Explaining Zionism: Jewish Nationalism

• Palestinian Oppression
• Zionist Origins
• Judaism as Ideology
• Jewish Nationhood
• Antisemitism
• Nazi Collaboration
• Judenrats
• Racial Purity and Class Division

Palestinian Oppression

Palestinian refugees were driven off their land by Zionist invaders, who made it their own. Devoid of their homes, hundreds of thousands of Arabs barely managed to keep alive with the help of charitable organizations. Their children, wholly absorbed in getting hold of a crust of bread, did not attend school and knew none of the joys of youth. A whole generation of Arabs have been born and brought up in exile never having known their original homeland.

Four major wars and many lesser ones and uprisings flared up in the Middle East since 1948. Overrunning Arab settlements, Israeli troops left ruin and ashes in their wake. Anguish and suffering followed them everywhere they went. Mercy is unknown to Zionism.

Zionist Origins

Zionism became a political movement among wealthy Jews at the end of the nineteenth century, when European imperialism encouraged a nationalist ferment to aggravate class antagonism across the continent. It grew among Yiddish speaking Jews from central to Eastern Europe in the shadow of German nationalism, mimicking the German need for an ideology of identity as part of the last phase of European nationalist enthusiasm. Its proponents were German Jews, Theodor Herze, Moses Hess, and Max Nordau, and it was peculiar among German Yiddish speakers in comparison with Jews elsewhere that there was a growing modern secular culture ready to enter the European ferment of nationalist movements.

The term “Zionism” was first introduced in 1893 by Nathan Birmbaum, an Austrian Jew, but the spiritual father of the movement was Theodor Herze, another Austrian Jew, then on the editorial staff of the Neue Freie Presse, a Vienna newspaper. Born in the family of a rich emancipated Budapest merchant, he became completely assimilated, changing his Jewish name to an Austrian one—Theodor Herzl. Although he knew no Hebrew, nor Jewish history, Herzl became the ideologue of Jewish nationalism.

Capitalizing on a favourable situation which had developed after the case of Alfred Dreyfus, a captain in the French General Staff who was unjustly accused by antisemites of spying for Germany and who in 1894 was sentenced to penal servitude for life, Herzl was recognized as the founder of the Zionist ideology when he published his book, The Jewish State (1895), where he declared that the cure for antisemitism was the establishment of a Jewish state. As he saw it, the best place to establish this state was in Palestine. He called on the Jews not to sit and wait for the Messiah to come, but to quickly resettle “the land promised to them by God”, and establish a Jewish national state there. Despite his efforts, however, by 1914, ten years after his death, only 2 percent of German Jews were Zionists.

Herzl’s view was eagerly grabbed and upheld by his followers. Chaim Weizmann, then a chemistry professor at Manchester university in the UK, maintained that antisemitism is a bacillus which every man carries with him everywhere, regardless of his assurances to the contrary. Following mainstream Zionist rejection of that proposal, Weizmann was credited later with persuading Balfour, then the GB Foreign Minister, for British support to establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine, the original Zionist demand. Weizmann famously said:

There is a country which happens to be called Palestine, a country without people, and, on the other hand, there exists the Jewish people, and it has no country.

Palestine certainly did have a people—the Palestinians—but they were ruled for hundreds of years by the Ottomons. Apparently, because they did not rule themselves, Weizmann and his fellow Zionists could not see them. Yet the Jews had not ruled themselves since the time of Pompey, the Roman general in the first century BC! Neverthless, this slogan, “a country without a people for a people without a country” was used to recruit Jewish immigrants to Palestine. Weizmann also described the Palestinian people, “the rocks of Judea, as obstacles that had to be cleared on a difficult path”. In the 1920s, with Zionism still unpopular among Jews, Weizmann wrote:

I trembled lest the British Government would call me and ask: “Tell us, what is this Zionist Organization? Where are they, your Zionists?”… The Jews, they knew, were against us [the Zionists].

Weizmann eventually became president of the Zionist Organization (ZO). Founded in 1897, Herzl’s followers and supporters met at their first international congress in Basel, Switzerland, giving birth to the Zionist Organization. Mount Zion is a hill at the edge of Jerusalem, on which, according to the bible, king David, the mythical ruler of Judah, once lived. The Temple of Jerusalem, which became the centre of Judaism, was built there during the reign of David’s equally mythical son, King Solomon… allegedly!

