Post-Ugandan Zionism On Trial (2 vols.) [Paperback]

S. B. Beit Zvi (Author)

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

The Holocaust researcher, S.B. Beit Zvi was born in Lita in 1906. He studied electricity engineering and worked as an engineer in Russia. On 1947 he has immigrated with his family to Israel.

After his son, Zvi, fell in battle during the Israeli Independence war, he changed his last name to Beit Zvi.

During the end of the fifties, while being active on behalf of the Soviet Union Jewry he found out that the Israeli society, the Israeli authorities and the Zionist movement have followed a selfish approach which puts the narrow interest of the struggle over the land of Israel above the importance of helping and rescuing Diaspora Jews, whenever they felt these two interests are opposed.

This conclusion that the Reduced Zionism prefers the means over the goals, has motivated the author to investigate the roots of this narrow Zionist approach and its implementation by the leader of the Jewish population of Mandatory Palestine during the Holocaust.

The author has also studied the Holocaust's historiography written by the research authorities in Israel. He has found an aimed tendentiousness in the history written by these researchers.

On 1977 after a long research of about 20 years, S.B. Beit Zvi has published his results in the Hebrew version of this book.

Right after its publication, the book has faced a wall of ignoring and disregard from the Israeli academic establishment. Only in the early nineties researches in Israel and in the whole world started to give the book the recognition it deserves and to adopt its thesis.

The demand in the USA for the results of the research led the publication of the English version on 1991.

Unfortunately, on July 1994 the author has passed away and did not live to see the distribution of the English version.

Product Details

• Paperback: 650 pages
• Publisher: S. B. Beit Zvi (June 1, 1991)
• ISBN-10: 0962884308
• ISBN-13: 978-0962884306
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #10,250,071 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One of the most important books on the Zionist record and the Nazi holocaust, January 1, 2009

By 

Mr. Tony Greenstein (United Kingdom) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Post-Ugandan Zionism On Trial (2 vols.) (Paperback)

Politically S Beit Zvi comes from a revisionist Zionist perspective. He is, like his predecssor Ben Hecht, who wrote definitive book, Perfidy, on the Kasztner Trial in Israel (concerning the collaboration of the leader of Hungarian Zionism with the Nazis) an ultra Zionist. He doesn't condemn Zionism but rather its leaders. In that sense, like Hecht and the Emergency Committee in the USA under Peter Bergson and Shmuel Merlin, he doesn't see that there was a 'logic' in the Zionist leaders counterposing rescue of Jews to anywhere that would have them, to the building of a Jewish State. This 'logic' being that if other countries could indeed rescue Europe's threatened Jews, what need was there of Palestine?

As the title suggests, Beit Zvi sees the problems as post-dating the Ugandan Crisis of the 6th Zionist Congress in 1903 when Herzl wanted to take up a British offer of Uganda (actually the White Highlands of Kenya) as a Jewish state/refuge. He is motivated by what he sees as the failure of the Zionist movement to take up the issue of Soviet Jewry. In this sense he is simply wrong. The Zionist movement worked very hard on the Soviet Jewish campaign, and as with their record of the Nazis, campaigned vigorously against Soviet Jews going anywhere but Israel.

But this is one of the most important books on the Zionist record over the Nazi holocaust that you can read, precisely because it comes from within the family. He documents copiously, if anything too copiously, how reports of the Jewish situation in Eastern Europe were played down, deprecated and in the case of US Zionist leader, actually suppressed for 3 months until November 1942 at the behest of the State Department.

For example in Chapter 2 he tells how the semi-official paper of the World Zionist Organisation, Davar, owned by the Labour Zionists' Histadrut, reported the ongoing holocaust of Jews:

'On 10th August 1942 in an editorial Davar argued that `Some of the numbers concerning the slaughter of tens of thousands which were published recently seemed to be exaggerated... From this point of view, the Nazi denial may be trustworthy.'

In 1944 Davar repeated the same trick, playing down the Hungarian holocaust. Beit Zvi shows how the Zionists, when they learnt of the 1938 Evian Conference of the Western Powers, whose focus was the Jewish refugees of Europe, did their best to ensure that other places of refuge other than Palestine were not opened up.

This book continues is on the same theme as Lenni Brenner's Zionism in the Age of the Dictators in showing how the Zionist misuse of the Holocaust is even more breathtakingly hypocritical than one would suppose.

Tony Greenstein