Owen Jones Hawks His Conscience Around the Left Posing as a Supporter of both the Palestinians and the Zionists
The Attack on Ken Loach and Perdition for Telling the Truth About Nazi-Zionist Collaboration is not only Dishonest it is Anti-Semitic
When Israel’s 2014 attack on Gaza was at its height, during which 2,200 Palestinians including 551 children murdered, Jones was more concerned about ‘anti-Semitism’ in Britain which he described as ‘a menace’. Zionism according to Jones was not, however, a menace.
The summer of 2014 was when the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism was formed, widely suspected to be funded by Israel’s dirty tricks Ministry of Strategic Affairs with the remit to smear supporters of the Palestinians as ‘anti-Semites’. Amongst the CAA’s first targets was Jewish MP Gerald Kaufman who labelled Israel’s behaviour in Gaza as ‘Nazi like’.
There is nothing ‘left wing’ about identity politics as the neo-Nazi Generation Identity have demonstrated
Jones is not a socialist although he considers himself on the left. He is an exponent of identity politics. And everyone has an identity. That is how racists and neo-Nazis describe themselves today as Generation Identity.
Instead of identifying with Palestinians Jones identifies with Zionist (not anti-Zionist) Jews. Throughout the attacks on Jeremy Corbyn Jones worked with the right-wing Jewish Labour Movement which was refounded in 2015 to take-out Corbyn. When the JLM passed a vote of no confidence in Corbyn Owen Jones said nothing.
Jones described how excited he was to deliver a lecture to the JLM. He kept company with all their MPs – Margaret Hodge, Ruth Smeeth, Luciana Berger, Louise Ellman – all right-wing and anti-Corbyn whilst convincing himself it was all about ‘anti-Semitism’.
When Ken Loach was expelled from the Labour Party Owen Jones condemned what had happened. But it didn’t last long. As soon as the Zionists piled-on Jones began walking his comments back.
What happened was a repetition of the previous 5 years. Jones initially supported Jackie Walker, the Black Jewish socialist who was subject to a tsunami of racist and misogynist attacks. But when the Zionists stepped up their attacks on her Jones backtracked and retreated into the safe spaces where a thousand identities flourish.
Jones once said that ‘Loach was always a hero of mine” however when the Zionists falsely accused Loach of being a holocaust denier, twisting his remark that “I think history is for all of us to discuss” Jones backtracked. Loach made it clear that he opposed Holocaust denial but that didn’t suffice. The Zionists want people to be holocaust deniers in order that they can argue that opposition to Zionism is motivated by anti-Semitism.
Jones began retreating so fast that you couldn’t see him for the dust. Jones said that Loach had produced a play that was ‘incredibly distressing to Jewish people.” The play was in fact based on the Israel’s Kasztner trial (1954- 1958).
According to Jones not some Jewish people but all Jewish people were distressed. If I had said that all Gay people were as reactionary as Jones that would be classified as homophobic.
Jones repeated a Zionist quotation attributed to Jim Allen, the socialist playwright who wrote Perdition. Even if the quote is accurate, it has been distorted out of all recognition. Perdition was apparently
“the most lethal attack on Zionism ever written because it touches at the heart of the most abiding myth of modern history, the Holocaust. Because it says quite plainly that privileged Jewish leaders…”
Clearly Allen wasn’t calling the holocaust a myth because the play was based on the extermination of nearly half a million Hungarian Jews. The real objection of the Zionists is that the play labelled the leaders of Hungarian Zionism collaborators with the Nazis.
Allen described how the Zionists had created a whole series of myths around the holocaust, not least their own role in it. As Israel Shahak, a child survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto and Belsen once said:
‘It’s not an awareness of the holocaust but rather the myth of the holocaust or even a falsification of the holocaust (in the sense that “a half-truth is worse than a lie”) which has been instilled here (in Israel ).’ Israel Shahak, ‘Falsification of the Holocaust’, 19 May 1989, Kol Ha’ir, Jerusalem].