The ZO became the WZO, the World Zionist Organization, which accepted no individuals as members, but united various political groups and parties—from the fascist-type Berut to self-styled labour and socialist ones like MAPAI and MAPAM. The WZO’s supreme body was the periodically convened Zionist Congress, delegates to which were appointed by the leaders of Zionist organizations in different countries. Originally, congresses were held every year, but later the intervals between them grew longer, until it became once every four years. The Congress elects the World Zionist Council which forms the executive committee with representatives in New York and Jerusalem. The WZO has branches in many countries consisting of the World Zionist Unions, international Zionist Federations, and international organizations calling themselves Zionist, such as WIZO, Hadassah, Bnai-Brith, Maccabi, the International Sephardic Federation, and the three streams of world Judaism—Orthodox, Conservative, Reform.

Judaism as Ideology

From the outset the WZO adopted Judaism, not as its religion—many of the Zionists were secular or actively atheistic—but as its ideology. The myths invented by Judaic priests about the Jews being God’s chosen people, about the Promised Land, the rising from ruins on Mount Sinai of a temple built by people freed from captivity by Cyrus the Persian and destroyed by Romans in 73 AD, and also the determination of the rabbis to preserve the separation of Jewish communities, accorded with the political aims of unscrupulous Zionist leaders. By applying religious dogmata to politics, Zionists seek to sow national discord among people, and extend the Judaic thesis about the Jews being God’s chosen people to claim that the Jews are a “noble race”, and “the purest race among the civilized nations of the world”. Having reconstructed a fourteenth century treatise written by Talmudic sages, they used it for a book of instruction in Israeli schools. It says Jews are “mankind’s elite” and that “people of other nationalities should be slaves to the Jews”.

Zionist propaganda claims that besides the “historical exclusiveness” of the Jewish race, the Jews possess greater ability and enterprise than European, Asian and African peoples. For this reason, goes the Zionist hypothesis, people of other races or nationalities envy the Jews, and fear them because they cannot compete with them, in equal situations. This, Zionists claim, causes the bitter hatred they arouse. Naturally, these ideas are scientifically unverified because they are purely invented. No race can remain pure in the course of many centuries of contact with other peoples. Attempts to prove “racial purity” are absurd, and do not differ from Nazi ideology. Far from being universally hated, Judaism is a culture that most people admire, but that Zionism is successfully undermining.

In their biblical myths, the Jews’ forebears, the Israelites, came to Palestine from the Sinai Desert around 1300 BC, and partly conquered then mixed freely with the indigenous population of Palestine, the Canaanites. In actual history, they were Canaanites who were introduced to a form of diluted Zoroastrianism by their Persian overlords in the fifth century BC. It is from Zoroastrianism that Jews derive their cleanliness taboos, Judaism having no theological explanation for them, whereas Zoroastrianism has.

The Persian colonists, the Judaic priesthood, forbade mixed marriages at that time. Despite that, with the demise of the Persian empire to Alexander’s Macedonians, the priests did marry with the native people, the Am ha Eretz, so “God’s chosen people” from then on were interbred, and they have interbred a good deal more since, for intermixing never stopped despite the ban. Besides that, the Persians allowed and perhaps required, non-Persian subjects to convert to Judaism, which they seem to have been setting up as a new religion for non-Zoroastrians as a stepping stone to conversion. Thus Jews have always been settled in other places in the world besides Palestine.

The Romans did not expel the Jews from Palestine after the Jewish War of 66-73 AD as most people seem to think. Proof enough is the Jewish rising under the messianic claimant, Bar Kochba, in 132-135 AD. If Jews were strong enough to rise against the Romans 70 years after the Jewish War and require several legions to be beaten, they obviously had not been expelled beforehand. Jews were expelled from Jerusalem, but not from Palestine, after this uprising. Hadrian made Jerusalem a city of Goyim, and called it Ælia Capitolina.

Some wealthier Jews—priests were largely the local ruling class, the princes and nobles—will have left Palestine to join the diaspora in the Roman and Persian empires, but most could only retreat to the countryside to live with relatives on smallholdings, like the Arab fellahin, or sell themselves as slaves. These Palestinian Jews differed from most in the diaspora in that the Persians had sent them as the priests of the new Jerusalem temple, and they felt more strongly, as priests, that they had to keep pure. The later diaspora rabbis—in an effort to preserve their influence and income—persistently opposed mixed marriages, and damned the apostates with terrible punishment in the next world, and organized Jewish separation in ghettos, if they failed to completely keep their congregations pure.

