This past week has been dominated by the ceremonies commemorating the 75th anniversary of D-Day, when Allied forces landed in Normandy in 1944 in an invasion that was to roll back the German forces. With the Soviet advance across eastern Europe, the invasion eventually led to the final defeat of Nazi Germany and the liberation of Europe. The news coverage of the various displays, ceremonies and discussions of the events of D-Day and their historical significance have also included the Holocaust, and calls for its survivors each to be given proper honours by the Queen.
I’ve absolutely no objection to this. These men and women, now obviously thinned by time and old age, survived a true living hell at the hands of a regime that has come to symbolise tyranny and mass murder at its darkest, most extreme and malign. I also believe that the Holocaust needs to be taught, remembered and properly understood and placed in its historical, sociological and political context. The forces of the extreme Right, though severely beaten, are always at the political margins, seeking to gain a foothold back into power. Thanks to neoliberalism and its impoverishment of the masses in order to benefit the elite super-rich, Fascism and extreme right-wing populism is now on the rise again across Europe and America, from Donald Trump in the US to UKIP and the Brexit party here in the UK, Marine Le Pen and her crew in France, and the AfD in Germany. These last contain some unreconstructed, real Nazis, who have denounced their country’s Holocaust monument as ‘a badge of shame’ and have said that when they get into power, they will open up an underground railway to the infamous death camp. And then there’s the various bitterly racist and anti-Semitic regimes in eastern Europe, like Viktor Orban’s Fidesz in Hungary, the Baltic states and their determination to honour as patriotic heroes Nazi collaborators during War, and the truly Nazi Azov battalion in the Ukraine.
Now more than ever we need to show how genocidal Fascism arises, and leads nations to commit the most horrific atrocities.
However, nearly a month ago, on the 13th May 2019, Tony Greenstein, a Jewish activist against all forms of racism and Fascism, and particularly its Jewish form, Zionism, put up a piece on his blog arguing that the Holocaust should not be commemorated. It’s a highly controversial piece, and obviously shocking to very many. But Greenstein is not alone, and his piece is backed up by very strong arguments. For example, it was only after the 1967 War that Israel began commemorating the Shoah. Before then they played it down and actively discouraged its commemoration. It was felt that the sufferings of the Jewish people would reflect badly on their ability to found a new state for themselves. The survivors themselves were vilified. Greenstein states that in Israel they were subject to the disgusting epithet ‘sapon’ – soap – from the myth that the Nazis turned the bodies of those murdered in the gas chambers into the substance.
Greenstein also shows that, despite Holocaust Day being a regularly part of the Israeli calendar and the emphasis on the Holocaust and its commemoration in the Israeli education system, with young Israelis taken on trips to Auschwitz, there is no proper understanding of it or the reasons behind it. Instead, Israelis are simply taught that it was due to anti-Semitism. The result is that the Holocaust is used to foster the sense of national persecution and intense patriotism, especially against the indigenous Arabs. Forty-four per cent of young Israelis don’t believe that Arabs should be elected to the Knesset. And no Israeli, after visiting Auschwitz, has gone to the walls and fences around Gaza, and vowed ‘Never again’ for its citizens as well.
As for the Shoah’s survivors in Israel, many of them live in abject poverty, denied the compensation that Israel has claimed on their behalf. Which shows how hypocritical the Israeli state’s attitude to the welfare of these people, who endured so much, actually is.
But the Zionists are determined that the Holocaust should be considered a unique event, a phenomenon that occurred only to the Jews. In fact Gypsies were also singled out for extermination because of their race in Nazi Germany, and the techniques of mass murder – gassing with Zyklon B cyanide gas – was developed first to destroy the congenitally disabled, who were also considered racially undesirable. The Holocaust also had a precedent in the Armenian Massacres, the attempt by the Young Turks regime to exterminate the entire Armenian people, when they rose up against their imperial masters during the First World War. Hitler was encouraged to move to the mass extermination of the Jews by his observation that the great powers – Britain, France and America – had done nothing to stop this genocide. ‘Who remembers the Armenians?’ he remarked.
And in order to preserve the idea that the Holocaust was a unique event, peculiar only to the Jews, some Zionists have also done their best to discourage comparable commemorations of the Nazi murder of the Romany and disabled, or the Turkish slaughter of the Armenians. Greenstein wrote
The elevation of the Jewish Holocaust above all other acts of genocide not only suggests that it is unique but that it has nothing to tell us beyond the fact that it occurred. If the purpose of remembering and commemorating acts of genocide is to prevent their reoccurrence and to act as a warning against their repetition, why single out one act of genocide? The genocide of the Gypsies and the Disabled are all but omitted from Holocaust museums such as Yad Vashem and the Washington US Holocaust Museum. The genocide of Africans in the slave trade or Armenians forms no part of Holocaust Memorial Day.
Indeed from the days of Herzl onwards there has been a determined refusal by Zionism to acknowledge the Armenian massacres and genocide. Lucy Dawidowicz, a prominent Zionist historian went so far as to say that unlike the Nazis, the Turks had a ‘rational’ reason for massacring Armenians. Elie Wiesel, Alan Dershowitz and Arthur Hertzberg, all prominent Zionists, withdrew from an international conference on genocide in Tel Aviv when the sponsors refused to remove sessions on the Armenians. (Novick pp. 192-193, Finkelstein pp. 69-70) The Zionist lobby in the United States has repeatedly opposed any commemoration of the Armenian holocaust.
Yehuda Bauer, Professor of Holocaust Studies at the Hebrew University Jerusalem, in a debate with Dr Sybil Milton, the Senior Resident Historian at the US Holocaust Memorial Council argued that
‘the tragedy of the Gypsies’ whilst being ‘ no less poignant, and no less horrible’ was nonetheless not part of the Holocaust. Whilst ‘it happened at the same time as the Holocaust, and there are of course many similarities. Yet it appears to me that the Holocaust is very much a unique case. If someone prefers to call it Judeocide, that is his her privilege. It is exactly the same thing: it is the mass murder of the Jews at the hands of the Nazis.’
For Zionism the Holocaust is a Jewish only affair. Sybil Milton, who was herself Jewish, responded succinctly:
‘(The) Nazi genocide, popularly known as the Holocaust, can be defined as the mass murder of human beings because they belonged to a biologically defined group. Heredity determined the selection of the victims. The Nazi regime applied a consistent and inclusive policy of extermination- based on heredity- only against three groups of human beings: the handicapped, Jews, and Gypsies.’
