2001 Private Eye Article on Israeli Assassinations and Atrocities Against Palestinians, Americans, and Lebanon

Keir Starmer has shown himself determined to purge the party of any and all critics of Israel on the utterly specious grounds that they are automatically anti-Semites. They must be, despite the fact that very many of them are self-respecting Jews and equally self-respecting non-Jewish anti-racists. This is because the Israel lobby and the British establishment and media have declared that anybody who supports Jeremy Corbyn and/ or shares his conviction that Palestinians should be allowed to live in peace in their traditional homeland has to be a horrible Jew-hater and a Nazi. Even if, like Corbyn, Tony Greenstein, Marc Wadsworth, Jackie Walker, Mike, Martin Odoni and any number of others, they are determined anti-racists. So let’s remind people just what the Palestinians are facing, and why criticising Israel is entirely legitimate and is based on what the Israeli state and its armed forces do, not because they’re Jewish.

I found this ‘Letter from Israel’ in Private Eye’s edition for 30th November – 13th December 2001. This was a time when the Eye didn’t flinch at criticising Israel, even when outraged Zionists complained that it was being anti-Semitic by doing so. The Eye has said that the ‘Letter From…’ pieces are written by journalists from countries described, so that this piece, although anonymous and possibly reworked by someone else in the Eye to cover up the author’s identity, comes from an Israeli journo. And it’s a long list of Israel’s attacks, not just on the Palestinians and their leaders, but also the Americans and Lebanon. It runs

Terrorism is the topic of the year, and whatever the current focus, history shows that we in Israel have a certain historical experience.

Take the bombing of American targets. Our chaps bombed the US cultural centres in Cairo and Alexandria as early as 1954, planning to let Abdul Nasser’s new Egyptian government take the blame. Unfortunately the scam went wrong and our defence minister Pinhas Lavon had to resign, though the director-general of his ministry, Shimon Peres, managed to hang on. Today he is Ariel Sharon’s foreign minister.

Or take political assassinations. If you ever wondered why Yasser Arafat’s lieutenants are hard to understand, the answer it simple: we shot most of his organisation’s top foreign language speakers. In fact in one glorious year, 1972, our Mossad secret service managed to kill both the PLO’s political representative in Rome, Wael Zouetar, and his counterpart in Paris, Mahmoud Hamdan.

Admittedly we make the odd mistake. There was the embarrassing 1974 incident in Lilienhammer, when a Mossad hit squad shot dead Moroccan waiter Ahmed Bouchiki in front of his heavily pregnant Norwegian wife, having mistaken him for a PLO man.

Still, we maintain a sense of proportion and have never believed in simply takinig an eye for an eye. In 1982 when an assassin from the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon wounded (but not killed) our London rep, Shlomo Argov, we invaded Lebanon and more than 20,000 people there died, mostly civilians.

Then there is the bombing of local public buildings, one of our specialities. In recent months we have shelled not just West Bank police stations, but hotels, an orphanage and the Bethlehem maternity hospital. (Not that many Palestinian women reach the hospital. Our boys at the checkpoints surrounding their townships are particularly mistrustful of women claiming to be in labour and so refuse to let them through).

None of this would have happened, of course, if the Palestinians would agree to live happily while surrounded by our soldiers and settlers. But they won’t and we must protect ourselves. Not for us any lily-livered effort to apprehend the actual perpetrators. We prefer hostage taking. This is certainly what we did when some Palestinians recently shot that nice man, ex-general Rehavam Zeevi, the founder of a party whose sole platform is the expulsion of all Arabs. Such a view had resulted in his being invited into Mr Sharon’s government as a tourism minister.

Anyway, whenever that sort of thing happens we just hold the entire population of the West Bank and Gaza Strip at gunpoint and station tanks in their streets. Then we smash the place up (just look at Manger Square after we finished with it!) and kill a few dozen locals of mixed age and sex.

And, oh yes, we also use helicopter gunships to blow to smithereens any Palestinian we suspect of planning any attacks on us, though not usually the actual perpetrators. Those we expect Yasser Arafat to hand over, in exchange for the goodwill we have shown in our peace talks with him, which have been dragging on for a mere eight years. Why are those Palestinians in such a rush?

That we have spent those years building thousands of new settler homes in the West Bank is a mere accident, not a lack of sincerity. True, this may have involved confiscating Palestinian land, arresting its owners and shooting demonstrators, which slows down agreement; but it makes sense: we just like holding peace talks so much we never want them to end.

Of course, we cannot negotiate with just anyone, and so we are currently helping improve Arafat’s administration by picking off any unsuitable figures. And we don’t just mean military men: one of those killed by us was Dr. Tahbed Thabed, the director-general of the Palestinian health authority.

In the 19 years since then, we’ve had the blockade of Gaza and now Netanyahu has declared his intention of seizing 1/3 of Palestinian land on the West Bank. But organisations like the Chief Rabbinate, Board of Deputies of British Jews, Jewish Leadership Council, the entirely wrongly named Jewish Labour Movement, whose members don’t have to be Jews or members of the Labour Party, and the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, founded to bolster British support for Israel after the bombardment of Gaza, will denounce anything more than the mildest, token criticism of Israel’s actions.

