John Ware was the reporter for the 2019 BBC Panorama documentary Is Labour Antisemitic? In Part 1 of this series he explained how The Forde Report, and Forde’s statements in a subsequent interview to Al Jazeera, are badly misleading people about his documentary. Here, he critically reviews Asa Winstanley’s book Weaponising Anti-Semitism: How the Israel Lobby Brought Down Jeremy Corbyn. As with the Forde report, it’s important, he says, to keep the historical record straight. In Part 3 he will critique Al Jazeera’s series The Labour Files.
‘SOLD OUT!’ tweeted Asa Winstanley, referring to his book Weaponising Anti-Semitism: how the Israeli lobby brought down Jeremy Corbyn. The first print run just ‘flew off the shelves’ he says, and within three weeks was reprinting.[1] ‘Very honoured that my journalism is helping the (Palestinian) movement.’[2]
Winstanley styles himself as an ‘investigative journalist.’ More precisely, he’s an activist, an agenda journalist. The clue is in the title of the online outlet he edits, ‘The Electronic Intifada’.[3]
His book doesn’t beat about the bush: the antisemitism crisis under Corbyn was ‘constructed … manufactured … concocted’ and its ‘biggest wave’ was the row that led to the removal from the Labour party of one of Corbyn’s closest political allies, Ken Livingstone.[4]
Disciplining Livingstone, he says, set the pattern of retreat by Corbyn leading to concessions and ultimately rendering comparison between Zionism and Nazism taboo, ‘no matter how historically factual and carefully worded.’[5]
According to Winstanley, the moment that triggered Corbyn’s capitulation was 8.50am on 28 April 2016 as the 71 year old ex-London Mayor was walking his dog, the same day that his wife turned 50. He was asked by Vanessa Feltz on BBC radio if Labour MP Naz Shah’s Facebook posts advocating the ‘transportation’ of Jews from Israel to America as a ‘solution’ to the Israel-Palestine conflict were antisemitic?[6]
Shah appeared to be endorsing the ethnic cleansing of Jews in Israel and had tagged one of her posts with a hashtag ‘#ApartheidIsrael’ above a police mugshot of Martin Luther and his famous quote: “We should never forget that everything Adolph Hitler did in Germany was ‘legal’”, [7] drawing the obvious parallel between what Hitler did and the actions of the Israeli state.
Livingstone notoriously responded that the posts were ‘not antisemitic’ followed by a non-sequitur which seemed like another of his many attacks on the legitimacy of the entire Zionist enterprise: ‘Let’s remember that when Hitler won his election in 1932, his policy was then that Jews should be removed to Israel. Hitler supported Zionism.’[8] (my emphasis)
Winstanley scoffs at any suggestion of antisemitism by Shah and her ‘series of grovelling apologies’[9] even though she herself admitted her posts were antisemitic. She said she ‘deeply’ regretted’ them. ‘Antisemitism is racism. Full stop.’[10]
Winstanley then devotes his 36-page long chapter called ‘Nazi Comparisons’ to trying to demonstrate that what Livingstone said about ‘Hitler supporting Zionism’ was ‘absolutely correct’.[11] There was ‘absolutely nothing antisemitic about what Livingstone had said’ asserts Winstanley.[12] On ‘the general facts there is no doubt that Livingstone was correct, however uncomfortable supporters of Zionism in the present day may find it.’[13] Jewish antizionists in the fringe organisation Jewish Voice for Labour (JVL) agree. ‘Winstanley spends pages and pages showing convincingly that Livingstone was historically correct to say that “Hitler was supporting Zionism”’ wrote Deborah Maccoby.[14]
It is true that the revival of Zionism in Germany generated by Hitler’s persecution of Jews was marked by certain events which, on their face, seem bewilderingly collaborative in view of what Hitler had in store for the Jews. Jewish emigration from Germany to Palestine was indeed promoted by agencies of the German government and the National Socialist party.[15] A moment’s thought, however, explains why, of necessity, the German Zionist Federation (ZVfD) had to deal with the devil as they navigated their way to liberation in Judaism’s ancestral home. By focusing exclusively on the most acute of these events, notable for their omission of key facts, Winstanley simply shows the zeal of his animus against Zionism and how real Labour’s antisemitism crisis was.
Still, some high profile commentators consider his book well worth reading: a ‘story that needs to be told’ says the former Labour parliamentary undersecretary of state for Foreign and Commonwealth affairs Chris Mullin; an ‘important book’ says the prominent ex-Daily Mail columnist Peter Oborne; ‘explosive’ says the ex-Pink Floyd multi-millionaire musician Roger Waters; ‘vital reading’ says the stand-up comedian Alexi Sayle[16]; ‘essential reading’ says the film director Ken Loach ‘a comprehensive answer to right wing propagandists who endorse this manufactured campaign.’[17] His book publishes 27 further tributes from activists and the odd journalist who were vocal in their support for Jeremy Corbyn during the crisis.
One of the most adulatory reviews comes from a London based TV producer for the Qatari owned Al Jazeera network. Writing in the online outlet Middle East Eye owned by an ex Al Jazeera executive, Richard Sanders’s praise is so effusive that Winstanley pinned it to his Twitter page: ‘A thorough, meticulous reporter’ adjudges Sanders of Winstanley. ‘The book is revelatory, even for those of us who have followed this story … as careful and conscientious a historian as he is a journalist.’[18]
I disagree. Had Winstanley been ‘careful and conscientious’ he would have framed his entire chapter by spelling out that whilst decisions by Hitler’s Nazi regime from 1933-1939 had the effect of supporting Zionism, Hitler was emphatically opposed to Zionism’s aims and goals, quoting the conclusions of reputable historians who have emphasised the importance of making this distinction clear. But like Livingstone, Winstanley seems to go out of his way to try to dirty Zionism’s past. He paints a picture of German Zionists colluding with Hitler as a self-serving, double-dealing bunch, stonehearted at the fate of Jews they left behind after emigrating to British Mandate Palestine.
Winstanley contrives to show the Zionists were even rather enamoured with Nazi views about racial purity because of the Zionist concept of a separate Jewish Volk. ‘There’s evidence that Hitler had an accord with Zionist ideology especially on the idea that Jews are a race apart’ he writes.[19] He quotes Nazi party theoretician Alfred Rosenberg saying in 1919 that ‘Nazi and Zionist strategic goals were not necessarily incompatible.’ Hence Zionism needed to be ‘vigorously supported in order to encourage a significant number of German Jews to leave for Palestine and other destinations.’ [20] So, yes, Zionism was ‘supported’ but only in the sense that it could be cynically exploited by the Nazi regime to encourage Jews to leave in support of Hitler’s ultimate goal of a Judenfrei Germany, which Hitler first articulated in 1919 when he referred to the Jewish presence as a ‘race-tuberculosis of the peoples.’ [21]At the same time, Winstanley omits evidence from Nazis and historians he otherwise relies on that shows this image of ideological affinity to be profoundly misleading. Here’s what Rosenberg really thought about Zionism: ‘Some of the locusts which have been sucking the marrow of Europe are returning to the promised land and are already looking for greener pastures. At its best Zionism is the impotent effort of an unfit people to achieve something constructive, but in the main it helps ambitious speculators as a new field in which to practise usury on a world-wide scale.’ [22]
Winstanley says the ‘accord’ between the ZVfD and the Nazis resulted in ‘an extraordinary series of supportive practical measures to boost the Zionist movement’ whilst reminding us Zionism was a ‘settler colonial movement’ creating a Jewish state in Palestine ‘against the wishes of the majority non-Jewish population.’ [23] Portraying the ZVfD as entirely self-serving Winstanley says they ‘agreed and pushed for these measures’ despite the persecution of their fellow Jews.[24] To describe these ‘measures’ as a result of the Nazis having an ‘accord’ with ‘Zionist ideology’ is pushing it. Not only did Hitler want the Jews out of Germany, the Nazis were also determined to make them pay handsomely to the Reich exchequer for their freedom. Chief amongst these ‘measures’ that ‘supported Zionism’ was the agreement between the ZVfD, the Jewish Agency for Palestine and the Reich Ministry for Economics to facilitate emigration to Palestine, which prior to Hitler’s arrival had, of course, been unobstructed.
