The coverage of Prince Philip’s death is what you would expect of North Korea on the death of their ‘beloved leader’

I’m not going to waste words on Philip Windsor or is it Battenburg?  He lived an unremarkable life and his main achievement was living until 99 and marrying a woman who was able to keep him. His sisters supported the Nazisas did most of the Greek royals.

Phil was famous for a series of racist remarks the most famous of which were made on his visit to China in 1986 when he toldBritish students: "If you stay here much longer you'll all be slitty-eyed."

He also quipped:

“If it has four legs and is not a chair, has wings and is not an aeroplane, or swims and is not a submarine, the Cantonese will eat it.”

 During a visit to an electronics factory in Scotland, Prince Philip sawa messy fuse box and said it looked "as though it was put in by an Indian". He also askeda driving instructor in Oban: “How do you keep the natives off the booze long enough to pass the test?”

Phil the Greek was also an insensitive bastard. After the Dunblane massacre in 1996, in which 16 children and one teacher died he opposed controls on possession of guns saying

“If a cricketer suddenly decided to go into a school and batter a lot of people to death with a cricket bat, are you going to ban cricket bats?”

I won’t waste any more words on this worthless man. It says everything about the BBC that they have spent more time on the death of this useless royal parasite than the 127,000(at least) people who have died from COVID-19.  If the hundreds of millions of pounds spent on this dysfunctional family had been spent on the NHS building up stocks of PPE and if large sections of the NHS hadn’t been privatized thousands of those people would be alive today.

As Percy Shelley famously said‘Monarchy is only the string that ties the robbers’ bundle’. The purpose of the Royals is to ensure that however rich or poor you are that you will identify with this symbol of national unity that enables the rich and privileged to get away with their robbery of ordinary people. Racism helps divide the poor amongst themselves.

Let the BBC and the British Establishment mourn, we should organise starting with demonstrations tomorrow against the Police Bill

Tony Greenstein

In his desperation to defend the IHRA Definition of anti-Semitism against the Jerusalem Definition, Rich prays in aid the support of anti-Semites

I am always pleased to be proved correct in my analysis! When a group of academics issued the Jerusalem Declaration on Anti-SemitismI gave it a critical welcome as I saw immediately that it could be a weapon in the fight against the IHRA’s conflation of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism.

Almost immediately the Zionists went on the attack. To the notorious David Collier from the fascist wing of Zionism the JDA is ‘harmful to Jews’.

Dave Rich, the Deputy Director of the CST, an organisation that was set up by Mossad, Israel’s MI6 and the Board of Deputies, arguesthat the JDA ‘risks setting back genuine efforts to tackle antisemitism.’ Whereas in fact it is the IHRA, by defining anti-Zionism as anti-Semitism which does that.

When I submitted a Subject Access Request to the CST some years ago I got back a file containing over 300 pages. Indeed so copious was the file that there were things in it that I could not recall. When I come to write my autobiography the first thing I will do will be to submit another SAR to the CST! In reality the CST is in the business of monitoring the opponents of Zionism and Israeli Apartheid.

Why you might ask should the CST spy on fellow Jews if their purpose is, as they claim, simply to protect Britain’s Jewish community? Or are they saying that anti-Zionist Jews pose a threat to British Jews?

David Schraub, an Assistant Professor no less, was on the attack against the JDA in Ha'aretz. Being a senior academic however doesn’t stop Schraub from getting even the most basic facts wrong. Contrary to his assertion Jackie Walker was not expelled from the Labour Party for anti-Semitism. Schraub is one of those cheap imitation academics who reproduce the lies of others and dress it up as profundity. It is a form of political plagiarism.

Dave Rich wrote an articlein the Jewish Chronicle ‘We don’t need another definition of Jew hate’. Which is of course true. What he omits to mention is that the IHRA isn’t a definition of anything let alone anti-Semitism. As the Jewish former Court of Appeal Judge Stephen Sedley said, the IHRA isn’t a definition because it’s indefinite! David Feldman, a Zionist whom I’ve criticisedoften enough, describedthe IHRA as ‘bewilderingly imprecise.’

The reason that Rich is opposed to the JDA is that it is, despite its flaws, a definition of anti-Semitism. Consider the central 38 word core of the IHRA, it definesanti-Semitism thus:

“Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.”

What is this ‘certain perception’?  If it ‘may be expressed as hatred’ what else may it be expressed as? The IHRA is a model of obscurity and obfuscation. And deliberately so.

Compare this with the JDA’s core definition:

Antisemitism is discrimination, prejudice, hostility or violence against Jews as Jews (or Jewish institutions as Jewish).

Not only is it less than half the IHRA definition it is crystal clear and explicit as to what anti-Semitism is.  That is the real Zionist objection. Thelast thing Zionist zealots want is a definition which is actually a definition. They want it to be obscure, obfuscatory, hazy and open to interpretation because then they can, by a process of political osmosis, infect every area of criticism of Zionism and Israel with the charge of ‘anti-Semitism’.

Zionists want to respond to criticism of Israel, not with intellectual or reasoned arguments but ‘feelings’ of threats to their ‘welfare’ and ‘safety’. Even an 84 year old film producer, Ken Loach, was a threatto the Zionist snowflakes at St. Peter’s College Oxford.

And if, like David Miller, you point to the fact that the students attacking him belong to a Zionist organisation, the Union of Jewish Students, which receives its funding direct from the Israeli Embassy, then you are even more of a threat.  And 100 stupid right-wing MPs, including Caroline Lucas, will sign a statement demanding that you are sacked.

The reason for this is obvious. It is impossible to defend Apartheid Israel and the Zionists have to resort to identity politics.

In the face of the big Goebbels style lie, we need to reiterate that anti-Semitism is about discrimination, prejudice, hostility or violence directed at Jews because they are Jews.

How does Dave Rich, a fake academic who has written a rubbish book The Left’s Jewish Problem, get over this? *

Rich decides to use the anti-Semitic attacks on George Soros, the philanthropic Jewish billionaire who is portrayed as the typical international Jewish financier, as the reason for not adopting the JDA. He saysthat the JDA

‘risks missing all but the most overt cases.’ The Hungarian government’s campaign against George Soros never mentions the fact Soros is Jewish but it derives its resonance and force from the use of antisemitic language.

In fact it was blindingly obvious that the Hungarian Prime Minister , Viktor Orban’s target was Jewish. Orban, won the 2018 General Election in Hungary by basing his campaign on the demonisation of George Soros. He didn’t need to explicitly mention that Soros was Jewish because this was so well known and his supporters made it explicit.

Orban’s campaign was backed by right-wing Zionists including Netanyahu’s son Yair, who producedan anti-Semitic cartoon praised which was praisedby neo-Nazis. Orban was quotedas saying during his campaign:

“We are fighting an enemy that is different from us. Not open, but hiding; not straightforward but crafty; not honest but base; not national but international; does not believe in working but speculates with money; does not have its own homeland but feels it owns the whole world,”

It doesn’t take many brain cells to work out that Jews are the object here. It is a recitation of standard Jewish conspiracy theories. But here is the problem? Among those countries who have adoptedthe IHRA is Hungary! Indeed it was under Viktor Orban that Hungary adopted the IHRA definition. Orban is a big supporter of the IHRA as is fellow anti-Semite Donald Trump.

And let us not forget that in 2018 Conservative MEPs votedto support Orban against a censure motion in the European Parliament.  I don’t remember the Zionists, who were so taken up with Jeremy Corbyn’s ‘anti-Semitism’ protesting that the Tories were anti-Semitic.  Strange that.

And for over a decade the same Tory MEPs were in the same European Conservative Reform Group as Latvian and Poland anti-Semites. Again without any criticism from the Zionists. Indeed as we know, the Zionist Board of Deputies totally ignored the far greater Tory anti-Semitism for the simple reason that the campaign waged against the Labour Left had nothing to do with anti-Semitism.

Indeed when Jonathan Freedland criticisedthe Tories for getting into the same sewer as Roberts Zile, the Latvian MEP who marched with the veterans of the Latvia Waffen SS each year and with the equally repugnant Michal Kaminski, who had defended the pogromists of Jedwabne who had the blood of up to 1600 Jews on their hands, who defended these fascists? None other than the Editor of the Jewish Chronicle, Stephen Pollard in an article Poland's Kaminski is not an antisemite: he's a friend to Jews. Pollard’s reasons were that Kaminski was ardently pro-Zionist which is true for many anti-Semites.

Genuine anti-Semites have no difficulty supporting the IHRA because it isn’t about anti-Semitism but about shoe horning anti-Zionism into the anti-Semitism mould. But Dave Rich is too dishonest to admit this. Instead he thinks that the readers of the Jewish Chronicle are too stupid to ask questions (and he is probably right about that!).

Another fact is that under Benjamin Netanyahu Israel too has adopted the IHRA definition. This is not surprising since the whole purpose of the IHRA is to protect the Israeli State from criticism. But who is it that has close and friendly relations with the anti-Semitic Orban?  Netanyahu!

As the Times of Israel said, quoting a Hungarian official:  ‘Netanyahu and Orban belong to same political family’. This if nothing else demonstrates the hypocrisy of the Zionist claque who will stop at nothing to conflate anti-racist and anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism with Dave Rich leading the charge. Rich should ask how it is that Israel elects a Prime Minister who maintains such friendly relations with an anti-Semitic regime and leave the question of what is anti-Semitic to those who have some understanding of it.

Tony Greenstein

*       When Rich expressed is delight that I had read his book on Twitter I had to suggest that he reign in his pleasure. After all, I told him, I have also read Hitler’s Mein Kampf!

Did the Zionists collaborate with the Jews’ arch enemy? Come to my talk Friday 6 p.m.

Please register here

When Ken Livingstone declaredthat Hitler supported Zionism the Zionist movement gave us an orchestrated display of faux outrage. To even mention, let alone discuss, Zionism’s record during the Third Reich, was called ‘anti-Semitism’. This in itself suggests that Zionism has something to hide.

The immediate reaction of for example The Independent to Livingstone’s remarks was to commission an article Why the Haavara Agreement does not mean the Nazis were Zionists by Rainer Schulze, who described Ha’avara, the trading agreement between the Nazis and the Zionists as ‘a way to save Jews from the claws of an increasingly hostile regime and attract them to Palestine.’

Yet just a little research would show that Ha’avara was not only bitterly condemned by the vast majority of Jews, including the Jewish Chronicle, for undermining the Jewish Boycott of Nazi Germany, but it was only ever intended to apply to the richest German Jews.

Schulze wrote that ‘Zionism was a movement based on the right of self-determination. It originated as a national liberation movement’.

Schulze is an Emeritus Professor of History at Essex University so there is no excuse for fabricating history.

The Zionist movement described itself as a colonising movement and referred to its settlements in Palestine as colonies. In his famous essay ‘The Iron Wall’ Vladimir Jabotinsky, the founder of Revisionist Zionism (now Likud) wrote:

My readers have a general idea of the history of colonisation in other countries.  I suggest that they consider all the precedents with which they are acquainted, and see whether there is one solitary instance of any colonisation being carried on with the consent of the native population. There is no such precedent.

 The native populations, civilised or uncivilised, have always stubbornly resisted the colonists, irrespective of whether they were civilised or savage.[i]

“How, then, do I happen to turn to you since this is an out-of-the-way matter for you? How indeed? Because it is something colonial… I want you ... to put the stamp of your authority on the Zionist plan…’

Zionism and Anti-Semitism

The IHRA ‘definition’ of anti-Semitism, which anti-Semites like Viktor Orban and Donald Trump love so much defines anti-Semitism as ‘Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis’. So if you compare the Nazis’ barring of Jews from certain residential areas of towns to Israel’s policy of barring Arabs from areas of Israel such as Mitzpe Aviv then you are anti-Semitic.

It used to be the case that if something was true it couldn’t be anti-Semitic. Anti-Semitism by its very nature was based on falsehoods.  Now however something can be both true and ‘anti-Semitic’.

Zionism and Anti-Semitism are like Siamese twins. They feed off each other and share a common belief that Jews and non-Jews cannot live together in the same society. This is why, from the beginning of the Zionist movement in the late 19^thcentury, anti-Semites have consistently supported the Zionist movement.

Theodor Herzl, the founder of Political Zionism understood this well:

‘the anti-Semites will become our most dependable friends, the anti-Semitic countries our allies.’^[ii]

There are many examples of this mutual affection. William Stanley Shaw, President of the British Brothers League, the precursor of the British Union of Fascists, which campaigned against the immigration of Jewish refugees, expressed his admiration for Zionism:

I am a firm believer in the Zionist movement, which the British Brothers League will do much incidentally to foster. The return of the Jews to Palestine is one of the most striking signs of the times…. All students of prophecy are watching the manifold signs of the times with almost breathless interest…[iii]

The Zionist approach to the Nazis was no different to their attitude historically to anti-Semitism. It sought not to oppose or fight the Nazis but to work with them. Zionism saw anti-Semitism as a force that would drive the Jews to Palestine. In Herzl’s analogy it was the steam that drove the engine.

This mutual affection was recognised very early on by the principal theoretician of the Nazi Party, Alfred Rosenberg who argued that:

‘Zionism must be vigorously supported in order to encourage a significant number of German Jews to leave for Palestine or other destinations.’^[iv]

Rosenberg:

 ‘intended to use Zionism as a legal justification for depriving German Jews of their civil rights’ and ‘eventually the Jewish presence in Germany.’[v]

Rosenberg was hanged at Nuremburg for crimes against humanity. Heinrich Class, the leader of the 100,000 Pan German League, who became a Nazi member of the Reichstag in 1933 wrote that:^[vi]

“... among the Jews themselves the nationalist movement called Zionism is gaining more and more adherents ... They also declare openly that a true assimilation of the Jewish aliens to the host nations would be impossible... the Zionists confirm what the enemies of the Jews... have always asserted...” [If I Were the Kaiser, Daniel Frymman]

Donald Niewyk asked if German Zionism

‘reinforced the anti-Semitic stereotype of the Jews as materialists, exploiters, and traitors?... Did their assertions of racial and national otherness… hasten the day when the Nazis might seek to make Germany judenrein?’^[vii]

JB Agus asked if

‘the Zionist programme and philosophy contribute(d) decisively to the enormous catastrophe of the extermination of 6 million Jews by the Nazis by popularizing the notion that the Jews were forever aliens in Europe?’[viii]

Ha’avara and the Jewish Boycott - What was the Zionist attitude to the rise of the Nazis?

