John Newsinger on the Zionists’ Collaboration with Anti-Semites and the Nazis

John Newsinger, whose book The Blood Never Dried: A People’s History of the British Empire I blogged about yesterday, is one of the many anti-Zionist and Israel-critical Jews, whose voices the Tory and Jewish establishments are both keen to marginalise and silence. Decent, self-regarding Jewish anti-racists, who also oppose Zionism, like Tony Greenstein and Jackie Walker, have been smeared as ‘self-hating’ and anti-Semitic because they expose the racism, apartheid and ethnic cleansing at the heart of the Israeli state. They have been purged from the Labour Party along with committed non-Jewish anti-racists like Ken Livingstone and the supporters of Jeremy Corbyn, who have also criticised and denounced Israel. ‘Red’ Ken was particularly smeared, partly because he stated quite correctly that Hitler initially supported Zionism. This is factually correct, however unpalatable it is to modern supporters of Israel. Before the Nazis decided on their horrific ‘Final Solution’, they weren’t particularly concerned what happened to the Jews as long as they were cleansed from Germany. They therefore made a short-lived pact, the Ha’avah Agreement, with the Zionists to smuggle German Jews into Palestine, then under the British mandate. Tony Greenstein blogged about the Ha’avah agreement in support of Leninspart, showing that it is established, respectable documented history, and even posting photos of the extremely rare medal the Nazis struck to celebrate the visit of one of their storm troopers to the Jewish community in Palestine. He also quoted extensively from the memoirs of Theodor Herzl, Zionism’s founder, to show how he regarded the anti-Semites as the Zionists’ most valuable allies.

Newsinger is a long-time contributor to the conspiracies/parapolitics journal Lobster. He is the senior lecturer in History and Cultural Studies at Bath Spa University College. Although he also has his differences with the Trotskyite newt-fancier, he published a piece in that magazine showing very clearly, again with copious documentation, that Livingstone was right. He also describes Herzl’s positive attitude towards European anti-Semites as a source of support for the Zionists, and the Zionists’ initial collaboration with the Nazis in the Jewish settlement of Palestine in The Blood Never Dried. He writes

While the settlers on the ground inevitably looked to the Turkish government for support and protection, the international Zionist movement was concerned to persuade European governments to pressure the Turks into being more sympathetic. This involved developing a relationship not only with the rival European empires, but also with openly anti-Semitic governments and politicians. Indeed, according to one historian, Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism

regarded the anti-Semites as his most dependable friends and allies. Rather than attack and denounce anti-Semitism, Herzl declared that ‘the anti-Semites will be our most dependable friends, the anti-Semitic countries our allies.’

The Zionists, at this time, argued that there was no place for Jews in countries like Russia, Germany, France, Britain or the United States, and this sentiment was reciprocated by anti-Semites in those countries. They could cooperate on the basis of this shared understanding. (p. 123).

Of the collaboration between the Zionists and the Nazis, Newsinger writes, pp. 129-30,

One other point worth making here is the extent to which the Zionist movement actually collaborate with the Nazis in the 1930s, in particular with the SS. To be blunt, they found they had a shared interest in the eviction of Jews from Germany. Reinhard heydrich no less, later to be the architect of the Holocaust, in September 1935 protclaimed his solidarity with Zionism in the SS newspaper, Das Schwarze Korps. The Nazis, he made clear, were “in complete agreement with the great spiritual movement within Jewry itself, the so-called Zionism, with its recognition of the solidarity of Jewry throughout the world, and the rejection of all assimilationist ideas”. Adolf Eichmann, a key figure in the destruction of Europe’s Jews, actually visited Palestine in 1937 at the invitation of the Zionists. The Gestapo worked closely with Mossad, the Zionist agency handling illegal immigration. In 1939 Heydrich was demanding that Mossad should be sending off “400 Jews per week … from Berlin alone”. This cooperation extended to the SS providing the Haganah with smuggled arms.” The moral bankruptcy of the Zionist movement is nowhere better demonstrated than in Ben Gurion’s response to the possibility of thousands of Jewish children being admitted into Britain after the Kristallnacht progrom in Germany. On 7 December 1938 he told a meeting of Zionist leaders

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 those children, but also the history of the people of Israel.

With the Nazis, of course, there was to be no such choice.

Mike was also suspended, expelled from the Party and then smeared as an anti-Semite and Holocaust denier – things that he is most definitely not – because he wrote a pamphlet, The Livingstone Delusion, defending Leninspart and showing that he was not an anti-Semite, and also actually right about the initial relationship between the Zionists and the Nazis.

