The dialectics of antisemitism and the holocaust
Preface
The holocaust is a powerful reference for Jewish suffering. Zionists use the way in which certain people (or institutions) address the holocaust, to illustrate what they regard as antisemitic. This article describes four cases where Zionists have struggled against what they perceived as antisemitic interpretation of the holocaust. The article also describes the counter force — where there was resistance — of those who were accused of propagating antisemitism.
The fifth article in this series explicated the Zionist concepts of being Jewish and the meaning of antisemitism. The sixth article presented a critique of these Zionist identity claims. Based on this understanding of the Zionist identity claims and the critique thereof the seventh article examined claims by the Anti-defamation League (ADL) and the American Jewish Congress (AJC) as well as some of their partner organisations, about the incidence of antisemitism in contemporary Germany, South Africa and the United States (US). The ADL’s, AJC’s and partner organisations’ claims are based on the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) text as well as the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism (JDA). However, the sixth article concluded that the IHRA text and the JDA are flawed definitions of antisemitism. Consequently the seventh article found wanting the ADL’s, AJC’s and partner organisations’ claims about the incidence of antisemitism in these countries in recent years.
The analysis developed in this series of articles is based on the following framework. Within class-differentiated modern societies different social grouping and classes are engaged in contesting the meaning of key concepts like ‘nation’, ‘citizen’, ‘human rights’ and ‘national self-determination’. With respect to the conflict over Israeli apartheid, each of these concepts is defined in one way by Zionists with respect to the state of Israel, and in another way by their anti-Zionist critics. Analysts need to grasp the self-understanding that each of these conflicting social groupings and classes has assigned to these concepts. But the concrete reality of these ideas is always contained within the oppositional struggle against those parties acting as agents, opposing the imposition of these contrarian ideas. This contested dynamic of the development of ideas is what is meant by the term ideological struggle. States play a key role in assigning these identity concepts to individuals and collectives. The fifth article argued that the assignation of identities happens through ideological state apparatuses. Therefore a state — or states — invariably form part of the antagonists in these conflicts. The state of Israel and its various ideological state apparatuses is an obvious example. But these struggles are not restricted to the state of Israel — they also involve other states, including those allied with Israel and Zionism, those in opposition and those proclaiming neutrality (like the South African, African National Congress government).
This article describes the ideological struggles between self-proclaimed defenders of Jewish rights and alleged antisemites, in four cases: in Austria (one case), the United Kingdom (UK) (one case) and in South Africa (two cases). The defenders of Jewish rights were Zionists and members of — or people/organisations associated with — Jewish elites. Those alleged to be antisemites were invariably — but not necessarily — critics of Israel’s policies towards the Palestinian people. These struggles were fought explicitly over the designation of the holocaust.
Fundamentally, the contestation was about the following questions.
Is it antisemitic to question whether the destruction of European Jewry was intended as planned? The implication of this question is whether it is antisemitic to posit that European Jewry was the unfortunate collateral damage of a casus belli.
A related question is whether it is antisemitic to enquire whether (or to indicate that) the Zionist movement collaborated with the National Socialists during the 1930s. The implication of this question is that the Zionist movement hindered Jewish resistance to National Socialist policies in Europe and thereby contributed (even if unintentionally) to the persecution and destruction of European Jewry.
Although these issues appear unrelated to events in contemporary Israel/Palestine, their meaning is syncretically integrated into the ideology of Zionism. From the perspective of Zionism criticism of the ethno-state regime of the state of Israel is ipso facto antisemitic. From the perspective of Zionism this criticism morphs into a generalised antisemitism that dares to interrogate the history of collaboration between National Socialism and Zionism, as well as the meaning and truth value of the holocaust.
Zionists have clarified what is permissible and what not when talking about the holocaust and the state of Israel. The questions referred to above fall outside the boundaries of the permissible. Simply putting these questions, as well as their implications could be deemed antisemitic following the criteria of the IHRA text and the JDA. The IHRA gives three examples of a discourse about the holocaust that is antisemitic.
- “Denying the fact, scope, mechanisms (e.g. gas chambers) or intentionality of the genocide of the Jewish people at the hands of National Socialist Germany and its supporters and accomplices during World War II (the Holocaust).”
- “Accusing the Jews as a people, or Israel as a state, of inventing or exaggerating the Holocaust.”
- “Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.”
The JDA gives one example of a discourse about the holocaust that is antisemitic.