Jewish Nationhood

In their effort to prove a lack of distinctions among Jews, and the existence of a world Jewish nation, the Zionists adopted an absurd definition of “nation”. According to them, a nation is a community of people united by struggle against a common enemy. This definition would make all the peoples involved in war against Napoleon’s France or against Nazi Germany a single nation, and it certainly contradicts their own propaganda that there is no Palestinian nation. If there was not, the Zionists have created it.

Equally absurd was the Zionists’ attempt to declare Jews all over the world a single nation on the basis of Judaism, allegedly the common religion of them all. While it is true that the original designation of Jew was a worshipper of Yehouah, the god of the Jews, yet obviously now:

1. not all Jews believe in Yehouah and profess Judaism,
2. beliefs and convictions do not determine nationality, otherwise, all Catholics, Lutherans, Orthodox believers, and Buddhists, would have to be considered one nation.

So, there is no world Jewish nation which the Zionists claim to represent, nor was there ever such a nation. In those far-off days when the majority of the Jews lived as more or less compact communities, they, like other ethnic groups, could not become a “world nation”, or even an ordinary one, because there were no stable economic ties between them, which is an important condition for the emergence of a nation. Dispersed all over the world and having no such national characteristics as a common economy, land, language, dress, and common psychological traits, the Jews lacked the necessary requisites for nationhood:

What were the common elements in the ethnographic cultures of a Jew in Kiev and a Jew in Marrakech other than religious belief…?

Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People, 2009

The only Jewish nation arose originally when the Hasmonaean family of priests in Yehud led a rebellion against their Seleucid Greek rulers, and succeeded in liberating the temple state, and even its subjects were diverse and certainly did not all speak one language. Moreover, most were illiterate. It was notionally a theocracy, although practically it was ruled by the victorious noble family of the Hasmonaean princes. They declared the temple state an independent Jewish state, even though most Jews did not live there and never had done. Soon the Roman general Pompey took over Judah and renamed it Palestine after the earlier tribe whose name, the Philistines, had been given to the coastal land. The Jewish kingdom had lasted about a century.

Antisemitism

Readers may be shocked to learn that Herzl believed Zionism offered the world a welcome “final solution of the Jewish question”. Thus he, not the Nazis, coined that awful phrase. While claiming the establishment of a “Jewish” state would cure antisemitism, he also thought antisemitism should be used to further his Zionist cause. So the main argument for a mass emigration of Jews to Palestine for Herzl was what he called universal and uncontrollable antisemitism, since he believed that the people among whom the Jews lived were all either openly or secretly antisemitic.

Benny Morris, an Israeli Historian, described how Herzl foresaw that antisemitism could be “harnessed” for the realization of Zionism. He said:

Herzl regarded Zionism’s triumph as inevitable, not only because life in Europe was ever more untenable for Jews, but also because it was in Europe’s interests to rid the Jews and be relieved of antisemitism. The European political establishment would eventually be persuaded to promote Zionism. Herzl recognized that antisemitism would be “harnessed” to his own—Zionist-purposes.

Righteous Victims, 21

Theodor Herzl was one of the first to view antisemitism in a positive light. He said:

It is essential that the sufferings of Jews… become worse… this will assist in realization of our plans… I have an excellent idea… I shall induce antisemites to liquidate Jewish wealth… The antisemites will assist us thereby in that they will strengthen the persecution and oppression of Jews. The antisemites shall be our best friends.

Diaries, 1:16

and:

Anti-Semites will become our surest friends, antisemitic countries our allies.

Diaries, 19

Herzl wrote in his diary:

I’ve come to regard antisemitism more broadly. Historically, I’m beginning to understand and even forgive it. Moreover, I recognize the futility and uselessness of fighting antisemitism. A powerful and rather subconscious force, it is not harmful to the Jews. I consider it a useful factor in the development of Jewish individuality.

Another ideologist of Zionism, Vladimir Jabotinsky, who founded the ultra-Right Herut party and whom the Zionists idolized after his death, wrote in 1905:

In Zionist propaganda, antisemitism is of course very convenient and useful, especially as a principle.