When Hitler became Chancellor of Germany on 30 January 1933, world Jewry spontaneously organised a Boycott of Nazi Germany. This caused the Nazis to panic. Only a tiny minority of Jews, the Zionists and the Jewish bourgeoisie opposed the Boycott.

‘faced with the consequences of an economic boycott by the Jews of the whole world the Nazis of Germany are denying stories of the atrocious treatment which has been meted out to those of Jewish nationality.[ix]

The Boycott reigned in the Nazi terror but the Zionists were wholly indifferent to the plight of Germany’s Jews.

On 9 June 1933 the German Zionist Federation, (ZVfD) the Jewish Agency and the Palestine Land Development Company began negotiations with the Nazi government to secure a trade agreement. Agreement was reached by August 7^th.

The Zionist leaders of the Palestine Jewish community (Yishuv) opposed the Boycott of Nazi Germany because

‘Zionist priorities... awarded precedence to the realization of Zionist goals and the building of Palestine over the struggle to preserve Jewish civil rights in the Diaspora.’ [x]

Dov Hoz observed that “In these negotiations, we are reaping the fruit of the boycott we oppose.”[xi] But for the Boycott the Nazis would not have agreed to Ha'avara. The Zionist movement was parasitic on the Boycott movement. As Yf’aat Weiss noted

The Zionist movement found itself in a profound conflict between transfer and boycott and, in the broad sense, between the needs of the Yishuv and the sentiments of the Jewish people.[xii]

Marek Edelman - the Bundist Commander of the Warsaw Ghetto Resistance

Far from doing their best to maximize the number of German Jews who could enter Palestine (no one believed then that the Nazis would kill Germany’s Jews) the Zionists sought to restrict the numbers. Werner Senator, a member of the Jewish Agency Executive [JAE] warned that if German Zionists ‘did not improve the quality of the “human material” they were sending the number of certificates would be cut.[xiv]

If the Zionists sought to rescue the maximum number of German Jews then it made no sense that nearly 5,000 American Jews and 20,000 from countries where Jews were not under threat were given certificates to enter Palestine between 1933 and 1939. Even as dedicated a Zionist as Elie Wiesel, wrote that

‘Surely, Jewish Palestine... needed money to finance its development, but this brazen pragmatism went against the political philosophy of a majority of world Jewry. There developed a growing perception that instead of supporting and strengthening the boycott, Palestine was, in fact, sabotaging it.’ [Elie Wiesel][xv]

The behaviour of the Zionists infuriated Jewish workers and trade unionists. In a debate between Berl Locker of the Zionist Executive and Baruch Vladeck, the Bundist editor of the Yiddish Forward and Chairman of the Jewish Labor Committee, Vladeck described how

‘The whole organized labor movement and the progressive world are waging a fight against Hitler through the boycott. The Transfer Agreement scabs on that fight.’

Vladeck contended that

The main purpose of the Transfer is not to rescue the Jews from Germany but to strengthen various institutions in Palestine. Vladeck termed Palestine ‘the official scab agent against the boycott in the Near-East’.^[xvi]

The Zionist leaders welcomed the Nazis

The Zionist leadership actually welcomed the rise to power of Hitler. In their eyes the triumph of the Nazis had vindicated them. They had been right when they said that there was no future for the diaspora.

I’m not suggesting that the Zionists welcomed the holocaust. In 1933 very few people thought the Nazis would exterminate the Jews. However most Jews realised that the Nazis represented a new form of racial anti-Semitism and that they represented a dire threat to the safety of German Jews.

The Zionist attitude to Nazi anti-Semitism was that of Herzl.  Anti-Semitism ‘will not harm the Jews…. It represents the education of a group by the masses... Education is accomplished by hard knocks.’^[xvii]

There can be no doubt that the Zionist willingly and voluntarily proposed collaborating with the Nazis. On 21 June 1933, the ZVfD sent a memo to Hitler which was never answered. It read:

On the foundation of the new state, which has established the principle of race... fruitful activity for the fatherland is possible. Our acknowledgement of Jewish nationality provides for a clear and sincere relationship to the German people and its national and racial realities…. because we too are against mixed marriages and are for maintaining the purity of the Jewish group… The realisation of Zionism could only be hurt by resentment of Jews abroad against the German development. Boycott propaganda… is in essence fundamentally unZionist, because Zionism wants not to do battle but to convince and to build.’^[xviii](my emphasis)

Chaim Weizmann, Israel’s first President warned his personal secretary, Lewis Namier, a Jewish anti-Semite, who was writing the Introduction to Arthur Ruppin’s Jews in the Modern World

‘not to be so open in expressing their common toleration of Nazism’ because ‘the louts will say, the Jews themselves think that it will be all for the good, etc.’ (my emphasis)[xix]

Bloom commented that ‘Ruppin’s attitude towards the Nazis, then, reflects the general reaction of many Zionists, including “liberals” like Weizmann.’ [xx] Ruppin was subscribed to the racial sciences.

The Zionist national poet Chaim Nachman Bialik volunteered that ‘Hitler has perhaps saved German Jewry, which was being assimilated into annihilation.’[xxi]

Emil Ludwig, the world famous biographer, ‘expressed the general attitude of the Zionist movement:’ when he wrote that:

‘Hitler will be forgotten in a few years, but he will have a beautiful monument in Palestine. You know, the coming of the Nazis was rather a welcome thing. … Thousands who seemed to be completely lost to Judaism were brought back to the fold by Hitler, and for that I am personally very grateful to him.’ [xxii]

Francis Nicosia described how ‘so positive’ was its assessment of the situation that the ZVfD announced its determination to take advantage of the crisis to win over German Jewry to Zionism.[xxiii]

David Ben Gurion, the Chairman of the Jewish Agency and Israel’s first Prime Minister is quoted as saying that

‘Disaster is strength if channeled to a productive course. The whole trick of Zionism is that it knows how to channel our disaster, not into despondency or degradation, as is the case in the Diaspora, but into a source of creativity and exploitation.’ [xxiv]

Ben Gurion’s view was widely shared. The Zionist movement was determined to take advantage of the rise of the Nazis in order to build their ‘Jewish’ state.

Rabbi Prinz, the President of the ZVfD and later deputy President of the World Jewish Congress described the Nazi assumption of power as the ‘beginning of the Jew’s return to his Judaism.’ The main Jewish German body, the Centralverein talked about German Zionism having inflicted ‘a stab in the back’ to the struggle against Hitler.^[xxv]

Berl Katznelson, a founder of Mapai, and Ben Gurion’s effective deputy, saw the rise of Hitler as “an opportunity to build and flourish like none we have ever had or ever will have” [xxvi] 

Ben Gurion was even more optimistic. ‘The Nazis victory would become “a fertile force for Zionism.”[xxvii]

Exploiting the Holocaust for a Jewish Palestine

Noah Lucas, a critical Zionist historian, wrote about how, as the European holocaust erupted,

Ben Gurion saw it as a decisive opportunity for Zionism... In conditions of peace,… Zionism could not move the masses of world Jewry. The forces unleashed by Hitler in all their horror must be harnessed to the advantage of Zionism. ... By the end of 1942… the struggle for a Jewish state became the primary concern of the movement.’[xxviii]

The desire to rescue Europe's Jews “was conveniently structured by the Zionist programme in a way that involved only helping Jews to reach Palestine.”[xxix]Dina Porat, Yad Vashem’s chief historian agreed.

Most of the discussion in the Yishuv focused on immigration to Palestine as a solution,… Little attention was given to the actual plight of the Jews of Europe.[xxx]

Christopher Sykes observed that ‘from the very beginning of the Nazi disaster, the Zionist leadership determined to wrest political advantage from the tragedy.’[xxxi] Lucas, reached similar conclusions:

‘While hopes and efforts for the rescue of Europe's Jews continued, the struggle for a Jewish state became the primary concern of the (Zionist) movement.’[xxxii]

Ben-Gurion’s biographer, Shabtai Teveth, described how Ben-Gurion

‘concentrated all his efforts on the [Zionist] program, not to the tragedy of European Jewry. He maintained a puzzling silence about what was going on in Europe and Riegner’s telegram.’ [xxxiii]

Teveth described how

‘In spite of the certainty that genocide was being carried out, the JAE did not deviate appreciably from its routine.’ [xxxiv]

Dina Porat admitted in respect of Ben Gurion’s attitude that ‘these questions are hard to answer’ because ‘Ben-Gurion’s concentration on post-war goals shifted attention away from the present plight of Europe’s Jews.’ [xxxv]

To Ben Gurion the war was 'a rare opportunity to achieve the “Zionist solution... to the problem of the Jewish people.’[xxxvi]

‘all the significant steps in the progress of Zionism were always related to the intensification of Jewish distress.’ [xxxvii]

Shabtai Teveth concluded that

‘if there was a line in Ben Gurion’s mind between the beneficial disaster and an all-destroying catastrophe, it must have been a very fine one.’ [xxxviii]

In October 1941 Ben Gurion saw the catastrophe, ‘in its pre-holocaust sense, as a source of strength and momentum’ [xxxix]He wrote that

‘to the disaster of German Jewry we must offer a Zionist response, namely we must convert the disaster into a source for the upbuilding of Palestine’ [xl]

Refugeeism

In the wake of Kristallnacht, the state organised pogrom against Germany’s Jews, there was a wave of sympathy for the plight of Germany’s Jews. In Britain the government agreed to the kindertransport, admitting 10,000 unaccompanied Jewish children from Germany.

The Zionists were extremely hostile to this offer. They wanted to use the children as a battering ram to open the gates of Palestine to Jewish immigration. Ben Gurion expressed his hostility to the proposal in a shocking speech to Mapai’s Central Committee on 9 December 1938:

‘If I knew that it would be possible to save all the children in Germany by bringing them over to England, and only half of them by transporting them to Eretz Yisrael, then I would opt for the second alternative. For we must weigh not only the life of these children, but also the history of the People of Israel.’ [xli]

Malcolm MacDonald, the Colonial Secretary, recalled:

‘I remember at the time that Weizmann’s attitude shocked me.  He insisted on the children going to Palestine.  As far as he was concerned it was Palestine or nowhere.’ [xlii] 

The Zionist leadership’s great fear was that

the future and destiny of Palestine and the plight of European Jewry would be considered as two separate problems. As a result, efforts would be made to solve the problem of European Jewry without using Palestine as a refuge.[xliii] 

The Zionists were determined to use the plight of Europe’s Jews to build their state. They vehemently opposed ‘refugeeism’ – the rescue of Jews to anywhere that would have them. If the Jews were to be saved it had to be to Palestine. Ben Gurion explained that:

‘Zionism… is not primarily engaged in saving individuals. If along the way it saves a few thousand, tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of individuals, so much the better.’ But in the event of a conflict of interest between saving individual Jews and the good of the Zionist enterprise, we shall say the enterprise comes first.’[xliv]

Ben Gurion was also clear that the task of rescuing Jews from the Nazi hell was not one for Zionism. Zionism turned its back on the Jews trapped in Nazi occupied Europe. Ben Gurion insisted that:

The tasks of assistance, of saving one more Jew , of doing all to prevent deportations, are very important… and must be assumed by another organisation, to be set up and funded from other sources.’ JAE funds could only be used for rescue to Palestine [xlv]

For Ben-Gurion ‘It is the job of Zionism not to save the remnant of Israel in Europe but rather to save the land of Israel for the Jewish people.’[xlvi]Zionism was at no time concerned with Jews as individuals but as a collective, a people/race.

Saul Friedlander, himself a holocaust survivor, concluded that

‘rescue of the Jews in Europe was not at the top of the Yishuv leaders’ list of priorities. For them, the most important thing was the effort to establish the state’.^[xlvii]

Friedlander described the Zionist attitude as ‘perplexing’: ‘no concrete assistance or rescue plans emerged from the Yishuv throughout most of 1941’. The Jewish Agency [xlviii]‘hardly paid attention to the situation in Europe...’[xlix]

Abba Hillel-Silver, the President of the Zionist Organisation of America, worried that:

It is possible for the Diaspora to undermine the Jewish state, because the urgency of the rescue issue could lead the world to accept a temporary solution. We should place increased emphasis on fundamental Zionist ideology.^[l]

Evian

The Evian Conference (July 6-15, 1938) was a face-saving exercise. It was called by Roosevelt on the basis that countries were not expected to change their existing refugee policies. Roosevelt was only prepared to admit refugees outside of America’s quotas at the end of 1941 when 2,000 statesmen, artists and scientists, who had been trapped in Vichy France were allowed entry. Only in the years 1938-1940 did the USA admit more than half the miserly quotas allotted to Germany and Austria.[li]

The JAE first discussed Evian on 26 June 1938. Yitzhak Gruenbaum feared

‘immense dangers loom from the Evian conference. It could mark the end of Palestine as a land of immigration.... they will find some new territory to which they will want to direct Jewish emigration. We must defend our principle – that Jewish settlement can succeed only in Eretz-Israel, and therefore no other [place of] settlement can be considered.’[lii]:

It seemed to Ben-Gurion that the Zionists’ main task was

‘to reduce the damage, the danger and the disaster that can be expected from the Evian Conference...It could remove Palestine from the international agenda as a factor in the solution of the Jewish question. Because at this time Palestine is not serving as a haven for masses of immigrants. The haverim who propose to highlight at Evian the question of the Jewish people are making a mistake. That question needs no more “highlighting.”  the more we highlight the terrible distress of the Jewish masses in Germany, Poland and Romania, the more damage we will do at this time to the negotiations [with Britain].’ [liii]

What Ben Gurion feared was that since Palestine was unable to solve the refugee question, it would inevitably mean looking for other places of refuge. Zionism would be redundant. A meeting of the JAE on June 26, 1938 decided to:

‘belittle the [Evian] Conference as far as possible and to cause it to decide nothing…. We are particularly worried that it would move Jewish organizations to collect large sums of money for aid to Jewish refugees, and these collections could interfere with our collection efforts’ [liv]

The Zionists Sabotage Other Places of Refuge

The only positive outcome from Evian was the offer from Gen. Trujillo of San Domingo to accept 100,000 Jewish refugees. Brazil’s representative, Helio Lobo, indicated that Brazil could accept 40,000 emigrants a year, though nothing like this number were admitted.[lv]  It is estimated that more German Jewish refugees found refuge in Latin America than Palestine during the 1930s.[lvi]

The JA was unremitting in their hostility to Trujillo’s offer and did its best to destroy it. Trujillo was a maverick dictator as well as a racist. He supported the Republicans in Spain, giving shelter to thousands following Franco’s victory. This and the offer to accept 100,000 Jews stemmed from his desire to “whiten” Dominican society.[lvii]

The Zionist Yiddisher Kempfer attacked the project in a fit of hypocritical anti-racist rhetoric. The settlement originated ‘in the curse and disgrace of his racist hatred for the Negroes of Haiti.’ Only the support of Roosevelt caused the America’s Zionist leaders to restrain their opposition.[lviii]

When US Interior Secretary Harold Ickes raised the idea of admitting 10,000 Jewish refugees a year to Alaska, which was not subject to America’s strict immigration quotas, Stephen Wise, the American Zionist leader, rejected the idea. His pretext was that the territory was “too cold” for Europeans. Auschwitz was no doubt warmer.

