From “The Jewish Question” of Nazis to “the Israel Question” by Maung Zarni

 First, “the Jewish Question”.

The Holocaust Memorial erected in the middle of unified Berlin was dedicated to “the Murdered Jews of the Nazi-occupied Europe”. The mass murder of European Jews on the sole basis of their group identity was rooted in and triggered by the Third Reich’s manufactured and mobilised racial hatred towards “the Jews”. Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kempf is soaked in the author’s hate-filled perception towards Jewish people while offering the pseudo-scientific rationalisations of this Class A racism - if racism (and racist institutions) could be hauled and indicated before a court of law.

By completely disregarding the natural diversity, both good and evil, within an identity-based group, in this case, Jews (ala Buddhists, Muslims, Hindus, Jains, Christians, Marxists, Communists, socialists etc.) Hitler and Nazis painted “the Jews” in the most essentialising, totalising light. In a nutshell, in the Nazis’ lens, because “the Jews” were so wicked, so cunning and so parasitic that they must be totally exterminated.

To be sure, there were historical prejudices (or racism, in today’s parlance), discrimination, persecution and pogroms towards Jewish people in the Old Christian Europe throughout the centuries. The 3,000-word-Magna Carta of the 13th century England singled out “Jews” and spelled out conditions under which the indebted families could be exempted from repaying their debts to Jewish moneylenders of the day. Likewise, the 14th century resolutions by German weavers’ guilds banned their members from doing business with Jewish wool suppliers. While economic considerations may have been a significant factor behind these articulations the identity of the racial group was apparently essentialised and front-loaded.

In later periods in feudal Europe, when a certain prosperous Jewish merchant or merchant class fell from favour with their Christian patron-monarchs, for instance, in the 15th and 16th century Polish kingdoms, royal punishment was typically meted out against ALL Jews: they were stripped off their wealth and social standing while having been condemned as aliens who “came with nothing”, settled in the kingdom, made a fortune and climbed the court ladder.

Policies of race/faith discrimination as to where Jews could live and what land they could own were present in European kingdoms, including Tsarist Russia of Eastern Orthodoxy. That the word “pogroms” is Russian speaks volumes.

Fast-forward to the end of the World War I.

Wilhelm II (1859-1941), a grandson of Britain’s Queen Victoria and the last German Emperor of Germany (source).

As late as 1919, Kaiser Wilhelm II, by then deposed into exile-hood in the Netherlands, was depicting German Jews as “mushroom that grows on the beautiful German oak tree” in one of his letters to a former German Field Marshall back home in Germany.

However, it was NOT until Hitler (and the Nazis) came along in Germany in mid-1920’s that the systematic scheme to ethnically cleanse Germany (and subsequently the Nazi-occupied Europe), first, forced mass emigration and finally the industrial scale mass extermination at various death and concentration camps.

A brief but important detour:

Photo screenshot from BBC.

Today, forced mass migration or deportation is euphemistically termed “re-migration,” by anti-immigration and anti-refugee White Supremacists in the West, most prominently Germany’s AfD, Britain’s ultra-Right Wing Nigel Farage, Trump’s Arch-Zionist White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller and Elon Musk with their broadly shared Great Replacement Conspiracy theory].

Stephen Miller, anti-Muslim and anti-immigration Tzar of ICE (see The Great Replacement Theory: Donald Trump’s Delusional Theory That Replacing the Chief of Staff With Racist Stephen Miller Will Help Him, Nov. 6, 2026.)

For Nazism of 1920’s, 1930’s and 1940’s, distinguished itself from any garden variety racisms of the Old Europe by envisaging a total ethnic cleansing of Germany (and Europe).

Mass extermination of ALL Jews within the Nazi-occupied Europe was the exceptionally dark Nazi dystopia. That is, except a small minority of Zionist Jews who saw the rise of Nazis in Germany as “once in a life time opportunity” - to make money AND to flood the Arab Palestine with the demographic tidal wave of Europe’s un-wanted Jews.

In his recent one-on-one public conversation with Ahdaf Soueif, the Egyptian author and co-founder of Palestine Lit Festival, the anti-Zionist, anti-Israel author Bejamin Moser, himself a Texas-born Jewish American, pointed out the sickening fact that David Ben-Gurion’s close assistant saw a rare economic opportunity in the genocidal Nazis coming to power in Berlin, for the financially struggling Zionist/Jewish Agency.

Watch the SOAS talk here below.

Facts about the Haavara (Transfer) Agreement between Ben-Gurion and Hitler (1933 - late 41), and the Zionist response to the Holocaust

While the Nazi genocide as in mass extermination of European Jews (and other large numbers of identity-based groups deemed unworthy of life including German trade unionists, German communists, German children with disabilities, Soviet POWs, Poles, Romani and Sinti peoples, homosexuals, anti-Nazi resistance fighters known as “the Partisans”) was not pursued until the latter part of the World War II when the Nazis began to suffer severe battle fields losses, Hitler’s unconcealed genocidal vision, that is, the world without Jews, in essence - was unconcealed in his Mein Kempf, published in 1925.

Hitler’s genocidal text, first published in German in 1925.

Zionist collaborators knew the Nazis were genocidal anti-semites all along.

Above photos from the Anthology of Glances: The Warsaw Ghetto.

Retrospectively, it is clear that Zionist leaders too aspired to be genocidal colonisers, under the right imperialist patronage of Britain under the leadership of quintessentially anti-Semitic British ruling class.

Therefore, collaboration with Hitler and Nazis suited David Ben-Gurion and Zionists just fine as they pursued their Zionist Project, political movement to build the Jewish state on someone else’s homeland.

The ugly empirical fact is this: Israel did NOT go bad like the Israeli genocide historian Omar Bartov and countless number of Zionist Jews of different hues in the diaspora have deluded themselves since its founding on Palestinian soil via ethnic cleansing of the majority of the native Palestinian people in the closing months of 1947 and spring of 1948.

Israel as the last in a long series of European settler colonial projects was conceived, hedged and executed in the complete and utter moral, ethical and spiritual void.

Israel as today’s brazenly genocidal entity operates outside the framework of post-Nuremberg international law, ethical or moral framework or any collective and normative conscience one finds in normal healthy human groups.

If in doubt, ask the indigenous Palestinians.

Historically, as early as 1896, the founder of political Zionism and founding President of the World Zionist Congress - Theodore Hezl specifically identified antisemites (and imperialists) as the most dependable allies that would play a crucial role for the Zionist project of acquiring land and building it up as the Jewish State.

In Herzl’s words,

It would be an excellent idea to call in respectable, accredited anti-Semites as liquidators of property. To the people they would vouch for the fact that we do not wish to bring about the impoverishment of the countries that we leave. At first they must not be given large fees for this; otherwise we shall spoil our instruments and make them despicable as ‘stooges’ of the Jews.
Later their fees will increase, and in the end we shall have only Gentile officials in the countries from which we have emigrated. The anti-Semites will become our most dependable friends, the anti-Semitic countries our allies. We want to emigrate as respected people (12 June 1896). [see The Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl. Vol. 1, edited by Raphael Patai, translated by Harry Zohn, page 83-84)