Israel’s supporters did the same to Chris Williamson, whose expulsion Jones also supported. They twisted what he said into its exact opposite. When Williamson said:
“The party that has done more to stand up to racism is now being demonised as a racist, bigoted party…. I think our party’s response has been partly responsible for that because in my opinion… we’ve backed off far too much, we have given too much ground, we’ve been too apologetic. We’ve done more to actually address the scourge of antisemitism than any other political party. Any other political party. And yet we are being traduced.”
that became Labour has been too apologetic for anti-Semitism. Now they are doing the same with Ken Loach and Owen Jones is more than willing to help them out.
Asa Winstanley pointed out that Jones, by agreeing with Lara McNeill that Labour Against the Witchhunt should be proscribed, had agreed to the expulsion of Loach. Loach has supported LAW since its foundation. Winstanley argued, referring to Labour List, that the whole purpose of proscribing LAW was to remove Ken Loach.
Asa gave Jones a history lesson in the background to Perdition. Kasztner, the leader of Hungarian Zionism and a senior official in Israel’s ruling Labor party sued Hungarian refugee, Malchiel Greenwald, who had accused him of being a Nazi collaborator.
Judge Benjamin Halevi of the Jerusalem District Court found that Kasztner had ‘sold his soul to Satan’ by reaching an agreement with Adolf Eichmann. In exchange for a train carrying the Zionist and Jewish elite out of Hungary Kasztner would help pacify and mislead the Jews of Hungary into voluntarily getting onto the deportation trains which were going straight to Auschwitz.
Of course this story is distressing to Zionists. Their propaganda rests on making non-Jewish people feel guilty over the holocaust and keeping quiet about atrocities against the Palestinians. If the actual record of the Zionist movement during the holocaust was known, then people might not be so willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.
Asa pointed out that Jones was known as the weather vane of the left. Just before the June 2017 General Election Jones called for Corbyn to step down. When the election came Corbyn obtained the biggest swing to Labour since 1945. Jones wrote:
The polling for Labour is catastrophic…. Yes, polls can be wrong: 2015 and 1992 represent the two big polling disasters of our time. Yet in both cases, the disaster was overestimating Labour’s lead… precedent suggests the real picture is even worse for Labour.
Ironically Loach wrote an Op Ed Don’t blame Corbyn for the sins of Blair, Brown and New Labour a day before Jones. The contrast between the two articles tells us everything we need to know about the difference between Loach and Jones. Loach wrote:
‘In the parts of Britain that have been left to rot, people support Jeremy Corbyn’s policies. So why aren’t MPs promoting them?’
It was a question that Jones, the Prince of Identity Politics, hadn’t thought of asking. Loach described how
‘the spate of calls for Jeremy Corbyn to quit since last week’s byelections in Stoke and Copeland has been as predictable as it was premeditated. It says everything about the political agenda of the media, and nothing about people’s real needs and experiences.’
The article repays reading. Jones parents may have been working class but Jones has nothing in common with them. He is part of the metropolitan elite, divorced from ordinary working class people.
These 4 children playing on Gaza’s beach were executed by an Israeli warplane – Israel dismissed it as a ‘tragic accident’
What Loach wrote came from his socialist politics. Just as this blog was virtually alone in predicting that Corbyn would do well. My first blog, on April 20, just days after the election was called was ‘Labour Can Win if Corbyn is Bold’ 10 days later I wrote Owen Jones: Every Quality of a Dog Except Loyalty! I called him a racist hypocrite for prioritising ‘anti-Semitism’ and ignoring Israel’s invasion of Gaza in particular his failure to call out Israel’s execution of 4 children playing on Gaza’s beach who were machine gunned to death.https://www.blogger.com
On June 2I wrote another article Is Labour on the threshold of victory?. It was clear that something was happening. Unlike Jones I didn’t live in a media bubble. Jones is the weather vane of the left. But as Bob Dylan sang you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows!
Jones was stung by Asa’s article into responding. People with integrity may disagree politically while ensuring that they do not distort their opponents’ arguments. Jones however lacks all integrity. He went out of his way to distort what Asa was saying relying on a left-Zionist masquerading as an anti-Zionist to speak for him!
The reply was headed No, Jews did not collaborate in their own genocide. Of course Asa had never said such a preposterous thing. Jones could only defend the indefensible by lying through his teeth.
The destruction of half a million Hungarian Jews was not an act of collective suicide. They were betrayed by the leaders of Hungarian Zionism. Kasztner, the Jewish Agency representative, reached an agreement with Eichmann that in exchange for a train allowing the Jewish and Zionist elite to escape, the Zionists would mislead and misinform the Jews into voluntarily reporting for deportation.
