Zionism Before, During and After the Nazis: A History of Collusion, w/ Tony Greenstein

Zionism has never had a problem with anti-Semitism. And of course, if you call yourself the Jewish State and then you say that Jews are in support of that state, and you have the absurdity that people like our own Su Braan and Rishi Sunak demonstrations in London against genocide, or hostile to Jews, make them feel uncomfortable, what you're saying is that Jews in England support genocide in Palestine. How can that not produce anti-Semitism? You know, I mean, the non-Jewish bourgeoisie is more than happy to associate Jews with what's happening, and thereby increase anti-Semitism, which they then turn around hypocritically and condemn. But they're the founders of it in the first place.

Hello everyone, I'm R. Cic, and this is Dispatches. The Holocaust is constantly exploited by Israel's supporters to justify Israel's colonial policies in Palestine by framing Israel's creation and ongoing existence as a settler state as a necessary refuge for Jews and the only answer to anti-Semitism. If you follow the Israeli narrative, you would think that Zionists were at the forefront of trying to support and save Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe, and that they're the only means of protection for Jews around the world today. This is far from the truth. R. L. discusses the Zionist movement's historical collaboration with the far-right, including Nazi Germany, and their ongoing support for the far-right today. So, what's the real history, and why is it still relevant? Joining me to discuss this and more is Tony Greenstein, a long-standing Jewish anti-Zionist, Marxist, and anti-fascist activist from the UK, and author of the book "Zionism During the Holocaust: The Weaponization of Memory and the Service of State and Nation."

But before we jump into it, this is just part of this episode. The full interview is available to Breakthrough News members only. You can become a member at patreon.com/breakthroughnews. And as always, be sure to hit the subscribe button and the bell so you get a notification whenever we post new content. And if you appreciate this show, you can also donate below on YouTube. Tony, welcome back to the show.

Thank you. Well, it's good to have you on again. We got to chat a few weeks ago, or a month ago, or so, about a very important topic related to the way that Israel wrongly uses the Holocaust to justify its existence and treatment of Palestinians. But today, I want to talk to you more about what's in your fantastic book, which I have in front of me, and I want to show off here because it's so good and so important, and anybody who is able to should absolutely get a copy of this. It's called "Zionism During the Holocaust" by Tony Greenstein. It is an essential resource, especially at this moment, as Israel is just completely destroying Gaza in the name of, you know, preventing another Holocaust and all kinds of ridiculous excuses that it comes up with. So, Tony, I like the way you kind of lay out the book. You sort of, you go in a kind of chronological order. You talk about Zionism before the Holocaust, and some of the roots of it. You talk about Zionism during the Holocaust, and then you talk a bit about it after. So, I'm going to, I'm going to kind of go through some of this chronologically with you because I think it's a good way to lay all this out. So, let's start with Zionism before the Holocaust. And here, I want to talk about a bit about the roots of the Zionist movement and some of its leaders, as well as the issue of anti-Semitism in Europe. So, when we talk about Zionism, where did it originate from? What leaders are we talking about? And what did they actually want?

Well, the origins of Zionism were in Christian Zionism, the Enlightenment, the post-Reformation period. Because the Catholic Church, pre-Reformation, held that it was the successor to the children of Israel, that the Israelites, if you like, had transgressed, had offended God, and were no longer part of the covenant. So the Catholics had a theology which was that they were the successors to those in the Old Testament. But come the post-Reformation, Calvin and others, and a whole number of different theologians, weaved the myth that the Jews in Europe were in fact the successors to the ancient Hebrews, and that their political project, what they saw it as a religious project at first, was to encourage them to return, because until they returned, Jesus wouldn't come back. So it was part of the Messianic fulfillment. It was a millenarian project, if you like, envisioned. Now, that was taken up again in the early 19th century by a whole number of imperialists. In fact, the first person to promise the Jews a Jewish state was Napoleon in 1799, as part of his invasion of Palestine and Egypt. He thought that establishing a Jewish state under French, on the banks of the Suez Canal, would aid the French's, if you like, grand plans. But that never came to fruition because he was defeated by the British. Anyway, but the first people then to take it up seriously were people like Lord Palmerston and Lord Shaftesbury, who very much wedded and melded the idea of a Jewish return to Palestine and the establishment of a Jewish state with British imperialist plans. And of course, come the Suez Canal, which I think was 1869, then it took on a greater urgency. And people like Lord Shaftesbury, for example, was very much opposed to Jewish emancipation in Britain, which took place in 1858, but it was all in favor of sending Jews to Palestine, which in his eyes was where they really belonged. So, I mean, had this early marriage of anti-Semitism and Christian Zionism, the only problem was that the Jews were particularly keen on going to Palestine, and they saw Zionism as a form of anti-Semitism immediately. I mean, the Pittsburgh Declaration, I think it was 1885, of the German Reform rabbis, was quite clear, not the German, but the American Reform movement, that they wanted no part of it. And the Board of Deputies, I think it was around 1840 and 1842, made a declaration when they were approached by Shaftesbury and Palmerston, they too wanted no part of it. Their battle was to be accepted on an equal basis in Britain. They didn't buy into the idea that they didn't belong, and therefore they should go to Palestine. That was anathema to them. So Christian Zionism, evangelical Zionism, predated Jewish Zionism. And it was only as a result of the continued pogroms in Russia, in particular, the 1881 Odessa pogrom, as a result of the assassination of Tsar Alexander II, and then a continuing series of pogroms, that a certain section, if you like, of the Jewish petty bourgeoisie, the traders, the middle agents, and so on, then looked to the idea that, well, yes, we don't belong, we should go to Palestine. I mean, there's always a section of the oppressed who take on board the ideas of the oppressor. I mean, that's true in every movement.