Wise’s real reasons were spelt out in a private letter to Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter (19.10.39). It would ‘make(s) a wrong and hurtful impression to have it appear that Jews are taking over some part of the country for settlement.’[lix] Unlike Palestine of course!

Other areas of settlement that were proposed included Kimberley and the Northern Territories in Australia, British Guiana and Mindanao (in the Philippines). When Neville Chamberlain suggested the former German colony of Tanganyika, Wise exploded:

‘I would rather have my fellow Jews die in Germany than live somehow, anyhow, in the lands which bear the imprint of yesterday’s occupation by Germany’.

Pressurising the Gestapo

Not only did the Zionist leaders oppose “refugeeism” but they lobbied the Gestapo to ensure that German refugees could only go to Palestine. The Gestapo ‘did everything in those days to promote emigration, particularly to Palestine.’[lx]

Haganah agent Feivel Polkes spearheaded these efforts. SS files show that in return for information from Polkes on attempts to kill Hitler, the Gestapo agreed that pressure

‘will be exerted on the Reichsvertretung der Juden in Deutschland [the Jewish representative body] to oblige Jews who emigrate from Germany to go exclusively to Palestine, and not to other countries.’^[lxi]

Tom Segev says that it is hard to ascertain what position Polkes had within Haganah.[lxii]Israel has refused to release its files on Polkes.

Zionist Indifference to the Holocaust at the time

It almost seems counter intuitive when Israel takes thousands of students to Auschwitz each year and the holocaust forms such a major component of Zionist propaganda, to learn that during the holocaust itself, the Zionist movement went to great lengths to ignore the subject altogether, even denying that there was a holocaust.

For example Gerhard Riegner of the World Jewish Congress in Geneva received confirmation at the end of July 1942 that Europe’s Jews were being exterminated. On 8^th August he sent cables to the US and British consulates confirming the Final Solution. Stephen Wise received this on 28^thAugust and agreed, at the State Department’s request, to keep quiet. It was not until November 23^rd that the Jewish Agency finally issued a statement to the world confirming that the extermination of the Jews was taking place.

In a letter to Roosevelt of 2nd December 1942 Wise admitted that:

‘… it is indisputable that as many as two million civilian Jews have been slain. I have had cables and underground advices for some months, telling of these things. I succeeded, together with the heads of other Jewish organizations, in keeping these out of the press.’^[lxiii] (my emphasis)

Yet even after issuing their statement the Jewish Agency continued to play down or even deny that the holocaust was taking place.

On 27 December 1942 the Agency issued a statement informing the Yishuv that the holocaust had come to an end in Poland. This was based on the Official Gazette of the Nazi General Government in Poland which stated that 53 Jewish ghettos had been set up.[lxiv]

On 23 March 1943 Davar, the Histadrut newspaper, was reprimanded by Yosef Gravitzky, of the Jewish Agency’s Palcor news agency, for copying from a Nazi paper, Ostland, a “report” that 2m Jews remained in Poland, after the paper had reported one day earlier that no more than 200,000 Jews were still alive.[lxv]In fact by this time Polish Jewry had been almost completely decimated.

Numerous “reports” and false information concocted by the Propaganda Ministry in Berlin found an echo in the Palestine press.[lxvi]

When Bernard Joseph. the director of the JA political department, was told that the Journalists' Union had requested its colleagues abroad to give widespread prominence to the reports from Europe, Dov Joseph urged caution in ‘exaggerating the number of Jewish victims’.

‘if we announce that millions of Jews have been slaughtered by the Nazis, we will justifiably be asked where the millions of Jews are, for whom we claim that we shall need to provide a home in Eretz Israel after the war ends.’[lxvii]

Beit-Zvi observed that

‘Probably not even Goebbels in his wildest plans could have elicited the kind of treatment the Hebrew press accorded to information about the holocaust.’[lxviii]

In the Kasztner trial it was reported by HaBoker that Moshe Sharett, when head of the Political Department of the JA had ‘deliberately concealed information about the annihilation’. Menachem Begin of Herut, the future Prime Minister of Israel, alleged that ‘the Jewish Agency covered up the news of the mass annihilation.’ ^[lxix]

Rudolf Kasztner and Rudolf Vrba

Rudolf Kasztner was the leader of Hungarian Zionism during the war. In 1953 a libel case was brought against Malchiel Gruenwald, a 69-year-old Hungarian Jew who alleged that Kasztner had collaborated with the Nazis in the deportation of Hungary’s Jews. He depicted the JA as ‘the Judenrat of Palestine’^[lxx]and accused them of complicity in the murder of thousands of Hungarian Jews.

The trial began on 1 January 1954. Kasztner was a Mapai candidate in the forthcoming Knesset elections.[lxxi] Attorney General Haim Cohen had insisted that Kasztner sue Gruenwald and the state would finance the action. Cohen unwittingly opened up a can of worms.

Hungarian holocaust survivors testified that if they had known the truth then they would have tried to escape.[lxxii]Wiesel told how

‘We were taken just two weeks before D-Day, and we did not know that Auschwitz existed… everyone knew except the victims.’[lxxiii]

When he arrived at Auschwitz a Sonderkommando berated them: ‘Didn’t you know what was in store for you here in Auschwitz?’ Wiesel admitted ‘True. We didn’t know. Nobody had told us. He couldn’t believe his ears…’ [lxxiv]Yehuda Bauer and the Zionist stable of holocaust historians maintain that Hungary’s Jews knew.

Rudolf Vrba

Wiesel accused Kasztner of failing to warn Jews of the danger, concentrating instead on secret negotiations with the SS.

‘Many of us could have, would have found hiding places with Christian friends or in the surrounding mountains.’ ^[lxxv]

If the Jews had been warned what deportation meant then thousands could have escaped across the border to Romania, which was now a place of refuge for Jews, or hidden in Hungary.[lxxvi]It is estimated that 4,000-4,500 Jews escaped across the Romanian border in any event and many more escaped to Slovakia and neighbouring countries.[lxxvii] 

Kasztner and Vaada dissuaded the Jews of Kolosvar and elsewhere from escaping over the border.[lxxviii]Joseph Katz, a lawyer from Nodvarod, four miles from the Romanian border, testified that its 20,000 Jews knew nothing of Auschwitz.

Rudolf Vrba was one of 2 Jews who escaped from Auschwitz on 10 April 1944. Vrba and Alfred Wetzler reached Slovakia after a perilous journey, on 24 April. The next day they wrote the Auschwitz Report or Protocols, which revealed to the world the secrets of Auschwitz and its gas chambers. This testimony was the first eye witness evidence that Auschwitz was an extermination not a labour camp. The Report was given to Kasztner on or around the 27^th April. However Kasztner decided to suppress the Report. Vrba later wrote:

‘I am a Jew. In spite of that – indeed because of that “I accuse certain Jewish leaders of one of the most ghastly deeds of the war. This small group of quislings knew what was happening to their brethren in Hitler's gas chambers and bought their own lives with the price of silence. Among them was Dr Kasztner.” … I was able to give Hungarian Zionist leaders three weeks notice that Eichmann planned to send a million of their Jews to his gas chambers… Kasztner went to Eichmann and told him, ‘I know of your plans; spare some Jews of my choice and I shall keep quiet.’ [lxxix]

When Israeli Professor Jacob Talman criticised Hannah Arendt, for mentioning Zionist collaboration with the Nazis, Vrba asked:

‘Did the Judenrat (or the Judenverrat) in Hungary tell their Jews what was awaiting them? No, they remained silent and for this silence some of their leaders – for example Dr R Kasztner – bartered their own lives and the lives of 1684 other ‘prominent’ Jews directly from Eichmann.’^[lxxx]

‘If there was a line in Ben-Gurion’s mind between the beneficial disaster and an all-destroying catastrophe, it must have been a very fine one.’  Shabtai Teveth, official biographer of David Ben Gurion [lxxxi]

Guilty consciences

The Zionists knew what they were doing in giving preference to building a Jewish state even to the extent of blocking rescue. Unsurprisingly they had a guilty conscience. Chaim Weizmann wrote:

 ‘unless some radical measures are taken fairly soon, we Zionists may stand charged, when history come to be written, with criminal indifference in the face of the greatest trial to which Jewry has been subjected in modern times.’ [lxxxii]

Joachim Prinz wrote about how

“It was morally disturbing to seem to be considered as the favoured children of the Nazi Government, particularly when it dissolved the anti-Zionist youth groups, and seemed in other ways to prefer the Zionists. The Nazis asked for a 'more Zionist behaviour.” ^[lxxxiii]

Noah Lucas wrote of

‘… a gnawing sense of guilt’ among Israel’s leaders, asking: ‘Did the Jewish Agency and other organisations do all that had been possible to save the Jews of Europe from extermination. Were the various wartime negotiations with the Nazi executives of death morally impeccable? … Did the concentration on attaining statehood itself impede rescue? Did Zionist statecraft contribute to the toll of Jewish life? These and other questions… were submerged in the unconscious mind of the nation… From time to time they came to the surface demanding precise elucidation in the courts of law, as in the Kasztner case.’

Even as devoted a Zionist historian as Walter Lacquer spoke of how, after the war ‘the question was asked whether enough had been done to help them’, the Jews living in Nazi occupied Europe. Lacquer referred to ‘an uneasy conscience.’ [lxxxiv]

This is just a snapshot of a much larger topic. If you are interested tune in tomorrow night to my talk on ‘Zionism During the Holocaust’ at 6.00 p.m.

You can register here https://tinyurl.com/vjvw9kr9

German Volunteers in the French Resistance and the story of Anti-Fascist Germans Fighting an  ‘Anti-Patriotic’ War

Book Review:    

Anti-Nazi Germans: Enemies of the Nazi State from within the Working Class Movement (Merilyn Moos) & German Volunteers in the French Resistance (Steve Cushion), 

Community Languages (with the Socialist History Society), 2020, pp. 316, £10, ISBN  978-1-9163423-0-9

As the blurb on the back of the book says,

it is a commonly held belief that there was very little resistance in Germany to the Nazis, except for one or two well known instances. But, regularly ignored or forgotten is the level of opposition from anti-Germans and in particular from the German working class movement.

When I told a friend that I was reviewing a book on the German Resistance, she responded by saying that it must be a remarkably thin book then! I responded by saying that no, it was over 300 pages at which point she quipped that it must be in a very large print size!  No I responded, if I have any criticism of the book it is that the print is too small and the footnotes are almost unreadably tiny.

The German working class has been written out of the history of Nazism. It is a common belief that only the Jews were murdered and but for Churchill and Roosevelt we would be goostepping our way to work today. The contribution of the Soviet Union of course is either minimized or ignored.

This book is therefore a welcome contribution to rectifying the historical record and I recommend it to anyone who seriously wants to understand what the level of repression was that the opponents of Hitler had to work under. As the Introduction says,

‘this book does not aim for objectivity. It is unashamedly written to honour the resistance which had its roots in the working class movement.’[1]

Zionist historiography treats all Germans as one undifferentiated mass. They were all Jew haters, regardless of class. The best known of these is Daniel Goldhagen’s Germans: Hitler’s Willing Executionersin which he posits that:

the vast majority—not all, but the vast majority—of ordinary Germans during the Nazi period were prepared to kill Jews.

Goldhagen argued that Germany during the Nazi period had a political system that was both dictatorial and consensual. Despite the widespread belief that Jews were the primary victims of the Nazis, the first victims of the Nazis were communists and trade unionists. It was they who were imprisoned in Dachau, the first concentration camp which was established in March 1933.

As Ian Birchall notes in the Preface, in the first years of the Nazi regime it was the working class who were their main target not the Jews. Only 5% of the first camp inmates were Jewish. Even by 1937 there were only hundreds of Jewish men in the camps, imprisoned because they were communists not because they were Jews. Indeed in the 1932 Presidential election between Hitler and Hindenburg Hitler’s programme didn’t even mention the Jews.

Moos estimates that at least 3,000 Jewish Germans were involved in the illegal German workers and youth movements in the first phase of the resistance. ‘They were generally not from a Zionist background where the emphasis was on emigration to Palestine.’ (189) The Zionist youth organisations were legal until 1939 (the non-Zionist ones having been banned in 1936).

Some 3 million Germans became political prisoners during the Nazi era and as many as 200,000 were detained in 1933 alone, including 60,000 communists, of whom 2,000 were murdered.

By the end of the war about 150,000 KPD members had been detained, of whom at least 30,000 were executed. Some 1 million leftists were imprisoned in camps of whom 200,000 were murdered.

To those who dismiss the German resistance and that of the millions of slave labourers we should remember that only half the planned number of V2 flying bombs were produced for use against Britain in 1944-45 because of go slows and sabotage. As Merilyn Moose remarks ‘some Londoners will have owed their lives to these acts of bravery.’

The main resistance to the Nazis was the German Communist Party, the KPD. The Social Democratic Party (SPD), put up virtually no resistance and indeed was a party to the repression. In 1918/19 it had set the Freikorps on the workers in the German revolution and in 1929 in Berlin the Prussian SPD government ordered the Police to fire on the May Day demonstrators. On 22 January 1933 the KPD leadership appealed to the SPD leaders to co-operate in opposing the Nazi march on the KPD headquarters, Karl Liebnicht House in Berlin. What the KPD should have done was to appeal to the SPD base but calling them social fascists wasn’t the best way of winning them over.

