Livingstone may not be everyone’s pin-up boy but he does know his history

Ken Livingstone may not be everyone’s pin-up boy but he does know his history. Shortly after Hitler gained power the Zionist leader, David ben-Gurion, felt the Nazis’ take-over could become ‘a fertile force’ for Zionism.

A Mapai Party activist, Moshe Beilinson, soon visited Germany and reported — “The streets are paved with more money than we have ever dreamed of in the history of our Zionist enterprise. Here is an opportunity to build and flourish like none we have ever had or will ever have.”

A senior Zionist official, Prussian-born Arthur Ruppin, then went to Berlin to bargain with the Nazis, to secure the transfer to Palestine of the property of German Jewish emigrants. Travelling on to Jena, Ruppin had a two-hour meeting with the prominent Nazi race theorist, Hans F.K. Gunther — who assured his visitor that he did not see Jews as “inferior” to Aryans, only “different”. Therefore “a fair solution” must be found for “the Jewish problem”. Back in Berlin, on 7 August 1933, Ruppin was well received at the Nazi finance ministry.