Yeah, yeah. So I wanted to ask you then, to maybe walk us through two things, because you mentioned the anti-Semitism of Zionists. But first, can you explain European anti-Semitism? What was European anti-Semitism about? I think oftentimes, especially for those of us who grew up in the West, we understand anti-Semitism to be, you know, a German phenomenon, a Hitler phenomenon, a Nazi phenomenon, that spread. But anti-Semitism was quite prevalent for many reasons, kind of across the political spectrum of these, you know, Western imperialist countries. So, walk us through European anti-Semitism. What did that mean? What did that look like? Why did it exist? And then how did Zionism adopt some of the ideas about Jews that anti-Semites held?

Well, you're asking a lot. Yeah, it's a big question, and we can split it up. We can start with the European anti-Semitism first. Yeah. The first thing I would refer people to is a really great book by Abram Leon, who was a Belgian Trotskyist who was murdered in Auschwitz, and was a leader of the Belgian section. And he wrote a book, "The Jewish Question: A Marxist Interpretation," which goes through the rise of anti-Semitism and the role of the Jews in the Middle Ages, and pre-Middle Ages, and then under capitalism. And what he said was, in essence, and if I can remember the quote, that Zionism transposes anti-Semitism to all of history and saves itself the trouble of understanding it. And what he meant was quite simply, that anti-Semitism hasn't, like the Zionists argue, remained constant. I mean, for the Zionists, anti-Semitism is inherent in every Jew, it's part of your DNA. And so you can't fight it. If it's a psychological, pathological problem that you can't get rid of, then the best solution is to escape it. There's no point in combating it. So that was the position. But Leon argued, and what others have argued, is that anti-Semitism in Europe was a reaction to the Jews' role as agents in an economy not based on money, which was based primarily on usury values. So Jews were seen, if you like, as usurers, money lenders, tax stewards, etc., the agents of the nobility, and indeed the kings. And so they were hated, often by the peasants, for that reason, not because they were Jewish, but because of the social and economic role they played. They were expelled first from Western Europe, and they went into Eastern Europe. And then in Eastern Europe, when Eastern Europe became and started developing later economically and started transforming from feudalism to capitalism, the same problems arose. Whereas in Western Europe, the Jews had largely assimilated, anti-Semitism was no longer a problem. What, if you like, produced it in a sense, was the immigration of East European refugees into Western Europe, and all the old problems manufactured themselves. And then in Germany, in particular, you had a kind of frustrated German nationalism, which was anti-modernist from the top below. So it wasn't a genuine popular movement that unified Germany, and the Jews, if you like, were the ideal scapegoats and the ideal targets because they were seen as the alien element. German capital needed some form of identity, and Jews were not part of that. And that goes back to, if you like, they borrowed from the images of feudal anti-Semitism and weaponized it. But there was a difference in the sense that in the feudal era, anti-Semitism was a popular movement from below. Oh, in the post-19th century, late 19th century period, anti-Semitism was something from the top. So we saw in Tsarist Russia that it was the ministers and the government of the Tsarist autocracy which organized groups like the Black Hundreds to stir up and create pogroms on the basis of divide and rule. And of course, in Nazi Germany, that's exactly the same. Anti-Semitism served the purposes of the ruling class, the bourgeoisie, the army, the old aristocrats, and so on. They could point, I mean, if you like, anti-Semitism was the false anti-capitalism of the Nazi party. It welded together the kind of plebeian hoodlums who'd been brawling in the Munich beer halls with the bourgeoisie who had joined the Nazi party. They could all agree on one thing, and that was anti-Semitism. But there was a difference, and it's a very crucial difference. I mean, Martin Luther, from becoming a pro-Semite, he became an anti-Semite and was quoted by the Nazis as saying, "The Jews are our misfortune," in the paper *Der Stürmer*. But for Martin Luther, once a Jew converted, that was it. His soul was saved. There was nothing more to be said. For Hitler, once a Jew, always a Jew. So he had the phenomenon of the Christian Jews, in other words, Jews who had been baptized, who converted to Christianity, but in his eyes, they were still Jews because it was a racial, not a religious, phenomenon. And that came about, I mean, the first, if you like, racial anti-Semite was Wilhelm Marr, who popularized the term "anti-Semite," and for him, the Jews were not Europeans, they were Semites. And so, although he didn't coin it, he popularized the term anti-Semitism in the belief, the false belief, that the Jews of Europe were Semitic. Well, of course, the Zionists accepted that Jews were Semitic as well. So you again get that marriage between the two. But most Jews did not see themselves as Semitic. Yes, they prayed once a day, "Next year in Jerusalem," but there was a spiritual vision. It really meant, "Next year I will be free." It had no political significance. And you could see that because between the middle of the 19th century and 1914, about two and a half million Jews immigrated from Russia and Poland. They fled the pogroms, the economic poverty, and so on. 99% of them went either to the United States, Britain, or other places in Europe. Barely 1% went to Palestine. The majority then returned. There was nothing to stop them. You didn't need a passport. There were no borders. It was the Ottoman Empire. But Palestine was the last place that Jews would go. Other Jews who went were religious to study and to die there, and they were called Yishuv Jews by Chaim Weizmann. They lived on the charity of rich Jews in the West. They went to perform a mitzvah, it's called in the Jewish religion, to die on the Holy Land. But they had no political pretensions. And indeed, Weizmann, who was the first president of Israel, in his autobiography "Trial and Error," says that they, he called them the Old Yishuv, because they were anti-Zionists. They opposed the new secular Zionists who came in, who didn't believe in religion anyway, and who used the Jewish religion to cloak their political project. And that is really where anti-Semitism in Europe originated from.

