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.
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