I, John Harvey Foster of …………….in the State of Victoria state:-

1.         I am a lecturer in German History at the University of Melbourne.  I hold the degree of Master of Arts in German from the University of Melbourne and Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Wales.  I have also studied in the University of Tubingen and the Free University of Berlin.  I teach the history of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust at the University of Melbourne in courses for second and fourth year students and I supervise post-graduate and doctoral research in modern Jewish history and the history of the Holocaust.  I am engaged in research in the history of German Jewish communities, and have worked in this connection at the archives of the Holocaust Memorial (Yad Vashem) in Jerusalem, the Central Archives of the Jewish people at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, the Wiener Library in London, and at the institute for Contemporary history at Munich.

2.         I have read transcripts of material broadcast on 3CR concerning pre-war Germany, the Holocaust and allegations of a Nazi-Zionist collaboration,  I consider much of the material to be a gross distortion of the historical facts in a way which is calculated to be deliberately misleading. 

3.         The attempt to equate Zionism with racism thoroughly misrepresents the intentions and aims of the Zionist movement.  Zionism should he understood as a classical nationalist movement in the same sense as other nineteenth century movements, such as those to establish nation states in Italy, Czechoslovakia or Poland.  Zionist claims to nationality-rose from consciousness amount some Jews of being an identifiable historical community, with a clear continuity of existence, an affection for the Biblical land and a common cultural inheritance.  These are typical of characteristics by which nineteenth century nationalistic movements are usually defined.  Racism, on the other hand, is a distinctly different kind of doctrine, which has nothing to do with Zionism.  In particular Nazi racism was conceived in terms of a permanent struggle between races so that by definition a claim to racist superiority would be demonstrated by the subjugation, persecution or even physical elimination of other races considered to be inferior.  Zionism has never made similar claims.  The claim that ‘racism and Zionism are like Hitler’s Germany (27th August 1977) defies not only the rules grammar, but also the facts.  In Israel many different ethnic, religious and political groups live side by side in a way which would be intolerable to a racist state. 

4.         ‘Palestine Speaks’ makes frequent reference to alleged collaboration between Nazis and Zionists.  In particular, it has claimed on 8th October 1978, ‘that the collaboration between the Zionist and the Nazi fascists was neither accidental or expedient.  It flowed logically from shared aims.   They were not strange bed-fellows but common bedfellows.’  Such statements are extremely misleading; in the first place the German Zionist organization - together with the other German Jews - strenuously opposed the Nazi Party during its rise to power, both through public statements and through substantial financial contributions to the political fighting funds of the democratic parties.  This would be well known by anybody who took the trouble to read the German Zionist press of those years.  In the second place from the moment the Nazis seized power, Jewish communities - first in Germany and then throughout Europe increasingly lost their freedom of action, and were forced more and more to operate within the constraints of the different stages of the Nazi persecution.  Consequently any rational or unprejudiced account of Jewish political activities in the following twelve years has to be understood within the context of oppression and mass extermination. Jews were hostages and then victims - they were never free agents:  This makes nonsense of any claims that Zionists – or Jews of any persuasion - collaborated voluntarily with 'the fascist repression apparatus' (Palestine Speaks, 8^th October 1978) . 

5.         It has been argued elsewhere that even those Jews who walked unresistingly into the gas chambers assisted the Nazis in the execution of their extermination policy.  Whatever one thinks about the political morality of this argument, it makes abundantly clear the absurdity of attempting to derive conclusions about a person's political ideology from particular actions in such an extreme situation. 

6.         Three examples will make clear how maliciously the broadcasts distort the facts:- 

(a)        The Haavara Transfer Agreement of 1933 (Palestine Speaks 5th June 1977, 16th October 1977).  This agreement was concluded between Zionist authorities in Palestine and the Nazi regime, as a means for transferring the capital of German Jews emigrating to Palestine.  The broadcasts refer to the agreement as an example of Nazi-Zionist collaboration.  What they fail to mention is that, according to German exchequer figures, a Jew who transferred his capital under the terms of the agreement had to surrender between two-thirds and three-quarters of the total to the German Government in the form of special taxes and administrative expenses.   

The agreement was, clearly no normal business arrangement.  The desire to emigrate, the need to transfer capital and to accent such enormous losses were solely dictated by the Nazi persecution.  This was no piece of Nazi-Zionist ‘collaboration’; it was an attempt to salvage some Jewish property, the rest of which was expropriated by the Nazis in 1938-39.   

The broadcast of 5th June 1977 concludes that ‘the moral effort by anti-racist Jews to boycott Nazi products was undermined by the Haavara agreement and the refusal of the Eighth Zionist Congress to even participate in the boycott’.  This statement is intended to create the impression that, unlike other Jews, the Zionists collaborated with Nazi racism.  However, it suppresses the fact that the official representation of German Jewry overwhelmingly anti-Zionist in their convictions at that time - had themselves protested against the boycott.  They did this because, as patriotic Germans, they had no wish to see the German economy harmed and because, as Jews, they feared that the boycott would provoke increasingly severe anti-Jewish measures in Germany.   

Far from betraying their fellow-Jews, the Zionist Congress was attempting to act in solidarity with the persecuted German Jews.  In retrospect one may question the political wisdom of their actions: but one cannot doubt their intentions.  They were the very opposite of what the broadcast misleadingly implies.
(b)  The Kastner Case: 

In attempting to bolster up this charge of Nazi-Zionist Collaboration, the broadcasts make much use of the Kastner Case (l6th October 1977; 7th and  8th  October   1978).     Here again, the broadcasts reveal their prejudice by the use of the term ‘collaboration’.  It is true that there were negotiations between Kastner, the Zionist Relief and Rescue Committee and the Nazis concerning the purchase of Jewish lives for money and military equipment. These took place in the context of the almost completed destruction of European Jewry.  The Hungarians were the last on the list; and the sole purpose of the negotiations was to preserve some Jews from their otherwise inevitable fate at Auschwitz.  In these circumstances, to talk of collaboration is malicious and absurd.   