This correspondence ‘Gypsies and the Holocaust’ can be found in The History Teacher, Vol. 25, No. 4. (Aug., 1992), pp. 513-521.
Wiesel’s, Dershowitz’s and Hertzberg’s decision to walk out of the international conference on genocide because its inclusion of the Armenian massacres, in my view, is no doubt a direct contradiction of the fellowship many Jews feel towards them because of both peoples’ shared experience of genocide. It can be seen, for example, in the play, Burning Issues, which Mike and I saw at the theatre in Quakers Friars here in Bristol way back in the ’90s. Set in the American publishing industry, it’s similar to King Lear in that the drama is about an elderly, failing patriarch being challenged by his children. In this case, the central character is an Jewish publisher, who is determined to bring out an exhaustive encyclopaedia of the Holocaust. His fixation with the Third Reich is damaging sales, however, and his children wish to rescue the firm from bankruptcy by ditching the project and publishing something far more popular instead. The old man is himself a survivor of the Shoah, and his closest relationship is with his Armenian cleaner through the shared bond of surviving the attempted extermination of their peoples. The behaviour of Dawidowicz, Wiesel, Hertzberg and Dershowitz in their refusal to allow the extermination of other groups into the memorialisation of the Holocaust, even when they are directly comparable and relevant, is disgusting and should rule them out utterly as any kind of moral authorities on this subject.
Greenstein goes on to consider how the Israeli Holocaust Museum, Yad Vashem, has been used to whitewash many extreme right-wing political leaders from around the world. People like Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, who has compared himself to Hitler, and the leader of the Austrian Freedom Party, which was founded by two former members of the SS. These politicians sign agreements with Israel, duly visit Yad Vashem, at which they lay wreaths, and then are duly legitimised by Israel’s Zionist establishment as friends of the Jews.
He also describes how Yad Vashem doesn’t discuss the Nazis’ murder of other ethnic groups during the Holocaust, quoting one of the journalists for the Israeli paper Haaretz. He says
Blatman noted the absence of Yad Vashem from the 5thGlobal Conference on Genocide in Jerusalem in 2016. Why? It has nothing to say on anything bar the Jewish genocide. Blatman wrote of how
None of the hundreds of scientific events organized by Yad Vashem has been dedicated to the Holocaust and genocide…. You have to look hard to find any reference to the destruction of other populations in the Holocaust, and its chief aim seems to be to silence criticism. Similar museums in Paris and Washington hold regular activities on these topics
Whilst Yad Vashem studies what happened to the Jews in Polish or Ukrainian cities ‘they rarely address Nazi atrocities against other ethnic groups’. They study the minute detail of what happened to the Jews without ever seeing the wider picture. Yad Vashem ‘helps keep the Holocaust in a narrow Jewish ghetto that serves the xenophobic manipulations Israel makes of it.’
That is why Yad Vashem has never given birth to a comprehensive book on the Holocaust such as Gerald Reitlinger’s The Final Solution or Raul Hilberg’s Destruction of the European Jews. Holocaust research in Israel has done nothing to combat racism.
In fact, Yehuda Elkana, an Israeli historian, believed instead that the commemoration of the Holocaust had been so appropriated and corrupted by the Zionists, including Yad Vashem, that it was actively fostering Israeli racism. The only lessons they had learned from it was that Jews were victims, and so they were morally empowered to do anything against those they considered enemies with force. Elkana therefore argued that the Holocaust needs to be forgotten. Greenstein also quotes another Jewish scholar, Gideon Levy, who made the same point.
Greenstein himself writes
The Holocaust cannot be forgotten. The question is how it is remembered, by whom and for what purpose. Zionism’s abuse of Holocaust memory has to be challenged. Under capitalism all memory serves a purpose.
And concludes
The Holocaust needs to be reclaimed by the Left and Anti-Fascism. For too long the Zionist movement has got away with harnessing the Holocaust to the chariot of racism and ethnic cleansing.
Absolutely. If Europe is to be saved from the new wave of racism and Fascism, it has to be by showing how similar the Holocaust is to the other prejudices and strains of racism now spreading across Europe. Like hatred of Blacks, Asians and Islamophobia. This needs to be done because vicious islamophobes like Tommy Robinson will declare their support for Israel and march with the extreme Right Jewish Defence League on the grounds that Israel is an outpost of western civilisation that needs to be defended from Islam.
It is absolutely disgusting that Zionism, or at least leading Zionists, are not allowing and indeed have actively blocked the commemoration of similar genocides against other ethnic groups in their memorialisation of the Holocaust. Just as it also shows that Jackie Walker had a point in her complaint that the plans by the Jewish Labour Movement to commemorate the Shoah also left out the genocidal persecution of other peoples and races, like the slave trade in Black Africans.
It is entirely right that survivors of the Holocaust should receive proper honours by her Maj at the 75th anniversary of D-Day. But we desperately need to remember also that they were and are not alone as the victims of attempted extermination. These horrors continue today, such as the Chinese state’s attempts to destroy the culture and ethnic identity of Uighurs of Sinkiang. The victims of these genocides are every bit as worthy as the generation, who passed through the Shoah, and their suffering every bit as deserving of commemoration and condemnation.
Here’s another very interesting piece from Mike over at Vox Political. The social media giant, Facebook, has banned the Archmides Group, an Israeli company based in Tel Aviv, because it was trying to manipulate elections in Africa, Asia and Latin America by posting propaganda and setting up fake accounts. It took down 265 Facebook and Instagram accounts, pages, groups and events, followed by 2.8 million Facebook accounts, because they were judged or disseminated manipulative content.
Mike asks the obvious questions. Like whether this means that the Israelis have been trying to influence politics in this country, whether other countries, like Russia, are also doing the same, and whether Facebook itself can be trusted. It hosts ‘dark advertising’, which is targeted as specific individuals. This makes it hard to follow for anyone but the specified recipient, and so can be used by political parties to hide how much they are spending on electoral campaigns.
And Mike wonders if the Tories realised that their support of globalisation would mean that they would be allowing other countries to influence elections right here?
This is another instance where, unfortunately, I’m not remotely surprised. It seems that the Israeli state has no scruples whatsoever in its dealings with other nations. From the 1970s onwards it formed alliances with extremely repressive, Fascist states around the world. This included not only apartheid South Africa, which shocked many Israelis, but also the Fascist regimes in Latin America. Like Guatemala, where Israeli experts showed the Fascist government how to isolate and imprison the indigenous peoples in special villages in its genocidal war against the Mayan Indians. They supported the horrific regimes of Nicaragua and El Salvador, as well as General Pinochet in Chile. Even though the bloody butcher also tortured and murdered Jews in his roundup of Left wing activists.
