Interview with Rania Khalek of Breakthrough News about my book Zionism During the Holocaust
Rania Khalek Interviews Tony Greenstein – Zionism Before, During and After the Nazis: A History of Collusion
I’ve been interviewed twice by Rania Khalek this year. The first time, in early April, took place partly in Hungary and then in the UK. It was based on an article I wrote for Electronic Intifada about how the lazy explanation for the genocide in Gaza is the myth of ‘holocaust trauma’.
I explained that Israelis were suffering, not from holocaust trauma, but settler colonial trauma. Their reaction was typical of the slaveholders in the Caribbean who, faced with uprisings by their Black slaves, reacted with unbridled violence. It was the reaction of those who have their foot on the neck of the slave or subjugated and then react violently to any rebellion. It is always the nightmare of the oppressor that their victims will rise up and take revenge.
That was what October 7 was about. That was why almost immediately after October 7 Israel began fashioning a narrative about the terrible cruelties and atrocities of the Palestinian resistance attack.
First we had the stories of the 40 beheaded babies, the baked baby and even the baby hung up to dry on a clothing line.
The problem was that none of this was true. Only 2 of the 1139 Israelis who died that day were babies. The 2 babies who did die were killed accidentally. Compare this with Israel’s slaughter of 20,000+ Palestinian children.
Then we had the ‘rape narrative’ which the New York Times did so much to give legs to with its now discredited article Screams Without Words by an Israeli reporter Anat Schwartz, a supporter of Israel’s genocide, and two others. It has since been comprehensively discredited by The Intercept and other publications.
This fabricated narrative was the justification for the genocide that followed in Gaza.
My second interview a month ago, was about my book Zionism During the Holocaust.
How Israel Weaponizes the Holocaust to Justify Killing Palestinians
The interview about my book was a very wide-ranging interview, much like my interview a year ago by Asa Winstanley and Nora Barrows Friedman, which has attracted over 300,000 views.
We started out with an overview of pre-holocaust anti-Semitism and I made the point that in the feudal era anti-Semitism was a popular movement from below against the role that Jews played, the agents of money in an economy based on use values. It was the indebted peasants who reacted at times violently to the Jews.
But in the modern era, from around the last third of the 19th century anti-Semitism took on a different character from Christian anti-Semitism. It was no longer based on religion, i.e. the economic role that Jews played in society but on race.
For Martin Luther once a Jew had converted to Christianity that was the end of the matter. Their soul was saved. For Hitler it was of no account if a Jew had been baptised. Once a Jew always a Jew. It was Wilhelm Marr, the founder of the League of Anti-Semites, who, in 1879 coined the term ‘anti-Semitism’. It was based on the false premise that Jews were Semites, that is they didn’t belong in Europe but were really from the Middle East. Semite was a linguistic not a racial term.
Count von Plehve – instigated pogroms in Czarist Russia including at Kishinev in 1903 – but as an anti-Semite he also supported the Zionist movement
From this point onwards, anti-Semitism was a movement from the top not the bottom. It was the ruling class who used anti-Semitism as a weapon to divide the working class and oppressed. After the assassination of Czar Alexander II in 1881 the Czarist regime under Interior Minister Vyacheslav von Plehve consciously sought to promote pogroms and anti-Semitism as a means of dividing the enemy. That was why the Bolsheviks held that anyone who was an anti-Semite was a supporter of the Czar.
For Hitler it was ‘Marx the Jew’. Jews were the biological parents of Bolshevism/socialism. Zionism was a reaction to the support of Jews for the revolutionary and socialist groups. Zionism was a consciously counter-revolutionary current. It accepted the characterisation of Jews as foreign interlopers who didn’t belong and they sought instead the creation of a Jewish state mirroring that of the anti-Semitic countries. In this they have succeeded. Israel is, as I once said, Hitler’s Bastard Offspring.
The Zionists often outdid the anti-Semites in their description of the diaspora Jew who they hated. They accepted the caricatures and stereotypes of the anti-Semites. Being separated from what they saw as their ancient land the Jews had developed asocial tendencies. Zionism, especially in Germany, was of the Blood and Soil type, mirroring as they did German nationalism. With ‘national’ soil under them the Jews would be like all others, only more so.
In the words of the founder of Revisionist Zionism, Vladimir Jabotinsky, the Jews were ‘a very nasty people and its neighbours hate it and they are right.’ If one didn’t know that the speaker was a Zionist one would assume that they were a typical non-Jewish anti-Semite. As Joachim Doron, an Israeli political scientist wrote in an article, Classic Zionism and Modern Anti-Semitism – Parallels and Influences:
rather than take up arms against the enemies of the Jews, Zionism attacked the ‘enemy within’, the Diaspora Jew himself and subjected him to a hail of criticism…. Indeed a perusal of the Zionist sources reveals a wealth of charges against the Diaspora Jew, some of which are so scathing that the generation that witnessed Auschwitz has difficulty comprehending them. (my emphasis)
Zionism was seen by the ruling class as, in the words of Count Vyacheslav von Plehve, as an ‘antidote to socialism’. It was a reactionary nationalist diversion. Churchill in 1920 wrote a famous article for the Illustrated Sunday Herald Zionism vs Bolshevism. Support for Zionism was seen as a way of weaning Jews off their revolutionary habits.
Zionism always had one and only one objective. The creation of a Jewish State and it didn’t mind how it got there. Although whilst they were weak they didn’t openly call for such a state, relying on euphemisms such as a ‘Jewish Homeland’, the Zionists had one and only one objective in mind.
It is crucial that people understand, because of the myths that abound about Zionism. There was never any difference between the ‘left-wing’ and the ‘right-wing’ of Zionism. Both wings agreed on the need for a Jewish state.