Jones first lie was that ‘several nonzionist and antizionist Jewish socialists’ contacted him to explain why Perdition ‘was problematic.’ I don’t believe that any non-Zionist or anti-Zionist Jews contacted Jones. What he means is members of the Zionist Alliance for Workers Liberty agreed to help out!
Jones went out of his way to befriend the JLM. Treachery never had a better friend than Owen Jones. The JLM called the Israeli Labor Party its ‘sister party’. This is the party that carried out the ethnic cleansing of ¾ million Palestinians in 1948. It is the party that drew up the plans to ‘Judaise’ the Galilee and Negev. It is explicitly opposed to Arab and Jewish equality and believes in separation of Jews and Arabs. The JLM boasts that it is affiliated to the World Zionist Organisation, an organisation which has a ‘land theft division’.
When Trump was elected President Israeli Labor’s former leader, now Israeli President, Isaac Herzog, wrote.
Warm congratulations to the president of the most powerful nation in the world: Donald J Trump! Your win shows elites are thing of past
Herzog also declared that his nightmare was waking up to find that Israel had an Arab Prime Minister and 61 Arab Members of Israel’s Knesset. He declared that he wanted to dispel the false impression that the ILP were ‘Arab Lovers’ a deeply racist term.
Jones is incapable of defending his attacks on Ken Loach for producing the play Perdition so he has posted on his blog a ‘brilliant detailed response by a Jewish antizionist’. The response is neither detailed nor brilliant. This so-called anti-Zionist, who won’t even put his name to the article (I shall call him X) is a fraud.
My Response to Owen Jones ‘Anti-Zionist’
1. X says it is not unusual for some of the oppressed to be accused of ‘collaboration’. This is true but we are not talking about a few individuals but a whole political movement. When Hitler came to power the Zionist movement was determined to extract the maximum advantage. Whilst world Jewry reacted with fury and immediately launched a Boycott of Nazi Germany the Zionist leadership in Palestine and Germany welcomed them.
2. Berl Katznelson, deputy to David Ben Gurion, the first Prime Minister of Israel, saw the advent of the Nazis as “an opportunity to build and flourish like none we have ever had or ever will have”. [1] Ben Gurion was even more optimistic. ‘The Nazis victory would become “a fertile force for Zionism.”[2] Rabbi Joachim Prinz, a German Zionist leader 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.” [3]
3. Etan Bloom in his Ph D thesis Arthur Ruppin and the Production of Modern Hebrew Culture, quotes Emil Ludwig, the biographer ‘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….the coming of the Nazis was rather a welcome thing. So many of our German Jews were hovering between two coasts… riding the treacherous current between the Scylla of assimilation and the Charybdis of a nodding acquaintance with Jewish things. 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.’ [4]
The Zionist national poet Chaim Nachman Bialik believed that ‘Hitler has perhaps saved German Jewry, which was being assimilated into annihilation.’
4. The Zionists therefore agreed in August 1933 a trade pact Ha’avara with the Nazis which resulted in 60% of capital investment in the Palestine Jewish economy between 1933 and 1939 coming from Nazi Germany. Hitler literally built the ‘Jewish’ state.[5]
5. Throughout the war the Zionists fought against the admission of Jewish refugees to any country other than Palestine. For example Alaska.Ben Gurion opposed the decision of the British government to admit 10,000 Jewish children from Nazi Germany in after Kristallnacht. On the 9 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.’[6]
Malcolm MacDonald, the Colonial Secretary, told of a conversation with Chaim Weizmann, Israel’s first President:
‘I remember at the time that Weizmann’s attitude shocked me. He insisted on the children going to Palestine. As far as he was concerned it was Palestine or nowhere.’ [7]
6. There was a cruel logic to this policy. Zionism was formed on the basis of the negation of the Jewish diaspora. In their view anti-Semitism stemmed from Jews not having a state of their own. To move Jews from Germany to America would not solve the problem. It would simply transfer it. That was why they actively opposed the lowering of the immigration barriers in the US.
