Exchange: Tony Greenstein – More Errors Than Paragraphs, Cont. Previous: Paul Bogdanor NB: Here Greenstein’s first comment replies to “Mikey” and his second replies (or refuses to reply) to me. - Paul Bogdanor. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Greenstein is wrong – Polkehn’s article comes from the Journal of Palestine Studies in 1976... And hopefully the reply to the reply will be in bold! Firstly I have already acknowledged that Polkehn’s article, an excellent one I might add, is from the Journal of Palestinian Studies and I was confusing it with Jacob Boas’s “A Nazi Travels to Palestine” in History Today of January 1980. That’s what happens when you reply off the cuff. But I am pleased to see that there is no continuation of the cold war McCarthyism of – “oh it’s all the fault of the Soviets.” Less guilt by association and more dealing with the argument. The personnel involved in Mildenstein’s trip is unimportant. Tuchler from the German Zionist Federation organised or commissioned the trip, but the invitation to stay and tour in Palestine was from the Labour Zionists, which is why Mildenstein stayed primarily on kibbutzim and kvutzah such as Givat Brenner. The idea that all the Jews had to do was to colonise Palestine for the Zionist movement, all 6-8 million of them, is absurd. Leave aside the question why Palestine, the fact is that the indigenous population didn’t want to be colonised, not surprisingly. It would not have been possible, still less desirable. What was possible was mass emigration to the West, as after the Russian pogroms, but the Zionists in the USA were implacably opposed to such immigration. The Zionist answer was no answer at all. The tragedy was that Zionism acted as an obstacle. If Greenstein is aware when the Kasztner trial started, then why did he get the dates wrong... Yes, it’s 1953-8. Is this an issue? Regarding the Zionist policy of selecting the few out of the many... There is no confusion at all my dear Mikey, except in your own mind. Selectivity was an unchanged policy, up to and including the war. Of course I haven’t quoted the whole of Chaim Cohen’s speeches to the lower and higher courts. Naturally I haven’t included his opinions as to the essential goodness of Kastner (which I actually think irrelevant). But let me cite just a few passages:           Kastner did nothing more and nothing less than was done by us in rescuing the Jews and bringing them to           Palestine… You are allowed – in fact it is your duty – to risk losing the many in order to save the few.           If in Kastner’s opinion, rightly or wrongly, he believed that one million Jews were hopelessly doomed, he           was allowed not to inform them of their fate; and to concentrate on the saving of the few. He was entitled           to make a deal with the Nazis for the saving of a few hundred and entitled not to warn the millions. In fact           if that’s how he saw it, rightly or wrongly, that was his duty... It has always been our Zionist tradition to           selected the few out of many in arranging the immigration to Palestine. (Hecht, pp. 194-5) In fact this had been one of the key differences between Labour Zionism and Revisionism, the latter of which did believe that Palestine could accommodate the millions in Europe. So oh yes, Golda Meir in a fine, rhetorical speech in Palestine, whilst doing nothing concrete re: the saving of Europe’s Jews (she had been particularly insistent at Evian that Palestine must not be lost sight of when talk of rescuing Jews was on the agenda to the point that the Zionists actively [?]. All serious commentators, like Christopher Sykes, agree that the Zionists were pleased at the failure of Evian, and S. Beit Zvi (a Zionist and Israeli historian) argues in great detail that they took active steps to prevent the offer of 100,000 places in Santo Domingo coming to fruition. Greenstein is wrong on this point. The Supreme Court overturned the lower court decision on the point of collaboration by 4:1 and on the point of preparing the ground for murder by 5:0... Disagree. It is quite clear from their speeches that the Supreme (or High) Court of Israel voted 3-2 in overturning the decision of the lower court. And as Judge Shlomo Cheshin, for the majority, wrote: “As I said, I am not arguing with the basic factual findings of the learned President of the Jewish District Court.” He goes on to say that the findings do not, of necessity, therefore mean Kastner was guilty of collaboration. Moshe Silberg, for the minority, was quite explicit. Kastner was “a collaborator with the angel of death.” The 5 judges were unanimous in holding that Kastner “in a perjurious and criminal way” saved Becher, a major German war criminal. Regarding Dobkin’s claim... In fact to this day the Jewish Agency has not withdrawn its name from Becher’s [should be Kastner’s] affidavits, testimony and lobbying on behalf of the cream of the Jewish Department of the SS and Waffen SS. You ask how many others saved as many as Kastner. It’s rather a strange question. You could equally ask how many people died because of Kastner who might otherwise have survived? Let me quote Supreme Court Justice Moshe Silberg again, albeit not someone known as an anti-Zionist (nor Ben Hecht, who cites him in Perfidy, p. 274).           