“Denying or minimizing the Holocaust by claiming that the deliberate Nazi genocide of the Jews did not take place, or that there were no extermination camps or gas chambers, or that the number of victims was a fraction of the actual total, is antisemitic”.
David Irving, holocaust sceptic: historian or Nazi propagandist?
The jailing of British revisionist historian David Irving is an example of the weaponization of antisemitism, justified as the struggle-against-Nazi-incitement. Irving had made a name as a sympathizer with right-wing
German political trends. He claimed in ‘Hitler’s War’ that the fuehrer had not known about the holocaust until 1943, a point on which he was contradicted by Gitta Sereny. Sereny, referred to in the fifth article of this series, was an accomplished historian of the holocaust, who wrote biographies and analyses of Albert Speer (Hitler’s second-in-command) and Franz Stangel (the kommandant of the Treblinka extermination camp), both of whom she interviewed. She claimed (in the Sunday Times, 1977) that Irving’s premise was false on the basis of her own knowledge of archival documents and interviews with the same witnesses (as Irving’s). Deborah Lipstadt is a US academic committed to exposing as false Irving’s claims that the Nazis had neither intended nor implemented the holocaust — he contended that Jewish deaths resulted from poor and unhealthy living conditions in camps. Lipstadt publicly called out Irving as a holocaust denier and in response he sued her for libel in 2001, and lost the case in a British court.[1]
After World War Two Austria legislated that questioning the holocaust is a crime. In a 1989 speech to conservative students in Austria Irving referred to the holocaust as a myth. In 2006 — 17 years after his speech — an Austrian court jailed him for holocaust denial, sentencing him to three-years incarceration. (On appeal he was released after serving 400 days).
Several of Irving’s critics and opponents criticized the criminalisation of ‘holocaust denial’. Lipstadt herself thought his trial and incarceration undermined free speech. Scholar, activist and well-known critic of Israel Norman Finkelstein (referred to in the first article) noted that Hillberg (the doyen of holocaust scholars, referred to in the seventh article), and historians Gordon Craig and Arno Mayer made a similar point, acknowledging Irving’s meticulous archival research as a contribution to the history of the Second World War and the Third Reich. (Irving’s ‘Goebbels’ made a similar impression when I read it…). Notwithstanding his political sympathies they acknowledged as scientifically legitimate the requirement for evidence-based explanation of the holocaust event, which required interpreting voluminous background information that had to be analysed in turn (Hillberg said this was easier to say than to demonstrate).
Ken Livingstone on Zionist-Nazi collaboration: anti-racist or closet antisemite?
Recently Zionists and the state of Israel succeeded in interpellating key left leaders of the British Labour Party as antisemites. The immediate impact of this was to bolster the power of supporters of Israel in the party, marginalize anti-Zionists and defeat the left welfare state programme for the United Kingdom (UK). This point will be returned to in a later article.
The trigger for this was a statement by a leading Labour Party member that Zionists and the Nazis had collaborated in the 1930s.
Between 2016 and 2018 supporters of (previous party leader) Tony Blair brought charges of antisemitism against left-wing British Labour Party leaders Ken Livingstone and Jeremy Corbyn, resulting in the former’s resignation and the latter’s temporary suspension from the party. Underlying the issue were deeper ideological differences of the ‘Blairites’ with Livingstone’s and Corbyn’s left wing welfare programmes. The campaigns against Corbyn and Livingstone had clear links with the Israeli government. A future article will explore how these campaigns played out. The present article focuses on the designation of Livingstone as an antisemite for claiming Zionist/Nazi collaboration.
In 2016, in the course of commenting on the suspension of another Labour Party member allegedly for antisemitism, Livingstone said that Hitler and the Nazis had supported Zionism. This evoked strong criticism from within and without Labour, that his comments were not only untrue but also antisemitic. One of the IHRA examples of antisemitism (referred to earlier) is accusing Israel of implementing policies similar to those of the Nazis — arguably Livingstone’s claim could have been adjudged antisemitic by interpreting it as implying that.