Although the authorities in British mandate Palestine did not require immigration certificates for those able to take with them 1000 Palestinian pounds in cash (about £59,000 today), this vastly exceeded the 200 Reichsmarks (£13 sterling – about £760 today)[25] the Nazi’s currency controls allowed emigrants to take out of the country.
However, in August 1933, eight months after Hitler became German Chancellor, the ZVfD and Reich ministry officials agreed a way round this for wealthier Jews wishing to emigrate to Palestine.
Emigrant Jews who had £1000 available, were permitted to liquidate their assets into the Reichsbank which then transferred their value to a company in Tel Aviv called Ha’avara Ltd provided this asset transfer was used to buy German exports to be sold in Palestine with the new Jewish immigrants reimbursed from the proceeds.
Winstanley says the Ha’avara (Transfer) Agreement gave the ailing German economy a ‘lifeline’ [26] and ‘helped Hitler’s regime stabilise itself.’[27] That was certainly the Reich ministry’s hope because some Jewish organisations had been demanding an international boycott of German goods since March 1933 in protest at the persecution of Jews. However, the actual value of Ha’avara to the German economy is contested. Some historians say it was marginal. According to the late Richard Levy, professor of Modern German History at the University of Illinois in Chicago, ‘the most authoritative statistical source on the transfer’[28] records Ha’avara having a negligible effect on German exports to Palestine ‘accounting for only 0.1 per cent of the total.’ Estimates of the capital assets from Ha’avara that went into Mandatory Palestine also vary. Winstanley puts it at around half a billion pounds sterling in today’s money.[29] That roughly matches one authoritative estimate that Ha’avara led to an injection of some 9 million Palestinian pounds into Mandate Palestine’s economy.[30] Other estimates are much lower and say that Ha’avara ‘in no way contributed to the building of a Jewish state.’ [31] This was not a perspective offered by Winstanley. He states that the ‘Nazi government provided a crucial boost to the struggling economy of the Zionist settler-colonial project in Palestine’ accounting for nearly 60 per cent of capital investment.[32] One researcher on whom Winstanley relies quite heavily puts it more provocatively: ‘The Nazis literally built the Jewish state’[33] That person is Tony Greenstein, an anti-Zionist expelled from Labour for intimidating public figures who’ve identified as Zionists with venomous epithets like ‘Janus faced whore’, ‘racist whore’, ‘Zionist scum’, ‘gay Zionists make me want to puke’, ‘Jewish herrenvolk’ (German master race), ‘fuck off Progress twat’, ‘Crooked McNicol’ and so on,[34] not that Winstanley tells us that.
What is clear is that Jewish emigres lost much of the value of their liquidated assets under the Ha’avara arrangement. The German exports were sold with an extortionate markup and by the time commission, currency devaluation and other costs were deducted, some newly arrived immigrants had lost up to 75 per cent of their wealth and even then, did not retrieve the 25 per cent that was left for up to two years. [35] In fairness Winstanley does allude to this.[36]
However, he is convinced that while helping Zionists leave one racist state only to create what he regards as another, Ha’avara also made it harder for other Jews to escape ‘elsewhere by restricting the capital they could take out.’ [37] The unspoken insult is that in their single minded determination to build a ‘settler-colonial state’ German Zionists contributed to genocide when Hitler decided to solve his ‘Jewish problem’ not by emigration, but extermination from 1941.
Winstanley also maintains that those who say that Ha’avara was about German Zionists avoiding persecution, are wrong. Like Greenstein[38], he says the ‘real goal was to save Jewish capital not German Jewish lives.’ [39] Why could it not have been both? It was surely to escape from the future that they saw in front of Germany’s half million Jews.
Winstanley says the Zionists also had a ‘more sinister motive’ behind Ha’avara. Because Zionists were a small minority of Germany’s Jews, they saw Hitler’s persecution of Jews as an opportunity to expand the Zionist enterprise by recruiting the ‘traditionally liberal/assimilationist Jewish community in Germany to the Zionist cause.’[40]
But why would exploiting that opportunity to get more Jews to a place of safety, be ‘sinister?’ Of course, what Winstanley means by ‘sinister’ is what he describes as the whole ‘Zionist-settler-colonial project.’[41]
Winstanley can’t resist putting the nastiest face on pretty well everything the German Zionists did: ‘While condemning Hitler’s regime in public’ he writes, ‘Zionist leaders were in private, far more cheerful about the opportunities that the Nazi regime presented to them.’[42] Like Greenstein, he quotes from a memo the ZVfD is said to have sent to Hitler in June 1933 two months before Ha’avara was agreed: ‘Zionism believes that the rebirth of the national life of a people, which is now occurring in Germany through the emphasis on its Christian and national character must also come about among the Jewish people.’[43]
Winstanley portrays this ‘Nazi-Zionist collusion’[44] as more than just a ‘simple marriage of convenience.’ He sees it as Zionist leaders trying to ‘reconcile their ideology with Nazism, expressing agreement with aspects of its racist ideology.’ [45] He devotes quite a lot of space to showing what he describes as Zionism’s ‘ideological affinity with Nazism.’[46]
The simple truth about the relationship between Zionists and the Nazis, such as it was, is that both used it for their own ends, only one of which was ‘sinister’: the Nazis wanted Germany ‘cleansed’ of Jews – a Jewish-free Germany or ‘Judenfrei’ – and the Zionists took this opportunity to avoid persecution by getting out with what wealth they could salvage and in the process saved thousands of endangered Jews who otherwise would not have escaped at all or would have escaped to countries neighbouring Germany, where they would have perished later in the Holocaust.
Besides Ha’avara, Winstanley lists several other concessions by the Nazi regime which he says ‘encouraged the Zionist movement throughout the 1930s.’ Again, he imputes the worst possible motives by swerving around the facts that paint a completely different picture.