The Israeli state has been engaged on a decades-long campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Palestinians, and many of its own citizens have protested against it. Israel is a country. It is not, and never have been, synonymous with the Jewish people, no matter what law Netanyahu passes to claim that it is. Criticising Israel and its leaders is not anti-Semitic, no matter how much the Board and the Chief Rabbis howl that it is.

And Starmer has no business kicking genuine anti-racists and opponents of anti-Semitism out of Labour, simply for supporting the Palestinians. And especially not when he is tolerating real, anti-Black racists and islamophobes.

Ilan Pappe’s Demolition of the Myths of Modern Israel and Its Ethnic Cleansing of the Palestinians

 

Ilan Pappe, Ten Myths About Israel (London: Verso 2017)

Ilan Pappe is an Israeli historian and activist, who has extensively researched and documented Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians from its foundation in 1948 till today. Because of this, he was subjected to abuse and academic censure by the authorities and his university. He now teaches, I believe, at Exeter University. He has been a signatory of several of the letters from academics and leading members of the Jewish community defending Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters from the charges of anti-Semitism.

This book tackles the ten myths Pappe identifies as central to the history of modern Israel and its continuing dispossession of its indigenous people. The blurb for the book states

In this groundbreaking book, published on the fiftieth anniversary of the Occupation, the outspoken and radical Israeli historian Ilan Pappe examines the most contested ideas concerning the origins and identity of the contemporary state of Israel.

The “ten myths” that Pappe explores – repeated endlessly in the media, enforced by the military, accepted without question by the world’s governments – reinforce the region status quo. He explores the claims that Palestine was an empty land at the time of the Balfour Declaration, as well as the formation of Zionism and its role in the early decades of nation building. He asks whether the Palestinians voluntarily left their homeland in 1948, and whether June 1967 was a war of “no choice”. Turning to the myths surrounding the failure of the Camp David Accords and the official reasons for the attacks on Gaza, Pappe explains why the two-state solution is no longer viable. 

The book is divided into three parts. Part 11, ‘Fallacies of the Past’, contains the following chapters attacking these particular myths.

1. Palestine was an empty land.
2. The Jews were a people without a land.
3. Zionism is Judaism.
4. Zionism is not colonialism.
5. The Palestinians voluntarily left their homeland in 1948.
6. The June 1967 War was a war of no choice.

Part II, ‘Fallacies of the Present’, has the following

7. Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East.

8. The Oslo mythologies.

9. The Gaza mythologies.

Part III ‘Looking Ahead’

10. The two-states solution is the only way forward.

Conclusion: The Settler Colonial state of Israel in the 21st First century.

There’s also a timeline of Israeli/Zionist history from the 1881 pogroms in the Russian Empire to 2015 and the fourth Netanyahu government.

This is a short book, the actual text taking up 153 pages. Although it is properly documented with notes and index, it’s clearly written and seems to be aimed the general reader, rather than an exclusively academic audience. Much of it will be familiar to readers of the blogs of the great Jewish critics and activists against Zionist racism, like Tony Greenstein, Martin Odoni and David Rosenberg. He points out, for example, that Zionism was a minority movement amongst Jews before 1948, and that it was preceded by Christian Zionism, which wished to see the Jews return to Israel in order to hasten Christ’s return to Earth and the End Times, as well as more immediate religious and geopolitical goals. Some hoped that the Jews would convert to Christianity, while others, like Palmerston, believed that a western Jewish presence in the Holy Land would help shore up the decaying Ottoman Empire. Others associated it with restoring the glory of the Crusades. Most Jews at the time, however, were much more eager to remain in the countries of their birth. For Reform Jews and the Socialists of the Bund, this meant fighting for equality as fellow citizens and adopting wider European secular culture to a greater or lesser extent so that they could fully participate in the new societies from the Enlightenment onwards. So determined were they to do so, that Reform Judaism removed altogether references from their services to the return to Israel. They also rejected the idea of a Jewish state because they felt its establishment would cast doubt on their loyalties to their mother countries as proper English or Germans. Orthodox Judaism remained far more conservative, rejecting the Enlightenment, but still determined to remain in their traditional homelands because Israel could only be restored through divine will by the Messiah. Until he came, it was their religious duty to wait out their exile.

