Despite Libelling Ken Loach over Perdition – the Zionists Do Not Want to Discuss their Record During the Holocaust or their Relations with the Nazis because it is ‘anti-Semitic’
Channel 4 Debate on Perdition
Given my recent conviction in a trial of Palestine Action activists and the possibility of being imprisoned I wish to sell my remaining copies of Zionism During the Holocaust as quickly as possible! I am therefore offering them for sale at cost price. Prices from the bookshops and Amazon are 50% higher! For those interested please contact me at [email protected]
Secondly it is remarkable that the only criticism of my book from the Zionists has come from ex-Jewish Chronicle hack Jenni Frazer, now writing for Jewish News.
In a piece, written over a year before my book came out and just after the Zionists had successfully pressurised Crowdfunder to take down my crowdfunder, Frazer compared me to Netanyahu:
One is an egregious and avid Jewish antisemite, the Brighton-based Tony Greenstein. And the other is the former Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.
Without reading a word of the book Frazer confidently writes that ‘the book does honestly just sound dreadful. …’ I guess it must be dreadful for Zionist propagandists (which is what ‘journalists’ for the Zionist press are) to read the truth for once. Frazer described how:
A martyred Greenstein blames “the Zionist bookburners” for the demise of his Crowdfunder appeal, asking: “What is the difference between Joseph Goebbels and the Zionist lobby? Answer: Goebbels burnt books after they were printed. The Zionists try to burn the books before they are printed”. Gosh, how witty…. ‘
[thanks Jenny that is almost a compliment! – TG]
Anyone who is the least bit tempted [to support the Crowdfunding Appeal] ought perhaps to know that disgraced former MP Chris Williamson, who was suspended from Labour over allegations of antisemitism (and then resigned from the party before he was expelled) is an admirer of Greenstein’s and has urged people to donate.
I ought perhaps to add… that in criticising Netanyahu I do not question his true and lasting love of Israel. I just question his methodology. What he and Greenstein have in common, I am afraid, is an overweening sense of self and rightness. Neither is attractive.
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Clearly Jenny thought that associating the ‘disgraced (in whose eyes?) MP Chris Williamson’ with my book would prove detrimental.
I mention all this because the book has been selling extremely well. The reviews have all been favourable and it is given a score of 4.8 out of 5 on Amazon.
40 years ago when Lenni Brenner brought out the first book on Zionist-Nazi Collaboration, Zionism During the Dictators, the Zionist propaganda machine got to work and there was actually a debate in the pages of the Jewish Chronicle. Today the only debates in the JC are between right-wing and even further right Zionists.
4 years later Ken Loach produced Perdition, a play by Jim Allen. Perdition was based on a libel trial in Israel brought by Rudolf Kasztner, the former leader of Hungarian Zionism, against a holocaust survivor who accused him of collaboration. Kasztner had reached a deal with Eichmann for a train out of Hungary for the Zionist elite. In return he and his followers collaborated with the Nazis in the deportation of nearly half a million Hungarian Jews.
The Kasztner Train
Kasztner failed in his action and Israel’s government fell as a result. It is a trial that the Zionist movement doesn’t like to talk about today because the facts of the case are so clear. Even many Zionists now accept that Kasztner was a collaborator but that hasn’t stopped the attacks against Ken Loach.
Why then have the Zionists, who normally don’t hesitate to attack anything that upsets them, like the film ‘Oh Jeremy Corbyn – The Big Lie’ kept so quiet?
The obvious, indeed the only, reason is simply that the Zionists got badly burned first time around by Brenner’s book and then Perdition. The evidence, not only of collaboration with the Nazis but active efforts by the Zionists to prevent Jewish refugees being rescued, is so great that this is a debate that they simply don’t want to get into.
The Perdition affair led to a heated debate on Channel 4 which pitted Brenner, Alan and Marion Woolfson against 3 Zionist propagandists. By common acclaim the Zionists lost and lost badly.
The usual Zionist response to allegations of collaboration with the Nazis is, as their faithful pet Owen Jones repeats, that such accusations are equivalent to saying that the Jews murdered themselves (see No, Jews did not collaborate in their own genocide).
This is as absurd as saying that to speak of Quisling is to suggest that all Norwegians collaborated in their own occupation. Quisling represented a tiny minority of Norway’s population and likewise the Zionists were a tiny minority of the German Jewish population. Everywhere in the Jewish world the Zionists were in a minority.
No one is suggesting that the Jews collaborated with the Nazis but that the Zionist leadership did. Once again people like Owen Jones conflate Zionist with being Jewish and then go on to blame us for their own anti-Semitism! The fact that only 2% of German Jews were Zionists in 1933 escape these apologists for Apartheid.
But the record is very clear. As Ben Gurion told the Executive of Mapai (forerunner of the Israeli Labor Party) on 9 December 1938:
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.[1]
Jewish synagogue set alight during the Kristallnacht pogrom
This was in the context of the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 9-10 1938 which shocked the world. The British Government agreed to let 10,000 German Jewish children into Britain and the Zionists bitterly opposed it.