The charge emanating from the testimony of the witnesses against Kastner is that had they known of the           Auschwitz secret, then thousands or tens of thousands would have been able to save their lives by local,           partial, specific or indirect rescue operations… How can he examine the tens of thousands of possibilities?           Does he decide instead of God? The point is that Kastner acted, not as an individual but as a Jewish Agency representative throughout. And if SS General Walter Schellenburg, Chief of Himmler’s Intelligence is correct, he also acted as an SS agent as well. ... Kasztner testified against many Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg. For example Kasztner stated in his report that Eichmann was determined that not a single Jew should survive... Yes, but Eichmann wasn’t at Nuremberg so it would have been very easy to testify against him! The point is that he testified in favour of those who were there. Not that Kastner’s own Report should be accepted uncritically or at all. But as Mikey says, he was there on behalf of the Vaadah, the Jewish Agency Relief and Rescue Committee, the Hungarian Judenverrat and much else besides. Vrba himself writes, in his book I Escaped From Auschwitz, that “It is of interest to know that Eichmann’s cronies from Budapest, SS officers Krumey and Hunsche, were protected from prosecution after the war because Dr. Kasztner, in the name of the World Zionist Congress, issued them protective affidavits.” Citing K Muller-Tupath’s Reichsfuhrers etc., 1982. In 1969-70, Vrba testified at their trial in Frankfurt and is therefore in a better position to know the truth than Mikey. Or as Robert Kempner, a senior US official at Nuremberg described it: “Kasztner was running around at Nuremberg looking for Nazis he could save.” (Linn, p. 51). Greenstein is denying what he said when it is there in print for everyone to see “all the allegations in Perdition are made by the 2/3rd Jewish escapee from Auschwitz, the non-Zionist Rudolph Vrba.” ... Yes you are correct. Grammatically! I should have made it explicit by putting “also” in i.e. “are ALSO made by the 2/3rd…” Oh, I think that Vrba comes to much the same conclusions, to wit:           Did the Judenrat (or the Judenverrat) in Hungary tell their Jews what was awaiting them? No, they           remained silent and for this silence some of their leaders – for instance Dr. R. Kasztner – bartered their           own lives and the lives of 1,684 other “prominent” Jews directly from Eichmann. (Linn, p. 12, citing a           debate with Prof. Talmon in The Observer, 22.9.63). Of course there will be differences. And it is childish to say that I consider Vrba an anti-Semite. I say, and it is quite clear, that by the guilt by association technique of Mikey (everything is a Soviet plot) and his Zionist friends, then Vrba is an anti-Semite. A difference that is quite easy to understand. ... Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem was correctly attacked... Mikey tells us that Arendt’s book was “correctly attacked,” but doesn’t say why. Like any book it has its deficiencies, not least a lack of footnoting, but its general conclusions, viz. that the existence of the Judenrat could not but be of help to the Nazi exterminators cannot be faulted, nor her observations on why there was a differential rate of survival in the different countries, i.e. that not all countries were anti-Semitic to the same extent and opposition to anti-Semitism in countries like Bulgaria and France was far more important than the pie-in-the-sky schemes of the Zionists. Arendt courted the wrath of the Zionist establishment and the Mikeys of the day because she stumbled on some of the issues that the Eichmann trial had been intent on avoiding, such as Hungary and Kastner. That was why neither Vrba nor Marek Edelman (the last surviving leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Resistance) were called. They were not Zionists and did not sing to the tune of the establishment in Israel and its intention to mould the story of the Holocaust to their political purposes, not least by whitewashing their own role. But unlike the servile account of Mikey, who is in a long tradition of bowing and scraping at the feet of the Jewish establishment, Ruth Linn’s questions are more profound. She writes of Vrba: “Could a narrative of an individualistic escape, by a non-Zionist Jew, critical of his Jewish leaders, ever be made to harmonize with the ‘collective aura’ that dominated the state of Israel.” The same, of course, is true of the 4th and 5th escapees, Rosin and Mordowicz. Given that the first escapee was barely such, though he did bring out the first news of Auschwitz (he was passported out by a renegade SS officer who was murdered on his return), one has to make the point that the escapees were typical of the non/anti-Zionist East European Jews. Zionism likes to claim these Jews but only in so far as they keep their distance. In reality, the life of ghetto Jewry in Eastern Europe is as distant as it is impossible to imagine from Israel, the US’s