33 thoughts on “Guardian’s Peter Beaumont “Piles on” Ken Livingstone, Mangles Nazi-Era and Zionist History – Tikun Olam תיקון עולם إصلاح العالم
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  1. The Haavara, or Transfer Agreement is a complex historical subject that has drawn the attention of several detailed books and research papers. That a true bigot named Livingstone reduces this complexity to, ‘Hitler supported Zionism’, speaks volumes.

    Yet. There are people that support Livingstone.

    1. @ Bernie: Ah yes, the Zio-crowd use “complex” in place of saying “morally compromising.” because they can’t admit that Zionism has ever behaved in a morally compromised fashion. Livingstone is no more a bigot than you are. You’re not a bigot, are you?

      Your comment shows you haven’t even bothered to read my post. Because if you had you’d understand that Livingstone was precisely historically correct in the thrust of his view, even if he expressed himself slightly inelegantly or over dramatically.

      1. @Tony
        @Richard

        The Haavara Agreement saved 60,000 German Jewish lives.
        How many German Jewish lives did the boycott ( of Nazi Germany) save?

        Yes. The Haavara Agreement is complex, and Ken Livingstone’s mindless hate of Zionism qualifies him as a Britain always had a lot of Jew haters. Today’s Jew haters include many from the Pakistani community, to whom Livingstone, Shah, Galloway, etal, pander to for votes.

        1. @ Bernie X: THe number I have read is 20,000 Jews, not 60,000. But as Tony says in his comment, the main purpose was not to save Jews but to help the financial bottom line of the Yishuv & Nazi Germany by confiscating the wealth of Jews who emigrated.

          How many German Jewish lives did the boycott ( of Nazi Germany) save?

          The boycott was not prosecuted to the end. If it had continued after 1933, instead of being cancelled by U.S. Zionist leadership, it could’ve had a huge impact.

          Ken Livingstone’s mindless hate of Zionism qualifies him as a Britain always had a lot of Jew haters.

          That’s a major comment rule faux pas. You WILL NOT conflate anyone attacking Zionism with someone who hates Jews. You do that again & you’re moderated. Mark me well.

          Today’s Jew haters include many from the Pakistani community

          Same goes for this Islamophobia nonsense. I won’t stand for it. DO it again & you’re history.

          1. @Bernie X: You’ve just exceeded your daily 3 comment a day limit. Since you seem deliberately hogging the threads you will be moderated. Your next violation will result in banning.

          2. @ Bernie X: Robert Mackey in The Intercept today said the number was 20,000:

            Just months after Hitler came to power, in 1933, the Zionist-led Jewish Agency in British-administered Palestine did strike an agreement with the Nazis to facilitate the emigration of about 20,000 German Jews to Palestine over the next decade.

            Since he links to Tom Segev in the next sentence, that may very well be his source. If it is, Tom Segev is the gold standard for me.

            Yad VaShem also puts the number at 20,000 here.

            And I note that your source says that “most” of the 60,000 came under Haavara. That means Haavara brought less than 60,000, though we don’t know how many less.

        2. …”and Ken Livingstone’s mindless hate of Zionism qualifies him as a Britain always had a lot of Jew haters”….

          It’s like watching a cheap pea ‘n’ thimble trick, only it is one where the word “Zionism” appears and then disappears from view only to have – abracadabra! – the word “Jew” appear in its place.

          Or didn’t you even notice your own sleight of hand, Bernie?

          The “logic” is this: Livingstone doesn’t like Zionism, ergo, he hates Jews.
          It is, so sorry, an illogical form of logic.

          Try this one: Livingston is scared of soccer hooligans, ergo, he doesn’t like soccer.
          That one is equally “logical”, and equally inapt.

          1. Bernie: I consider this little more than anti Semitism porn. It’s based on flimsy lies & distortions. I refuse to waste my time rebutting this utter dreck. If you post more of this you will be moderated or banned. You’ve been warned.

          2. I wasn’t commenting on the Labor Party, Bernie.

            I was pointing out that your argument requires you to assume a-priori that because someone doesn’t like Zionism that *must* mean that they hate Jews.

            There is, of course, another possibility – they look at what Zionism has done both to that region and to their own society, and they are concerned about that far more than they are concerned about racial and ethnic identity.

