Sentenced
life imprisonment alongside Mandela at the 1963-4 Rivonia to Trial, Goldberg’s
death passed unnoticed in Israel where opposition to racism and Apartheid is
not a popular cause
 |
| Denis Goldberg and Nelson Mandela |
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 He died not having received the recognition from Israel that
he so richly deserved.’
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 29th 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
Kassrill’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.
 |
| Denis Goldberg with fellow Rivonia defendants |
“I understood that what was happening in South
Africa with its racism was like the racism of Nazi Germany in Europe that we
were supposed to be fighting against,”
“You have to
be involved one way or another. That’s what I grew up with. I come from a generation who were prepared to put our
lives on the line for freedom”
Just as Denis Goldberg was inspired to
oppose Apartheid by what the Nazis had done to the Jews so many Jews today
oppose Israel, the so-called Jewish state for the same reasons. Hatred of racism is a universal principle or
it is nothing.
 |
| Denis's Art Collection |
It was at Cape Town University that he
met Esme Bodenstein, a physiotherapist and fellow activist whom he married in
1954. They had two children, Hilary, who ran a nursery in London and predeceased
him, and David, who went into finance, working in foreign exchange in the City.
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.
 |
| My posting on the South Africa Board of Deputies Facebook Page |
On release he was allowed a visit to
his father’s grave in a Jewish cemetery in Johannesburg then put on a plane to
Tel Aviv. His daughter was working on Kibbutz Ma’ayanei HaYeshu where he stayed
for a short period with his family before living in exile in London, where he
continued to take part in the anti-Apartheid movement. Though Israel had helped
to secure his release, Goldberg denounced its close ties to South Africa’s
apartheid regime.
Israel and Zionism
Goldberg recalled that some people questioned his
description of Israel as an apartheid state, when Israel, for example, has a
number of Palestinian members of parliament and Israeli Palestinians can vote.
His response was clear and simple:
“Well I say
you don’t need to be like South Africa to be an apartheid state; there is a
definition in international law through the UNESCO declaration on apartheid.”
Apartheid exists, he said, in states
that enforce laws and policies that discriminate between people on the basis of
race or religion, and this holds true in Israel proper as well as in the
occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. He was one of a panel of anti-apartheid
activists discussing the lessons that struggle holds for the Palestinian cause.
Like so many of his colleagues in the anti-apartheid
movement, Goldberg became a vocal critic of Israel and a stalwart supporter of
the Palestinian cause.
"There
is no doubt in my mind that Israel is an apartheid state. Having lived through
apartheid in South Africa, I cannot allow in my name the same kind of
oppression to go on."
“It’s simple: the dominant group excludes the indigenous people from
their equal rights within the borders of Israel itself and in the occupied
territories, in breach of international law,
In a video
urging people not to
go on propaganda trips to Israel, Denis Goldberg said that,
“Going on free trips to Israel causes harm to the Palestinian people
just as people who visited South Africa and broke the cultural and academic
boycott against white South Africa, did harm to our movement.”
He also described the “enormous” lies propagated to defend
Israel. “I’ve lived through South African
apartheid and I saw it there as well.”
Goldberg added that not a single settlement is built by
Israel that is not erected on the ruins of Palestinians homes, their livelihood
and the livelihood of their children for generations to come. “This is outrageous, I cannot possibly
support them.”
Goldberg said he had a responsibility
as a human being to uphold justice, truth and righteousness, “just as I did as a first-generation white
South African” who opposed apartheid.
Goldberg also said that the situation
in Israel is not as complicated as the Zionist lobby tries to make it seem.
“It’s simple: the dominant group excludes the
indigenous people from their equal rights within the borders of Israel itself
and in the occupied territories, in breach of international law,”
He said these actions showed an
attitude that Palestinians were considered lesser people, which is similar to
what happened in South Africa during the apartheid era when blacks were barred
from voting.
"I have to be an
opponent of the exclusionist policies of Zionism, but let me say straight away
that I have to be opposed to the exclusionary policies of the feudal Arab
states of the Middle East as well."
When apartheid eventually began to
crumble, and Mandela was freed in 1990, he wanted to return to South Africa but
his wife was reluctant and Britain was by that time home for his children
He returned to attend Mandela’s
inauguration after South Africa’s first free elections in 1994. The following
day Elias Motsoaledi, a fellow Rivonia defendant, died. At his wake in Soweto
Goldberg received a hero’s welcome.
During a subsequent visit to South
Africa that November Goldberg resolved to help rebuild his native country
and destroy apartheid’s legacy. He founded a UK-based charity, Community Heart,
to help raise standards of health and education for black South Africans.
With his new wife, Goldberg, aged 69,
returned to South Africa after 18 years in Britain to work as an adviser to
Ronnie Kasrils, then minister of water affairs, in Pretoria, the city of his
previous imprisonment. “I have the desire
to go home. The time is right and I need a breather,” he said.
He retired in 2006, and the man who
had spent so long staring at walls moved to a house he had built on a hilltop
near Cape Town with a spectacular view across Hout Bay. Later that year his
second wife died of cancer.
Goldberg never lost faith in the ANC,
though he was dismayed by the corruption that engulfed the party during Jacob
Zuma’s presidency. Its members needed to “renew
the leadership from top to bottom”, he said.
In 2016 he
returned to Britain after being invited by David Cameron – along with fellow
Rivonia veterans Kathrada and Mlangeni and their surviving lawyers – to a
ceremony at Number 10 to honour them and recognise their contribution to the
ending of apartheid.
