RIP Denis Goldberg – A True Jewish Hero of the Anti-Apartheid struggle…

.....who was mourned by millions and hated by the Zionists
by Tony Greenstein
6th May 2020

When Marek Edelman, Commander of the Warsaw Ghetto Resistance died in 2009, Moshe Arens, Likud’s former Foreign Minister wrote that:
‘He had received Poland's highest honor, and at the 65th commemoration of the Warsaw ghetto uprising he was awarded the French Legion of Honour. He died not having received the recognition from Israel that he so richly deserved.’

In my own commemoration I wrote that:
The President of Poland spoke at his funeral, held in the old Jewish cemetery of Warsaw. Two thousand people attended the grave-side ceremony. But no one from the Israeli government attended - though Israel's former ambassador to Poland, Shevach Weiss, attended in a personal capacity. No official representative of any international Jewish organization attended either: not even from the Holocaust memorialization organizations. As far as I can tell, neither the Jerusalem Post nor Ha'aretz ran a story when Edelman died, nor any sort of eulogy.

Marek Edelman was probably fortunate not to have had a hypocritical tribute by a state founded on the same principles as the European fascists of the 1930s.

The same is true of Denis Goldberg, who died of cancer on April 29^th aged 87, a Jewish veteran of the anti-Apartheid struggle. Israel calls itself a ‘Jewish’ state but it doesn’t care to celebrate Jewish heroes of the fight against racism. Indeed it barely acknowledges the contribution of anti-Zionist Jews to Jewish history. They are written out of Zionist history. This is probably a good thing as there could be no greater dishonour than to be praised by the apartheid regime in Tel Aviv and its sycophants.

Only a couple of months ago I had the privilege of attending a packed meeting at Sussex University, which was addressed by Albie Sachs, another Jewish veteran of the anti-Apartheid struggle. Sachs was blinded in one eye and lost an arm when opening a letter bomb from South Africa’s secret police, BOSS.

Last year I attended a meeting at SOAS with Ronnie Kasril’s, the former ANC security minister and commander of Umkhonto we Sizwe, the ANC’s military wing. Ronnie told us how, under the IHRA misdefinition of ‘anti-Semitism’ his meeting in support of the Palestinians was banned by Vienna’s local authority from Council property. The decision had been unanimous.  The Green Party, the SPD and Austria’s neo-Nazi Freedom Party had all voted together to ban a Jewish veteran of the anti-apartheid struggle. Such are the alliances that have been formed in defence of the world’s only apartheid state.

Denis Goldberg was born on April 11 1933 in Cape Town to Annie and Sam, communist working-class Jewish immigrants from Britain who would die when their son was in prison.  His mother later spent time in prison for her anti-apartheid activism. His parents were the children of Jewish immigrants from Lithuania. He recalled that his opposition to racism began at the age of six when he and his parents would give food to striking workers.

Goldberg grew up reading about Nazi atrocities during the Second World War. After leaving the Observatory Boys School he studied civil engineering at the University of Cape Town because, he said, he wanted to “build roads and bridges, dams and pipelines for people”. Why did he get involved in the anti-Apartheid struggle? He told a 2019 interviewer with the University of Cape Town.

In 1957 Goldberg joined the banned Communist Party and his first run-in with the law came in 1960, during protests following the Sharpeville massacre when 69 unarmed protestors were shot dead by South African police. During the state of emergency imposed after the Sharpeville massacre of 1960 he was imprisoned for four months as the regime cracked down on activists. He again lost his job, this time with a construction company building a power station. Following his release from custody, he joined the military wing of the African National Congress (ANC), uMkhonto we Sizwe.

In 1962 Mandela set up Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) and Goldberg, now notorious as “the most dangerous white man in South Africa”, went underground to set up a training camp near Cape Town for a campaign of sabotage directed at government buildings and infrastructure, the first such camp inside South Africa.

After being arrested Goldberg was sentenced to life imprisonment alongside Nelson Mandela and nine others in the 1964 Rivonia trial in which he was found guilty of sabotage. He was the only white man to be convicted and, at 31, he was the youngest of the defendants. The Defendants had expected to be sentenced to death and it was almost certainly international pressure which averted this.

After their life sentences were handed down, Goldberg’s mother, who was hard of hearing, called down from the public gallery: “Denis, what is it?” He shouted back: “It’s life, and life is wonderful!”. In the documentary, Life is Wonderful, Goldberg emerged as its gentle, self-deprecating but steely star.

When his father died Goldberg did not seek permission to attend his funeral because “I wasn’t going to give them the pleasure of refusing me”.

In prison in Pretoria Goldberg took degrees in Public Administration, History, Geography and Library Science, taught himself German and was half way through a law degree when he was released from prison in 1985 as international pressure forced the apartheid regime into making concessions.