Deal with the issues
I’ve no idea whether anyone’s interested in this stuff. I look down the page at the amount I’ve written and think “you’re a loony Yorky”! But, I dunno, sometimes it’s good to get your thoughts in order. And the subject is important. Anyone interested in the general stuff might want to read the first few paras and the concluding ones. Beyond that it’s a detailed correction to DannyD’s astonishingly misleading posts. The stuff on Kastner is amongst the most misleading, but I'll save that for another day. I should add perhaps that what follows is all my own work and not – as is the case with my adversary - something I found on google.
There are two revisionist myths about the holocaust, both equally ideological, both utterly crackpot.
1 That it didn’t happen. That indeed it was “the biggest hoax of the 20th century”.
2 That it did happen, but that it was the product of Nazi-Zionist collaboration.
Number 1 is familiar to many people because it is linked with the discredited name of David Irving. Those who believe it, and certainly those who contribute to it, are usually on the Neo-Nazi Far Right. Number 2, which is DannyD’s preferred interpretation, is less familiar but is probably believed by more people. Back in the 1970s it was linked with Stalinism and its propaganda arm, the Soviet telegraph agency. Today it’s peddled by the ultra-left and, I guess, the jihadist right in the Middle East. The idea, if you haven’t quite got it from DannyD’s posts, is that Zionists and Nazis shared a creed (both were racist), and that, as a movement, Zionism collaborated with Nazism even while it was killing 6 million European Jews. Moreover it did both of these things in order to expedite a Jewish state in Palestine. The only reason today that Zionists wish to remember the Holocaust is to extort money out of the German government and Swiss banks and – more importantly – to raise their own score in the suffering stakes against the Palestinian Arabs.
That’s quite a charge-sheet. I can imagine many Jews getting upset with it. But is it right?
The first thing to say is that no mainstream scholars accept it. That doesn’t mean it’s wrong of course, and I can imagine that many who do believe the equation Zionism = Nazism will argue that there’s a sort of Jewish conspiracy to keep the truth out of the public realm – the sinister tentacles belonging, of course, to Yad Vashem (the holocuast institute in Israel), ‘the Jewish lobby’ in America, and the Jewish-controlled/intimidated media, academic publishing houses and universities of the West. (We had a little taste of this when DannyD speculated that Hilberg – Hilberg of all people! - had been coerced into correcting ‘errors’ in his book by the faceless men of Yad Vashem). But I think the main reason why no serious student of the holocaust accepts the idea that the Nazis and zionists worked on the holocaust together is that it’s overwhelming nonsense.
There are two fundamental reasons why.
For one thing
all Jews – including zionist Jews – were regarded as ‘sub-human’ by the Nazis. At no point did the Nazis ask a Jew if he or she was a zionist during that person’s transit to the gas chambers of Auschwitz or Treblinka. It simply didn’t matter to the Gestapo or SS. Nor did any single Jew ever save himself from the ovens by saying “I’m a Zionist!” That might seem obvious, but somehow DannyD never gets to saying it.
Second, there is no such thing as ‘Zionism’. Not in the way that DannyD and his cohorts use it. Zionism was a nationalist movement, and like all other nationalist movements fighting for ‘liberation’ it contained many elements, from extreme left to extreme right. There were marxist zionists and there were fascist zionists - and a whole load of shades in between. It was, if you like, a technicolour dream-coat of a movement, and some of the colours were indeed lurid. The marxists and (especially) the fascists were small in numbers, but they existed.