There was a
certain irony in having a Tory Prime Minister entertaining those who had been
called ‘terrorists’ by Margaret Thatcher two decades before. This shows that
‘terrorism’ is what you call your enemies and if you are the victor then you
are no longer a terrorist!
The same
year Goldberg published a memoir, A Life
for Freedom: The Mission to End Racial Injustice in South Africa.
In 2017,
despite having received a diagnosis of lung cancer, Goldberg
undertook a campaign to build a centre for the arts, House of Hope, in his
hometown of Hout Bay, near Cape Town.
In 2009 he was awarded South Africa’s
Order of Luthuli (silver). “A luta
continua,” he
told a university
audience in 2012, repeating a Portuguese anti-colonial rallying cry while
urging South Africans to continue the struggle for justice. “Let it continue. . . . I don’t want to see
what we fought for collapse.”
Below there
are a number of links to obituaries and articles on Denis Goldberg. I am also
republishing a wonderful tribute by Gideon Levy, Israel’s bravest journalist,
in tribute to Denis Goldberg.
Denis Goldberg, anti-apartheid
activist, was born on April 11, 1933. He died of cancer on April 29, 2020, aged
87
Denis Goldberg, veteran South African human rights activist convicted
with Nelson Mandela – obituary
Pioneer Jewish
South African Freedom Fighter Calls Israel 'Apartheid State'
Veteran South
African activist Denis Goldberg: Israel 'an apartheid state'
Denis Goldberg,
anti-apartheid activist who spent 22 years in prison, dies at 87
Tributes
pour in for veteran anti-apartheid campaigner Denis Goldberg
Tributes
to South African anti-Apartheid activist Denis Goldberg, who dies at 87
Opinion
 |
| Denis Goldberg |
A Tribute to a South African
Jewish Hero and Freedom Fighter
Gideon Levy
May 03, 2020 4:25 AM
A Jewish hero died on Independence Day, with his death
unmarked here. Denis Goldberg died in Cape Town, the city he was born in, at
the age of 87. He was the epitome of struggle, sacrifice, courage and
solidarity, all the qualities so lacking in Israel’s left. If he’d immigrated
to Israel, he’d be considered a traitor and terrorist here. But Israel never
had Jews such as him, willing to sacrifice everything in the struggle for the
freedom of the Palestinians.
In South Africa he wasn’t the only Jew who sacrificed
all for the struggle for freedom of blacks. Ruth First was killed by a parcel
bomb addressed to her, Albie Sachs lost an arm and an eye, later becoming a
judge on the Constitutional Court of South Africa. There aren’t many Jewish
communities that gave rise to such heroes. In Israel, obviously, no one tells
their stories.
Goldberg wasn’t an esteemed Jew like Sheldon
Adelson or an influential one like Israeli media personality Sivan
Rahav Meir, but he and his friends were the heroes history will remember. They
didn’t fight for their nation, they fought for others. It’s hard to think of
loftier or more courageous conduct. If there is a reason for Jewish pride, it
is these Jews who crossed the lines in South Africa, not falling in line with
position taken by Jewish leaders in their country and the Jewish Board of
Deputies, the biggest collaborator with the apartheid regime and its inveterate
ally, the state of Israel.
Goldberg was arrested along with Nelson Mandela on
July 11, 1963, at the farm of Arthur Goldreich, another Jewish hero. Of the 17
members of the African National Congress who were arrested that day at
Liliesleaf Farm, five were Jewish. At the Rivonia Trial, Goldberg was
sentenced, along with Mandela, to four life sentences, for 200 acts of terror.
These arch-terrorists are now considered national and international heroes,
more food for thought in Israel.
In a heated debate in the literature section of
Haaretz over the weekend, Professors Hannan Hever and Dan Miron discussed the
courage of author S. Yizhar [one of the first writers to write about and issue
a moral outcry related to the events of 1948]. Goldberg could have served as an
example bolstering Hever’s position, since he believed in an armed struggle. He
spent 22 years in prison until his release, owed in part to Herut Lapid, an
Israeli activist who brought about the release of many prisoners.
Goldberg was flown to Israel, where he spent a brief
time in his daughter’s kibbutz before hurrying to depart. Like his partners to
the struggle, he detested
what was happening here. He told historian Tom Segev that Israel was the
Middle East’s South Africa and that the solution in both places should be
identical: one state with equal rights for all. His vision was realized in his
own country and Goldberg returned there, crowned in glory.
Over the weekend, Mandela’s grandson, Chief
Zwelivelile Mandela, wrote on WhatsApp: “we salute a great man and a leader of
our struggle…he belonged to a special generation of people who chose a life of
struggle over one of convenience, unafraid of the brutality of the apartheid
state.” Mandela ended his words with the Hebrew words commemorating a person’s
memory. Shivers and Jewish pride. He added a photo of himself with Goldberg,
when the latter was already in a wheelchair.
I didn’t know him, but I did meet two of his partners
to the struggle, Ronnie Kasrils, who was the Minister for Intelligence Services
under Mandela, and Ben Turok, a member of parliament on behalf of the African
National Congress, both of them Jewish. There aren’t many Jews as sharply
critical of Israel as these two were. One can’t be a freedom fighter like they
were and think otherwise. In the eyes of people like them, who know a thing or
two about human rights, equality and struggle, Israel is an apartheid state
just like their country was.
But no one here wants to know about Goldberg and his
associates. The residence of South Africa’s ambassador in Ramat Gan has been
vacant for months, a protest against the occupation and apartheid. In an ironic
coincidence, Goldberg died on Israel’s Independence Day. Let us light a
symbolic memorial candle in his honor.