In keeping with these theories, the followers of Herzl and Jabotinsky have invariably relied on antisemitism as scaremongering propaganda among Jews. They have provoked instances of antisemitism. David Ben-Gurion, a Zionist leader and Israel’s first Prime Minister, organized, through Zionist agents, the blowing up of a synagogue in Baghdad to provide proof of the persecution of Jews in Iraq and to justify the persecution of Arabs in Israel. He stated cynically that he would like to send specially picked young men to countries of Jewish mass settlement to promote antisemitic campaigns which would be more effective in getting Jews to emigrate to Israel than the call of the “ancient homeland”. Zionists see every Jew as a supporter, eager to return to the “land of his forefathers”. According to the logic of Zionists, and that of the rabid antisemitic pogromists, all Jews are either pro-Zionist or pro-communist.

Despite all lures and persuasion, and the support of capitalist countries, people prepared to seek happiness in a strange land with an unfamiliar climate and hard physical conditions were few. So Jewish emigration to Palestine remained slight and the Jewish population in Palestine grew only slowly. Zionist propagandists did not attain much success with their vivid descriptions of “an earthly paradise” in the “ancient homeland” or appeals to nationalist sentiments and the “call of the blood”.

Reflecting their origins and purpose, the methods used by the Zionists in winning over a considerable part of the Jewish poor are reminiscent of those used by the Nazis who, while upholding the interests of the financial oligarchy, managed, by means of demagogy, deception, and inflated nationalist sentiments, to enlist the mass support of the lower middle class and large sections of the German working people. In both cases antisemitism was used to advantage. The Nazis incited it, and the Zionists exploited the results. In making false promises of an earthly paradise in the Holy Land, they used the bogeyman of antisemitism to intimidate innocent people. They rightly regarded it as one of their chief propaganda cards, and happily capitalized on the slightest manifestations of it. They knew that antisemites strengthened Zionism.

Zionist reliance on antisemitism to further its aims continues still. Without a continued inflow of Jewish immigrants to Israel, within a decade its Jewish population will be the minority. So to maintain a Jewish majority, its leaders “encourage” Jews to leave their homelands and seek “refuge” by promoting antisemitism throughout the world. In some periods, it has worked. Studies of immigration records reflect increased immigration to the Zionist state when antisemitism is rife.

Nazi Collaboration

What the Zionist recruiting agents failed to achieve was done by Nazi terror. Rabid Nazi antisemitism and the wave of pogroms which swept Germany late on 9 November, 1938—ironically, that night was called Crystal Night, because the streets were covered with glass from the windows of Jewish shops and flats—to the Zionists were a blessing. In the first three years Hitler was in power, from 1933 to 1936, the Jews in Palestine increased by 50 percent. When the Second World War began, the influx of Jewish immigrants became particularly large. As the Nazis conquered more and more countries, the number of Jewish refugees grew.

Various Zionist organizations, working in contact with the Nazis, sent the refugees only to Palestine, refusing to cooperate with, and even hindering, those who wished to go to another country. Levi Eshkol—Lev Shkolnik when he was still a Slav—the future Israeli head of government, took an active part in setting up the Palestine Office in Berlin. This office sorted out Jewish refugees to be sent to their “ancient homeland”, selecting first of all Zionist activists, well to do men, and young people.

The departure of old men and women and poor people to Palestine was hindered with a host of pretexts. The extent to which the cynicism of the selectors went can be judged from the reply of the then head of the World Zionist Organization, Chaim Weizmann, to some British MPs who asked him whether it would be possible to move all the West European Jews to Palestine:

No, old people are out… They are dust, the economic and moral dust of the greater world…

In the face of the threat of physical extermination of the entire Jewish population of Germany, the Zionist “guardians” of the Jews were not concerned about saving the lives of elderly German Jews—they were only interested in expanding the Jewish colony in Palestine. It implies a Nazi holocaust of solely elderly Jews would have been acceptable to Zionist leaders like Weizmann.

They vigorously protested when the US President, Franklin D Roosevelt, expressed readiness to give asylum to half a million Jewish refugees from Europe. They insisted that the US Department of the Interior refuse permission to Jewish refugees from Europe to settle in Alaska, that only one door be open for Jewish emigrants—to Palestine. Thus they zealously saw to it that the victims of Nazi terror would get no other possibility of escape except to the Promised Land. Zionist agents continued just as zealously after WWII to obstruct Jews from going anywhere but Palestine. They persuaded the British authorities to forbid Jewish emigration to Western Australia. They reached agreement with the American and British authorities that Jews in “displaced persons” camps would have only one road to take—to Palestine.

