Ken Livingstone and Naz Shah

Here's an article on Ken Livingstone by David Rosenberg of the Jewish Socialist Group.  In it he seems to come on the side of those seeking Ken's expulsion from the Labour Party:

If  Livingstone had had the nous, he would have simply noted Shah’s acknowledgement that she had crossed a line into antisemitism, welcomed her apology and then used all the weight of his background in anti-racism in London to utterly condemn the Tories for their thoroughly racist campaign against Khan. That could,  and should, have been the story. Instead he tried to excuse Shah’s tweets as “completely over the top but … not antisemitic”. Immediately after this came his infamous remarks about Hitler and Zionism.

David goes on to take exception to Ken invoking Lenni Brenner as a source for his Hitler/Zionism remarks.  David finds Brenner's work wanting.

Brenner’s book reads much more like tabloid journalism than any serious academic study. It makes crude allegations of Zionist-Nazi collaboration, treats the actions of some Zionists as representing all Zionists, and utterly distorts the power relations between Zionists and Nazis.

Within the same article David mentions the main victims of Zionism who have been absent from most of this bogus antisemitism campaign, the Palestinians:

this whole effort to try to find evidence of Zionists behaving badly in the 1930s in order to expose the way Zionism behaves today, is such a poor way of supporting the Palestinians and their just demands. It rests on too many crude generalisations. You do not have to go back to Hitler and the 1930s in order to expose and challenge the oppression of Palestinians by Zionist ideology and practice today.

I have a few problems with David Rosenberg's take on all this and here's something I wrote elsewhere:

Did Naz Shah actually apologise specifically for saying "the Jews are rallying" for Israel or was it a more mealy mouthed showtrial sort of apology couched in terms that failed to pinpoint what she had actually said that was antisemitic?  I thought it was the latter. In fact the more she apologised the more she seemed to be saying something like, "I'm sorry I said whatever I said, I had no idea of the extent to which the Jews rally for Israel".

And did Ken Livingstone actually make an intervention? Or was he invited to a radio interview with Vanessa Feltz? I thought that was the latter.

The first mention of Hitler was by Feltz and Ken responded.  He seemed to be pointing up the hypocrisy of the Zionist movement on the whole question of Nazi Zionist collaboration or of comparisons between Israel and the Nazis.

Certainly Ken invoked Lenni Brenner as a source but there are many sources to support the idea of Zionist collaboration with the Nazis including some that say that Hitler himself must have intervened to maintain Ha'avara when other leading Nazis were against it.

I think to gift the Zionists by throwing Ken under the bus when the NCC seems to have deliberately avoided examination of what Ken (and by extension, Naz Shah) actually did say would be a major mistake not least because if Ken's offence in the eyes of the NCC was to defend Naz Shah then what becomes of people who defended Ken?

My own view is that the NCC didn't expel Ken and avoided discussion of the "historical facts" because, as David said, most of what Naz Shah said wasn't antisemitic and what she did say that was antisemitic was no different from what most Zionists say (and indeed did say at that appalling select committee).  

The NCC avoided what Ken said about Hitler, Nazism and Zionism because what Ken said was broadly correct regardless of whether we run with Lenni Brenner as a source or not.  (eg, see this)

Of course this isn't now simply about the NCC charges. Ken is now being condemned for defending himself whenever the opportunity presented itself.

Regarding whether or not an exposé of Zionist collaboration with antisemitism or nazism is good or bad for the Palestinians is irrelevant given that Ken isn't being accused by JLM or the NCC of not being good for the Palestinians and if he was being good for the Palestinians no doubt he'd be accused of antisemitism for that.

So I don't think we have to twist or ignore facts to support Ken Livingstone. We should welcome a more forensic examination of all of the facts of both Ken and Naz Shah's cases.

For a more detailed examination of the case of Ken Livingstone and the NCC see this article, Compulsory Lies by Mike MacNair in the Weekly Worker.