The topic of Nazi-Zionist cooperation is viewed as an antisemitic trope even by people who are not uncritical of Israel or Zionism. Investigative journalist Craig Murray (a previous UK ambassador to Uzbekistan) regarded such topics as motivated by antisemitism,although he concluded that Livingstone was no antisemite.[2] Murray conceded that there were fringe Zionist elements that engaged with the Nazis. However ardent Zionist Edwin Black, in ‘The Transfer Agreement’,[3] demonstrated that Zionists who collaborated, or supported collaboration, with the Nazis were not some ‘misguided’ off-mainstream types, but included leaders of the Zionist Organisation of Germany, British Jewish Board of Deputies and the American Jewish Congress. They included names like Chaim Weizmann, Nahum Goldman and David ben Gurion. The collaboration was about enabling the relocation of Jewish Germans to Palestine, which the Nazis supported because it was consistent with their policies to make the Third Reich ‘Judenrein’ (uncontaminated by Jews). The agreement reached enabled not only 50 000 Jewish Germans to emigrate but also for a portion of their wealth (asset values) to be transferred to the then authority of the Jewish community in mandate Palestine. According to Black, enabling immigrants and their wealth to Palestine was a precondition for the formation of the Jewish state. Black argued that breaking the boycott was justified because the situation of Jewish Germans — indeed of all Jewish Europeans — was by 1933 hopeless and the transfer arrangement would save 50 000 of the fittest Jewish Germans and invest their wealth in a Jewish state, which was the only long-term guarantee of Jewish survival anyhow.
Notwithstanding the truth value of his claim, Livingstone’s membership of Labour was promptly suspended, Corbyn was pressurised to act against him and in 2018 he (Livingstone) resigned from the party in protest.
Exploring the history and meaning of the links between the mainstream Zionist and Nazi leadership is a legitimate object of historical science. Both Zionism and Nazism are ethno-nationalist, i.e. they posit a biological ethnos, in one case ‘German Aryan’, in the other ‘Jewish Semitic’. It is clear from Black’s book that the similarities in their ideologies gave them a mutual understanding and acceptance of each other’s weltanschauungen. Regardless of their mutual hostility, they spoke the same meta-language and this was an important factor in enabling them to make a ‘deal’ with each other. One can contrast this with the Dietrich Boenhoffers’ of this world, for whom on principle there could be no compromise with Nazis and their ideology. Such a reflection would also cast interesting ideas about Israel’s current relationship with extreme right-wing parties like Alternative fuer Deutschland (AfD) (a leader of which called for the dismantling of the holocaust memorial in Berlin), right wing Ukrainian military forces (identified by Max Blumenthal of the Gray Zone) and Poland’s right wing government.
In both the cases of David Irving’s and Ken Livingstone’s utterances, the powers associated with the IHRA and JDA triumphed. Even 16 years after Irving’s fateful speech he was apprehended, tried and imprisoned. The message was that there was no place to hide from the long arms of the law against speech defined by the IHRA and JDA as antisemitic. Livingstone’s contention of collaboration between Zionists and Nazis did not violate a specific IHRA example of antisemitic speech. It claimed a historical understanding between Zionists and Nazis, but it did not draw a comparison between contemporary Israeli policies and those of the Nazis. That said, the lesson from the cancellation of Livingstone is that the effect of the IHRA was to criminalise any alleged association between Zionism and Nazism.
Notwithstanding the successful policing of the discourse regarding the holocaust, in the case of Irving his incarceration provoked a criticism of the criminalization of ‘holocaust denial’ by influential scholars. This was that it impeded truth-seeking as a valued ideological practice, essential for the development of science and democracy. This is the very principle on which this article is based, namely that if actively sought the truth will eventually out.
Yaqub Zaki, holocaust denial — unintended antisemitism?
In South Africa a struggle over the nature and meaning of the holocaust took a different turn to that waged between Irving and Livingstone and their accusers. After more than a decade of ideological struggle over the meaning of the holocaust, South African Zionists conceded that a Muslim scholar’s questioning the holocaust was not ipso facto intentionally antisemitic.
In 1998 historian Dr Yaqub Zaki, during an interview on Radio 786, claimed that about one million Jews died in Nazi camps mainly of infectious diseases, meaning that there was no genocide. He is also alleged to have said that Jews were the initiators of the two world wars and caused economic turmoil in the world. Radio 786 is run by the Islamic Unity Convention (IUC). In response the South African Jewish Board of Deputies (SAJBoD) — the self-proclaimed representatives of Jewish South Africans and unapologetically Zionist — laid a complaint with the Independent Broadcasting Authority (IBA) — the IBA is the regulator of broadcasting to ensure that there is, inter alia, a diversity of opinions heard on the airwaves — that Dr Zaki’s views contravened clause 2 (a) of the IBA’s code of conduct, specifically that it would cause harm to and prejudice sections of the population against each other. The IBA directed that the Broadcasting Complaints Commission (BCC) hold a formal hearing about this broadcast. The BCC is an independent judicial tribunal that is tasked with hearing complaints against broadcaster members of the National Association of Broadcasters.
