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Post-Ugandan Zionism On Trial (2 vols.)

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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