And they’re still doing pretty much the same today, supporting the far right regimes in Poland, Hungary, the Baltic States and Ukraine, because these regimes buy their guns and armaments. Right at the same time those same regimes are celebrating Nazi collaborators, or pushing anti-Semitic propaganda. Like the Polish Law and Justice Party, which has passed legislation prohibiting discussion of Polish collaboration in the Holocaust.
As for the Tories allowing foreign influence in our elections, frankly, they really don’t care. You think of all the Russian oligarchs that are funding the Tory party. And the way the Tories were very keen to shut down any further discussion of Israeli influence in the party after al-Jazeera expose Shai Masot. Not that Blair was much different. Under international law, allied countries may not spy on each other. However, the Israelis have been caught several times doing so in Britain. They did it under Thatcher, who went berserk and threatened them with closing down their embassy. They duly caved in. When they did it again under Blair, he issued a feeble reprimand, but did nothing. Possibly because Blair was receiving donations from Zionist businessmen he’d met through the Israeli embassy.
Israel is a brutal, Fascist, manipulative state. But proper exposure of just how nefarious it is, is prevented through threats and accusations of anti-Semitism. It’s high time this was stopped, and Israel really shown for what it is. Especially as it is using the Eurovision Song Contest to brighten its foul image.
This is the second video put up on YouTube in March 2017 by Brighton and Hove Boycott, Divestment and Sanction movement. In this first, Tony Greenstein, the veteran Jewish anti-racism and anti-Zionism activist, spoke about how false accusations of anti-Semitism were used by the Israel lobby to defend the indefensible – Israel’s brutal maltreatment of the Palestinians. In this video another great anti-racism activist, Jackie Walker, continues the theme.
Targeting Walker and Jeremy Corbyn
She begins by introducing herself as a life-long anti-racist activist, teacher, trainer and writer, and that as a young woman she was involved with SWAPO, the anti-apartheid movement in Namibia, and went on from that as a natural progression to supporting the Palestinians and criticism of Israel. She states that it is very clear from watching documentaries like the al-Jazeera film, the Lobby, that the reason her posts were so delved into and organisations like the Jewish Chronicle and the Jewish Labour Movement had such an attraction for her is because they target anyone, who is any way prominent (as a critic of Israel). She states that she’s only a minor figure, as Tony Greenstein keeps reminding her, but he’s right. And this shows the level of paranoia and resources that is going into the campaign against activists like her.
She says it’s no coincidence that they had no problem with anti-Semitism in the Labour Party until Jeremy Corbyn, one of the best-known anti-racists on the left, became leader of the Party. Can you imagine what happened in Tel Aviv, she asks the audience. She states that she will get into trouble for saying it, so she’ll say it again: accusations of anti-Semitism have become weaponised. It’s a weapon that doesn’t just affect individuals like her, but affects communities, families, Labour parties, and people who support the struggle to have better human rights. She states that she doesn’t have a problem with those on the Right and Zionists. They’re just doing their jobs. They’re our enemies. Her problem is with people, who are supposedly on the Left, who are actually undermining the campaign for justice in Palestine all the time.
The Alt-Right and Zionism
The reason Israel has put millions of pounds into undermining the BDS is not for no reason. It is a recognition of the fact that what’s happening in Gaza is being steadily raised. And as it is, we see this strange thing happening with international leaders who seem to be getting closer and closer to Israel. We see it in particular in America. And most people find that link between the Alt Right and support for Zionism very strange. But as an anti-racism campaigner, it makes total sense to her. All nationalist ideologies have more in common than things that separate them. Trump can speak a language that the Chair of the Board of Deputies of British Jews can understand, particularly when he supports Jewish settlements, or even now beginning to lay the groundwork for suggesting that the two-state solution is dead. And this plain-speaking at last may be a good thing. She thinks that for most of them this might clear the ground, as the establishment of Jewish settlements has shown that the two-state solution is unworkable. She says that as someone, who has relatives living in the settlements in Israel. ‘And let me tell you’, she states, ‘there’s no way those people are leaving’.
BDS a ‘Strategic Threat’ to Jews
Netanyahu has branded the BDS movement and people like them ‘a strategic threat’. They’re up there with Iran’s nuclear weapons, Hamas and no doubt a few other enemies of Israel. She finds it extraordinary that she, at the age of 63 and a grandmother of three, is up there with Hamas. It’s even more crazy in that the Wiesenthal Centre, who compile a list of the top ten threats to Jews in the world included Jeremy Corbyn and her at No. 2. Yes, she’s the No. 2 threat to Jews, not Hamas. This is why the campaign against them is led by the Ministry of Strategic Affairs and why they’re really gearing up on it. She makes it clear that it is not easy thing for her to resist what’s happening to her. She’s making light of it, but it’s destroyed her life, because she’s become that crazy woman who won’t be silent about the injustice she sees, or be bullied by them. She won’t allow people, who tell her that they want to see her put in a plastic bin and burnt, or put in a concentration camp, or call her any of the names they want to, silence her. And one of the reasons is that she has had racial abuse as a Black person for 63 years, and she’s got to that point you do when you get older when you can’t be a***ed any more. But she no longer has a job or young children to look after. She’s told her adult children to come off twitter so they don’t see what’s being said about their mother. She then tells the story about how she shared a platform in Norwich with a young teacher, who had the temerity to read out a poem that his children had written about children in Palestine. This man almost lost his job due to the wave of criticism that was sent to his headmaster. Every single time she goes to a meeting there are attempts to shut it down. This is even to the point that they had a security officer come into the middle of the room, as someone had said that there was a rabid racist speaking and it was going to cause trouble. This was one of the nicer techniques they use, along with the new definition of anti-Semitism, which makes it more difficult for people to speak out. This is what is happening to free speech.
The Left Particularly Under Attack
She goes on to address those of the audience, who are in the Labour Party, mentioning that she’s on her second suspension, and who think this is just a fringe problem. She asks them to think about, because it is people on the Left, who are being picked off, attacked and gagged. She is sure that had she gone quietly, they’d leave her alone. But she won’t go quietly, and there are things that are going to happen which people should look out for. Addressing the audience again, she says that those of them, who saw the film the Lobby will have seen the involvement of the Jewish Labour Movement. The Jewish Labour Movement have an affiliation with the Labour party for historical reasons, and are actively lobbying for all the changes that will come in at Conference this year. This will mean that any kind of criticism of Israel will become such a hot potato that it will become very hard to discuss it in the Constituency Labour Parties.
