On the Alliance between Zionists and Antisemites, by Tony Greenstein

This piece is a transcription of Tony Greenstein’s recent interview with Rania Khalek, based on his book, Zionism During the Holocaust: The weaponisation of memory in the service of state and nation. The transcribed passages have been edited for clarity by Zachary Foster.

The origins of Zionism can be traced to the post-reformation period in the 16th century. The Catholic Church claimed the Israelites had transgressed and thus were no longer part of the Covenant and so instead the Catholic Church itself was the successor to the children of Israel. But the Reformation changed that. Calvin and other theologians claimed the Jews of Europe were the successors to the ancient Hebrews and that their “return” to Palestine was necessary to bring about the return of Jesus. It was part of the messianic fulfillment.

Imperialists took up this vision again in the early 19th century. In 1799, Napoleon invaded Egypt and Palestine. He thought that establishing a Jewish State under the French on the banks of the Suez Canal would aid France’s imperial ambitions.

The first people to take it up seriously were Lord Palmerston and Lord Shaftesbury. They were wedded to the idea of a Jewish return to Palestine. Lord Shaftesbury was opposed to Jewish emancipation in Britain in 1858 but he was in favor of sending Jews to Palestine. So there was this early marriage of anti-Semitism and Christian Zionism.

[The construction of the Suez Canal in 1869 gave the idea greater urgency and fit nicely with British imperial plans.]

The only problem was that the Jews were not particularly keen on going to Palestine and they saw Zionism as a form of anti-Semitism:

→ The American Reform movement made clear it wanted no part in Zionism in its founding document, The Pittsburgh Platform of 1885..

→ The Board of Deputies of British Jews were also approached by Shaftesbury and Palmerston to make a declaration in support of a Jewish State in Palestine and they too wanted no part of it. Their battle was to be accepted as equals in Britain. They didn't buy into the idea that they didn't belong.

The Jewish Belgian Trotskyist (1918-1944), Abram Leon, wrote a book titled “The Jewish Question” which goes through the rise of anti-Semitism and the role of the Jews in the Middle Ages. He writes, “Zionism transposes anti-Semitism to all of history and saves itself the trouble of understanding it.” For Zionists, anti-Semitism is inherent in every non-Jew. It's part of their DNA. They can’t change it, and thus there’s no point in combating it.

But for Leon, anti-semitism was not a constant in history, as the Zionists would have you believe. Leon argued that anti-Semitism in Europe was a reaction to the Jewish role as agents, usurious money lenders, tax stewards, the agents of the nobility and kings, and so they were hated by the peasants not because of their religion but because of their social and economic role. So Jews were expelled first from Western Europe and so they went to Eastern Europe. And then when Eastern Europe started transforming from feudalism to capitalism the same problems arose. 

From the mid-19th century to 1914, about two and a half million Jews immigrated from Russia and Poland, fleeing pogroms and impoverishment. 99% went either to the United States, Britain or other places in Europe. 1% went to Palestine, and even a majority of those returned to Europe at a later point. Palestine was the last place that Jews would go.

Zionist Anti Semitism

In his 1896 pamphlet, “The Jewish State,” Theodor Herzl asks, what is the cause of anti-Semitism? He says its immediate cause is “our excessive production of mediocre intellect who cannot find an outlook downwards or upwards.” He continues: “when we sink we become a revolutionary proletariat… [but] when we rise, the rise is also the terrible power of our purse.”

Herzl, founder of modern Jewish political Zionism, adopted all the negative stereotypes of Jews. He wrote “Mauschel,” published in Die Welt, in which he attacked anti-zionist Jews using every imaginable anti-semitic stereotype. The Zionist position was that anti-Semitism was caused by the presence of Jews. 

And so the Zionist criticisms of Jews often mirrored the anti-semitic criticism of Jews. Ze'ev Jabotinsky, the founder of revisionist Zionism, now Likud, 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, and he knows no order or discipline.” Elsewhere he said, “the Jewish people are a very bad people. Its neighbors hate it and rightly so.”

The Zionists accepted that the Jews had developed all these asocial qualities because they were rootless and detached from their own national land. This was the same blood and soil ideology of the Nazis. The Zionists and the Nazis believed that peoples needed to be rooted in their own lands or else they would become asocial revolutionary wanderers.