He says that apart from the Swastika, the only other flag the Nazis allowed to be flown in Nazi Germany was ‘the same blue and white flag that would become the standard of the state of Israel.’[47] This was hardly a favour to Jews. Section 4 Part 2 of the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 merely allowed Jews to fly flags with ‘Jewish colours’[48] and were ‘forbidden to hoist the Reich and national flag and to present the colours of the Reich’ presumably to highlight that German Jews were foreigners and regarded as aliens.[49]
Nor is Winstanley precisely correct that the Jewish colours were the ‘same blue and white flag’ that became the Israeli flag. Richard Evans, Regius Professor Emeritus of History at Cambridge University says not only did the new law not say what the ‘Jewish colours’ were, no one had the ‘faintest idea’ what they were ‘least of all German Jews.’ [50]
The website of the Jewish Museum in Berlin reveals how Jews interpreted the ‘Jewish colours.’ It cites the story of a young man called Martin Friedlaender who made a flag in blue and white, with a white Star of David on an all-blue background and hung it out of his window in protest. Blue and white were the Zionist colours but the flag had no official status of any kind either with the ZVfD or with the Nazis. A Nazi magazine carried a photo of Friedlaender’s flag with the sarcastic caption: ‘Thus the riddle of what the Jewish flag actually looks like has now been solved.’ The present-day Israeli flag is completely different in shape from Friedlaender’s. The Star of David is also blue, not white, and against a mainly white – not blue – background.[51]
Winstanley also asserts as a fact that ‘Nazi support for Zionism even went as far as arms.’[52] There is no clear evidence that it did. He also implies that an intelligence agent for the Haganah, (forerunner to the IDF as the Jewish community’s main defence force) was in some unspecified way involved in, or anyway had knowledge of, these allegedly Nazi supplied guns. Winstanley says the agent, a Polish Jew called Feival Polkes offered to spy for the SS after being brought to Berlin in 1937 by Adolf Eichmann to meet SS and Gestapo officials. There, says Winstanley, Polkes boasted of his links with French, British and Italian intelligence services and offered to include the Nazis in his circle in exchange for aid to Palestine. [53]
A report retrieved from the Berlin Sicherheitsdienst (security police) does record Polkes visit to Berlin between 28 February and 2 March 1937 and says he wanted to restrict his information to matters that ‘would not run counter to his own political aims’ – i.e. establishing a Jewish homeland. The quid pro-quo Polkes sought was a ‘loosening of German currency regulations for Jews to emigrate to Palestine.’[54] There is nothing at all about guns. And the report reveals that Polkes’s visit to Berlin was ‘not planned by the Haganah’ so if he was offering to spy for the Nazis it seems that this was a freelance initiative, not at the Haganah’s behest.
That’s consistent with reports that when his Haganah bosses learned of the meeting with Eichmann, Polkes was ‘fiercely denounced’ by them and he was ‘removed from all positions within the group.’[55] Winstanley states that between 1933-35 the Haganah smuggled ‘300 barrels half filled with Mauser pistols and ammunition’ from Germany to Palestine’ for which Polkes thanked his Berlin hosts saying they’d ‘been useful to the Haganah during the recent Palestinian Arab uprising.’ [56] Given that the guns are said to have arrived several years before Polkes offered his services as an informer in Berlin, it’s hard to see how any informing Polkes did was directly rewarded by guns. According to the eminent Holocaust historian Professor Francis Nicosia, it’s unclear who supplied the guns, although ‘it is certain that somebody in German did and the police authorities were aware of it.’[57] Maybe so, but the dates don’t appear to fit for Polkes being the supplier and anyway the Haganah are reported to have had many operatives in Germany during the 1930s[58] who presumably were seeking as many weapons as they could get. The man in charge of the Haganah’s intelligence and counter-espionage arm called ‘Shai’, has said the pistols were shipped in 1935, not from Nazi Germany, but from Belgium.[59]
Winstanley also alleges that in 1940, the underground Stern gang ‘offer(ed) … to collaborate with Hitler’ after war had broken out ‘in exchange for recognising their aspirations to create a Jewish state in Palestine’ but this was ignored.[60] It’s true that Avraham Stern’s splinter group, the Lehi, offered to fight for Nazi Germany in exchange for the establishment of a Jewish state and the evacuation of all the millions of Jews from Nazi Europe to the Jewish state. What Winstanley doesn’t clarify is that Stern was not offering collaboration in the persecution or murder of Europe’s Jews but offering his services to Germany in the hope of freeing Europe’s Jews. His offer was moral and political madness born of delusion, but his aims were not what Winstanley’s bald statement implies.
Nor does Winstanley tell us how the Lehi – then a small terrorist group who’d assassinated both British soldiers and fellow Jews – were widely reviled by Jews in Palestine, or that the Jewish community’s pre-eminent leader, David Ben-Gurion acted against them by allowing the Haganah to supply intelligence to the British to arrest Lehi members. [61] Unlike the Lehi, Ben-Gurion also urged Jews to join the British army to fight the Nazis which many Jews did.[62] The Irgun Tz’va’i Le’umi also opposed Stern – and even reprinted British ‘wanted’ posters for Sternists in its own publications. The Irgun joined the British war effort against the Nazis and their leader David Raziel was killed on a British military mission against pro-Nazi leader in Iraq.[63] Both the mainstream Zionists and the revisionist Zionists lobbied the allies to form a Jewish army to fight the Nazis.
Instead, Winstanley paints Ben-Gurion in the coldest and most calculating of lights over the Kindertransport plan to rescue Jewish children from Nazi controlled Europe after Kristallnacht in November 1938. He quotes Ben-Gurion as telling Mapai’s central committee in December 1938: ‘If I knew that it was possible to save all the (Jewish) children in Germany by transporting them to England, but only half of them by transporting them to Palestine, I would choose the second – because we face not only the reckoning of those children, but the historical reckoning of the Jewish people.’[64] Historians are divided as to what exactly Ben Gurion meant. Winstanley prefers the version that shows Zionism was more about cold bloodedly building a ‘settler-colonial’ state Jewish state than about saving Jews from the Holocaust because the entire Zionist project risked being undermined if countries other than Mandate Palestine opened their doors to refugees. In other words, put to the test, Zionism was prepared to sacrifice Europe’s Jews if its goal was at risk.[65]
The Ben Gurion quote is accurate but the alternative – and prevailing historical interpretation – is that its brusqueness masks his utter despair at the unwillingness of other countries to accept mass immigration of Jewish refugees from Germany, the ever stricter limits Britain was putting on Jewish immigration to Palestine, and a conviction that Hitler’s ascendancy meant no Diaspora country could ever be safe for Jews. In his demoralised state, Ben Gurion thought he saw the future. The month before Kristallnacht, he’d spoken of Hitler’s ‘sadistic and jealous desire…to annihilate the whole of world Jewry’[66]; after Kristallnacht he again warned: ‘The Nazi pogrom of last November is a signal for the destruction of the Jews of the world…….who knows what will happen in tomorrow in Czechoslovakia…in Poland, in Romania, and other countries…?’ [67]
This version of history holds that Ben Gurion’s bleak statement was a primaeval cry of anguish at his impotence in the face of what he feared would be Jewry’s global annihilation and that this galvanised him to redouble his ambition to secure a Jewish homeland in the sincere belief that this was the only way Jews could have a future. As he later put it: ‘A Jewish people cannot be kept alive without a Jewish country.’[68]
After the awful reality of Ben Gurion’s prescience became manifest in Europe in late 1942, Ben-Gurion reversed his ‘Palestine First’ policy: ‘First of all, and foremost, the saving of Jews, then the saving of the Yishuv, and finally and thirdly the saving of Zionism.’ [69] He emphasised the importance of funding the rescue mission declaring
We must do whatever is humanly possible…to extend material aid to those working on rescue operation in order to save (those who) can still be saved, to delay the calamity as far as it can be delayed. (And we must) do it immediately, to the best of our ability. I hesitate to say – since the matter is so serious – that we shall do our utmost; we are flesh and blood and cannot do the maximum, but we shall do what we can.[70]
Winstanley makes no reference to that, or this alternative historical version, perhaps because he is preoccupied with a belief that Zionism should be dirtied whenever it can be.