More on Hitler's support for Zionism

Here's another comment from the Crooked Timber site post supposedly about this orchestrated campaign against the Labour leadership and left.  This comment was from Corey Robin:

This is from Saul Friedlander, Nazi Germany and the Jews. Volume I: The Years of Persecution, 1933-1939. Friedlander, along with Yehuda Bauer, is considered the dean of Holocaust historians.

In addition, the material difficulty of emigrating was considerable, especially in a period of economic uncertainty; it entailed an immediate and heavy material loss….
In one instance only were the economic conditions of emigration somewhat facilitated. Not only did the regime encourage Zionist activities on the territory of the Reich, but concrete economic measures were taken to ease the departure of the Jews for Palestine. The so-called Haavarah (Hebrew: Transfer) Agreement, concluded on August 27, 1933, between the German Ministry of the Economy and Zionist representatives from Germany and Palestine, allowed Jewish emigrants indirect transfer of part of their assets and facilitated exports of goods from Nazi Germany to Palestine. As a result, some one hundred million Riechsmarks were transferred to Palestine, and most of the sixty thousand Germany Jews who arrived in that country during 1933-39 could thereby ensure a minimal basis for their material existence.
…
…About Zionism itself, moreover, Nazi ideology and Nazi policies were divided from the outset: while favoring, like all other European extreme anti-Semites, Zionism as a means of enticing the Jews to leave Europe, they also considered the Zionist organization established in Basel in 1987 as a key element of the Jewish world conspiracy….
…
Even before the conclusion of the Haavarah Agreement, such “cooperation” [between the Nazis and the Zionists] took bizarre forms. Thus, in early 1933, Baron Leopold Itz Edler von Mildenstein, a man who a few years later was to become chief of the Jewish section of the SD (the Sicherheitsdienst, or security service, the SS intelligence branch headed by Reinhard Heydrich), was invited along with his wife to tour Palestine and write a series of articles for Goebbels’s Der Angriff . And so it was that the Mildensteins, accompanied by Kurt Tuchler, a leading member of the Berlin Zionist Organization, and his wife, visited Jewish settlements in Eretz Israel. The highly positive articles, entitled “A Nazi Visits Palestine,” were duly published, and, to mark the occasion, a special medallion cast, with a swastika on one side and a Star of David on the other.
…
Zionist hopes were moderated by practical worries about excessive numbers of immigrants. “In order that the immigration not flood the existing settlement in Palestine like lava,” Ruppin declared at the Zionist Congress held in Prague in the summer of 1933, “it must be proportionate to a certain percentage of that settlement.” This remained the policy for several years to come, and well after the passage of the 1935 Nuremberg racial laws, both the German Zionists and the leader of the Yishuv were still envisaging an annual rate of fifteen to twenty thousand German-Jewish emigrants, extending over a period of twenty to thirty years.

Later in the book, Friedlander talks about a growing move in the mid to late 1930s against the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine among certain sectors of the Nazi Foreign Ministry. This led to increasing opposition to that Haavarah agreement, which was the Nazi policy for facilitating Jewish emigration to Palestine. But this is what Friedlander has to say about that growing opposition to the Haavarah agreement:

But no one [in the Nazi foreign ministry] dared to take any concrete measures against the agreement, as Hitler had not yet expressed his viewpoint. His decision announced at the end of January 1938, clearly implied maintenance of the Haavarah: Further Jewish emigration [to Palestine] by all possible means . The bureaucracy was left with only one choice: Comply. And so it did. 

Lots of Zionists are quick to point out that Hitler said he didn't like Zionists in Mein Kampf  but the above excerpt shows that he seems to have changed his mind some time between the 1925 publication of Hitler's book and Ha'avara in 1933.

It's stuff like this that is going to have the Zionists biting off more than they can chew especially if they try to take on Ken Livingstone.

UPDATE: What a difference 3 years makes. I don't remember when Ken left Labour but the Zionists have defeated him for now.  I actually have no idea what landed me in the edit version of this page but, boy, was I embarrassed when I read that last line.