In May 1948 Ben Gurion instructed the Israeli Army to fire on the Revisionist arms boat, the Altalena – here burning off the Tel Aviv shoreline
Their only differences and sometimes these were quite violent, were about tactics and on occasion blood was spilt as with the shelling of the Revisionist boat Altalena.
Although the holocaust is an essential part of the Zionist narrative today, when the holocaust was actually happening the Zionistsdid not want to know. It was a distraction from their project of state building. Even worse it threatened to disrupt their funding because Jews were more likely to give money to saving refugees and keeping them alive than a nationalist project in the Middle East.
The Zionists worked hard to tie the refugee problem to Zionism. If refugees were to be saved anywhere it had to be in Palestine. All other places were to be opposed because if you could save Jews elsewhere what was the point in having a Jewish State? They disparagingly talked of ‘refugeeism’.
This was the ‘logic’ behind the obstruction of any and all attempts to rescue Jews if the destination was not Palestine. It was summed up by David Ben-Gurion, the Chairman of the Zionist Organisation and first Prime Minister of Israel. When Britain offered to accept 10,000 Jewish children in the wake of Kristallnacht, the Nazi pogrom in November 1938, Ben-Gurion was outraged. In a speech to the Central Council of Mapai (Israeli Labor Party) in December 1938, he said:
If I knew that it would be possible to save all the children in Germany by bringing them over to England, and only half of them by transporting them to Eretz Yisrael, then I would opt for the second alternative. For we must weigh not only the life of these children, but also the history of the People of Israel.
Zionism was in essence a racial preservation project. The Zionist idea was based on race, not religion. Most of the early Zionists were atheists but they rested their claim to Palestine on the promise of a god they denied.
My book details how the Zionists wilfully obstructed the efforts of others to save Jews by always shouting ‘what about Palestine’ whenever alternative destinations were proposed. Saving Jews from the gas chambers always came second to building their state.
To the end, they opposed the setting up of Roosevelt’s War Refugee Board in January 1944, which was instrumental in saving some 200,000 Jews. In Hungary their deals with the Nazis amounted to the saving of 1684 Jews of the Zionist and Jewish elite in exchange for keeping quiet about and even misinforming the 437,000 Jews who were deported about where they were heading – Auschwitz.
All of this came out in Israel’s Kasztner trial when the leader of Hungarian Zionism during the war, Israel Kasztner, brought a libel trial against a Hungarian Jew who had called him a collaborator. He lost and was then assassinated by the Israeli secret service Shin Bet. Although acquitted on appeal the facts found by the lower court were not challenged and one charge of collaboration was upheld.
When the Nazis first came to power in January 1933 most Jews were horrified and they began boycotting Nazi German goods. It was a spontaneous Boycott that grew up which nearly all Jews, except the Zionists and the bourgeois Jews, supported. The Zionist leaders welcomed Hitler to power sensing that in the carnage that followed and the inevitable exodus of Jews from Germany and elsewhere in Europe, they could only prosper.
Noah Lucas, a critical Zionist historian wrote that
‘As the European holocaust erupted, Ben-Gurion saw it as a decisive opportunity for Zionism… Ben-Gurion above all others sensed the tremendous possibilities inherent in the dynamic of the chaos and carnage in Europe…. In conditions of peace,… Zionism could not move the masses of world Jewry. The forces unleashed by Hitler in all their horror must be harnessed to the advantage of Zionism. … By the end of 1942… the struggle for a Jewish state became the primary concern of the movement.’
In August 1933 they negotiated a trade agreement, Ha’avara, with the Nazis. For mentioning this Ken Livingstone was forced out of the Labour Party.
Hayim Nahman Bialik, the Zionist national poet, welcomed Hitler to power
Some Zionists openly welcomed the advent of Hitler. Hayim Nahman Bialik wrote that:
Hitlerism has perhaps saved German Jewry, which was being assimilated into annihilation
Emil Ludwig was another Zionist who welcomed Hitler to power
Emil Ludwig (1881-1948), the world-famous biographer, ‘who expressed the general attitude of the Zionist movement’ wrote that:
Hitler will be forgotten in a few years, but he will have a beautiful monument in Palestine. You know, the coming of the Nazis was rather a welcome thing. … Thousands who seemed to be completely lost to Judaism were brought back to the fold by Hitler, and for that I am personally very grateful to him
The more important point though is that the Zionists seriously believed that because they had no ideological differences with the Nazis, because they too accepted that German Jews did not belong in Germany, that they could do business with them. They even believed that the Nuremberg Race Laws of 1935, which established that German Jews were aliens and a separate race from Germans, established a basis for living side by side until the Jews could emigrate. In this they were to be proved wrong.
On June 21 1933 the Zionist Federation of Germany [ZVfD] wrote in to Hitler saying that
On the foundation of the new state, which has established the principle of race… fruitful activity for the Fatherland is possible…. Our acknowledgement of Jewish nationality provides for a clear and sincere relationship to the German people and its national and racial realities. Precisely because we don’t wish to falsify these fundamentals, because we, too, are against mixed marriage and are for maintaining the purity of the Jewish group… The realization of Zionism could only be hurt by resentment of Jews abroad against the German development. Boycott propaganda… is in essence unZionist, because Zionism wants not to do battle but to convince and to build.
What the ZVfD wrote was true. The Zionists also believed in race and nation, hence their desire to co-operate. Today they hold exactly the same beliefs and they are determined to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians because they are not of the same race, the Jewish race.
I recommend that you listen to the interview with Rania.
Tony Greenstein
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