7. In 1938 the US sponsored the Evian conference on Jewish refugees. The Zionists were hostile to it. Christopher Sykes explained why:
‘From the start they [the Zionists] 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…. It is hard, perhaps impossible, to find a parallel in history to this particular Zionist idea… that such was the basic Zionist idea is not a matter of opinion but a fact abundantly provable by evidence…’[8] (my emphasis)
Noah Lucas, another pro- Zionist historian, described how “the Zionists were not displeased by the failure of the Evian conference.’ [9] Zionist historian, Robert Silverberg, reached the same conclusion:
‘… truly dedicated Zionists hoped for the failure of the Evian talks. How disastrous it would be for Zionism if Australia say were to agree to admit a million Jews at once!… 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.’[10]
8. It is a lie to say that ‘many Jews who expressed distress about Perdition held antizionist beliefs.’ I have never met one.
9. X distorts what happened in the Kasztner Trial saying that
‘It is understandable why Hungarian Jews who’d lost their whole families in the Holocaust, looking for someone to blame, might point the finger at other Jewish survivors and ask ‘why did you save other peoples’ families and not mine?’ or ‘what price did you pay to get out?’
10. Jacob Freifeld testified that he had asked Kasztner’s friend Hillel Danzig about where the deportation trains were going.
‘he gave me a tip. I should try to go to Kenyermezo as soon as I could, because the first arrivals there would get the best places.’[11]
Under cross-examination Danzig admitted that he knew that he was being taken “to a safe place” and that people like Freifeld would be taken to “a place much worse.”[12]
All of Freifield’s family bar himself, were gassed in Auschwitz. Dr Imre Kertesz, the 2002 Nobel Laureate for Literature confirmed this.[13] Danzig left on Kasztner’s train.[14] Yechiel Shmueli, Levi Blum and David Rozner confirmed Freifeld’s account.[15] When Rozner was asked why Kasztner would have been killed if he had set foot in Kolosvar after the war, he replied ‘Because he was the man who misled the Jews to believe in the good intentions of the Germans.’[16]
Kasztner and his henchmen misinformed and misled the Jews of Kolosvar to thinking that they were going to a non-existent place Kenyermeze. This wasn’t jealousy this was treachery.
11. X informs us that
‘Winstanley describes the Jews who Kasztner saved as ‘an elite group’ of ‘mostly fellow Zionists, family and friends’. Winstanley does not provide a citation for this claim… Kasztner was not simply concerned with a small elite but was involved with various rescue efforts which helped thousands upon thousands of Jews.’
X admits that ‘it seems Zionist Jews may possibly have been prioritised by Kasztner but the mission certainly did not exclusively rescue Zionists.’ No one ever suggested that it did. It included rich, bourgeois Jews and a handful of ultra-orthodox anti-Zionists but the vast majority were Zionists.
X wants sources. Well one source is the Kasztner Report that was written in 1946. Kasztner described the train (p.125) as an ‘aliya gateway’. The passengers were destined for Palestine. The train was known as the ‘Train of the Prominents’. Kasztner described how ‘I once again inquired about the prominent people from the provinces.’ Kasztner complained that ‘More than 300,000 have already been sent to Auschwitz and there was no possibility of saving even one of the 300 prominent figures.’(p.137) There are repeated references to ‘prominent individuals.’ [17]
The idea that ‘many working class Jews’ were present is false. Lob describes how his father, a businessman ‘was listed as a ‘farmer’ because Palestine required farmers not businessmen.’ [18]
The list of Zionist organisations whose members were saved is documented. (p.163) Kasztner was even planning ‘in case of a deportation of the Budapest Jews, a second train for 1,500 people. In other words Kasztner was planning to sacrifice the 250,000 Jews of Budapest. (p. 168)
According to Lob ‘The frequent use of Hebrew terms reflected the ideology and practices of the Zionist organisation which dominated our entire group.’ [19] Judge Shimon Agranat of Israel’s Supreme Court[20] agreed that Kasztner’s decision to include a high number of Zionists on the train was ‘perfectly rational.’[21]
12. 388 of the seats on the train consisted of Kasztner’s friends and family from Kolosvar led by his father-in-law, Josef Fischer.
13. X resorts to semantics. ‘Can anyone fleeing from a state which wants to kill them for belonging to a racial minority meaningfully be described as elite?’ Yes. If they bought their safety at the expense of working class Jews.