It’s no surprise then that DannyD – following the pseudo-scholar Lenni Brenner – likes to quote the fascists to make his points. He doesn’t call them that by the way. He simply calls them ‘zionists’. Brenner is particularly fond of the murderous Stern Gang (or ‘Lehi’), a breakaway of a breakaway of a breakaway from mainstream zionism. His
51 documents rely heavily on stuff from Lehi, an organisation never exceeding 100 people! They were indeed a nasty and treacherous bunch with some horrible right-wing ideas. They fought the British rulers in Palestine during the Second World War, they murdered Arabs for political reasons and they made overtures to the Nazis (never reciprocated by the way) because they believed a British defeat would pave the way for Zion. But they were a small, unrepresentative sect. It would be as ridiculous to pass them off as the authentic voice of zionism as it would be for me to promote the Nazi-saluting Blue-Shirts as the authentic voice of Irish nationalism, or the Indian National Army (the merry band of deluded men who fought with the Japanese against the Allies in 1942-45) as the real voice of the Indian freedom movement. But that’s what DannyD always does. It’s what Brenner does too. The Stern Gang, and occasionally Irgun, become the representative voice of ‘Zionism’.
Brenner’s collection of
51 documents, subtitled
Zionist Collaboration with the Nazis, serves as a kind of candy-store for greedy little DannyD-types. A handful of heavily-edited documents contained there are repeatedly quoted, over and over again, in order to prove the thesis that the Nazis and ‘Zionists’ helped each other achieve their goals. Many of the documents were first edited and popularised in the Soviet Union in the 1970s. They featured in books like
The Dirty Tentacles of the Zionists by J Bohatka and
The Sinister Secrets of Zionism by L Korneyev. Brenner himself draws on the work of an East German propagandist called Klaus Polkehn. The Soviet Union’s gone now (praise be), but Brenner’s work is faithfully quoted on sites like ‘Stormfront’ and ‘Blood and Soil’ (no guessing what they believe in).
As for Brenner’s documents themselves, eight are from the Stern Gang (see above) and 14 more from Jabotinsky’s Revisionist Zionists (extreme right-wing and therefore prone to sounding like Nazis on questions of race, but nevertheless ferocious fighters in the ZZW
against the Nazis in Warsaw and elsewhere). Other ‘collaborationists’ in Brenner’s collection are Albert Einstein and Winston Churchill. Yes, that’s Winston Churchill, “fight them on the beaches” and all that. A Nazi-collaborator! It’s just pitiful.
Then there are several documents which show how zionism’s belief that a Jewish State would create a ‘new Jew’ and blow away the ‘old’ European one. Brenner takes this to mean that they shared a world-view similar to the Nazis, who also wanted to blow away the European Jew. This is similar to the stunt pulled by Goldhagen in his book
Hitler’s Willing Executioners which would quote German socialists and marxists dreaming of the day the ‘ghetto Jew’ disappeared in order to show they shared the Nazi desire to "eliminate" the Jew. It’s ridiculous.
I’ll be blowing my nose on some of the other Brenner documents in this rebuttal, but it’s probably worth me pointing out now that the longest document in the collection is Adolf Eichmann’s ‘memoir’ which
Life magazine published in 1960. In fact the document is so long Brenner splits it into two and calls it “two documents”! That’s odd enough, but what’s even odder (at least to anyone with half a mind) is that Eichmann’s self-serving attempt to pass the blame for the atrocities committed by his SS department on to the Jews (the ‘Zionists’) is understood by Brenner (and DannyD) to be the honest truth. It’s like nodding approval at a serial rapist saying in court “She was asking for it. Blame her. She’s as bad as me. She led me on”. We wouldn’t do it, would we?
Only someone with a fucking big axe to grind would take Eichmann’s lying self-defence and use it to excoriate his victims.
When Hitler came to powerThis is what can be said about Zionism and Nazism in January 1933. Neither believed the Jews had a future in Germany. It sounds shocking doesn’t it? It makes a certain underdeveloped mind want to say “There! They both wanted to get rid of the Jews! Hitler must have been a Zionist, and the Zionists must have been Nazis!”
This process is happily moved along by doing the one thing all historians are told never to do – viz, applying hindsight to everything. Use a complacent Jewish quote from 1933, put it next to the word ‘Auschwitz’, and you already have the makings of a satanic collaboration! But there’s nothing honest to be gained from assuming that any Jew, or any zionist, believed in 1933 that Nazism would result in the genocidal killing of 6 million Jews. No one believed that.
