by Ron Unz, The Unz Review:
Last month I explored the historical origins of the State of Israel and the intertwined expulsion of the Palestinian refugees from their ancient homeland. During this discussion, I emphasized the crucial role that the Jewish Holocaust had played in justifying and facilitating those momentous events of three generations ago.
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I read or reread more than a dozen books for my long review article, and also glancingly mentioned an additional one, which I’ve now digested as well. My main focus had been on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, and The Seventh Million by Tom Segev only slightly touched on that topic. But his descriptive subtitle “The Israelis and the Holocaust” suggested a related subject of inquiry that proved quite fruitful.
Born in 1945, Segev is generally regarded as one of Israel’s leading journalists, the author of numerous widely-praised histories regarding Israel’s origins and its various wars. Although his 1991 bestseller was controversial, the back cover carried glowing praise from such top Israeli figures as Abba Eban and Amos Elon, as well as important Holocaust scholars such as Prof. George L. Mosse and leaders of the Jewish diaspora such as Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel. I found it quite enlightening, though perhaps not entirely in the way the author intended.
Even aside from its main theme, the first chapter provided some extremely useful information. Back in 2018, I’d drawn upon the shocking research found in the books of maverick leftist Lenni Brenner to publish a long article on the surprising relationship between the various Zionist factions and Nazi Germany, which spent most of the 1930s working together in a close economic partnership that laid the basis for the creation of the State of Israel.
- American Pravda: Jews and Nazis
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • August 6, 2018 • 6,800 Words
Although Brenner’s documentary research seemed rock-solid and had never been seriously challenged, I’d always had a few slight doubts at the back of my mind. I had wondered whether such utterly astonishing facts could really be true and yet remained totally concealed for generations by virtually all of our journalists and academics, but Segev’s brief discussion completely put those concerns to rest. Segev is a very mainstream pro-Zionist Israeli writer and he probably despised Brenner, a radical anti-Zionist Trotskyite, never mentioning the name of the latter anywhere in his nearly 600 pages of text. But Segev drew upon the same underlying archival sources to fully confirm all of Brenner’s most incendiary historical claims and even added a few additional ones, though all of this similar material was obviously presented in a very different fashion.
By the 1920s the mainstream leftist Zionist movement was heavily influenced by Marxism and led by Russian-born David Ben-Gurion, who modeled himself after Lenin, but those Zionists still eagerly formed a 1930s economic partnership with Nazi Germany based upon an obvious commonality of interests. Hitler was eager to encourage the departure of Germany’s problematical 1% Jewish minority while the Zionists were just as eager to receive them, along with the huge infusion of financial and industrial capital they could provide. During this period, important SS leaders including Adolf Eichmann were invited to Palestine as honored Zionist guests and then published their flattering accounts of the successful development activities of their Zionist partners in Joseph Goebbels’ leading Berlin Nazi newspaper. Some Zionist leaders reciprocated, traveling to Germany for very friendly meetings with their Nazi counterparts, and they reported how well the Jews of that country seemed to be doing despite Hitler’s supposedly harsh new regime.
Indeed, Segev’s figures demonstrate the enormous prosperity of German Jews, explaining why the Zionists were so eager to arrange for them to relocate to impoverished Palestine. The Nazis agreed that every such Jewish emigrant could take with him the present-day equivalent of $200,000 in foreign currency, plus another $250,000 or more in German merchandise. These were huge sums for what had been the desperately poor society of Weimar Germany, and such Jewish wealth had obviously been one of the major sources of anti-Semitic resentment in that country.