murderous client state. Greenstein fails to answer my claim that Bauer called Vrba a “hero.” He just chooses to ignore it... Oh yes, I certainly failed to answer Mikey’s comment about Bauer calling Vrba a “hero.” I assumed I didn’t need to. It was so obviously a sham, like me calling Mikey a discerning and astute critic! In his Rethinking the Holocaust, Bauer calls him a “bitter Auschwitz survivor,” “not credible,” “embittered and furious,” his “despair and bitterness are overdone.” And referring to Vrba’s Haifa honorary doctorate (nothing to do with Bauer incidentally), in Leadership under Duress: The Working Group in Slovakia, 1942-44, Bauer and other of the Zionist Establishment Historians (Fatran, Rothkirken etc.) write of the criticism of the Slovakian Judenrat that “Regretfully, it was given legitimacy [lit.: was made kosher] when Haifa University awarded a honorary doctorate to the head of these mockers, Peter [sic] Vrba… Just because he was an Auschwitz prisoner endowed with personal heroism, he has crowned himself as knowledgeable to judge all those…” (Linn, pp. 109-110). Yes, I realise I shouldn’t have left out the reference to heroism, but in the circumstances... As Linn asks, what if Hungarian Jews had read the Vrba-Wetzler report and believed it? What if Israeli high-school students had been given a chance to read Vrba’s memoirs and draw their own conclusions? Quite. But Bauer too had his regrets. “I truly regret that Yad Vashem did not publish the book [Vrba’s memoirs] in Hebrew. On the other hand Vrba’s wild attacks on Kastner and on the Slovak underground are all a-historical…” So there we have it. Bauer regrets, basically, having been found out. Vrba’s main point in his debate with Bauer, etc., is that he and those who experienced what happened are the better historians, not those who write about it later from a particular partisan and political perspective in Israel. In fact, we can judge Bauer from what he wrote in his The Holocaust: Some Historical Aspects, his best known Hebrew book. The only reference to Vrba is a sentence: “Detailed reports about the death camp in Auschwitz and the gas chambers there were received in Slovakia from 2 Slovak Jews who escaped from Auschwitz on April 7.” True to form, even the names of the escapees were not mentioned in any, bar one, Israeli account until a hue and cry was raised by Linn, among others. In 1998, Vrba’s memoirs were published in Hebrew and finally included in Gutman’s Hebrew writings on the Holocaust for high school students. “Kasztner was given a copy of the report on 29 April 1944… but at that time he had already made a decision, together with other Jewish leaders, choosing not to disseminate the report in order not to harm the negotiations with the Nazis.” Quite. (Linn p. 72) As I have said – Bauer has praised Vrba... I think I have covered this nonsense. Bauer praises when he has no options left. But when he could have praised Vrba, and mentioned and published him, he chose to do nothing other than refer to him obliquely. Bauer’s and Gutman’s 1994 publications in English do mention the escape; it is not given the same treatment in the Hebrew editions. As Linn observes, Erich Kulka “after he joined the Israeli establishment” also joined in this “long-term tradition of discrediting” Vrba, to the extent of changing his name to Rosenberg-Vrba! His student, Ruth Davis, wrote to Vrba that “Kulka never mentioned to me that you are still living, or that you are in Canada.” (Linn, p. 68) Jim Allen, in his play that Tony Greenstein supported, did deny that that the Zionists fought Hitler’s army. I am glad Greenstein recognizes some did... Oh yes, the Zionists wanted their army or Jewish Legion or Zion Mule Corps as per the first world war. But that was as part of an imperialist war that did not have the objective of rescuing Jews. That was why the concentration camps were not bombed, refugees not admitted to the UK or USA, why Hitler was welcomed to power by most Western leaders, etc. The Zionists did want an army, because they wished to develop Haganah as quickly as possible into a proper army. But that had nothing to do with fighting Hitler and his extermination of the Jews. In any case it was sheer tokenism. It was the Soviet Army which tore the guts out of the Wehrmacht and thereby saved hundreds of thousands of Jews, not counting the million-plus who managed to escape into Russia from Poland and the Ukraine. Greenstein is either not aware or fails to acknowledge the socialist Zionists... Oh yes, I am aware of Tabenkin. I believe he ended up politically in Tehiya, the far-right settler party, with Geula Cohen, wanting to “transfer” the Palestinians. I don’t doubt that Ben Gurion said something once about socialism. But the problem with being 100% Zionist and socialist is that this is a contradiction. Ben Gurion sought to harness the capital of the Jewish bourgeoisie to financing his proto-state. He didn’t challenge capital or the alliance with the West, he sought it out. What was no part of Ben Gurion’s strategy was an alliance with the Arab workers. How could he when Histadrut campaigned on Jewish Labour, Land & Produce – i.e. a boycott of Arab Labour, Land & Produce. An