I got this email from Labour and Palestine asking people to sign their call to the Labour party to speak up for the Palestinians against their continued oppression and dispossession by the Israeli state, in stark contravention of international law. The email runs
‘Labour Must Speak up for Palestine – add your name!
UPDATED FOR #PALESTINEDAY 2022: Sign here // Share here // Read our article here // Retweet here
“To be an internationalist and democratic socialist party, it is the responsibility of the Labour Party to speak up for Palestine and stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people and their fundamental rights, including to self-determination.
Recent actions by the Israeli Government have illustrated the continuing nature of Israel’s illegal occupation and the denial of the rights of Palestinian peoples with the use of militarised violence and forced displacements. The attacks on Gaza in August 2022 killed 44 Palestinians, including 15 children, and were described by the UN Special rapporteur as an act contrary to international law. The Israeli army’s killing of the Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh; the attacks on the Al Aqsa mosque and the outlawing of 7 NGOs who spoke up for Palestinian rights being just some examples.
The seriousness of the situation facing the people of Palestine is confirmed by the fact the International Criminal Court is holding an inquiry into abuses committed in the occupied Palestinian Territories since 2014.
The continuing de facto annexation of Palestinian land by accelerated settlement building alongside statements of Israel’s continuing intention to proceed with annexation, show it is clearer than ever that the Israeli State is intent on eliminating any prospects of Palestinian self-determination, including by trying to annex Jerusalem as its sole capital.
Major reports by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem have concluded that Israel is practising the crime of apartheid as defined by the UN.
Labour must build on – not step back from – its commitments to immediate recognition of the state of Palestine and an end to the blockade, occupation and settlements as outlined in the 2017 and 2019 manifestos, and in the motions overwhelmingly passed by the Party’s annual conferences in 2018, 2019 and 2021, the last of which stated “that the Labour Party must stand on the right side of history and abide by these resolutions in its policy, communications and political strategy.”
We must support “effective measures” including sanctions, as called for by Palestinian civil society, against actions by the Israeli state that are illegal according to international law. This must include action to ensure that Israel stops the building of settlements, reverses any annexation, ends the occupation of the West Bank, ceases the blockade of Gaza, brings down the Wall and respects the right of refugees to return to their homes under international law.
We oppose measures designed to stop civil society using non-violent actions, including ethical investment policies, to try to ensure Israel complies with international law.”
* Sign here // Share here // Read our article here // Retweet here‘
I’ve signed it, as it is clearly a matter of simply justice to defend the victims of persecution regardless of the state doing it. I fear that it will probably do little good, as Starmer is ‘100 per cent Zionist’ and backs the Israeli state to the hilt, even employing a former Israeli spook to hunt down the emails and social media posts of people he can smear as anti-Semitic. But if you are a member of the Labour party or a Labour supporter and feel the same way about it I do, please consider signing this as well.
A few days ago Amnesty International released a report stating what anti-racist and pro-Palestinian activists had known for a long time: that Israel was an apartheid state that oppressed and persecuted its indigenous Arab population. I got the impression that it’s upset Israel and its mouthpieces over here, because Israel has been furiously denying that for decades. It’s the real reason Jeremy Corbyn and his genuinely anti-racist supporters were smeared as anti-Semites. They weren’t, and four-fifths of those smeared are decent, self-respecting Jews. But smearing their critics as Jew-haters is just about the only way the Israel lobby can defend the indefensible. I got this email yesterday from Labour & Palestine welcoming the report.
“Spread the word – major Amnesty International report: Israel’s apartheid against Palestinians: a cruel system of domination & a crime against humanity
Read the report & AI press release here // share our FB status here // retweet here
Amnesty International have this week released a report arguing that “Israeli authorities must be held accountable for committing the crime of apartheid against Palestinians.”
The comprehensive report, Israel’s Apartheid against Palestinians: Cruel System of Domination and Crime against Humanity, sets out how “massive seizures of Palestinian land and property, unlawful killings, forcible transfer, drastic movement restrictions, and the denial of nationality and citizenship to Palestinians are all components of a system which amounts to apartheid under international law,” adding that “this system is maintained by violations which Amnesty International found to constitute apartheid as a crime against humanity, as defined in the Rome Statute and Apartheid Convention.”
In response to the report, Hugh Lanning of Labour & Palestine said, “This is a very welcome report from Amnesty reinforcing the growing number of organisations and bodies recognising that Israel is guilty of the crime of Apartheid.
It is time for the UN to investigate officially and the international community to recognise the reality the Palestinians face – not because of history or religion, but because the Israeli state chooses to operate a racist and discriminatory system in the land it controls and occupies between the Mediterranean Sea and the River Jordan.
End the occupation, give Palestinians back their stolen land.”
The report reinforces the importance of the motion in solidarity with Palestine passed at Labour Conference last year and why we must continue to speak up for Palestine.
You can read the report & AI press release here plus share our FB status here & retweet here
Please reply to this email if you’d like us to speak on the report at your CLP or other meeting.“
I am very pleased that Amnesty International has published this report and hope that it leads to justice and the restoration of the Palestinian people’s land and dignity. But I doubt that it will, because I think the reaction of right-wing politicians across the West will be instead either to dismiss the report or decry it as anti-Semitic. This includes Keir Starmer, the Thatcherite nonentity who now leads the Labour party, who has declared himself to be ‘100 per cent Zionist’. There are many Zionists, who nevertheless despise Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. But Starmer and the rest of the Blairites in Labour aren’t among them.
I found this video from Middle East Eye on YouTube of the demonstration in London sometime this week against Israel’s attacks on the Palestinians. The protest was held outside Downing Street, and the video features comments from a woman from the Muslim Association of Britain, Jeremy Corbyn and a gent from the Stop the War Coalition. The Muslim woman points to how large the demonstration is and how it shows people are getting increasingly angry. Corbyn says that the US and Britain are close to Israel, and so must urge it to it stop. He adds that there are very many people and organisations in Israel who also believe it is wrong. And the gent from the Stop the War Coalition states that Britain is complicit in Israel’s attacks through our connections with them.