Instead, he similarly accuses of Chaim Weizmann, who became Israel’s first president of having also spoken out ‘against the Kindertransport.’[71] If so, Weizmann’s opposition doesn’t seem to have been for long. He established The Central British Fund for German Jewry instrumental in making the Kindertransport happen. Weizmann and his cofounder Lionel De Rothschild personally lobbied prime minister Neville Chamberlain to allow the children to come to Britain.[72]
Winstanley ploughs on nonetheless: ‘The immense amount of material support that the German government under the Nazis gave to the Zionist movement is plain from the historical record’, he says.[73] Like Livingstone, he creates an overwhelming sense of Zionists colluding cosily with Hitler’s Nazi regime, or in Livingstone’s case, directly with Hitler himself. ‘If you go to the Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem at Yad Vashem’ said Livingstone six months after his suspension by the Labour party in 2016, ‘one of the pamphlets you will buy there is about that deal that was done between Hitler and the Zionists in the 1930s.’[74]
I did go to Yad Vashem during my research for Panorama’s ‘Is Labour antisemitic?’ where I interviewed Professor Adam Hofri Winogradow from the law faculty of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He’s a Cambridge educated specialist in trust law and has studied the legal structure and operation of the Ha’avara agreement.[75] For a front-line politician, Livingstone’s lack of attention to detail was embarrassing.
Hofri told me that Hitler had nothing to do with the Ha’avara agreement. It was struck between, ‘private Jewish businessmen, German-Jewish banks, of the German Zionist movement, and the Reich Ministry for Economics.’ Winstanley reports that the Economics minister was a personal friend of SS leader Henrich Himmler.[76] Maybe so, but according to Hofri the actual officials who negotiated the deal were those ‘still free enough from antisemitism, to take part in this sort of arrangement.’[77]
According to Professor Evans, the ZVfD believed Ha’avara would save lives and guarantee the emigration to Palestine of 15-20,000 German Jews every year for up to three decades.[78] In the event, a total of only about 20,000 German Jews are reported to have migrated to Palestine under Ha’avara – consistent with those historians who say the agreement was of limited assistance to the Reich’s economy. I should emphasis this is contested by other reputable historians.[79] In any case, two thirds of the 55,000 German Jews who emigrated to Palestine in the 1930s managed this outside Ha’avara.[80]
Winstanley says ‘it’s a simple fact of history that the Nazis struck agreements (plural) in the 1930s with Germany’s Zionist movement.’[81] It’s true that the SS had pre-WW2 meetings with Zionist representatives as well as Jewish community leaders in pursuit of its pre-WW2 mandate to evict Jews as fast as possible. However, according to Holocaust historian Deborah Lipstadt, America’s Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism, Ha’avara was the only formal contract between them.[82]
In any case, given that Nazi policy was to make life for Jews in Germany unbearable, who could blame the Zionists for doing a deal with the Nazis to get as many as possible out of their terrible predicament? As Professor Evans says, similar policies were pursued on the eve of World War 2 by the British government, rescuing 10,000 Jewish children to the UK in the Kindertransporte.[83]
None of this means that Hitler ‘supported Zionism’ in the sense that he was in any way sympathetic to its aims and goals. Quite the reverse. The Fuhrer’s overriding aim was to remove Germany’s 523,000 Jews from Germany to anywhere who would have them[84] not just ‘all German Jews to Israel (sic)’ as Livingstone erroneously said.[85] ‘The Nazis couldn’t frankly care less where the Jews went, so long as they left Germany, preferably with as few possessions as possible’ said historian Lord Andrew Roberts.’ [86] By September 1939, more than half had emigrated.[87] But as Hitler’s Reich expanded, the vastly increased number of Jews seeking to emigrate overwhelmed the refuge quotas imposed by the rest of the world. It became increasingly difficult to escape.
Following the 1937 Peel Commission recommending Mandate Palestine be partitioned into separate Jewish and Arab sovereign states, there was near unanimous opposition within the Nazi government and party leadership to the creation of an independent Jewish state.[88] In June 1937, after reaffirming Germany’s opposition, the German foreign minister Konstantin von Neurath observed: ‘there exists a German interest in the strengthening of the Arabs as a counterweight against such a simultaneous growth in the power of the Jews.’[89] Four months later, posing as a journalist, Adolf Eichmann visited Palestine and is said to have reported back: ‘The creation of a Jewish State must be prevented.’[90] In 1938 and 1939 the Nazis are also reported to have helped arm the Arab Revolt, the rebellion between 1936-39 against British mandatory control of Palestine triggered by the increase in Jewish immigration due to Hitler.[91]
Hitler had long since made clear his visceral contempt for Zionism. In Mein Kampf in 1925, he wrote that Zionism was a ‘sly’ plot by ‘the Jews’ to ‘dupe the stupid goyim’ into believing they wanted a Jewish state in Palestine when their real plan was to take over the world. By November 1940, he had reversed his support for emigration. He banned Jewish emigration from the Polish ‘general government’ and bans on Jewish emigration from other Nazi-controlled territory quickly followed. Polish Jews were being deliberately starved to death in the Nazi ghettos well before the Nazi attack on the USSR and the adoption of the Final Solution in 1941. By then Hitler was actively supporting ‘the elimination of the Jewish National home’, according to the official record of Hitler’s meeting in November 1941 with the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, the Palestinian leader Haj Amin al-Hussein: ‘The Fuhrer replied that … Germany stood for uncompromising war against the Jews. That naturally included active opposition to the Jewish national home in Palestine, which was nothing other than a centre in the form of a state, for the exercise of destructive influence by Jewish interests. Germany was also aware that the assertion that the Jews were carrying out the functions of economic pioneers in Palestine was a lie.’ [92]
In 1944, the Nazis conspired with the Mufti to execute Operation Atlas: a plan to incite Arabs in Palestine to kill Jews.[93] So much for Hitler ‘supporting Zionism’.
Sanders applauds Winstanley
The Al Jazeera producer Richard Sanders – so lavish in his praise of Winstanley as a ‘meticulous…careful and conscientious historian’ – acknowledges that Livingstone’s comments about Hitler supporting Zionism were ‘crass and gratuitously provocative’ but he doesn’t see them as antisemitic. In fact, he applauds Winstanley’s journalism that ‘explores the historical facts’ that the author maintains demonstrate that Livingstone had been ‘absolutely correct.’
Sanders is impressed by Winstanley’s ‘extensive footnotes’ in his chapter ‘Nazi comparisons’ with ‘every aspect backed up by references.’[94] He should not be. As someone who has authored two historical books himself, Sanders would know that good history is not just about amassing data. Had Sanders done his ‘homework’ – a homily he lobs at mainstream media journalists he regards as incurious dupes over Labour’s antisemitism crisis – he would have discovered that Winstanley has been selective.
The chapter’s biggest single source of footnotes relates to works by the respected historian of the Nazi era Francis Nicosia, Professor Emeritus of History, and Raul Hilberg, Distinguished Professor of Holocaust Studies at the University of Vermont.[95] ‘We can learn much about Nazi-Zionist relations in the pre-war years from the work of American academic Francis Nicosia’, writes Winstanley.[96]
Indeed, we can – provided we don’t restrict our references to only those that support the case that Livingstone was ‘absolutely correct’ when he said Hitler supported Zionism – whilst omitting references which show the opposite. However, like Livingstone, that is what Winstanley has done.
