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.
[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.
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.
"[3] Writing for the Journal of Palestine Studies, Hilton Obenzinger prefaced his remarks by noting from personal experience the atmosphere of hostility that surrounded any attempt to address the Palestinian issue in public: rational debate quickly broke down into a "screaming bedlam".
For Obenzinger Brenner's meticulous documentation expressed an intention to disarm criticism of a thesis that would be considered controversial, and ward off the "barrage of abuse" its publication would inevitably excite.
[20][g][21] He writes that the book was a "crude ...pseudo-scholarly" piece of left-wing revisionism, and classified it as an example of a trend towards "pathological anti-Zionism" that arose in the wake of the UN declaration (1975) equating racism and Zionism, which moreover Brenner indicts for failing to mobilize the working classes against antisemitism.
After listing and disagreeing with Brenner's estimations of several historical figures, Cheyette concludes by deploring in the strongest terms the fact that the book was distributed by a respectable British publisher.
Ben-Noah argues that Brenner "creates a fantasy world in which the Zionists did wish for and expect the Holocaust, and in which the most fanatical Jewish nationalists were in reality, ardent anti-semites".
[23] Highly critical of the argument that "Zionists saw anti-semites as nationalists like themselves with a common objective in the removal of Jews from Europe", Ben-Noah asks rhetorically, "Where does one begin to review work like this?
[27] David Cesarani, commenting on Allen's admission that Brenner's work was a key inspiration for his play, asserted that, Many of his "facts" and "quotations" had been pre-selected and edited by Brenner to fit the well-established anti-Zionist argument that Israel is a "racist" state governed by a fascist (Yitzhak Shamir), the origins of which can be explicated by reference to parallels between Nazi and Zionist ideology and instances of concrete collaboration.