The broadcast of 16th October 1977 again deliberately suppresses information to create its effect.  It is true as the broadcast states, that there was a trial involving Kastner's activities, in which the Jerusalem District Court found against him.  But the broadcasts omit to mention that when the case was appealed before the Israeli Supreme Court, the verdict of the lower Court was overturned, and Kastner, though now dead, was fully rehabilitated. 

Finally, the claim that without Kastner's collaboration the Nazis would not have been able to exterminate the Hungarian Jews is simply untrue.  It flies in the face of all that we know about the machinery of the Nazi destruction process. 

(C)       The third example concerns a sin of omission. 

In presenting the Zionists as Nazi collaborators, the broadcasts entirely omit to mention two basic facts:- 

(1)   Most European Zionists, along with their fellow Jews, were exterminated.     An odd way to deal with 'collaborators'; 

(2)   Zionists were at least as prominent as others in all phases of the Jewish resistance.  The most striking example of this is the well documented Zionist participation in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, but there were countless other cases as well; 

Both of these facts are willfully ignored by the broadcasts.  They cannot be unknown to anyone who has concerned himself with the details of the Holocaust. 

7.         With their deliberate distortion of some fact and their willful omission of others, I can only conclude that the broadcasts intend to falsify history for propaganda purposes.  There is nothing new in the attempt to tar the Zionists with the Nazi brush:  It was one of the chief propaganda weapons of the Soviet Press during the anti-Zionist trials of  1971.  Nothing could have been more calculated to ferment anti-Semitism in the U.S.S.R. than lurid comparisons between Nazism and Zionism; and I believe the same to be true in this country. 

8.         The propaganda broadcast by ‘Palestine Speaks’ is typically anti-Semitic.  The broadcasters attempt to absolve themselves of the politically damaging charge of anti-Semitism by claiming that they are not racists; and a submission to the Tribunal from a group who ‘call themselves ‘Jews against Zionism and anti-Semitism’ is intended to give substance to this claim, by demonstrating that some Jews are opposed to Zionism, and that anti-Zionists are therefore not opposed to all Jews. 

9.         This attempt at self-absolution rests upon the assumption that anti-Semitism is identifiable with an overtly racist ideology.  But this is not the case.  Racial anti-Semitism - in a technical sense - is a recent development which emerged in the late nineteenth century in Europe and reached its most extreme form under the Nazis.  It represents only one phase - though the most terrible one - in the history of anti-Semitism.  It was preceded, for instance, by hundreds of years of Christian anti-Semitism, which operated with a theological rationale, derived ultimately from the accusation of ........  Jews were harassed and persecuted, ostensibly for religious reasons; and conversion offered the only escape.

 10.         Anti-Zionist anti-Semitism is simply another variant of an age-old theme.  It operates with a political (rather than a religious or racial) rationale, and attacks the great majority of Jews who identify with Zionism either ‘organizationally or emotionally, which exonerating the relatively few who dissociate themselves from Zionist sympathies. In this respect the Jews against Zionism fulfill the same objective function as the Jewish converts in pre-modern (i.e. Christian) anti-Semitism. 

11.       Political opposition to Zionism need not be anti-Semitic, any more than religious opposition to Judaism need be anti-Semitic.  That the broadcasts in question are anti-Semitic can be demonstrated by the fact that they employ almost the whole range and vocabulary of traditional anti-Semitic propaganda.  All of these slogans existed long before the Nazis, who tailored them carefully to correspond with their own political circumstances.  The broadcasts of 'Palestine Speaks' simply present a re-arrangement of the traditional material, again adjusted to meet the requirements of a new political situation.   

The following examples will make the point abundantly clear: 

11.1.       The Zionist 'is like poison in the world' (24th July 1977) echoes the mediaeval theme of Jews poisoning the food and water of the Christian population.

 11.2.        That Zionists aim 'to suck the blood of the working man' combines the racist theme of the Jew as a parasite on the body of the German people with the populist theme of the Jew as an insatiable capitalist exploiter (2nd December 1978). 

11.3.        That Zionists control the press and the media, (16th July 1978) and that they operate a world wide conspiracy (l6th October 1977; is a variation of a familiar anti-Semitic claim used by the Nazis and fully developed in the notorious anti-Semitic forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. 

11.4.         Zionists are 'criminals' (19th November 1978); they endanger the good order of society (19th November 1978); they operate 'behind the Jewish community' (llth September 1977).  These claims are all familiar ingredients of anti-Semitism, in which the Jew was seen as a secret agent of social decomposition.  Both the Protocols and Nazi propaganda offer numerous parallels.

 11.5.         Even the claim that the Zionist cultivate anti-Semitism for their own political ends (25th September 1977; 16th July 1978) is an argument which is fully developed in the Protocols and elsewhere.  By an exquisite irony the victim becomes responsible for his own misery. 

11.6.         The threat and the reality of violence is a standard part of such propaganda.  It does not take much imagination to find parallels for the claim (16th April 1978) that 'the Palestinian people are continuing to wage an uncompromising struggle to wipe Zionism off the face of the earth.' 

12.          Leopards do not change their spots, and anti-Semites do not change their arguments.  There is a remarkable consistency in the imagery and language of anti-Semitism in mediaeval times to the present day.  The broadcasts 'Palestine Speaks' stand squarely in that tradition.

OR GO TO:          

APPENDIX B  (The enquiry that never was)

APPENDIX C   (Unilateral decalaration by Community radio Station 3CR)