What the zionists did believe in 1933 was that it was foolish of German Jews to cling to the old liberal hope that assimilation was still an option in Nazi Germany. Therefore they turned their backs completely on policies designed to liberalise (or intimidate) the Nazi regime into behaving better. They rejected the calls for an economic boycott of Germany for example. Nor did they grumble over-much at the Nuremburg Laws which seemed to them to prove the zionist point that Jews could never expect a square deal outside Zion. In place of these things they put all their efforts into getting German Jews into the only place they believed
was safe. That place, obviously, was Palestine - and 165,000 did escape central Europe for Palestine between 1933-38. Many of them did so illegally. Had the Nazis triumphed in the second world war then Palestine would
not have been a safe haven for the Jews. That helps explain why so many Palestinian Jews fought for the Allies in the war.
The zionists may have been wrong in their attitude to Nazi Germany. Maybe they ought to have campaigned against the Nuremburg Laws and maybe they ought to have clamoured for an economic boycott. There again, perhaps they were right. There wasn’t exactly a popular movement of ordinary Germans clamping at the bit to help the Jews. Nor, despite the reputation of ‘Red Vienna’ were there many Austrians telling Hitler to ‘go home’ after the anschluss. And nor did the prospects for assimilation and legal equality look good in Germany or Austria so long as Hitler was ‘Heiled’ every morning.
By 1940 more German and Polish Jews must have wished they’d listened to the zionists, packed up everything and headed out for Palestine. Until 1938, it’s true, the Nazis were happy to see them go. They didn’t particularly care where the Jews went to - Palestine, Britain, America, Argentina. The important thing was that they left – oh, yes, and left their property, their businesses and their bank balances behind when they closed the door.
Shall we call this “collaboration”? The idea is absurd.
Now I can see DannyD rustling for his first Brenner document. This will be Haavarah Agreement of August 27th 1933. This agreement allowed emigrating Jews to transfer a certain amount of property to Palestine (the option was not open to those emigrating to other parts of Europe). Brenner does add a sheepish little footnote (page 47) to the effect that “the conditions of this pact changed over the ‘30s, always in favour of the Hitlerites”. You bet they did! Right from the start there were important dissenting voices in the Nazi hierarchy who strongly opposed the Jewish emigration to Palestine. They got their lead from an impeccable authority – Adolf Hitler. In
Mein Kamp Hitler dismissed zionism with the following sentence: “All they want is a central organisation for their international world swindle, endowed with its own sovereign rights and removed from the intervention of other states: a haven for convicted scroundrels and a university for budding crooks”. He also said “this apparent struggle between Zionist and Liberal Jews disgusted me, for it was false through and through, founded on lies” (quoted Lucy Dawidowicz,
The War against the Jews 1933-1945 Penguin p. 119). He seems to like zionists even less than DannyD!
By 1937 the Nazi opponents of emigration to Palestine had received a boost from the German consulate in Jerusalem who had decided that “the formation of a Jewish state here is not in Germany’s interest”. By mid-1937 Foreign Minister von Neurath started to construct a Palestinian policy along the lines outlined by
Mein Kamp. A Jewish homeland in Palestine, he said, “would create additional power bases for international Jewry somewhat like the Vatican State for political Catholicism or Moscow for the Comintern. That is why it is in the interest of Germany to contribute to the strengthening of the Arab world in order to offset…the increased power of world Jewry” (
Documents on German Foreign Policy Series D, vol 5 pp. 746-47).
This concern found an echo where it really mattered – in the SS. Richard Evans,
The Third Reich in Power (Penguin p. 557) says that the key event was the creation of the Jewish Affairs Division of the SS in 1935. “It was led by an increasingly radical group of young officers, including…Adolf Eichmann. These men became progressively more anxious that encouraging Jews to go to Palestine would accelerate the formation of a Jewish state there, with dangerous consequences for Germany in the long run”. Eichmann’s agency was more concerned with plundering the assets of the emigrant Jews than with giving them a helping hand (Evans p. 661). Indeed, after visiting Palestine in 1937 with his boss Herbert Hagan, Eichmann co-signed a document rejecting a plan to boost Jewish emigration to the Middle east with these words: “The emigration of 50,000 Jews annually would strengthen Judaism in Palestine and considering that according to the policy of the Reich the establishment of an independent state of the Jews in Palestine
should be prevented this plan cannot be subject for discussion” (quoted D Cesarani,
Becoming Eichmann Da Capo Press 2004 p. 55).