That is how Zionist leaders treat in deeds, and not in words, such conceptions as the unity, brotherhood, and community of interests of the Jews which they spout in their propaganda. As a result of these coercive measures, by 1948 the Jewish community in Palestine numbered over 600,000 or one third of the population. This was also a result of the atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis, who acted in partnership with Zionists, as well as the use of deception and brute force rather than the appeal of Zionist propaganda.

The Zionists maintained close ties with fascist regimes of Pilsudski in Poland, of Mussolini in Italy, and of Antonescu in Romania. They even reached agreement with the Nazis. According to Julius Mader, a German journalist, the list of Zionists who collaborated with the Nazis consisting of 16 close typed pages. Years later Zionist dealings with the Nazis were revealed by such senior Zionist leaders as:

• Chaim Weizmann, the first President of Israel
• Moshe Sharett, his successor
• David Ben-Gurion, later Prime Minister of Israel
• Rudolf Kastner, the Hungarian Zionist leader...

Zionists even cooperated with SS Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann and SS Standartenführer Kurt Becher, two of Hitler’s henchmen who organized mass killings of Jews. Early in 1939, long before Hitler planncd his “final solution” of the Jewish question, Zionist leaders made a deal with Eichmann according to which the Nazis were to let a train of Jews leave for Palestine. The passengers on that train had been carefully selected, and included Zionist activists and Jewish capitalists. In return for that favour, Zionist leaders helped Eichmann to select 40,000 people from among the Jewish poor and workers and to send to extermination camps. Eichmann looked favourably on his Zionists friends for making his job easier.

According to the West German magazine, Der Spiegel, the chief of the Jewish Affairs Department of the Nazi intelligence service, von Mindelstein, cooperated with the Zionists in setting up special camps where young Jewish people were trained in farm work before they were sent to Palestine. Von Mindelstein closely followed Zionist propaganda. He even had a map in his department showing the spread of Zionism among the German Jews.

A vivid example of cooperation between the Zionists and the Nazis is Rudolf Kastner, the head of the Hungarian branch of the Jewish Agency and permanent delegate to the International Zionist Congress, and his assistants, including Grosz-Bandy Gyórgy, Moshe Schweiger, Moshe Kraus, Joel Brandt and his wife. They arranged with Eichmann and Becher to ransom Zionist activists and rich Jews held captive by the Nazis at 1,000 dollars each. The deal was to be kept secret. Zionist talk of “a lack of class distinctions” among Jews, “racial unity” and “unbreakable brotherhood” was forgotten at oncc. Later Kastner admitted that train accommodation was offered first of all to those who could pay the most in money or valuables!

The deal netted the Nazis $200,000, 200kg of gold, and 750g of platinum, to say nothing of other valuables and currencies. However, Kastner and company paid more than just “filthy lucre” to save the lives of their associates. In those days, hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews were concentrated in camps from which they were sent to Auschwitz to be exterminated. The camps were only a few miles away from the Romanian border, and Romania had already capitulated under the pressure of advancing Soviet armed forces. Had the inmates known that they were condemned to die they would have tried to escape, and it is not likely that the small force posted to guard them could have successfully stopped them. Enö Lévai, a Hungarian historian, writes:

Undoubtedly, if the hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews had known what fate awaited them, if they had been told about this, the Nazis could not have been able to herd them, like cattle, into the ghettos, and from there, just as easily, into death trains. They had not been informed by anyone. On the contrary, Jewish organizations, including the Jewish Agency, reassured them and urged them to comply with all the requests in order to avoid a greater evil.

This was the price that the Hungarian Zionist leaders willingly paid to rescue the businessmen who financed them and their disciples.

When the state of Israel came into being, Kastner was given a responsible post in the Ministry of Industry and Trade. He was also put in charge of the department of Kol-Israel—the Voice of Israel—broadcasting to Hungary and Romania.

In 1953, Kastner sued a journalist, M Greenwald, “for libel”. In his articles Greenwald had lifted the shroud of secrecy from Kastner’s treacherous activity in Hungary. Examined at a Jerusalem court the case finally backfired against Kastner. The testimony of witnesses and the authentic documents showed him to have been in collusion with the Nazis. At another trial held in Budapest, in May 1955, Kastner was conclusively exposed as a Nazi collaborator. When cornered, he admitted having collaborated with Eichmann, Becher and other killers of Jews. His frankness, however, cost him his life. On May 3, 1957, he was shot at in the street, and died in an Israeli hospital under somewhat obscure circumstances. During investigation of the shooting it was found that two of the three assailants were agents of the Israeli secret police. One of them told the court that he had acted under orders of the Israeli secret service. The Zionist leaders had succeeded in silencing their over-talkative associate.

