'Antek' Zuckerman testifies for the prosecution during the trial of Adolf Eichmann. USHMM, courtesy of Israel Government Press Office. Wikicommons. Some rights reserevd.The Zionist Nazi “negotiations” which featured in Norman Finkelstein’s interview in last week’s OD were of course in one sense part of a pattern of Zionist leaders approaching influential world leaders to make their claims on Palestine. Their list included some extremely unsavoury characters, the German Kaiser but especially leaders of the Russian Tsarist regime responsible for the infamous forged document, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a Hitler favourite.
At the same time I want to argue that the approach, and context, to the Nazis was different and here I would like to offer some reservations about Norman Finkelstein’s otherwise excellent discussion with Jamie Stern-Weiner in OD last week. I have already attempted briefly to address some of these issues here: Don’t fall into your opponent’s traps. But I would like to develop these arguments by focusing on two paragraphs from Norman’s interview.
“John Mann, when he accosted Livingstone in front of the cameras, asked rhetorically whether Livingstone had read Mein Kampf. If you do read Mein Kampf, which I suspect none of the interlocutors in this debate has done (I used to teach it, before the ‘Zionists’ drove me out of academia – joke!), you see that Hitler is emphatic that Jews are not a religion, but a nation. He says that the big Jewish lie is that they claim to be a religion; whereas in fact, he says, they’re a race (at that time, ‘race’ was used interchangeably with ‘nation’). And on page 56 of the standard English edition of Mein Kampf, he says that the only Jews honest enough to acknowledge this reality are the Zionists. Now, to be clear, Hitler didn’t just think that Jews were a distinct race. He also thought that they were a Satanic race, and ultimately, that they were a Satanic race that had to be exterminated. Still, on the first, not trivial, premise, he and the Zionists were in agreement.