They are not wrong. Earlier this evening I watched a bit of an on-line left Labour party rally by the Socialist Group of MPs. Hosted by Bell Ribeiro-Addy, this Virtual rally included such great MPs as Jeremy Corbyn, Diane Abbott, and Rebecca Long Bailey. Zara Sultana gave a superb speech condemning the Israeli attacks, as did John McDonnell. He also called for the whip to be restored to Jeremy Corbyn and for Corbyn’s supporters to be readmitted to the party. Absolutely! One or the other of those two great MPs also said that one of the reasons the Israeli police fired on the protesters in the al-Aqsa Mosque was to clear the way for a march by Israeli extreme right-wingers. This was the annual ‘March of the Flags’, when Israeli far right bovver boys march through Muslim east Jerusalem vandalising Palestinian property and threatening the local people. Former Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks and the current Chief Rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis, have both gone on it. Sacks even led a party of British Jews against the request not to from a British liberal Jewish organisation. That’s right, Sacks and Mirvis were rubbing shoulders there with the Israeli equivalent of the BNP. And these were the men, who accused Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters of being anti-Semites when they were and are definitely no such thing.
I don’t support Palestinian terrorism, but the Israeli attacks and massacres of innocent people and the theft of their homes and land must stop. Now.
The election’s on, the Tories are clearly scared of Corbyn, as they’re lying and publishing fake news, and almost inevitably, they’re trying to revive the old anti-Semitism smears. According to Zelo Street, the Scum’s deputy political editor, Matt Dathan, published a piece claiming that ‘life-long Labour supporter’ Maureen Lipman has left the Labour party. Apparently she’s recorded a mock version of her adverts for BT, in which she attacks the Labour leader’s economic plans and accuses him of having an ‘ology’ in extremism. This isn’t news. Lipman left the Labour party way back in 2014 when its leader was Ed Miliband. Who was Jewish. She was furious at his backing for a symbolic vote in the Commons recognising Palestine as a state.
Tom London, who is Jewish, tweeted back a reply to Dathan putting him right:
“I remember Maureen Lipman very publicly protesting and leaving the Labour Party when it was led by (the Jewish) Ed Miliband, in protest over his policy on Israel/Palestine. This policy reflected Miliband’s absolutely proper concern for Palestinian human rights”.
Socialist Voice also reminded people how she had left the Labour party back then under Miliband, who was also himself the victim of anti-Semitic attacks in the Tory press.
And the tweeter Darius Faruz also pointed Lipman’s double standards in her attacks on Labour, while she was silent about the greater amount of racism rampant in the Tories:
“Maureen Lipman stays SILENT on the greater levels of antisemitism in the Tory party? Silent on the Conservative party of #Windrush, dog whistle racism … Silent on Johnson’s Islamophobia – letterbox / bank robbers, watermelon smiles, picaninnies”.
But she had the support of Mike Gapes, Michael Gove, the mainstream media and the Scum. Almost like the latter three were all connected, as another tweeter pointedly observed.
There was a time when I liked and admired Maureen Lipman. She’s an extremely talented comic actor, and I’ve enjoyed her performances about another great British actor and comedian, Joyce Grenfell. But here she shows real moral squalor. She left the Labour party when Miliband moved slightly further left than the old Blair and Brown regime. Which means she’s quite happy seeing Britain’s public services delivering poor service in order to boost the profits of the private companies that own them. She’s quite happy to see the NHS, schools and colleges privatised, with students lumbered with crippling debt. With increasing numbers becoming homeless and house prices at unaffordable levels to create a ‘generation rent’. With wages so low the majority of people using food banks are actually in work. And a brutal sanctions regime that has seen tens, if not hundreds of thousands of people thrown into despair and poverty, because they’ve been declared ‘fit for work’ when they are anything but, or the Jobcentre decided they were going to cut of their jobseeker’s allowance on some flimsy excuse.
She’s ignored the way Corbyn has stood up for Britain’s Jewish community, and has enjoyed the support of many of its members. Like Jewdas, Jewish Voice for Labour, the Jewish Socialist Group and the Haredi community. No, he – and Ed Miliband before him – are terrible anti-Semites because they recognise the Palestinian people’s right to their own state. Or want to end the decades-long system of apartheid, land seizures and aggressive expropriation and colonisation in Israel itself. An apartheid which viewed the mizrahim – the indigenous Jews of the region – scarcely human.
She’s just another shabby ultra-Zionist, no different than the other fanatics and smear merchants. Zelo Street concluded their article about this sorry episode with
‘Maureen Lipman slagging off Labour is old news. And tediously predictable with it.’
Absolutely. And with her absolute lack of any genuine concern for Britain’s working people, and skewed hypocritical attitude on racism, I doubt many people miss her in the party either.
Hey, ho! Another day, another anti-Semitism smear against the Labour party from the Beeb. I might be overreacting here, but my respect for Victoria Coren has just taken a very severe dent. On Have I Got News For You tonight she made a very stupid joke about Corbyn believing in the classic conspiracy theory about Jewish bankers. She told the world that Labour had gone from a surplus in funds of several million to being £650,000 in debt. She then told Corbyn, ‘Jeremy, if you want to know someone good with money, it’s the Jewish bankers you believe are conspiring against you.’ Or something like that. I’ve forgotten the precise wording, but no doubt someone will put it up on YouTube tomorrow. But whatever the wording, she definitely mentioned Corbyn and the Jewish banking conspiracy.
I’m really disappointed as I thought she was better than that.
I can’t say I’m a fan of Have I Got News For You. I got sick and tired of seeing the Beeb push lies on it. It annoyed me so much at one point I stopped watching it completely. I wasn’t really keen on seeing it tonight, truth be told. Perhaps I should have kept well away.