14. X says that ‘There is no credible evidence that Kasztner had any agency to save any more Jews than he did.’ Clearly he never heard of Rudolf Vrba. Vrba was one of just 5 Jews who successfully escaped from Auschwitz. He and Alfred Wetzler reached Slovakia on April 24 and wrote the Auschwitz Protocols 3 weeks before the deportations started from Hungary. For the first time there was proof that Auschwitz was an extermination camp. Previously it was believed to be a labour camp.
15. Kasztner was given the Protocols on April 27. What did he do? He suppressed them. If they had been distributed in time then most Hungarian Jews would not have reported for deportation. Those who didn’t report survived. There were less than 200 SS men in the whole of Hungary. The war was going badly, the Nazis could not afford more men. The Russians were at the doors. It was ONLY because of collaboration by the Zionist AND the bourgeois leaders that Hungarian Jewry were deported.
16. Fortunately copies of the Protocols had been made and Kastner could only delay their distribution. The Protocols led directly to the cancellation by Horthy, the Hungarian ruler, of the deportations on July 6. As a result the Jews of Budapest were saved. That was Vrba and Wetzler’s doing NOT Kastner. People like George Soros owe their lives to the Auschwitz Protocols.
17. As Elie Wiesel, a staunch Zionist and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, a child survivor of Auschwitz, said:
‘Why didn’t we know? To this day I try to understand what happened. If ever there was a tragedy that could have been prevented, it was that one.’
Wiesel told in his book Night (p.20) how their maid Maria
‘came to them ‘sobbing’. ‘She begged us to come with her to her village where she had prepared a safe shelter.’
Wiesel told how
‘We were taken just two weeks before D-Day, and we did not know that Auschwitz existed… everyone knew except the victims.’
18. That is why the role of the Zionists is relevant. As Vrba wrote later in the Daily Herald:
‘I am a Jew. In spite of that – indeed because of that “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.’
19. This is what Owen Jones defends. Of course there is a connection between Zionism, what it did to European Jewry and the Palestinians. It was the same mindset that led to ethnic cleansing. They thought in terms of race, saving the few out of the many. Kasztner’s defence counsel Chaim Cohen put it succinctly:
‘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 … that was his duty… 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?’
“Eichmann, the chief exterminator, knew that the Jews would be peaceful and not resist if he allowed the Prominents to be saved, that the Train of the Prominents was organized on Eichmann’s orders to facilitate the extermination of the whole people. … if all the Jews of Hungary are to be sent to their death he is entitled to organize a rescue train for 600 people. He is not only entitled to it but is also bound to act accordingly.”
20. Judge Moshe Silberg took issue with this argument:
‘‘then he acted innocently and cannot be charged with collaboration with the Nazis in facilitating the extermination of the Jews, even if he, de facto, contributed to this result.
I must say that I cannot accept this argument. Is this ‘innocence’? Is there ‘representation’ of despair? Can a single individual, even jointly with some friends, despair on behalf – and without the knowledge – of 800,000 people?…. The burning question of ‘By what authority’ and ‘quo warranto’ is an adequate answer to such a claim of Bona Fide.
21. Instead of hawking his conscience around the left Jones should shut up about things he knows nothing about. He should also stop using fake anti-Zionists. There’s a long history of non-Jews using Court Jews to attack other Jews.
22. The Zionist movement betrayed the Jews of Europe, including many thousands of Zionists. As Wiesel observed:
‘Jewish leaders of Palestine never made the rescue of European Jews into an overwhelming national priority. We know that Zionist leader Itzhak Gruenbaum… considered creating new settlements more urgent than saving Jews from being sent to Treblinka and Birkenau.’ [22]
23. Kasztner lied on oath when he said that he hadn’t given evidence at Nuremberg in favour of a Nazi war criminal, Himmler’s personal emissary Kurt Becher of the SS. But even worse was his testimony in favour of at least 5 other leading SS men including Dieter Wisliceny, who was hanged by the Czechs after the war.
24. Kasztner tried to save Wisliceny who had been responsible for the deportation of 60,000 Jews from Slovakia. Wisliceny was also responsible for the deportation to Auschwitz of nearly the entire Jewish community of Salonika, some 2/3 of Greek Jewry.
