Ken Livingstone and the Myth of Zionist “Collaboration” With the Nazis

[Valin]

The Tower:

Paul Bogdanor

04.23.17

 

The crisis surrounding antisemitism in the Labour Party refuses to die down. Aside from all the other incidents occurring on a regular basis, Ken Livingstone – the former Mayor of London and one of the party’s best-known members – has been the subject of an internal inquiry for bringing the party into disrepute. Even after being found guilty of this charge in April 2017, he has been given the light sentence of suspension – not from membership but only from holding office in the party for another year, prompting calls from over 100 Labour MPs for his expulsion. The British Jewish community, appalled at his continuing statements that Hitler supported Zionism and that there was “real collaboration” between Zionists and the Nazis, has deserted Labour in droves. (By May 2016, after a series of revelations about antisemitism within the party, only 8.5 per cent of the Jewish community planned to vote Labour. The figure had been 22 per cent a year earlier.)

 

Livingstone has declined to apologize; he links the Jewish national independence movement with the Third Reich at any opportunity. When challenged, he asserts the existence of a malicious campaign by pro-Israel lobbyists and “Blairites” to silence him. The well-established tactic of diverting attention from the issue of antisemitism by accusing Jews and others of trying to suppress ‘criticism of Israeli policy’ is now known as ‘the Livingstone Formulation.’

 

(Snip)

 

CONCLUSION

 

Ken Livingstone’s examples of pre-war Nazi-Zionist ‘collaboration’ are either distorted or invented. He has taken fragments from a paper by one historian, Francis Nicosia, and from a propaganda tract by a Trotskyist, Lenni Brenner, and twisted them beyond recognition.

 

The existence of forced contacts between the Nazis and German Zionists (as well as non-Zionists) during the 1930s is no secret. The aim of the Nazis at the time was to terrorise Jews into leaving Germany after stealing their property. The aim of the Zionist movement was to rescue Jews from Nazi control and, if possible, to preserve a fraction of their assets.

 

Historians, including those cited by Livingstone, dismiss the ‘collaboration’ charge (e.g., Laqueur, 1989: 500-1; Nicosia, 2008: 291; Schulze, 2016; Snyder, 2016). In describing the contacts between Nazis and some Jews as ‘real collaboration,’ Livingstone is mutilating facts; he is equating persecutors and rescuers, aggressors and victims, the powerful and the powerless, oppressors and the oppressed. His record betrays an obsession with attacking various Jewish people, and his campaign of falsification will be grist to the mill of the worst antisemites – both on the totalitarian left and on the fascist right.