            But such thinking appears to be very, very foreign to you.

        1. @Bernie: I read the piece and though the writer is a professor, his grasp of historical sources is both weak & tendentious. Refute my historical sources. That’s a meaningful argument. What you are doing is nattering.

  2. Richard,

    there are a few mistakes here too.

    Lehi broke off from Irgun under the command Yair Stern, hence the Stern Gang. It called itself, I believe Irgun B but it was Lehi not the Irgun under Begin which proposed, twice, an agreement with the Nazis. Lehi was commanded by a triumvirate of 3, which included Shamir. Begin had nothing to do with the group.
    http://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1099/weapon-of-choice/
    The purpose of Ha’avara was not to save German Jews. Zionism was only interested in selective immigration – Weizmann and Ruppin among others made this crystal clear. They did not seek a rescue of Germany Jewry but wanted to ‘rescue’ their wealth. Immigrants got maybe 20% of their wealth back.

    Finally although he is a good comrade, it was me who first used the term’ weaponising anti-Semitism’ and indeed weaponising the holocaust in an article in Weekly Worker!

    1. @ Tony Greenstein: Thanks Tony. They were editing errors rather than mistakes. I caught my error before publication but only changed “Lehi” to “Irgun” in two places and missed the other references to the incorrect reference. That’s corrected now.

      I had no idea you coined the term. Brilliant. Will give credit where it’s due from now on.

  3. I think it is pretty appalling how labour members who in all likelihood are privately holding with the hare, but publicly running with the hounds, are now trying to cover their respective rear ends, all in “righteous indignation”. What are they scared off for Pete’s sake?

    In this place we happily stick with the hare. Thanks Richard.

    I read that Ken Livingstone is referring to publications by Lenni Brenner to defend his comments. What I know about it I also got from Brenner. I am not aware of any respectable attempts to refute him. In addition, Richard, to sentences of that notorious letter that you published, here is a copy of a post that I placed on this site earlier and that contains the full text of the letter as I found it in Brenner. What, apart from the appalling proposal as such, especially got me in that text were the words “Volkisch-national Hebraicum”. In Nazi terminology the word “Volk”had a very special meaning and was closely linked to the “Blut und Boden” (blood and soil) complex, the ideological underpinning of a racist – territorial exclusivism.

    The following document was published in Lenni Brenner’s “Zionism in the Age of the Dictators”, the publication to which Ken Livingstone is referring

    “An alliance between his (Stern’s) movement and the Third Reich was discovered in the files of the German Embassy in Turkey. The Ankara document called itself a ‘Proposal of the National Military Organisation (Irgun Zvai Leumi) Concerning the Solution of the Jewish Question in Europe and the Participation of the NMO in the War on the side of Germany.’ (The Ankara document is dated 11 January 1941. At that point the Sternists still thought of themselves as the ‘real’ Irgun, and it was only later that they adopted the Fighters for the Freedom of Israel –Lohamei Herut Yisrael– appellation.) In it the Stern group told the Nazis:

    The evacuation of the Jewish masses from Europe is a precondition for solving the Jewish question; but this can only be made possible and complete through the settlement of these masses in the home of the Jewish people, Palestine, and through the establishment of a Jewish state in its historical boundaries…

    The NMO, which is well-acquainted with the goodwill of the German Reich government and its authorities towards Zionist activity inside Germany and towards Zionist emigration plans, is of the opinion that:

    1. Common interests could exist between the establishment of a New Order in Europe in conformity with the German concept, and the true national aspirations of the Jewish people as they are embodied by the NMO.

    2. Cooperation between the new Germany and a renewed volkish-national Hebraicum would be possible and

    3. The establishment of the historical Jewish state on a national and totalitarian basis, and bound by a treaty with the German Reich, would be in the interest of a maintained and strengthened future German position of power in the Near East.
    Proceeding from these considerations, the NMO in Palestine, under the condition the above-mentioned national aspirations of the Israeli freedom movement are recognized on the side of the German Reich, offers to actively take part in the war on Germany’s side.

    This offer by the NMO… would be connected to the military training and organizing of Jewish manpower in Europe, under the leadership and command of the NMO. These military units would take part in the fight to conquer Palestine, should such a front be decided upon.