Haavarah (or what was left of it) did not die straight away, but it was a dead letter by the end of 1938. But you’d never know it from reading Brenner.
It was at this point (1937-38) that the Nazis started courting the ‘other side’ in Palestine – ie the Grand Mufti Muhammed Amin al-Husseini. This man eventually became a good buddy of Adolf Eichmann’s and the grateful recipient of German arms shipped to him via Saudi Arabia. The Mufti, of course, went on to greater things by hob-nobbing with Hitler and Heinrich Himmler…..but that’s another story.
* * *
You can certainly condemn the zionist organisations for underestimating Hitler. But who can’t you condemn for this? The British government underestimated him, the French government did, the Roman Catholic church did, the Protestant denominations did, the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) did. And so did many German Jews. According to Saul Friedlander, “There was no sense of panic or even urgency” among Jews when Hitler took power in 1933 (
Nazi Germany and the Jews vol 1 Weidenfeld and Nicolson 1997 p. 15). Many believed that the violence and hateful rhetoric of the Nazis would be moderated by the experience of government. Many believed that Hitler’s armed gangs would now come under the rule of law.
It is in this context that one ought to judge the 23rd June 1933 document that DannyD copies from Brenner: the one from the German Zionist Federation calling for a modus vivendi with the Hitler regime. Today it makes embarrassing reading. No doubt about it. It was opportunist and it was grovelling. But it’s inept – or dishonest - to read the document without understanding the relations of power behind it. Do I really have to spell it out DannyD? The Nazis were driving the car. The Jews were tied by a rope to its rear bumper. Lucy Dawidowicz (
The War Against the Jews pp 231-2) puts too kind a gloss on the document for my liking, but she does usefully remind us that the Nazis never replied to it (odd sort of ‘collaboration’ that). DannyD’s posts always make it sound like the Nazis and the Zionists were
equal partners. That the Jews could somehow go to the SS on an equal footing.
It’s history with the economics and the policemen ripped out! It’s a similar story of distortion with the Chaim Weizmann quote. DannyD has posted Brenner’s version of the 1937 presidential speech to the Zionist congress several times. This is the one where Weizmann says “The old ones will pass. They will bear their fate or they will not. They are dust, economic or moral dust in a cruel world.” The clear insinuation is that Weizmann was no different to the Nazis in calling people “dust” and that, foreseeing the holocaust, he heartlessly left the European Jews to their grisly fate. What DannyD doesn’t mention is that
in the same speech Weizmann went on to outline a plan for accelerating the rate of immigration to Palestine by 150% - that would have allowed 2 million Jews to live in Palestine.
But there’s an obvious problem there, is there not? One that DannyD, wearing his other hat (a fez, if I may be so bold), would be up and raving about. Increasing the number of Jewish emigrants to Palestine? But it’s an Arab land!
Of course Palestine was neither Jewish nor Arab at the time. It was British. And the British controlled immigration. It was the British Mandatory power that set the quotas on Jewish immigration to Palestine. At no point does DannyD mention this basic fact. How could he? It would spoil the emphasis he puts of “selectivity” which he seems to think puts the zionists into the same racist boat as the Nazis. Here’s DannyD:
“Selectivity was a major part of Zionist policy. Non-Zionists were overlooked as were the old infirm or those who were not useful in Palestine”.