And now to the question of Zionist, the Zionist movement's views of Jews. And this is where you kind of touched a little bit on some of the marriage between the ideas that anti-Semites held, that sort of mixed in a little bit to some of the ideas that Zionists adopted about Jews. And here, you know, I'm talking about maybe two groups of people. There's the kind of Theodor Herzl generation, who were, you know, trying to get imperialist leaders around the West on board with the idea of a Jewish state. And then there's a generation that comes after him, which is many people who ended up actually founding Israel and like serving in its some of its first administrations, and you know, were involved in some of the terrorist gangs that founded Israel. What were these people's views, the Zionists' views of Jews? And I think it's interesting to talk about this because it's kind of shocking how the way that they looked at Jews was not that different than the way Western anti-Semites viewed Jews.

Well, I mean, that's right. I mean, that's right. I mean, Zionism, the Zionists had a political project, which was the creation of a Jewish state. And Herzl, in 1896, wrote this pamphlet, "The Jewish State." It was the founding pamphlet of the Zionist movement. And he says, he asks, what is the cause of anti-Semitism? And he says this on page 26: "Its immediate cause is our excessive production of mediocre intellects who cannot find an outlook downwards or upwards, that is to say, no wholesome outlet in either direction." And then this is the crucial part, I think: "When we sink, we become a revolutionary proletariat, the subordinate officers of all revolutionary parties. And at the same time, when we rise, the rise is also the terrible power of our purse." So Herzl adopted all the stereotypes of Jews in that. And he wrote quite a bit, Melcher, in an article in *Der Welt*, the Zionist paper, which went really overboard in attacking anti-Zionist Jews, using every anti-Semitic stereotype there is. But the Zionist position, in essence, was that anti-Semitism was caused by the presence of Jews, the mere fact that Jews had outstayed their welcome. They were kind of guests in a hotel who were no longer paying their bill, and the hotel owner wanted to get rid of them. The same with the non-Jewish countries, they wanted to get rid of the Jews because they'd had them long enough, and they'd developed antisocial qualities. And so the Zionist criticisms of Jews often mirrored, and were even worse than, that of the anti-Semites. I mean, I can give you a few examples. I mean, Ze'ev Jabotinsky was the founder of Revisionist Zionism, which is now Likud. He said, "A Jew is a caricature of a normal, natural human being, both physically and spiritually. As an individual in society, he revolts and throws off the harness of social obligations, knows no order nor discipline." And he went on, in another quote, to say, "The Jewish people is a very bad people. Its neighbors hate it, and rightly so. Its only salvation lies in the general immigration to the land of Israel." And I, you know, I could go on with other quotes as well. The point is that the Zionists accepted that the Jews had developed all these antisocial qualities because they weren't rooted, they didn't stand on their own national land. In a sense, this was the same blood and soil ideology that the Nazis and the anti-Semites had, that unless you were rooted in your own land, you would inevitably become wanderers, antisocial, revolutionary people who knew no order. If I quote Yoav Joachim Doron, who is an Israeli political scientist, he said, wrote this in the Journal of Israeli History, I think number four, he described it, it's an article, "Classic Zionism and Its Enemies." He said, "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, the perusal of 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. And say, that's in "Classic Zionism and Its Enemies," so it's quite easily available. But of course, most people won't read it. I mean, most Zionists, I mean, I mean, some Zionists like Arthur Ruppin, who was the key major figure in Practical Zionism, openly said, "Yes, I'm anti-Semitic. I have no time for these Jews." And when Ben-Gurion told Chaim Weizmann that he shared many of the same prejudices as Cosima Wagner, the wife of Richard Wagner, Weizmann didn't take him up on it. He said, "Yes, I too have problems with German Jews." So, I mean, this was common to Zionism. They had no problem with genuine Zionism, with genuine anti-Semitism.

So then I... Oh, go ahead. There's just one thing I wanted to ask you about with relation to all that. Yeah. Well, I wanted to ask you about the issue of anti-socialism and anti-communism and all this. I mean, you have, you refer to Zionism in one part of your book as being seen as an antidote for socialism in the UK, for example. So there's another common thing that it seems as though anti-Semites and Zionists shared, among what you've already mentioned, and that is this, this ardent anti-communism, where they actually view Jews as being, like you mentioned earlier, kind of like harbingers of communism. Can you talk a bit about that?

