I’m old enough to remember when the Second World War was relived in the playground, with less popular kids forced to be Germans. Three decades after the conflict ended the Battle of Britain, Dambusters and D-Day lingered in boys’ imagination, as they read jingoistic comics such as Victor and Warlord. The atom bomb, which ended the war in Japan, loomed large in the Cold War between the West and the USSR.
But that was the generation of ‘baby boomers’. The war, as taught to children today, has changed in emphasis from factual detail about battles and strategy to a moral narrative. In the revised history, the main event was the Holocaust, and the perpetrators the most evil racist regime that has ever existed. Undoubtedly, Hitler’s tyranny persecuted the Jews, among other ethnic minorities, and its pursuit of the ‘final solution’ is a stain on humanity.
Whereas my generation saw the war in terms of a desperate fight against German invasion, the Blitz by the Luftwaffe, and Atlantic convoys bringing food and fuel harassed by U-boats. This British perspective was different to that of the Russians, or of any country overrun by the Wehrmacht. Of course, European Jews had a particularly traumatic experience, but for that to become the dominant account suggests ideological motive.
The truth about the relationship between the Third Reich and the Jews is more complicated than the induced horror of a trip to Auschwitz. Robert Oulds, in his masterpiece, World War II: the First Culture War (2023), describes what happened in Palestine, a less-known yet dramatic theatre of the Second World War.
In the 1930s Hitler had supported a Jewish homeland, as was already emerging since the Balfour Declaration of 1917. But the Holy Land around Jerusalem was keenly contested. The British had suppressed the Arab Revolt of 1936 to 1939, but Palestine and the wider Middle East were volatile.. Hitler sought to radicalise Muslims for jihad against the British and French colonial powers, as had the Kaiser in the First World War. As Oulds explains: –
‘Hitler planned to use Crete as a steppingstone to reach Cyprus and from there take Palestine from the British and Zionists who were in the process of colonising the Mandate.’
The Zionist paramilitary organisation, the Stern Gang, sought cooperation with the Nazis, to liberate Palestine from British control, but their overtures were coolly received. Hitler favoured the Arab nationalists. Meanwhile, twelve thousand Palestinians, mostly but not exclusively Christian, had volunteered to serve in the British army.
According to Oulds, ‘the Nazis admired Islam because its adherents were prepared to sacrifice their lives for their cause. Furthermore, as the Nazis were opponents of Judeo-Christian heritage, they thought that Islam could be a useful tool in undermining the traditions which the National Socialists despised.’ Ironically, this was similar to the aim of the Frankfurt School, whose Cultural Marxist professors were predominantly of the Jewish intelligentsia targeted by Hitler.
Muslims, particularly from the Caucasus, Bosnia and the Crimean Tatars, were recruited to the Waffen SS. The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem helped the Germans in this regard. However, Hitler’s Middle-Eastern endeavour was unsuccessful.
Zionists showed little gratitude to the British for the initiation of the Jewish state. The Stern Gang killed about two hundred servicemen, many of whom had fought bravely in the North African desert against Rommel’s army. In 1946, ninety-one people died in the bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, site of the British administrative headquarters. Twenty-eight lives were lost, including five British soldiers, in an attack on the El Kantara to Haifa express train in 1947. Other violent campaigns of terror and ethnic cleansing were waged by other Jewish terrorist organisations, including the Haganah, Irgun, and Lehi.
The Haganah was later rebranded and would eventually form the founding core of the Israeli Defense Forces. Likewise, many of the leaders of these terrorist groups would go on to become leaders, and even heads of state, in the new State of Israel. These included Menachem Begin (Irgun), Yitzḥak Shamir (Stern Gang), Ariel Sharon (Haganah), Shimon Peres (Haganah), and others, all of whom helped to execute was entrusted with the implementation of “Plan Dalet,” which sought to ethnic cleanse the Palestinian population from their historic homeland.
The state of Israel was ‘created out of Jewish terrorism’. That was the choice of words by Sir Gerald Kaufman, whose parliamentary seat of Gorton in Manchester has a large Jewish population. Born of Polish Jews, Kaufman was a zealous Zionist in his youth, but was disillusioned by the Israeli government’s treatment of the Palestinian people In the House of Commons in 2009, he asserted:
‘The present Israeli government ruthlessly and cynically exploits the continuing guilt from Gentiles over the slaughter of Jews in the Holocaust as justification for the murder of Palestinians’.
A Labour MP from 1970 until his death in 2017,. Kaufman understood the fundamental difference between ordinary Jews (including his constituents) and Zionists, who manipulate and exploit history to portray themselves as victims when they are really the villains. Since the incident of 7th October, Hamas has been likened to the Nazis. The refrain of ‘never again’ is repeatedly uttered by Zionist leaders and followers, and the killing and kidnapping of Israelis likened to the Holocaust.
The truth, as should be apparent by now to anyone with critical faculties and a moral compass, is that Zionists are using the Hamas attack as a licence for uncompromising ethnic cleansing, its genocidal bombardment of civilians inevitably leading to a land grab and theft of natural resources (notably, the gas field off the Gazan coast).
As Oulds’ book on the World War II shows, there are always two sides to a story.