    The indirect participation of the Israeli freedom movement in the
    [268]

    New Order in Europe, already in the preparatory stage, would be linked with a positive-radical solution of the European Jewish problem in conformity with the above-mentioned national aspirations of the Jewish people. This would extraordinarily strengthen the moral basis of the New Order in the eyes of all humanity.

    The Sternists again emphasised: ‘The NMO is closely related to the totalitarian movements of Europe in its ideology and structure.’602”

  4. @Richard:
    This is a good example of what I was talking about in my comment on the previous post
    I’ll assume that all of your facts are correct here. So what’s the interpretation?
    Why is this even important for Israel critics to bring up?

    In world history, all kinds of parties, including adversaries, cooperate at various times or in limited circumstances, because of shared interests. This is the reality of diplomacy. Very frequently countries make “deals with the devil”, because of specific common goals. I think that this Nazi-Yishuv cooperation falls into this category. We can be sure that both sides had to hold their noses when dealing with the other side.

    So I return to the question: Why is this news for the anti-Israel crowd?

    Its the way you weave the story. By rhetorically drawing a parallel between the Nazis and the Zionists, even by using them in the same sentence, there is the unstated but very clear implication that Zionism is somehow like Nazism, and/or the Zionists somehow supported or helped the Nazi’s murderous plans in the holocaust.

    Many countries and entities cooperated with Nazi regime, in various spheres, especially early on, yet nobody claims that they are like the Nazis or are guilty of anything. Guilt by association is selectively applied to the Zionist Jews.

    So rather than looking at the agreement as a sad chapter in a long series of events in a tragic period, the anti-Israel crowd uses it as “proof”– “weaponizing” Nazism so to speak– that the Israeli Zionist are like the Nazis.

    This also speaks to your Kantian morality, Richard. Evidently, you feel that making a deal with the devil is always prohibited. Perhaps it also explains your bitter condemnation of any Palestinian groups who cooperate with Israelis. Yet this has always been part of diplomacy and realpolitik, everywhere. Groups whose interests align will work together, even if they disagree in other areas.

    Believe me, Richard, I could flood my comments with dozens of links supporting my view, but I think its pointless, because the argument here is mainly ideological. Behind your dissection of the facts in these posts is ideology– thus your tendentious dismissal of extreme or anti-Semitic statements as being “dramatic”, or re-framing an agreement of convenience with Zionist Jews as “a partnership” with the Nazis.

    1. Yehuda says: In world history, all kinds of parties, including adversaries, cooperate at various times or in limited circumstances, because of shared interests. This is the reality of diplomacy. Very frequently countries make “deals with the devil”, because of specific common goals. I think that this Nazi-Yishuv cooperation falls into this category.

      Yes as did the Hitler-Chamberlain appeasement and the Ribbontrof-Molotov pact but that does not stop, nor should it, criticism of those historical events. The Zionists have succeeded remarkably in suppressing their deal with the devil.

  5. @Yehuda

    This was not a merely an opportunistic pact with the devil. There are clear parallels here having to do with a racial-territorial exclusivism (“Blut und Boden”).

    The fascist tendencies of post-war Zionism were drawn attention to in that letter to the New York Times that was signed by Einstein, Hannah Arendt and some lesser luminaries.

    A copy was recently published on this site .

    It strikes me as hugely ironical (if such a word can be used about this drama) that ultimately that racial-territorial exclusivism might have to be given up and that the situation will then be what the Palestinians proposed after the war in the first place: sharing the country on the basis of equal rights for all. And that after that enormous detour full of blood and tears.

    1. Arie Brand:

      Only a visionary imagines that Israeli “territorial exclusivism” “will have to be given up” at least any more than it already has been willingly “given up” by occupation-of-the-whole (and colonization-of-the-whole).

      Israel has practiced a form of 1SS since 1967, the more so as the colonization of the West Bank has progressed to include about 10% of the Israeli-Jewish population ( I count occupied Jerusalem as “occupied” and “colonized-under-occupation”). But this is 1SS-apartheid, not 1SS-mainly-Jewish and certainly not 1SS-democratic-mixed.