He quotes Nicosia as his reference for saying that the Nazis allowed the Zionists to set up training camps to prepare Jews for their new lives in Palestine.[97] By August 1936, the youth wing of the ZVfD had established 40 such Umschulungslager (re-education camps) with ‘the full approval of the Nazi authorities.’[98]
He also quotes Nicosia saying the German Ministry of Labour ‘expressed its unqualified support’ and that the Ministry ‘referred favourably to the support already given to the retraining programme by Hitler and the Gestapo.’ (Winstanley’s emphases)[99]
So here is Winstanley using an academic widely recognised as perhaps the preeminent authority on pre-WW2 Nazi-Zionist diplomacy, to help corroborate his claim that ‘Hitler was supporting Zionism. Ken Livingstone was right.’[100]
Except that Livingstone was wrong when he said ‘the SS set up (the) training camps.’[101] They did not. The camps were established and funded by the Zionist movement as Nicosia also makes clear. [102] Winstanley says nothing about how Livingstone was wrong to attribute this to the SS.
Nor does Winstanley tell us about the awful living conditions that Nicosia has also described existed in the camps: training programmes had to be held in segregated facilities, mixing with German farmers or tradesmen, was forbidden,[103] no singing, whistling, smoking or unnecessary noise was allowed and there were severe punishments including expulsion from the programme for breaking these rules.[104] Nor does Winstanley mention Nicosia’s reference to the existence of non-Zionist centres preparing Jews for destinations other than Palestine.[105] The Nazis just wanted all Jews out, not just Zionists. Period.
Instead, throughout his ‘Nazi Comparisons’ chapter, Winstanley sprinkles references from Nicosia that he regards as supportive of Livingstone’s claim that ‘Hitler supported Zionism’ whilst omitting those that don’t, his most egregious omission being Nicosia’s definitive judgement that despite the Nazis allowing emigration to Palestine, Hitler categorically did not support Zionism:
The consistent preference of the various government and party agencies for the German Zionist movement from 1933 through 1938 was by no means a reflection of Nazi respect for or solidarity with the philosophy and aims of Zionism. Had that been the case, Zionists might have been spared the hardships and brutality meted out to all Jews in Germany after 1933. Nazi policy meant neither the acceptance of Zionism as a positive force in Jewish life through the national rebirth of the Jewish people, nor of the related objective of an independent Jewish state in Palestine as the centre of that national rebirth. Indeed, both Alfred Rosenberg and Adolf Hitler had clearly indicated a Nazi approach toward Zionism in the early 1920s that, while rejecting the substance of Zionism, nevertheless identified it as a useful instrument in the quest to make Germany judenrein’[106]
In other words, Ken Livingstone was manifestly not ‘right’ as Winstanley keeps telling us. Not only was Livingstone wrong about his repeated suggestion that a shared racist ideology was behind Hitler ‘supporting Zionism’, he was wrong about some of the details too. Far from Winstanley’s assertion that ‘on the general facts’ Livingstone was ‘right’, his grasp of the facts was tenuous. Winstanley clearly sees himself as a ‘thorough journalist’ while accusing others of being guilty of the ‘habitual ignoring of inconvenient facts’. He insists he has demonstrated ‘in some detail’ the ‘undisputed historical fact that the German Zionist movement collaborated with Hitler’s Nazi government in the 1930s.’[107] Winstanley’s fellow anti-Zionist Richard Sanders also lauds Winstanley for not ‘shy (ing) away from exploring the historical facts.’ But by leaving out that critical paragraph from Nicosia, (and much else as I have itemised) [108] that’s exactly what Winstanley has done. In my opinion, he is neither the ‘thorough, meticulous reporter’ attested to by Sanders, nor ‘as careful and conscientious a historian as he is a journalist.’ [109]
Instead, Winstanley seems to have followed Livingstone in cherry picking his way through the historical record.
In his chapter “Nazi Comparison’ Winstanley often relies on Tony Greenstein, the abusive antizionist who unsuccessfully sued the Campaign Against Antisemitism for describing him as a notorious antisemite.[110] And just as Winstanley relies on Greenstein, so Livingstone relies on another ferocious anti-Zionist for his assertion that ‘Hitler supported Zionism.’
Relying on Lennie Brenner
Livingstone’s guide is the American Jewish anti-Zionist Trotskyist Lenni Brenner, author of a 1983 publication ‘Zionism in the Age of the Dictators’.[111] Brenner is also said to have ‘worked with’ the Marxist-Leninist terrorist group, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).[112] Brenner ‘helped me form my view of Zionism and its history’ says Livingstone, which is that there was a ‘shared common belief between the Nazis and the Zionists in preserving their race from interracial marriage and things like that … they wanted to preserve their ethnic purity and that’s why they had a working relationship.’ [113]
This is nonsense. As I have argued, the only reason that the ZVfD had any kind of ‘relationship’ with the Nazis was a ruthlessly pragmatic one: to get out of Germany because there was no future for Jews there. But Livingstone appears to prefer Brenner’s description of Germany’s 1930s Zionists as ‘mimics of the Nazis’, ‘confirmed racists’, and ‘the ideological jackals of Nazism’.[114] Brenner also accused the Zionists of repeatedly seeking the ‘patronage of Hitler’ and that the ‘Nazis preferred the Zionists to all other Jews.’[115]
A key source relied on by Brenner for this assessment of the relationship between German Zionists and the Nazis is an article in 1937 by a Berlin-based Rabbi Joachim Prinz after he escaped from Nazi Germany. Brenner quotes approvingly the following from Prinz’s article: ‘Solution of the Jewish question? It was our Zionist dream! We never denied the existence of the Jewish question! Dissimilation? It was our own appeal!’ [116]
Except that just as Winstanley cherry picks Nicosia, so Brenner quotes only those parts of Prinz’s article that convey a potent sense of Nazis and Zionists being in cahoots because they shared common goals. He omits Prinz’s defining conclusion from the same article,[117] never cited by Brenner or Livingstone:
… the Nazi attitude toward the Zionists was only a façade. In reality, the Zionists were and are miserably treated … During the years, Zionists have frequently been arrested. Zionist meetings were forbidden or dissolved … Zionist officials were and still are frequently called to the Gestapo and examined in not very polite terms. In brief, the seeming pro-Zionist attitude of the German Government is not an expression of, and should not be confused with, cooperation on the part of one side or the other.[118]
Here’s another of Prinz’s conclusions omitted by Brenner and Livingstone: ’We believed in the slim possibility of saving the German Jews, but nothing happened. Nothing!’ The Nazi government’s ‘only attitude toward Jews was one of humiliation, degradation, and the spirit of the Sturmer …’[119] referring to the overtly antisemitic propaganda weekly journal edited by one of Hitler’s most ardent admirers Julius Streicher, otherwise regarded as ‘Jew Baiter Number One.’[120]
For Fathom in 2016, the author Paul Bogdanor who specialises in studies relating to the Holocaust, Israel and Zionism,[121] teased out how Brenner ducked and weaved around Prinz’s account. As Bogdanor says, by omitting those passages from Prinz, Brenner has quite simply ‘reversed the meaning of his source.’[122]
Winstanley avers that ‘the general outline of the facts laid out’ by Professor Nicosia, was also published by Brenner.[123] Except that both Nicosia and Brenner’s source, Prinz, arrive at a completely different destination. But Winstanley doesn’t tell us that.
Livingstone Changes Tack
None of this is to deny that Ha’avara and some of the Nazi regime’s decisions in the 1930s had the effect of supporting Zionism in that they allowed German Zionists to emigrate to Palestine and to prepare for life there.
