True face of zionism

[lorddreadnought]

“Are we again … going to confuse Zionism with refugeeism, which is likely to defeat Zionism? … Zionism is not a refugee movement,” stated one. Another worried that “it is possible for the diaspora to undermine the Jewish state, because the urgency of the rescue issue could lead the world to accept a temporary solution. We should place increased emphasis on fundamental Zionist ideology.”

David Ben-Gurion himself (later to become Israel’s first prime minister) in 1938 similarly fretted that Jewish morality would lead to European Jewish refugees being rescued and sheltered in countries other than his emerging settler-colony in Palestine: “If the Jews are faced with a choice between … rescuing Jews from concentration camps on the one hand, and aid for the national museum in Palestine on the other, the Jewish sense of pity will prevail … [and] Zionism will vanish from the agenda.”

Clearly something had to be done to prevent such a disaster.

And something was done. Zionism’s influential diplomats and lobbyists flexed their muscles. Chaim Weizmann, the leader of the Zionist Organization (later Israel’s first president) pressured British Colonial Secretary Malcolm MacDonald to actually deny entry to German Jewish children fleeing Nazi persecution in the wake of the Kristallnacht pogroms.

“Weizmann’s attitude shocked me,” MacDonald later wrote. “He insisted on the children going to Palestine. As far as he was concerned it was Palestine or nowhere.”

Luckily, the Board of Deputies of British Jews had not yet been conquered by the Zionists. “If it had been then the children of the Kindertransport might have become one more grisly statistic,” Greenstein concludes.

Zionist activists in the US, meanwhile, actually picketed the offices of a non-Zionist Jewish group which was organizing food parcels to aid starving Jewish ghettos in Poland.

There’s so much of this depraved stuff that it’s genuinely hard to comprehend. This is by no means an easy read.

The weaknesses of this book lie rooted in the fact that Greenstein was unable to find a publisher and hence also a dedicated editor. For one thing it is too long, at almost 500 pages.

There are a couple of chapters that struck me as unnecessary.

Greenstein also assumes too much knowledge on the part of his readers. A dizzying array of characters, places and acronyms are dropped into the book with very little explanation.

Some of the general copyediting is scrappy.

Nonetheless, this book remains a monumental achievement. It deserves as wide an audience as possible.

It’s not too late for a publisher to bring it out – perhaps in a slimmer, re-edited second edition.