Yes, I mean, this was common both amongst the Zionists and, if you like, the ruling classes. I mean, Churchill wrote, I think, in 1920, in The Illustrated Sunday Herald, the famous essay "Zionism Versus Bolshevism." He saw the Jews, there were the good Jews, the Zionists, the national Jews, and the bad Jews, and they lived mainly in the East End of London, were forever going on strike, causing trouble, put large numbers were members of the Communist Party, and so on. And you read the writings of any, any key Zionist like Herzl, David Ben-Gurion, and so on. Their main enemies were socialist and communist Jews. Why? Because for socialists, the battle was not to secure Palestine in alliance with some, with one or the other imperialist powers. It was to fight anti-Semitism where you were, to fight for your wages and economic conditions and so on. For the Zionists, that was irrelevant, it was useless, it was a waste of energy. Why divert yourself from the struggle where you didn't belong anyway, when you could be fighting for a Jewish state? So Herzl, after the most famous pogroms in Kishinev in 1903, he went three or four months later, I think it was in August 1903, to visit the Tsarist ministers, Von Plehve, who was the Tsarist Minister of the Interior, Count Witte, the Minister of Finance, who told Herzl that if he could kill six million Jews by drowning them in the Black Sea, he would, but he knew he couldn't, so he had to support Zionism. Herzl went primarily to secure the legal status of the Zionist project in Tsarist Russia. In Tsarist Russia, just about no political movement was legal because it was an autocracy, but Zionism was accepted because it was seen as a useful movement to the Tsarists. And when Herzl began talking to Von Plehve, who had organized the Kishinev pogrom, in essence, and he started persuading him of the merits of Zionism, he said, "You don't need to preach to me. I am a convert already." The Tsarists were happy with that. And Herzl promised, he said, "If you give us a royal charter, then we will call off the revolutionary movements." Of course, he wasn't in a position to do that. And the Bund, which was the General Jewish Workers' Union of Russia, Poland, and Lithuania, was absolutely outraged. And for them, Zionism was the most evil enemy of all because it sought to undermine the Jewish workers and their struggles against both anti-Semitism and poverty, and if you like, capitalism, which was incipient. I mean, it was mainly a feudal society, but it was slowly transforming. The Bund was a mass movement. It had 40, 50,000, I mean, in the early 1900s, it was a serious, genuine movement, whereas the Zionists was really a petty bourgeois movement which attracted itself to those who, despairing of their own place in society, saw this kind of false mirage, if you like, in Palestine. But I mean, that's all it was. I mean, Zionists did have a base in Russia, but as the struggle against anti-Semitism increased, so the strength of the Zionists decreased. And so you have, in the last three elections in Poland, for example, which is where over half of Europe's Jews who were killed, over I think it was three million Polish Jews were killed out of the 3.3 million, in the last three elections in 1938, the local council elections in Warsaw, after the 20 Jewish council seats, because Jews voted separately for their seats, the Zionists won one, and the Bund won 17. Most Jews were in support of the Bund, if only because they were the only ones who were seen to seriously fight anti-Semitism. Indeed, the Zionists themselves were split. They split in 1919 into right-wing and left-wing Poalei Zion. Left Poalei Zion, in essence, abandoned Zionism because the struggle against anti-Semitism made it, you know, this project in Palestine completely irrelevant. So, but the phrase that Zionism is an antidote to socialism was from an interview in The Times by Von Plehve with Lucien Wolf, who was a bourgeois leader of the Jewish Board of Deputies, who was incidentally anti-Zionist in 1904 when he came to London. So, I mean, that's how the Russian ruling class, or the autocrats, saw Zionism: an antidote to socialism. So Zionism has always been anti-communist from the start.

Well, I think that's so important to point out because, you know, there is this always this attempt to like frame the kibbutzim, the kibbutzim of early Israel as being these sort of socialist paradises when they were just kind of these like racial, racially superior zones for these like, you know, new, for the Zionist movement to like build communities on Palestinian land. But I want to ask you about, I mean, let's move on to it's very clear from what you've written about Zionism before the Holocaust that Zionism was not popular among the Jewish masses. It was a movement among bourgeois Jews in certain parts of Western Europe, for the most part, that wanted to... I would say more the middle classes. Not not the big bourgeoisie. They tended to look down on it. I mean, it's a... Oh, interesting. Okay. I mean, there's a myth that the Rothschilds spawned Zionism, which you'd get the kind of anti-Semitic supporters of Palestine, sometimes these weird conspiracy theories. But although Balfour's letter was written to Lord Walter Rothschild, because he was, if you like, the most, the principal aristocrat amongst the Jews, the Rothschilds as a family were largely anti-Zionist in Britain. Indeed, when the Balfour Declaration was issued, there was formed the League of British Jews, which was an anti-Zionist group. And its first meeting, its first founding AGM, of over 400 Jews, all of whom were from the principal houses of British Jewry, I mean, the aristocrats, if you like, was held in New Court, which was the Rothschilds' business headquarters. Anthony Rothschild, Lionel Rothschild, Leopold, they were all anti-Zionist. Walter was an exception, but his main interest was in zoology. He wasn't really an activist in any sense. So Zionism was really unpopular. I mean, Zionism was not a popular movement among Jews at all. They refrained from organizing in the East End of London because they didn't really want the rabble and the mob. That's that's funny. Well, so, okay, then we get to, I want to talk about Zionism now during the Holocaust, because this is where you'll have Israel's government officials and Israel's most ardent supporters frame Israel as though, I mean, you literally, if you listen to these people, you would think that like the Zionist movement was going and like scooping up Jews from concentration camps if they could and taking them to refuge out of these horrible Nazi-infested places. But that's not actually what happened. And the way you describe it in your book is more like a lot of indifference and a lot of silence about the Holocaust, and in even some cases, seeing it as a nuance and distraction from the project they were trying to build. So I guess let's start there. Let's start with how did Zionists respond, first, I guess, maybe to the rise of Nazis in Germany, for example?

