Re: [Marxism] The history of the Jews

[Jim Farmelant <farmelantj@xxxxxxxx>]

On Sat, 28 Jun 2008 22:24:41 -0700 "yossi schwartz"
<ssschwartz8@xxxxxxxxx> writes:
> The history of the Jews.
> 
> 



> 
> There is a reason why the Zionists are only confusing the question 
> who is
> Anti-Semite and the reason is that the Zionists have never fought 
> the Anti
> Semites they   have collaborated  with them.
> 
> 
> 
>  The most known case is the case of  Dr R Kastner. Kastner had 
> assumed
> various leadership roles within the Jewish community in Hungary and
> Transylvania before and during the war, including the chairmanship 
> of the
> "rescue committee" of Jews who escaped from countries occupied by 
> Nazi
> Germany

The issue of collaboration between Zionists and Nazis has been
taken up by several writers including the late Raul Hilberg in his
"The Destruction of the European Jews" (Hilberg who BTW
was a conservative Republican and a Zionist, spent the last
months of his life defending Norman Finkelstein), and Hannah
Arendt, who discussed the issue in her "Eichmann in
Jerusalem".  Other writers to address the issue
include  the Israeli historian Saul Friedlaender,
and Lenni Brenner has written extensively on this,
drawing heavily on Hilberg and Arendt.  Not too
surprisingly those Jewish writers who have addressed
this issue have come under heavily assault from
the so-called "Jewish establishment."  Hilberg
for instance was denied access to the Yad Vashem archives
in Israel for that reason.  Hannah Arendt famously
came under the vicious attacks in the 1960s following
publication of *Eichmann in Jerusalem*.  She not
only came under attack from Zionists and the
"Jewish establishment," but also from many
leading Jewish intellectuals as well, including
people (especially among the Partisan Review
crowd) who had been former friends of hers.

Here is what Hannah Arendt had to say about Kastner 
and his relationship with Adolf Eichmann in 
*Eichmann in Jerusalem* (NY: Pengiuin, 1964) pp.41-2 .

Referring to Eichmann, she wrote:

"His first personal contacts with Jewish functionaries, all of them
well-known Zionists of long standing, were thoroughly satisfactory.
The reason he became so fascinated by the "Jewish question," he
explained, was his own "idealism"; these Jews, unlike the
Assimilationists, whom he always despised, and unlike Orthodox
Jews, who bored him, were "idealists," like him.  An "idealist,"
according to Eichmann's notions, was not merely a man who believed
in an "idea" is someone who did not steal or accept bribes, though these
qualifications were indispensable.  An "idealist was a man who lived
for his idea - hence he could not be a businessman - and who was
prepared to sacrifice everything and, especially, everybody.  When
he said in his police examination that he would have sent his own
father to his death if that had been required, he did not mean merely
to stress the extent to which he was under orders, and ready to
obey them; he also meant to show what an "idealist" he had always
been.  The perfect "idealist," like everybody else, had of course his
personal feelings and emotions, but he would never permit them to
interfere with his actions if they came into conflict with his "idea." 
The
greatest "idealist" Eichmann ever encountered among the Jews was
Dr. Rudolf Kastner, with whom he negotiated during the Jewish
deportations from Hungary and with whom he came to an agreement
that he, Eichmann, would permit the "illegal" departure if a few
thousand Jews to Palestine (the trains were in fact guarded by German
police) in exchange for "quiet and order" in the camps from which
hundreds of thousands were shipped to Auschwitz.  The few thousand
saved by the agreement, prominent Jews and member of the
Zionist youth organizations, were in Eichmann's words, "the best
biological material."  Dr. Kastner, as Eichmann understood it,
had sacrificed his fellow-Jews to his "idea," and this was as it
should be.  Judge Benjamin Halevi, one of the three judges at
Eichmann's trial, had been in charge of Kastner's trial in Israel,
at which Kastner had to defend himself for his cooperation
with Eichmann and other high-ranking Nazis; in Halevi's
opinion, Kastner had "sold his soul to the devil." Now
that the devil himself was in the dock he turned out to be
an "idealist," and though it may be hard to believe, it
is quite possible that the one who had sold his soul
had also been an "idealist". "

She pointed out that among other
things, that Adolf Eichmann, for instance, 
professed to having a generally sympathetic
view of Zionism, and that he indeed claimed to be
an admirer of Theodor Herzl as well as a number 
of the then contemporary Zionists with
whom he had dealt with in his capacity as an officer
in the S.S.  Thus Arendt wrote:

"(It may be worth mentioning that as late as 1939 ,
he seems to have protested against desecrators
of Herzl's grave in Vienna, and there are reports
of his presence in civilian clothes at the commemoration of the
thirty-fifth anniversary of Herzl's death.  Strangely
enough, he did not talk about these things in
Jerusalem, where he continuously boasted of his
good relations with Jewish officials.)"

