3.     WHAT IS COLLABORATION?

The term ‘collaboration’ has a definite meaning which does not always imply common aims, voluntary cooperation or equal partnership.

Marshal Petain, Head of State of Vichy France, for example, is generally held to have been a Nazi collaborator because he assisted the Nazis to do their dirty work in France, although it is not suggested that he actually had the common aim of wanting to see the Germans rule France, or that he was an equal partner, or that his collaboration was not the involuntary result of France being defeated in the war. 

The point is that while most French people either resisted or just went about their business and did what they had to, to survive, Petain and his associates actively collaborated with the enemy that had occupied France, and for that they stand condemned.

Another term, ‘Quisling’, is sometimes used, especially in Israeli literature about Jewish collaborators with Nazism, although it should properly be applied only to collaborators who had exactly the same aims as the enemy.

It is well known within the Jewish community, although less widely known outside, that there were many Jewish collaborators with the Nazis, just as there were collaborators among all other people subjected to the Nazi jackboot.  These included members of the so-called ‘Judenrat’, or Jewish Councils in the ghettoes, almost all the Jewish Police in the ghettoes, and all the Jewish Gestapo agents and concentration camp trustees or ‘Kapos’. 

The only dispute is a semantic one as to whether ‘collaborator’ is the appropriate term for people who were not actually Quislings, and who usually collaborated primarily in order to save their own necks.  There is no real dispute that ‘collaborator’ is the proper term in many of these cases; and it can be applied to certain Jews who actively assisted the Nazis, even though they did not have the same aims as the Nazis and were in many cases exterminated along with the rest when their usefulness had ended.

The State of Israel even has a special law for dealing with these people, which is unique in applying to crimes committed outside Israeli territory and before the State came into existence, and also unique in providing for the death penalty and being exempted from the statute of limitations.

The only dispute is whether top Zionist leaders are guilty of collaboration and whether they should be executed in accordance with this law.  Naturally, most Zionists deny it, although by no means all, since the facts about Nazi-Zionist collaboration have been exposed by prominent Zionists including the present Israeli Minister for Justice, Shmuel Tamir ¹¹.   Those who deny it often get quite frenzied about it and pretend that Zionism is being accused of responsibility for Nazism so as to avoid answering the accusations of collaboration with Nazism.

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