In Jack Bernstein's The Life Of An American Jew In Racist Marxist Israel, the author said many times that there was a cooperation between the Zionists and the Nazis. For instance:
In Germany, the average Jews were victims of the Zionist elite who worked hand in hand with the Nazis. Many of those same Zionist Jews who, in Germany, had worked with the Nazis, came to Israel and joined hands with the Zionist/Communist Jews from Poland and Russia.
[...] During World War II, in Germany these elite Zionist Ashkenazi Jews worked closely with Hitler's Gestapo in persecuting the lower class German Jews and delivering them to concentration camps.
Is this historically true?
Thanks in advance.
So, just by the title of the book you're reading it should be fairly obvious that the book is a polemic, not an unbiased view of anything. It's also not a history book in the first place.
A thorough refutation of this is really not possible, since there are no details of any sort given (which should, again, tip you off that he's making things up). But the myths of a "Zionist elite" involved in the Nazis is very very common in antisemitic literature. You could call the political elites in Israel the "Zionist elite" if you really wanted, but that's still wrong because most Zionists were not elites in any sense.
In Germany, the average Jews were victims of the Zionist elite who worked hand in hand with the Nazis. Many of those same Zionist Jews who, in Germany, had worked with the Nazis, came to Israel and joined hands with the Zionist/Communist Jews from Poland and Russia.
For the first bit, I imagine he's maybe mangling a half-remembered fact. There are two possible things here--the Ha'avara, or Transfer Agreement, and Lehi, a Jewish paramilitary. The Transfer Agreement was a deal between the Jewish Agency, Zionist groups in Germany, and the Nazi government. In it, Jews in Germany could emigrate, provided they paid a large sum of money, which would be used to buy German goods for Jewish groups in Palestine. That sounds very bizarre to modern ears, and it was extremely controversial at the time. But this was when Nazi policy towards Jews was openly antisemitic but not yet totally murderous (this agreement was during the 30s), and since both getting Jews out of Germany and into Palestine was difficult, the Jewish participants saw it as a way to use Nazi antisemitism to strengthen the Jewish presence in Palestine, with the money going to the Germany economy being an irrelevant side-effect, particularly since the alternative was Jews paying the German government directly, rather than having their money go towards goods for Jews in Palestine.
The second possibility is Lehi, a very radical Jewish group in Palestine. They sent an overture to the Nazis regarding an alliance against the British, which was Lehi's main ideological thrust--uncompromising aggression towards Britain. They somewhat uniquely were both fascist and communist. But they didn't have any significant presence outside Palestine, never were a substantial share of Zionist political movements, and never actually did anything with the Nazis. They were also not elite in any sense.
So, while the author may've been thinking of something real, it's so wrong that it's not even clear what real think he's referring to.
[...] During World War II, in Germany these elite Zionist Ashkenazi Jews worked closely with Hitler's Gestapo in persecuting the lower class German Jews and delivering them to concentration camps.
For this part, the only thing I could possibly imagine it referring to are the Judenräte, or Jewish Councils, which governed ghettos in Eastern Europe (not in Germany). They were essentially the Nazi's attempt to use native Jewish institutions to govern ghettos. As a consequence, they were composed of the elite of a local community, but I'm unaware of any of them having any particular connection to Zionism. They worked with the SS, not the Gestapo. And it's quite clear their efforts were misguided attempts to shield Jewish communities from harm, not genuine efforts to help the Nazis, and certainly not to harm Jews. At this point, they figured that cooperation would mean that Jews would live in intolerable conditions, but most would survive, rather than the entire community being murdered, not knowing (or more likely, not accepting the reality) that that was the Nazi's plan anyway.
So there, too, if there's something real it's referencing, it's pretty much entirely wrong.
Book is just a tangent of racist drivel. That whole international Zionist conspiracy is the epitome of an anti-Semitic canard. The evil Jews do not control everything. Some of the more radical Jewish groups, like Lehi, tried to facilitate a deal with the Nazis to allow the Jews to immigrate to Palestine in exchange for their support against the British, who they perceived to be more anti-Zionist than the Nazis. However, this all occurred in 1940, before the starvation campaigns in the ghettos, before the war with USSR and the death squads, before the death camps, before the deportations to the east. The Jewish groups were rebuffed and no such collaboration occurred, and, by 1942, the same group went on to ally themselves with Stalin, the Soviet Union, and Socialism.