25. Kasztner also gave evidence in favour of Eichmann’s deputy, Herman Krumey, who had commanded the special Nazi detachments in Warsaw, Lemberg, Amsterdam and Paris. ‘Krumey arrived in Hungary already crowned by glorious achievements.’ [23] Krumey was responsible for implementing the Hungarian holocaust. Yet Kasztner gave evidence in his favour.
26. Krumey led the SS in its massacre of the Czech village of Lidice when 84 children were butchered. This is who Jones and his ‘anti-Zionist’ friend are defending when they defend Kastner.
27. X derides Asa’s claim that the Jews of ‘one specific ghetto’ could have overcome theirNazi guards ‘and escaped to safety across the Romanian border’ if Kasztner had not misled them. In fact the claim was made by Joseph Katz, a lawyer from Nodvarod, who testified that its Jews knew nothing of Auschwitz.
Shmuel Tamir: ‘Did you know how to use arms?’
Katz: Yes. It was easy to escape into Romania. Jews were safe in Romania at that time. Some skeptics did escape—because they didn’t like the Nodvarod atmosphere.[24]
28. Having got most of his facts wrong, X engages in semantics. He criticises Asa Winstanley’s use of Eichmann’s interview with Dutch Nazi journalist, Wilhelm Sassen. He asks rhetorically:
As most GCSE History students learn, an account of the Holocaust told through Nazi testimony is likely to be ‘biased’. And yet Winstanley quotes from Eichmann largely uncritically, as if Nazi accounts of the Holocaust are to be trusted.’
29. Eichmann’s interview with Sassen is extremely valuable because he boasted of his role in the holocaust. It is a retort to holocaust deniers because he admitted that Jews were exterminated by gas.
30. But if X is right then it is not Asa he should be criticising but the Israeli state! Because the Prosecution in the Eichmann Trial used Eichmann’s interview as evidence. It was Eichmann’s lawyer who objected on the grounds that Eichmann was drunk! The judges largely accepted the objection. But let us be clear. Eichmann did not want his interview to be introduced which suggests that it is indeed a truthful account of his foul deeds.
31. Of course some Nazi accounts are truthful. Even the Devil occasionally tells the truth! Is X suggesting we don’t quote the Goebbels Diaries? What some Nazis said is historically valuable and a good historian can sift the wheat from the chaff!
32. Most historians accept that the Nazis favoured the Zionists in preference to the anti-Zionists. 30,000 Jews were arrested after Kristallnacht. Those connected with the German Zionist Federation were immediately released. As David Cesarani wrote:
‘The efforts of the Gestapo are oriented to promoting Zionism as much as possible and lending support to its efforts to promote emigration.’ [25]
33. In May 1935 Schwarze Korps, paper of the SS, wrote that
‘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.’[26]
34. X claims that 60,000 German Jews were ‘rescued’ under the Ha’avara agreement. Not so. About 20,000 were. Most came to Palestine with certificates. Ha’avara saved virtually no one because it only benefitted the richest Jews who could have gone elsewhere. What it did was to break the Jewish boycott of Nazi Germany and ensure the survival of the Hitler regime.
35. X describes the Nazi state as ‘white supremacist’. It was of course primarily anti-Semitic and the Jews were White not Black. This is fake radicalism.
36. X demonstrates how reactionary he is when he argues that:
‘We do not need to minimise Nazi intentions, overemphasise Jewish power or spin history to claim that ‘Jewish leaders collaborated in the oppression of their own kind’ to make a case for why Zionism is bad.’
Perdition did no such thing. To say that Zionism collaborated with the Nazis is not to minimise Nazi intentions. Nor does it say anything about ‘Jewish power’. Did the collaboration of Quisling or Petain say anything about French or Norwegian power? X talks of Jewish leaders collaborating in the oppression of ‘their own kind’. This is the language of race. X tells us that:
‘Zionism is wrong, not because of its possible implications for Jews, but because of what it does to Palestinians. To claim that Zionism needs to have harmed Jews as well to be condemned is to decentre Palestinians in their own story. Palestinian pain is important on its own terms and we do not need to prove that Zionism has hurt non-Palestinians to denounce, discredit and fiercely oppose Zionist ideas.’
More fake radicalism. Zionism would be racist and reactionary, even were there no Palestinians. Just as Garveyism was reactionary in its own terms despite it being a mass movement.
