Book Review: Zionism During The Holocaust by Tony Greenstein

JVL Introduction

Andrew Hornung has reviewed Tony Greenstein’s book “Zionism During The Holocaust”, a book covering important and usually ignored aspects of Zionist history.  Andrew has some criticisms but is mostly positive about the work.  Tony is often criticised – not to say vilified – but his expansive knowledge of Jewish, Nazi and Zionist history deserves respect and recognition. While he is critical of the role of Zionists, as Hornung points out:

“Of course, as Greenstein makes clear, this does not mean that all Zionists everywhere failed to oppose the Nazis and their allies (…); it means, however, that the leadership of the movement would always place benefit to the strengthening of the Yishuv before rescue.  It is this that forms the ideological context for the Ha’avara agreement that broke the international anti-German boycott; this that shaped the choices facing the Budapest Judenrat in its dealings with Eichmann; this that ensured that the Zionist and Zionist-dominated organisations in non-occupied Europe and in the USA failed to oppose local restrictions on Jewish immigration.  And it is this that underpins the Zionist state’s failure to give voice to many of the real heroes of Jewish anti-Nazi resistance like those to whom the book is dedicated.”

Andrew Hornung writes:

When in 1944 Hannah Arendt wrote of “the Revisionist (Zionists) entering into negotiations with the antisemitic prewar Polish government” and the general Zionists’ “constant contact with the Hitler government in Germany about the transfer business” – accusations that would have got her stigmatised as an anti-Semite by today’s mass media and political elite – she did not go into detail.  After all, this was all well known to her readers.  In the intervening years, however, the truth regarding these contacts, agreements and transfers – and worse – has been forgotten, distorted and even denied.

The great value of Tony Greenstein’s book is to give concreteness and an avalanche of detail to Arendt’s statement and contextualising this betrayal within an analysis of Zionist ideology.

The purpose of the book is clearly set out on its first page: “This book is intended to ensure that an end is put to Israel’s weaponisation of the memory of the Jewish victims of the Holocaust as a justification for its war crimes against the Palestinians.”

Of course, this book can only offer a contribution to the battle against Zionism and for its victims, but it is a vital and valuable contribution, the fruit of extensive research.

Among reviewers of non-fiction there are those who are as well or better informed than the authors whose work they are judging.  I am certainly not among that happy group in this case.  It is not within my capacity to examine all the assertions, test the accuracy and context of all the quotations or evaluate all the details that Greenstein adduces to make his case.  That said, I have no doubt that “Zionism during the Holocaust” effectively demolishes Zionism’s claim to have been the saviour of world Jewry – one of the central theses of Zionist historiography.

Zionist ideologues – well-educated historians and shameless propagandists alike – have tried to obscure the movement’s history in a variety of ways.  They have accused people like Greenstein of trying to minimise the guilt of the Nazis, as if moral responsibility were a finite object; they have distorted and suppressed important documents; where denial was impossible they have relied on arguing that there was no choice; and, failing all else, they have waged an unceasing campaign of vilification and boycott against their opponents.  But while some historical debates have little immediate effect on daily public life, the debate about Zionism and its claims has had a decisive impact not least on British public life thanks to malicious accusations of anti-Semitism against leading Labour Party figures.  Obviously Zionism’s claims – ones that lie outside the remit of Greenstein’s book – to be a national liberation movement – to be the little David fighting for survival against the Goliath of Arab exterminatory terror have an even harsher effect on the Palestinian population.

Of course, these two impacts are connected.  As Greenstein puts it: “The weaponisation of the Holocaust has led to the marginalisation and dispossession of the Palestinians.”  The more Zionism is seen as the saviour of persecuted Jews, the more its colonialist traits are disregarded or excused and the more the Palestinians’ struggle is seen as a continuation of the embattled condition of Jewry.

