I dare say that there’s a lot that Jackie Walker and I would disagree on, but on this issue she has a razor-sharp intelligence and insight doubtless gained through her decades campaigning against apartheid in South Africa and the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians in Israel. And I dare say that her parents, civil rights campaigners in the US, also taught her much about institutional prejudice and its enforcement by political authorities. I have a feeling that the Office of Strategic Affairs, the department of the Israeli state tasked with shutting down anti-Israel opinion abroad, considers her the No. 2 existential threat to Israel. All this fuss over a respectable middle class academic and Jewish grandmother!
This comes from the Crispin Flintoff show on YouTube, and shows Jackie and Flintoff analysing Starmer’s non-answer to a question in parliament about what kind of definition of genocide he is using while men, women and children are being killed in Gaza. Starmer replies by saying it would be wise to take the question back to October 7th, which seems to be a typical, ‘Well, I wouldn’t start from here’ answer, as if he was replying to a lost person asking for directions but really didn’t know how you’d get to the destination from the present location himself. He then goes on to say that he is well aware of the definition of genocide, which is why he’s not going to answer that question. Somebody has commented elsewhere that the reason he doesn’t give a definition of genocide is that all of them describe exactly what Israel is doing to the Palestinians now.
Jackie states that this is the answer you’d expect from a mafia boss flanked by two of his heavies. Starmer is warning not just the Labour party behind him – because they all talk like that – but also the general public that such questioning will not be tolerated. She points to the various critics of Israel like Craig Murray, Tony Greenstein and most recently Natalie Strecker, who have been pulled in by the fuzz, information taken from their computers and mobiles, and then released without charge. It certainly compares to the tactics the Stasi used. Apart from disappearing and torturing dissidents, they used to send a couple of agents round regularly to their houses, just to let them know they were being watched. She also notes that while there’s a lot of discussion in the right-wing press – of which she considers the Guardian to be a part – about people jailed for offensive tweets, no-one has called attention to the arrest of the above critics of Israel.
She also states that the question about the kidnapped Israeli hostages is irrelevant, as they’ve probably been killed by the Israeli’s bombing and starvation of Gaza. I’ve also come across an even more chilling suggestion about what has probably happened to them: they were killed by the Israeli state as part of its Hannibal strategy, in which Israeli citizens are killed by their own armed forces to prevent them being taken captive. This view also comments on the contradiction in the claims of the Israeli military, that they can accurately locate Arab generals and senior officers for assassination, but can’t find the missing hostages. It does sound unlikely.
And this is going to get worse. Trump wants us to decide between America and Europe. If he puts up tariffs on our goods of 30, 40, 50 per cent, then we’re screwed. And he’ll want us to back Israel.
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