But it was only when confronted with the possibility of being expelled from Labour by the party’s National Constitutional Committee in April 2017, that Ken Livingstone explained this was all he’d meant to say all along: ‘I was just pointing out that the Nazi policy in relation to the Transfer Agreement had the effect (my emphasis) of supporting Zionism.’[124] When Professor Nicosia’s definitive judgement that Hitler had not supported Zionism (….’Nazi policy meant neither the acceptance of Zionism as a positive force in Jewish life through the national rebirth of the Jewish people, nor of the related objective of an independent Jewish state in Palestine as the centre of that national rebirth…’) was put to Livingstone at the NCC, he replied that those who’d interpreted him as meaning Hitler supported the creation of a Jewish state had ‘misunderstood’ him.[125]
Yet this was not what Livingstone had told Vanessa Feltz in his fateful interview, nor what his words were understood to mean, which to the ordinary person connoted the very opposite of Nicosia conclusion: that Hitler not only agreed with, but actively sought to further Zionism’s aims and goals because they shared an ideological racist affinity.
A full year had passed in which Livingstone had stuck doggedly to his bald mantra that ‘Hitler supported Zionism.’ At no stage had Livingstone clarified that what he’d meant was just Hitler’s ‘effect on Zionism’, although he did point out that he never said ‘Hitler was a Zionist.’[126] Interviewed on LBC two days after his fateful BBC interview, according to the Labour party, he refused sixteen times to apologise for not choosing his words more carefully, insisting he was just reporting historical facts.[127] Challenged later at the Oxford Union, he said: ‘I’m never going to apologise for saying that Hitler was a supporter of Zionism.’[128] Now before the NCC with his lifelong political career in the balance, he was saying something different.[129]
Not only had Livingstone’s words not been understood to mean what he now said they meant, in his opening address to the NCC, the Labour party’s counsel, Clive Sheldon KC maintained that Livingstone had never intended them to mean that either.[130] Instead, said Sheldon, Livingstone had decided that whenever there was an attack on the Labour party about anti-Semitism, he was ‘going to throw back at them this dirty relationship between the Zionists and the Nazis.’ [131]
The notes of Livingstone’s initial interview with Labour party officials record him as laying on that dirt with a trowel. They note that he told his inquisitors ‘the Israeli state was based on fascism’ because the Zionists had ‘approached Hitler offering support’ and that there were ‘some very disturbing quotes in my book from leading Zionists actually praising Hitler.’[132]
The ex-London Mayor had spent the year doubling down on his claim that ‘right up until the start of the second world war’ there was ‘real collaboration’[133] between the Nazis and German Zionists because like Nazis, the Zionists ‘wanted to preserve their ethnic purity and that’s why they had a working relationship.’[134] He had boasted of having ‘spent a lifetime reading history’[135] and yet the examples he gave of this alleged ‘collaboration’ – the Zionist training camps ‘set up’ by the SS, the Mauser pistols ‘sold’ to the Haganah by the Nazis; the Nuremberg Laws giving special permission for the ‘Zionist flag’ to be flown, to name but three – were based on a misreading of the historical facts.
So much for Winstanley’s endorsement of Livingstone having been ‘absolutely correct.’ [136]
From beginning to end, Livingstone had treated his critics with flippant condescension that he knew what he was talking about, and they didn’t. ‘One of the reasons we make so many mistakes in politics is that so few politicians study history,’ he said.[137] Arriving for interview by Labour officials ahead of his NCC hearing, he wrote ‘Torture chamber’[138] when asked to sign in at party HQ reception. At the hearing itself, invited by NCC chair to introduce himself to a witness about to take the stand, Livingstone quipped: ‘I’m Boris Johnson, the international war criminal.’ The joke fell flat.
Conclusion
Some in Jeremy Corbyn’s office are also reported to have been amused by Livingstone’s comments to Vanessa Feltz about ‘Hitler supporting Zionism.’ Watching Livingstone defending his comments a few hours later on BBC Daily Politics, the mood in Jeremy Corbyn’s office was jocular. A former staffer told the EHRC: ‘A number of office staff grinned, and one said: “Whoops.” Most thought his comments not that bad.’ An adviser to Corbyn is also reported to have ‘made an offhand remark about a “Jewish conspiracy” and a “political smear campaign”.’[139] Members of Corbyn’s office are reported to have been ‘very against suspending Livingstone’. [140] A senior party official reported that Seumas Milne, Corbyn’s Executive Director of Strategy and Communications had said ‘we couldn’t suspend Ken Livingstone…and then gave us a speech about the Israel/Palestine conflict and he suggested what Ken said was true and therefore he could not be suspended.’[141] Another party official noted Milne as having said that suspending Livingstone would create ‘a perception of bringing antisemitism into mainstream antizionism, making debate about Israel and Palestine impossible.’[142]
This mood music was a portent of things to come for it captured the insouciance of the Left at the hurt and anguish of ordinary Jewish members. It signalled a cold house awaited Jewish members, most of them Zionists critical of successive Israeli governments, anguished at the inexorable rightwards shift of Israeli politics, and muscular in their support of two states – but Zionists all the same, for Zionism comes in many forms. Where once they had been embraced first and foremost as party members like everyone else, now their Jewish/Zionist identity was coming into play. Some felt barely tolerated by their branches. A conditionality to their membership had crept in: were they Zionists or anti Zionists? Them and Us. Too many on the Left never really understood that – and still don’t.
So visceral is Asa Winstanley’s loathing of Zionism, that he holds this notion in contempt: the antisemitism crisis was ‘constructed … manufactured … concocted’ he asserts. Should we assume that the many activists, journalists and academics on the Left who have lavished praise on his book agree? ‘A story that needs to be told’ says the former minister and Chris Mullin. Only if it’s true, surely?
Some of Winstanley’s plaudits have come from those who originally relied upon what the Al Jazeera producer Richard Sanders has described as the ‘absolute bible’ of Labour’s antisemitism crisis for their claims that that it was weaponised. I’m referring to the 860-page internal report commissioned by Corbyn’s General Secretary Jennie Formby in the dying days of his leadership. If Winstanley’s admirers regard his journalism as essential reading, presumably they now believe there was little or no crisis at all? Yet, if that is indeed what they believe, what do they make of the ‘bible’s’ other major conclusion:
This report thoroughly disproves any suggestion that antisemitism is not a problem in the Party, or that it is all a ‘smear’ or a ‘witch-hunt’. The report’s findings prove the scale of the problem, and could help end the denialism amongst parts of the Party membership which has further hurt Jewish members and the Jewish community.[143]
For historical revisionists, getting to your final destination as you thread your way past each awkward pillar and relying on those witnesses and passages in the plethora of reports generated by this crisis that support your case, has been a long and winding road. Still, as with politics, you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do to get to where you want to get to. If we could just be spared the sanctimony about the intellectual rigour that got them there, it would make their contortions more bearable.
[1] https://twitter.com/AsaWinstanley/status/1672262996549050370
[2] https://twitter.com/AsaWinstanley/status/1672200219138613248
[3] https://electronicintifada.net/
[4] Weaponising Antisemitism – how the Israel Lobby Brought Down Jeremy Corbyn, Asa Winstanley, 2023, p. 134.
[5] Op Cit. Winstanley p. 163.
[6] Shah FB post, 15 August 2014.
