Zionism in the Age of the Dictators is a 1983 work by the American free-lance journalist and author Lenni Brenner arguing that Zionist leaders collaborated with fascism, particularly in Nazi Germany, in order to build up a Jewish presence in Palestine.^[1]

Zionism in the Age of the Dictators is one of two works by Brenner on the alleged collaboration between Zionism and Nazism. Brenner returns to this topic in his 2002 work 51 Documents: Zionist Collaboration with the Nazis.

The author is Jewish, a Trotskyist, and an outspoken pro-Palestinian activist.^[2]

Argument of the book

For Brenner, Zionism emerged from within 19th century conservative nationalism, sharing with it both its ideology of Blut und Boden and its racist assumptions. Like classic antisemites, early Zionists,^[a] he claims, considered antisemitism to be the fault of Jews themselves, as putative rootless "intruders" trying to assimilate and exploiting socialist movements to do so. Only in Palestine, Zionists argued, could Jews become a healthy race.^[b]

Brenner notes that Theodor Herzl himself confided to his diary that he tried to win over Germany's Kaiser Wilhelm to Zionism by arguing that the movement would subtract Jews from revolutionary parties by relocating them abroad. Zionism's contempt for socialism led its leaders to repeatedly cooperate with conservative nationalist movements to suppress this perceived threat.^[3][4][2]

Brenner charges that the World Zionist Organization's abandonment of the idea that Jews in the diaspora were worth helping played a consequential role in the fate that later befel the Jews.^[3][5] To this end he cites several documents, one of which is a memorandum of the Zionist Federation of Germany sent to the Nazi Party soon after Hitler became Chancellor. In it German Zionists undertook to ensure that Jews would thenceforth avoid "becoming the rootless critics of the national foundations of German essence," for

a rebirth of national life, such as is occurring in German life through adhesion to Christian and national values, must also take place in the Jewish national group.

Brenner states that, after the passage of the Nuremberg Laws in 1935, Zionism was the one Jewish organization permitted to exist in Germany, and its flag the only one allowed to fly next to the Nazi banner.^[6][7] He reads the Ha'avara Agreement negotiated between Zionists and the Nazis as a subversion of the Anti-Nazi boycott promoted by the diaspora Jewish mainstream.^[8][7]

Zionists, in Brenner's interpretation, were so intent on colonizing Palestine with Jews, that they prioritized emigration there over any other form of rescuing Jews. To this end, Brenner cites a remark made by David Ben-Gurion in the wake of Kristallnacht when great Britain laid out a proposal to convey thousands of Jewish children at risk to the safety of its shores. Ben-Gurion commented

If I knew that it would be possible to save all the children in Germany by bringing them over to England, and only half of them by transporting them to Eretz Yisrael, then I would opt for the second alternative.^[3][9]

Likewise, in the United States in 1943 Brenner states that rabbi Stephen Wise opposed a congressional bill designed to create a rescue commission for Jews because it failed to mention Palestine.^[3][10]

Brenner concludes his book by a chapter on the Stern gang – which had broken away from the Irgun – and its efforts to forge an alliance with the Nazis against Great Britain, on the basis that the gang viewed itself as a totalitarian nationalist movement in the German mould. Suppressed as a terrorist group during the war, the reviewer notes, in the postwar era, one of its leaders, Yitzhak Shamir rose to become Prime Minister of Israel, and the former Irgun militant, Menachem Begin, on becoming prime minister, honoured the gang's founder, Avraham Stern by having a postage stamp with his portrait printed.^[3]