https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/nora-barrows-friedman/podcast-ep-68-how-zionists-collaborated-nazis
On episode 68, we speak with activist and blogger Tony Greenstein, a veteran of the Palestine solidarity movement in the UK, about his new book Zionism During the Holocaust: The Weaponization of Memory in the Service of State and Nation.
With an anti-Zionist analysis, Greenstein’s book dives into the history of the Zionist movement’s collaboration with the far right, even including Nazi Germany, while seeking to build the state of Israel.
“You have to see Zionism as a racial project to perpetuate the Jewish people, you can’t understand it any other way,” he tells us. “It wasn’t to create a refuge for Jews or anything else. It was a perpetuation of the Jewish nation-race.”
Greenstein analyzes the Zionist movement’s settlement policy before, during and after the Nakba – the expulsion of 800,000 Palestinians in 1947-1948 – and how Zionist leaders “consciously ignored” the Nazi genocide against Jewish Europeans in order to grab land in Palestine.
He says that in the early 1940s, Zionists “not only were not bothered about the Holocaust, they actively tried to stop anyone who wanted to provide a refuge from doing so. And that was the amazing thing. They had a weird and incredible logic. But it was their logic.”
The Zionist logic, he adds, “was that where there are Jews, there is anti-Semitism. Jews cause anti-Semitism, because they are living in the countries of other people. In the words of [Israeli novelist] A.B. Yehoshua, they are guests in other people’s hotels, and of course, they’ve outstayed their welcome.”
Transplanting Jews from Nazi-occupied Europe to America or Britain, he explains, “would not solve the problem. It would simply recreate anti-Semitism in another place. So you had to be cruel to be kind and say the only place of settlement was Palestine.”
He also talks about the reasons behind Israel’s current alignment with far-right regimes and governments.
“Israel has no hesitation in cooperating with neo-Nazi regimes and movements. Is it any wonder? We have a Jewish Nazi party, which is set to become the third largest in the Knesset [Israel’s parliament] now,” he explains, in reference to the Religious Zionism party, which looks set to win a ministerial seat in the next government.
“If you establish an ethno-nationalist state, what you do accords with the logic of what the Nazis did as well. That’s the fate of ethno-nationalist states, which is why neo-Nazis today love Israel, because really, what is there not to like about it? As [American far-right figure] Richard Spencer says, ‘I’m a white Zionist.’”
