is hosting the Book Launch Sunday 13 November 5 pm
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It has been a long time coming but my book Zionism During the Holocaust – The Weaponisation of Memory in the Service of State and Nation is due to be released this week in time for the book launch which is being hosted by Jewish Network for Palestine.
You can order the book by contacting me at [email protected] and sending me your name and address. The paperback will cost £12.50 and the hardback £18.00. Alternatively you can transfer the money to the following account and then contact me to let me have your details:
Name: Brighton and Hove Unemployed Workers Centre
Sort Code: 09-01-50
Account Number: 04093879
Reference: Your Name
Alternatively you can send a cheque made out to B&HUWC, with all your details, to
BUWC, PO Box 173, Brighton BN51 9EZ
Interviews & Readings
During the Labour Party Conference on September 27 I was interviewed about the book by Tina Werkmann for the Beyond the Fringe – Future of the Left Events
and in October I was interviewed by Electronic Intifada’s Asa Winstanley and Nora Barrows-Friedman, for a Podcast How Zionists collaborated with the Nazis,
On October 27 I was invited to read extracts from the book by the Over the Edge Literary Events at Galway City Library in Ireland, alongside two other writers, Rob Doyle and Riley Johnson. The video of my talk is here.
I was also interviewed by Tony Gosling of Bristol Community Radio about my book and you can hear the interview here:
A Brief Summary of My Book
My book covers the relationship of the Zionist movement to anti-Semitism before, during and after the Holocaust and looks at how the Holocaust has been weaponised by the Zionist movement. It particularly focuses on the period of the Holocaust itself.
Despite the efforts of the Zionists to prevent my Crowdfunder the book has been published and it is over 500 pages with more than 3,000 footnotes, mainly from Zionist sources.
Of course the mainstream media are not interested in anything that contradicts the Establishment narrative that Zionism was the answer to anti-Semitism and the Holocaust. A narrative that totally eliminates the anti-Zionist leaders of Poland’s Jews from history.
In Poland in the last free elections in 1938 in Warsaw the anti-Zionist Bund took 17 of the 20 Jewish Council seats. The Zionists obtained one. Throughout Poland, in conjunction with the Polish Socialist Party, the Bund were victorious. Jewish and Israeli students today know nothing of this history.
In Germany the Zionists were even more of a fringe minority. They constituted no more than 2% of its Jews.
It will make uncomfortable reading for Zionists and supporters of the State of Israel because I rely on mostly Zionist sources to show how the Zionist movement was a Quisling movement.
In my reading in Galway I quoted David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister and the then Chair of the Jewish Agency, the Zionist government in waiting. After the British had accepted the entrance of nearly 10,000 Jewish children from Nazi Germany in the wake of Kristallnacht, the November 1938 pogrom against Germany’s Jews, Ben Gurion made a speech to Mapai’s Central Committee (Israeli Labor Party) on 9 December 1938. Ben Gurion explained 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.
This quote can be found in multiple sources includingthe official biography of Ben-Gurion by Shabtai Teveth ‘The Burning Ground – 1886-1948’ (p.855) as well as in Yoav Gelber’s ‘Zionist policy and the Fate of European Jewry,’ Yad Vashem Studies (1939-42) p. 199 and Tom Segev’s, The Seventh Million, 28.
Many Zionist leaders saw the rise of Hitler as a good thing. Of course they did not foresee the Holocaust but whereas most Jewish people did see the Nazis as a dire threat to German’s Jews the Zionists only saw opportunities.
Emil Ludwig, the world-famous biographer, ‘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 am personally very grateful to him.’
Nahman Bialik, the national Zionist poet, volunteered that
‘Hitlerism has perhaps saved German Jewry, which was being assimilated into annihilation.’
Germany’s remaining Jews were of course annihilated, but not by assimilation. Berl Katznelson, a founder of Mapai (the forerunner of Israel’s Labour Party) and editor of its paper Davar, as well as Ben-Gurion’s effective deputy, saw the rise of Hitler as ‘an opportunity to build and flourish like none we have ever had or ever will have.’
Ben-Gurion himself was even more optimistic. ‘The Nazis’ victory would become “a fertile force for Zionism.’ One of the leaders of German Zionism, Rabbi Joachim Prinz admitted that:
It was morally disturbing to seem to be considered as the favoured 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.
Today the Zionists keep quiet about this because they know how appalling their record is. Their only response is to cry ‘anti-Semitism’.