The SPD leaders said that they would only use legal means to oppose the Nazis. In other words they surrendered, in the name of bourgeois legality, to the Nazis. As our own Labour Party shows, the leaders of the SPD were political cowards and reactionary. However the base of the SPD’s support was the German working class and it was these people whom the KPD’s ‘social fascist’ slogans alienated.

Stalin-Ribbentrop

The decision of Stalin and the KPD leaders to adopt the ‘Third Period’ position that the social democrats were social fascists was criminal. What it was saying was that workers who supported the SPD were no better than the lumpen rabble that made up the Nazi party’s base. As late as February 1932 the KPD CC were saying that the SPD and the Nazis were ‘political twins and equally evil.’ (47)

It was not until the summer of 1935 at the 7^th Congress of the Comintern that the Third Period line was abandoned for Popular Frontism.  But the KPD leaders clung to the old position until 1936.

Steve Cushion compares the Nazi seizure of power in Germany to the successful mobilisation of workers in France who prevented an attempted fascist coup in Paris as being the final nail in the coffin of the Communist International’s Third Period.

Moos points out that Trotsky was urging the KPD to form a united front with the SPD and workers who supported it.  He raised the slogan ‘March separately but strike together’.  Unfortunately Trotskyists were in a political minority.

The reason for the Third Period line was Stalin’s belief that Hitler coming to power would cause problems for the British and French.  The German working class was sacrificed on the altar of Russian foreign policy. The signing of the Molotov-RibbentropPact in August 1939 was the logical continuation of this policy. Stalin used the Pact to repatriate to Germany hundreds of communists who had fled Germany for the Soviet Union. (56)

The Pact was a disaster both for the Communist Party and the anti-fascist movement. The needs of the Stalinist rulers of Russia spelt disaster for Communist Parties in other countries. In France it gave the Daladier government an ideal excuse to repress the left and introduce the death penalty for membership of the Communist Party.

When Hitler took power on 30 January 1933 the KPD leadership refused to even call a demonstration. In sign of just how absurd and delusional were the politics of Stalin’s Third Period, the communist press came out with slogans such as ‘the worse the better’ and ‘After Hitler, it will be us.’  

It didn’t take long for the KPD leadership to learn that the rise of Hitler was not a victory for German workers. Not until 28 February did the KPD Central Committee issue a call to the 3 trade union federations and the SPD for strikes but by then it was too late. (29)

In 1933 53,000 people fled from Germany and 4,000 made their way to the USSR. 70% of them were to lose their lives in Stalin’s purges.

There are heroes too numerous to mention in this book such as Wolfgang Abendroth who, having been expelled from the KPD in 1928 joined the SAP (Socialist Workers Party). Arrested and imprisoned he was forced to serve in Criminal Division 999. He deserted to the Greek partisans ELAS and was imprisoned by the British before becoming a Politics Professor at Marburg University.

Abendroth was the exception. One of the most depressing aspects of this book are the numerous members of the resistance who were tortured and executed. That Stalin facilitated the rise to power of Hitler should serve as a reminder to anyone foolish enough to believe that Stalin was anything other than a monster and a criminal.

Merilyn Moos makes the books purpose clear when she says that history has a political function. It is not a neutral collection of facts. The West German state was supposed to be de-Nazified but this came to a halt with the Cold War. The highest civil servant and aide to Chancellor Konrad Adeneur was Hans Globke, who had been personally responsible for drafting the Reich Citizenship Law which removed citizenship from German Jews as well as the ordinance to force all Jews to take the names Israel or Sarah. He also drafted the laws on Rassenchande which forbade sexual relations between a Jew and non-Jew. Yet the Israeli state at Ben Gurion’s insistence excluded all mention of him at the Eichmann Trial. Silence about Globke was part of the price of German-Israeli rapprochement after the war.

As late as 1956 the Bundestag voted to compensate the widows of SS officers whilst denying compensation to the widows of murdered communists, whose party was outlawed.

The book details the confrontations between Communist militants and the Nazi SA on the streets of Weimar Germany. These confrontations were led by the KPD’s Red Front but the leadership of the KPD was lukewarm about their activities. The KPD leadership had embarked on a policy of trying to win over the SA and Nazi rank and file. That was why not one of the 77 KPD representatives in the 1930-32 Reichstag was Jewish. The Thalman leadership acquiesced in the Nazis’ anti-Semitism by excluding Jews.

Another example of this approach was the joint KPD/SA picket during the transport strike of 1932. It was as if Stalinism had reserved the united front tactic for the Nazis. Yet what took place on the streets of Berlin between 1930 and 1933 was ‘something akin to a civil war’.

It is a myth that with the abolition of the trade unions on May 2^nd1933 that strikes ended. There were more than 200 work stoppages from February 1936 to July 1937 which is remarkable given the presence of the Gestapo in most major factories. In 1938/39 there was a successful go-slow by the Ruhr miners against Goering’s wage cuts and even during the war, in one Chemnitz factory there was a go slow resulting in a reduction of 21% in production.

In the IG Farben factory in 1939 4 workers were sent to prison for smoking and ‘slackers’ were warned that their names would be handed to the Gestapo. A number of workers were executed for ‘incitement to strike’ or ‘sabotage’. This was the benign dictatorship that Zionist historians believe was the lot of ordinary Germans.

The SPD put up no resistance in Germany after 1933. Its leaders abandoned ship. The KPD, despite its ultra-left policies, continued to operate. In 1934 over 1 million papers were distributed in factories and it put out over a million leaflets until 1935/6. By 1935 of the 422  former KPD leaders, 219 had been arrested, 14 assassinated, 125 had gone into exile and 10 had left the party.

There were a number of anti-Nazi splinter groups such as the SAP, which consisted mainly of those who had left the SPD in 1931. There was the KPD Opposition (KPO) which broke from the KPD in 1928, over their opposition to the Third Period and its absurd belief that the workers would spontaneously rise up once Hitler took power.

Willi Brandt

By the spring 1933 some 15,000 members of the SAPwere involved in resistance work. One of their most prominent leaders, Max Kohler survived and joined the SPD after the war. Another prominent member was Willi Brandt, the future Chancellor of Germany.

Alexander Schwab

One of the most interesting groups was the Rote Kämpfer (Red Fighters). Formed in 1931/2 it consisted of about 400 young left-wing socialists. They specialised in hiding Jews and had cells in Berlin, Stuttgart, Hamburg, Karlsruhe and Frankfurt. However by 1936 they had been infiltrated by the Gestapo and their leader, Alexander Schwab and most of the members were arrested and executed.

The two main Trotskyist groups were the Left Opposition and the German section of the 4th International, the International Communists of Germany. The former had about 600 members and the latter about 1,000. It was especially hard hit by the rise of the Nazis. Half their members simply deserted and 150 ended up in the concentration camps. They played virtually no role in the resistance.

Edelweiss Pirates

Extremely important was the role of youth groups. After the passage of the Hitler Youth Act of 1 December 1936 membership became almost compulsory. The rebellion of youth was a combination of culture and politics with a desire to be free. Jazz music and swing were outlawed by the Nazis as ‘degenerate’. The Edelweiss Pirateswere primarily based in Cologne (Navajos) though they had a presence in a number of other cities. They were branded as lazy and the Gestapo declared them a criminal group. One of their favourite activities was assaulting Hitler Youth patrols.  They purchased arms and staged burglaries and theft. They worse unconventional clothes, sang anti-militaristic songs and robbed the homes of the Hitler Youth! On one occasion in 1942 they shot dead a leader of the Hitler Youth and injured another.

As the war progressed they became increasingly political and in 1943 their graffiti read ‘Down with Hitler, Down with Nazi brutality. We want freedom.’ (84)

13 Edelweiss Pirates were hanged in November 1944 in Cologne on Himmler's orders

Merilyn Moos writes that in Duisberg around 1943, the Pirates  travelled in groups of 60 or 70 and attacked leaders of the Hitler Youth with brass knuckles. There was a significant leakage from the Hitler Youth to the Pirates, partly because of a dislike of the doctrine of ‘Aryanism’.

The Piratesoffered shelter to army deserters, escaped prisoners from the concentration camps and forced labour camps. They also made raids on arms depots and engaged in sabotaging war production. From 1941-43 they defied the Nazi regime by distributing leaflets to working class sections of Hamburg.

This chimes with what I heard when I visited friends in Hamburg. I was told that at night there were parts of Hamburg, which had been a radical left city, where the Nazis wouldn’t go unless they were armed.

However the Gestapo hated them. In December 1942 in Dusseldorf the Gestapo rounded up over 1,000 and they were treated brutally. In Cologne there was a shoot out between the Pirates and the Gestapo in which the Chief of the Gestapo was killed. On 25 October 1944, Heinrich Himmler ordered a crackdown on the group and in November of that year, a group of thirteen people, the heads of the Ehrenfelder Gruppe, were publicly hanged in Cologne. The Edelweißpiraten hanged included six teenagers, among them Bartholomäus Schink, (Barthel), a former member of the local Navajos. Fritz Theilen survived.

Moos suggest that the Edelweiss Pirates in Cologne contained a network of 3,000 mostly working class kids. The Wuppertal Edelweiss Pirates were predominantly working class and Moos describes them as street kids for whom the Pirates were their family.

Jean Julich

Because the Nazi judges continued on into West Germany, it was not until 2005 that their Gestapo records were expunged. Jean Jülich: One of the Edelweiss Pirates, who resisted the Nazis

In the mountainous areas of Saxon Switzerland many opponents of the Nazis organised themselves as outdoor, mountaineering or hiking groups such as the United Climbing Division (VKA). Their advantage was that they could hold meetings in lonely out of the way places.

Heinz Kapelle

German Resistance Groups

The Kapelle Group continued the resistance in 1938/9 when most groups had been destroyed and infiltrated. With the invasion of Poland the group produced anti-war leaflets which they deposited in phone booths and plastered on walls. However the Gestapo between 15 and 17 October 1939 began a crackdown on resistance activities and Heinz Kapelle and Erich Ziegler were arrested and tortured. Kapelle was murdered at Plotzensee prison in Berlin in July 1941.

Robert Uhrig

The Uhrig group spanned both periods of resistance, before and after war broke out. Led by Robert Uhrig, a member of the KPD, by the beginning of 1942 Uhrig had links with 89 factory groups and cells in several factories in Berlin, especially Siemens.

Amongst the many heroes of the group was Werner Seelenbinder, a wrestler and KPD member who refused to give the Hitler salute when receiving his medal at the German Wrestling Championship. He was given a 16 month ban on competing but was allowed to participate in the 1936 Olympic Games. He became active in the Uhrig group as a courier in 1941 but in February 1942 he was arrested with 65 others. Severely tortured on 24 October 1944 he was beheaded.

The Gestapo had infiltrated the group and Uhrig and 200 others were arrested also in February 1942. Uhrig was sent to Sachsenhausen KZ and guillotined on 21 August 1944.

Bernhard Bastelein

Another group was the Bastelein group which mainly organised in Hamburg. By December 1941 the group had cells in about 30 Hamburg factories, shipyards and wharves. In October 1942 the Gestapo uncovered their activities and of their 200 activists 100 were arrested and 60 sentenced to death. Bernhard Bastelein was moved in August 1943 to Potzensee prison in Berlin where he would almost certainly have been executed but for the fact that in January 1944 the prison was bombed and he escaped.

The Saefkow-Jacob Bastlein Organisation had a membership of about 500 and in 1943-44 it was probably the biggest and most active of resistance groups. About 30 of the group were involved in relief operations for Jews. The group concentrated on making contacts with foreign slave labourers in factories such as Askania.

As the war progressed and more Germans were called up, so millions of slave labourers were imported into Germany to keep the wheels of production moving.  Even Jews, who had been deported to make Germany Judenrein, were brought back to work in the factories.

Gad Beck

One group who I wish to single out is the Baum group. It was the only organised and sustained Jewish resistance group in Germany. It included both Zionists and Communists. One such was Gad Beck, a gay Jewish Zionist. 3 months before the Nazi surrender he was betrayed by a Jew working for the Gestapo. However he survived.

Herbert Baum

Merilyn Moos writes that the leader, Herbert Baum saw himself primarily as a communist not a Jew. Many young Jews regarded communism as the answer to the political crisis in Germany and were antagonistic to a collective Jewish identity, seeing it as bourgeois.

Today with the advent of the State of Israel and its replication of the racial supremacist politics of Nazi Germany we can but pay tribute to those Jews who, whilst fighting the Nazis opposed Zionism.

There was also a relatively high proportion of women involved in the Baum group, almost all of whom were involved in the firebombingof the Soviet Paradise exhibition in Berlin’s Lustgarten on 18 May 1942.

Marianne Baum

The Soviet-Paradise exhibition was staged by Goebbels as an attempt to show the poverty and degradation of the Soviet Union. It was believed that the destruction of the exhibition would awake the spirit of resistance in the German working class.

Unfortunately the planning and implementation was inept but they managed to burn down a small part of the exhibition before fire fighters arrived. Most of the group were arrested soon after and they were sentenced to death and executed in Berlin-Plotzensee prison.

Although consisting of mainly communists the Baum Group condemned the Hitler-Stalin pact from the start. Towards the end of the Nazi regime the size of the anti-Nazi opposition was considerable in some places. In Hamburg an Anti-Fascist Committee was established with 700 communists and others, 200 of whom were organised as military units.  In the Blohm und Voss shipyard 250-300 workers were organised into anti-Nazi groups.

Resistance Towards the End of the War

In Bremen the communists had about 200 activists. Lubeck KPD had about 30 members with a group of 225 armed Germans and foreign workers. In Hanover the Gestapo discovered frequent acts of sabotage and in Leipzig armed uprisings were planned. As the Allies approached they issued a leaflet calling for no resistance and in fact they succeeded in ensuring that there was no firefight.

In Cologne the opposition was particularly strong but the Allied bombing was particularly heavy and created hostility to the Allies.