The Jewish Chronicle and the Other Papers
She goes on to make the point that her second suspension wasn’t for anti-Semitism, although she knows that the papers said it was. They lie. They lie in a very interesting way. She doesn’t think it’s a conspiracy, but what happens is that the Jewish Chronicle gets a story, runs it, and the other newspapers then run the same story. But they don’t come back to you to question it. They run exactly the same story. She also says, in reply to those, who’ve asked her why she hasn’t sued them, it’s because she’s not a millionaire. According to her lawyers it would cost half a million pounds to run something because of the type of case it would be, so if people would give her the money, she would be quite happy to run a case of defamation both against the Jewish Chronicle and the Board of Deputies.
The JLM and the Labour Party
JLM are very much building up their position within the Labour party. She points out that you don’t actually have to be Jewish to be a member, and may be what needs to happen is that ‘you lot’, meaning the audience, should all join the JLM. And so there’s a question about the validity about the JLM being the voice of Jews. But what the JLM is, is a very effective voice of the Right. As such they now have a position on the NEC, and a position on the Equalities Subcommittee. That means that when people like herself and Greenstein are being suspended for being racist – because that’s all anti-Semitism is, there’s nothing special about anti-Semitism, it’s just racism, and every racism has its particularity – they’ll come up with their own ideas about what anti-Semitism is. She states that she would like to ask the Labour party, and has asked the Labour party about it, and it would be interesting to see their answer, that she was suspended the second time for comments she made at a training session. She asks the labour party if they have investigated who leaked that to the press, because it was during the Labour party conference and you couldn’t get in unless you were a party member. She has suggested that the person who brought the Labour party into disrepute was the person, who leaked that tape. There are also people, who think they know what that person was. But she hasn’t had a reply on that at all.
She concludes by telling her audience to keep their ears out, it’s an ongoing situation, they’re here in a struggle, they’re up against extraordinary forces, and she promises that, as insignificant as she is, so long as she can keep annoying them, she will keep buzzing.
Walker and Greenstein’s experience of being vilified, smeared and abused as anti-Semites is typical of those of the many other decent members of the Labour party, who’ve also been libeled as anti-Semites. And they’re also stymied in their campaigns to clear their name because of the huge expenses of the British judicial system. Jenny Randles, a UFO investigator, who was smeared with a different accusation connected with the world of UFOs, declared that the British legal system considers you guilty until declared rich, which aptly describes the situation. Mike and Tony Greenstein, however, have been helped by being able to start a crowdfunding appeal on the internet. But even so, considerable obstacles have been placed in their way of ever obtaining justice.
Walker’s revelation that, according to the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, she and Corbyn are the number two threat to Jews around the world just shows how skewed and perverted the Zionist worldview is. That they consider two anti-racist older people, one of whom is a Jewish granny, a major threat to Jews above Hamas and many other explicitly anti-Semitic groups, is a twisted obscenity. I can remember the various documentaries celebrating Simon Wiesenthal when I was growing up. He was a Nazi hunter, and rightly admired and celebrated for bring people, who had perpetrated the most horrific crimes against humanity to justice. For the Wiesenthal Centre to mix entirely decent people like Walker and Corbyn in with real Nazis devalues Wiesenthal’s work, and should discredit the Centre itself.
And the various nationalisms certainly do have more in common with each other than differences. It’s why Alt Right figures like Steve Bannon, Sebastian Gorka, Milo Yiannopolis and the islamophobe Tommy Robinson have been welcomed in Israel. In fact the founder of the Alt Right has declared himself to be a ‘White Zionist’, and wants to create a White ethnostate in America the same as Israel is an ethnostate for Jews. Zionism is simply another form of racial nationalism, and so their enemies aren’t those on the extreme Right so much as the real anti-racists, and opponents of anti-Semitism, like Greenstein, Walker, Martin Odoni, Mike, Ken Livingstone and so many others. The Right has a near monopoly of the press, and even left-wing newspapers like the Guardian and the Mirror repeat the anti-Semitism lies and smears.
But the truth is coming out through the internet, and the more the establishment lies, the more people are increasingly seeing through them. And I hope this process goes on, until the press and the Israel lobby is completely discredited, and the reputations of those they have smeared vindicated and restored.
Haim Bresheeth is another Jewish critic of Israel. He’s put up a number of videos on YouTube covering the Jewish supporters of Jeremy Corbyn and their demonstrations of solidarity with him and against the anti-Semitism smears. In this video, posted on 20th February 2019, the academic and film-maker talks to the Iranian news service, Press TV about the Independents and particularly Joan Ryan.
The video begins with him telling the host that the only thing the Independents have in common is support for Israeli apartheid and the attacks on Gaza, and for wars everywhere. It that’s going to be their platform, and the founding eleven may be joined by one or two more, then Bresheeth states that he thinks they have no future. They are supporting another government, which is legally an apartheid government, is not going to bring voters to that movement.
The host asks Bresheeth for his response to her claim that she left Labour because of its anti-Semitism. Bresheeth states that he has been a member of the Labour party has been living in Britain for 45 years, and he has not met an anti-Semite, either in the Labour party or anywhere else in Britain. So they must be hiding so well it’s unbelievable. He’s not saying there are no anti-Semites in Britain, but they’re not in the Labour party. They’re more likely to be in UKIP. Joan Ryan was not only shown to be a friend of Israel, and is definitely not a friend of Labour, but she was working with Mossad people, Shai Masot, as shown in al-Jazeera’s documentary, ‘The Lobby’. They were plotting to bring down a British minister tells you just what Joan Ryan is about. She’s not the MP for North Enfield, she’s the MP for Mossad.
Readers of this blog will know the absolute contempt I have for the Iranian regime, its human rights abuses, corruption and oppression of that ancient nation’s working people. But, like RT, which is owned by Russia, it’s one of the few news broadcasters that’s actually telling the truth about the anti-Semitism smears.