Kastner was no exception among Zionists. S Mayer, the head of the Zionist branch in Switzerland, also ransomed his associates from the Nazis. He did this through SS Sturmbannführer Hans Eggen. The SS used the large sums turned over to Eggen to buy strategic materials, transport means and military equipment.

Judenrats

A horrible phenomenon was the cooperation of the Zionist Judenrats with the Nazis, helpng them to enforce their orders for lists of people to be taken in the ghettos to be murdered. They made up lists of inmates condemned to death, and they built up “an exchange fund” of persons to be exchanged for Zionist activists whenever the latter were included by the SS in the lists of persons marked for extermination. Hannah Arendt, a celebrated Jewish political thinkers, accused the Judenrats in her 1963 book Eichmann in Jerusalem. Without the Judenräte’s assistance in the registration of the Jews in ghettos, and, later, in the Jews’ deportation to extermination camps, many fewer Jews would have perished. The Germans could not have easily drawn up the lists of Jews they needed. The Nazis entrusted Jewish officials to make these lists, and information about the property they owned. The Judenräte also told the Jewish police to help Germans catch Jews and load them onto trains for concentration camps. Arendt wrote:

To a Jew this role of the Jewish leaders in the destruction of their own people is undoubtedly the darkest chapter of the whole dark story.

The Lwow Judenrat in the Ukraine included such Jewish capitalists as Heinrich Landsberg, Joseph Parnas, Eineugler, and Adolf Ratfeld. It had an administrative apparatus of about 3,000, and a police force of 750 men armed with rubber clubs. The latter helped the SS to keep discipline in the ghetto and to herd condemned persons into vehicles to be taken out and shot. The Nazis eventually assuming that those who betrayed their own kith and kin could also betray them, abolished the Judenräte and their Jewish police. But that disgraceful collaboration with the Nazi murderers remains one of the more hideous chapters in the history of Zionism.

The story of Dr Alfred Nossig, a veteran of the Zionist movement, was somewhat different from that of the Judenrat leaders. For many years he was a Gestapo informer and together with the Nazis worked out plans for exterminating poor and old Jews. He was 80 years old when he was captured, charged with treason, and executed by Warsaw ghetto militants.

Towards the end of the war, when it became clear that the Nazis would have to soon answer for their crimes, important Zionists readily entered into talks with them concerning their future relations. Gestapo and Nazi security service chiefs began meeting with N Masur, G Storch, the Sternbuch brothers and other Zionist leaders. Himmler received Masur in his office and he tried to ingratiate himself with H Storch, the Stockholm representative of the World Jewish Congress, in the hope of securing his protection in the future. Himmler promised Dr Musy, a former President of Switzerland who mediated between Himmler and the Zionists, to let small groups of Jews go to Switzerland according to lists made up by the Zionists. The transaction was to be paid for in foreign currency. In an effort to minimize the retribution coming to his chief, SS Brigadenführer Walter Schellenberg, one of Himmler’s right-hand men, wrote several articles printed in US newspapers, with the help of the organization of American rabbis, praising the respectability of Heinrich Himmler.

The Zionists did not fail Nazis. Thanks to their Zionist protectors quite a few Nazis escaped the hangman’s noose. For instance, when after the war SS Obergruppenfüher Hans Juttner, SS Standartenführer Kurt Becher, SS Obersturmbannführer Hermann Krumey and several other SS führers were tried by the US Nuremberg tribunal, the testimony of witnesses for the defence sent by Zionist organizations saved the lives of these criminals.

Obviously, a key factor here was that, prior to his arrest, Becher turned two trunks with gold and precious stones over to Moshe Schweitzer, who sent them, through the Palestinian representative of the Jewish Agency, Arman, to the Agency’s treasurer, Kaplan. These dealers were not abashed by the fact that the gold and stones had come from the SS account in the Reichsbank and had been supplied by death camps. Auschwitz alone yielded the SS nine tons of gold teeth every year.