Well, the majority of the Jews, I mean, the overwhelming majority of Jews were absolutely horrified by the rise of Hitler and the Nazis. They saw, quite rightly, this was not just another anti-Semitic government, but this was a fascist government which had a program, a program of disenfranchisement, which rejected the position of Jews, and which was determined to do something about it. So there was almost an instantaneous boycott that sprang up, which wasn't organized, but basically, you wouldn't, you don't buy German. For example, businessmen would not order from Germany. And this coalesced by about March into an organized movement which had the Nazis terrified, because Germany was an export economy, in essence. It needed currency to import goods which it then manufactured and then exported, and that's how it made its way in the world. And this movement was threatening to throttle it from the beginning. So on, I think it was March 25th, Göring called in the leaders of the Jewish community, and at first the Zionists weren't invited because they were a fringe movement, but they got themselves invited. And Göring basically threatened them and said, "You've got to go to Europe and America to get..." It was a big demonstration a couple of days later, called off in Madison Square Garden. Well, it went ahead, but whereas the non-Zionists prevaricated and made excuses, the leader of the Zionists, Kurt Blumenfeld, volunteered that they would be more than happy to take on board opposition to the boycott. Because the Zionists, at no stage, supported the boycott of that to Germany. They believed, because they saw the rise of Hitler, they were the only ones who welcomed Hitler. And I mean, I can give you some quotes. Berl Katznelson, who was the deputy to Ben-Gurion, he was really, I say, he was a very important guy. We edited *Davar*, which was the edit, which was the Mapai Israeli Labor Party daily, and he saw the rise of Hitler as, and I quote, "an opportunity to build and flourish like none we have ever had or ever will have." And Ben-Gurion himself, the first Prime Minister of Israel, was even more optimistic. "The Nazis' victory would become a fertile force for Zionism." I mean, some were even more enthusiastic. Emil Fackenheim, who's a famous biographer and also a Zionist, said, "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." And Natan Alterman, who is the national Zionist poet, was quoted as saying, "Hitlerism has perhaps saved German Jewry, which was being assimilated into annihilation." Well, I think we know that although the Jews were assimilated, it wasn't into annihilation, but that was how the Zionists saw it. Because in peacetime, the Zionists could not move the Jewish masses. It needed a catastrophe such as the advent of the Nazis and eventually the Holocaust in order to persuade Jews to immigrate. And if the Jews were going to immigrate, the Zionists were absolutely determined there was only one place they should immigrate, because as far as they were concerned, if they immigrated to Europe, other places in Europe, or America, or Britain, they would simply take their anti-Semitism with them. So if there was to be a solution, they had to go to Palestine. And that was what the Zionists were extremely concerned about was that a refugee movement, they called it "refugeeism," would arise which would try to save Jews anywhere. They were absolutely dogmatic about the fact if Jews were to leave Germany, they had to go to Palestine. And they lobbied and pressurized the Gestapo only to allow them to go to Germany. So, I mean, if I quote, say, I mean, and he is a Zionist historian, Noah Lucas, let me just bring it up.

Yeah, please. And this is one reason why, I mean, this book is, your book is so important because you have so many quotes, so many quotes. They said it themselves. But go ahead, please.

Yeah, I mean, the reason I have quotes is simply because I want to allow the Zionists, wherever possible, to tell the story and not me, because they will say that well, I'm not telling the truth, but they say it in their own words. Noah Lucas, he's a critical Zionist, and it was his book, I think it was "The Modern Foundations of Israel," "The Modern History of Israel," you can look it up. And he wrote, "As the European Holocaust erupted, Ben-Gurion saw it as a decisive opportunity for Zionism. Ben-Gurion, above all, 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. And that was the position of Ben-Gurion, for example. And if you read, read just about anything he wrote at the time, but in particular, I recommend the final chapter of his authorized biography by Shabtai Tevet, "The Running," "The Burning Ground." It's titled "Disaster is Strength." The very final chapter, it's on the Holocaust, and he quotes him at length as to his reaction. I'll give you, I mean, just a few. Ben-Gurion saw, I mean, he was quoted as saying, "Disaster is strength if channeled to a productive course. The whole trick of Zionism is it knows how to channel our disaster not into despondency or degradation, as is the case of the diaspora, but into a source of creativity and dynamism and exploitation." And he was quite clear that Jewish Agency funds should only be used for rescue by immigration to Palestine. And he said, "Rescue by assisting Jews to survive elsewhere was to be funded solely by private organizations." And one can go on. But I think probably the quote which I use which is most damning, it is in respect to the Kindertransport.