Hitler's support for Zionism

I hardly blog anymore but I thought I ought to grab some stuff from the net while it's hot.  Ken Livingstone is the latest casualty in the orchestrated campaign against the Labour leadership and left because he said something like, "Hitler supported Zionism".

There's a not entirely bad article on the Crooked Timber website by some banker (really) called Daniel.  I'm not quite sure what he's saying and frankly I don't really trust him because I think he's saying that there seems to be something in these allegations of antisemitism in the Labour Party but he doesn't give many or even any examples.  But I'm just grabbing this quote from Hannah Arendt which the commenter seems to think supports Ken:

But quite apart from all slogans and ideological quarrels, it was in those years a fact of everyday life that only Zionists had any chance of negotiating with the German authorities, for the simple reason that their chief Jewish adversary, the Central Association of German Citizens of Jewish Faith, to which ninety-five per cent of organized Jews in Germany then belonged, specified in its bylaws that its chief task was the “fight against anti-Semitism”; it had suddenly become by definition an organization “hostile to the State,” and would indeed have been persecuted—which it was not—if it had ever dared to do what it was supposed to do. During its first few years, Hitler’s rise to power appeared to the Zionists chiefly as “the decisive defeat of assimilationism.” Hence, the Zionists could, for a time, at least, engage in a certain amount of non-criminal cooperation with the Nazi authorities; the Zionists too believed that “dissimilation,” combined with the emigration to Palestine of Jewish youngsters and, they hoped, Jewish capitalists, could be a “mutually fair solution.” At the time. many German officials held this opinion, and this kind of talk seems to have been quite common up to the end. A letter from a survivor of Theresienstadt, a German Jew, relates that all leading positions in the Nazi- appointed Reichsvereinigung were held by Zionists (whereas the authentically Jewish Reichsvertretung had been composed of both Zionists and non- Zionists), because Zionists, according to the Nazis, were “the ‘decent’ Jews since they too thought in ‘national’ terms.” To be sure, no prominent Nazi ever spoke publicly in this vein; from beginning to end, Nazi propaganda was fiercely, unequivocally, uncompromisingly anti-Semitic, and eventually nothing counted but what people who were still without experience in the mysteries of totalitarian government dismissed as “mere propaganda.” There existed in those first years a mutually highly satisfactory agreement between the Nazi authorities and the Jewish Agency for Palestine—a Ha’avarah, or Transfer Agreement, which provided that an emigrant to Palestine could transfer his money there in German goods and exchange them for pounds upon arrival. It was soon the only legal way for a Jew to take his money with him (the alternative then being the establishment of a blocked account, which could be liquidated abroad only at a loss of between fifty and ninety-five per cent). The result was that ¡n the thirties, when American Jewry took great pains to organize a boycott of German merchandise, Palestine, of all places, was swamped with all kinds of goods “made in Germany.”

There's a lot more out there to demonstrate that Hitler supported Zionism from the time he came to power to the outbreak of WWII and if I remember I'll grab it and post it.

Zionists are beside themselves that what Ken Livingstone said, whilst clumsy and wrong in parts, was essentially true and certainly not antisemitic.  But of course they could have done without an exercise in Zio-Nazi collaboration getting an airing because as much as they seem to be able to get Labourites suspended with a snap of their fingers, the question has to be asked, what were the Zionists doing collaborating with such a rabid Jew hater?

They were saving Jews of course.  But were they?  See the deal.  Jews could get much more money out of Germany if they went to Palestine than if they went elsewhere.  Now if you understand Zionism then you will understand that Zionists prefer to get Jews to Palestine than to anywhere else and the Zionist leadership were clear that they would rather have x amount of Jews in Palestine the twice that number safe elsewhere.

But Hitler had to approve this deal.  Why would he approve it?  Simples! to get rid of Jews. But why Palestine?  Because it was easier.  But it wasn't easier.  Jews could go to other places.  The main difficulty was turning up penniless.  The question of why Zionists wanted Jews in Palestine is like asking why Zionists wanted to be Zionists.  But the big question and it's still a mystery is why was Hitler so keen not simply to get rid of Jews but to get Jews to go to Palestine.