That’s correct. At least so far as it goes. Zionism was built on the belief that a national homeland would create a ‘new Jew’. Whereas the ‘old Jew’ in Europe had been ghettoised and confined by law to certain ‘non-productive’ occupations, the ‘new Jew’ would be familiar with all the stuff he’d been denied in Europe – spanners, engines, cranes, steam-hammers, spades, picks, hoes, tractors, and guns. The new homeland needed these skills, said the zionists, more than they needed usurers, talmudic scholars or merchants. This was ‘selectivity’. It wasn’t a species of Nazism, any more than ‘selective’ immigration controls in the UK, or USA, or Australia are a species of Nazism. Countries always tend to tailor immigration to their occupational requirements. Given the historic distortion of the Jewish occupational profile ‘selectivity’ was arguably even more important.
But, inevitably, after the Nazis came to power, and Jews started to think about leaving Germany, the zionist belief in ‘selectivity’ was put under more and more pressure. In an ideal situation the zionists had wanted enthusiastic and qualified pioneers. Now they were being asked to take desperate refugees. And, as a result, they began to punch holes in ‘selectivity’ in order to save Jews who were under the most duress. In 1938 the Jewish Agency (JA) apologized to its representatives abroad: “The terrible plight of the Jews in Austria and Germany has forced us to assign half our quota to them…We hope that the other countries will accept this necessary sacrifice for the Jews of Austria and Germany”. (Tom Segev,
The Seventh Million. The Israelis and the Holocaust Hill and Wang 1993 p. 45).
Similarly the zionist leader David Ben-Gurion told the British High Commissioner that “regardless of our Zionist beliefs” the Jewish Agency was prepared to support the wholesale shifting of Poland’s Jewish population to Argentina or the USA. (S Teveth,
Ben-Gurion and the Holocaust, Harcourt & Brace 1996 p. 126). After the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact he also said this (29 Feb 1940): “I do not give priority to the interests of the Jewish community in Eretz-Israel over those of the Jews of Germany or any other country. The fate of the 3 million Jews in Poland worries me more than the fate of the 500,000 Jews in Eretz-Israel” (Dina Porat,
Israeli Society, the Holocaust and its Survivors Valentine-Mitchell 2008 p. 16). The JA would probably have liked to have punched even bigger holes in its ‘selectivity’ policy. But, as I said, the number of visas for Palestine was fixed by the British.
DannyD mentions the 1938 Evian Conference, called by Roosevelt, to discuss Jewish emigration from Germany, and – naturally – sees it as yet another example of Zionist perfidy. He makes it sound as if the world’s leading powers were simply waiting for a Zionist spokesman to say “Yes please, take as many as you like” and that they closed their doors on European Jewry simply because “the Zionists” weren’t clamorous enough. This is kiddy history. Saul Friedlander, a brilliant holocaust historian who has studied the documents, says that “the outcome of Evian was decided before it was even convened…No doors opened at Evian, and no hope was offered to the refugees” (p. 248). Bernard Wasserstein (
Britain and the Jews Oxford University Press p. 9) says Evian “proved to be the occasion for a dismal series of speeches by the delegate of country after country, each of whom demonstrated the inability of his nation, notwithstanding the deepest sympathy and generosity towards the refugees, to absorb further numbers of immigrants”. One wry British civil servant, surveying the response of the colonial governments wrote “I don’t know what’s wrong with the colonial Empire, but its absorptive capacity seems to be nil” (p. 47). Nazi sarcasm, inevitably, had a field day after this. Evian seemed to show that nobody cared for the Jews.
What about the Dominican Republic’s offer to take 100,000 refugees, asks DannyD? Well yes, it was a serious offer. But common sense tells you it came too late in the day. The Zionists certainly didn’t sabotage it! The Dominican Settlement Association Inc was set up in 1939 but the first Jewish settlers didn’t arrive until 1940. By then, the Third Reich’s doors had closed (WD Rubinstein,
The Myth of Rescue, Routledge 1997 p. 38).
The warDannyD wants people to believe that ‘Zionism’ happily went to work with the Nazis during the war. He lets go a thin stream of piss for an argument, but even a thimble-full eventually begins to stink if you don’t mop it up.