The Israeli political scientist Joachim Doron published a piece, “Classic Zionism and its Enemies” in the Journal of Israeli History. He writes: “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, a perusal of the Zionist sources reveals a wealth of charges against a diaspora Jew, some of which are so scathing that the generation that witnessed Auschwitz has difficulty comprehending them.”

Arthur Ruppin, a key figure in pre-1948 Zionism, openly said, “I'm anti-semitic, I have no time for these Jews.” When Arthur Balfour told Chaim Weizmann that he shared many of the same prejudices as Cosima Wagner, the wife of the German composer Richard Wagner, Weizmann said, “yes I too have problems with German Jews.”

This was common among Zionists. They had no problem with antisemitism.

Zionism, Socialism and Communism

In 1920, Winston Churchill wrote a famous essay “Zionism versus Bolshevism” in The Illustrated Sunday Herald. He believed there were good Jews, the Zionists, and there were bad Jews, the Communists, who lived in the East End of London and were always going on strike and causing trouble.

Zionist leaders like Herzel and Ben Gurion believed their main enemies were socialist and communist Jews. For socialists, the battle was not to secure Palestine in alliance with an imperialist power, the battle was to fight anti-Semitism where you were and to fight for better wages and economic conditions. For the Zionists, this was a waste of energy.

After the most famous 1903 Kishinev pogrom, Herzl visited the Tsarist Minister of Interior von Plehve and the Minister of Finance, Sergei Witte. The latter told Herzl, if he could kill six million Jews by drowning them in the Black Sea, he would, but he knew he couldn’t do that, so he supported Zionism [to rid the Russian Empire of its Jews].

Herzl went primarily to secure the legal status of the Zionist project in autocratic Tsarist Russia, where nearly all political movements were outlawed. But Zionism was accepted because it was seen as a useful movement. When Herzl began preaching Zionism to von Plehve, who organized the Kishinev pogrom, von Plehve said, you don't need to convince me, I am already a convert.

The Bund, the General Jewish Workers Union of Russia, Poland and Lithuania, was a mass movement of some 40-50,000 members in the early 1900s, whereas the Zionists were a petty bourgeois movement which sought to undermine the Bund and their struggles against anti-Semitism and poverty.

The Zionists did have a base in Russia and Poland, but as the struggle against anti-Semitism increased, the strength of the Zionists decreased. For example, in 1938, in the last three local council elections in Warsaw, Poland, the Bund won 17 seats, the Zionists won 1. Most Jews supported the Bund because they were the only ones seen as fighting anti-Semitism. 

There's a myth that the Rothchild family was a center of Zionism. As a family, the Rothchild’s were largely anti-zionist. When the Balfour Declaration was issued, a league of anti-zionist British Jews formed, and its first meeting included over 400 Jews all of whom were from the principal houses of British Jewry and the aristocrats. The meeting was held in New Court at the Rothchild’s business headquarters. Most of the Rothchilds -- Anthony Rothchild, Lionel Rothchild, Leopold Rothchild -- were anti-zionists. Walter was an exception, but his interest was zoology and he wasn’t much of an activist.

The Zionists and the Nazis

The overwhelming majority of Jews were horrified by the rise of Hitler and thus a spontaneous boycott of German goods sprung up. This coalesced by March 1933 into an organized movement, which had the Nazis terrified. On March 25th, 1933, Hermann Göring, a Nazi official, called the leaders of the Jewish community of Germany for a meeting. At first, the Zionist were not invited because they were a fringe movement. Eventually, they got themselves invited. Göring threatened them if they didn’t end the boycott. Whereas the non-Zionists made excuses and prevaricated, the Zionist leader Kurt Blumenfeld volunteered that they would be more than happy to oppose the boycott. 

The Zionists didn’t have a problem with the rise of Hitler. Berl Katznelson, deputy to Ben Gurion and editor of the Davar newspaper, mouthpiece of Mapai, the Israeli labor party, saw the rise of Hitler in a positive light: “An opportunity to build and flourish like none we have ever had or ever will have.” Ben Gurion was even more optimistic: “The Nazi Victory would become a fertile force for Zionism,” he said. The Zionist Emil Ludwig said, “Hitler will be forgotten in a few years but he will have a beautiful monument in Palestine.” The coming of the Nazis was rather a welcome thing.“Thousands who seemed to have completely lost Judaism were brought back to the fold by Hitler and for that I am personally very grateful to him.” Nachman Bialik, the national Zionist poet, was quoted as saying Hitlerism has perhaps saved German Jewry which was being assimilated into annihilation.