If you remember, the Kindertransport was organized in the wake of Kristallnacht, the Nazi pogrom of November, I think it was the 10th and the 11th, 1938. And although the British had been very parsimonious in allowing Jews to come into Britain, they relented and agreed that 10,000 Jewish children from Germany would be allowed, albeit without their parents, who of course, most of whom would not have lived. And Ben-Gurion was clear, and he said it was, it was in a speech, no, it was in a memorandum to the Zionist Executive of December 17th, and this is very widely documented, no one challenges it. It 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 Israel, 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." And then just a week later, on the 17th of December, he he wrote a memo to the Zionist Executive outlining the problems that the Zionists faced. And he said, "If the Jews are faced with a choice between the refugee problem and rescuing Jews from concentration camps on the one hand, and aid for the National Museum in Palestine on the other, the Jewish sense of pity will prevail, and our people's entire strength will be directed at aid for the refugees in the various countries. Zionism will vanish from the agenda." And indeed, not only world public opinion in England and America, but also from Jewish public opinion. "We are risking Zionism's very existence if we allow the refugee problem to be separated from the Palestine problem." And that was their fear. Because if you were a Zionist, a leading Zionist, I'm not talking about a rank and file Zionist for whom such sentiments would be anathema, but for the Zionist leadership, the aim, the main aim, was to build the Jewish state. And here you had an opportunity, and you couldn't waste it by throwing all your energies into saving Jews elsewhere. That would be complete madness.

It's so, it's so sick. In the midst of like a horrific, you know, what turned into a horrific genocide. I want to ask, can you specifically elaborate on the Zionist response to, I, for, I didn't ask you about this, and I should have started with this, but the Zionist response to the Nuremberg Laws? What was the position when the Nuremberg Laws were passed? And then also, could you explain to us what the Ha'avara Agreement is?

Yes, sure. Well, the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, it was, I think, October, November 1935. They consisted of two rules: the Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honor, and then another law which dealt with flags and so on. And basically, it stripped citizenship and nationality from the German Jews. I mean, it was done in a series of ordinances, not just Jews, also Gypsies, and also black people as well. They were basically considered not part of the national German collective. The Zionists were almost alone in welcoming it. They had no problems with it because they too believed that Jews were not Germans, they were Jewish nationals. And if you can give me a few seconds, I, yes, please. I will turn up some quotes. There's always quotes. There's I like that. That's what's amazing here is like, this isn't hidden. There's always quotes. And like, I just want to reiterate that Tony, you're reading quotes from Zionist leadership themselves saying it quite openly. They weren't trying to hide anything.

Yeah, I mean, in my section on the Nuremberg Laws, I mean, the Nuremberg Laws themselves had an introduction, I think it was in the 1939 version, which said, "If the Jews had a state of their own in which the bulk of their people were at home, the Jewish question could already be considered solved." Today, the orthodox Zionists of all people have objected least of all to the basic ideas of the Nuremberg Laws because they know that these laws are the only correct solution for the Jewish people. And as the Palestine Post, which is now The Jerusalem Post, noted, the position is regarding George Kessary, that anyone who offends him, because he was the leading supporter of them, he was open in his support, is liable to severe penalties. And, I mean, people like the Zionist Executive President, Menahem Ussishkin, was effusive. "There is something positive in their tragedy, and that is that Hitler oppressed them as a race, not a religion. Had he done the latter, half the Jews in Germany would have simply converted to Christianity." Because in Hungary, where it was still the case that even converted Jews would escape being deported, it was reported that there were queues around the block to become converted in the ecclesiastical office. So most Jews were quite happy to shed their Jewishness if that meant their lives were saved. So, of course, not surprisingly, and Nahum Goldmann, he later became Deputy President of the World Jewish Congress, explained that regarding the Nuremberg Laws, "The Jews have been drawn out of the last secret recesses of christening and mixed marriages. We are not unhappy about it. The theory of assimilation has collapsed. We want to replace assimilation by something new: the declaration of belonging to the Jewish nation and the Jewish race. A state built according to the principle of purity of the nation and race can only be honored and respected by a Jew who declares his belonging to his own kind." And David Cesarani, who is a leading Zionist historian, is no longer alive, observed that the Zionists saw the pressure towards segregation as a fulfillment of their assertion that Jews were a separate nation with no place in Germany. That was in his last book, "The Final Solution." Cesarani was one of the major two major Zionist historians who attacked Pedition, which was a play about the Castri trial. It seems that he had second thoughts about some of the positions he took towards the end of his life. He actually never saw his final book. He died very young. Yeah. But, I mean, so can you, also to add to that sentiment, much of which you just described with various quotes, can you then explain to our audience what was the Ha'avara Agreement? Why was that a significant turning point in the...

Yeah, go ahead. No, no, it's okay. I'm just trying to, just give me a moment and I'll bring up the chapter.

Yes, please. And again, I want, I want everyone to know that like Tony's book, "Zionism During the Holocaust," has, it's so well-written, it's very easy to read, and everything is very well-documented. It's the most citations I think I've ever, ever seen in a book.

But yeah, go ahead, Tony.

When Hitler came to power in, what, January the 30th, 1933, 99% of Jews were horrified and did all they could to try and overthrow that regime while it was weak. And the chosen weapon was the Jewish boycott of Nazi Germany. Now, if you look, as I've looked through, say, the pages of The Jewish Chronicle of that period, there is hardly an issue of it which doesn't mention the boycott of Nazi Germany. It was, it was extremely effective. And you can read the chapter yourself. And there's another book, Edwin Black's "The Transfer Agreement." Black is a revisionist Zionist, he's no anti-Zionist, but he documents it very thoroughly. And I go through both his book, not just his book, and The Jewish Chronicle of the period to examine what happened. And the Zionists from the start were absolutely opposed to. I'll be absolutely opposed to the boycott.