Nor was Palestine remotely empty, despite the Zionists maintaining that it was – ‘a land without a people for a people without a land’, as the Zionist maxim ran. 18th and 19th century European travelers noted that Palestine was very definitely occupied, and that ten per cent of its population was Jewish. Zionist settlers there found to their shock and discomfort that there were Arabs there, with whom they were going to have to live. And that these Arabs weren’t like them. Which shouldn’t really be surprising. However marginalised eastern European Jews were, they were still part of European society and so were bound to have certain aspects of their culture in common with other Europeans. As for the Palestinians themselves, they were perfectly willing to provide shelter and help to the early Jewish settlers when it seemed that they were simply migrants, who were not intending to colonise and displace them. They only became hostile, ultimately turning to violence, when it became clear just what the Zionists’ intentions towards them were. Pappe also points out that at the time the first Zionist communities were being founded, Palestinian society was undergoing its second wave of nationalism. The first was the general wave of Arab nationalism from the 19th century onwards, as the Arabs became conscious of themselves as a distinct people with the multi-ethnic Ottoman Empire. The second was when the individual Arab nations, such as Syria and Egypt, became conscious of themselves and began demanding their separate independence. And these new, emerging Arab nations included Palestine.

The book also shows how Zionism is colonialism through comparing Israel with other White nations, like those of  North and South America, New Zealand and so on, where the indigenous people were massacred and their land seized for White colonisation. He  then shows how Zionist leaders such as David Ben-Gurion had planned in 1948 to cleanse what they could of the Israel state they were creating of its Arab population in order to ensure that Jews were in the majority. Thus Palestinian towns and villages were razed and their people massacred. At the same time, the Israelis spread propaganda that the Palestinians had somehow voluntarily left their homes, rather than fled. He also argues that the Israeli government was determined to exploit diplomatic and military tensions with Nasser’s Egypt and Syria in 1967 in order to manufacture a war that would allow them to seize the West Bank and the holy places of west Jerusalem, with their rich archaeological sites. Pappe shows that, whatever their composion, whether Labour, Likud, or, as in 1967, a coalition of parties across the Israeli political spectrum, successive Israeli government have pursued a policy of securing the greatest amount of land for Israel with the least amount of Palestinians. This has meant redrawing and redefining the boundaries of what is Jewish territory, with the intention of forcing the Palestinians into minuscule cantons or bantustans, to use the word applied to similar settlements in apartheid South Africa. The Palestinians were to have some autonomy within them, but only if the acted as Israel’s peacekeeper within those territories. This was the real intention of the Oslo Peace Process, which was unacceptable to Yasser Arafat and the Arab leadership because far from improving conditions for the Palestinians, it actually made them much worse. It was a deal that the Palestinians could not accept, hence the breakdown of the talks and the eruption of the Second Intifada.

Pappe describes the Israeli attacks on Gaza as an ‘incremental genocide’. He states that he has been reluctant to call it thus, because it’s a very loaded term, but can find no other way to reasonably describe it. Each stage begins with a Palestinian rocket attack, which kills very few Israelis, if any. The Israelis then launch massive counterattacks, killing hundreds, with names like ‘Summer Rains’, ‘Autumn Rains’, and then ‘Operation Cast lead’, which the Israelis claim are just reprisals against Palestinian terrorism. The goal is supposed to be the removal of the Hamas government in Gaza. While Hamas are an Islamic organisation, they were democratically elected and their rise was initially aided by Israel, who believed that the real threat to their security was the secular, nationalist Fatah.

The chapter arguing against Israel as a democracy shows that it cannot justly be considered such given the apartheid system that dispossesses and marginalises the Palestinians. Part of this apartheid is based on willingness or suitability for military service. Rather like the future Earth of Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, civil rights are connected with national service. The Israelis disbar the Palestinians from serving in the armed forces on the grounds that the Palestinians would be unwilling to join them. But even here the Palestinians do the unexpected: a majority of them have shown themselves willing in a poll to join the Israeli army.

Pappe considers that the two-state solution, as a realistic solution to the Palestinian crisis, is near its end. Its only real purpose was to give the Israelis a justification for seizing the most land while dispossessing the indigenous people, who lived there. It will eventually fall, one way or another, because the Israelis are determined to colonise the West Bank and the siege of Gaza. He also makes the point that no discussion of the issue of human rights in the Middle East, in nations like Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, for example, can be complete without including the 100 year long persecution of the Palestinians. At the same time, the West allowed Israel to emerge as a settler colonial state, at a time when settler-colonialism was being abandoned, partly out of guilt over the Holocaust. Germany in particular contributed a large amount of funding to the new state. But the foundation of Israel hasn’t solved the problem of anti-Semitism, only increased it. The discrediting of the ten major myths about Israel should ensure better justice for the Palestinians, and a fitting, proper end to the legacy of the Holocaust.

It’s a very effective demolition of the myths Israel uses and exploits to support its own existence and its policies towards the Palestinians. For example, Israel claims that its occupation of the West Bank is only temporary, while the facts on the ground amply demonstrate that it intends to be there permanently. Pappe is also extremely critical about the use of the Bible and archaeology to justify Israel’s occupation of Palestine. He seems to support the Biblical minimalists assessment that the Bible isn’t a reliable source of historical information. I don’t think this can be reasonably maintained, as while archaeology can’t be used to establish whether some episodes in the Bible are historically true, it does seem clear that ancient Israel undoubtedly existed, at least after the Exile and probably before then. But he certainly raises proper moral questions about the use of archaeology to justify the removal of Palestinian communities and their transformation into Israeli settlements on the grounds that they are really ancient Israelite towns and villages.