Moos mentions the National Committee for a Free Germany (NKVD) which was created by the Soviet Union in July 1943 in a POW camp. The Soviets pursued a strategy of trying to turn German POWs against Hitler. The NKVD’s name was revealing. ‘Germany needs to be freed from Hitler, not transformed into a socialist society.’

There were also links between the NKVD and the aristocratic Kreisau Circle whose figurehead was Helmuth von Moltkeon whose estate the group met. Moltke was arrested on 19 January 1944 in connection with the purges of resistance elements within the Abwehr. He was executed in January 1945 though his wife Freya carried on the struggle. The circle aimed for a social democratic and humanist Germany after the war as part of a united Europe.

Unlike much of occupied Europe, in Germany in the last years of the war working class resistance movements were all but smashed. ‘There remains the question as to how far the Comintern contributed to Nazism’s demise.’

By late summer 1944 some 7.6 million foreign workers and POWs were working in Germany. They comprised between 25% and 40% of all workers. The Nazis did not want to employ ‘animals’ in their strategic industries but they had no choice. ‘Economic need trumped ideology and foreign forced labour became the backbone of the German war economy.’ Not just Russians but up to 200,000 Hungarian Jews were employed. However sexual contact with German women was punished by public execution.

Up till May 1940 more than 1 million Polish workers were employed in Germany. Indeed in the farms they had vacated the Zionists organised their kibbutzim, something the Bund condemned as scabbing. There were some 2 million French workers and 1 million Italians in Germany. The largest contingent, 3 million, was from the Soviet Union, of whom over half were women.

There was a very high rate of arrests for refusal to work. In Berlin in December 1941 out of 605 arrests 345 were for refusal to work. As Nazi Germany looked as if it would be defeated from early 1944 onwards so foreign workers gained in confidence. At the Cologne Klocknerplant sabotage was carried out in the engine plant.

George Schumann

Some Soviet  POWs attempted to build anti-Nazi resistance groups. Very few POWs or other forced labourers succeeded in making contact with resistance groups but in Munich the resistance group under metalworker Karl Zimmer did and they formed the Anti-Nazi German People’s Front. Another group with contacts with Soviet POWs was the Leipsig group led by Georg Schumann, a former KPD member of the Reichstag.

The European Union, formed in Berlin in 1939 by Georg Groscurth and Robert Havemann was about 50 strong. It had high level contacts in the Nazi regime and it wrote a number of leaflets calling for a united socialist Europe. Saved from the death penalty because of the value of his work Havemann was dismissed from his academic post at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin in 1948 because of American pressure. In 1963 he was dismissed as professor from the Humboldt University of Berlin in East Germany. He was a permanent dissident.

There is also a section on the communist resistance in the camps, including Auschwitz and Buchenwald where it saved a number of people including children. Indeed at Buchenwald the resistance took charge and ousted the SS as the Americans approached.

At Auschwitz the resistance, which was weaker, gave the warning to the Sonderkommando that they were about to be murdered which led to the 7 October 1944 revolt and the destruction of one of the crematoria. Unfortunately the revolt had come too late as the Nazis were already preparing to destroy the extermination apparatus.

In Flossenburg 100-300 pairs of airplane wings were destroyed though the reprisals were savage.

There was also considerable resistance within the armed forces, especially as the situation turned militarily against Germany. One division in particular, Strafdivision 999 (Criminal Division 999), which included a high proportion of politicals, simply deserted. 400-500 joined the Greek Resistance. In the end the 999 divisions were disarmed for fear of further rebellions, especially on the eastern front.

The 999s played a significant part in the Greek resistance and the graves of those executed were decorated with wreaths and flowers by the Greeks. It is estimated that of the 12 million German conscripts by the war’s end between 300,000 and 500,000 deserted.

Moos argues that the ‘disproportionate numbers and leading role of historically Jewish people in the resistance was largely ignored until the 1970s.’ Why?  Because the resistance was dominated by communists and historians were influenced by the cold war.

Jewish historians were not in general concerned with resistance of a left wing and illegal form… Both German Jewish historiography and the British based Leo Baeck Institute had previously largely ignored political resistance to the Nazi regime by anti-fascists who were only loosely connected to the established Jewish community. (193)

Also, with the exception of the White Rose group, underground groups did not emphasise the anti-Semitic character of Nazism.

There is a section on Jewish Youth. The Zionist youth groups like Hashomer Hatzair were legal until 1939. The main non-Zionist group was Kameradenwhich split into Zionist, non-Zionist and Communist factions. On occasion the Zionists took part in resistance activities such as when the socialist Zionist Borochov-Jugend put out the polemical underground paper Anti-Sturmer a riposte to Julius Streicher’s virulently anti-Semitic paper.

The most militant of the anti-Zionist youth groups in Kamaraden was the Schwarzer Haufen(Black Block) many of whom joined the KPD   or the Trotskyists or KPO. Many of its activists were later captured and murdered.

Because the left parties and their organisations were banned, many young people who would have joined left groups joined Jewish groups instead. This helped provide cover for the recruitment of young Jews for anti-fascist propaganda work and cemented ties with the KPD. For example many Jewish women were instrumental in helping to build several communist resistance circles in Berlin.

There is a chapter on Cologne which out of a population of ¾ million had about 10,000 in the resistance of whom 3,000 were active in the working class movement. Unfortunately Allies under Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris committed terrible war crimes when they repeatedly bombed Cologne. Apparently the civilian population dropped to 453,000 in 1945.

The resistance was led by the KPD.  For every SPD member arrested there were 20 from the KPD. Because of Cologne’s proximity to the border it became the link town for the SPD and its exile organisation (SOPADE). What distinguished Cologne from other places was the role of the Catholic resistance. A few Catholics, mostly priests and lay officials of the Catholic workers movement put up active resistance.

A key feature of Cologne was the importance of foreign labour. By September 1944 there were about 30,000 inmates of concentration camps in Cologne, 40% of whom were Russian or Ukrainians.  From November on the rate of executions on portable gallows of foreign labourers increased exponentially.

In August 1943 alone the Gestapo arrested over 2,000 people in Cologne. From 1944 the Gestapo deported thousands of Cologne Jews apparently and killed over 1,500 Sinti and Roma people, homosexuals and other ‘anti-social’ elements.

By October/November 1944 the Nazi authorities were close to collapse in Cologne. ‘A diaspora of the disaffected developed. What happened in Cologne was close to open rebellion, even civil war.’

At the start of the war the Gestapo targeted the political enemies of the state. Amongst the first were the veterans of the Spanish civil war. They were deported to Mauthausen where almost 75% were murdered. Annihilated through labour.

It is estimated that in the early months of 1945 some 300,000 inmates of the camps were murdered. Himmler had stated in April 1945 that no prisoner should fall into enemy hands.

Merilyn Moos argues that

‘it was the decimation of the left, the anti-Nazi resistance and its ideological opposition to Nazism which was an essential prerequisite for the construction of the Jew as a racialised outsider and the anti-Semitic practices which followed.’

The precondition for the holocaust was the elimination of the left. Zionist historians like Yehuda Bauer and Lucy Dawidowicz argued that Hitler was engaged primarily in a ‘war against the Jews’.

In the last weeks of the war about 120 anti-fascist groups sprang up.  In Leipsig the group had 150,000 supporters. They urged soldiers to desert and demanded that the Allies should not cause further destruction.  Moos speculates that the German resistance also helped hasten the end of the war.

German Volunteers in the French Resistance

The second section of the book is on German Volunteers in the French Resistance by Steve Cushion. Steve points out that the large number of foreign fighters in the French liberation whilst so many French citizens collaborated was uncomfortable.

Once the German army invaded a campaign of urban terrorism was launched against them culminating in Nice when Max Brings, a Jewish German communist blew up the officers mess after Christmas 1943.  Max Brings impersonated an SS officer and entered an SS training centre in Aix en Provence. Together with August Mahnke and other members of the resistance, they obtained the files of the SD (intelligence police) on the resistance and made off with them. 

The Travail allemande was an initiative in which German speakers infiltrated the occupation authorities in order to aid the French resistance. French Trotskyists also attempted to spread propaganda amongst the German soldiers. Both initiatives paid a very high price in terms of lives lost but there were some successes and some German soldiers were persuaded to desert or act as informants. But the most important desertions came from the SS recruits from Eastern Europe and Bosnia who often shot their German officers.

Veterans of the Spanish civil war played a key part in organising armed resistance to the Nazis. With the defeat of the Spanish Republican government thousands of International Brigaders and a quarter of a million refugees crossed the border into France. The Communist CGTU trade union federation sought to organise these and other immigrants into the MOI (Immigrant Labour Force).

Cushion describes how the large Italian presence in France, over a million and a half people, were augmented by refugees from Mussolini.  They were largely based in the mining regions and were to the fore in organising a successful week long strike in May 1941.

Despite skepticism amongst the KPD leadership in France about the Travail Allemande after 1941 young German speaking women would make the acquaintance of German soldiers who would be passed on to their superiors. There was a heavy price to pay and over 100 activists, mainly women were tortured and executed.

However by August 1944 there were 37 soldiers’ committees, 51 groups comprising between 2 and 5 members and 75 soldiers who joined individually.

An example of the activity of the communist resistance was that of Wally Heckling, a courier for the KPD in Paris. She gained employment as an accountant for a German firm and managed to secure the employment of her comrades. Taking over the administration of the company they obtained access to stamps that validated workers’ identity passes as well as employing French comrades on the run.

Berthold Blank, a member of the SPD in Leipzig, was the first Wehrmacht deserter in Toulouse. He was posted, as a punishment for returning late, to the Birkenau death camp where he became aware of the extermination programme. He passed this information on to the writers of Soldat am Mittelmeer.

Walter Kramer, was an NCO stationed in Toulouse where he ran a Wehrmacht bookshop. He was able to forewarn of a big round-up of Jews in Toulouse.

Anton Schmid

Sergeant Anton Schmid took an active part in the Jewish resistance. His apartment in Vilnius was a refuge for Jewish partisans. In February 1942 he was arrested, tried by a German military court and executed on 13 April 1942.

In Italy the Garibaldi Brigades were organised by the Italian Communist Party. The Piemonte region was a stronghold of the partisan movement with thousands of combatants by mid-April 1945 whose activity spilled out into a general strike and insurrection. The partisan liberation of Italian cities began in Bologna on 21 April 1945.

Martin Monath

Martin Monath was a Berliner who had been a member of the German section of Hashomer Hatzair, the socialist Zionist group. HH’s Hebrew language magazine was permitted in Nazi Germany until 1938 even though it contained some of Trotsky’s articles! Trotsky of course rejected the idea that the struggle against fascism should be subordinated to the ‘democratic’ bourgeoisie.

Monath was involved in contacts between a German soldiers’ committee and the resistance in Brest. Unfortunately the Gestapo got wind of the group and during  October 1943 25  German soldiers and 25 Trotskyists were arrested. 12 soldiers were immediately executed.

Martin Monath

Monath escaped and in early 1944 returned to Paris. Resuming work on the papers Arbeiter and Soldat he was arrested by the French police and handed over to the Gestapo. He was tortured and shot just days before the general strike and insurrection broke out in Paris.  Another figure involved in this work was Robert Cruau in Brest who was also killed by the Gestapo in October 1943.

There is a fascinating chapter on  ‘The Revolt of the Ost Legion’. The 13^th Handzar division consisting of Bosnian Muslims was formed following the massacre of 2,000 Muslims by Serb nationalists. The Nazis were approached to form a local gendarmerie for the protection of local Muslims. 

However it was sent to Villefranche de Rouergue in Southern France in August 1943. All the officers were Nazis who treated the men with racist contempt. On 16-17 September they staged a rebellion executing their officers. Unfortunately one of them was only wounded and got away. SS reinforcements captured 100 of the escapees and shot them but those that got away joined either the French or Yugoslav partisans.

According to Stephen Schwartz the Handschar Division had been sent to France for retraining on the Jewish Question. Cushion details a whole series of revolts by captured Russians, Ukranians, Azeris and Poles who had agreed to fight for Hitler. Sent to France to replace German troops who had been sent to the East they soon rebelled: ‘the counterproductive nature of German racism now became evident.’

It was Nazi repression that led to the defeat of a strike by 100,000 miners in the Forbidden Zone in Northern France. This convinced the miners that they had to resort to armed resistance. The mine owners worked closely with the Gestapo handing over names of ringleaders, 270 of whom were deported to the concentration camps.

One factory owner remarked that  ‘I would rather see my country occupied by the Germans than my factory by the workers.’ As Cushion observed when the employers are seen as traitors, the class struggle appears patriotic. However the Popular Front policy of the Communist Party relegated class struggle to an alliance with Ango-American imperialism.

‘The main political outcome of the strike was to provide the French resistance with its most solid base.’

In 1942 and 1943 over half the armed attacks and sabotage in France occurred in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais. The tactic of individual assassinations became replaced by derailing troop trains.

By 1943 with their losses in Russia the Nazis were forced to recruit what was essentially slave labour from France. 600,000 French workers were sent to Germany with another 200,000 managing to evade capture. It was massively unpopular and was an important factor in alienating French public opinion from the Petain government. It led to the growth of a rural resistance.

Of the half million Spanish Republican refugees who fled to France some 120,000 were still living in France in 1940.  Both the Nazis and Petain, who was a friend of Franco, had a special hatred for them.  About 15,000 were interned in French concentration camps.

With the end of the war these refugees became an embarrassment as Franco was rehabilitated by the United States as an anti-communist ally. The former heroes of the resistance became ‘foreign terrorists’.

Gerhard Leo

Gerhard Leo was the son of a Viennese social democrat, Wilhem Leon. The family moved to France in 1933 after his father had been released from Oranienburg concentration camp. He joined the resistance where he edited a German soldiers magazine Soldat am Mittelmeer.Betrayed he ended up in Toulouse prison before ending up in front of a German Court Martial accused of treason.

Oradour-sur-Glane

Because he had been stripped of his German citizenship he couldn’t be tried for treason and he was sent to Paris for interrogation and retrial. The train was intercepted by the Maquis. Leo survived an attempt by the police to murder him and joined in the successful attack on the regional capital Tulle on 8 June 1944.  Unfortunately the SS Das Reich division was en route to Normandy and Tulle lay in its path. Gerhard was one of 99 people hanged from lampposts.  On 10 June the SS Das Reich division destroyed the French town of Oradour-sur-Glanemurdering 642 of its inhabitants – men, women and children.