But for the information of Victoria Coren-Mitchell and anyone else who might be taken in by the media’s lies, neither Jeremy Corbyn nor his followers believe in stupid, murderous theories about Jewish bankers. Indeed, as Mike and so many others have put up on their blogs, Corbyn has a proud record of defending the British Jewish community. He even criticised the Beeb and other broadcasters for not putting on enough programmes to cater for the Jewish community. What he has done to cause outrage to the Conservative British Jewish establishment – the Board of Deputies of British Jews, the Jewish Leadership Council and former Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, among others, is demand proper civil rights and equality for Palestinians. Freedom from torture, house demolitions, arbitrary arrest, seizure and eviction from ancestral lands by the Israeli state and militant settlers, the dismantlement of the system of apartheid that exactly mirrors that of White South Africa. You know, basic human rights like that.
In his criticism of Israel, Corbyn has enjoyed the support of Jews, who share his concerns. Hajo Meyer, at whose speech criticising Israel Corbyn committed the heinous crime of nodding in agreement, is not only Jewish but a Holocaust survivor. Many of the entirely decent people smeared as anti-Semites and suspended or expelled from the Labour party by their kangaroo court, are also Jews. People like Tony Greenstein, Jackie Walker, Martin Odoni and many, many others.
No-one from the BBC has ever had the decency to talk to any of the people smeared by the witch-hunters, whether anti-racist gentiles like Mike or Ken Livingstone, or the self-respecting, Torah-observant and secular Jews like those I’ve mentioned. They have sought comments on the anti-Semitism smears from people like the Israel-critical Jewish American scholar, Norman Finkelstein, and have given only grudging airtime to Jewish Voice for Labour. Nor has anyone mentioned that some of the heroes of the Warsaw Uprising against the Nazis, like Marek Edelman, were also supporters of the Palestinians. Indeed, Edelman caused notoriety in Israel by stating that the Palestinian rebels were the equivalent of his comrades in their revolt against occupation and murder by the Nazis. Edelman has passed on, but his legacy as an anti-Fascist and supporter of Palestinian rights is admired by veteran anti-racists in the Labour party like Tony Greenstein. A man who is also justly proud of the way British Jews and their gentile comrades in the Labour movement and trade unions resisted Mosley and his thugs before the War.
All this has gone by the wayside. Instead, the Beeb has followed the media pack and its self-imposed groupthink, and pushed ad nauseam the lie that Corbyn and the Labour party are institutionally anti-Semitic. And this latest smear of Corbyn is very suspicious in its timing. Zelo Street yesterday suggested that Louise Ellman’s resignation and the way news of it seemed to come first from the wretched Guido Fawkes was deliberately timed to do damage to Labour. Boris Johnson was in trouble, there hadn’t been an anti-Semitism smear scandal in a little while, so lo! Ellman manufactured one. As has the Beeb. As Mike and Zelo Street have pointed out, Ellman was a Thatcherite entryist parachuted into Liverpool by Blair. Jewish members of her constituency party have made a video stating that they have always been welcomed in the party and they do not recognise her comments about it.
I don’t expect anything better than the BBC in this. The Beeb has been pushing the anti-Semitism smears ever since they were first made. But I did expect better of Victoria Coren-Mitchell. How wrong I was.
This video was put on YouTube two years ago, in March 2017, by Brighton BDS, the local branch of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and oppression of the Palestinians. It’s one of two videos from that meeting, in which Greenstein and Jackie Walker respectively tell of how accusations of anti-Semitism are used to stifle justified criticism of Israel. Both Greenstein and Walker are Jewish critics of Israel, and despite their being firm anti-racists and anti-Fascists, have thus been smeared as anti-Semites.
Greenstein begins his speech by welcoming his audience, and congratulating them in that they are going to see two anti-Semites for the price of one. He explains that the accusations of anti-Semitism have nothing to do with real anti-Semitism. They’re the method used to silence critics of the unjustifiable, like Israel’s destruction of a Bedouin village in the Negeb desert to make way for a Jewish village. And Administrative Detention, where the only people detained without trial are Palestinians. It is also difficult to justify a law which retroactively legalises the theft of Palestinian land, and the existence of two different legal system in the West Bank, one for Palestinians and the other for Jews. He states that in most people’s understanding of the word, that’s apartheid. It’s certainly racist. And it’s easier to attack critics as anti-Semitic, than deal with the issues concerned.
And Israel doesn’t operate in a vacuum. It receives more aid from the United States than every other country in the world combined. Israel is defended because it’s a very important partner of the West in the Middle East. It’s critics do single out Israel, because it’s the only apartheid state in the world, the only state that says one section of the population – Jews – will have privileges, while the other section won’t. He states that there are many repressive states in the world, but there is only one apartheid state. The Zionists then reply that there’s only one Jewish state. Greenstein responds to that by pointing to 1789 and the liberation of the Jews in France during the French Revolution, the first people to be granted such emancipation. The French Revolution established the principle that the state and religion should be separate. This is also a cardinal principle of the American Constitution, but it doesn’t exist in Israel. Greenstein states that he has the right to go to Israel, claiming citizenship, and get privileges like access to land because he’s Jewish, while Yasser – a member of the audience – has no such rights, despite being born their and having a family there, because he’s not Jewish. You can’t say it’s not racist and unjust, and so they accuse people, who criticise it, of anti-Semitism.
He makes the point that it’s like the British in India. They didn’t claim they were going there to exploit the natural wealth of India, and pillage and rape it. No, they justified it by saying they were going there to civilise it by getting rid of Suttee, the burning of a man’s widow on his funeral pyre. He cites Kipling’s metaphor as the Empire as a burden on the White man’s back. It was the Empire on which the sun never set, which was because, as some people said, God didn’t trust the British. It wasn’t just the Conservatives, but also the Labour party, who justified British imperial rule in these terms. The Labour Party justified it as trusteeship. Britain held the lands in Africa and Asia in trust for their peoples until they came up to our standard of civilisation.