apartheid state within a state? Class unity? Hardly, this was Zionism. What is more relevant is the admission of Prinz, in his interview with Brenner (51 Documents) that Zionism never fought Hitler in Germany. Which is the same conclusion as Niewycks’s in his book on German Jews in Weimar Germany. ... Vrba does not specifically call either Weissmandel or Kasztner a collaborator and thank you pointing that out. Although he is highly critical of Weissmmandel, not least for giving a personal letter to Wisliceny stating that he, Wisliceny, could be trusted by Hungarian Jewish leaders. (Vrba, p. 417). Vrba certainly believed that Kastner was a collaborator. Vrba did not write Holocaust Victims Accuse, it was written by Schonfeld... I’m aware Vrba didn’t write HVA. It was based on Min Hamitzair however, but it has to be treated with caution where it doesn’t document facts by explicit reference or photostat and omits all mention of the fact that Weismmandel was a member of the Jewish Council in Slovakia and Bratislava. Here we should be clear as to what Vrba did, what he claimed and what he has guessed. Vrba did not go to Hungary – the claim that Kasztner dressed in a SS uniform is denied... It cannot be proved beyond doubt that Kastner dressed up in SS uniform. He admitted at the trial that he went with Becher to Bergen-Belsen, so it stands to reason that he wore a uniform. Likewise he stayed in the dying embers of the Nazi regime as a guest of the SS and Becher in Berlin. I don’t know why you try and defend this person, who by any stretch of imagination was a collaborator. Of course, Vrba cannot know what was actually said to Eichmann but he had a pretty good idea of their relationship, something Eichmann confirmed in his interview with a Dutch Nazi journalist printed in Life Magazine of 28.11.60 and 5.12.60. In this entirely unforced interview, sometime in 1955, Eichmann describes Kastner so:           As a matter of fact there was a very strong similarity between our attitudes in the SS and the viewpoint of           these immensely idealistic Zionist leaders… I believe that Kastner would have sacrificed a thousand or a           hundred thousand of his blood to achieve his political goal. He was not interested in old Jews or those           who had become assimilated into Hungarian society. But he was incredibly persistent in trying to save           biologically valuable Jewish blood… (Brenner, 51 Documents, pp. 280-1). Mikey is simply wrong when he claims that Vrba claims that the Protocols were given to Kastner on 26 April. Vrba states that “the final version was typed by Thursday, April 27, 1944.” (Vrba, I Escaped, p. 403). He too is unclear when Kastner received it but he was told by May 1st that Kastner had already been given a copy. Krasniansky of the Slovak Council is clear that Kastner had the report before the end of the month, as is Bauer incidentally. (Linn, p. 27). Yad Vashem is not an “Israeli propaganda institute.” It is a Holocaust memorial centre... Yes, well, as Israel Shahak, noted, a Holocaust memorial centre that can welcome Nazi supporter and South African Premier John Vorster, isn’t worth a candle politically. The “explanation” for not publishing it is without merit as is the distinction without a difference between publishing and printing. In fact Yad Vashem withdrew a promise to co-publish with Columbia and the reason given is absurd. Anyone who wishes to understand the mechanics of the Holocaust has to base themselves on German documentation for obvious reasons. Hebrew was not a language spoken by most of the Jews in Europe incidentally! And if there’s any doubt about Hilberg, Bauer admits himself, in his Rethinking the Holocaust, that Hilberg’s book was a “monumental, brilliant and, in my view, unsurpassed analysis of the Nazi bureaucracy.” We can understand the decision not to publish because it focussed on the destruction, those who died, rather than the attempt by the Zionist Historians to seek out those who resisted, and magnify and glorify those relatively few incidents, in order to maintain the myth that there is some kind of continuity between resistance in the ghettos and what Israel does militarily today. Hence why Hilberg’s book is translated into virtually every language bar Hebrew! Remember that the question asked of the Holocaust survivors above all by Prosecutor Hausner at the Eichmann trial was “why did you not resist.” An unfair question put by a nationalist to those whose circumstances he could not even conceive of. Tony Greenstein is well aware from his Jewish upbringing that the prayers for the festival of Passover which predate the First Zionist Congress by numerous centuries plea for “Next Year in Jerusalem.” ... I am indeed aware of all the above prayers. Strange that these prayers, which of course predate, as Mikey says, the 1st Zionist Congress, did not lead to mass emigration to Palestine. Even stranger that the Orthodox were so bitterly opposed to the Zionist political project, so much so that the 1st Zionist Congress that Mikey refers to had to be transferred to Basle because Rabbi Gudeman and others were so opposed to it. What became then of their prayers? The reality is that they