Pappe has always maintained that his countrymen are decent people, who just need the situation properly explained to them. He attempted to do this himself by holding open evenings at his home every Thursday night, in the Israeli village in which he lived. During these evenings anyone could come to his home and ask him what was really going on. These evenings eventually grew to such an extent that, despite the real anger and hostility against him by the academic and political establishment, he had 30-40 people in his front room. In the book he also properly pays tribute to the courage and determination of those Israelis, who are determined to challenge their country’s attacks on the Palestinians. If there is to be hope for the Palestinians, then they should surely play a part on the Israeli side.

I don’t know if there will ever be proper justice for the Palestinians. The Israel lobby has shown itself to be determined and expert at the demonisation of its opponents here in the West. That’s been shown in the recent expulsions of prinicipled anti-Zionists and anti-racists like Tony Greenstein, Ken Livingstone, Marc Wadsworth, Mike and now Jackie Walker on trumped up charges of ‘anti-Semitism’ from the Labour Party. But there are signs that the Israel lobby is losing its grip. They’re turning from Jews to Christian Evangelicals in America for support, while Ireland has recently passed legislation supporting the BDS movement. These are signs for hope. But the process will be long and difficult. This book, however, helps provide the means by which more people can fight back against Israeli and establishment propaganda to support a proper peace with justice, dignity and proper autonomy for Jews and Palestinians in a single state.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Labour MP Gerald Kaufman Attacks Israel for Its Nazi Crimes in Gaza

It wasn’t just the Irish challenging their governments over support for Israel during the bombardment of Gaza. In the video below from 2009, posted on YouTube by setfree68, the veteran Labour MP Gerald Kaufman also bitterly criticises Israel for its attacks on civilians. Kaufman himself, as his speech makes very clear, was Jewish and his family also suffered under Nazi persecution, with many of relatives being murdered. He makes an explicit parallel between the way the Nazis treated them and the other Jews, and how the Israelis were then treating the Palestinians. Kaufman was one of the MPs, who lost his seat and was convicted of fiddling his expenses during that scandal a few years ago. Nevertheless in many ways he was a fine politician, and certainly spoke the truth here with real moral courage that certainly was not shared by the former Labour leader, Tony Blair.

He begins by addressing the deputy speaker, and describes how he was brought up as an Orthodox Jew and a Zionist. On a shelf on his family’s kitchen was a tin box for the Jewish National Fund into which they put coins to help the pioneers building a Jewish presence in Palestine. He first when to Israel in 1961 and states that he has since been there more times than he could count. He has family and friends in Israel, one of whom fought in the wars of 1956, 1967 and 1973, and was wounded in two of them. He states that he is wearing a tie-clip made from a campaign decoration awarded to one of his friends, which he presented to Kaufman. He states that he knew most of the prime ministers of Israel, starting with the founding PM, David Ben-Gurion and describes Golda Meir as his friend, along with deputy prime minister Yigal Alon, who was the general, who won the Negeb for Israel in the 1948 War of Independence.

He states that his parents came to Britain as refugees from Poland, and that most of their families were subsequently murdered by the Nazis in the Holocaust. His grandmother was ill in her bed when the Nazis came to her hometown of Stashev, and she was shot dead in her bed by a German soldier. He then goes to state that his grandmother did not die to provide cover for Israeli soldiers murdering Palestinian grandmothers in Gaza. The present Israeli government ruthlessly and cynically exploits the continuing guilt among gentiles over the slaughter of Jews in the Holocaust as justification for their murder of Palestinians. The implication is that Jewish lives are precious, but the lives of Palestinians do not count. He mentions that on Sky News a few days previously an Israeli arm spokeswoman Major Liebovich was asked about the Israeli killing of, at that time, 800 Palestinians. The total, he says, is now a thousand. Leibovich replied that five hundred of them were militants. That, he states unhesitatingly, is the reply of a Nazi. He says that he supposes that the Jews fighting unhesitatingly for their lives in the ghetto could have been dismissed as militants.

He then goes on to discuss Hamas and the problems they pose for a proper peace. He states that the Israeli foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, asserts that her government will have no dealing with Hamas because they’re terrorists. Livni’s father was Atan Livni, chief operations officer of the terrorist Irgun Tzvi Liun, who organised the blowing up of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, which killed 91 victims, including four Jews. Israel was born out of Jewish terrorism. Jewish terrorists hanged two British sergeants and booby trapped their corpses. Irgun, together with the terrorist Stern Gang massacred 254 Palestinians in 1948 in the village of Deir Yassin. Today, the present Israeli government indicates that they would be willing in circumstances acceptable to them to negotiate with the Palestinian president, Abbas, of Fatah. He declares that it’s too late for that. They could have negotiated with Fatah’s previous leader, Yasser Arafat. who was a friend of Kaufman’s. Instead they besieged him in a bunker in Ramallah where Kaufman visited him. It’s because of the failings of Fatah since Arafat’s death that Hamas won the Palestinian election in 2006.

