Moshé Machover

• I WAS disappointed to read that there are some people criticising the Labour Party’s expulsion of Moshé Machover for his ravings about what he called “the Zionist-Nazi connection” in a Communist Party publication (Labour expels professor at its peril, October 12).

Moshé Machover would not be in this position if he had contained his comments to criticism of the Israeli government. One might have agreed or disagreed with what he said, but debate about the policies of any government is an important part of democracy.

What he decided to do instead was to distort history and suggest some sort of common cause between the Zionists – who sought to liberate Jews from oppression in Europe by creating an independent Jewish state – with the Nazis, whose oppression culminated in the murder of six million Jews in the Holocaust.

In defence of his bizarre hypothesis, Machover takes the unusual step of taking at its word Nazi propaganda from Reinhard Heydrich, a key architect of the industrialised murder of Europe’s Jews.

In the passage quoted by Machover, Heydrich makes the self-evidently preposterous claim that, “National socialism has no intention of attacking the Jewish people in any way” and goes on to say that the Nazi efforts to enforce the “racial separateness” between Jews and their (mostly) Christian neighbours, were in fact supporting the Zionist effort towards Jewish autonomy.

This is plainly baloney. The objective of the Zionist project was the national liberation of the Jewish people in a state where they would not be subject to the capricious whims of anti-Semitic and populist governments.

The Nazis, by contrast, sought to systematically pass laws to alienate Jews from their neighbours to permit ever-greater oppression and eventually genocide.

Machover’s historical revisionism, like that of Ken Livingstone, is not just poor history, it is malicious. It attempts to tether Zionism to Nazism in a sinister attempt to discredit the movement that has created a place of safety for the world’s Jews, including the Nazis’ victims, who were made refugees after the Holocaust.

The idea that any Jews, including Zionists, had common cause with their Nazi murderers is clearly grotesquely offensive.

It would be like using quotes from leading members of the Ku Klux Klan to argue that black empowerment and black consciousness initiatives in the struggle for civil rights were actually allies of white supremacists, on the tenuous basis that both were providing responses to the questions posed by racial diversity.

Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party is supposed to be about “Standing up, not standing by” and Labour Party has got this one right by “standing up” to someone who has offensively misused Nazi quotes in a Communist Party publication.

Those who persist in “standing by” such behaviour probably need to ask themselves if they are in the right party.

CLLR PHIL ROSENBERG
Labour, West Hampstead ward