Can you just give me one second?

Of course, of course, of course. No, I mean, you explained earlier the fact that most Jews were supporting a boycott, and then the Zionists were against it. And there's actually a written agreement that comes out of that opposition to the boycott. And I think it's also important to emphasize what you just mentioned, which is the fact that the boycott was incredibly effective.

Yes, yeah. I mean, Jews began boycotting from the start. Ha'avara, which is the trading agreement between the Nazis and the Zionists, was signed, I think it was the 7th of August, 1933. But from the very start, the Zionists opposed the boycott. I mean, for example, Kol Yisrael, which is the voice of Israel, the radio station, on the 18th of May, broadcast that "screaming slogans calling for a boycott are a crime," and referring to a recent arson attack on the German consulate, they said, "We are all anxious about our brethren in Germany, but we have no quarrel with the representatives of the German government in Palestine." And Black goes on to say that it was amongst the kibbutznik, the kibbutzniks, that there was the least opposition to the decision of the Zionist organization to trade with Hitler. So this myth of socialist Zionism based on the kibbutz is exactly that, it's a myth. Because the kibbutzim, though they were collective settlements, were not engaged in any class struggle of any shape or form. On the contrary, they were the most, they were created by the bourgeois Zionists as the most effective means of colonization. And Moshe Zimmerman, a professor, I think he was at Tel Aviv University, spoke of the practical dissociation of the institutions of the Zionist movement and the Yishuv of the Jewish community in Palestine from militant opposition to Zionism. So from the very start, the Zionists, together with the Jewish bourgeoisie, opposed the boycott. So in Britain, you had an alliance of the Zionists in the Jewish boy, in the Jewish Board of Deputies, and British Jews. And it's arguable that it was precisely this alliance which led to the Jewish Board of Deputies eventually adopting Zionism as a solution to the problem of German Jews. And in 1940, the first open Zionist, Cecil Roth, became president of the Board of Deputies. So it took, it had taken 23 years from the Balfour Declaration for that to occur. But the trading agreement was very simple. It meant that if you had money in Germany, you put it into a bank account run by an a company called P.W.R. Limited. It was frozen in that bank account. You were given 1,000 marks, 1,000 pounds from the money you had, in order to qualify for entrance to Palestine on an A certificate, which meant it wasn't part of the labor certificates which the British issued, you could enter automatically. And then the money that was frozen of yours in Germany was used to buy German goods, which therefore meant increasing the orders for German factories, and they were then exported to Palestine where they were sold off, and then you got a fraction, maybe 30, 40%, eventually of the takings. The problem was that Palestine soon became glutted with German goods. So then Ha'avara went to further afield. It set up other companies, the Near East Company, for example, which sold these goods in the Arab countries. And you had a similar company set up in Europe also to sell German goods. So the Zionists became the kind of main sales agent for Nazi Germany.

It's crazy because then this offsets the obvious material costs of the boycott, like it basically undoes what the boycott was accomplishing.

Yeah, I mean, Palestine was flooded with German goods at the very same time as in the United States and Britain were saying, "Don't buy German goods." So obviously, it broke the boycott. And Hitler was not slow in pointing this out, that the Jews on the one hand call for a boycott, and yet they're the ones who are trying to sell our goods and make some money, and you Gentiles are gullible enough to believe them. So they made hay, of course, of it. And there was a debate between Baruch Zuckerman of the Jewish Labor Committee and Berl Locker of the Zionist Executive, where Zuckerman accused the Zionists of being the scab agent of Nazism. They were undermining all Jewish opposition. And in the winter, I mean, leading up to the winter of '33, the Nazi economy was extremely weak. It's quite possible the Nazis could in that period have been overthrown. But the Zionists had an interest in stabilizing the Nazi regime. And that's the conclusion that Edwin Black draws. It's not my conclusion. And Cesarani says in his book that it wasn't wishful thinking that the German Nazi regime was tottering. This was a fact. And a number of others, The Investors Review, for example, also thought the Nazi regime could come to an end at the end of 1933.

That was the least thing that the last thing that the Zionist wanted. They wanted the Nazi regime to stabilize because between '33 and '39, 60% of capital investment in the issue of, in the J, in the Jewish Palestine economy came from Nazi Germany. So when I said in the Palestinian, uh, uh, seminar that, uh, the Jewish state was Hitler's bastard off, bastard offspring, The Jewish Chronicles screamed about this notorious anti-Zanes once again indulging terrible anti-Semitism. But that was true. The irony, the irony of saying that, oh my goodness, you know, I want to, I want to, before we, I, before we move on to, um, Zionism post Holocaust, I want to ask you. I know we've already kind of delved into this, but I just feel like it's worth mentioning. We don't have to go too deeply into it, but you have this section, um, called, "What Was Hitler's Motivation? Anti-Semitism or Anti-Communism?" I mean, obviously Hitler was a verant anti-Semite. Um, he oversaw a Holocaust of European Jewry, but you actually place it in the context of anti-communism, which is something we don't learn again in North America. We certainly don't learn that, um, because we're not supposed to learn really anything relevant about communism except that it's really, really bad and you should hate it and capitalism's superior. Um, but I think this is an important point to hone in on because of the fact that, you know, Hitler was allowed to rise by a lot of Western countries because he was seen as a work against Soviet, Soviet communism. And Hitler's number one enemy, because Hitler was a fascist, was communism. And he referred to the Bolsheviks specifically, and you mentioned this, he referred to Judeo-Bolshevism. So anyways, can you just briefly, like, talk a little bit about the fact that Hitler's number one enemy was actually communism?