Hamas, he says clearly, is a deeply nasty organisation, but it was democratically elected and is the only game in town. The boycotting of Hamas, including by our own government, has been a culpable error from which dreadful consequences have followed. He says that the great Israeli foreign minister, Abba Eban, with whom Kaufman campaigned for peace on many platforms, said ‘You make peace by talking to your enemies’. However many Palestinians the Israelis murder in Gaza, they cannot solve this existential problem by military means. Whenever and however the fighting ends, there will still be 1 1/2 million Palestinians in Gaza and 2 1/2 million more Palestinians in the West Bank, who are treated like dirt by the Israelis with hundreds of roadblocks and the ghastly denizens of the Jewish settlements harassing them as well. Kaufman predicts that a time will come, not so long from now, when they will outnumber the Jewish population in Israel. It’s time for our government, he declares, to make clear to the Israeli government that its conduct and policies are unacceptable, and to impose a total arms ban on Israel. It is time for peace, he says, but real peace, not the solution by conquest which is the Israelis’ real goal, which is impossible for them to achieve. He concludes with the stinging words ‘They’re not simply war criminals, they’re fools!’

The video ends with the address of a couple of websites. I haven’t visited them, and so I can’t vouch if they are reasonable websites or not, so be careful.

Kaufman’s statesmanlike speech makes it very clear that he isn’t a knee-jerk anti-Israeli, nor is he ashamed of his Jewish background. Indeed, from this it’s clear that he’s proud of his connections to Israel. But like very many decent people of every race and creed, he was disgusted by the Fascistic violence of the Israelis against the indigenous Arabs.

He is also absolutely correct about Israel’s cynical exploitation of gentile guilt over the Holocaust. This is quite different from the proper commemoration of the Holocaust and its victims, which should serve as a reminder that terrible atrocities were committed in civilised Europe, and that such horrors could indeed occur again if it is not properly remembered. And we need that now, when real Fascists, Nazis and anti-Semitic regimes are taking power in Hungary, Poland, the Baltic States and Ukraine.

But the Israelis and their supporters do exploit the Holocaust. We’ve seen it with the way the Israel lobby smears their opponents as anti-Semites, and people like Mike as Holocaust deniers. Indeed, Margaret Hodge used the Holocaust to smear Corbyn when she whined that her suspension was like that of the Jews in eastern Europe waiting for the Nazis’ knock at the door. Of course, it was nothing like that, and Jews and non-Jews, whose relatives really had suffered arrest and imprisonment by the Nazis angrily reminded her of that. Norman Finkelstein also addressed it in his book, The Holocaust Industry, in which he described how the Israeli state and greedy lawyers enrich themselves by suing governments and organisations for compensation and monies owed to Holocaust survivors and their families, but then swallow this in legal fees. Thousands of Holocaust survivors have been swindled like this, and left in poverty in Israel.

As for Hamas, they’re horrific. But they were democratically elected, something Killary lamented in a recorded phone call. The time is long past when governments around the world should be indulging Israel and its genocidal policies. But they will, because of geopolitical reasons. Israel is the West’s key ally in the Middle East, along with Saudi Arabia. And they sell guns and other weapons to eastern Europe, as well as no doubt buying all that ‘wonderful kit’ David Cameron raved about as an arms factory in Lancashire.

The Democrat politicos who aren’t going to AIPAC this weekend have made a great moral decision. It is one which I hope more of the world’s politicians follow, and that I hope it also pays off as an increasing number of people in America and Europe turn away from Israeli brutality. As for Kaufman, he may have been a crook, but he would have been a far better Foreign Minister than that clown Boris.

A Pro-Jewish and Pro-Palestinian Attack on Zionism and Its Crimes

Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews, Vol. 1, Alan Hart (Kent: World Focus Publishing 2005).

I said a few weeks ago in a post about one of the stories carried by the great Tony Greenstein on his blog that Zionism had been responsible for so many crimes against ordinary Jews around the world, that there was enough material for somebody to write a book about it. Well, someone had, and that person was Alan Hart. Hart was a reporter for both the BBC and ITV. The potted biography on the back cover states that he

has a unique experience of the Arab-Israeli conflict in both its regional and global aspects as a foreign correspondent for ITN and the BBC’s Panorama; as, on the human level, a confidant of leaders on both sides of the conflict, and as a participant at leadership level in the secret diplomacy of the search for peace. And his own observations are informed by his empathy with both sides: with the unspeakable but real fear of the Jews, Holocaust II: and with the anger and humiliation of the Arabs and Moslems everywhere.

Hart admits in the book that he is a gentile, but describes with pride how he had the confidence of both Yasser Arafat and Golda Meir, who even described him as ‘a dear friend’.

The blurb on the front flap of the dust jacket states

Can a Clash of Civilisations, Judeo-Christian v Islamic, be averted?

It all depends, the Author of this book, believes, on what Churchill once called “the struggle for the soul of the Jewish people.”

The Zionism of this book’s title is Jewish nationalism, the creating and sustaining force of the modern state of Israel. And this Zionism, political Zionism, is not be confused with the spiritual Zionism of Judaism.