In 2001, in the Johannesburg High Court, the IUC challenged the IBA’s directive (for a formal hearing). The IUC also asked the High Court to declare clause 2 (a) of the code of conduct unconstitutional because it was inconsistent with section 16 (a) of the Constitution’s guarantee of freedom of speech. Later that year the High Court set aside the IBA’s directive for a formal hearing but declined to consider the constitutionality of clause 2 (a) of its code of conduct.
The IUC then took the matter to a Constitutional Court hearing (2001), arguing that what was broadcast was an ‘expression of pro-Palestinian views concerning the historical, political, economic and social factors which played a role in the establishment of the State of Israel’ and asking for the relevant wording in section 2 (a) of the code to be declared unconstitutional. In 2002 the Constitutional Court declared unconstitutional that part of the IBA’s code that referred to the causing of harm and prejudicing sections of the population against each other. The court added the proviso that its order did not apply to speech that was propaganda for war, incitement of imminent violence and advocacy of hatred based on race, ethnicity, gender or religion, that constituted incitement to cause harm. (These are explicitly excluded as protected speech by the Constitution).
Following the above there are contradictory reports about what happened. One narrative is that the BCC eventually held its hearing in 2012. The outcome of this was however not specified.
A second narrative is that there was a second Constitutional Court hearing regarding this matter (although this is still to be verified independently of referenced sources) at which the court ruled that there should still be a formal hearing of this matter by the then successor to the BCC, namely the Broadcasting Monitoring and Complaints Committee (BMCC), scheduled for March 2006. Early in March the IUC applied to the Witwatersrand High Court to have the hearings postponed, and after this was dismissed also for leave to appeal to the Constitutional Court. In May 2006 the BMCC found the IUC guilty of the charges laid against them by SAJBoD. In 2007 the IUC applied to the Cape High Court to have the BMCC decision declared null and void, and this was set down for trial in 2011. In the interim the IUC applied to the Constitutional Court in 2007 that the BMCC investigative, prosecutorial and adjudicative powers were impermissible, but the Court ruled that there was nothing impermissible in these BMCC powers.[5]
In 2014 the SAJBoD and the IUC reached an agreement in terms of which the IUC recognised that the broadcasting of Dr Zaki’s remarks caused offence and distress to members of the South African Jewish community. In turn, SAJBoD recognised that Radio 786 never intended to cause such distress and offense. The fact that the SAJBoD took into account the intentions of the IUC contradicts the antisemitic-in-effect-if-not-in-intent position articulated as part of the Zionist definition of antisemitism. What is interesting is that two anti-Zionists — one Jewish — in 2012 and 2013 refused to be interviewed on radio 786 because they regarded the station as participating in holocaust denial and therefore antisemitic.
In 2012 Zackie Achmat accused Radio 786 of legitimising war crimes under the guise of freedom of expression. Likewise in 2013 Doron Isaacs said that Zaki’s remarks were antisemitic and that by broadcasting his remarks Radio 786 was promoting antisemitism, for which it had yet to apologise. A Muslim Views 2014 article reflects a difference of opinion within the ICU about whether their agreement with the SAJBoD constituted a capitulation to the latter or a victory for the principle of free speech. In this article the ICU explained that it had offered the SAJBoD a right of reply to Dr Zaki, which they had refused.
The IUC-SAJBoD ideological struggle was waged persistently by both sides over a period of 16 years. Both sides made extensive usage of the legal ideological state apparatuses to put their points of view and contest opposing points of view. Clearly both parties possessed the human and financial resources to prosecute their struggles over a lengthy period. The compromise agreement reached indicates that they were more or less evenly matched ideologically.
Lwazi Lushaba: Irony or antisemitism?
