I have tried to follow the argument
made against Ken Livingstone, now leading to a 100 Labour MPs calling for his expulsion from their
party for his alleged anti-semitic views.(“Corbyn faces revolt over
Livingstone," 6 April; https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/apr/05/growing-pressure-on-corbyn-to-sack-ken-livingstone-over-antisemitic-comments)
Your leader on antisemitism, “Labour has put Ken Livingstone ahead of a fundamental
principle, (Opinion, 6 April; https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/apr/05/the-guardian-view-on-labour-and-ken-livingstone-wrong-decision-terrible-message) accuses Mr Livingstone of presenting a “grotesque
misreading of history”
And talks of him perpetrating something
designated as “vindictive
revisionism.”
I am neither Jewish nor a historian,
but I am a professional researcher. I
have tried to understand the basis of the Nazi - Zionist nexus in the1930s
that Livingstone insists is historically true. I searched the on line
documentation publicly accessible
and found the following in two
Jewish archives.
In the summer of 1933, the Jewish
Agency for Palestine, the German Zionist
Federation, and the German Economics
Ministry drafted a plan meant to allow
German Jews emigrating to Palestine to
retain some of the value of their property in
Germany by purchasing German goods for
the Yishuv, which would redeem them in
Palestine local currency. This scheme,
known as the Transfer Agreement or
Ha’avarah, met the needs of
all interested parties: German Jews, the German
economy, and the Mandatory Government
and the Yishuv in Palestine…
In retrospect, and in view of what we
know about the annihilation of European Jewry,
these relations between the Zionist
movement and Nazi Germany seem especially
problematic. Even then, however, the
negotiations and the agreement they spawned
were profoundly controversial in broad
Jewish circles. For this reason, until 1935 the
Jewish Agency masked its role in the
Agreement and attempted to pass it off as an
economic agreement between private
parties.”
One of the German authorities’
principal goals in negotiating with the Zionist
movement was to fragment the Jewish
boycott of German goods. Although in
retrospect we know the boycott had
only a marginal effect on German economic
development in the 1930s, at the time
it was perceived as a genuine threat.
Correspondence between Heinrich Wolff,
the German consul in Palestine, and the
German Foreign Ministry shows that
shattering the boycott was a key motive for the
German authorities in concluding the
Transfer Agreement.3 In the absence of precise
information concerning the Yishuv’s
standing in the international boycott movement,
some tended to believe that a
considerable economic impact could be achieved by
concluding a contract with the
Palestinian Yishuv. Nobody doubted the moral weight
that breaking the boycott in the
Yishuv would carry for world Jewry.
The Jewish movement to boycott German
goods was foremost among the efforts of
international Jewish organizations on
behalf of German Jewry, and Jewish
communities worldwide, especially in
the United States, France, and Great Britain,
took part in it
(The Transfer Agreement and the
Boycott Movement: A Jewish Dilemma on the Eve of the Holocaust, by Yf’aat Weiss;
Shoah Resource Center, The International 2/33 School for Holocaust Studies;https://www.yadvashem.org/odot_pdf/Microsoft%20Word%20-%203231.pdf)
Another document in the archive of the US National Holocaust Memorial
museum in Washington DC on Chaim Weizmann, the president of the World Zionist Organization
during the Nazi era and the first president of Israel, records the following:
“In August 1933, the Zionist Congress nominated Weizmann, to head the
Jewish Agency's Department for the settlement of German Refugees. His first
action was to try to coordinate and streamline all Jewish relief activities.
His efforts met with little success. Weizmann opposed mere philanthropy; he
always wished to bring about an organized, carefully controlled immigration of
German Jews and other refugees to Palestine. Nevertheless, in light of the
increased persecution of German Jews, he did not adopt a rigid policy. On the
contrary, he hoped that a large influx of immigrants would greatly enhance the
Zionist enterprise in Palestine. He felt that the young Jews, who had no future
in Germany, should be given preference and that as much of their property as
was possible to save ought to be transferred to Palestine. Although he was not
personally involved in the details of the Haavara agreement, he supported it.
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