Haim Bresheeth is not along when he states that he’s lived in this country without meeting an anti-Semite. Corbyn’s Jewish supporters in organisations like Jewish Voice for Labour, who are resolutely ignored by the media, have also said that, like him, they’re sure it exists, but they’ve never encountered it personally. Statistics show that only 3.6 per cent of the Labour have anti-Semitic views. In the Tories, it’s 3.9 per cent. And in UKIP it’s something like 4.2. per cent. I don’t know whether Masot really was part of Mossad, but it is certainly true he was conspiring to remove a Tory member of cabinet, Alan Duncan. Just as Ryan was shown manufacturing a fake anti-Semitism accusation against another Labour supporter, Jean Fitzpatrick. Ryan’s notorious advocacy of Israel at the expense of her own constituents is notorious in the Labour party, and earned her the soubriquet ‘the MP for Tel Aviv North’.
And I’ve no doubt that Bresheeth is also right when he says they stand for more wars everywhere. They all supported the Iraq invasion, and they are all desperate for there not to be a public enquiry, as this would no doubt expose their illegality, acquiescence and promotion of Blair’s lies. And as supporters of Israel, an apartheid state, they are definitely not anti-racists, no matter what they scream about anti-Semitism.
Domestically the Independents, or at least Chris Leslie, stand for supporting the Tory party against Jeremy Corbyn, privatisation, including that of the NHS, tuition fees, keeping the water companies private, destroying the welfare state, and more tax cuts for the rich at the expense of the poor. They are warmongering Tories, who have nothing to offer Britain’s working people, except possibly membership of the EU. There is absolutely no doubt that we should have bye-elections now, so that they can be voted out, and replaced with those, who really do respect the wishes of their constituents.
On Friday, 22nd February 2019, the long-time enemy of Fascism and Zionism Tony Greenstein put up a very ominous piece about a particularly revolting development in Israeli politics. Benjamin Netanyahu, or, as I’ve heard one Jewish professor described him, ‘That bastard Netanyahu’, has invited the extremist party Otzma Yehudit to join his coalition by urging the far right party Jewish Homeland-National Union to merge with them. Netanyahu has made this cynical maneuvre in order to fend off defeat from the Resilience and Yesh Atid parties.
This has dismayed and disgusted liberal Zionists, as Otzma Yehudit, whose name means ‘Jewish Power’, is the descendant of Meir Kahane’s Kach. In 1984 Kahane entered the cabinet with a programme that Michael Aarenau, a journo for The Times of Israel, reported that some Likud members were comparing to the Nazis’ infamous Nuremberg race laws. Kahane demanded
– Revocation of non-Jewish citizenship.
– Expulsion of non-Jews from Jerusalem and eventually Israel.
– The eventual imposition of slavery on Arabs and other non-Jews.
– Prohibition of contact between Jews and Arabs, including sexual relations.
– Segregated beaches.
– Prohibition of non-Jews living in Jewish neighborhoods.
– Forced dissolution of all intermarriages.
Greenstein notes that this comes straight from the Nazi laws, but also codifies what was already common practice in Israel. Kahane was banned from sitting in 1988 when it looked like his wretched party would get somewhere between 4 to 8 seats. And before then, when Kahane entered the chamber, the other 119 Knesset members would walk out. Greenstein states that you can tell just how extreme the party is from the behaviour of its leader, Michael Ben Ari. Ben Ari was a member of the Knesset for the National Union from 2009 to 2013. In that time, he started a pogrom against Black African refugees in South Tel Aviv. He also tore up a copy of the New Testament a Christian missionary had sent him and threw it in the bin. Now imagine the outrage that would quite rightly occur if a Christian leader tore up a copy of the Talmud! Ben Ari’s also a bloodthirsty thug, who hold non-Jewish and left-wing Jewish life in absolute contempt. When he was told in 2010 that six Palestinians had died for every Israeli, he declared that 500 should be killed instead for every soldier. As for the Gazans, he said that there were no innocents in Gaza, and they all should be mown down. He also described human rights organizations and left-wing Jews as ‘germs’ to be eradicated.
Greenstein then shows that Ben Ari only stated openly what other Israeli leaders were saying in private. The article also discusses the dismay and horror expressed by liberal Zionist organisations, Like the Forward newspaper. He makes the case that Otzma Yehudit, which wants to abandon democracy in Israel for a theocratic state, is only bringing to the fore the conflict between democracy and the idea of a Jewish state. You can have one, but not the other. If Israel’s a Jewish state, then consequently it abandons democracy as non-Jews cannot have the same rights as Jewish Israelis.
It’s very clear that the term ‘judaeonazi’ – a term coined by an Israeli professor and philosopher – aptly describes these thugs. This is the type of party and racial-theocratic bigot Netanyahu and his coalition represents. And by extension, it’s the type of Israeli Nazis that the Board of Deputies of British Jews and Chief Rabbi represent when they attack Jeremy Corbyn as an anti-Semite, simply for supporting the right of the Palestinians to stay in their ancestral homes and live without fear as equal citizens.
It is these thugs that Joan Ryan, the chair of Labour Friends of Israel, John Mann and Tom Watson are defending when they make these accusation of anti-Semitism. But this is being ignored by the political-media establishment, who simply want to use it to force Corbyn out.
But it’ll be interesting to see how the Israel lobby, Labour Friends of Israel, the Jewish Labour Movement, formerly Paole Zion, the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism and the rest of the Israel lobby try to spin all this when the pogroms and lynchings start, and when non-Jews, including Christians, are expelled from Israel.
If this is reported at all. Remember, according to the media, any criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic.
This video is George Galloway’s take on the plot exposed by Al-Jazeera in their documentary ‘The Lobby’, and published in the press by the Mail on Sunday, of Shai Masot and various Labour and Conservative Friends of Israel to ‘take down’ various politicians the Israelis found inconvenient.
One of the politicos they discussed doing this to was the Conservative minister, Alan Duncan. Galloway notes that Duncan is one of the first openly gay Tory MPs, so you don’t have to be Einstein to imagine what kind of scandal they would invent to bring him down. Galloway states that this should have been enough for Duncan’s boss, Boris Johnson, who Masot described as ‘an idiot’ to summon the Israeli ambassador, Mark Regev, to London and give him his marching orders. Another MP they also discussed bringing down in a scandal was Sir Crispin Blunt, the chairman of the Parliamentary Foreign Affairs Committee, who is also gay. Again, you don’t have to spend much time wondering what that scandal might have been. He speculates whether they would have tried to bring Duncan and Blunt together as sexual partners.