His old friend ‘selectivity’ is raised again. And, yes, there were zionist voices which continued to talk of ‘selectivity’ after 1942 – ie as the Final Solution was under way. Not surprisingly DannyD finds one in Brenner – Yitzak Gruenbaum, the chairman of the JA’s rescue committee. But again the relevant document is bowdlerised (by Brenner) in order to fit his bizarre thesis of collaboration. The quote comes from a memorandum drawn up on 18th January 1943. It’s an amazing document because it shows the leaders of the Jewish Agency in Palestine debating their options at the moment the news is coming in from Europe of something horrendous and extraordinary. Much of the document and the minutes it generated can be found in Tom Segev’s book pp 99-103 (Again, I should point out that Segev is a highly-respected left-wing Israeli historian. The book is hugely critical of the Jewish Agency and also of Israel’s ‘offical’ view of the holocaust, but it is
fair and tries to see the thing
historically rather than ideologically).
In the document Apolinari Hartglass, a Polish Jew, says that the rescue committee could only achieve “a drop in the ocean”. He hoped “the will to live” would save many European Jews, but thought the zionists themselves could not rescue more than 12,000. Yehudi Bahar said that “it is clear that under the conditions of war than can be
no selecting of material” and that the rescue committee was bringing “those whom we could bring (to Palestine)”. Ben-Gurion said he no longer agreed that zionists should be given preference over non-zionists. Golda Meir, the future leader of Israel, said that in the face of the holocaust there was “no Zionism other than saving Jews. We cannot talk about immigration in the same way that we spoke about it 10 years ago…Now it is a question of bringing every Jew – not because he is a farmer, but because he is a Jew and in the ghetto”. Yosef Sprinzak said “What do we need at this moment? Not a Zionist programme but something very simple:
a varm Yiddish hartz (a warm Jewish heart).
Now DannyD does not quote any of these people, because they don’t fit with his theory. He doesn’t even let us know that
a debate was going on. He selects the Gruenbaum quote instead – and the worst part of it – in order to show the racist cruelty of the rescue committee. If DannyD had read a bit further on (or his source had quoted a bit more of the document) he’d have seen that Gruenbaum also said this: “We must not leave a stone unturned to stop the massacre. We must demand retaliation and …join forces with the Poles who demand this”. But given the inability to save
everyone he stuck to his policy of trying to rescue the “best” Jews for Palestine. To him that meant the ones who already believed in the idea of a Jewish homeland and were fit enough to contribute to its growth. Gruenbaum
knew what he was saying: “They will say that I am anti-semitic. That I don’t want to save the Exile, that I don’t have a varm Yiddish hartz”. Gruenbaum’s son (a zionist by the way), was already in Auschwitz, and he knew this too.
His policy was wrong I think. The others were right. But I don’t know anyone apart from DannyD who could read the exchange without perceiving the dilemma. Let alone accusing everyone there of being a ‘Zionist collaborator’ with Nazism. It’s incredible!
I mean, what did these “Zionist collaborators” think of the Final Solution? Ben-Gurion was neither indifferent to the fate of its victims nor hopeful it would help the zionist cause, as DannyD always implies. On the contrary he thought it would put an end to it. “The extermination of European Jewry is a catastrophe for Zionism”, he said in December 1942: “There won’t be anyone left to build the country with!” (Tom Segev,
The Seventh Million p. 97). Later he famously declared “The State appeared and did not find the Nation that awaited it”. Now you might call this attitude selfish. You might even say it’s defeatist. But it’s hardly indifferent. And it certainly isn’t collaborationist.
But what about all the zionists who fought for the Wehrmacht?......Oh, sorry, there weren’t any. The 40,000 Jews in Palestine (I guess we can call them Zionists?) who signed up to fight in the war all signed up for the British side. That represented a stonking one third of all male breadwinners. Funny, but DannyD doesn’t mention this inconvenient fact when he’s talking about how Zionists “looked upon the Nazis not as oppressors
but as soul mates and people they could work for and with”. Nor does he ever mention the Jewish Brigade which was raised in Palestine and which fought against the Wehrmacht in northern Italy in 1944-45. Nor is there any mention (except as a stick to beat poor old Kastner with!) of the brave young parachutists who were sent by the Jewish Agency to fight behind German lines in Yugoslavia, Rumania and Bulgaria. And no mention either mention of the zionist attempts to persuade the Allies to bomb Auschwitz.