Cushion remarks that

‘if the German volunteers who fought in France are a problem for French historiography then they are doubly difficult for a nationalist reading of German history.’

PCF, the French Communist Party, accepted the role of junior partner in the post-war Gaullist government. Part of the price was buying into the nationalist narrative and downplaying the role of the FTP-MOI, the immigrant and foreigner’s section of the French resistance.

As Cushion says, the decision to form the FTP-MOI had been an ‘unusually far-sighted act of internationalism that contributed significantly to the fight against fascism.’ Cushion quotes Robert Gildea as describing the Jewish component as ‘the most militant and effective’ of the foreign fighters as they were ‘Dead men on Leave’.

Cushion concluded that

‘the principal contribution of these anti-fascist activists is to undermine the idea of a citizen’s loyalty to the Nation as their primary duty.’

Cushion and Moos conclude by saying that

‘the present political conjuncture in the UK includes some frightening similarities with final period of the Weimar Republic’. 

I agree and it is something that those fools on the left who became part of the Brexit campaign should ponder, in particular those who believed in Lexit, which was a left version of British nationalism.

Tony Greenstein

Moshe Machover and Tony Greenstein will speak on what the differences are between the Jerusalem Declaration and the IHRA definitions of anti-Semitism

Register here for the meeting

The Jerusalem Declaration on Anti-Semitism was issued on March 25 2021. It had been a year in gestation and was sponsored by Israel’s Van Leer Institute. The original idea had been that the 8 people drawing it up should meet up in Jerusalem, hence the name, but COVID-19 put paid to that.

I know of only 2 of the 7 academics and 1 journalist, David Feldman and Brian Klug.  David Feldman, head of the (Pears) Institute of Anti-Semitism at Birkbeck College is a Zionist who has moved to the right, effectively accepting the anti-Semitism smear campaign in the Labour Party. I have written a couple of articles, here and here. Needless to say they are extremely critical of what I see as Feldman’s intellectual dishonesty.

I know Brian Klug better. He is a non-Zionist but as I wrote two years ago “the false anti-Semitism juggernaut seems to have impaired Brian’s critical faculties”. I was referring to an article by Brian in the Jewish Quarterly ‘The Left and the Jews.’ In it Brian discovered, without anything in the way of evidence, that whilst the Zionists’ anti-Semitism campaign in the Labour Party was about Zionism, the ‘grounds for disquiet go deep and they go back a long way”. In fact they went back to June 1975 and UN resolution 3379, which declared that “Zionism is a form of racism”. Brian saw this as rendering Zionism “evil” and that was why the Board of Deputies and all the gaggle of Zionist organisations had it in for Corbyn!

Like so many intellectuals when under political pressure Brian gave way.  Zionism is a form of racism and Israel is its true expression. The reasons for the campaign against Corbyn had nothing to do with UN Resolution 3379. I recalled in my article on David Feldman’s political cowardice the case of Victor Klemperer, a Professor at the Technical University of Dresden. He had converted to Christianity but he was considered by the Nazis as a Jew racially. He was fortunate in that being married to an Aryan he was a Privileged Jew and thus exempt from deportation. In fact the Nazis tried to reverse this but the protest at Rosenstrasse by their non-Jewish wives caused Goebbels to reverse their arrest by the Gestapo.

Under the April 1933 Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service academics were considered civil servants. This led to the dismissal of Jewish academics. Klemperer was ‘lucky’. He was not immediately dismissed because he was a decorated veteran of the 1914-1918 War and President Hindenburg had insisted that Jewish veterans be excluded from the provisions of the Act.

However Hindenburg died in August 1934. At the end of April 1935 Klemperer was dismissed. Richard Evans describes how, when Klemperer was dismissed ‘none of his colleagues did anything to help him; the only sympathy came from a secretary.’ [The Third Reich in Power p.568] This behaviour was true of most of German intellectuals, most of whom swore fealty to the Nazis.

In other words most academics like a quiet life and are more than willing to trim their views to the current political climate. Unfortunately Brian was not immune from this.

Nonetheless both Brian Klug and David Feldman have performed an important service by being part of the team that produced the Jerusalem Declaration on Anti-Semitism.  It is not, as I have already written, perfect by any means but it is, unlike the IHRA, about anti-Semitism not anti-Zionism.

What has been its reception by our enemies, since that is the test of whether or not it is useful?  The bourgeois media has been totally silent on it after having been so voluble about Labour ‘anti-Semitism’.  Strange that. Jonathan Freedland seems to have gone quiet. The Zionist reaction has also been muted. There has been nothing said by the Board of Deputies.

However a number of bodies have made their views felt and it has all been negative. Ben Cohen in the Jewish News Syndicatedismissed it as Yet another attempt to sanitize anti-Zionism. Dave Rich of Mossad’s Community Security Trust has been particularly busy. His article ‘We don’t need another definition of Jew hate’ appeared in the Jewish Chronicleand in Algemeiner, an American Zionist rag, as ‘Why the Flawed ‘Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism’ Risks Setting Back Efforts to Fight Antisemitism’. Interestingly when I posted a comment in the latter publication they refused to put it up. The Jewish Chronicle also refused to print a letter by Tony Klug in response to Rich.  I guess Zionists don’t do debate.

Fathom, the Zionists’ main theoretical journal published an article by Cary Nelson entitled ‘Accommodating the New Antisemitism: a Critique of ‘The Jerusalem Declaration’. After prompting by me they did at least publish a reply. It is the only response so I guess Fathom doesn’t have a wide circulation!

I thought as preparation for my talk tomorrow that it would be useful to publish an article on the IHRA and its origin.

The IHRA– Its Structure and Origins

The first thing to be said about the IHRA is that it rests on one simple assumption.  It is that criticism of Israel is motivated by anti-Semitism unless the person accused can demonstrate otherwise. So for example you might be a trenchant critic of Israel’s theft and confiscation of Palestinian land, its demolition of Palestinian homes and its treatment of Palestinian children.

However unless you can demonstrate that you are prepared to criticise the Chinese and Burmese governments, to name but two, then you are guilty of ‘double standards’ and thus you are an anti-Semite.

Of course you may criticise Israel exclusively because you are a Palestinian who has just lost her home or her children to Israeli snipers or both.  You may be a child of Palestinian refugees with a burning sense of injustice but unless you have been a member of the Venezuela Solidarity Campaign you are an anti-Semite!

It is clear or should be to all but the narrowest of minds that whether or not you criticise Israel to the exclusion of all other issues has nothing to do with anti-Semitism. I concentrate on Israel, not because I love Burma or Egypt or any other ally of Israel but because, being Jewish, I take exception to the Israeli state claiming that its actions are undertaken on my behalf.

The IHRA Definition first saw light of day when the European Union Monitoring Committee [EUMC] issued the Working Definition of Anti-Semitism [WDA] in January 2005. In 2009 the EUMC was replaced by the Fundamental Rights Agency which, in 2013 decided it would no longer host the WDA on its website.

The idea for a definition that conflated anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism originated with Dinah Porat, Chief Historian at Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust Propaganda Museum and then at Tel Aviv University’s Kantor Centre for the Study of Contemporary Jewry.

Poland's Anti-Semitic President - Mateusz Morawiecki

Porat was someone who would later put the seal of approvalon Netanyahu’s sordid deal with the far-Right Polish Government over a 2018 law which made any reference to Polish complicity in the holocaust a criminal offence.

Even Yehuda Bauer, the most prominent Zionist Holocaust historian condemned the deal as ‘collaboration’ in ‘Holocaust distortion’.

“It’s a betrayal of the memory of the Holocaust and the interest of the Jewish people. And the reason for it is entirely pragmatic: the diplomatic, political, and economic ties between the Israeli government and the government of Poland.”

At a conference ‘The Working Definition of Antisemitism - Six Years After’ organised by the Stephen Roth Institute,Mike Whine explained that the reasons for creating the WDA were

‘the demonization and disproportionate criticism of Israel which masqueraded as anti-Zionism, and which came increasingly from Muslims’.

Kenneth Stern of the American Jewish Committee, the WDA’s principal drafter, confessed that he was at first sceptical, quoting U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart that although obscenity was difficult to define, “I know it when I see it.”.

My father who took part in the Battle of Cable Street against the Oswald Moseley’s British Union of Fascistsdidn’t need a definition of anti-Semitism to know what he was fighting! This should be our first question.  Why is there a need for a definition?

Stern claimed in a paper ‘The WDA – A Reappraisal’at a Conference The WDA – 6 Yearsin August-September 2010 that the problem was that the EUMC had defined anti-Semitism in terms of Jewish stereotypes. a ‘clunker of a definition’. He gave as an example of the problem what if someone attacked a Jew because they held to traditional stereotypes of Jews (corrupt, conspiratorial etc.) That was clearly anti-Semitic. However if they were attacked because of what Israel had done then that was not anti-Semitic.

Stern believed it was ‘crazy’ to focus on the motive of the attacker. What mattered was the fact of the attack. The problem with this is that if a Jew is attacked, not because s/he is Jewish but as part of a random street attack then clearly that isn’t anti-Semitic. Motive is vital.

The solution to Stern’s non-problem lies in what most people understand as anti-Semitism, the Oxford English Dictionary definition‘hostility to or prejudice against Jewish people’ has been extended by the JDA to ‘discrimination, prejudice, hostility or violence against Jews as Jews (or Jewish institutions as Jewish).’

If someone attacks someone because they are Jewish, then that is anti-Semitism. This includes if they are attacked because of what Israel has done.

What Stern doesn’t say, because it formed a consensus at the conference, was the Zionist need to label anti-Zionist and Palestine solidarity activity, in particular BDS, as anti-Semitic. Stern never explained how creating a definition that included a Jew being attacked on the streets of Paris‘as a stand-in for an Israeli’ was solved by creating a definition whose illustrations of anti-Semitism included

‘denying the Jewish people the right to self-determination or

‘Applying double standards by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.’

This argument over ‘double standards’ has a long pedigree. Apologists for Apartheid in South Africa were forever complaining of the hypocrisy of those who attacked it but not surrounding Black states with worse human rights records. India says the same today over Kashmir.  Every repressive regime and state believes it’s being singled out unfairly. If Stern’s logic holds true then all international solidarity work is racist.

The list of speakers at this Conference included Graciela Ben Dror from the Jewish only religious settlement of Moreshet in the Northern Galilee. If you go to the website of this settlement you read that their Community Rabbi ‘Rabbi Yitzchak Cohen,(is) a graduate of the Mercaz HaRav and Ateret Cohanim Yishivot.’ It is difficult to find two more racist Orthodox Jewish religious institutions in Israel.

Mercaz HaRav has produced a generation of racist rabbis such as Moshe Levinger and Shmuel Eliyahu. The Ateret Cohanimare messianic madmen who want to construct the Third Temple and demolish the Mosque of the Golden Dome and Al Aqsa. They are engaged in ethnically cleansing East Jerusalem of Palestinians through the use of subterfuge, forged documents and using the Absentee Property Law which enabled the confiscation of land and property from Israeli Arabs who were not expelled in 1948. In the Orwellian language of this Act they were ‘present-absentees’. Like all colonial peoples they were present but absent and invisible.

The list of sponsors of this conference included Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Israel’s Ministry of Public Affairs and the Diaspora, the Kantor Centre and the World Zionist Organisation. The only sponsor from outside Israel, the Jews they were allegedly concerned about, was the US Joint Distribution Committee.

Tammi Rossman-Benjamin of the McCarthyist Amcha Initiative

I don’t doubt Stern’s personal sincerity when he says he opposes the use of the IHRA for anything other than the collection of data on anti-Semitic attacks, but he is a good man who has fallen among thieves. He is also remarkably naive. Stern said that some Jewish groups were using the WDA in an ‘inappropriate way’. But is that surprising given the bona fides of those who organised the conference?

Stern has come under criticism from right-wing Zionists like Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, whose Amcha Initiativesought to prevent Israeli Professor Ilan Pappe speaking at California State University.

When Stern co-signed a statement with Cary Nelson, President of the American Association of University Professors, suggesting that supporters of Israel were using the WDA to impose censorship on campus he was criticised by the AJC as ‘ill-advised’. Stern has recoiled from the Frankenstein he had helped create.

Stern has spent much of the past decade criticising the ‘abuse’ of the WDA/IHRA. In testimony to Congress in November 2017 he argued that ‘The definition was not drafted, and was never intended, as a tool to target or chill speech on a college campus.’ Perhaps not in his eyes but that was certainly not how his fellow Zionists saw it.

Stern stated that ‘if one has the task of collecting data on antisemitism, it is unworkable to require a clear view of what is in the mind of any actor’ yet that is precisely what the IHRA/WDA does do. It sets a number of political tests of peoples’ views, such as do you think there is any comparison between Israel and Nazi Germany or do you think Israel is a racist state and concludes from that that they are anti-Semitic. Why else include amongst the 11 ‘illustrations of anti-Semitism’ 7 which single out criticism of Israel?

Stern is offended at the way that the IHRA has been used, singling out as ‘most egregious, an off-campus group’the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism which called on Professor Rachel Gould’s employer, Bristol University, to dismiss her for writing an articleBeyond Anti-Semitismon how the holocaust intimidates critics of Israel. 

Stern followed this up with an article which talked about ‘the chilling of expressions that pro-Israel Jews find disturbing’ and how right-wing Jews were weaponising his definition.

The IHRA Rises from the Ashes of the WDA

Following the disavowal of the WDA by the FRA it appeared that the WDA had died a death. It had met with opposition in universities and the lecturers union, the Association of University Teachers, passed policy opposing it. Yet in 2016, like Dracula’s undead, the WDA was reborn as the IHRA’s Working Definition of Anti-Semitism.

The IHRA is an inter-governmental body of 31 states. Its adoption of the WDA was first announcedon May 11 2016 in a scrappy press release from the Chair of its Plenary in Bucharest. The WDA was a definition that anti-Semitic governmentsin Hungary and Poland were more than happy with. Donald Trump used an Executive Order to try and incorporate it into Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. This is the same man who describedneo-Nazis in Charlottesville as ‘fine people’ whilst telling four Black Congress members to ‘go back home’whilst simultaneously condemning them for ‘anti-Semitism’! Trump’s support for the IHRA didn’t prevent him telling American Jews that they were disloyal to Israel which was their ‘real home’.