The Zionists could not move the Jewish masses in peacetime. It needed a catastrophe such as the rise 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 they needed to immigrate to Palestine. The Zionists were concerned over the rise of a refugee movement, what they called refugeeism, to try and save Jews and send them wherever possible. And so the Zionists lobbied and pressured the Gestapo, the secret police of Nazi Germany, to only allow them to go to Palestine.

Ben Gurion was quite clear that Jewish Agency funds should only be used for rescue by immigration to Palestine. He said rescue by assisting Jews to survive elsewhere was to be funded solely by private organizations. 

The Kindertransport was organized in the wake of Kristallnacht, the Nazi Pogrom of Nov. 9–10, 1938. Though the British had been parsimonious in allowing Jew  to come into Britain, they relented and agreed that 10,000 Jewish children from Germany would be allowed, albeit without their parents, most of whom perished in the Holocaust.

Ben Gurion stated in a memorandum to the Zionist Executive of 17th of December 1938. “If I knew that it would be possible to save all the children in Germany by bringing them over to England, or only half of them by transporting them to 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.”

Just a week later, he wrote a memo to the Zionist Executive outlining the problems that the Zionist faced. 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 of 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 the Zionist leadership, the main aim was to build the Jewish State. The opportunity presented by the Holocaust could not go to waste. Zionist energies could not go to saving Jews elsewhere.

The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 stripped nationality from the German Jews, Gypsies, Blacks, etc. They were not considered part of the national German collective. The Zionists were almost alone in welcoming it. They too believed that Jews were not Germans, they were Jewish nationals. 

The introduction to the Nuremberg Laws states that if the Jews had a state of their own, the Jewish question could already be considered solved today. The Zionists, of all people, had objected least of all to the basic ideas of the Nuremberg Laws, because they know these laws are the only correct solution for the Jewish people.

The Zionist Executive President Menachem 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 Christian.”

When Hitler came to power on Jan. 30, 1933, 99% of Jews were horrified and did all they could to try and overthrow that regime while it was weak. The chosen weapon was the Jewish boycott of Nazi Germany. The Jewish Chronicle mentions the boycott in every issue, for example. It was extremely effective. 

But the Zionists were absolutely opposed to the boycott. Edwin Black's book, The Transfer Agreement, documents it very thoroughly. There was a written agreement that came out of that opposition to the boycott, an agreement between the Nazis and the Zionists, signed on the 7th of August 1933.

A few months earlier, On May 18, 1933, Kol Yisrael, The Voice of Israel, the Zionist radio station, broadcasted that slogans calling for a boycott were 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.”

The agreement [between the Zionists and the Nazis] meant that if you had money in Germany, it could be put into a bank account, it was frozen in that bank. You would be given a thousand pounds from the money to qualify for entrance to Palestine, which meant automatic entry to Palestine, and then the money that was frozen in Germany was used to buy German goods, which were then exported to Palestine.

But the Zionists went further. They set up other companies, the Near East Company, for example, which sold these German goods in the Arab countries. There was a similar company set up in Europe, which also sold German goods around Europe. So the Zionist became the main sales agents for Nazi Germany. Palestine was flooded with German goods at the very same time that Jews in the US and Britain were saying, boycott German goods. In fact, Hitler pointed this out, that the Jews called for a boycott on the one hand, and yet they're the ones selling German goods on the other.

Leading up to the winter 1933, the Nazi economy was extremely weak. Edwin Black concluded that it was quite possible the Nazis could in that period have been overthrown, but the Zionist had an interest in stabilizing the Nazi regime. The historian David Cesarani says it wasn't wishful thinking that the German Nazi regime was tottering, this was a fact. The Investors Review, for example, also thought the Nazi regime could come to an end at the end of 1933. 

But that was the last thing that the Zionist wanted. They wanted the Nazi regime to stabilize. Between 1933 and 1939, 60% of capital investment in the Jewish Palestine economy came from Nazi Germany.