The Zionist movement even betrayed its own young Zionist fighters in Warsaw and the other ghettos of Poland. Their writings and diaries were falsified and edited in such a way as to remove any criticism of the Zionist movement. Tuvia (Tova) Altman, a leader of the Hashomer Hatzair underground in Poland, wrote in December 1942 that ‘Israel is dying before my eyes and I wring my hands and cannot help.’ What they didn’t publish was the following:
After all, you have erased me from your memory and what are we…. It takes all the restraint I can muster not to vent the bitterness that has accumulated for you and your friends for forgetting me so completely… Only the realization and the certainty that we will never again meet led me to write…. Do not give regards to anyone. I don’t want to know about them.
Another victim of the censorship was Hayka (Chajka) Klinger who, when she went to Israel, couldn’t find anywhere to publishher experiences. When she diedher Ghetto Diary was published. However it had so many changes and erasures that researchers were recommended to consult the original. The originals have now been republished, see Chajka Klinger, I am Writing these Words to You: The original diaries, Będzin, 1943. https://tinyurl.com/4trn2dtd.
When Chajka went to Palestine in 1944 she made a speech to the Zionist Executive. However the extracts below were not mentioned in references to the speech by Dina Porat, the Chief Historian at the Zionist propaganda museum Yad Vashem, in her book The Blue and the Yellow Stars of David. Chajka told how the Jewish Councils, the Judenrate, were hated by the masses for their collaboration with the Nazis and how they were largely staffed by members of the Zionist movement:
[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 carry on 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] … Yes one must try Haim Molchadsky, the head of the JNF in Bedzin…
Today the Zionist movement claims credit for the Warsaw Ghetto Resistance but at the time the leadership of the Zionist movement in Palestine urged them to abandon the fight against the Nazis and go to Palestine via Aliya Bet, the secret emigration of Zionist pioneers from Nazi occupied Europe.
Hayka Klinger, who arrived in Palestine in March 1944, told the Histadrut Executive that ‘we received an order not to organize any more defence.’ To the Zionist leadership the ghetto fighters were more valuable in Palestine. Klinger observed that
‘Without a people, a people’s avant-garde is of no value. If rescue it is, then the entire people must be rescued. If it is to be annihilation, then the avante-garde too shall be annihilated.’
Never was the ethical and moral distinction between the Jewish diaspora and Palestine’s Zionist leaders clearer.
The Zionist leaders saw the risings in the ghettos as ‘a kind of betrayal of the overriding principle of the homeland.’ Yet despite opposing the uprisings at the time, the ghetto fighters were ‘retrospectively conscripted’ into the Zionist terror groups. ‘We fought here and they fought there’ according to Palmach commander Yitzhak Sadeh. Except that the Jewish partisans were fighting against the fascists whereas the Zionist militias fought with fascists.
The anti-Zionist leadership of the Warsaw Ghetto resistance, of which the Bund was the main component, has been eliminated by the Zionists from history.
The Israeli state was extremely hostile to the last commander of the Warsaw Ghetto Resistance, Marek Edelman, who had written an Open Letter to the Palestinians asking them to stop the bloodshed and enter into peace negotiations. The letter caused outrage because Edelman did not mention the word ‘terrorism.’ Israeli leaders were particularly incensed by its title: ‘Letter to Palestinian partisans’. Paul Foot wrote in an obituary to Edelman:
Mr Edelman … wrote in a spirit of solidarity from a fellow resistance fighter, as a former leader of a Jewish uprising …He addressed his letter to ‘commanders of the Palestinian military, paramilitary and partisan operations – to all the soldiers of the Palestinian fighting organisations.’ This set up a howl of rage in the Zionist press, who reminded their readers that Mr Edelman, despite his heroism in the 1940s, is a former supporter of the anti-Zionist socialist Bund and can therefore not be trusted.
What was particularly irksome was that Edelman had compared the structures of the Jewish resistance movement in Warsaw to that of the Palestinians. Although he occasionally came to Israel to visit old friends, Edelman retained the Bund’s hostility to Zionism. In an interview he described Israel as a:
chauvinist, religious state, where a Christian is a second-class citizen and a Muslim is third-class. It is a disaster, after three million were murdered in Poland, they want to dominate everything and not to consider non-Jews!
When Edelman died on 9 October 2009 he was honoured with a state funeral and a fifteen-gun salute. Not even the lowliest clerk at the Israeli Embassy attended. Edelman received Poland’s highest honour and the French Legion of Honour but he died unrecognised and forgotten in Israel.
The President of Poland spoke at his funeral… held in the old Jewish cemetery of Warsaw. Two thousand people attended the grave-side ceremony. But no one from the Israeli government attended… No official representative of any international Jewish organisation attended either: not even from the holocaust memorialisation organisations.
You can read about all of the above and much more besides, including the story of Ha’avara, for which Ken Livingstone was forced from the Labour Party in my book