But Boris immediately declared the matter closed, leading Galloway to ask this question: if that had been a Russian or Iranian embassy official doing the plotting, would the affair then have been closed? Or would the ambassadors have been brought into the Foreign Office and then expelled from the country? If this had been any other state, we would now be in the middle of a state to state crisis because of it.
Galloway then leaves Duncan and Blunt, as they can look after themselves. He’s far more interested in the Labour aspects of the scandal. Galloway recalls how he and Corbyn have marched together in support of the Palestinians for over 30 years. Which is why, the moment Corbyn was elected, and even before, when it seemed he would win the leadership of the Labour party, the Israel lobby went ‘bananas’. They persecuted him every step of the way to the leadership, and once he had, they conspired to have him overthrown. They concocted the fake anti-Semitism scare within the Labour party, making it seem that it was a nest of racism, when in fact there was nothing to these allegations whatsoever. He states that the only thing the mass of Labour members have in common with Jeremy Corbyn in this is their support for the Palestinian people, and their opposition to Israel’s crimes.
Galloway then moves on to talk about Joan Ryan, the Labour MP for Enfield North, who was also at the lunch with Masot. But you wouldn’t know represented Enfield; she’s better described as the MP for Tel Aviv, and is the chair of Labour Friends of Israel. Ryan was filmed grinning all over her face when Masot told her the good news that he had secured a million pound slush fund to secure Labour politicians to come to Israel’s aid. This was dressed up as a fund to fly Labour MPs to Israel for ‘fact-finding missions’, a pretext which Galloway describes as entirely bogus. He points out that most of them have already been on several ‘fact-finding’ missions to Israel. You can also fly to Israel for well under a thousand pounds. So if half of all Labour MPs have taken the Shekel, that only means an expenditure of 100,000 pounds. What’s the other 900,000 quid for?
He answers that it was a slush fund to destabilise Jeremy Corbyn, to remove him as the leader of the Labour party, by Labour MPs themselves, on behalf of a foreign power. And Israel isn’t just any foreign power, but the biggest violator of international law, and one which has just been condemned by the entire Security Council of the United Nations for its crimes against the Palestinians. He asks what kind of Labour MP is not only in bed with a state like that, but is covertly receiving money from a foreign embassy, for the defence of that country, when it stands in public disapproval amongst all Labour members and most people in Britain, and most countries in the world?
He then goes on to discuss the Conservative official’s remark at the lunch that almost all Conservative MPs are members of the Conservative Friends of Israel. Galloway says that he can tell you himself that at least half of Labour MPs are members of the Labour Friends of Israel. He states ‘Isn’t it about time that you demanded that your MP’s first allegiance was to Britain? That their first responsibility should be to debate and decide what Britain’s foreign policy should be, rather than be agents for a somebody’s else’s country?’ He then goes on to say, ‘And when that somebody else’s country is a country of gangsters that murder people, including British people, and for a very long time’.
He states that the Israel lobby has been in Westminster and Whitehall before, they tried to murder Churchill when he was leading the country in the epic battle against Fascism, the perpetrators of the Holocaust which murdered six million Jews. They planted bombs in the Foreign Office and Whitehall, which killed British officials. Talking about the Stern Gang in Israel, he describes how they hanged two British sergeants in an orange grove and took pictures of it so that it could be used as propaganda around the world. The blew up more than 90 British civil servants in a hotel in Jerusalem. He goes on to say that Israel invented terrorism, or at least, modern terrorism. Yet it now calls its victims, the Palestinians, terrorists and themselves the victims of terror. Before we sort out the Middle East and its problems, we have to sort out our own parliament and democratic system. He states
We must not tolerate its subversion by a foreign power. We cannot tolerate members of Parliament being bought and paid for by a foreign power. Because we can never know, when they say, when they ask, when they do what they do in parliament, we can never know if its in our interests or it’s in the interests of someone else.
He states that he hasn’t seen the Al-Jazeera documentary yet, but when he does, he’s sure he’ll have the chance to come to talk to us about it again.
The Israelis didn’t invent modern terrorism. It first seems to have appeared in the wave of assassinations carried out by nationalists and radicals, including anarchists and socialists/ Communists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, like the various plots in Russia to kill the tsar. But certainly the founders of Israel used terror in their attempt to overthrow British rule in Palestine. The Stern Gang not only killed the two sergeants, they also booby-trapped the bodies to kill the British squaddies come to retrieve their remains. The bombing of the hotel in Jerusalem was the King David, and the attack is notorious. However, I was not aware that Zionist terrorists had planted a bomb in Whitehall, though I don’t doubt it occurred. Galloway is also clearly speculating when he describes the slush fund procured by Masot as mainly for the overthrow of Jeremy Corbyn, but I have no doubt that here he’s also right.
And he’s right about the threat they pose to British politics and democracy, no matter how much they may try to pose as victims and whine about anti-Semitic tropes.
Yet another short video, this time from that noted pro-Arab, Islamist propaganda mouthpiece, Al-Jazeera. Or it is in the minds of American Republicans and the Islamophobic ‘counterjihad’ movement, like the EDL and Pegida.
Argentina was due to play a friendly with Israel, but pulled out after the venue for the match was changed from Haifa to Jerusalem under pressure from the Palestinians. Jibril Rajoub, the head of the Palestinian Football Association, states that this was in response to the Israelis politicising the match. They had said that it was part of the celebrations for the 70th anniversary of the founding of Israel, and the 51st anniversary of the ‘liberation’ of Jerusalem.
Netanyahu is supposed to have phoned the Argentinian president, Maurizio Macri to try to get him to change the team’s mind, but he replied that it wasn’t up to him.
Reuven Rivlin, the Israeli president, issued a statement accusing the Argentinians of politicising the match. This read
It is truly a sad day for soccer fans, including some of my grandchildren, but there are values even bigger than Messi. The politicisation in the Argentinian decision is of great concern. Even in the most difficult times we made every effort to leave considerations that are not purely about sport off the playing field, and it is a pity that the Argentina team did not manage do so on this occasion.
Al-Jazeera’s reporter Bernard Smith concludes the piece by explaining that the Israelis want to normalise Jerusalem as the nation’s capital with the international community, and this was part of their strategy. But it’s backfired this time by reminding everyone how the status of Jerusalem is far from settled.