Given the aim of the book, most of the material relates to the indifference of the leaders of both the Yishuv and diaspora Zionism to the defence and rescue of European Jewry unless the destination of those saved was the future Israeli state.  This indifference was based on two central ideas, firstly the view that the Jews of the Diaspora were largely a degenerate population and secondly that their assimilation into Diaspora society would represent an annihilation of the “Jewish nation” as surely as that promised by Nazism.

As Greenstein points out, this first idea led the early Zionist movement to espouse an overtly racist – yes, anti-Semitic! – view of world Jewry, one with dire consequences for the victims of Nazi persecution.  The author cites this example from a memo sent to Hitler in June 1933 by the Zionistische Vereinigung fuer Deutschland (German Zionist Federation) identifying “the difficulty of the Jewish condition” as consisting “above all in an abnormal occupational pattern and in the fault of an intellectual and moral posture not rooted in one’s own tradition….an answer to the Jewish question truly satisfying to the national state can be brought about only with the collaboration of the Jewish movement that aims at a social, cultural and moral renewal of Jewry… We too are against mixed marriages and are for maintaining the purity of the Jewish group.”  The same text attacks “liberalism” and assures Hitler that “we are not concerned with the interests of individual Jews who have lost their economic and social position as a result of Germany’s profound transformation…”  Here we see not simply passivity but an invitation to complicity.  Indeed, the memo goes on to declare that “Boycott propaganda…is in essence unZionist…”

Giving priority to ensuring the safety of the persecuted Jews of Europe over ensuring immigration to Palestine was denigrated by the Zionist leadership as “refugeeism”.  Speaking in 1938 [Greenstein p. 297] Ben Gurion chillingly asserted, “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.”

And in the same year he wrote “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.”

For those who doubt Greenstein’s picture of a Zionist movement intent only on rescue to Palestine and failing to engage in battles to lift immigration quotas, it’s enough to read the work of his ideological counterpart, the much lauded Walter Lacquer.  In the many pages of his widely read History of Zionism there is not one initiative he is able to cite when Zionists campaigned to rescue to persecuted Jews of occupied Europe….unless the destination was Palestine.

Of course, as Greenstein makes clear, this does not mean that all Zionists everywhere failed to oppose the Nazis and their allies (and presumably some of the capitulating and collaborating Judenraete were not dominated by Zionists); it means, however, that the leadership of the movement would always place benefit to the strengthening of the Yishuv before rescue.  It is this that forms the ideological context for the Ha’avara agreement that broke the international anti-German boycott; this that shaped the choices facing the Budapest Judenrat in its dealings with Eichmann; this that ensured that the Zionist and Zionist-dominated organisations in non-occupied Europe and in the USA failed to oppose local restrictions on Jewish immigration.  And it is this that underpins the Zionist state’s failure to give voice to many of the real heroes of Jewish anti-Nazi resistance like those to whom the book is dedicated.

As the book’s title specifies, its central focus is in the period of the Holocaust.  Nonetheless the author cites scores of examples outside this period when the interests of the Zionist state have taken precedence over and even actively obstructed the struggle against anti-Semitism or against racism in general.  Israel, after all entertained warm relations with apartheid South Africa and was a permanent sanctions-breaker.

Given the extensive reading (mainly of secondary sources) that Greenstein draws, it seems churlish to cite omissions from the bibliography, but it seems to me that, if he had taken into account the information in Timothy Snyder’s “Black Earth”, a less positive picture of the actions in the areas under Soviet occupation would have emerged.  This would not change the basic picture that Greenstein paints but it would open up an important dimension in understanding the post-war acceptance of Zionism.

Self-publishing a book of this scope is a massive project and Greenstein is to be congratulated for undertaking it.  But the lack of editorial supervision this entails means, among other things, that there are frequent brash overstatements, ones that do not change the book’s fundamental value but ones which may help opponents distract attention from the core argument presented.  Would that it were true, for instance, that “Zionism in the West appeals to a small band of nationalist zealots suspended between Scylla and Charybdis.”

Note from Editor:  details of how to get the book are in the comments (posted by Tony Greenstein)

Anti Nazi Rally at Madison Square Garden, New York, 1937