The IHRA Definition of Anti-Semitism

The IHRA definition is almost exactly identical to the WDA. The actual definition consists of 38 words. It comes with a statement that it is a ‘non-legally binding working definition of antisemitism’.

The adoption by the IHRA of the WDA was a breakthrough in the Zionist movement’s battle against BDS.  Since 2016 the IHRA has been used throughout Europe and the United States as a means of attacking BDS. That is its main purpose.

The reasons for the IHRA’s success are political. The WDA is incoherent, contradictory, vague and even anti-Semitic. It adds nothing to the debate on anti-Semitism. It is or should be obvious that a 500+ word ‘definition’ is, by definition, not a definition!

The IHRA’s adoption is testimony to the strategic importance of Israel in Western foreign policy and the desire of imperialism to put debate about the legitimacy of the West’s settler watchdog beyond the bounds of acceptable discourse. It is there to close down debate.

Opposition to ‘anti-Semitism’ provides a moral legitimacy to Western imperialism. European leaders can proudly boast of their opposition to anti-Semitism whilst criminalisingthose who rescue refugees from drowning. The lessons of the holocaust don’t extend to refugees or to the fact that if the gates of the USA and Britain had been open during the war far fewer Jews would have died.

The IHRA has proved politically useful to the Labour Right. Why? Because it plays to the deep fissures on the left caused by identity politics. Because the majority of Western Jews define themselves as Zionists many have come to see criticism of Zionism and Israel as an attack on their identity and therefore anti-Semitic. There is nothing new in this. Critics of South Africa’s Apartheid used to be accused of being ‘anti-White’.

Racism has been redefined. Instead of being an attack on someone because of fixed and unchangeable characteristics, it is now an attack on peoples’ identity. This is the poisonous legacy of identity politics.

So if the majority of Jews adopt an identity based on support for a racist state then anti-Zionism is redefined as anti-Semitism. Israel becomes the Jew among the nations.

Using this ‘logic’ opposition to the Hindu supremacist regime of Narendra Modi’s BJP in India makes one Hinduphobic.  This is precisely what is being argued by Hindu racists who declare that opposition to the occupation of Kashmir makes one Hinduphobic. Keir Starmer has accepted this by reversing Labour’s policy supporting Kashmiri self-determination.

If there had been a large number of White South African émigrés in Britain then they could have claimed that being anti-Apartheid was racist because it denied them the right to define their own identity. Apartheid, like Zionism, believed in ‘separate development’.

So popular is the fight against ‘anti-Semitism’ these days that fascists and racists from Trump and Steve Bannon to Germany’s neo-Nazi AfD and Tommy Robinsonall oppose it. Even Richard Spencer, neo-Nazi founder of the alt-Right declares himself a White Zionist.

When people hear the word ‘anti-Semitism’ they think ‘holocaust’. What better way to rebut criticism than to associate your opponent with the holocaust? When the Labour Right attacked Corbyn they weaponised anti-Semitism. Corbyn became, in the words of Margaret Hodge, a ‘fucking anti-Semite’ even though according to John Bercow, former Jewish Speaker of the House of Commons, there wasn’t ‘a whiff of anti-Semitism’ about him. It was easier to attack the left for ‘anti-Semitism’ than for opposing austerity. Anti-Semitism provided the Right with a moral narrative that being pro-austerity didn’t give them. As Marx explained the ruling ideas in every epoch are the ideas of its ruling class, however illogical they may be!

Only this explains the wall to wall support from the British media - from the Sun to the BBC and Guardian - for what Stern called the ‘bastardised’ version the IHRA. The successful deployment of the IHRA involved the use of the 11 illustrations in isolation. I wrote to Stern and asked him whether or not the IHRA had ever been intended to become a tool with which to brand individuals as anti-Semitic.  In his response Stern referred me to his book where he stated that

The purpose of the definition, of course, was not to label anyone an antisemite but rather to guide data collectors.

The problem is that by having 11 illustrations that define anti-Semitism in terms of anti-Zionism the WDA inevitably became a means of branding people as anti-Semitic.

The IHRA and Identity Politics

The IHRA has been universally panned. Those who defend it do it  subjectively and relying on emotion. Hannah Weizfeld of the liberal Zionist Yachadwrote that

‘when Jewish communities call for Labour to adopt the IHRA definition of antsemitism they are not allowed to define their own oppression.’ 

Or as MI5’s man on the Guardian Jonathan Freedland put it

On the left, black people are usually allowed to define what’s racism; women can define sexism; Muslims are trusted to define Islamophobia. But when Jews call out something as antisemitic, leftist non-Jews feel curiously entitled to tell Jews they’re wrong.

Freedland makes a profession of dishonest journalism. Noone says Black people can define racism in isolation because Black people are not homogenous.  Nor are women or Muslims. To argue that Jews are all of one mind is in itself anti-Semitic.

But of course people can define themselves how they want. What is really meant is that we have to accept that definition! The defence of the IHRA has been waged, not over its substance but in terms of identity politics and guilt-tripping. It can’t be defended rationally.

The problem is that the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism rests upon denying Palestinians the right to define their identity in terms of Israel/Zionism. So Weizfeld/Freedland’s argument is also racist.

There is no proof that the ‘Jewish community’ supports the IHRA or that they have even discussed it. I doubt 1% have read it! But even if Freedland were right then most Jews are simply wrong. And of course the IHRA is opposed by left-wing anti-racist Jews.

When many Muslims said that Satanic Verses offended them and defined it as racist, western liberals, including Freedland, talked about free speech. When Charlie Hebdo published images poking fun at the prophet Mohammad, the Washington Post declared that:

‘public opinion from Paris to Palo Alto insisted that the paper had a right to publish whatever it pleased’ regardless of whether it was offensive.’

When Muslim identity is attacked then it is a question of free speech but when Jewish identity is criticised its ‘anti-Semitic’. Why?

Identity politics assumes one a single identity for a defined group of people. These identities are socially constructed and usually imposed. Indians for Labour and South Asia Solidarity Group [LSASG] said:

The mention of ‘Hinduphobia’.. and the parallels drawn between this and anti-Semitism, are deeply worrying given that this idea has been propagated by the BJP and their supporters in India to shut down dissent and criticism of their fascistic measures.

Just as Jews opposed to the IHRA were the ‘wrong sort of Jews’so it is with Indians opposed to the BJP. Starmer orientates to the most reactionary Indians just as he does with Jews. Opposition to Hindu racism towards Dalits and Muslims is defined as ‘Hinduphobia.’ The LSASG go on to say that ‘The terms ‘Hinduphobia’ and ‘anti-Hindu’ have, in fact, been used to justify Islamophobia and repression in India.’ Just like ‘anti-Semitism’ justifies anti-Palestinian racism.

Identity politics are a substitute for reasoned argument, resting on tribal identity. Despite the Establishment consensus in favour of the IHRA, academics and lawyers are almost unanimously opposed to it.

The IHRA has been contested by Brian Klug, David Feldman, and Antony Lerman; and jurists such as Hugh TomlinsonQC, Stephen Sedley, Geoffrey Bindman QC, and Geoffrey RobertsonQC.

Tomlinson described the IHRA as ‘vague’ and ‘confusing’, that it

‘lacks clarity and comprehensiveness’ and has a ‘potential chilling effect on public bodies.’

Lerman, stated that

‘Not only is there now overwhelming evidence that it’s not fit for purpose, but it also has the effect of making Jews more vulnerable to antisemitism, not less.’

Sir Geoffrey Bindman described the 38 word IHRA definition as

‘poorly drafted, misleading, and in practice has led to the suppression of legitimate debate and freedom of expression.

Stephen Sedley, a Jewish former Court of Appeal Judge  said the IHRA ‘fails the first test of any definition: it is indefinite. He also described it as

‘placing the historical, political, military and humanitarian uniqueness of Israel’s occupation and colonisation of Palestine beyond permissible criticism.’

David Feldman described it as ‘bewilderingly imprecise”. Geoffrey Robertson QC  statedthat it would ‘chill free speech’ and that it was ‘not fit for purpose’ 

The IHRA, Its Structure and Contradictions

The IHRA is divided into 3 parts

1.           The first part is the 38 word definition

“Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.”

2.           The second part, consisting of 3 paragraphs, introduces the 11 examples of ‘contemporary anti-Semitism’ which ‘could’ be anti-Semitic. It begins by saying that manifestations of anti-Semitism

 ‘might include the targeting of the state of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity. However, criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic.’

3.           The third part consists of the 11 examples. There are also 3 concluding paragraphs which are statements of the obvious

The 38 word definition is a model of ambiguity. Anti-Semitism is defined as ‘a certain perception of Jews’ but it avoids telling us what that perception is. It says that it ‘may be expressed as hatred toward Jews’. What else might it be expressed as. Anti-Zionism? Ironically the IHRA raises the bar very high to genuine anti-Semitism - hatred. According to the IHRA if someone simply dislikes the company of Jews that is not anti-Semitic. What kind of definition of anti-Semitism gives equal place to non-Jews and associative discrimination?

Even worse the definition defines anti-Semitism in terms of anti-Semitism! What are these ‘rhetorical and physical manifestations’?  Would a picket of the Board of Deputies by anti-Zionist Jews count?

So useless is the actual definition that Cary Nelson, when defending the IHRA, admitsthat

the brief opening preamble definition, much criticised as being vague and unusable, is not in fact being used. It is not really meant to be used.

The second part of the IHRA, which puts conditions on the illustrations is also ignored in practice. It says that the behaviour in question ‘may’ or ‘could’ be anti-Semitic. This is hardly a definition. It asserts that Israel is ‘conceived as a Jewish collectivity’. That is a political statement contested by the very existence of a Jewish diaspora. If Israel does represent Jews collectively then Jews are not true citizens of the states they live in. This is normally understood as being anti-Semitic!

This section also limits criticism of Israel to criticism ‘similar to that leveled against any other country.’ The problem is that Israel is not like any other country. There is no Israeli nationality. Which other countries occupy other peoples’ lands or declare that the State represents only part of its population? The IHRA therefore prevents anything but the most anodyne criticism of Israel.

The Illustrations

The most poisonous part of the IHRA lies in the 11 illustrations of anti-Semitism. Not only the 7 examples which mention Israel but the other 4 examples are also problematic:

The first illustration of anti-Semitism is harming or killing Jews ‘in the name of a radical ideology or an extremist view of religion’. What about if Jews are killed in the name of a conservative ideology or moderate view of religion? It is clear that the authors had Political Islam not White Supremacy in mind.

The second example talks of ‘Making mendacious, dehumanizing, demonizing, or stereotypical allegations about Jews’ and their power as a collective. But Zionist lobby groups like AIPAC openly boast about how they buy influence. In Al Jazeera’s documentary

leaders of the pro-Israel lobby speak openly about how they use money to influence the political process, in ways so blunt that if the comments were made by critics, they’d be charged with anti-Semitism.

Jewish groups defend AIPAC in the name of Jews. If people get the idea that Jews are powerful then it’s not hard to work out where they get that idea from. Israel calls itself a Jewish state and projects an image of military might. Is it any wonder that some people talk about Jewish power? Most anti-Semitic stereotypes today are a product of Zionist claims.

The 4^th example defines Holocaust denial as anti-Semitic. Unfortunately Holocaust denial has spread beyond the neo-Nazi fringe. In Arab and third world countries holocaust denial is functional, a reaction to Israel’s use of the holocaust as a propaganda weapon. In India the kindle version of Mein Kampf became the 11^th best selling book for Amazon. Are all these readers anti-Semites?

The 5^th example merely repeats the 4^th example in a different form.

The 6^th example claims that accusing Jews of being more loyal to Israel than their own nations is anti-Semitic. One wonders where this idea arose if not from the Zionist claim that Israel is the state of all Jews, not just those who live there. Jonathan Pollard, the Israeli spy gaoled for 30 years in America, recently claimed that Jews ‘will always have dual loyalty whether they know it or not.’

In 2013 Israel’s immigrant absorption and foreign ministries distributed a questionnaire to Israelis in the USA and American Jews asking them where their allegiance would lie in the case of a crisis between the two countries. Dual loyalty is inherent in Zionism.

The 7^thexample is a non-sequitur:

‘Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor’

It is replete with assumptions such as whether there is one single Jewish people, an anti-Semitic concept. Even if Jews were one nation, since when is opposition to self-determination racist? Is it racist to oppose Scottish independence? These are political questions. But even if you support Jewish self-determination you can still believe that Israel is a racist state. The IHRA is intellectually threadbare.

Israel encourages Jews all over the world to live in there yet at the same time refuses to allow the Palestinians to return because Jews would be outnumbered. What is that if not racist?

The 8^thexample says it is anti-Semitic to apply double standards by requiring Israel to behave in a way not required ‘of any other democratic nation.’ But Israel is not like any other democratic nation. Everything in Israel, from education to land, is segregated. Israel is a modern version of America’s Deep South.

The 9^th example appears, at first sight, innocuous.

Using the symbols and images associated with classic antisemitism... to characterize Israel or Israelis.’

Jews in the Middle Ages were accused of poisoning wells and killing non-Jewish children. That was anti-Semitic. However Israel doespoisonPalestinian water sources. In 1948 it infected the water of Acre with typhoid. Israel does kill Palestinian children in large numbers. The IHRA treats Israel as an individual Jew but states are not human beings. You can’t be racist towards a state.

The 10^thexample says that ‘Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis’ is anti-Semitic.’ So if mobs of Israelis chant ‘death to the Arabs’ one may not compare that to mobs in Europe who shouted ‘death to the Jews’. When Professor Ze’ev Sternhell wrote an article comparing Israel to Nazi Germany was he, a child survivor of a Nazi ghetto in Poland, an anti-Semite? Comparisons between Israel and the Nazis are inevitable. Israel uses the holocaust as a justification continually. How else would Israel justify denying access to 93% of its land to non-Jews?

There are many comparisons between pre-1939 Nazi Germany and Israel. Israel, like Nazi Germany, is an ethno nationalist state. The French Revolution overthrew the idea of religious states in favour of a separation between church and state. The Israeli state is a throwback to the feudal era in the age of imperialism.