Zionism was reactionary and racist because it abandoned the fight against anti-Semitism and allied with the anti-Semites. It posited intra class unity between Jewish workers and their bourgeoisie rather than solidarity between Jewish and non-Jewish workers.
37. When Herzl wrote, barely 6 months after the conviction of Alfred Dreyfus for treason, that
‘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’
Herzl demonstrated why Zionism was a form of Jewish anti-Semitism. Zionism agreed that Jews did not belong where they lived. It abandoned the fight against anti-Semitism for the fight against the Palestinians. It is wholly artificial to separate off the acceptance by Zionism of anti-Semitism from what it did to the Palestinian. Alec, a character in drr Simon Blumenfeld’s novel Jew Boy put it well when he said , ‘I don’t see why I should change one set of exploiters for another because they are Jewish.’
X is neither a socialist nor an anti-Zionist. Just like Jones. If there were no Palestinians and if Zionism had colonised an empty Pacific island I would still oppose it.
38. The Zionist movement even tried to prevent German Jewish refugees emigrating to any country bar Palestine.
‘the ZVfD lobbied the Gestapo, which was charged with implementing the Nazis’ anti-Jewish policy, to ensure that German refugees could only go to Palestine. The Gestapo ‘did everything in those days to promote emigration, particularly to Palestine.’[27]
Feivel Polkes, a Haganah intelligence agent, offered to become an informant for the Gestapo, sharing Haganah intelligence information with them, in return for which the Gestapo would pressure the Reich Representation of Jews in Germany (RVt) to require emigrating Jews to settle exclusively in Palestine.[28]
The German Zionists used their relationship with the Gestapo to weaken their Jewish opponents. They demanded parity with non-Zionists on the Reichsvertretung despite the Zionists being in a minority. Dawidowicz attributed this to the Zionist belief that the Gestapo favoured them over the non-Zionists.
‘The Zionist demand for parity stunned the non-Zionists and their paper, the C-V Zeitung of 9.5.35. ‘branded it ‘unjustified, disruptive and astonishing’. [29]
Owen Jones and X believe that telling the truth about how German Zionists worked with the Nazis against their Jewish opponents would distress Jews today. If it is true then so be it. Sometimes the truth is very distressing.
Selig Brodestsky – President of the Board of Deputies – Marcus Retter in the Jewish Chronicle (5.2.93.) spoke of ‘the tireless efforts of Professor Selig Brodetsky, president of the Board of Deputies to sabotage the efforts of Rabbi Shonfeld who headed the Chief Rabbis Rescue Committee to save Jewish Refugees
The Board of Deputies today claims it is opposed to anti-Semitism. In 1940 Selig Brodetsky of the Zionists won the Presidency of the BOD. Throughout the war both Brotman, its Secretary and Brodetsky opposed any campaign to save Jewish refugees. When an attempt was made in October 1942 to persuade MPs to set up a Committee to relax Swiss restrictions on the entry of refugees, Brotman was ‘furious’.[30]
When FO officials urged Brodetsky not to issue public statements or hold demonstrations against the extermination of Hungarian Jewry, he obliged. At a Board meeting on 18 June 1944, held to protest what was happening in Hungary, Brodetsky warned ‘against over emphasizing the sufferings of the Jews.’ [31]
Jones pleads that all he has done is to ‘marry unequivocal support for Palestinian justice with opposition to antisemitism.’ But this is not true. Owen Jones’s opposition to anti-Semitism has nothing to do with hostility to Jews and everything to do with Israel. Jones supported the IHRA misdefinition of anti-Semitism which conflates anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. Jones accepts that opposition to a Jewish identity based on Zionism is in itself anti-Semitic.
That is why he supported the expulsion of Jewish anti-Zionists such as Jackie Walker as well as Marc Wadsworth and Ken Livingstone. Jones accused Asa of doing
‘nothing, literally nothing, to advance the cause of the Palestinian people. They speak to a tiny online faction who they succeed in making very angry’.
Jones is speaking about himself. Asa Winstanley is one of the few journalists to have called out the fake anti-Semitism campaign and to have seen it as an attack on supporters of the Palestinians, especially Jewish anti-Zionists. That has been demonstrated clearly by Keir Starmer, a Zionist without qualification.
