ABSTRACT
The interests and aims of the Zionist movement and the German government appear to have coincided at the end of the nineteenth century. This resulted in an informal alliance that, in spite of occasional difficulties, was to last through World War I and the Weimar period. The Zionist movement had become an instrument for the promotion of British, not German, imperial interests. The German government tried to regain some of the advantage lost to Britain with measures that paralleled those carried out in London after the Balfour Declaration. Sobernheim identified the small nucleus of German Zionist leaders in Palestine and the masses of German-oriented east European Jewish immigrants as agents of German culture in the Middle East. The German government pursued its Palestine policy through the German Zionist movement. The only serious opposition to the pro-Zionist policy of the government and the creation of the Pro-Palastina Komitee came from within the predominantly liberal/assimilationist German Jewish community itself.