It’s the same with Israel today. When Britain and America support Israel, they don’t do it because it’s colonisation, or because Jewish mobs go round Jerusalem every Jerusalem Day chanting ‘Death to the Arabs’, utter anti-Muslim blasphemies and their other actions, which mean Arabs have to stay in their homes to avoid being attacked by thousands of settler youths. It’s because of anti-Semitism and some vague connection with the Holocaust. But opposing Israel is in no way anti-Semitic. He states that the definition of anti-Semitism is simple. It is ‘hostility to Jews, as Jews’. He states that a friend of his, the Oxford academic Brian Klug, worked that out years ago. He then talks about how the Working Definition of Anti-Semitism was devised in 2004 to connect anti-Semitism with Israel by the European Monitoring Commission. It met much resistance, and was opposed by the University College Union, the National Union of Students opposed it along with other civil society groups. In 2013 the EUMC’s successor took it down from its website and it fell into disuse. It was then revived as the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of anti-Semitism. This then emerged a few months previous to the meeting, when a Home Affairs Select Committee report, apart from attacking Jeremy Corbyn and Shami Chakrabarti for tolerating anti-Semitism in the Labour party, came up with this new definition. This takes 500 words to say what could be said in 50.
One of these is accusing Jews of being more loyal to each other than their own nation. He shows that definition is nonsense by stating that if he received a pound for every time he was called a traitor because he was an anti-Zionist, he’d be quite rich. The essence of Zionism is that Jews owe a dual loyalty, and their main loyalty is to Israel. Israel defines itself as the Jewish state, not just for its own citizens, but for Jews everywhere. This is unique, as most countries have a citizenship based on that country, to which everyone belongs, and a nationality. Britain has a British nationality. That nationality applies to everyone who lives in a particular place. If Scotland became independent, as the SNP made clear, then everyone living in Scotland would have Scots nationality. The same with France and Germany. But in Israel there is no Israeli nationality, although it says so on the Israeli passport. But the Hebrew translates as ‘citizen’ not ‘nation’, but the Israelis assume most people are too stupid to notice the difference. There are hundreds of nationalities in Israel, primarily Jewish, but also Arab, Islamic, Christian and those of other religions. But the only nationality that counts is Jewish, and it applies not only to Jewish citizens and residents, but also Jews wherever they live. He states that this is the foundation stone of Israeli racism, that some people – Jews- are returning, because their ancestors were there 2,000 years ago. This is one of the many racist myths that abound.
He then goes on to another definition, ‘Denying the Jews the right to self-determination’. He states that he asked Joan Ryan, the Labour MP and chair of Labour Friends of Israel, when she was wittering on about how anti-Semitic to oppose the Jewish right to self-determination about it. He wrote her a letter, to which she never replied, which asked her when precisely Zionism talked about the Jewish right to self-determination. It’s only very recent. If you look back at Zionist documents, like The Jewish State, by the founder of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, it talks about colonisation. The first Zionist congress, held in 1897, was a result of the publication of Herzl’s pamphlet. The Zionists never talked about Jewish self-determination, they talked about colonisation and did so for most of their history. But with the change in zeitgeist they changed it to Jewish national self-determination. But this means that Jews are not citizens of the country where they live. He compares Jews to Roman Catholics, as the idea that all Roman Catholics form the same nation is clearly a retrogressive step. In many ways it’s an anti-Semitic step, as it says that Jews do not belong in the countries in which they live, as they’re all one and the same.
He goes on to talk about Herzl himself, and encourages his audience to Google him, if they haven’t already. Herzl was a Viennese journalist, who operated in Paris. His diaries are particularly interesting, as if you read all four volumes of them, you find he talks about anti-Semitism as having the divine will to good about it. In other words, there would be no Zionism without anti-Semitism, which provides the propulsion for Jews separating out of their own nations and going on for what he hoped would be a Jewish nation. Herzl traveled around Europe trying to create an alliance between Zionism and one of the imperial powers of the time. Eventually in 1917 they reached an agreement with the British imperialists, Lloyd George’s war cabinet, the Balfour Declaration, in which Britain granted them the land of Palestine over the heads of the Palestinians, who were not asked for their opinion.
When Herzl was going around the European princes, he met the Kaiser’s uncle, the Grand Duke of Baden, who told Herzl that he agreed with him and supported him. This was because Herzl told him that Zionism would take the revolutionary Jews away from the socialist movement and move them to a pure national ideal. The Grand Duke said he had no problems supporting Zionism except one. If he supported Zionism, which was at that time very small, only a handful of Jews supported Zionism up to 1945, then people would accuse him of being anti-Semitic. Most Jews at the time considered Zionism to be a form of anti-Semitism. Greenstein asks how many people know that on Lloyd George’s war cabinet, the one member who opposed the Balfour Declaration was its only Jewish member, Sir Edwin Montague, who later became the Secretary of State for India. He accused all his fellows of anti-Semitism, because they didn’t want Jews in Britain, but wanted them to go to Palestine. And he states that is what they’re opposing today. The opposite is true when they accuse Israel’s opponents of being anti-Semitic. It is the Zionist movement that has always held that Jews do not belong in these countries and should go to Israel. We see it today in the election of Donald Trump. There has been an outbreak of anti-Semitism, and the Zionist movement has no problem with it, because Trump is a good supporter of Israel. And the appointment of Steve Bannon was welcomed by the Zionist Organisation of America, who invited him to speak at their annual gala in New York. He didn’t attend because there was a large demonstration of leftists and anti-Zionists. He concludes that if someone today tells him he doesn’t belong in this country, they’re either a Zionist or an anti-Semite.
Greenstein thus exposes the real agenda behind the anti-Semitism accusations and the utter hypocrisy of those making them, as well as the real anti-Semitism that lies at the heart of Zionism itself. It’s to silence critics like Greenstein and Walker that they, and so many other decent anti-racists, have been accused of anti-Semitism while the real anti-Semites, like Bannon and Sebastian Gorka, have been given enthusiastic welcomes by the Israeli state.