Zionism: the Real Enemy of the Jews was chosen by the author as the title for this book because, in seven words, it reflects two terrifying truths of our time.

The first is that more than half a century on from the obscenity of the Nazi Holocaust anti-Semitism is on the rise again in Europe and America, where most of the world’s Jews live as citizens of many nations and as spiritual Zionists – looking upon Jerusalem as the centre of their religion and spiritual capital.

The second, a great and tragic irony, is that the behavior of political Zionism’s child, Israel, where only a minority of the world’s Jews live giving substance to Jewish nationalism in action, is the prime cause of the re-awakening of the sleeping giant of anti-Semitism.

The story this book has to tell – thrilling, chilling but ultimately inspirational – is a must read for all who wish to understand why, really, the countdown to Armageddon is on. And how it can be stopped.

Like very many other critics of Zionism, including Jewish and Israeli academics such as Norman Finkelstein and Ilan Pappe, to the Jewish and non-Jewish victims of the anti-Semitic slurs and suspensions in Labour party this year, Ken Livingstone, Jackie Walker, Tony Greenstein and Mike over at Vox Political, Hart is outraged at the bullying and intimidation of decent, non-racist people, by the Zionists, who use false accusations of anti-Semitism to silence their critics. Hart raises this very point in the first paragraph of his acknowledgements. He writes

A letter to my literary agent described the manuscript for this book as “awesome… driven by passion, commitment and profound learning”. The letter concluded: “There is no question it deserves to be published.” The writer was a major UK publisher who, like others of his fraternity, was too frightened to publish this book out of fear of offending Zionism and being falsely accused of anti-Semitism. Since the obscenity of the Nazi holocaust, the false charge of anti-Semitism is the blackmail card Zionism has played, brilliantly, to prevent informed and honest debate about who must do what if there is to be a peaceful resolution of the Palestine problem, which is the prerequisite for averting a clash of civilisations, Judeo-Christian v Islamic.

He then writes about the possible optimistic outcome of this struggle to get the truth out to the public indicated by the result of a debate inspired by his book’s title, on the motion ‘Zionism is today the real enemy of the Jews’, was held by the London debating society, Intelligence Squared, at the Royal Geographical Society. The motion was carried, a result which Hart declared was ‘pregnant with hope for the future’. He continues

Why so? Because the silence of mainstream diaspora Jews on the matter of the Zionist state’s behavior had been broken.

However, he soon found out that he and the others fighting for truth on this issue would have a very long way to go before achieving their goal.

But it soon became clear to me that this pregnancy is going to be a very long and difficult one. After the historic IS debate I decided to delay publication of this book to give my publisher and I quality time to reach out to Jewish groups and organisations, as sensitively as we knew how, to prepare the ground for the Great Debate this book was written to provoke and promote. We learned that most Jews, because of the past, are so fearful of the future – unspeakably terrified – not just frightened – that they are frozen in silence, unable more than unwilling to criticize Israel. In my book, I have tried my best to take account of, and speak to, this fear.

This passage therefore shows just how immensely courageous Jewish critics of Zionism, like Finkelstein, Pappe, Greenstein and Walker are, in defying this fear. And it also shows just as clearly how utterly wretched and despicable those would try to silence Israel’s critics by denouncing them as anti-Semites, when they are nothing of the sort, and constantly trying to invoke fears of a renewed holocaust. These are the tactics used by the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism and the Jewish Labour Movement.

Hart duly credits the authors, whose work he has used, and in particular a group of eight Jewish and Israeli writers. He quotes the Israeli writer, Yehoshafat Harkabi, the author of the book Hachraot Goraliot, published in English as Israel’s Fateful Hour. Harkabi wrote that

What we need in Israel is not a united front behind a wrong policy (continuing Israeli occupation of Arab land seized in 1967) but searching self-criticism and a careful examination of our goals and means, so that we can differentiate between realistic vision and adventurist fantasy. We need clear, rational and, above all, long-term, comprehensive political thinking… Jews in the West, particularly in the United States, should participate in this debate. They should not be squeamish and discouraged by the fear that the arguments they air may help their enemies and those of Israel. The choice facing them, as well as Israel, is not between good and bad, but between bad and worse. Criticising Israeli policies may be harmfully divisive, but refraining from criticism and allowing Israel to maintain its wrong policy is incomparably worse. If the state of Israel comes to grief (God forbid), it will not be because of a lack of weaponry or money, but because of skewed political thinking and because Jews who understood the situation did not exert themselves to convince Israelis to change that thinking. Harkabi explicitly stated that Jews around the world would be judged according to Israel’s actions, and that this would provoke an anti-Semitic reaction.

As for the threat of Armageddon, he describes an interview he had with Golda Meir, who stated explicitly that if Israel was ever defeated on the battlefield, it would be prepared to take the entire region and the whole world down with it. (p.xii). He also states on the same page that the Zionists have deceived Jews and gentiles across the world into falsely believing that Israel’s existence has been in jeopardy, when that has never been the case. And he also discusses the powerful influence of the American Evangelical Christian right, and in particular a chilling speech by its leader, Pastor Hagee, which supports Zionism in the hope of bringing about the Apocalypse and Christ’s return to Earth. (p. xiii).