Jones has said nothing about Starmer’s anti-Palestinian racism. It’s Jones who has done less than nothing. Until recently he derided the idea of Israel as an Apartheid State. He also opposed BDS. Above all he has given legs to the fake anti-Semitism campaign that was directed, not against antisemites but supporters of the Palestinians.
Does Jones really believe that the Board of Deputies was sincere in its opposition to anti-Semitism when it held its first ever demonstration against ‘racism’ in March 2018 against Jeremy Corbyn, alongside such progressive politicians as Norman Tebbit and Ian Paisley?
Has Jones even one word of explanation as to why the British media was happy to join him in opposition to anti-Semitism? What is it that joins the Daily Mail and Jones other than ‘anti-Semitism’?
After trying for years to ride 2 horses at the same time – the Zionist stalking horse whilst purporting to support for the Palestinians, Owen Jones has felt increasingly unable to maintain his balance. He is in danger of falling off hence his vituperative attack.
Tony Greenstein
[1] Francis Nicosia, Zionism and Anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany, p.91. Tom Segev, the 7th Million, p.18 attributes this quote to a report by Moshe Beilinson, a cofounder of Davar, to Katznelson.
[2] Tom Segev, The Seventh Million, p.18.
[3] Joachim Prinz, Zionism under the Nazi Government, Young Zionist (London, November 1937), p.18 cited in Lenni Brenner, 51 Documents, p. 101.
[4] Etan Bloom, Arthur Ruppin and Modern Hebrew Culture, p.417 see also https://tinyurl.com/y4bqt3wf
[5] David Rosenthall, Chaim Arlosoroff 65 Years After his Assassination, Jewish Frontier, May-June 1998, p.28, New York https://tinyurl.com/y5msw8ts In 1937 over 31m RM was transferred. Nicosia, The Third Reich and the Palestine Question, p.213.
[6] Yoav Gelber, ‘Zionist policy and the Fate of European Jewry, Yad Vashem Studies (1939-42) p.199, see also Segev, p.28, Teveth, The Burning Ground, p.855, Piterberg,,The Returns of Zionism, p.99.
[7] The Palestine Triangle, p. 52. Nicholas Bethell, Andre Deutsch, London, 1979.
[8] Christopher Sykes Crossroads to Israel, pp.188-189, Indiana University Press, 1973.
[9] Noah Lucas, The Modern History of Israel, fn. 2, p. 458.
[10] Robert Silverberg, If I Forget Thee O Jerusalem p. 175.
[11] Ben Hecht, Perfidy p. 106.
[12] Hecht, p. 107.
[13] Ruth Linn, Escaping Auschwitz – A Culture of Forgetting p.82
[14] Hecht, pp.106-107.
[15] Hecht pp. 105-110..
[16] Hecht p. 109.
[17] The Kasztner Report – The Report of the Budapest Jewish Rescue Committee, 1942-1945, p.151., Jerusalem 2013. Ed. Laszlo Karsai & Judit Molnar, Yad Vashem 2013.
[18] Ladislaubd Lob, Dealing with Satan, p.117, was a passenger on the train.
[19] Ladislaub Lob, ‘Dealing with Satan’, p.100.
[20] The Supreme Court unanimously accepted the facts as found by Judge Halevi, but they refused to accept his interpretation.
[21] Lob p. 280.
[22] Elie Wiesel, The Land That Broke Its Promise: The Seventh Million: https://tinyurl.com/y6pnfcj4
[23] Perdition, A Play in Two Acts, p. 98, Ithaca Press, London.
[24] Hecht, p.109.
[25] David Cesarani, The Final Solution, p. 96.
[26] Randolph Braham, The Politics of Genocide – The Holocaust in Hungary, p. 484, fn. 94., 5.5.35. Lucy Dawidowicz, War Against the Jews, p.118.
[27] Nicosia, Third Reich & the Palestine Question (TRPQ), p.57.
[28] Nicosia, ZANG, p.125, TRPQ pp. 62-63, Zionism in National Socialist Jewish Policy, D1266.
[29] War Against the Jews, pp. 240-241.
[30] Sompolinsky, The British Government and the Holocaust, pp. 70-71.
[31] Sompolinsky, p. 200.