However, the decision by many Democrat politicos not to attend the AIPAC conference this weekend may indicate that there’s a sea change coming in the American people’s tolerance for this nonsense. Hopefully it won’t be too long before Israel’s critics like Greenstein and Walker are properly recognised as the real opponents of racism and anti-Semitism, and the people who smeared them held in contempt for their lies and vilification.
Yesterday, Mike put up a piece discussing how he had finally got written notification from the Labour party, informing him he had been thrown out as an anti-Semite. He can, apparently, reapply for admission in something like 18 months time. The letter also informed Mike on what grounds they had decided he was anti-Semitic. As Mike points out, these were quite different grounds than the charges that were originally made against him.
The letter declared that he had been found guilty because
“Upon the balance of probabilities the charge was proved for reasons including:
◾It was not disputed that you were responsible for the posting the content that the NEC claimed breached Labour Party rules;
◾A reasonable person would find the posted content, that is the basis of the NEC’s charge, to have the propensity to cause offence, be regarded as abusive and make some feel discriminated against;
◾In posting the content you breached the Labour Party’s Antisemitism and other forms of racism code of conduct, Social Media Policy and Member’s Pledge in appendix 9 of the Rule Book.”
But the original charges were
“Mr Sivier has repeatedly posted content propogating the conspiracy that secretive networks of Jews control and have undue influence over government and other societal institutions. He uses language that is dismissive of antisemitism and that denies Jews the right to self-identify as they wish. This falls fairly and squarely within the IHRA definition of antisemitism, which the Labour Party has adopted.”
Mike states clearly that at his hearing he completely blew these charges out of the water, which is why the NCC was reduced to finding him guilty on the trumped-up twaddle in the letter. But he points out that all the letter proves is that there was someone who felt abused, offended and discriminated against.
He also makes the point that there is a huge difference between saying something and meaning it, and that the complaint was deliberately made to interfere with his attempt to run for election as a member of Powys council.
He also wondered how the reasonable people, who read his blog, and don’t believe that he’s an anti-Semite feel about how the NCC has described them. Their ruling is a clear statement that they don’t regard people like them as reasonable.
Actually, the unreasonable person(s) in the whole affair are whoever made the complaint, and Labour’s NCC, and the Vishinsky in charge of this Stalinist show trial, Maggie Cousins. The allegations that Mike’s an anti-Semite was made originally by the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, and apparently supported by the Israel lobby within the Labour party, like the Jewish Labour Movement. Or Paole Zion, as it used to be called. These people aren’t remotely reasonable. They’re bug-eyed fanatics, who demand unquestioning support for Israeli policies, even when these are clearly Fascistic, such as the system of apartheid designed to contain and isolate the Palestinians, and their slow ethnic cleansing through land seizures, house demolitions, the poisoning of their water supplies and the arrest, torture and casual shooting by the armed forces, including women and children.
The Israel lobby in Britain is violently islamophobic and, like its Israeli masters, makes alliances with real Nazis and anti-Semites to further its ends. Israel has invited Richard Spencer, the head of the Alt-Right, Sebastian Gorka and Stephen Bannon from America, and Tommy Robinson, the former head of the English Defence League, onto its television and high-level political and military gatherings. The Israeli state has also allied itself with the Far Right governments of Poland and Hungary, and sold arms to the Nazis now running amok in the Ukraine.
In the UK, we’ve had Stephen Pollard, the editor of the Jewish Chronicle, tell Groaniad readers that Michal Kaminski, an MEP for the current ruling party in Poland, isn’t an anti-Semite. This is despite Kaminski’s party trying to cover up Polish complicity in the Holocaust and denying that the villagers of Jedwabne were responsible for the massacre of the Jews there. Zionists like Jonathan Hoffman turn up at anti-Palestine demonstrations in the company of members of Britain First and have links to the EDL. Which had a Jewish division, quite apart from the Jewish Defence League. Some of the members of the British Zionist movement are Likudniks, members of the Likud party’s British organization, Herut. And there are a couple, who even brazenly turn up wearing the insignia of Kach, a Fascistic Israeli organization banned in Israel for terrorism.
As for former Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sachs, who was one of the leading members of the Jewish community baying for Corbyn’s removal, Sachs has absolutely no business calling anyone racist. A few years ago, Sachs took it upon himself to lead a party of Jewish Brits to join the Israel Day march in Jerusalem. This is when the Israeli equivalent of skinhead thugs march through the Muslim quarter to threaten and intimidate the indigenous residents, vandalizing their property, scrawling racist graffiti on the walls and Lord knows what else. One Israeli scientist, religious scholar and philosopher described such thugs as ‘Judeonazis’. And he’s right. They are the Jewish equivalent of the Nazis. There is no other word which properly describes them, no matter how much the Israel lobby may scream and howl with rage at the comparison.
Of the letter itself, Mike says it proves two things, that
I am not an anti-Semite (the letter makes no suggestion of any hatred towards Jews, simply because they are Jewish) – and Labour’s National Constitutional Committee is a laughing-stock.
However, the affair has also created problems for the Labour party. Labour has just launched a recruitment campaign. But they may find that a problem, as many people will not want to join a party that is so prejudiced against its own grassroots members, and which cannot correct and root out the systemic corruption in its bureaucracy. This gives the party a credibility problem with its treatment of Mike and others like him, especially as there is no appeal procedure.
He states that this also puts them in an actionable position, so perhaps the mess can be sorted out in court. He also makes the point that while he is putting a brave face on it, it is nevertheless distressing to be accused of anti-Semitism.
Labour is now particularly in a difficult position, as they wish to close the gap with the Conservatives in the polls. But that’s the party’s fault, not Mike’s.
He concludes
If Labour really wanted to gain credibility now, the party’s leaders should have thought very carefully before inflicting this particular injustice on this particular man.
