With the outbreak of the war, Jabotinsky, an ardent Anglophile in spite of everything, ordered the Irgun to stop all such actions and cooperate with the British. Stern proposed the opposite approach. His credo was: our enemy is Britain. The war provides us an opportunity to drive them out. The enemy of our enemy is our friend. Adolf Hitler is an anti-Semite, but now he is our potential ally.
Stern's approach caused a split in the Irgun. A furious debate broke out in all the secret cells. As a 16-year old member, I took part. Being a refugee from Nazi Germany, I rejected Stern's thesis.
Stern created his own group (later called Lehi, Hebrew initials of Fighters for the Freedom of Israel, also known as the "Stern gang.") He sent an emissary to neutral Turkey, where he delivered the German ambassador a letter for "Mr. Hitler," offering cooperation. The Fuehrer did not reply. That was, of course, before the Holocaust.
Stern was caught by the British and "shot while trying to escape." When the war ended, and Soviet Russia became the enemy of Britain and the West, Stern's heirs approached Stalin and offered cooperation. Stalin, whose anti-Semitism was becoming more pronounced at the time, ignored the offer.
During the war, one of the architects of the Holocaust was Adolf Eichmann, the SS officer who was in charge of organizing the transport of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz. In Budapest he established contact with a group of Zionists, led by Israel Kastner, with whom he made a deal. As a good-will gesture he allowed him to send a few hundred Jews to neutral Switzerland.
Eichmann sent one member of the group, Yoel Brand, to Istanbul, with a crazy-looking offer to the Zionist leadership in Jerusalem: if the allies provided the Nazis with a thousand trucks, the deportation of the Hungarian Jews would be stopped.
Contrary to his instructions, Brand crossed the border into British-occupied Syria and was arrested by the British. The deportation of the Hungarian Jews -- 10,000 a day -- went on.
What was the Nazis' purpose in this bizarre affair? My own theory is that Heinrich Himmler was already determined to dethrone Hitler and make a separate peace with the Western allies. Eichmann served his plan to establish contact with the allies. As a dyed-in-the-wool anti-Semite, Himmler was convinced that the Jews control the world.
Some time after the war, in Israeli captivity, Eichmann wrote down his memories. He stated that he believed that the Zionists were the "biologically positive" element of the Jewish race.
Mahmood Abbas, by the way, as a student at Moscow University, wrote his doctoral thesis on Nazi-Zionist cooperation.
CAN TRUMP'S assistants now include rabid Zionists and rabid anti-Semites at the same time?
Of course they can.
This week, our far-right Minister of Defense, Avigdor Lieberman, condemned the French plan to convene (in Paris in a few days from now) a conference on Israeli-Palestinian peace. The Israeli government fears that there, Secretary of State John Kerry will submit his detailed practical plan for a peace agreement, including the setting up of the State of Palestine. This plan would be adopted by the conference, and then by the UN Security Council.
This would be President Obama's parting shot. No veto.
(By the way, Kerry's plan is almost identical with a plan my friends and I published in 1957, 59 years ago, called "The Hebrew Manifesto.")
Blazing with fury, Lieberman compared this to the Dreyfus Affair. Some 120 years ago, a Jewish captain in the French army was falsely convicted of espionage for Germany and sent to Devil's Island off French Guiana. He was later acquitted. Zionist mythology has it that Theodor Herzl, then a Paris correspondent of a Viennese newspaper, was so shaken by the event that he was inspired with the Zionist idea.
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