But Newsinger’s book, well-documented and written by a proper, academic Jewish historian, shows that Mike, Tony Greenstein, Livingstone, and all the others were factually correct. It is the Zionists who are peddling anti-Semitic lies in order to cover up Zionism’s shameful record.

Mike’s expulsion, along with those of the other victims of the witch hunt, like Tony, Jackie, Livingstone, Marc Wadsworth, Martin Odoni, Cyril Chilson and so many, many other decent, innocent people, is a glaring injustice that needs to be reversed. Now.

The Political Abuse of Anti-Semitism Accusations: Jeremy Corbyn, and the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia

I’ve put up a whole series of article attacking and debunking the accusations of anti-Semitism, which have been directed against the Labour party, and more specifically its leader, Jeremy Corbyn. As I’ve shown, these are all false, gross distortions of history and offensive personal smears of decent men and women. Ken Livingstone, for example, was entirely correct when he said that Hitler favoured at one time the emigration of Jews to Israel. He did. The Nazis, including Adolf Eichmann, one of the most notorious of those responsible for the Holocaust, aided people smugglers in getting Jews into Palestine, then under the British Mandate. They also supplied arms to the Haganah, the clandestine Jewish military organisation in Palestine, so that it could aid the British in suppressing the Arab rebellion against British rule – the First Intifada. This is documented in the work of the Jewish historian and passionate Zionist, David Cesarani, on the Holocaust and the origins of the Israel. Naz Shah, one of the others, who have been accused, has the support of her local synagogue. This surely provided good testimony that whatever faults she may have, anti-Semitism isn’t one of them. As for Jackie Smith, one of the others slandered with this accusation, she is a veteran anti-racism campaigner. Her mother was Black British civil rights activist, who was deported from America for her activism by the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Her father was a Russian Jew, and her partner is also Jewish.

The source of these allegations lie in the Blairite wing of the Labour party, who are desperate to use any tactic to cling on to power, and the Israel lobby. These latter are determined to smear anybody and everybody, who objects to their oppression and maltreatment of the Palestinians, as an anti-Semite, even when these are other Jews, such as the head of Bernie Sander’s Jewish outreach department in his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination.

I’ve also been struck by the way the anti-Semitism allegations recall earlier attempts to discredit left-wing political leaders, in fact and fiction. David English, the editor of the Daily Mail, believed Ken Livingstone was an anti-Semite, and continued to press the issue for about a year in the early 1980s. There was also a piece on the Going Underground news programme on RT, hosted by Afshin Rattansi, which compared the anti-Semitism smears with the plot of the 1980s novel and Channel 4 series, A Very British Coup, in which the media and opposition politicians manufacture false accusations of anti-Semitism to discredit a genuinely popular left-wing Labour Prime Minister.

And the Soviet Union under Brezhnev also used accusations of anti-Semitism in its campaign against the proposed democratisation of Communist Czechoslovakia under its leader, Anton Dubcek, in 1968. Dubcek wished to free his country from the rigid control of the Soviet Union. While remaining very much a Communist, he also planned on introducing platform of reforms aimed at liberalising the country, while retaining the Communist party’s privileged position as the country’s leading political authority. He was going to allow a certain degree of political freedom, in allowing non-Communist groups and voluntary societies to be formed. Inside the Communist party, the policy of ‘democratic centralism’ was to be replaced by democracy and the free discussion of ideas. The security services was to be made responsible solely for defending the Czechoslovakian nation, and not for protecting the Communist parties. The command economy was going to be weakened, to allow greater consumer choice. State enterprises were not going to be privatised, but were going to be freed from the constraints of following the plan, and allowed to manage their own affairs. He was also in favour of something like workers’ control, and the democratic election by the workers of the management committees. In many ways, it prefigures much of Gorbachev’s reforms in the Soviet Union during Perestroika.

All this was too much for Brezhnev’s USSR, which invaded. One of the reasons for the Soviet Union’s hostility to the reforms, according Hugh Lunghi, in his introduction to the book, Dubcek’s Blueprint for Freedom (London: William Kimber 1968) was the fear that the USSR’s covert operations manipulating and dominating its satellites would be revealed by Dubcek’s de-Stalinisation campaign. Dubcek was determined to go ahead with the investigation of Stalin’s terror and the rehabilitation of the old thug’s victims. This would almost certain produce evidence of the activities of the Soviet Union and its secret police in destroying the opposition to the imposition of Communism and those countries’ direct control by Moscow.