[7] https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/apr/27/naz-shah-timeline-of-events-leading-to-mps-suspension-from-labour
[8] Livingstone interviewed by Vanesa Feltz, BBC Radio London 28 April 2016.
[9] Op Cit p163
[10] https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201617/cmselect/cmhaff/136/136.pdf
[11] Op Cit. Winstanley p. 143.
[12] Op Cit p141
[13] Op Cit p143
[14] https://www.jewishvoiceforlabour.org.uk/article/weaponising-antisemitism-a-review/
[15] ‘Arab Nationalism and National Socialist Germany, 1933-1939: Ideological and Strategic Incompatibility’, Francis Nicosia, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol. 12, No. 3, 1980, p. 357.
[16] Tributes on the back page of Weaponizing Antisemitism – how the Israel lobby brought down Jeremy Corbyn
[17] https://twitter.com/AsaWinstanley?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor
[18] https://twitter.com/AsaWinstanley/status/1669037951580266513
[19] Op Cit. Winstanley p. 145.
[20] ibid.
[21] https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/timeline-event/holocaust/before-1933/adolf-hitler-issues-comment-on-the-jewish-question
[22] A History of Zionism, Walter Laqueur, MJF Books, New York, 1972.
[23] Op Cit. Winstanley p. 146.
[24] Op Cit. Winstanley p. 147.
[25] https://scholars.huji.ac.il/sites/default/files/adamhofriwinogradow/files/hofri_-_the_legal_structure_of_the_haavara_transfer_agreement.pdf
[26] Op Cit. Winstanley p. 149.
[27] Op Cit. Winstanley p. 150.
[28] Werner Feilchenfeld et al., Ha’avara-Transfer nach Palästina, Tübingen, 1972.
[29] Op Cit. Winstanley p. 148.
[30] https://scholars.huji.ac.il/adamhofriwinogradow/publications/legal-structure-haavara-transfer-agreement-design-and-operation
[31] https://www.commentary.org/articles/richard-levy/the-transfer-agreement-by-edwin-black/
[32] Op Cit. Winstanley p. 148.
[33] Tony Greenstein’s blog: https://azvsas.blogspot.com/2022/11/why-ken-livingstone-was-right-when-he.html
[34] JW witness statement as served in Ware v French (Skeleton argument In The Matter of Mr Tony Greenstein (L1435959).
[35] https://scholars.huji.ac.il/sites/default/files/adamhofriwinogradow/files/hofri_-_the_legal_structure_of_the_haavara_transfer_agreement.pdf
[36] Op Cit. Winstanley p. 147: ‘Most Jews leaving Germany had about two thirds of their assets confiscated.’
[37] Op Cit. Winstanley p. 150.
[38] https://azvsas.blogspot.com/2022/11/why-ken-livingstone-was-right-when-he.html
[39] Op Cit. Winstanley p. 151.
[40] Op Cit. Winstanley p. 150.
[41] Op Cit. Winstanley p. 148.
[42] OP Cit Winstanley p150
[43] Op Cit. Winstanley p. 151.
[44] Op Cit. Winstanley p. 151.
[45] Ibid.
[46] Op Cit. Winstanley p. 152.
[47] Op Cit. Winstanley p. 153.
[48] https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/the-nuremberg-laws/
SECTION 4
- Jews are forbidden to hoist the Reich and national flag and to present the colors of the Reich.
- On the other hand they are permitted to present the Jewish colors. The exercise of this authority is protected by the State.
[49] Jenni Frazer, ‘Top historians take down Ken Livingstone’s claim that “Hitler supported Zionism”’. The Times of Israel, 21 June 2016.
[50] Richard Evans email to Labour party in preparation for Livingstone’s appearance before the NCC.
[51] Website of the Jewish Museum in Berlin.
https://www.jmberlin.de/en/brave-protest-against-racist-laws
[52] Op Cit. Winstanley p. 156.
[53] Op Cit. Winstanley p. 156.
[54] https://wiener.soutron.net/Portal/Default/en-GB/recordview/index/106540
[55] https://fathomjournal.org/an-antisemitic-hoax-lenni-brenner-on-zionist-collaboration-with-the-nazis/
[56] Op Cit. Winstanley p. 156.
[57] Nicosia, The Third Reich.
[58] https://fathomjournal.org/ken-livingstone-and-the-myth-of-zionist-collaboration-with-the-nazis/
[59] Shai: The Exploits of Hagana Intelligence, by Efraim Dekel, Thomas Yoseloff, New York, 1959.
[60] Op Cit. Winstanley p. 157.
[61] Bruce Hoffman, Anonymous soldiers, 2015; Boyer Bell, Terror out of Zion, 1976.
[62] ‘Ben-Gurion’s road to the State’ (in Hebrew). Ben-Gurion Archives.
[63] https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/david-raziel
[64] Op Cit. Winstanley p.157
[65] Op Cit. Winstanley p. 157.
[66] Tuvia Friling, Arrows in the Dark: David Ben-Gurion, the Yishuv Leadership and Rescue Attempts During the Holocaust, University of Wisconsin Press, 2005, Vol. 1, p. 20
[67] Friling Vol 1 pp 21-22
[68] Yechiam Weitz, Middle Eastern Studies, Vol.30, No 2, April 1994 pp. 351-368
[69] Shabtai Teveth Ben Gurion and the Holocaust Harcourt Brace & Co.p. 143.
[70] Tuvia Friling, Arrows in the Dark, University of Wisconsin Press 2003.
[71] Op Cit. Winstanley p. 158.
[72] https://www.worldjewishrelief.org/news/a-momentous-day-that-kickstarted-the-kindertransport-2/
[73] Op Cit. Winstanley p. 158.
[74] Interview on Sky News with Kay Burley, 7 September 2016.
[75] https://scholars.huji.ac.il/adamhofriwinogradow/publications/legal-structure-haavara-transfer-agreement-design-and-operation
[76] Op Cit Winstanley p. 149.
[77] Hofri Interview by JW May 2019.
[78] Professor Richard Evans email to Labour party in response to Ken Livingstone’s discourse.
[79] Op Cit. Winstanley pp. 147-8. Winstanley cites the following: ‘Nicosia The Third Reich, p. 213 gives a total of 105m RM. Concurring with that total are Raul Hillberg Destruction of the European Jews, Volume 1, Third Edition (Yale University Press, 2003) p. 139, footnote 9 and Saul Friedlander, Nazi Germany and the Jews: the Years of Persecution 1933-1939 (New York: Harper Collins, 1997) p26. Estimating that Haavara’s value was far higher, the equivalent of 140m RM are: Hava Eshkoli-Wagman ‘Yishuv Zionism: Its Attitude to Nazism and The Third Reich reconsidered’ Modern Judaism, Vol 19:1 1999, The John Hopkins University Press, page 28, as well as Klaus Polkehn ‘The Secret Contacts: Zionism and Nazi Germany, 1933-1941’, Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol 5: 3/4 Spring-Summer 1976, p66. I am grateful to Tony Greenstein for the latter four references.’
[80] Yehuda Bauer, ‘Jews for Sale? Nazi – Jewish Negotiations, 1933-1945’, p. 10.
https://www.yadvashem.org/odot_pdf/Microsoft%20Word%20-%203231.pdf
[81] Op Cit. Winstanley p. 139.
[82] Deborah Lipstadt written evidence to Labour party in advance of Ken Livingstone appearance before the NCC.
[83] Email to Labour party preparing evidence for Ken Livingstone’s appearance before the NCC.
[84] https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/germany-jewish-population-in-1933.
