One of the world’s leading Holocaust historians has attacked the BDS movement, and denounced anti-Zionism as antisemitism.

Yehuda Bauer, professor of Holocaust Studies at Hebrew University, was in conversation with Tulip Siddiq, MP for Hampstead and Kilburn, at the JW3 Jewish community centre on Tuesday night.

He was brought over from Israel by the Yachad organisation, which describes itself as working “to build active support for a two-state solution in the British Jewish community.”

Professor Bauer said the boycott movement wanted "not a better Israel, they want no Israel.

“Now of course, they love Jews. Especially dead Jews. The ones who died in the Holocaust, they’re marvellous, they were terrific. Live Jews is something else.”

He added: “Anti-Zionism is a slogan, there’s nothing real behind it. It’s anti-Jewish, it’s antisemitic.

“They want to destroy the Jewish state; they want to destroy it because it’s a Jewish state. That means you are an antisemite.”

The 90-year-old academic criticised European and Israeli media outlets for not doing enough to promote the message of moderate Muslims fighting against their extremist counterparts.

“The media in this country refuses to deal with moderate opposition to radical Islam”, he said.

“In January of this year, in Marrakesh, there was a meeting of several hundred Muslim clerics, in order to distance themselves from radical Islam. They published a declaration, with the aid of a Catholic bishop and two Jewish rabbis. Did you read about it in any European paper, in any Israeli paper? Not a word.

“This is a complete blindness in Western society towards the only way you can fight radical Islamic antisemitism. That is by allying yourself with anti-radical Islam; there is no other way.”

In a week where Ken Livingstone provoked anger by repeating his remark that Hitler had supported Zionism, Professor Bauer offered a history lesson on the relationship between the Nazis and the movement to create a Jewish state.

He said: “The Nazi policy from 1933 when they reached power, was to get rid of the Jews of Germany.

“They did not yet plan the Holocaust. They wanted the Jews to emigrate and if they didn’t emigrate voluntarily, to expel them.

“The Zionist movement in Palestine at the time wanted to rescue these Jews. So they arrived at an agreement with the Nazi government that a certain number of Jews who had some wealth would be able to export some of their wealth – in goods – to Palestine, and thereby build up their own future and enable them to emigrate, which they otherwise would have had great difficulties doing due to the British policies in Palestine.

“The British government, in 1938-1939, agreed to the absorption in Britain of close to 10,000 Jewish children – the Kindertransport – from Germany, Austria and later from the occupied Czech lands until the outbreak of war.

“This was done with the agreement of the German government; they wanted to get rid of Jews, and the British wanted, at that point, to rescue children. Does that mean that the British and Nazi governments were in collusion?

“Anyone who says that, in this country or elsewhere, simply doesn’t know what they are talking about.”