      Where does anyone see forces gathering themselves together to force/require/even-arm-twist Israel to grant full non-discriminatory citizenship to all the non-Jews (or is it non-“Jews” considering some of the Russians?) And aren’t those nuclear weapons ready to be used (as a threat at least) to oppose any such pressure? Of course, creating such pressure is a purpose of BDS, but not a purpose clearly likely to succeed anytime soon.

      Israel these days is apparently willing to maintain apartheid (mixed with pressure on non-Jews to emigrate) til the cows come home (or until climate change makes The Land (or indeed the whole middle east) uninhabitable.

      I think the threat/promise of Israel being forced to give up its Jewish character is a sop to those (liberal Zionists?) who cannot stomach what they’ve seen since 1967: the alternatives: in intended perpetuity.

      1. @Pabelmont

        Well yes, perhaps not in our lifetime (I am also pretty long in the tooth). But when it becomes obvious that with increasing settlement Israel-Palestine has in fact become one state, the oppression of a very large part of its inhabitants will also become more obvious. The U.S would have to deny the history of its own civil rights movement to keep supporting that.

    2. Attributing to Nazism’s chief ideological enemy and victim, the characteristics of the Nazis themselves seems to me to be the height of absurdity, not to mention bad will.
      Racial theories were rampant in Europe and the US will into the 20th century. Eugenics was taught in academic circles in American Universities until WW2.
      So singling out some of the 1930s Zionists seems to be hypocrisy. Zionism means having a Jewish State, period. A homeland for the Jewish people. Not another country in which Jews will be guests. If you want to call that “racial-territorial exclusivism” go ahead. For some reason you don’t seem to have a problem with historic claims to exclusive Palestinian rights to the land.
      Again, I ask, what is the relevance now? For what purpose would somebody try to criticize Israel now by claiming that Zionists made an agreement with Nazis?
      It’s not being said for historical-academic reasons. It’s being made as a political statement: “Israelis are like Nazis. The Israelis are committing genocide”. Never mind what is happening to Israel’s neighbors, where there actually is genocide.
      Haven’t heard a word from Livingstone about the slaughter in Syria, Iraq or Libya.
      Let’s single out the Jewish state, those evil Zionists.

      So tell me, who is “weaponizing” the Nazis?

      1. @ Yehuda: Sorry, buddy but you’re going to have to deal with the facts rather than having a general emotional allergic reaction to this subject. Just because Jews were victims of the Nazis later, doesn’t mean that in the 1930s and up till the War, other Zionist Jews wouldn’t have found reason to make common cause in certain areas.

        As for racial theories, of course there were and are racists in many countries, but in only a very small handful of countries have people turned those racial theories into genocidal action. So doing the hasbara thing, which you are, of saying: Oh, but the Zionists in the 30s did what all others were doing at the time–that doesn’t cut it.

        Zionists did business with the Nazis because they had something the Zionists wanted: they had Jews and they had property that could be turned into cash. It was a cold, practical transaction on both sides.

        Now if you wish to argue the goal of founding the future Jewish state justified such abandonment of moral principle, that’s a position one might argue (& Zionists do). Not a strong one, & quite cynical. But it’s an argument, to a point.

        Again, I ask, what is the relevance now? For what purpose would somebody try to criticize Israel now by claiming that Zionists made an agreement with Nazis?

        As for why now? For that you’d have to ask all the Israel Lobby folks why they’ve chosen this timing to make this preposterous argument that anti-ZIonism is anti-Semitism. That is what brought us here. Livingstone was merely defending himself and the Labor Left when the crap hit the fan. You might suggest to your friends in the Lobby that they back off the witch hunt hysteria. Then things can return to normal. As long as the Lobby suggests that anti-Zionists are anti-Semites then historical sources & arguments like this will persist.

        Never mind what is happening to Israel’s neighbors, where there actually is genocide.
        Haven’t heard a word from Livingstone about the slaughter in Syria, Iraq or Libya.

        Oh please, really? IS that the best you can do? Echoing the hasbara brigade and hundreds of similar, boring, repetitive comments like it published here in the deep dark past.

        You know the comment rules well enough to know you are way off topic. And that you are employing hasbara tactic 1.000.1: divert & distract.

