Union of Fascists attempted to march through the East End of London, opposed Jews doing anything. The Board advised Jews to stay at home, keep their heads down and say nothing. Fortunately most Jewish workers ignored them.

Some 200,000 people, mainly non-Jews, Catholic dockers in particular but also thousands of Jewish workers, mobilized to oppose Mosley. So we can see clearly that the Board, once it was captured by the Zionists, was useless as an instrument for fighting anti-Semitism and racism.

Today of course we know that the Board’s main job is defence of Israel, right or wrong. The point was made by Pamela Shatzkes, that if the Board had been captured by the Zionists, not in 1940 but in 1938, then the children of the Kindertransport might have been one more grisly statistic. That is worth thinking about because people are often afraid to draw such conclusions.

Let us have a look at the Labour right - people like John Mann, Tom Watson, Wes Streeting and all the others who were vigorously opposed to ‘anti-Semitism’. You might have thought that they were standard bearers in the fight against racism generally, but, of course, the Labour right has never opposed either racism or anti-Semitism. In fact, when it came to genuine anti-Semitism of the racial kind in the Labour Party, the right were on the side of the anti-Semites.

When, during World War II, the question of admitting Jewish refugees came before the government, Herbert Morrison, home secretary, was absolutely opposed to admitting anything but the smallest numbers.

Just after the news of the holocaust had been announced by the Allies on December 17 1942, Clement Attlee, deputy prime minister and Labour leader, proposed a draft parliamentary statement, which said that “any such refugees as may arrive in the United Kingdom will be admitted”. Morrison advised him to remove the promise because “it gave the impression that if Jewish refugees are placed on some worthless boats and sent to a British port, that is a way of disposing of them”.

In October 1942, Morrison had received a delegation of churchmen and public figures, such as Lord Astor and Eleanor Rathbone, who asked for visas for 2,000 Jewish children and elderly in Vichy France. An urgent matter because the Germans would soon overrun the rump state. Morrison refused, his reason being that anti-Semitism was “just under the pavement”. A month later those Jews were deported to Auschwitz. Claire Urbach, in Excuses! Excuses! The failure to amend Britain’s immigration policy 1942-1943, says that Morrison doubted that there was a holocaust.

Morrison’s real reason for keeping the door shut was that if all the Jews were allowed to remain in Britain after the war, “they might be an explosive element in the country, especially if the economic situation deteriorated”. In other words, Morrison subscribed to the theory that Jews were communists, and in the event of strikes and other such struggles they would play a prominent part. Morrison really did not want them coming into this country. Now that was genuine anti-Semitism, and it had fatal consequences.

I could give many other cases. For example, Ramsay MacDonald went to Palestine in 1922 at the invitation of Poale Zion (now the Jewish Labour Movement). He came back enthused and wrote a pamphlet which Poale Zion printed. Let me quote from it:

The rich plutocratic Jew (who) is the true economic materialist. He is the person whose views upon life make one anti-Semitic. He has no country, no kindred. Whether as a sweater or a financier, he is an exploiter of everything he can squeeze. He is behind every evil that governments do and his political authority, always exercised in the dark, is greater than that of parliamentary majorities ... He detests Zionism because it revives the idealism of his race.

Not only did MacDonald write that, but it was published by Poale Zion. So it might be worth people reminding the JLM of the fact that they, like the rest of the Zionist movement, had no problem with actual anti-Semitism.

Nor was MacDonald alone. Sydney Webb, the founder of the Fabians and the New Statesman, was also colonial secretary from 1929 to 1931. Webb summed up his view of Jews, declaring that “French, German, Russian socialism is Jew-ridden. We, thank heaven, are free.” Why? “There’s no money in it.” Despite this, the Labour right were allowed to run with the allegations of anti-Semitism as if they had clean hands and were genuinely concerned about anti-Jewish racism.

Boycott

When the Nazis came to power most Jews were horrified. They spontaneously launched a boycott campaign. People did not buy German goods. But the Zionists had other ideas because they wanted to do business with the Nazis, not fight them. They saw the rise of the Nazis as a golden opportunity to build their ‘Jewish’ state. Francis Nicosia, a pro-Zionist historian, wrote in his book, Zionism and Anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany, that so positive was the Zionist leadership’s assessment of the situation that, as early as 1933, the German Zionist Federation announced its determination to take advantage of the crisis to win over the traditionally assimilationist German Jews. Of course the history of this period has been rewritten to suggest that being Jewish and being Zionist were one and the same, whereas in fact just two percent of German Jews were affiliated to Zionist organizations.

Zionism was a fringe movement, but today all of that is forgotten. Berl Katznelson, who was the founder of Mapai, which became the Israeli Labor Party, and editor of Davar as well as Ben Gurion’s effective deputy, saw in the rise of Hitler “an opportunity to build and flourish like none we have ever had or ever will happen”.⁵ Tom Segev, in The seventh million, quotes Ben Gurion, who was even more optimistic: the Nazis’ victory would become “a fertile force for Zionism”.

Joachim Prinz, who was a prominent leader of the German Zionists before emigrating to the US and who became chair of the American Jewish Congress and deputy president of the World Jewish Congress, admitted that:

it was morally disturbing to seem to be considered as the favourite children of the Nazi government, particularly when it dissolved the anti-Zionist youth groups and seemed in other ways to prefer the Zionists. The Nazis asked for a more Zionist behaviour.

These were not isolated views but were generally accepted amongst most of the Zionist leaders. Eitan Bloom in a PhD thesis for Tel Aviv University on ‘Arthur Ruppin and the production of the modern Hebrew culture’, quoted the world famous biographer Emil Ludwig, “who expressed the general attitude of the Zionist movement”:

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’m personally very grateful to him.

The Zionist National poet, Nahman Bialik, volunteered that:

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

Well I think we all know what happened to German Jewry. Those who could not get out were annihilated, but not by assimilation

This is an edited version of Tony Greenstein’s talk to the December 11 Online Communist Forum

You can read about this in Edith Zertal’s excellent book Israel’s holocaust and the politics of nationhood.↩︎
The burning ground 1886-1948, Shabtai Teveth, p850.↩︎
A very good book by Peter Novick, The holocaust in American life, goes into this in some detail.↩︎
Dan Porat, Bitter reckoning: Israel tries holocaust survivors as Nazi collaborators, p48. tinyurl.com/4phxsxxj ↩︎
I am quoting from Francis Nicosia, professor of holocaust studies at Vermont University.↩︎