Dubcek was, however, genuinely popular amongst the peoples of Czechoslovakia. Surprisingly, he also had the backing of the Czechoslovak secret police. When the KGB tried to infiltrate the country disguised as Czechoslovak secret agents, their passports and documents were in such awful Czech that the country’s real agents had no trouble recognising them and rounding them up. They were then delivered to the Russian embassy with the explanation that their Czech was so terrible, they must obviously be American spies.

Unable to find anyone willing to collaborate with them in a puppet government to replace Dubcek and his supporters, the Soviet authorities tried instead to grind him down by stalling his reforms and trying discredit Dubcek and his supporters. One of the ways they tried to do this was through entirely spurious accusations of anti-Semitism. Lunghi writes:

About a month later, on October 11th, Dubcek repeated [not to introduce a secret police terror campaign] in a major speech in which he explained why the Czechoslovak leadership had refused to authorise a programme of unjustified arrests and dismissals which “some Communists” (he did not specify in which country) demanded for anti-Semitic and other reasons. “Some individuals,” said Dubcek, “think this is now the time to move towards excesses similar to those of the ‘fifties, that this is a time to return to the deformities of sectarian non-Leninist methods.” Communists should understand, continued Dubcek, that “”socialist thought in our country is not deformed, for example, by anti-Semitism…” (p. 29, emphasis Lunghi’s). Several of those forced out of office on the orders of the Russians were the victims of anti-Semitism. These included Dr. Frantisek Kriegel, who was accused of being a ‘Zionist’. (p. 30). Which sort of prefigures the accusations of anti-Semitism against Jackie Smith, who’s half-Jewish, has a Jewish partner, and is a dedicated campaigner against racism. Or against Rhea Wolfson, who, despite being Jewish, was dropped as a candidate for the NEC by her constituency party on the advice of Jim Murphy, because she was connected with Momentum, which was an anti-Semitic organisation.

It seems the Blairites and their allies are following a very old pattern of using allegations of anti-Semitism to smear left-wing opponents. Well, the joke in Private Eye about Gordon Brown had him as a Stalinist apparatchik, issuing diktats, decrees and party purges like the thug himself.

Lobster on the Anti-Semitism Allegations, the Zionists and the Nazis

Mike has posted up yet another piece, which shows the disgusting attitude of the Blairites and their willingness to do anything to unseat and smear Jeremy Corbyn. It seems Sami Chakrabarti’s inquiry into anti-Semitism in the Labour party has generally given the party a clean bill of health. However, that hasn’t been good enough for Ruth Smeeth and Sam Stopp, two members, who seem absolutely convinced that the party is riddled with it and it’s all Corbyn’s fault. In the case of Smeeth, it seems to be because someone else in Labour called her a traitor because she was giving some assistance to the Torygraph in writing an article about it. And as she’s Jewish, she decided it must be because of her religion/ ethnicity, rather than in the fact that she was helping the notoriously anti-Socialist paper. In the case of Stopp, it’s because he looked at a speech in which Corbyn made it clear that Jews weren’t responsible for the actions of Israel, any more than Muslims were responsible for atrocities committed by ISIS, and came to the direct opposite of what was being meant. He perversely concluded that Corbyn was saying that Jews were responsible for the actions of Israel, and like Smeeth, promptly threw his toys out of the pram. See Mike’s article: http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2016/06/30/farcical-anti-semitism-accusations-fly-at-anti-semitism-inquiry-report/

These accusations about anti-Semitism in the Labour party are partly based on Ken Livingstone’s statement that Hitler too supported sending Jews to Israel. This was perfectly true, but was too much for the historically challenged Blairites, who in the person of John Mann, threw a fit and started accusing Red Ken of being a Nazi himself. Of course the old Leninist newt-fancier isn’t. When he was the head of the GLC, it was notorious for being right-on, anti-racist, anti-sexist and anti-homophobic. In his 1987 book, Livingstone’s Labour, Leninspart makes it very clear that he has no truck with racism, whether against Blacks, Jews or Irish, and provides deep and telling criticism of how the British and American governments recruited the real thing as part of their campaign against Communism. The Nazis they recruited as anti-Communist spies included heinous individuals, who had taken active part in the Holocaust and pogroms against the Jews during the invasion of the USSR. I’ve blogged about this before, many times, and quite simply I’m sick of having to explain it yet again.