The book is a history of Zionism and the state of Israel from its origins to Eisenhower’s 1957 confrontation with Nasser, with chapters on the Balfour declaration and ‘Zionist terrorism and ethnic cleansing’. Some of the events and documents will be familiar to readers of this blog from articles in Lobster, Tony Greenstein’s blog, the works of Norman Finkelstein and Ilan Pappe, and the material submitted by the Jewish supporters of Livingstone and the other maligned souls in the Labour party, Buddy Hell over at Guy Debord’s Cat and Mike. This includes explicit statements by the Zionist founding leadership that they were colonisers; the disgusting message by the Stern Gang offering to ally themselves with Nazi Germany in exchange for sending expelled German Jews to Israel; further statements by leading Zionists supporting the ethnic cleansing of the indigenous Arab population and the way the Israeli state used the massacre at Deir Yassin and the threat of the further violence to terrorise the Arabs into fleeing their homes.

Tony Greenstein has shown again and again in his blog that Zionists will ally with real, murderous anti-Semites, just as the Stern Gang wished, when it serves their purposes. And they can be completely indifferent, even hostile to attempts to save Jewish lives if this means allowing them to remain in their native lands, or moving somewhere else in the diaspora. On page 135 Hart describes how Morris Ernst, one of the wartime leaders of the Jewish community deeply involved in attempts to rescue eastern European Jews, approached president Roosevelt with a plan to increase the number of Jewish migrants to America and Britain. He stated that, after negotiating with them, the British authorities were prepared to let 150,000 more Jewish refugees into the country. The one provision was that American must allow the same number to enter their country. Ernst looked forward to saving a further 200,000, perhaps even 300,000 Jewish lives.

But he was to be severely disappointed. Under pressure from the Zionist and official Jewish organizations in America, Roosevelt had given in and decided against the plan. Jewish refugees from the Third Reich were to be sent to Palestine, not allowed into America. Ernst then went round his friends in the Jewish community to persuade them, and received a very frosty, even hostile reception.

Ernst was shocked and, without mentioning what Roosevelt had said, he approached his influential Jewish friends to try to get their support for a worldwide programme of rescue. As he described it himself in his own book, this was the response he got. ” I was thrown out of parlours of friends or mine who very frankly said, ‘Morris this is treason. You are undermining the Zionist movement.'” He also said that he found, everywhere, ” a deep, genuine, often fanatically emotional vested interest in putting over the Palestinian (Zionist) movement” in men “who are little concerned about human blood if it is not their own. (p. 136).

Hart goes on to explain that America’s Jews were assimilated and prosperous. They were afraid that the arrival of embittered, poverty-stricken and radical eastern European Jews would provoke an anti-Semitic reaction which would threaten their own comfortable position. (p. 36).

Hart also notes that many Jews today are increasingly considering the possibility of disassociating themselves from Israel. He cites the controversy that greeted a statement by a London rabbi, David Goldberg, in 2002, when he said that it may be time for Judaism and Israel to go their separate ways.

This incident perhaps explains why Netanyahu, Likud, and the other parties in his noxious coalition have passed legislation declaring all Jews, wherever they are, to be citizens of Israel. Except for those, who dare to criticize the country, no matter how mildly. They won’t be let anywhere near the country. It also provides a bit of background to the recent finding that the more American Jews, even those on heritage trips to Israel, funded by the Israeli government, find out about the Zionist state, the more they hate it. This includes even Jews, who have suffered real anti-Semitism. As, incidentally, have many of the Jews the Zionist lobby labelled as anti-Semites or self-hating Jews over here. It helps to explain the number of Jews, who support the Palestinians in the BDS movement. Clearly, a number of Jews, not just those in the anti-Zionist Naturei Karta, have been disillusioned or critical of Israel for a very long time. Certainly since the 1980s, when a number of Israeli authors first uncovered and published the evidence of Israel’s horrific crimes against the Palestinian people. And the movement is growing.

It’s because of this that there’s a bi-partisan movement in Congress to criminalise as anti-Semitic protests against Israel and the BDS movement. According to RT’s report, the proposed legislation will include a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison. Meanwhile, real anti-Semites and neo-Nazis, including some of the denizens of the Alt-Right in Trump’s own administration, are allowed to continue spouting their own hate, including holocaust denial, because free speech is protected under the Constitution. Well, it is, so long as it doesn’t threaten Israel and by extension, western power in the Middle East.

The book is a savage indictment of Zionism and its supporters in America and Europe, including the leading politicians in Britain and elsewhere, that promoted the country as a means of advancing their own global, imperial interests. And it shows that Zionism is not only dangerous for provoking anti-Semitism, but also that Zionists – both Jewish and gentile – will also use anti-Semitism as a weapon to ensure further Jewish emigration. The Zionists have shown that they can be just as ruthless and persecutory towards ordinary, diaspora Jews, as towards the Palestinians and other Arabs.