There are a number of reasons why the Argentinians would side with the Palestinians against the Israelis on this issue. Firstly, South America has long-established links with the Levant going back to the 19th century. Many of the merchants and traders, who supplied imported goods to communities across Latin America were ‘Turks’, actually ethnic Arabs from Lebanon and Syria, which were then provinces of the Turkish Empire. Carlos Menem, the right-wing president of one of the Latin American countries a few years ago, who was embroiled in a corruption scandal, was of Lebanese descent.
It also struck me that there was a possible element of anti-Americanism in this. The Latin American intellectuals, who formed the ideology of Arielismo in the 19th century, came from Argentina. Arielismo is the literary and political critique of US imperialism in Hispanic America. It arose after the US invaded and annexed parts of Mexico, and went to war with Spain in the last years of the 19th century to seize Cuba. It’s based on an anti-colonial reading of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Arielismo sees the peoples of Latin America as having been cast as Caliban, Prospero’s brutish assistant in the play. They have been presented as a monstrous, backward ‘other’, by the Americans, in order to justify their own imperialism towards the continent.
American and Israeli foreign policy in the Middle East is so closely enmeshed that it’s identical. Trump caused widespread outrage when he moved the location of the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. The refusal by the Argentinian team to play there may also be partly an attack on Trump and the Americans for doing so.
Also, I read in a review of a book on Israel’s activities supporting the Fascist dictators in South America in Lobster, that the Israeli secret agencies had acted as an American proxies in the parts of the continent where it would be dangerous for the Americans themselves to operate.
If this is correct, then the Argentinians’ decision isn’t just about Israel, but a wider condemnation of American colonialism and imperialism, of which Israel has been a part.
On Wednesday Mike put up a post questioning why Britain and many other countries had not made stronger condemnations of the Gaza massacre by Israeli soldiers. He also attacked the statement issued by the Board of Deputies of British Jews, justifying the shootings by stating that Hamas is a terrorist movement intent on the destruction of Israel that ruthlessly uses unarmed civilians and children, and so put them up to massing at and trying to break through the fence. Mike points out that, whatever the Israeli state has claimed, no Israelis were harmed, while 55 – the number of dead reported at the time – Palestinians had been killed. He also pointed out that this is blaming the victims, exactly what the Nazis did to justify their own persecution and genocide of the Jews.
And other Jews in this country and Israel have similarly been appalled and disgusted at the Israeli’s violence. They include tweeter Tom London, whose avatar is the fizzog of 18th century radical Tom Paine. Haggai Matar, whose first name is that of one of the lesser prophets of the Hebrew Bible, also posted a piccie of 500 Israeli protesters blocking the Tel Aviv road.
Muslims and those of Arab descent have naturally not been silent. Aleesha has expressed her utter disgust, and Mehdi Hasan has stated that the comments on the massacre by various organisations, which don’t condemn the Israeli state, mean that nothing they say on the subject of Israel should ever be taken seriously again.
Alistair Burt, speaking for the government, just made a very anodyne and half-hearted condemnation urging restraint of both sides, stating he was very saddened by the massacre and the use of live fire, but also the use of civilians by terrorists, and that all this was a threat to the peace process and a two state solution.
He was immediately torn into by Tom London, who found this weak condemnation also ‘cowardly, immoral and shameful’.
Rupert Colville, the UN’s spokesman on human rights, declared that the massacre was a violation.
And Linda Sarsour pointed out that South Africa, which has also lived through apartheid, has just broken off diplomatic relations with Israel. South Africa was a strong supporter of Israel under apartheid, something that appalled and disgusted many Israelis, even those who supported their own apartheid against the Palestinians. Will this loss of an erstwhile ally upset the Israelis? Not while they’ve got new, extreme right-wing allies in Europe like the present Polish administration and Fidesz in Hungary.
So why is the British government’s own response so muted? According to Marsha de Cordova, it’s because last year Britain sold the Israelis £216 million of arms, including sniper rifles. And coincidently, many of those murdered in Gaza were killed by snipers. The tweeter radicals put the figure at £445 million, including snipers.
Jeremy Corbyn issued a much more robust, statesmanlike response stating that the massacre came after weeks of Palestinians being killed while demonstrating for their right of return. He mentioned Trump’s movement of the American embassy to Jerusalem as a further emphasis to the threat to peace and the injustices inflicted on the Palestinians. He condemned the weak response by western governments to the massacre, and urged them to take a lead from Israei campaigners for peace and justice. There should be an end to the 11 years siege of Gaza, and the 50 year occupation of Palestinian territories, as well as the expansion of illegal Israeli settlements.
He concluded:
“We cannot turn a blind eye to such wanton disregard for international law. That is why Labour is committed to reviewing UK arms sales to Israel while these violations continue.
“The international community must at last put its collective authority and weight behind achieving a lasting settlement that delivers peace, justice and security for both Israelis and Palestinians, who have waited so long to achieve their rights.”
Corbyn’s speech is excellent, gives due credit and emphasis to Israeli campaigners for peace and justice for the Palestinians, and rightly condemns the ‘merchants of death’. So we can expect it will be seized upon and twisted by the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism for alleged Jew hatred. As soon as the Israel lobby finds a way of fending off public outrage against them, of course. Mike’s put up a piece today reporting that the Board of Deputies of British Jews is being torn to shreds by British Jews, who like Tom London, find their statement disgusting. Liberal Judaism is particularly appalled, as is Yachad. Many joined a demonstration held outside Downing Street by Jewdas, while others held a ‘Kaddish for Israel’. The Kaddish is the lament at Jewish funerals, and comes from the passage in the Hebrew Bible ‘The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. Blessed be the name of the Lord’. MPs have also condemned the shooting, and the board’s excuse that 50 of those killed were Hamas terrorists has been dismissed by one blogger as ‘a load of Fascist crap’. It’s another comparison between Israel and the Nazis. But as Mike points out, it isn’t anti-Semitic as it’s accurate.
He ends his article with the rhetorical question that if the side of reason is winning the argument, then
Why is the Duke of Cambridge – Prince William – determined to continue with a planned visit to Israel that will amount to an endorsement of that country’s murder of innocent people?
This issue becomes more complicated by the second.
Which is precisely the point Dr. Basem Naim, the former Gaza Health Minister raised when interviewed by Afshin Rattansi earlier this week.
Apart from arms sales, there are also other geopolitical reasons why Britain supports Israel. It’s one of the two pillars of British foreign policy in the reason, the other being Saudi Arabia. They’re supposed to represent islands of stability in the region, and were our allies against the Soviet bloc and its Arab allies.