In April 2021` a University of Cape Town (UCT) lecturer, Dr. Lwazi Lushaba, mentioned during the course of an on-line lecture that Hitler had committed no crime in massacring Jews and other people identified as subhuman. For this he was accused of antisemitism by Zionist supporting groups including UCT. Lushaba’s and his supporters’ justification for his use of words was that he was being ironic, to make a particular point. Lushaba’s ironic comment arises from a Black Consciousness (BC) weltanshauung, which perceives a ‘whiteist’ ideology as hegemonic in South African society. (The BC ideological framework and its impact on contemporary South African society, including antisemitic and anti-Zionist discourses, will be explored in a forthcoming article addressing real cases of antisemitism that emerged during specific anti-Zionist protests on South Africa). Those calling for Lushaba’s suspension thought he had crossed the line between legitimate scholarly investigation and antisemitic hate speech. This is an example of the contradiction between academic freedom and indeed freedom of speech on the one hand, and the limits imposed on free speech by claims of groups requiring protection from hurtful speech and the potential for incitement to violence against them. In this case the issue is narrowed down to the question of whether a lecturer has the right use irony to make a point …..
During a political science lecture in early-April 2021 Dr Lushaba said that ‘Hitler committed no crime. All Hitler did was to do to white people what white people had normally reserved for black people’. In the same lecture, by way of example, he referred to the 1904 to 1907 genocide by German troops of the Ovaherero people in the colony of German South West Africa, and the massacre of 200 members of the Israelite Church at Bulhoek, Eastern Cape, in May 1921 — in addition more than 100 members of the Church were
wounded.
Lushaba’s comments upset some students at the lecture. It caused a furore from the Democratic Alliance (DA) (the largest South African opposition party) and the SAJBoD, leading to calls for Lushaba’s suspension pending an investigation into the matter. The DA called for Lushaba’s suspension and lodged a complaint with the Human Rights Commission. The SAJBoD handed the case over to its Antisemitism and Legal subcommittee and ‘reached out to’ to UCT vice chancellor Mamokgethi Phakeng. As a result Lushaba faced an internal enquiry by UCT. The only reported support for Lushaba was from the UCT students representative council which emphasised his right to his views, saying that the point was taken completely out of context.
I watched the full video. I listened carefully to the 53 minute lecture. The statement about Hitler committing no crime took up a minute proportion of the time (about 13 seconds) in what was an interesting exegesis of the ideology of political science and its transformations between three frameworks of analysis. On 15 April in the Daily Maverick Steven Robins’ contribution (Lwazi Lushaba and his Hitler Analogy ….) dispelled any doubt about the myth that Lushaba was engaging in holocaust denial. In his lecture Lushaba referred to violence against the colonised as well as violence against European white people using the same term, namely ‘massacres’. This suggests that he did not intend to essentialise either group and set up their traumas in competition to one another…..He could well have been critiquing a competitive memory model by claiming ironically that if European genocides against black Africans were not seen as criminal then the holocaust should likewise not be regarded as a crime.
The SAJBoD and the DA called for Lushaba’s head for daring to articulate a critique of exceptional Jewish suffering. This is consistent with Zionist weaponising the holocaust to deflect criticism of Israel’s genocidal policies against Palestinians in Gaza. Several years ago Lushaba was instrumental in the founding of the Palestine Solidarity Forum at UCT, which is presumably known to SAJBoD. This makes it reasonable to hypothesise that the call for disciplining him is also a payback for his anti-Zionist activities.
Internet searches between July 2021 and May 2022 revealed there was no further news regarding the outcome of both the UCT and SAJBoD investigations into what Dr Lushaba had said. This might indicate that these bodies are no longer waging this ideological struggle or that it has simply been marking time. Organisations like SAJBoD have a record for persisting in their ideological struggles, in particularly through the legal ideological state apparatuses (specifically the judicial court system). If so, then this struggle is likely to reappear in the near future.
Conclusion
The critique of the criminalization of ‘holocaust denial’ is an important example of the ideological struggle for scientific truth as well as against Zionist hegemony. The eighth article in this series made the point that the truth value should be taken into account when assessing a claim about people interpellated as Jews. If an apparent antisemitic canard is true then uttering it cannot ipso facto be an instance of antisemitism. A critical understanding of ‘holocaust denial’ forms part and parcel of resisting the interpellation of ‘antisemite’. This interpellation is a pivot of Zionism’s ideological and political struggle against Palestinian movements like Boycott Divetsment Sanctions (and their global allies) for the liberation of Palestine.