We should look a bit more at the last one, because DannyD has ignorantly talked about the lengths to which “Zionists went to cover up operations in that camp”. Also the man at the centre of the efforts to bomb Auschwitz was Chaim Weizmann, who DannyD has already condemned as a kind of Nazi racist. On 6th July 1944 Weizmann met the British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden to outline a plan for bombing the railway lines leading to Auschwitz-Birkenau and “bombing the camps themselves with the object of destroying the plant used for gassing and burning”. (Wasserstein,
Britain and the Jews pp. 310-311). The demand was supported by a detailed memorandum from Shertok of the Jewish Agency on July 11th 1944. (Much of it is printed in Martin Gilbert,
Auschwitz and the Allies (1981) pp. 268-70. But it was turned down by the RAF as being too impractical.
It’s fair to add, too, that the Jewish Agency in Palestine was split over the issue. Ben-Gurion opposed bombing Auschwitz because he believed that the Allies, not the Nazis, would then take the blame for killing the Jews. On the other hand Gruenbaum (DannyD’s “collaborator”) was
for it. (WD Rubinstein,
The Myth of Rescue Routledge 1997 pp. 179-80.
Weizmann also tried to persuade the Roosevelt administration to bomb Auschwitz. That too was turned aside (Raul Hilberg,
Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders. The Jewish Catastrophe 1933-1945 p. 247. By this time, it might be worth adding, Weizmann’s son (a zionist) was already dead. He didn’t die in Auschwitz (like Greenbaum’s son) but in an RAF bomber, after being shot down on U-boat patrol. Thousands upon thousands of Jews – many of them zionists – died in the Allied armed forces. Zero dies in the Axis ones.
I ask you – how can you get a balanced view of zionism’s relationship to Nazism without ever mentioning these titanic efforts to confront it directly?
To sum upThere are many people who can take a share of the blame for what happened to the Jews in these years. The democracies for not opening their doors wider and for appeasing Hitler for so long. The German Communists for seeing the Socialists as a bigger enemy than the Nazis – indeed for temporarily allying themselves with the Nazis in Prussia in 1930 in order to oust a Socialist government. The Soviet Union for its disastrous and immoral Non-Aggression Pact with Hitler in 1939 – which threw millions of East European Jews straight into the moving parts of the Nazi killing-machine. The Christian churches for denying Christ and turning their backs on their neighbours. The behaviour of the victims themselves can also be criticised – too passive, too ready to believe that the worst could not happen. And you can blame the zionists, for not trying hard enough to get stricken Jews out of occupied Europe and being too fussy, until too late, about what sort of Jew was acceptable for Palestine.
But the people who are responsible for Shoah are not any of these groups. They are the Nazis. Full stop. They alone will carry the full unvarnished contempt of history.
Those, like DannyD, who see Shoah as a Nazi-Zionist collaboration are off their rockers. My fear is that DannyD’s travesty of history will one day become the accepted version on ‘the Arab street’ (if it isn’t already).
They have an excuse in that they are deliberately kept in ignorance by their governments and don’t have access to the films, books and museums of the West. DannyD and his pals do have access to this stuff, but they’re not interested in anything unless it can be pressed and contorted into supporting their view that ‘the Zionists’ are on the same moral plane as the Nazis. They take that stand because they have certain views about the Middle East today. There are a number of zionists who take a sort of equivalent stand too. They have their own documents and photographs and incriminating telegrams to illustrate the Grand Mufti’s collaboration with Hitler as if this is the major feature of the holocaust. It isn’t. It’s a minor side note.
You cannot understand the holocaust if you simply want to use it as a political weapon in the current Arab-Israeli conflict.
That, I’m afraid, is why DannyD and his deluded pals will probably never
get it.