        You will not do that again here. Understand me well.

  6. Richard:

    I addres the question: Did the Ha’avara agreement have a purpose of promoting Zionist statehood?

    I see the Ha’avara agreement is being intended by the Zionists to acquire money (and people) for Zionist purposes, that is, to build an eventual state. But I don’t see why that purpose need be ascribed to the Nazis as well. They may have seen Zionist statehood as a possibility, sure, but not as a sure thing and not as a purpose of their own. Since the Nazis had the power — which they eventually used, as I understand it, to confiscate all Jewish property, I believe this agreement must have been made at a time when the Nazis were not ready to perform such confiscation and therefore were “getting something out of it for themselves” — getting some of the Jewish wealth and getting rid of the Jewish people. Later they must have seen it as cheaper (and acceptable) to load Jews on trains to Poland and seize their property.. Or perhaps the agreement intended to reach Jewish property not located inside Germany — as foreign bank accounts.

    BTW, once the Jews had been sent off to Poland, they became “absentees” and their property could properly be seized by a german “administrator of absentee property”. At least, if Germany had created this sort of legal set-up it could have been so. Recently some Jewish families have had some luck recovering paintings taken by the Germans. Was it argued that the germans had not taken these paintings “legally” or merely that, under “winners law”, the losers (Germany) did not get to keep what they’d taken? [Disclosure: my late wife’s family owned some property in Israel-48 for which they hold a certificate from Israel that it was not absentee property.]

  7. Richard, three paragraphs from the Wikipedia page on the Haavara agreement shed a bit more light.

    The Haavara Agreement was an agreement between Nazi Germany and Zionist German Jews signed on 25 August 1933. The agreement was finalized after three months of talks by the Zionist Federation of Germany, the Anglo-Palestine Bank (under the directive of the Jewish Agency) and the economic authorities of Nazi Germany.

    (How come the Jewish Agency was able to issue directives to the Anglo-Palestine Bank?)

    Jews fleeing persecution in Nazi Germany could use some of their assets to purchase German manufactured goods for export, thus salvaging some part of their personal wealth during emigration. The agreement provided a substantial export market for German factories in British-ruled Palestine. Between November, 1933, and December 31, 1937, 77,800,000 Reichmarks, or $22,500,000, (values in 1938 currency) worth of goods were exported to Jewish businesses in Palestine under the program.[7] By the time the program ended with the start of World War II, the total had risen to 105,000,000 marks (about $35,000,000, 1939 values).

    Hitler’s own support of the Haavara Agreement was unclear and varied throughout the 1930s. Initially, Hitler criticized the agreement, but reversed his opinion and supported it in the period 1937-1939.

    1. You already posted a Ynetnews article about these two guys …..
      And the Telegraph-article is full of BS, and so are you.
      There is nothing about “Jews” in the Tweet about “stop drinking Gaza blood” which was tweeted during the 2014 Israeli agression on Gaza. The Tweet is published in the article, and it’s not because the journalist is dishonest that you have to be so too.
      Another example: “Bradford councillor Mohammed Shabbir sent tweets about a “Palestinian Holocaust in Gaza” and repeatedly used the term “Zio”, which is offensive to those of Jewish faith.”
      Wow, so “Zio” is offensive to ‘those of Jewish faith”. What about the Jewish atheists ? The non- or anti-Zionist Jews ? The non-Jewish Zionists ? That journalist doesn’t know what she talking about.
      Another exemple: the repeated manipulation about Vicki Kirby tweeting “Jews have big noses”. She tweeted a line from a film by a Jewish director and clearly indicated that by the hashtag of the film, the director confimed that on Twitter too.
      Electronic Intifada published a very long article debunking many of the “antisemitic” statements a couple of days ago, a long part was dedicated to the Kirby-case, and also to the fact that the Labour student from Oxford used to work for some-Hasbara organization. What a coincidence.

  8. @Yehuda

    “It’s not being said for historical-academic reasons. It’s being made as a political statement: “Israelis are like Nazis””

    Of course it is a political statement (which in itself does not reflect on its veracity). Do you think that when Professor Leibowitz coined the term 
“Judeo Nazi” he was trying to contribute to history? No – he was directly commenting on the political situation in Israel (that since his time has got a lot worse).

