American Pravda: Jews and Nazis
American Pravda: Jews and Nazis
Ron Unz
This documented history of the close relationship
between Zionists and Nazi Germany will blow your mind. The author of this
article is a Jew, so don’t make a fool of yourself by screaming “anti-semite.”
American Pravda: Jews and Nazis
RON UNZ • AUGUST 6, 2018
• 6,800 WORDS • 349 COMMENTS • REPLY
Around 35 years ago, I was sitting in
my college dorm-room closely reading the New York Times as I
did each and every morning when I noticed an astonishing article about the
controversial new Israeli Prime Minister, Yitzhak Shamir.
Back in those long-gone days, the
Gray Lady was strictly a black-and-white print publication, lacking the large
color photographs of rap stars and long stories about dieting techniques that
fill so much of today’s news coverage, and it also seemed to have a far harder
edge in its Middle East reporting. A year or so earlier, Shamir’s predecessor
Menacham Begin had allowed his Defense Minister Ariel Sharon to talk him into invading
Lebanon and besieging Beirut, and the subsequent massacre of Palestinian women
and children in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps had outraged the world and
angered America’s government. This eventually led to Begin’s resignation, with
Shamir, his Foreign Minister, taking his place.
Prior to his surprising 1977 election
victory, Begin had spent decades in the political wilderness as an unacceptable
right-winger, and Shamir had an even more extreme background, with the American
mainstream media freely reporting his long involvement in all sorts of
high-profile assassinations and terrorist attacks during the 1940s, painting
him as a very bad man indeed.
Given Shamir’s notorious activities,
few revelations would have shocked me, but this one did. Apparently, during the
late 1930s, Shamir and his small Zionist faction had become great admirers of
the Italian Fascists and German Nazis, and after World War II broke out, they
had made repeated attempts to contact Mussolini and the German leadership in
1940 and 1941, hoping to enlist in the Axis Powers as their Palestine
affiliate, and undertake a campaign of attacks and espionage against the local
British forces, then share in the political booty after Hitler’s inevitable
triumph.
Now the Times clearly
viewed Shamir in a very negative light, but it seemed extremely unlikely to me
that they would have published such a remarkable story without being absolutely
sure of their facts. Among other things, there were long excerpts from the
official letters sent to Mussolini ferociously denouncing the “decadent”
democratic systems of Britain and France that he was opposing, and
assuring Il Duce that such ridiculous political notions would
have no future place in the totalitarian Jewish client state they hoped to
establish under his auspices in Palestine.
As it happens, both Germany and Italy
were preoccupied with larger geopolitical issues at the time, and given the
small size of Shamir’s Zionist faction, not much seems to have ever come of
those efforts. But the idea of the sitting Prime Minister of the Jewish State
having spent his early wartime years as an unrequited Nazi ally was certainly
something that sticks in one’s mind, not quite conforming to the traditional
narrative of that era which I had always accepted.
Most remarkably, the revelation of
Shamir’s pro-Axis past seems to have had only a relatively minor impact upon
his political standing within Israeli society. I would think that any American
political figure found to have supported a military alliance with Nazi Germany
during the Second World War would have had a very difficult time surviving the
resulting political scandal, and the same would surely be true for politicians
in Britain, France, or most other western nations. But although there was
certainly some embarrassment in the Israeli press, especially after the
shocking story reached the international headlines, apparently most Israelis
took the whole matter in stride, and Shamir stayed in office for another year,
then later served a second, much longer term as Prime Minister during
1986-1992. The Jews of Israel apparently regarded Nazi Germany quite
differently than did most Americans, let alone most American Jews.
Around that same time, a second
intriguing example of this quite different Israeli perspective towards the
Nazis also came to my attention. In 1983, Amoz Oz, often described as Israel’s
greatest novelist, had published In the Land of Israel to
glowing reviews. This book was a collection of lengthy interviews with various
representative figures in Israeli society, both moderate and extreme, as well
as some coverage of the Palestinians who also lived among them.
