Jonathan Freedland rewrites history to hide an ugly truth about Israel

The Guardian columnist has to twist the story of the first Jew to escape Auschwitz because a true biography of Rudolf Vrba would expose the Zionist movement's collusion with the Nazis

Tony Greenstein offers an excoriating account of how Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland distorted the historical record in his biography of Rudolf Vrba, the first Jew to escape Auschwitz.

One might wonder why Vrba's incredible story has been buried for decades, given how keen Hollywood is to make Holocaust movies.

Greenstein explains. Vrba's efforts in early 1944 to warn other Jews of their coming fate in the Nazi death camps were betrayed by European leaders of the Zionist movement, who silenced him.

That movement was prepared to sacrifice hundreds of thousands of Jews in return for the Nazis escorting the Zionist elite out of danger in Europe to Palestine. There the Zionist movement was already well-advanced in its preparations to expel the native Palestinians and build a self-declared Jewish state on the ruins of their homeland.

The Zionists' attitude reflected that of the movement's founding father, Theodor Herzl: "The anti-Semites will become our most dependable friends, the anti-Semitic countries our allies.”

Vrba was hugely critical of the Zionist movement for collaborating with the Nazis, and had no love for the Jewish state it spawned.

In 1961, the Daily Herald published an extract from Vrba’s memoir, cited by Greenstein, in which he wrote:

“I am a Jew. In spite of that, indeed because of that, I accuse certain Jewish leaders of one of the most ghastly deeds of the war. This small group of quislings knew what was happening to their brethren in Hitler’s gas chambers and bought their own lives with the price of silence … I was able to give Hungarian Zionist leaders three weeks’ notice that [Adolf] Eichmann [key architect of the Holocaust] planned to send a million of their Jews to his gas chambers … [Rezso] Kasztner [leader of Hungary’s Zionist movement] went to Eichmann and told him, ‘I know of your plans; spare some Jews of my choice and I shall keep quiet.’”

Kasztner’s betrayal of those Jews, dooming them to the Nazi gas chambers, was later justified by Israel’s attorney general, Haim Cohen, in the following terms:

“He was entitled to make a deal with the Nazis for the saving of a few hundred and entitled not to warn the millions… That was his duty … It has always been our Zionist tradition to select the few out of many in arranging the immigration to Palestine… Are we to be called traitors?”

It is on that basis that Israel's Holocaust museum Yad Vashem has effectively excised Vrba's astonishing story from its halls, and why Israeli schoolchildren learn nothing of Vrba. It's also presumably why Hollywood has never picked up the most Hollywood story to come out of the Holocaust.

The anti-Zionist Vrba's story exposes the ideological foundations of Israel to be fully in sympathy with ugly European ethic nationalisms that culminated in Nazism. His story explains how Israel was always capable of, and is now committing, a genocide in Gaza.

When ideology becomes more important than human life, people – even those you see as your own – become expendable. They come to be treated as a pawns in a savage game of power politics. David Ben Gurion, Israel’s founding father, gave voice to precisely this sentiment in December 1938, as Nazi pogroms against Jews in Germany raged:

“If I knew that it was possible to save all the children of Germany by transporting them to England, and only half by transferring them to the Land of Israel, I would choose the latter, for before us lies not only the numbers of these children but the historical reckoning of the people of Israel.”

Freedland's task in his book The Escape Artist was to appropriate Vrba’s story, strip out its anti-Zionist message, and incorporate it into the now-dominant Zionist narrative carefully crafted after the Second World War.

That is why the biography has received awards and endless gushing praise from the usual suspects. Vrba's life story is doubtless now ready for a Hollywood makeover – one that, should it happen, will greatly enrich Freedland.

Thanks to his efforts, the threat posed by the true story of Vrba has been neutralised. That accords with the wider fate of anti-Zionist Jews – their existence is either ignored or sanitised to accord with a self-serving Zionist interpretation of history.

That process continues to this day:

The many anti-Zionist Jews who supported Jeremy Corbyn were either ignored or driven out of the Labour party because they undermined the bogus antisemitism narrative Freedland and many others promoted to get rid of a leader who genuinely supported the Palestinian people's right to statehood.

And the many anti-Zionist Jews who attend the marches to protest the genocide in Gaza have been disappeared because they give the lie to the establishment media's efforts to paint those marches as antisemitic.

Note that Israeli leaders like prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu have made close alliances, just as Herzl recommended, with openly antisemitic states like Viktor Orban’s Hungary. They have continued in the tradition begun by Kasztner, who saved himself and his Zionist friends by sacrificing hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews.

Note too that for decades Israeli governments have been moving relentlessly rightwards, to the point now that senior government ministers like Bezalel Smotrich openly declare themselves to be “Jewish fascists”.

Nonetheless, their Zionist ideology is little different from their supposedly “moderate” predecessors. The chief difference is that they are unapologetic in their Jewish supremacism and loud-mouthed in their contempt for Palestinian life. Zionism is simply coming out of a closet it was partially forced into by the rhetorical need to claim a moral basis for its actions and by concerns about placating western publics.

It is not the self-declared fascist Smotrich committing a genocide in Gaza. It is Israel’s establishment generals and its citizen army.

Greenstein recently published an important book, Zionism During the Holocaust, that deals extensively with the collusion of those who helped to found Israel with the Nazis. I recommend everyone seek it out.

[Many thanks to Matthew Alford for the audio reading of this article.]

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