According to Zionist ‘logic’ if refugees from Nazi Germany could be saved by going to any country other than Palestine then they would simply recreate anti-Semitism there. In his founding pamphlet, The Jewish State Theodor Herzl had written that the Jews:
…naturally move to those places where we are not persecuted and there our presence produces persecution…. The unfortunate Jews are now carrying Anti-Semitism into England; they have already introduced it into America.
If countries other than Palestine could save the Jews then what was the point of having a Jewish state? It is hard to argue with this logic.
Victor Orban, anti-Semitic Hungarian Prime Minister tours Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust Propaganda Museum like so many other anti-Semites and neo-Nazis before him
My book makes a number of points about the Zionist record before, during and after the holocaust.
i. Until the Holocaust, which was seen as the defeat of the Jewish diaspora, Zionism was in a minority in every Jewish community.
ii. From its inception the Zionist movement agreed with the anti-Semites that Jews did not belong in the countries of their birth. They also understood that without anti-Semitism there wouldn’t be enough Jewish immigrants to make a future Jewish state viable.
iii. That anti-Semites, not least the Nazis, frequently quoted from Zionist writings to ‘prove’ that the Jews were an alien element.
iv. That the Zionists uniquely amongst German Jews were pleased at the accession to power of the Nazis.
v. That the Zionist leadership in Palestine and internationally saw only opportunities for their movement to grow with the Nazis taking power in Germany.
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The International Jewish Boycott Campaign That the Zionists Fiercely Opposed
vi. Whereas the vast majority of Jews sought the overthrow of the Nazis through a Boycott campaign, the Zionists sought to establish relations with the Nazis to their mutual benefit.
vii. That throughout the war the Zionists opposed any scheme to rescue Jewish refugees from Nazi occupied Europe whose destination was not Palestine.
viii. That after the establishment of the State of Israel nothing changed. From the neo-Nazi Junta in Argentina to the Azov Battalion in Ukraine, Israel has been happy to supply weapons and training to anti-Semitic regimes and forces.
ix. That Zionism begins from the assumption that Jews are aliens in every country bar Israel and its goal is the ‘ingathering of the exiles’. The term ‘exile’ in itself means that Jews living outside Israel are aliens.
When I published my book I took a decision to leave out one chapter on Cruel Zionism. I have decided to make it available to people here. It describes the efforts of the State of Israel to destabilise the position of Jews in the Arab lands after 1948. Israel needed a Jewish working class and the European Ashkenazis preferred the Oriental or Arab Jews of the Middle East to be that working class. Also they sought new immigrants in order to make the state demographically viable and they therefore set about ensuring that the position of Jews in the Arab world was made untenable.
I copy below links to all the reviews, podcasts and interviews I’ve done in connection with the book. There are a number of Amazon reviews, all positive! I’ve also included one reader’s comment too.
Tony Greenstein
Reviews and Talks About the Book
CPGB meeting 12.12.2022
Zionism and the holocaust – Future of the Left Events
Electronic Intifada Podcast
Over the Edge Bookfair Galway
Interview Tony Gosling, Bristol Community Radio
Official Book Launch Jewish Network 4 Palestine
Review Jewish Voices for Labour
Book Review Middle East Monitor
Israel and Argentina During the Military Junta
Why lefties need a big book about anti-Semitism – Kay Green
Penniless Press – reviewed by Alan Dent
Phil Weiss speaks to Tony Greenstein.
Review in Electronic Intifada by Asa Winstanley
How the Zionist movement has used the Holocaust to Sanitise Their Racist Project by Weaponising the Memory of the Murdered 6 Million
Recording of the South Africa PSC and Brighton Book Launches for Zionism During the Holocaust
Brighton Book Launch
How Zionism helped the Nazis perpetrate the Holocaust
Asa Winstanley Review in Electronic Intifada
Al Hiwar TV – Tony Greenstein speaks about his book Zionism During the Holocaust
The Struggle – Rescue of Jews was NOT the Zionist Priority During the Holocaust
Rudolf Vrba, the anti-Zionist Jewish hero who escaped from Auschwitz to bring news of the extermination plans to Hungary’s Jews in the Auschwitz Protocols. The Hungarian Zionist leader, Kasztner, suppressed them.
Readers Comments
I just wanted to say how glad I am that you have written your book on Zionism during the holocaust – and glad too that I have read it. Every page. Including most of the index and bibliography thank you very much, and not forgetting the fantastic photos, especially of Vrba and Edelman.
I am ashamed to admit how much of the history was unknown to me (not all of it!), and there was not room in your book to address all of my ignorance, but you have set down the markers, laid out the case to answer (cases) and I do thank you for erring on the side of brevity and concision.
(One final point – trivial I know, against what you have accomplished – but thank you also for putting the footnote numbers in bold! I have not seen that done before. It is very helpful! I hope it catches on.)
Kind regards
John C
[1] Gelber, ‘Zionist policy and the Fate of European Jewry,’ Yad Vashem Studies (1939-42) p. 199; see also Segev, The Seventh Million, p. 28; Teveth p. 855; Piterberg p. 99.
the Fate of European Jewry,’ Yad Vashem Studies (1939-42) p. 199; see also Segev, The Seventh Million, p. 28; Teveth p. 855; Piterberg p. 99.