It is perhaps a bitter paradox that it was with these funds that the Jad Washem Memorial, whose floor is laid with slabs bearing the names of Auschwitz, Majdanek, Tremblinka, Dachau, Bergen-Belsen, Babii Yar, and other places where mass extermination of Jews took place, was built on a hill near the western edge of Jerusalem, or that the Forest of Martyrs, consisting of six million trees—the number of Nazi victims—was planted. The men of Zion had too easily and too soon swept clean the record of their collaboration with the Nazis. Guided by the cynical principle that the end justifies the means, to achieve their goal, Zionists were ready to collaborate with absolutely anyone, to bargain with millions of Jewish lives and to betray their own people without compunction.

Racial Purity and Class Division

Jewish history has been developing in accordance with the general laws of historical progression, by class struggle between an exploiting class and those who were exploited. No arguments of a religious, racial or nationalist nature can substantiate the groundless Zionist assertions that the Jews are an exception to the rule, that to them neither property status, class distinctions, nor class struggle are of any consequence:

Among the Jews there are working people, and they form the majority. They are our brothers, who, like us, are oppressed by capital. They are our comrades in the struggle for socialism. Among the Jews there are kulaks, exploiters, and capitalists, just as there are among the Russians, and among people of all nations. The capitalists strive to sow and foment hatred between workers of different faiths, different nations and different races. Those who do not work are kept in power by the power and strength of capital. Rich Jews, like rich Russians, and the rich in all countries, are in alliance to oppress, crush, rob and disunite workers.

V I Lenin

In its entire history of over a century, Zionism has never, in any circumstances, put forward or supported slogans calling on the Jewish workers to struggle against the exploitation of the Jewish capitalists. The Zionists have never anywhere raised their voice in defence of Jewish workers against Jewish bankers, merchants and manufacturers. So the class character of Zionism is plain and shows whom it actually serves. Just like the German Nazis, they substituted nationalism for class struggle undermining not only the cause of the liberation of Jewish workers from capitalist oppression, but the workers of the world.

Zionists needed the myth of racial purity to justify their claim that class distinctions were alien to the Jewish nation. According to them, property status makes no difference to Jews. They are all one family within the bounds of one nation. They are all brothers and friends united by common interests. Together they oppose the hostile peoples surrounding them, and together they uphold their common interests.

In the tsarist Russian Empire, according to Zionist logic, it was not the workers of Russian, Ukrainian, Polish and other nationalities who were the friends and brothers of the Jewish workers, but the sugar manufacturer Brodsky, the bankers Ginsburg, Kaminka, and Brothers Polyakov, the tea king Vysotsky, the Franco-British millionaire family of Rothschild, the German capitalist Oskar Wassermann, the US financial magnates Jakob H Schiff, Henry Morgenthau, Bernard Deutsch, Otto Warburg, and others who invested capital in Russia’s industry and received tremendous dividends from their profiteering. The idea of a class peace so advantageous to the Jewish middle class was also favourably viewed by the non-Jewish middle class who were no less interested in substituting national antagonisms for class ones.

Leading up to the revolution in Russia, Zionist leaders stood aside, cynically stating in a policy paper that the Russian revolution would not solve the “Jewish problem”. Naturally, the tsar’s police approved. One of its chiefs, Zubatov, urged the police department to support the Zionists in every way. The Zionists actively cooperated with counter revolutionaries. The tsarist Minister of Internal Affairs and organizer of the Jewish pogrom in Kishinev received Herzl in 1903 and had a long and friendly talk with him. He completely approved the Zionists’ desire to set up a legal organization in Russia and promised to secure the “royal approval of the monarch”.

A Zionist activist, a lawyer named Hessen, kept closely in touch with the Monarchists. A political party advocating unlimited autocracy, it included important landowners, government officials, and clergymen. After the October 1917 socialist revolution, he associated with White Guards, the various armed detachments raised by former tsarist army officers to bring about a civil war—a tactic western governments still use, as in Syria today—and fight against the socialist republic, and did his best to justify the Jewish pogroms they organized. During the Civil War, another Zionist leader, Pasmanik, urged Jews to cooperate with the anti-socialist armies. When Soviet power was consolidated, he fled to Paris where he took part in planning external anti-Soviet military plots.

Zionism is an ideological tool of capitalism in the era of imperialism. It is the way Jewish capital cooperates with world capital and the forces of imperialist reaction to achieve their global ends. The Zionist state, Israel, is central to that role.

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• I Abuelaish, I Shall Not Hate, 2011
• R Brodsky, The Truth about Zionism, 1974
• S Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People, 2009