In fact the various statements that have been made justifying this situation are just so much guff. Israel isn’t the only democratic state in the region – so was Lebanon. And what the Americans and our governments feared was Arab nationalism, which was also considered pro-Soviet. Many of the Arab socialist regimes were pro-Russian, but not Communist. And almost from the moment the Balfour declaration was issued, there were suspicions that this was an attempt to create a pro-British Jewish island in the region, just like Belfast was a pro-British island of Ulster Protestants.
The Conservatives have always had a very close relationship with the arms industry, and I don’t doubt for an instant that many of them have shares in arms companies. The excuse for backing the arms industry is that it will open up these countries to the import of other British products. It doesn’t. They don’t buy other British goods, just our arms.
And earlier this week people compared the British attitude to the Gaza massacre with the Saudis using British arms to kill children and babies in Yemen. Well, once again, the accusation is correct. The Israelis have also been using British weapons to kill the innocent. Especially as one of those who died was a baby after Israeli squaddies threw CS gas into a tent.
Israel is an apartheid state engaged in ethnic cleansing. It is a disgrace, like every other nation with the same policies. We should stop arms sales now, and give every effort to support a secure, just peace between Israel and the Palestinians. And those organisations justifying such massacres and persecutions should be marginalised and destroyed.
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.
This year it’s the 70th anniversary of the birth of Israel, and Radio 4 are broadcasting a number of programmes next week marking the occasion. At 8.00 pm Tuesday, 15th May 2018, there’s Present at the Creation. The blurb about it in the Radio Times runs
On 14 May 1948, a few hundred people crammed into the Tel Aviv Museum of Art to hear a proclamation that would change the course of history-the establishment of the state of Israel. Jonathan Freedland meets the last two surviving eyewitnesses of the ceremony and gets a rare glimpse of the original document containing the declaration. Contributors include Palestinian foreign minister Nabil Sha’ath and Israeli novelist Amos Oz, both children on this momentous day.
Then at 11.00 am Thursday morning, 17th May 2018, the foreign affairs show Crossing Continents is on ‘Shades of Jewish in Israel’. This tackles the very controversial issue of Israeli racism. The blurb for this runs
Since its founding in 1948, Israel has seen itself as a safe haven for Jews from anywhere in the world who are seeking to escape persecution. But now that policy is under threat. As Jewish communities in Ethiopia, Uganda and Kenya are finding, a debate has arisen about who is “Jewish enough” to qualify. David Baker investigates claims that decisions are being made not on the basis of ancestry or religious observance but on the colour of people’s skin.
And then at the same on Friday, historian Simon Schama is giving his personal view of the foundation and history of Israel. It’s entitled Israel at 70: A Personal Reflection, and the blurb runs:
Simon Schama was three in May 1948 when the state of Israel was born, and here he offers a personal account of the nation’s troubled and often bloody history, featuring contributors from Israeli and Palestinian historians and writers, a rabbi, entrepreneurs, and people working across borders for the exchange of resources. (p. 131).
The additional paragraph about it on page 130, by Simon O’Hagan, also states
Simon Schama presents this programme from the perspective of a British Jew who was three years old when the state of Israel came into being in 1948, and who feels that the Israel story and that of his own life have always been intertwined. He has, he says, followed Israel’s evolution with a mixture of “pride, anxiety, joy, and sometimes profound exasperation”. Arab voices share time with Jewish voices, and the tone of the programme is exemplary. Israel, Schama says, was made from a “dark crucible”, while for hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, its formation was “Nakba”-“The Catastrophe”. The existential threat to Israel has never gone away, but there’s a striking note of optimism with which Schama concludes. An extremely moving half-hour.
Some of the Black African Jewish communities are likely to be extremely old. Herodotus in his Histories records an instance where the Jewish squaddies in garrison in Southern Egypt deserted, and headed over the border to Nubia. When their commander called out ‘What about your wives and children’, they pointed to their crotches to show that so long as they had everything down there, they’d also have wives and children.
The Falashas, who were a sect of Ethiopian Jews famously rescued from persecution by Israel in the 1980s are the most famous of the African Jewish communities, but there are many others. The kings of Ethiopia traced their descent from King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. Each Ethiopian Orthodox church has an ark, though this term can cover any kind of box, so don’t get your hopes up about the Ark of the Covenant. These facts have been cited by some historians as indicating that the country may well have been Jewish before it converted to Christianity.
Tony Greenstein has reported on and discussed the immense racism in Israel against Black African Jews, as well as African asylum seekers trying to reach Europe, as part of his campaign to show just how racist the country is.
Simon Schama’s programme could also be interesting. Very interesting. The Palestinian Nakba is part of history. Amox Oz talks about it in his book, The Israelis, though it’s definitely not widely known. And I’ve no doubt the Israel lobby in this country, the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, Jewish Labour Movement, the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the rest of them would very much like that to stay. It’ll be interesting to hear if the programme mentions that the Palestinians were subject to a series of terrible massacres, and that 400 villages were destroyed. Or if the Beeb will simply go along with the old Zionist lie that they all left in terror of their own accord, and there were only a couple of massacres. Either way, I expect the Israel lobby will be listening very closely, ready to accuse the Beeb and Schama of ‘anti-Semitism’.
The Beeb probably feels that Schama may well have a better chance of escaping this smear. He’s a very well respected historian, and has presented his own ‘History of the Jews’, now being repeated on BBC4. I wish him the best of luck with that, as the Israel lobby and Likudnik politicians have also smeared very definitely self-respecting Jews and Beeb foreign correspondents as anti-Semites when they’ve mentioned awkward facts. Like Israel’s massacres of the Palestinians, or those of its Christian allies in Lebanon. As Mike pointed out, Natalie Portman was accused of it after she was awarded the Genesis prize for being such an excellent role model for Jews. Portman wouldn’t go to Israel because of the dodgy situation at the time to collect it, and so Likud and the rest of them went berserk. She was accused of being self-hating, part of the BDS movement – she isn’t, and made that very plain-and one Likudnik Member of the Knesset demanded that she be stripped of her Israeli citizenship.
Likud and the Israel lobby in Britain demand absolute obedience to the narrative they want to present, even when it contravenes well-established historical fact. And no matter how big or respected someone is, no matter if they’re Jewish or gentile, and how sincere they are fighting racism and real anti-Semitism, they will attempt to smear and destroy them.
These programmes sound fascinating.
The Israel lobby and their smears on the other hand, are utterly despicable.
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