[85] Livingstone to John Mann 28 April 2016: ‘His view was to deport all German Jews to Israel – true or not?’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJCzVV5eIg8
[86] https://capx.co/ken-livingstone-gets-the-history-wrong-on-anti-semitism-and-hitler/
[87] https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/german-jewish-refugees-1933-1939
[88] Francis Nicosia, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol. 12, No. 3, 1980. p. 358.
[89] Ibid.
[90] https://blog.nli.org.il/en/eichmann_secret_visit/
[91] Lukasz Hirszowicz, The Third Reich and the Arab East, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966. p. 43
Klaus-Michael Mallmann and Martin Cüppers, Nazi Palestine: The Plans for the Extermination of the Jews in Palestine, Enigma Books in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2010. pp. 48-9;
Barry Rubin and Wolfgang G. Schwanitz, Nazis, Islamists, and the Making of the Modern Middle East, Yale University Press, 2014. p. 97.
[92] https://www.timesofisrael.com/full-official-record-what-the-mufti-said-to-hitler/
[93] https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/operation-atlas
[94] https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/uk-labour-corbyn-years-antisemitism-weaponising
[95] https://www.uvm.edu/cas/history/profiles/francis-nicosia
[96] Op Cit. Winstanley p. 144.
[97] Op Cit. Winstanley p.154.
[98] Ibid. In FN 51 Winstanley sources Nicosia ‘for a full map of their locations see Nicosia The Third Reich p217’.
[99] Op Cit. Winstanley p. 154.
[100] Op Cit. Winstanley p. 154.
[101] Ken Livingstone, Statement to the Press, 30 March 2017: ‘The SS set up training camps so that German Jews who were going to go there [i.e.Palestine] could be trained to cope with a very different sort of country when they got there.’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M81xdVZVxhg
[102] F.R. Nicosia, Zionism and Anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany, Cambridge University Press, 2011. p.212; Correspondence between the Antisemitism Policy Trust with Professor Francis R Nicosia, 11 May 2017
https://antisemitism.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Holocaust-Denial-and-Revisionism-Draft-3.pdf
[103] Nicosia, Zionism and Anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany, Cambridge University Press, 2011. p. 228.
[104] Ibid. p. 229.
[105] Francis Nicosia: ‘Jewish Farmers in Hitler’s Germany: Zionist Occupational Retraining Centers and Nazi Jewish Policy in the 1930s,’ in Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 2005, p. 368; Zionism and Anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008, p. 229.
[106] Nicosia, Zionism and Anti-Semitism.
See also Clive Sheldon QC opening before the National Constitutional Committee 30 March 2017 (In the matter of the NEC of the Labour Pary and Ken Livingstone)
[107] https://www.jewishvoiceforlabour.org.uk/article/did-the-jewish-chronicles-reviewer-tanya-gold-even-read-my-book/
[108] https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/uk-labour-corbyn-years-antisemitism-weaponising
[109] Ibid
[110] https://antisemitism.org/judge-grants-caa-petition-to-declare-tony-greenstein-legally-bankrupt-over-legal-costs-in-his-humiliating-failed-notorious-antisemite-defamation-claim/
[111] https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/document/mideast/agedict/index.htm
[112] https://fathomjournal.org/an-antisemitic-hoax-lenni-brenner-on-zionist-collaboration-with-the-nazis/
[113] Ken Livingstone told Sky that Lenni Brenner ‘came to Britain to publicise his book and we did a public meeting together. The shocking thing about his book was that he revealed that not only Hitler had wanted to move all of Germany’s Jews to Israel, but that the Zionist leadership continued a dialogue privately with Hitler from ’33 when he became Chancellor from 1940-41,’ he said. ‘They were working quite closely. Lenni’s book shows a shared common belief between the Nazis and the Zionists in preserving their race from interracial marriage and things like that. They wanted to preserve their ethnic purity and that’s why they had a working relationship. This caused quite a stir at the time, but everyone’s forgotten it.’ https://web.archive.org/web/20160430120157/https://news.sky.com/story/1687454/livingstone-says-labour-should-reinstate-him
[114] Brenner 1983 pp. 52-55.
[115] http://hurryupharry.net/2016/05/01/ken-livingstone-lenni-brenner-and-falsified-evidence/
[116] Brenner 1983 p. 47.
[117] https://fathomjournal.org/an-antisemitic-hoax-lenni-brenner-on-zionist-collaboration-with-the-nazis/
[118] Prinz (1937).
[119] Prinz (1937).
[120] https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/nuremberg-trial-defendants-julius-streicher
[121] http://paulbogdanor.com/
[122] https://fathomjournal.org/an-antisemitic-hoax-lenni-brenner-on-zionist-collaboration-with-the-nazis/
[123] Op Cit. Winstanley p. 158.
[124] Opening Clive Sheldon KC before the NCC 30 March 2017.
[125] Livingstone XX by Sheldon NCC, 31 March 2017:
MR SHELDON: ‘You’ve seen the reference in the Nicosia monograph that we put in.
MR LIVINGSTONE: Yes.
MR SHELDON: And it’s referred to – it’s in the exhibit to Mr Stolliday. It’s pretty clear there, isn’t it, that Hitler was no supporter of Zionism in terms of agreeing with its aims? Is that correct?
MR LIVINGSTONE: I’ve never seen any suggestion that he supported the creation of a Jewish state, no.
MR SHELDON: So anyone hearing when you say, ‘Hitler supported Zionism’ thinking what you meant was Hitler supported the creation of a Jewish state misheard you, did they?
MR LIVINGSTONE: Misunderstood, yes.’
[126] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/i-didn-t-say-hitler-was-a-zionist-says-ken-livingstone-at-antisemitism-hearing-a7082586.html
[127] Labour Party Disputes Committee report DP/48/16 Ken Livingstone, Brent Central CLP.
[128] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovNjplP5QN0
[129] Day 2 NCC hearing, 31 March 2017: MR SHELDON: ‘You were asked about 10 questions in Parliament and you were asked a question at the Oxford Union about it, and you said, ‘I’m never going to apologise for saying that Hitler was a supporter of Zionism.
MR LIVINGSTONE: Yes. Well, obviously your interpretation of ‘supporter’ is different to mine.
MR SHELDON: No, your interpretation of support is different to your own interpretation, because you’ve said it in your witness statement. “What I was trying to say,” is what you say, “is the effect of what he did was to support Zionism.” That’s completely different.
MR LIVINGSTONE: Well, I mean, that’s fine, but for me, I said what I believe to be true. That’s the term I used.’
[130] Ibid.
[131] Ibid.
[132] Labour party interview with Ken Livingstone, 16 May 2016.
[133] https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/mar/30/ken-livingstone-repeats-claim-nazi-zionist-collaboration
[134] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8VJNSE8ViI0
[135] Labour party Interview with Ken Livingstone, 16 May 2016.
[136] Op Cit Winstanley p. 143.
[137] BBC R4 World at One 28 April 2016.
[138] JW interview with Kat Buckingham, April 2019
[139] Para 24 written statement to EHRC of former LOTO member
[140] Confidential source statement to EHRC
[141] Submission to EHRC by senior Labour party official
[142] Note of Milne’s comments in conference calls between LOTO, Chief Whip, and General Secretary’s Office written contemporaneously at 1.15pm on 28 April 2016.
[143] p11 The work of the Labour Party’s Governance and Legal Unit in relation to antisemitism, 2014 – 2019