This is a book that desperately needs to be read by more people, if a genuine, just peace is to be established in the Middle East. And it is also extremely useful in combating the lies, slander and bullying of the Israeli lobby in British politics, including the Labour party.

Young Anti-Zionist Jews Talk about their Beliefs and Activism

I’ve blogged several times in my pieces attacking Binyamin Netanyahu, the Likud party and the Israel lobby, and the anti-Semitism smears against Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour centre-left, that there are many very courageous Jews and Israelis, who are also strongly opposed to Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. This is another video I found on YouTube. It’s for an organisation, Young, Left and Jewish, and has the organisation’s website address at the end. In it, anti-Zionist Jewish young people describe their beliefs and activities to oppose and make people aware of the persecution of the Arabs.

One Jewish young woman describes how the trips to Israel provided by the Jewish organisations are designed to inculcate support for Israel, even going so far, if they can, to encourage Jews to immigrate there. Another young woman begins her story by telling a bit of her own family history. She is descended from two Holocaust survivors and a Nazi officer, and so is connected to both sides of the Holocaust. She shows a family photograph album, with photos of her parents and grandparents, including the tattoo of the number the Nazis’ had placed on the arms of their victims. She then describes how, on a trip to Israel, she and her friends encountered a group of Arab Israelis. She and they sat down to talk, and they discovered that they had much in common through their experiences of persecution, the Jews from the Nazis and the Arabs from the Israelis. She states that this is causing immense pain and outrage, and that this will continue for decades to come. Intercut with this bit is historical footage of Jews being herded into the cattle trucks to the death camps. Another young woman describes how she and her friends put on a play by Jews, for Jews, to explore and explain about the persecution of the Palestinians by the Israeli state. Yet another young woman tells how she heckled Ariel Sharon in order to tell ‘truth to power’.

In my posts about this issue, I’ve described the fierce hostility those Jews, who do campaign on the behalf of the Palestinians face from the Zionist establishment. Just as anti-Zionist gentiles are smeared as anti-Semites, Jews are accused of being self-hating, or ‘not proper Jews’. Or worse. Another young woman in this video talks about going to a Zionist meeting to hand round pamphlets and flyers about the Israeli occupation of Palestine. She describes how she and others like her are accused of being ‘self-hating’, or because they oppose Israel, they must somehow be in favour of terrorism or Yasser Arafat. She describes how she was cursed and spat at, with women she describes as looking like typical Ashkenazi (Eastern European Jewish) grandmothers raising their middle finger to her. One woman even turned away and covered her child’s eyes.
One Rabbi, R. Michael Lerner, the editor of Tikkun magazine, states that he has received death threat for his opinions.

The video is accompanied by a couple of pieces of traditional Jewish song.

I was particularly struck by the young woman, who found a common thread of experience through her family’s suffering under the Holocaust, and the Arab Israelis’ persecution by the Israeli state. The Palestinians refer to the destruction of their country as the Nakba, which means the ‘disaster’ or ‘catastrophe’. Amos Oz in his book, The Israelis, describes how just as the Israelis attempt to recover the history of the numerous Jewish communities destroyed in the Holocaust, so the Palestinians similarly attempt to document and trace their communities, which have been exterminated by the Israelis.

He also includes in his book accounts and statements by Israeli soldiers of their mixed feelings, including guilt and sorrow, at seeing Arabs forced off their lands and from their property. Several of them felt that it could easily have been them made to depart from their homes by an overwhelming power. It struck me that these feelings, like those of the young woman in this video, came from the collective Jewish experience of being repeatedly under attack, and forced to move on through violence, including armed force. The Holocaust is the best known, and most extreme and horrific of this, but just one example in the long persecution of the Jewish people. And some soldiers – unfortunately, not all – were bound to have profound misgivings when they found themselves ordered to do precisely the same thing to others.

Opposition to Israel and its systematic persecution of its indigenous population isn’t a simple case of anti-Semitism and Jewish self-hatred. it is a response by principled women and men to the persecution of yet another people by a colonial settler state. Very many of those who support the Palestinians against the likes of Netanyahu are sincere anti-racists, including Jews, who feel that this persecution runs counter to the teachings of their own religion. I put up a video a few days ago of a mass meeting of Orthodox Jews in New York to protest against the state of Israel and the conscription of Yeshiva students into the armed forces. One of the rabbis speaking declared that Israel was sinning by turning the Jews, a peaceful people, into a militaristic nation. He called this ‘the hands of Esau’. Oz in the Israelis also claims that the Jewish and Israeli peoples are not militaristic, giving a Yiddish word for militarism. This, translated into English, literally means, ‘the silly games of gentiles’.

Unfortunately, Israel is a highly militarised society, which has had the ethnic cleansing of the original people of Palestine as its goal from the start. If there is to be a just peace, and genuine reconciliation between Israelis and Arabs in the Middle East, it will be done by principled people like those in this video.