Yes. I mean, uh, between the period of 1930, when the, the Nazi party got 6 million votes, and the per, and the two elections in 1932, when he got 11 and 13 million votes, uh, the main propaganda of the Nazi party was anti-communist. It wasn't anti-Semitic. I mean, anti-Semitism was not particularly respectable in Germany, uh, that time. And, and it's a myth to believe that all the Germans were anti-Semites and therefore voted Hitler power. Hitler played down anti-Semitism almost to the point of non-existence. But in the Nazi ideology, Jews were seen as the biological parents of Bolshevism, and that was why it was, see, I mean, they were merged into two. Uh, when the AATS group and the killing squads, uh, followed in the wake of the German Army, uh, in the invasion of the Soviet Union, uh, they would merge commissars and Communists and Jews together because they were the, they were seemed to be one and the same almost. Uh, and that was the same with the, with the leading Nazis as well. Communists, uh, and Jews, uh, were seeing as two sides of the same coin, if you like. Uh, there was no real difference. Uh, and so for Hitler, getting rid of the Jews was to him, getting rid of the origin. The Jew marks is a very frequent phrase if you read Mein Kampf, for instance, or, or Judeo-Bolshevism was another phrase. So they were intertwined. But for the Zionists, of course, Hitlerism was simply about the Jews, and therefore it explains absolutely nothing, not least the support of the Western Bourgeois. I mean, for example, Lloyd George, who met Hitler, said, whatever one may think of his methods, and they are certainly not those of a parliamentary country, they can be no doubt that he has achieved a marvelous transformation in the spirit of the people, in their attitude towards each other, and in their social and economic outlook. He rightly proclaimed at Nuremberg that in four years his movement has made a new Germany. Uh, and even Churchill was on record as, uh, with similar comments about, uh, Hitler. Uh, and this was the view, the widespread view. I mean, The Paper, The New York Times, The New York Times had a whole like profile of Hitler in a very positive light. Yeah, I'm sure it did. I mean, The Times of England, uh, had absolutely no criticism of him under Geoffrey Dawson. The BBC, uh, which of course is now so opposed to anti-Semitism, had very little to say. Uh, The Daily Mail was a pro-Hitler paper, so was The Daily Express. Lord Rothermere, Viscount Rothermere, who owned the Mail, was an ardent Hitler supporter and deprecated all this reference to what he called atrocity propaganda. Yes, I mean, the Jews didn't have it great, you know, but, uh, it was nothing to worry about. Uh, so yes, I mean, very large sections of the Bourgeois supported Hitler. We had the Anglo-German Fellowship stuffed with all sorts of corporate sponsors. I'm trying to think of which ones, but I mean, there were a number of big companies, uh, Price Waterhouse, for example, a big accounting firm. They had Tory MPs and so on. And this was in essence, a parliamentary group lobbying in support of German interests. Anti-Semitism wasn't mentioned at the time. Anti-Semitism for them is only a recent phenomena, which comes about because of Israel.

Well, and also, apparently so. I, I, I want to circle back to this issue. I'm raising this now, but at near the end of our conversation, I want to talk a bit more about this, because this is relevant to some of what you're starting to raise here, which is the fact that all of these same forces today are like at the forefront of fighting anti-Semitism, and they claim it's the left that's so anti-Semitic. But we'll go back to that. But I want to, I want to stay in a bit of chronological order here, and I want to move to, sure.

Well, so then, then there's like after the Holocaust, right? I mean, which everyone knew was happening. So many people knew the Holocaust was happening. In terms of people in power in various governments, they didn't do anything about it because they really just didn't care. The Zionists, of course, tried to exploit the fact that there was after the Holocaust, all of these refugee camps full of Jews, and they advocated for them to go to Palestine. And many of them didn't want to go to Palestine. The vast majority of them, like, they don't have anything in common with the Middle East. It's not their home. They want to go back home, or they want to go to the West, they want to go to the US, right? Um, and Zionist lobbied very forcefully to have them go to Palestine. Western countries didn't want them because we know they never want refugees. And then you have the founding of Israel happened in conjunction with, you know, the end of the Holocaust. And I think what's interesting here, and what, what's so, I mean, all of this is, is very relevant historically, but everything you're talking about remains so relevant to what we're witnessing right now in Gaza because the Zionist movement is just another settler colonial movement with very fascistic elements to it. I mean, I know it's a spectrum, but right now the fascists of Zionism are in charge, and they have, I think, really mirrored some of those subhuman categories that the Nazis had. Um, you know, Palestinians are in one place. Even among Jews, I mean, they categorize Jews throughout Israel's history based on, you know, Ashkenazi Jews are at the top, and then you just kind of go down based on where in the world they come from. And I mean, all that's to say, you know, when we talk about Israel's founding and Des Zionist, the ongoing Zionist movement, how is everything you've just explained relevant to the ideology of Zionism when we see how they categorize human beings in historic Palestine?

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