    Or do you hold that when Sir Gerald Kaufman said in the House that a certain answer about the Gaza campaign by Tipi Livni was “the answer of a Nazi” he was merely trying to point to a fortuitous coincidence?

    No – he was deeply disturbed by the free pass that Israelis were trying to give themselves for their deeds by pointing to their own history of martyrdom. He remarked, among other things, that the fact that his own grandmother was shot dead in her bed by a German soldier did not give a licence to Israeli soldiers to do the same to Palestinian grandmothers.

    “Attributing to Nazism’s chief ideological enemy and victim, the characteristics of the Nazis themselves seems to me to be the height of absurdity, not to mention bad will.”

    Jews were indeed the main victims of Nazism. Among those Jews were Zionists (not all that many at that stage). From these two facts it doesn’t follow that Zionists were the “chief ideological enemy” of Nazism. Whatever the other differences between Zionists and their persecutors
    in their racial-territorial exclusivism they were (and are) much alike.

    When I think of the chief ideological enemies of Nazism in relation to my country of origin, the Netherlands, I look in the first place at the Committee of National Vigilance against National Socialism that was founded in 1936. Among the dozen or so prominent people who took the initiative and are mentioned in Wikipedia there was only one person of Jewish origin, Rosa Manus, who died in Ravensbrück. Rosa Manus had been active her whole life in feminist and pacifist movements. I can’t find a trace of Zionism.

    “Racial theories were rampant in Europe and the US will into the 20th century. Eugenics was taught in academic circles in American Universities until WW2.
    So singling out some of the 1930s Zionists seems to be hypocrisy.”

    I will tell you what I find the height of hypocrisy Yehuda. It is the suggestion that that racism is in Israel merely a matter of the past – like the racial theories held in some parts of European and American academe, just an unfortunate trait of some early Zionists. It isn’t. It is alive and well. When the Israeli academic you seem to be looking up to, Benny Morris, talks of Palestinians as “wild beasts” that need to be caged what else is that than the vilest racism? Can you imagine what would happen to a prominent American academic if he spoke in that way about the blacks?

    “Haven’t heard a word from Livingstone about the slaughter in Syria, Iraq or Libya. Let’s single out the Jewish state, those evil Zionists.”

    The eternal Israeli dodge: the others are worse. Well perhaps they are (though offhand I don’t know another example of the systematic harassment and expropriation Israel engages in). But the big difference is, dear Yehuda, that what these others are doing is not being given a free pass “given the circumstances” (that are always suggested to be inherently exculpatory in the case of Israel), given a free pass by tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of commentators, literate commentators, educated commentators, commentators who often have crucial positions in communications. Compared to that mighty apologetic chorus, our puny endeavours here and on some other blogs sound like whisperings in the dark. That mighty apologetic chorus doesn’t only want a free pass for Israel, it wants a free pass for its own tunes. Whatever protests these might arouse can be dismissed as anti-Semitism. Thus protests against Israeli racism are dismissed as racism. Are there any other human rights violators that habitually come up with such an absurd defence?

  9. Palestine was not the preferred country of migration for anti-Zionists. It was the USA.

  10. [comment deleted: you have been previously warned for violating comment rules. You are now moderated.]

    1. @ Bernie X: You are insufferable & now moderated. I can’t stand snark like yours. Good riddance. The next comment you publish that breaks the rules will result in your banning entirely.

        1. @ Bernie X: You linked to an article from the friggin’ BICOM hasbara publication, moron. That’s the UK Israel Lobby, the very body seeking to bury Left Labour.

          You are done in this thread. Publish another comment in this thread & I’ll be glad to ban your ass.

          You are using multiple IP addresses to post comments. It either means you are using IP addresses in public settings or you’re using proxy addresses. Some of your IPs are based in Switzerland, which is not where I believe you live. If you’re using proxies, you are under even deeper suspicion as you’re trying to protect your identity from being known. Then again, you may be working for MFA or IDC & their propaganda factory, which is why you have access to so many different IP addresses.

          You use the name “St. Bernardus” in your e mail address. The notion of comparing yourself to a saint is utterly ridiculous.

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