They’d better do something about it quickly – don’t you agree?
Now I very much do agree, but I don’t think the Blairites and Zionists in Labour, who have engineered this crisis are remotely bothered about it. They have shown themselves absolutely determined to destroy Corbyn’s leadership by any means, including organizing coup after coup, smearing him and his supporters in the press, trying to pack the party with Lib Dems and Tories in order to stop themselves being deselected, or prevent grassroots Labour members getting elected to important posts. And finally they’ve threatened to split from the party and form their own, like the SDP in the 1980s.
They have, in short, shown that they are determined to destroy the party, if they can’t control it. And if it does badly in the polls, then they’re highly delighted if they can blame it on Corbyn. And in order to prevent a Corbyn Labour government, they will betray the country and their members and vote with the government to prop up Theresa May.
In short, they are the credibility. And Corbyn is assisting them, as he has shown time and again that he won’t back up his supporters against these false charges of anti-Semitism, because he thinks that if he sacrifices them to the Israel lobby, it’ll placate them. It won’t. They have made it very clear that their overriding concern is to remove him. Attacking his supporters is merely part of this overall strategy.
The Blairites and the Israel lobby are a liability, and have created a credibility gap. And the only way it can be solved is if these people are cleaned out, and Corbyn grows a backbone and stands up to them.
Jared Kushner is proving to be every bit a bumptious, arrogrant braggart as his father-in-law, Donald Trump. Trump boasts that every deal or bill he’s going to pass will be absolutely wonderful, pushing them in the most superlative tones. So did Kushner about two weeks ago, when he declared that he was going to make a peace deal with the Palestinians. This was going to be great for the Israelis, and great for the Palestinians. He was not, however, going to spoil it by including the Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas, in the negotiations.
I don’t know what kind of deal he finalised, but I doubt is has any value to the Palestinians themselves. If memory serves me right, Kushner is one of the leaders of the Jewish National Fund in America. This is the Israeli organisation, which owns 97 per cent of the land in Israel, which is very much reserved for Israelis and definitely not for Palestinians.
And even if he isn’t connected to that organisation, Kushner is a real estate developer in Israel, who specialises in buying up Palestinian land and developing Israeli settlements, businesses and homes in the Occupied Territories.
The last peace deal the Israelis made with the Palestinians in the 1990s, according to Joe Sacco’s Palestine, did precious little to benefit the Palestinians. They were given an independent authority, but the occupation and its brutalities and injustices continued, as did the constrution and expansion of the illegal settlements. Kushner’s peace deal sounds exactly the same, with the exception that he doesn’t trust the Palestinian leader himself to agree to it. Perhaps the real reason he want to cut Abbas out of the negotiations was because the Palestinian leader may have been a bit too wise to what Kushner would try.
This looks like another insubstantial peace process, where Kushner, America and the Israelis will offer scraps or tokens, while making sure that the indigenous people of Israel will continue to have their lands seized, their schools closed, their homes bulldozed, water fouled, and themselves shot and persecuted as part of the Israelis’ long campaign of ethnic cleansing against them.
This is one of the classics of the graphic novel. Joe Sacco is an American journalist. He spent two months with the Palestinians in late 1991 and early 1992 in Gaza and the West Bank during the time of the first Intifada. He wrote and drew Palestine after his return to the US, basing it on his notes, publishing it as a nine-part comic strip. These were later collected into a single volume to form the graphic novel. The book also has a kind of introduction, ‘Homage to Joe Sacco’, from Edward Said, the author of Orientalism, critic of western imperialism and attitudes to the Arabs, and himself a Palestinian.
This is precisely the type of book the Israel lobby does not want people to read. Not BICOM, not the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, which was set up because Gideon Falter, its founder, was worried about British attitudes becoming more hostile to Israel after the blockade of Gaza, not the Jewish Labour Movement, formerly Paole Zion and the companion party to the Israeli Labor Party, not the various ‘Friends of Israel’ societies in the political parties, Tories and Labour, nor the Jewish Leadership Council and definitely not the Board of Deputies of British Jews. All of them shout ‘anti-Semitism’ at anyone who dares to publish anything critical of Israel, or show the barbarity with which it treats the Palestinians.
The book shows Sacco’s experiences as he goes around Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, talking to both Palestinians and Israelis, meeting them, entering their homes, and listening to their stories. He starts the book in Cairo, the beginning of his journey to Israel, and to which he returns at his departure. During his time there, he visits the Vale of Kidron, the Arab quarter of Old Jerusalem, Hebron, Ramallah, Jabalia refugee camp in the Gaza strip, as it then was, Balata, another refugee camp on the West Bank, Nablus, the town of Gaza itself, and finally Tel Aviv.
It’s not an easy read. This is an occupied country during deep unrest, and the threat of violence and arbitrary arrest and detention without trial is every where. There are patrols of soldiers, demonstrations, explosions and stone throwing. And he shows, with quotes, the contemptuous, lofty and hostile attitude the early Zionists and Lord Balfour had for the indigenous population. He quotes Balfour as saying
‘Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long tradition, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desire and prejudices of 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit this ancient land. We do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the inhabitants’.
Ben Gurion thought it would be simple to expel the Palestinians, because he felt they had no real attachment to their homeland. He wrote that the Palestinian ‘is equally at ease whether in Jordan, Lebanon or a variety of other places’. With the approach of war, he made it clear their expulsion was going to be through military force: ‘In each attack a decisive blow should be struck, resulting in the destruction of homes and the expulsion of the population.’ When that was done, ‘Palestinian Arabs have only one role – to flee’. He also quotes Golda Meir, who stated that a Palestinian people, defining itself as a Palestinian people, did not exist, and ‘we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They do not exist’. 400 Palestinian villages were razed in the war marking the birth of Israel. Meir’s lie – that the Palestinians don’t exist as a people – is still repeated by Republican and pro-Israel bloggers. Golda Meir was also concerned about the Palestinian population outstripping that of the Israelis, another issue that is still very alive today.