In the years following the end of World War Two, under the ideological hegemony of the victorious Allied states, some Western European governments interpellated ‘antisemite’ as a person who questioned the veracity of key aspects (i.e. the six million dead figure, the planned industrial extermination process, the use of gas chambers as a technique of mass murder, etc.) of the dominant holocaust narrative. This definition of antisemitism anticipates the IHRA example of it being antisemitic to criticise Israel for exaggerating the holocaust. Contradictory interpretations of the meaning of the holocaust event have played out as contested understandings of antisemitism.
Governments that adopted the equation ‘holocaust denier equals antisemite’ assumed that scepticism about any of the narrative’s aspects is a form of incitement of hatred and violence against Jews. For them punishment of holocaust denial is part of the struggle against the rise of Nazism. This view has been contested on the grounds that it creates the basis to censor legitimate questions regarding the evidence showing Nazi intention to eliminate Jews. From this point of view the criminalisation of holocaust denial is a threat to free speech and makes the state the adjudicator of what is true or false. Instead the truth or falsity of a proposition should be acknowledged through a critical debate within both scientific communities (like historians) and in the public domain (civil society). This view also resonates with, and could be used to reinforce the argument of Neocosmos (the South African scholar referred to in the fifth article in this series) that authentic freedom emerges from the experience of social struggle outside the control of the ideological state apparatuses. He argues that social scientists as critical intellectuals need to take cognisance of this in order to think through objectively the ongoing current ideological struggles in contemporary capitalism.
On this basis the dialectics of antisemitism and the holocaust is between a scientific definition and a strategic political definition which is a weapon in the struggle against Nazism.
This article is based on the assumption that it is legitimate to explore the truth value of what are claimed to be antisemitic canards. This theme will be returned to in the remaining articles about specific ideological struggles over the meaning of antisemitism.
Paul Hendler, Solidarity with Palestine, Stellenbosch, South Africa, 02 May 2022.
[1] In March 2022 the US Senate unanimously confirmed Deborah Lipstadt, Biden’s nominee for special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism. In a later article I explore a similar post created by the German state, the purpose of which is also to monitor and combat antisemitism, as it is defined by and exemplified in the IHRA text.
[2] Saying that Livingstone was not intentionally an antisemite contradicts the assumption that discourse about Zionist and Nazi collaboration is motivated by antisemitism.
[3] Cf. Black, Edwin 1984 The Transfer Agreement — The Untold Story of the Secret Pact between the Third Reich and Jewish Palestine, Macmillan Publishing Company, New York. The above diagram graphically depicts the Transfer Agreement between the Nazi Government and the following Key Zionist Organisations.
· Zionistische verein fuer Deutschland (ZVfD)
· American Jewish Congress (AJC)
· UK Jewish Board of Deputies (British Jewish establishment)
· Conference of Institutions (as negotiators)
The Transfer Agreement was sealed secretly between mainstream Zionist leaders and the Nazi government on 7 August 1933. At the time of the Transfer Agreement (1933) there was a large scale and successful trade boycott of German goods internationally, to put pressure on the Nazi state to end its persecution of Jews. By August 1933 this boycott had succeeded in diminishing Germany’s export surplus by more than 68 per cent, thereby threatening Germany’s ability to pay for the raw materials needed to keep its factories running and pay its monthly debt service of 50 million Reich Mark.
Through the Transfer Agreement the Nazi government’s goal was to break the boycott, and the objective of the mainstream Zionists was to enable the emigration of as many wealthy Jewish Germans as possible, and the transfer of their assets, to Palestine. Their common goal was to break the boycott. Many Zionist and non (or anti-Zionist) Jews opposed the breaking of the boycott. Amongst these was the revisionist Zionists (led by Zeev Jabotinsky, referred to in the fifth article in this series), which combined resisting the Nazi state with pressurizing for mass emigration of Jewish Germans to Palestine with all their assets. At the 18th Zionist Congress in Prague (October 1933) they were campaigning for the continued implementation of the boycott. Key mainstream (Mapai) Zionist leaders who opposed the boycott counted among their names those of Nahum Goldman, Chaim Weizmann (first President of the state of Israel) and David Ben-Gurion (first prime minister of the state).
[4] Leopold von Mildenstein was a high Nazi official who sympathsied with Zionist aspirations. For a time the Nazi party viewed the Zionist movement positively because it could contribute to resolving the so-called Jewish Question though getting Jewish Germans to emigrate to Palestine. The Nazi policy changed when it becamne clear that the numbers emigrating were relatively small.
[5] Constitutional Court of South Africa, 2007 Case CCT 33/07 Judgement — Media Summary.
