Ken Livingstone, mayor of London from 2000 to 2008, certainly thinks so and has the academic evidence to prove it, or so he claims. While the mayoral race this year transfixed Pakistanis worldwide by pitting son-of-the-soil, and eventual victor, Sadiq Khan against uber-rich Zac Goldsmith, also maternal uncle of children of Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) chief Imran Khan, Livingstone put forth his startling thesis in an interview with BBC Radio on April 28, prompting a rethink of pre-World War II (WWII) European history. In defending a colleague’s allegedly anti-Semitic Facebook rant, Livingstone asserted Adolf Hitler was “supporting Zionism” before he “went mad and ended up killing six million Jews.” He later called the creation of Israel “a great catastrophe,” and insisted that the UN should have resettled European Jews in Great Britain or the US after the WWII. Livingstone’s Labour Party quickly distanced itself from these comments and suspended his membership for “for bringing the Party into disrepute.” The unapologetic former mayor, however, countered, “How can the truth be an offence?” and railed at a “well-orchestrated campaign” by the “Israel lobby” to smear him. Members of Parliament, he explained, were unaware of this history because “they don’t teach it in Israeli schools.” Still, can we take this antiestablishment-and-proud politician’s claims at face value considering his long track record of bashing Israel and Zionism? This is, after all, not the first time the Labour leadership has suspended Livingstone over anti-Semitic remarks. That would be in 2006 when he likened a Jewish reporter to a Nazi concentration camp guard. Nonetheless, the centrepiece of his argument is historical fact, namely the Haavara (Hebrew for transfer) Agreement of 1933 between Hitler’s ministry of economics, the Zionist Federation of Germany and the Anglo-Palestine Bank run by the Jewish Agency of Palestine. Before his Third Reich cooked up a “final solution” to “the Jewish question” by gassing them, Hitler seemed willing, until 1938 at least, to help German Jews with “voluntary deportation” if they could pony up a minimum of 1,000 British pounds each in cash. Hitler’s rise had coincided with the implosion of Germany’s Weimar Republic from the Great Depression of 1929, so he was acutely aware of the economic bruising wrought upon his regime by the World Jewry’s international boycott of Germany. Under the Haavara plan, German Jews would sell their assets in exchange for funds they could use to buy property in Palestine. The Zionists also agreed to ignore the World Jewry’s boycott, and furthermore lobby Jewish leaders to cut Nazi Germany some slack. Around 60,000 German Jews took advantage of this deal and migrated to Palestine, thereby injecting close to a billion dollars at current valuation into the Jewish Agency coffers. This godsend helped the Yishuv, or early Jewish settlers of Palestine, hedge against the global financial crisis and losses to property from Arab rioting. While Hitler may not have been a Zionist in the conventional sense, and he was definitely a mass murderer without equal, there is little doubt that his actions helped create Israel by financing a pre-state Jewish setup in Palestine that no longer feared running out of money. Contemporary historians often view the Nuremberg Race Laws enacted by the Reich in 1935 as the curtain-raiser to the Holocaust. These laws revoked German citizenship for Jews and barred them from marrying people with “German or related blood.” This was Hitler’s first step towards racial purification by proactively erasing the Jewish footprint from society. Often forgotten though is the ultra-orthodox counter-narrative coursing through European Jewry in the mid 1930s: the Jews did not want to assimilate with the Gentiles. They had never wanted to assimilate with the Gentiles. If the Roman had not exiled their ancestors from Jerusalem, not a single Jew would have left ancient Judea. Hitler hounding them, hence, was a self-fulfilling prophecy, fulfilled. Sections of the Jewish press from that time were even grateful to Hitler for this social segregation. “Dos Yiddishe Tagblatt,” a Polish Diaspora newspaper, reported right after the passage of the Nuremberg laws that “Hitler made the Zionist flag kosher,” because he disallowed Jews from raising the German flag but was perfectly happy for them to hoist “Jewish colors.” The Doar Hayom publication from Palestine, moreover, compared Hitler favourably to Joseph Stalin while quoting the poet Haim Nahman Bialik, “In spite of ourselves, the Hitler regime makes us Jews and even nationalist and Zionist, while the Stalin regime led Russian Judaism to total assimilation.” Funnily enough, this deeply conservative train of thought — think Wahhabism for a Muslim equivalent — is alive and well in 2016. In an editorial a few weeks ago, the Israeli newspaper Yated Ne’eman declared, “Israel, which was established to solve the problem of anti-Semitism, has become the main cause of anti-Semitism. The Jews of the world are suffering not because of their religion, but because of Israel and its policies!” It went on to pronounce, “The natural state of the Jewish people is exile! Its normality is in the pressure cooker of hatred and persecution.” Many commentators have over the years drawn parallels between Pakistan and Israel as states spawned strictly from ideology. Indeed, in 1981, former dictator General Zia-ul-Haq proselytised “Take out Judaism from Israel and it will fall like a house of cards. Take Islam out of Pakistan and make it a secular state; it would collapse.” Clearly, the two-nation theory meant completely different things to Zia and Mohammed Ali Jinnah who loathed theocracies. Zia was similarly naive about Israel. The global Zionist movement strove to save the Jewish people, not Judaism. Sounds preposterous? Not if you read up on history and realise that many early Zionists, including patriarch Theodor Herzl and Israel’s first premier David Ben-Gurion, were atheists. Moreover, Israel never adopted a written constitution because the Zionists kept refusing the clergy’s wishes for one scripted around the Halacha (Jewish religious law). Livingstone’s intentions may be dubious, but he is right about the Haavara Agreement. Without Hitler’s consent, no matter how circuitous, there would be no Israel today. The writer is an Islamabad-based freelance journalist