His hosts are polite, welcoming him into their homes, and plying him with tea. But occasionally there is an outburst from one of them, when he’s asked what the point of him being there, of them talking to him, is. Because other journalists have been there too, and they’ve talked to them, and nothing has happened, nothing has changed. They also talk to him about the other factions, and of the peace process. In a separate text at the beginning of the book, he states that, while the peace process set up the Palestinian authority and gave them a government, it changed nothing for ordinary Palestinians, and the occupation and theft of land by the Israelis still goes on.
He also reveals that the Israelis appropriate 2/3 of the land in the West Bank for their own us, which includes the establishment of Israeli settlements, which are illegal under international law. And the governments gives Israelis plenty of incentives to move to them. They’re given a government grant if they do, lower interest rates on loan, the housing itself is cheaper than in Israel, and an income tax rate of 7 per cent. The settlers themselves can be extremely aggressive. Sacco’s hosts tell them about incidents where settlers have come into Palestinian villages, smashing windows and demanding that the owners come out. Of people shot by them, and the trivial sentences given to the settlers guilty of this. They’re given jail sentences of a few months. If they’re convicted in the first place. Palestinians who shoot and kill Israelis are jailed for years. Some lavish homes do exist in Palestine, occupied by Arabs, but most live in very bare houses, often with leaking roofs, which are vulnerable to storms.
His cartoons show what his Palestinian hosts tell him it’s like in prison camps like Ansar III, with crowds of prisoners crammed into small, bare rooms with no heat and poor ventilation. There are also few eating utensils, to the various political factions in the camp – Fateh, Hamas, Popular Front, organise meal times so that everyone gets a turn with the cup and plate to eat and drink. Several of the people he talks to were arrested simply on suspicion. Israeli law allowed them to be held without charge while evidence was compiled, with his captors returning to court over and over again to request a few more days more, until the judge finally listens to their lawyer, has the procedure stopped and the prisoner released. He also shows how the prisoners were tortured through beatings, being forced to stand for hours with bags over their heads, a process permitted under Israel law. A judge ruled that torture could not be used, but what methods were to replace them were kept secret. So many Palestinians have been incarcerated, that a green identity card showing a man has been in jail is a matter of pride. And not to have been to prison correspondingly is a mark of shame.
He talks about how the Israelis have a deliberate policy of not allowing the Palestinians to industrialise, so that they compete with the Israel. The State has also put obstacles in place to prevent Palestinian farmers competing with Israelis. They also deliberately uproot the olive trees many Palestinians grow to support themselves. The Israelis also appropriate most of the water, and dig deeper wells, so that the Palestinians have a much poorer water supply and their own wells are becoming increasingly saline. As a result, unemployment in Gaza was at 40 per cent. And Sacco himself was approached several times by Palestinians, hoping he could do something so that they could leave and go abroad to study or find work.
He describes a school, without electricity, as well as a school for the deaf, which is supported through volunteers and whose staff complain of their lack of training for dealing with people with disabilities. He also hears and illustrates the story of one Palestinian woman, whose son was shot by Israeli soldiers, but was prevented from taking him directly to hospital. Instead she was ordered to go hither and thither, where she was told a helicopter was waiting to take her and the boy. When she gets there, there is no helicopter. She eventually takes him to the hospital herself in a car, by which time it’s too late and the lad dies.
The book also shows the mass of roadblocks and the permit system which Palestinians have to go through to go to Israel. At the same time, Israelis are simply allowed to whiz through in their separate lanes.
Sacco also doesn’t shy away from showing the negative side of Palestine – the anti-Semitism, and particularly infamous murders, like the killing of Klinghoffer aboard the Achille Lauro, and the massacre of the Israeli Olympic team by the terrorist group Black September. This can turn into support for the murder of Israeli civilians. There’s also a chapter on the plight of Palestinian women, This is a society where women are still very much treated as inferiors and subordinates, where honour killings are carried out as the punishment for female adultery. It is also a society where collaborators are murdered, and those, who belong to the wrong faction may also be shot and killed.
The book was written 27 years ago, but nothing really seems to have changed since then. The illegal settlements are still there and expanding. Settlers are still seizing Palestinian homes and property, the apartheid separating Israelis from Palestinians is still in place, unemployment is still high, and Palestinians are still being treated as foreigners, refugees and second-class citizens on their own land.
However, some attitudes are changing. The Israeli liberals Sacco talks to only support the Palestinians up to a point. When pressed, some of them will say that Israel should keep the Occupied Territories, because they seized them in war. Or that they need to keep them for security reasons. But an increasing number of young Jews in America and elsewhere are appalled at the continuing maltreatment of the Palestinians and are becoming increasingly critical and hostile to Israel because of this. And there have also grown up major opposition groups like the human rights organisation B’Tselem and Breaking the Silence in Israel.
The Israeli state and its lobby and supporters in this country and others are increasingly scared. It’s why they’re trying to pass laws to criminalise the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement in America, and to outlaw criticism of Israel in this country through tortuous definitions of anti-Semitism that are stretched to include it. It’s why they’re smearing, with the connivance of the right-wing media, the Blairites in the Labour party, and the Conservatives, decent people, who have fought racism and anti-Semitism, as anti-Semites.
Very long, detailed books have been written about Israel’s brutal treatment, dispossession and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. Sacco’s Palestine presenting this as graphic novel, is an example of how comics can also be serious literature, tackling a difficult subject with both narrative and artistic skill and style. I’ve mentioned on this blog before the alternative comics that were also published from the ’60s to the 1980s/1990s on political topics, including the Israeli maltreatment of Palestinians in Pat Mills’ Crisis. Palestine is very much in that tradition, and in 1996 won the American Book Award.
