....Livingstone displays an ignorance of the history of World War II in North Africa. In November 1941, Hitler promised the Mufti, then in Berlin, that if and when the German armies were successful in the Caucuses, they would drive south to destroy the Jewish population then living in areas controlled by Britain in North Africa and the Middle East. In the summer and autumn of 1942, German General Irwin Rommel's Afrikakorps drove east from Tunisia to be met by forces from Australia, New Zealand and Britain at the Battle of El Alamein in Egypt. Nazi propaganda in those weeks and months urged Arab listeners to "kill the Jews," dispensing with any distinctions between Zionists and Jews. As the German historians Martin Cuppers and Klaus Michael Mallman have demonstrated in Nazi Palestine: The Plans for the Extermination of the Jews of Palestine, it was only the Allied victory at El Alamein over Rommel's forces that prevented the arrival of SS units eager to carry out mass murders of Jews in North Africa and Mandatory Palestine. Livingstone appears unfamiliar with this glorious page in the history of British anti-fascism.
While actions speak louder than words, Nazi propaganda aimed both at German audiences and at Arabs in North Africa and the Middle East constantly denounced Britain, the Jews and Zionism. This Nazi flood of anti-Zionist and anti-Jewish hatred is documented in my book Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World, [https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7trXEFcZimVbDhEYmlOeDNZQ0U/view?usp=drivesdk] which the leaders of the Labour Party really ought to read. Nazi propagandists claimed that a Jewish state in Palestine would be a "Vatican for the Jews," that is a power centre of an international Jewish conspiracy and thus a threat to Germany. They also argued that an Allied victory would be a victory for the Jews. They repeated lies that a Jewish state in Palestine would be a threat to the religion of Islam in the entire Arab Middle East. Zionism was described as a form of "Jewish imperialism" that was linked to British and American imperialism, and even to "Jewish Bolshevism" in Moscow as well. In the postwar years, neo-Nazis and Islamists in the Middle East viewed the establishment of the state of Israel as confirming these Nazi anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. In short, in both word and deed, Nazi Germany did all it could to ensure that a Jewish state in Palestine never would emerge.
Hitler and the Nazis' Anti-Zionism :: Middle East Forum
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