had no political significance. Zion was the idea of the Messiah’s return and of course that couldn’t be rushed or hurried along. ... This has false logic – it is based on the claim that Zionists wanted Jews out Europe and so did antisemites so Zionists are antisemites or even Nazis. The logic is as false as the old claim – Socrates is mortal, all cats are mortal, hence Socrates is cat... Well, I’m not aware that Socrates got most of his ideas from his cat. But Zionism did more than share a taste for pets or whatever with anti-Semitism. We are not talking about coincidences but joint work, praise, quoting by people like Heinrich Class from the Zionists. Of Herzl seeking out Drumont to get a favourable review for Der Judenstaat in his anti-Semitic daily, La Libre Parole. About the witterings of Nordau, Herzl’s deputy about racial theories and eugenics. About Herzl’s promise to the Czar’s anti-Semitic ministers that Zionism was an antidote to Socialism (thus how “socialist” Zionism came about – an attempt to bridge the gap between reality and rhetoric). The fact is that unlike Socrates’ cat, both Zionists and anti-Semites had a common objective. Herzl saw, in his own metaphor, anti-Semitism as the equivalent of steam in an engine. His task was to channel it in the right direction. I am not an apologist for the settler movement... I guess we should be grateful for small mercies. Mikey is wrong. I recognise the existence of the Israeli State, but like the Apartheid State I want to see it destroyed or deZionised, changed from a racial state seeking to privilege one section of the populace to a State that makes no distinction between those of different nationality or religion. To argue that there is an ideological link between Nazi Germany and Israel is not only hogwash but it also offensive... The truth is often offensive. In Israel there are essentially group rights, not equal individual rights. That was the purpose of the 1935 Nuremberg Laws. Arab villages are not recognised, Arabs cannot access 93% of Israeli land. Where does this come from, if not European anti-Semitism? Yes, a Jew is by virtue of the mother, but who determines whether the mother is Jewish, and how? The information includes that derived from Nazi sources. I mention Shahak because of course he was a childhood survivor of the Belsen camp and the Warsaw Ghetto. If the comparison was offensive, he nonetheless found it accurate. I do not know of Zionist organizations that tried to “ban” the play... Well, the Union of Jewish Students has tried to ban anything anti-Zionist. I have reams of their leaflets trying to ban me from speaking on campuses! When news of Perdition spread, the leaders of the Zionist groups in Britain, including the Zionist Federation, lobbied for it to be banned. I welcome these attempts because they always rebound. I always found that the Zionists would build the meetings I spoke at, in their attempts to deny the basic right of free speech. No, Healey’s WRP took money from Iraq to spy on Iraqi dissidents. I haven’t heard of spying on British Jews. Surely that is Israel? And I wouldn’t trust Harry’s Place for anything to do with information. Allen broke from the WRP and was a brilliant socialist playwright. It is that, rather than these absurd guilt-by-association techniques, that matters. And I note that Mikey hasn’t attempted to defend the ludicrous Stalinist charge against Jim Allen. Quite right too! Posted by: Tony Greenstein at January 26, 2007 05:15 AM -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I could be bothered replying to son of Vernon Bognador, the boring constitutionalist. Like father like son, obviously, except the son is even more reactionary! I think Vrba comes close to accusing Weissmandel of collaboration, but in the end he settles on him being a fool, but a brave fool. The quote which I have read and reread, before Bognador thought was a first, doesn’t say what Bognador thinks it says and I suggest he contextualises it. Ironically Bognador takes the same position as Lenni Brenner on these matters. I tend to believe that despite his secular education, Weissmandel fell into the pattern of parlying and bribing that was a rabbinical tradition. I note that Mikey agrees with me on this! The rest of the stuff is just typical McCarthyite rubbish interspersed with a few good Zionist quotes that prove nothing except that Zionists put the best interpretation possible on things, including Kastner’s exoneration of a major war criminal. In fact not just one, since he also tried to get Krumey and Wisliceny off too and of course SS General Juttner. I haven’t of course mentioned Ha’avarah, the welcome for Nuremberg, the role of Zionists in the Jewish Councils (Judenrat – of which Trunk estimates that 80% were Zionists). It was of course in their attitude to the Judenrat that Yad Vashem decided their stance towards Hilberg etc. Zionism was a movement of collaboration and therefore saw in the Judenrat their own kind. Now I’ve spent too much time on the warmongers list so you’ll have to debate among yourselves my children. Posted by: Tony Greenstein at January 26, 2007 05:31 AM -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Next: Paul Bogdanor