Ken Livingstone did nothing wrong: a thread

The bottom line is this: Livingstone was pushed out by Labour, and betrayed by his own comrade Jeremy Corbyn, for the supposed crime of stating historical facts.

Ken Livingstone in April 2016, responding to a BBC Radio London question about Hitler and Israel, replied: "When Hitler won his election in 1932, his policy then was that Jews should be moved to Israel. He was supporting Zionism" .

Like it or not, these are historical facts.

(He made a small error in that there was no such thing as Israel in 1932 -- it was Palestine.)

But in essence, Livingstone was persecuted for stating a perfectly valid interpretation of history that is supported by well established historical facts.

What he said is well attested by many historians, including the pro-Zionist scholar Francis Nicosia in "The Third Reich and the Palestine Question" and by anti-Zionist Marxist writer Lenni Brenner in "Zionism in the Age of the Dictators".

Between 1933 all the way up until the early years of WW2, the Nazis financially, logistically and politically supported the German Zionist movement. The Haavara agreement is only the most well-known aspect of this collaboration.

Of course, stating these facts is going to be "offensive" to Zionists. They tend not to like it when you point out the inconvenient historical fact that the German Zionist movement collaborated with Hitler's Nazi regime -- but that doesn't make it any less of a historical fact.

Hitler was a vicious anti-Semite who -- like previous anti-Semites, including Winston Churchill -- promoted a fantasy that there was a world conspiracy for Jewish control. He saw Zionism as one component part of that fantasy.

However, as an anti-Jewish racist, Hitler also saw Jews as "racially" incapable of building their own (settler-colonial) state in Palestine. (Unlike the white European empires -- especially the British one, which he particularly admired.)

The Hitler regime therefore saw no danger in promoting the German Zionist movement -- and did so for years.

The motive for this collaboration was stated openly by Alfred Rosenberg (a key antisemitic ideologue later hanged as a Nazi war criminal) as early as 1919:

“Zionism must be vigorously supported in order to encourage a significant number of German Jews to leave for Palestine or other destinations” (Nicosia, p 25).

In June 1933, only months after Hitler had come to power, the German Zionist Federation wrote to the Fuhrer promoting Zionism and its plan to create a Jewish state in Palestine, in terms that would appeal to the explicit racism of Nazi ideology:

“Zionism believes that the rebirth of the national life of a people, which is now occurring in Germany through the emphasis on its Christian and national character, must also come about among the Jewish people" (Nicosia, 42).

There is evidence of Nazi contacts with an agent for the "labour Zionist" militia, the Haganah: Feivel Polkes.

In 1937 Polkes met in Berlin with SS and Gestapo officials. His main contact was Adolf Eichmann himself (hanged in Israel decades later as a key perpetrator of the Holocaust) (Nicosia, 62-64).

There were even some limited military ties. 300 German pistols were sent to the Haganah in Jaffa between 1933-35. Polkes told Eichmann with appreciation they had been used against Palestinians during the 1936 Arab uprising (Nicosia, 63-64).

All this happened because both Nazis and Zionists agreed on the same antisemitic idea: "Jews in Germany" were not actually real Germans and should leave the country -- preferably for Palestine.

It goes even deeper: there's lots more evidence in the books I cited, but in summary: Ken Livingstone was right.

It's a historical fact there was material support by Hitler and the Nazis for the German Zionist movement.

Ken should not have been suspended in the first place.