Hannah Arendt also wrote about another
kind of collaboration between Zionists and
Nazis, namely the Ha'avarah
or Transfer Agreement between the Nazi regime
in Germany and Zionist leaders in Germany and

Palestine.  About this, Arendt wrote:

"But quite apart from all slogans and ideological quarrels, it
was in those years a fact of everyday life that only Zionists
had any chance of negotiating with the German authorities,
for the simple reason that their chief Jewish adversary,
the Central Association of German Citizens of Jewish
Faith, to which ninety-five percent of organized Jews in
Germany then belonged, specified in its bylaws that its
chief task was the "fight against anti-Semitism"; it had
suddenly become by definition  an organization
"hostile to the State,"and would have been persecuted-
which it was not - if it had dared to do what it was
supposed to do.  During its first few years, Hitler's rise
to power appeared to the Zionists chiefly as "the
decisive defeat of assimilationism."  Hence, the Zionists
could, for a time, engage in a certain amount of
non-criminal cooperation with the Nazi authorities;
the Zionists too believed that "dissimilation" combined
with the emigration to Palestine of Jewish youngsters
and, they hoped, Jewish capitalists, would be a
"mutually fair solution."  At the time, many German
officials held this opinion, and this kind of talk
seemed quite common up to the end.  A letter
from a survivor of Theresienstadt, a German Jew,
relates that all the leading positions in the Nazi-
appointed Reichsvereinigung were held by
Zionists (whereas the authentically Jewish
Reichsvertretung had been composed of
both Zionists and non-Zionists), because
Zionists, according to the Nazis were "the
'decent' Jews since they too thought in
'national' terms."  To be sure, no prominent
Nazi ever spoke publicly in this vein; from
beginning to end, Nazi propaganda was
fiercely, unequivocally, uncompromisingly
anti-Semitic, and eventually nothing counted
but what people who were still without
experience in the mysteries of totalitarian
government dismissed as "mere propaganda."
There existed in those early years a mutually
satisfactory agreement - a Ha'avarah, or
Transfer Agreement, which provided that an
emigrant to Palestine could transfer his
money there in German goods and exchange
them for pounds on arrival.  It was soon the
only legal way for a Jew to take his money
with him (the alternative then being the
establishment of a blocked account,
which could be liquidated abroad only
at a loss between fifty and ninety-five
percent).  The result was that in the
thirties, when American Jewry took
great pains to organize a boycott of
German merchandise, Palestine, of
all places was swamped with all kinds
of goods "made in Germany.""

And here is what Saul Friedlaender had to say
about this issue.
----------------------------------------------------
Saul Friedlaender
Consenting Elites, Threatened Elites
Source: S. Friedlaender, Chapter 2 in: Nazi Germany and the Jews , Vol I
-
The Years of Persecution 1933-1939, (New York 1997), p. 41-72.

http://tinyurl.com/fmyx

In one instance only were the economic conditions
of emigration somewhat facilitated. Not only did
the regime encourage Zionist activities on the
territory of the Reich, but concrete economic
measures were taken to ease the departure of Jews
for Palestine. The so-called Haavarah (Hebrew:
Transfer) Agreement, concluded on August 27, 1933,
between the German Ministry of the Economy and
Zionist representatives from Germany and Palestine,
allowed Jewish emigrants indirect transfer of part
of their assets and facilitated exports of goods
from Nazi Germany to Palestine. As a result, some
one hundred milliReichsmarks were transferred to
Palestine, and most of the sixty thousand German
Jews who arrived in that country during 1933-1939
could thereby ensure a minimal basis for their material existence.
Economic agreement and some measure of co-operation
in easing Jewish emigration from Germany (and in
1938 and 1939) from post-Anschluss Austria and
German-occupied Bohemia-Moravia) to Palestine, were
of course purely instrumental. The Zionist had no
doubts about the Nazis' evil designs on the Jews,
and the Nazis considered the Zionists first and foremost
Jews. About Zionism itself, moreover, Nazi ideology and
Nazi policies were divided from the outset: while favouring,
like all other European extreme anti-Semites, Zionism
as a means of enticing the Jews to leave Europe, they
also considered the Zionist Organisation established in
Basel in 1897 as a key element of the Jewish world
conspiracy - a Jewish state in Palestine would be a
kind of Vatican co-ordinating Jewish scheming all over
the world. Such necessary but unholy contacts between
Zionists and Nazis nonetheless continued up to the
beginning (and into) the war. One of the main benefits
the new regime hoped to reap from the Haavarah was a
breach in the foreign Jewish economic boycott of Germany.
The Nazi fears of a significant Jewish boycott were,
in fact, basically unreal, but Zionist policy responded
to what the Germans hoped to achieve. The Zionist organisations
and the leadership of the Yishuv (the Jewish community in
Palestine) distanced themselves from any form of mass
protest or boycott to avoid creating obstacles to the
new arrangements. Even before the conclusion of the
Haavarah Agreement, such "co-operation" sometimes took
bizarre forms. Thus, in early 1933, Baron
Leopold Itz Edler von Mildenstein, a man who a few years
later was to become chief of the Jewish section of the
SD (the Sicherheitsdienst, or security service, the
SS intelligence branch headed by Reinhard Heydrich),
was invited along with his wife to tour Palestine
and to write a series of articles for Goebbels?s
Der Angriff. And so it was that the Mildensteins,
accompanied by Kurt Tuchler, a leading member of the
Berlin Zionist Organisation, and his wife, visited
Jewish settlements in Eretz Israel. The highly
positive articles, entitled "A Nazi Visits Palestine,"
were duly published, and, to mark the occasion, a
special medallion cast, with a swastika on one side
and a Star of David on the other.
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