John Newsinger, one of the long-time contributors to the parapolitics magazine, Lobster, has also put up a piece about the scandal, entitled in ‘Livingstone, Zionism and the Nazis in issue 71 of the magazine for Summer, 2016. Newsinger is, or was, a history prof at Bath Spa university. He makes it clear at the beginning of the article that’s he’s not impressed with Leninspart, because he played into the hands of the Blairites and their appalling allies in the Labour Friends of Israel and the Israeli ambassador to Britain, Mark Regev, an Israeli ‘hawk’. But he cites histories of the Holocaust written by Jewish historians, including David Cesarani, to show that Livingstone was historically correct. He also goes on to show, more specifically, the vile attitude of Israel’s founders to the plight of their fellows under the Nazis in Europe. The great Zionist pioneers had nothing but utter contempt for Jews, who wished to stay in their European homelands, and were more than content to see the Nazis persecute and butcher them, if it meant that some would go to Israel.

Cesarani himself was the son of Italian Communists, and a strong supporter of Zionism. He briefly became disillusioned while staying America, but when he came back to Britain, he returned not only to Liberal Judaism, but also was one of the first to equate anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism. Nevertheless, Cesarani’s book on the Final Solution provides abundant quotes showing the Livingstone was correct. Cesarani’s book states that the Zionists took very little interest in defending Jewish Germans, and were opposed to Jewish organisations, such as the Centralverein and the Reichsbund Judischer Frontsoldaten, a patriotic Jewish servicement’s league, that did. For the RjFS, leaving Germany was out of the question. It was a form of surrender. Cesarani describes how the Nazis actively promoted the Zionists as a way of getting the Jews out of Germany anyway they could, even providing quotes from those responsible. In 1935, Reynhard Heydrich wrote in the SS newspaper, Das Schwarze Korps, that the Nazi regime was ‘in complete agreement with the great spiritual movement within Jewry itself, the so-called Zionism, with its recognition of the solidarity of Jewry throughout the world, and the rejection of all assimilationist ideas.’

Cesarani also provides some chilling quotes showing the indifference of leading Zionists to their people’s suffering. He describes how (I)n January 1934, the
American, James McDonald, was appalled by the attitude of Chaim Weizmann when he ‘expressed his contempt for German Jews as a whole, his indifference to their fate, and for that matter, his indifference to the fate of millions of Jews elsewhere, just so long as a saving remnant could be preserved in Palestine’. pp. 132-133) This grotesque attitude was also shared by David Ben Gurion, who told a closed meeting of the Jewish Agency ‘If I knew that all the Jewish
children of Europe could be saved by settlement in Britain and only half could be saved by settlement in Palestine, I should choose the latter’. He also notes that Zionists and Orthodox Jews were quite satisfied with the ban on mixed marriages in the Nazis’ notorious 1935 Nuremberg Laws.

Cesarani’s book also describes how the Nazis supplied arms and support to the Haganah, the Jewish organisation in Palestine that helped the British crush the First Intifada, the Palestinian insurrection against the Mandate. Eichmann also gave his support to people smugglers, like Bernard Storfer, whom he put in charge of the illegal emigration of Jews to the embryonic Israeli colony. While Newsinger is clearly not a Zionist, he is deeply impressed with Cesarani’s scholarship, and urges Lobster’s readers to look at Cesarani’s first book, Justice Delayed: How Britain Became a Refuge for Nazi War Criminals. This describes how the post-War Labour government recruited immense numbers of Nazis as potential recruits for SIS, one of Britain’s intelligence agencies. Among those recruited were the 9,000 members of the SS’ Galician Division, Ukrainians responsible for horrific atrocities in that part of the USSR. He also rightly takes the British government to task for failing to take in Jewish refugees during the Third Reich. In his concluding paragraph, he states that a firm resistance to anti-Semitism must be a part of any determined anti-Zionist campaign, as it was only due to anti-Semitism in Europe that there was any real support for Zionism. He ends with this observation:

If the United States, Britain, and other countries had opened their doors to Jews fleeing the Nazis, these countries would almost certainly have been the destiny of choice for the overwhelming majority of European Jews. Instead, the doors were kept closed except for a comparative few. Once again, this was anti-Semitism at work. It was European anti-Semitism, culminating in mass murder and
attempted genocide, that made the Zionist project viable at the expense, we have to insist, of the Palestinian people. Consequently the fight against anti-Semitism is a vital part of the fight against Zionism.

This is very much the attitude of most liberal critics of Israel. The American radical left magazine, Counterpunch, has also run articles recently on how Winston Churchill and the British government bowed to the prejudice and xenophobia expressed by papers like the Daily Mail, and had German and Austrian Jews interned as ‘enemy aliens’ during the War in camps with the very Nazis that were persecuting them. And Newsinger also shows that, despite his obvious anger at Livingstone for giving the Israel lobby a weapon, the great newt fancier was very largely correct.

The article is at: http://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/free/lobster71/lob71-livingstone.pdf. Read it for the information that the Blairite’s don’t want you to have.