Mike has also put up a piece today commenting on a report in Jewish News Online that Avi Gabbay, the head of the Israeli Labour Party, has broken off links between his party and the British Labour party because of Corbyn’s supposed hostility to the Jewish community, anti-Semitism and his attacks on Israel’s government and security forces, in which the government and opposition in Israel are one. As Mike points out, this is just rubbish. Corbyn has always actively campaigned against all forms of racism, including anti-Semitism, and his supporters include many Jews and Jewish organisations. Nor is he against Israel. He is just against the Israeli state’s persecution and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians.
Which is what Gabbay is really against. Gabbay is fully behind the dispossession of the Palestinians, and has described the illegal settlements built on land seized from the indigenous Arab inhabitants as ‘the beautiful and devoted face of Zionism’ and sworn that an Israeli Labour government would never include Arab members of the Knesset. He’s a nasty, virulent racist, and I dare say most people would probably think the Labour party was better off not having anything to do with him or the party he leads.
Labour Friends of Israel, however, see things very differently. They were complaining that Corbyn has never responded to their requests for a meeting, or gone with them to the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial. They have also said that Gabbay’s decision will not affect the Labour Friends of Israel, which will still continue to have ties with the Israeli party.
Mike in the title to his article about this states clearly that no-one’s actually bothered. Martin Odoni, one of the great commenters on Mike’s blog, has said that he believes that 99 per cent of the people in the Labour party probably don’t know that there is an Israeli Labour party, or that it’s linked to Britain’s, and probably don’t care either. Other commenters have also expressed their disappointment with the Israeli Labour party. They’d hoped for something better from it, but while there are some good people in it, it’s as pro-War, neoliberal and corrupt. Joe Sucksmith, another commenter, said that the Israeli Labour Party is institutionally racist and that Corbyn should cut ties with them. The only Israeli parties Corbyn should establish links to should be those dedicated to stopping the building of the illegal settlements, and allowing the Palestinians to return to their ancestral homelands. Both of these are demanded by UN resolutions.
In fact, a look at Tony Greenstein’s websites and discussion of the history of the Israeli Labour Party shows that historically, under Golda Meir and David Ben-Gurion, the party was as determined to massacre and ethnically cleanse Israel of the Palestinians as the right-wing parties. Rather than being a mark of shame, it could be said that Gabbay’s decision to cut ties with the Labour party is actually a good thing, as it means that genuine British anti-racists and opponents of anti-Semitism aren’t members of a party with links to the Israeli Labour Party and its policies of land seizure, apartheid and ethnic cleansing.
As for no-one being bothered, I’ve seen little coverage of this in the I. It wasn’t completely ignored, but was the subject of only a tiny paragraph on page 2. So not exactly a major issue for the I then, although I don’t doubt that the Tory press will try to inflate this into a major crisis later on.
As for the Labour Friends of Israel claiming that Gabbay’s decision doesn’t affect them, well, yes, it does, whether they like it or not. By retaining links with Gabbay’s outfit, they have become a group inside the Labour party hostile to its leader, and with links to an outside, hostile party. As have the Jewish Labour Movement. Formerly Paole Zion, the Jewish Labour Movement has said in its constitution that it is the sister party to the Israeli Labour Party. This makes their relationship to the Labour party and its membership as a whole very problematic, especially if they continue to try to undermine Corbyn’s supporters by smearing them as anti-Semites and seeking to get them expelled.
Mike also quotes Tom Pride, of Pride’s Purge, who also points out that while anti-Semitism certainly exists, and must be taken seriously, the real anti-Semites are generally right-wing. They despise Corbyn, the Labour Party and the left in general, and love Katie Hopkins, Nigel Farage, Brexit and Trump, as well as the Daily Mail. Oh yes, and they also hate Blacks and Muslims as much as they hate Jews. In my experience, this is absolutely true. You only have to look at the letters pages in the right-wing press, and the comments section for videos about race and immigration on YouTube. The racist readers of the Daily Heil hate Labour, because they see it as the party of unlimited coloured immigration. More specifically, they believe the allegation of a former British civil servant that Blair was determined to increase non-white immigration in order to change Britain demographically and rub the Tories’ faces in a new, multicultural Britain. This civil servant is the only person, who has made this claim, but it was repeated by the Heil and rest of the Tory press, and believed by very many of its readers.
Mike’s article also includes a Tweet from Chelley Ryan, which includes a video with a Jewish lady talking about the issues of anti-Semitism and the anti-Semitism smears under the hashtag #wrongkindofjew. This lady’s family comes from Vienna, and her mother’s family were nearly all butchered by the Nazis. She herself was a member of the Labour party up to the Iraq invasion, when she could no longer be a member. She rejoined as a supporter with the election of Jeremy Corbyn. She has many Jewish friends, with whom she discusses these issues. She states that while she doesn’t say that there isn’t any anti-Semitism in the Labour party, she hasn’t seen it or been subject to it. As for the anti-Semitism smears, she makes three points:
1. It’s a distraction from Israel’s horrific persecution of the Palestinians. This week, 15 unarmed protesters were shot by the IDF.
2. It’s also a distraction from the greater racism in the Tories, for example, Boris Johnson and his vile comments about ‘grinning picaninnies’.
3. It’s also about the forthcoming elections, and the determination of the Blairites to undermine Corbyn so that they can return to power. She also points out that many members of the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the other Jewish organisations making the accusations of anti-Semitism are Tories. She is also afraid that the appropriation of anti-Semitism by the right will backfire. But unfortunately, it won’t backfire on the right, but on the Jews generally. She has a point. Other people have also warned that the use of allegations of anti-Semitism purely as a political smear is dangerous, because it devalues anti-Semitism, to the point that people may become indifferent to real abuse or brutalisation of Jews, simply for being Jews.
Other Jewish members of the Labour party and Jewish Labour groups have said the same, or similar things. They also have a right to be heard in this debate. But the Thatcherite political establishment – the Tories, press and the Blairites in the Labour party – are determined to make sure that they aren’t. Like Jewdas, they’re ‘the wrong kinds of Jews’.
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