Ken Livingstone
Ken LivingstoneReuters

Former London Mayor Ken Livingstone is at it again, having claimed on Thursday there was at one point “real collaboration” between the Nazis and Jews, reports The Guardian.

Livingstone made the fresh series of highly controversial remarks before the start of an internal party tribunal that is hearing evidence about his suspension from the Labour party a year ago.

The former London mayor was suspended from Labour after he told the BBC in an interview that Nazi leader Adolf Hitler had supported Zionism.

He has repeatedly refused to apologize for the comments, even after being harangued as a "racist, Hitler-apologist" by an MP from his own party.

His latest comments expanded on his original claim that Hitler supported Zionism. His proof for this claim is that the Nazi government signed the Haavara agreement, which facilitated the relocation of Jews to Palestine in 1933 before the Third Reich turned to mass murder and extermination. The agreement allowed a portion of Jewish emigrants’ possessions, which they were forced to hand over before they left Germany, to be re-claimed through transfers to Palestine as German export goods.

Referring to Hitler, Livingstone said, according to The Guardian, “He didn’t just sign the deal. The SS set up training camps so that German Jews who were going to go there could be trained to cope with a very different sort of country when they got there. When the Zionist movement asked, would the Nazi government stop a Jewish rabbi doing their sermons in Yiddish and make them do it in Hebrew, he agreed to that.

“He passed a law saying the Zionist flag and the swastika were the only flags that could be flown in Germany. An awful lot. Of course, they started selling Mauser pistols to the underground Jewish army. So you had right up until the start of the second world war real collaboration,” claimed Livingstone.

He further claimed that when senior Nazis objected to sending Jews to Palestine in case it created a Jewish state, a directive came from Hitler ordering them to continue with the policy.

Livingstone’s latest comments come days after he posted a 17-page summary of the defense he will present to the Labour tribunal and in which he insisted he is not an anti-Semite.

Livingstone is one of dozens of Labour members who have been suspended and expelled from the Labour party over the past year, when the British media began scrutinizing the proliferation of anti-Semitic incidents within Labour.

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn himself has come under fire from the local Jewish community, due to his calling Hamas and Hezbollah his "friends" and for outright refusing to condemn those two terrorist organizations despite being urged to do so by local Jewish groups.

A report released in October determined that the Labour party’s leadership is failing to seriously confront the anti-Semitism among its ranks.