Lenni Brenner’s Anti-Zionist Libels

In an attempt to discredit Zionism, the American leftist activist Lenni Brenner concocted an argument, first put forth in his 1983 Zionism in the Age of the Dictators, that Zionists and Nazis agreed on fundamental principles, that leaders of the Zionist movement collaborated with the Nazis to arrange for the deportation of German Jews, and that Zionist leaders intentionally abandoned European Jews to their fate. Brenner’s claims, which Paul Bogdanor shows to be utterly spurious, are frequently cited by anti-Semites on the far right and the far left—most recently in the claim of London’s ex-mayor Ken Livingstone that “Hitler was a Zionist.”

Brenner was not writing in a vacuum. For many years before the publication of Zionism in the Age of the Dictators, the Soviet bloc had been waging an anti-Semitic campaign with the same themes. . . .

Negotiations between the Labor Zionists and the Nazi regime began in 1933; at issue was the opportunity to help German Jews immigrate to Palestine without losing almost everything they had. . . . [T]he resulting Transfer Agreement caused intense public controversy within the Zionist movement. . . .

The moral dilemma facing the Labor Zionists was whether to help German Jews leave with a fraction of their funds or to join a futile boycott of Germany, which meant abandoning Jews and their assets to the Nazis. The Labor Zionists may be dismissed as naive for entering these talks, but their motives were not unreasonable.

Brenner, of course, saw the Zionists as evil. His trump card in his attack on the Transfer Agreement was the fact that two-thirds of German Jews seeking Palestine certificates in the years between 1933 and 1935 were turned down. However, as his [own] source pointed out, the Jewish Agency’s representatives were forced to reject these applications because of the British quota, which limited the number of immigration permits.

Brenner scorned as “capitalists” the thousands of desperate human beings who were rescued thanks to the agreement. In his opinion, it would have been better to forget about saving Germany’s Jewish population: “Every genuine opponent of Nazism understood that once Hitler had taken power and had German Jewry in his claws, the struggle against him could not possibly be curbed by an over-concern for their fate.” . . .

To Brenner, the Labor Zionists of the 1930s, who disagreed with his pronouncement made from the comfort of postwar America, were guilty of “boycott-scabbing and outright collaboration” with Hitler.

Read more at Fathom

More about: Anti-Semitism, Anti-Zionism, History & Ideas, History of Zionism, Holocaust, Soviet Union

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF