BRANDING VICTIMS AS COLLABORATORS

Dear Professor Lipstadt:

Thanks for that explanation. I hope you don’t mind a follow-up question. During a visit I made to England last year, the media was awash with stories about Ken Livingstone, the former mayor of London, who had recently claimed:

During the 1930s, Hitler collaborated with the Zionists and supported them because he believed that a possible solution to his problem—the Jews—was that they should all move to Palestine. Then in the 1940s that changed, and he decided on genocide.1

Unlike white supremacists who might defend Hitler, Livingstone condemned him as “a monster from start to finish.” But then he made it sound as if the Zionists were in cahoots with him. “It’s simply the historical fact. His policy was originally to send all of Germany’s Jews to Israel, and there were private meetings between the Zionist movement and Hitler’s government which were kept confidential; they only became apparent after the war.”2

Livingstone’s remarks were the lead story on almost every news broadcast in England that day. I was left a bit baffled by it all. Is he flat-out lying? Is there any truth to this?

Yours,

Abigail

Dear Abigail and Joe:

In my opinion, Ken Livingstone can be described as a soft-core denier or soft-core denier-enabler—someone who provides the ammunition for the deniers. What Livingstone did was take a limited agreement between an organization of German Zionists and the Third Reich and misrepresent it to fit his own political agenda. Here are the facts: In August 1933, the Zionist Federation of Germany and the Economics Ministry of the German government reached an agreement—which became known as the Transfer Agreement—that allowed German Jews who wanted to emigrate to Palestine to turn some of their assets into funds that they would use to buy goods in Germany, which they could then export to their new home in Mandatory Palestine. These funds would have otherwise been frozen and confiscated by the Nazis. The agreement took three months to negotiate, but it was not a secret deal that “only became apparent after the war.” Because there was at the time an unofficial international boycott of German-made goods, Jews living outside Germany condemned it, as did by both the United States leadership of the World Zionist Congress and the Revisionist Zionist movement. There were also Nazis who opposed it. It was in place from 1933 until the German invasion of Poland in 1939.

Livingstone also falsely claimed that “the SS set up training camps so that German Jews who were going to go there [i.e., Palestine] could be trained to cope with a very different sort of country when they got there.” In fact, these camps to prepare German Jews for life in Palestine were actually set up by German Zionists before the Nazis came to power. Livingstone was sort of right on one point regarding Nazi involvement in the Zionist camps: When the Nazis came to power in 1933, the SS prohibited any singing and dancing at the camps.

The best refutation to Livingstone’s claims that Hitler thought his “Jewish problem” would be solved if all Jews moved to Palestine comes from Hitler himself, in this excerpt from Mein Kampf, which was published in 1925, fifteen years before, according to Livingstone, Hitler “went mad” in 1940 and decided to annihilate the world’s Jews.

For while the Zionists try to make the rest of the world believe that the national consciousness of the Jew finds its satisfaction in the creation of a Palestinian state, the Jews again slyly dupe the dumb Goyim. It doesn’t even enter their heads to build up a Jewish state in Palestine for the purpose of living there; all they want is a central organization for their international world swindle, endowed with its own sovereign rights and removed from the intervention of other states: a haven for convicted scoundrels and a university for budding crooks.3

Hitler’s plans for the Jews of Palestine became part of the historical record during his meeting with the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, on November 28, 1941, in Berlin, during which he reassured the Mufti of his “active opposition to the Jewish national home in Palestine. . . . Germany was resolved, step by step, to ask one European nation after the other to solve its Jewish problem and at the proper time to direct a similar appeal to non-European nations as well.” And when the German army eventually reached the Middle East from Caucasia, “Germany’s objective would then be solely the destruction of the Jewish element residing in the Arab sphere under the protection of British power.”4

Critics such as Livingstone who claim there was a collaboration between Nazis and Zionists do so for one repugnant reason only: to imply that the Jews themselves were complicit in the Nazis’ horrendous crimes. Livingstone’s argument is rooted in an immoral equivalency that treats Nazis and Zionists as ideological soulmates.5

While not an exterminationist antisemite, Livingstone is an antisemitic enabler who provokes in others contempt for Jews.6 When criticized for antisemitic remarks, he reflexively casts himself as the victim of pro-Israel hacks. “There’s been a very well-orchestrated campaign by the Israel lobby to smear anybody who criticizes Israeli policy as antisemitic. I had to put up with thirty-five years of this.”7 He relies on this rhetorical device so frequently that sociologist David Hirsh has branded it the Livingstone Formulation: “Accuse me of antisemitism and I will accuse you of smearing me in the name of Israel.”8 This Holocaust inversion of victims with perpetrators and “Holocaust-Zionist collaboration” plays politics with the Holocaust by accusing Jews of playing politics with the Holocaust. “It engages in victim competition by accusing Jews of engaging in victim competition. It obscures the actual relationship between Israel and the Holocaust by proposing all sorts of tangential, exaggerated and invented relationships between Israel and the Holocaust.”9

Abigail, what you encountered on your trip to England is one of the more sophisticated and slippery forms of Holocaust denial. To be perfectly honest, I fear this type of denial far more than the kind I confronted in court when defending myself against David Irving.

Yours,

DEL