Perplexing one that and one Zionists aren't too keen to answer.  Maybe we'll never know.  But what we do know is that for a time back there, Hitler supported Zionism.

Ken the endangered panderer

Oi gevalt! Does Ken Livingstone's opportunism know no bounds?  Here he is in Totally Jewish claiming that he is opposed to the boycott call to the Globe Theatre over the inclusion of a state directed Israeli theatre group:

in a move that will be applauded by those opposed to boycotts of Israel, he also expressed strong opposition to a call by some performers and writers to disinvite Israel's national theatre from a Cultural Olympiad event at the Globe Theatre next month. "I disagree with that. I don't want the Olympics, including the Cultural Olympiad, turned into a political football."

 There have been knives out for Livingstone throughout the hasbara blogosphere and his interview with Totally Jewish has him trying to pander his way back into favour.  I think his sheer lack of principle may still keep him on the endangered list.

Maybe it's because I'm a Londoner

Ok, I know my promise is now in tatters. Here's more on Ken by way of letters to the Guardian. Sadly, and typically, the Guardian gives the first and last word to the Zionists with Professor Shalom Lappin accusing Ken of "posing as a defender of the Palestinians and a champion of international justice" and the Jewish Chronicle's. Professor Geoffrey Alderman invoking "the systematic ethnic cleansing. of Jews from Arab lands" without offering any descriptions or evidence of course. There's also a letter from the Herut-Likud UK saying that if you "cut Israel, Jews everywhere bleed a little. Even here in London." And one from Israel suggesting that the opposition of Likud members to Sharon's policies amounts to unity with Ken.

So much for the cons; here are the pros:

Ken Livingstone's was a brilliant and honest piece. As a Jew in my 50s, I have been disgusted at the way in which the spectre of anti-semitism have been used as a shield against any criticism of Israel's repugnant and racist policies towards the Palestinians over 60 years. He eloquently reminds us there are still some universal values and that the lessons of the Holocaust apply equally to Israel. I feel proud to be a Londoner having a mayor like Livingstone.
Martin White
London

As a member of Jews for Justice for Palestinians and Just Peace UK, I applaud Ken Livingstone for speaking out about the creeping ethnic cleansing in the Palestinian territories. Israel is not driving the Palestinians out in an obvious way as in 1948, but is making life unbearable for them by means of house demolitions, uprooting of trees and confiscation of land for the constant expansion of settlements and the wall.

The hype over the "peace process" is an illusion to mask Israel's unilateral forcing of the Palestinians into a so-called interim state, which Sharon really intends to be permanent ghettoes or reservations, linked by tunnels which Israel can close off at will. This massive injustice is, as Livingstone points out, a threat to world peace because of the anger and violence it creates.
Deborah Maccoby (she gets around)
London

Many members of the Jewish community would be outraged at the patronising suggestion that criticism of Israel is necessarily taken by them as anti-Jewish. Many Jewish people strive to distance themselves from the brutal acts of Sharon and his government against the Palestinian people. The view that the Israeli government and its followers endeavour to use the religious card to repel criticism is widely held, not least by members of the Jewish community, many of whom have been some of the most articulate critics of Israeli policy.
Jamal Sheri
London

Ken's offhand offensive comment has been cynically manipulated by supporters of Israel desperate to link those opposing Israel's self-destructive policies to racism. Having several weeks ago visited villages now separated from the land that is their livelihood by the West Bank barrier, one can only conclude that one of its aims is to drive people away into the ever-growing Palestinian diaspora. Only this week, I had defenders of Sharon compare me to Auschwitz experimenter Josef Mengele while I was addressing a public meeting. The continuing row merely serves to emphasise the depths to which some in the pro-Israel lobby will sink to apply all blame for the current situation towards anyone but successive Israeli governments.
Ben Soffa
Member, Jewish Students for Justice for Palestinians