Geoffrey Alderman, the historian of British Jewry poured scorn on the IHRA. Alderman noted that many countries have been accused of behaving like Nazis. President Nasser was accused of being the ‘Hitler on the Nile.’ Tom Segev, an Israeli historian observed:

All Israeli governments have used the Holocaust as a political argument. Every Arab leader since 1948 has been compared at least once to Hitler. All Arab countries have compared Israel to the Nazis.

Netanyahu even claimed that Hitler would never have perpetrated the holocaust but for the Palestinian Mufti of Jerusalem.

The 11^th and final example holds that it is anti-Semitic to hold Jews ‘collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel.’ I agree, but who is responsible for this if not Israel which claims to act on behalf of all Jews? The Board of Deputies organiseddemonstrations on behalf of British Jews in support of Israel’s attacks on Gaza. If it is anti-Semitic to blame Jews for the actions of Israel then it is equally anti-Semitic to claim that British Jews collectively support Israel.

With the IHRA Zionism is trying to have its cake and eat it. Their purpose is as transparent as it is dishonest. One of the mysteries about the IHRA is how Kenneth Stern, who is clearly an anti-racist, came to construct such an incoherent, contradictory and even anti-Semitic definition of anti-Semitism. And having done so, he turned around and complained that it was being used to chill free speech!

The answer lies in the fact that Kenneth Stern is a liberal Zionist. He sincerely condemns White supremacy in the United States. He values academic freedom and sees the monster that he has created as threatening it. On the other hand he turns a blind eye to the reality of what Israel has become, which is an openly apartheid society where it is taken for granted that if Israel annexes part of the West Bank then Palestinians living there will not become Israeli citizens.

Tony Greenstein

Israel has always faced a choice between being a Jewish State or a Democratic State – what it can't be is both

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Uri Avnery was one of the few Zionists who were genuine peace activists. Indeed it is arguable whether he was a Zionist.  Although he believed in a Jewish state he also believed in a state of equality. Avnery argued in Talking Zionism that

Zionism was the scaffolding that made the building of the state possible, but once the house is built, the scaffolding becomes a hindrance and must be removed.

Uri Avnery and Yasser Arafat

Avnery went on to describe those who ‘dreamt of normality’ as the Canaanites. They were those who believed that Israel should cut itself off from the idea that it doesn’t form a separate nation and instead embrace their Arab citizens.

A demand for a state where each citizen, regardless of religion or colour, is equal is taken as the minimum requirements for a country to be considered democratic. Yet if you raised such a demand in relation to Israel, for a State of Equal Rights, then you will be accused of ‘anti-Semitism’. After all opposition to ‘the only Jewish state in the world’ is now defined as ‘anti-Semitic’ by the IHRA.

As Netanyahu declared, when reprimanding Israeli actress Rotem Sala:

“Israel is not a state of all its citizens,” he wrote in response to criticism from an Israeli actor, Rotem Sela. “According to the basic nationality law we passed, Israel is the nation state of the Jewish people – and only it.

We have just learnt tonight of a violent demonstration by the Jewish fascist group Lehava, in Israel, which took to the streets chanting ‘Death to the Arab’s– a carbon copy of the slogan of the anti-Semites in Germany and Poland – ‘Death to the Jews’ (yet such a comparison is termed anti-Semitic by the IHRA).

The present Israeli Ambassador to Britain, Tzipi Hotoveli, was personally responsibleas a member of the Knesset Committee for the State of Women and Gender Equality for channeling funds to Lehava’s ‘charitable’ wing.

I will argue in my talk that Zionism  far from being the scaffolding for the Israeli state was the building itself.  Zionism represented a particular form of architecture, otherwise known as ethno-nationalism. Having been born in original sin it was hardly capable of changing itself when it approached adulthood.

Israel was given legitimacy by United Nations Resolution 181 which partitioned Mandate Palestine into a Jewish and Arab state.  This was achieved by a combination of US pressure on recalcitrant states like Liberia and the treacherous decision of the Soviet Union to back a Jewish state as a means of being rid of British imperialism from the Middle East.

Simha Flapan

This gave birth to a whole series of myths surrounding Israel’s founding.  They are best summed up in a book by Simha Flapan, The Birth of Israel: Myths and Realities.

For example when I grew up in a Zionist family I was told that the only reason there were Arab refugees (the word ‘Palestinian’ was never used) was that the Arabs of Israel had been instructed to leave by the Arab regimes so that they could invade and destroy the fledgling Jewish state.

We were told that Israel had been the victim of a simultaneous assault by the surrounding Arab countries and it was only a miracle that had saved it (actually it was Czechoslovakian weaponry!).

We were told that the Zionists accepted the UN partition but the Arabs rejected it.

That it was a case of David v Goliath in 1948 and subsequently.

And of course Israel had always sought peace but the Arabs refused to sit down and talk with it.

All of these and more were myths.  Israel had a guerilla force, led by Haganah that had been created by the British.

In fact Walid Khalidi and Erskin Childers in 1961 had demonstratedbeyond doubt, by examining CIA and BBC transcripts, that there had been no Arab orders to evacuate.  On the contrary there were orders to stay!

Rabbi Meir Kahane

When Meir Kahane of Kach, a party that demanded the expulsion of Israel’s Palestinians was elected in 1984 to the Knesset, every other party boycotted him.  Members of the Knesset walked out when he was speaking. Today Itamar Gvir of Otzma Yehudit has been invited in by the Prime Minister Netanyahu as part of the governing coalition. Gvir’s view that Israel’s Palestinians do not belong are part of a growing and open right-wing consensus.

I want to look at a number of questions:about the formation of the Israeli state.

First and foremost is the role of Zionism in the creation of an apartheid state.

In particular laws such as the 1953 JNF law and 1950 Absentee Property Law

The role of imperialism. E.g. the Suez War, the alliance with France, relations with Apartheid in South Africa.

Was there a Zionist left in reference to Mapam?

These and more questions will be discussed tomorrow

And then to look at that thorny question, can a Jewish State and a Democratic State be reconciled?

When Kahane first burst on the scene he was quite clear.  You can have a Jewish state or a Democratic state but you can’t have both.  Was he right?

Tony Greenstein

 PSC’s leadership showed its contempt for members when it refused to support either David Miller or Palestine Action

 On Saturday PSC held its AGM, delayed from January because of COVID. Holding the conference online was an opportunity to involve people who normally would not have been able to attend. It also provided a chance to fightback against the ongoing attacks by Zionist organisations against Palestine solidarity activists and support for the Palestinians.

Needless to say PSC’s leaders were determined to squander the opportunity just as they have done for the past 5 years. It was clear from the start that the main concern of PSC Executive was to ward off criticism. The first thing they did was to rule out of order two emergency resolutions.

Despite being attacked itself PSC refused to respond to Zionist attacks

There were 2 possible formats for the AGM. Either a webinar, in which no member of the audience can see another member or a normal zoom session where everyone is equal. Clearly equality with the membership was the last thing PSC’s leaders had in mind so they used the webinar format in order to tightly control proceedings.

One of the few good things about PSC AGMs previously has been that you get to meet different people. The chat feature replicates that. People chatting amongst themselves without being supervised was the last thing that Ben Jamal, Ben Soffa, Kamel Hawwash and Louise Regan wanted. The ‘chat’ feature was therefore disabled. I asked repeatedly in the Q&A feature why this was so but of course no answer was forthcoming. I was simply told not to use the ‘Q&A’ feature for discussing such matters!

It is clear that Socialist Action, the clique that controls PSC, was determined that PSC would maintain a façade of democracy whilst at the same time clamping down on members’ ability to communicate with each other.

Learning from the past

Members were presented with an Annual Report and an Annual Plan. Unsurprisingly no mention was made of the Zionists’ 5 year long ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign which led to the defeat of Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour Party’s only pro-Palestinian leader. Nor was any mention made of the actions of Labour’s new Zionist without qualification leader, Keir Starmer, in suspending Corbyn for comments made about the trite and flawedEHRC Report. Indeed the EHRC Report itself was not mentioned. The only mention of the Labour Party was in the following objective:

Lobbying, with allies, the Labour Party regarding the protection of space to campaign for Palestine, at various levels within the Party.

That is the extent of PSC’s ambition. Meaningless verbiage.

For over 5 years the Zionists and the British Establishment, led by the BBC, waged a campaign alleging that Labour was an anti-Semitic party. During that time PSC sat on the sidelines like a frozen rabbit. It believed if it got on with business as normal, then it would all blow over. In fact the crisis has become deeper as PSC sinks into political irrelevance. The adoption of the IHRA and attacks on dissident and anti-Zionist academics is one part of that. As I predicted at the time the war in the Labour Party has spilt out into wider society.

In April 2016 I wrotea letter to the current Secretary of PSC, Ben Soffa, arguing that PSC should not be abstaining from the Zionists’ political attacks. Ben’s responseoozed with complacency.

PSC Conferences in Previous Years

Despite 14 trade unions being affiliated to PSC, there has been an adamant refusal to raise the issue of the IHRA in the unions. Since the unions effectively control the Labour Party this would have been a means to combat the adoptionin 2019 of the IHRA.

Pal Action activist Huda Ammori being arrested

What is Missing from the Annual Plan & Report

The Annual Report was more interesting for what was not in it than what was in it.

For example there was no mention of the fact that 4 members of PSC Executive resigned in the last year. This followed on from the forced resignation from PSC of a staff member, Huda, who claimed she had been bullied and harassed out of her post by PSC’s Director.

Huda went on sick leave with depression. Before going she had submitted a Grievance. Instead of investigating it PSC Chair Kamel Hawwash pressurised Huda to withdraw the Grievance. Huda was also forced to sign a non-disclosure agreement as part of a settlement. In this time of #metoo PSC members might want to ask questions about the ethics involved in this.

Emily Thornberry telling Labour Friends of Israel that Israel is a beacon of democracy in the Middle East - PSC nonetheless put her on its platform

Last year Adie Mormach from Manchester PSC was overwhelmingly elected as Campaigns Officer displacing the person who had held the post for a decade without seeming to do anything. Adie was a long standing activist.  Kamel Hawwash’s first comment to him was that  the post was being abolished the following year!

Apart from the fact that there had been no discussion on this proposal it shows the depth of bitterness felt by PSC leaders at the removal of one of their own. Suffice to say shortly after Adie resigned along with the others, thus demonstrating that in practice ordinary members of PSC Executive don’t control the organisation.

Propaganda blast from the Jewish Chronicle - PSC sees no need to defend the victims of the Zionists

Emergency Motions on David Miller and Elbit

Brighton & Hove PSC proposed 2 emergency motions – one supporting David Miller, the Bristol University academic under attack by the Union of Jewish (i.e. Zionist) Students. The second one was in support of Palestine Action, which has been conducting a series of high profile actions against Elbit Systems arms company in Britain.

Suffice to say the Executive has given PA no support. But instead of the Executive and Ben Jamal defending their refusal to give support they simply ruled out both motions on the grounds that they weren’t emergencies, which they clearly were given that both motions referenced events occurring since the closing days for motions.

The reason for this political cowardice was that their behaviour has been indefensible. There is a refusal to be honest with members about PSC’s leaders unwillingness to have anything to do with issues or groups involved in direct action which might lead to conflict with the state.

The motionon Palestine Action extended support and solidarity to a group formed last July. PA has engaged in a campaign of direct action against Elbit Arms factories. PA has done more in its short history than PSC has in the past decade to make the issue of Elbit into a live campaign.

In the Annual Plan there is one passing reference to Elbit and this:

Work with key partners including CAAT and Drone wars to look at building strategic campaigns focussed on arms manufacturers complicit in the arming of Israel with a presence in the UK, including Elbit Systems.

In other words PSC plans to do nothing. Yet instead of supporting Pal Action PSC has done its best to undermine it.

Scottish PSC is an example of a Palestine solidarity group which doesn't compromise on its principles and abandon its friends

Why? A combination of sectarianism towards any other solidarity group on Palestine coupled with an aversion to direct action that may mean that PSC ends up supporting those who break the law. The fact that Elbit is actively complicit in war crimes in Gaza, supplying 85% of Israeli drones is irrelevant. This is the price of ‘respectability’.

Earlier this year PSC distributed the gist of a legal opinion (but not the opinion itself) to the branch forum. The opinion was based on a far-fetched scenario whereby the Police would target those who gave money and support to Pal Action. This has never happened before and is highly unlikely.  Not content with this PSC contacted the Boycott National Committee to get them to join in the attack. Unfortunately the BNC made the mistake of believing it had the right to tell activists in this country, of which they have no knowledge or experience, how to conduct solidarity action. 

In March I wroteto Omar Barghouti of the BNC. Omar hasn’t replied which suggests that both he and the BNC are embarrassed by their stance. It is particularly unfortunate because Omar promised me two years ago that he and the BNC wouldn’t get involved in internal differences with the solidarity movement in Britain.  I wrote:

Under the guise of ‘discharging its duty of care to members’ PSC branches were told of “possible legal consequences of their association or support for Palestine Action's activities.” The legal advice is hypothetical and extremely unlikely to materialise in practice because of the difficulty of proving any causal link between support in general for PA with a particular action. To my knowledge such a prosecution has never been attempted before by the State as a way of attacking direct action campaign groups.

The advice of Hawwash and Jamal can best be characterised as irresponsible scare mongering whose primary motive is to harm PA rather than protect individual members of PSC.  The advice is irresponsible because, if it were adopted, it would cut off the source base of direct action groups from sympathisers. Not just PA but Extinction Rebellion, anti-road groups such as the HS2 campaign and Greenpeace.

The motionon David Miller recognised that the attack on him, like a similar attack on Ken Loach was not because of ‘anti-Semitism’ but because both of them were anti-Zionists. The motion declared

its full support for David Miller and any other anti-Zionist academics who are attacked by the Union of Jewish Students. This AGM sees any attempt to discipline David Miller as an attack on academic freedom and in particular the freedom of academics to research the links between Zionism, its organisations, and Islamaphobia and British racism

Zionist Establishment academic David Feldman sticks the knife into David Miller in Haaretz

This was too much for PSC’s leaders who had previously issued a mealy mouthed statement Protecting Palestinian Rights and Academic Freedom. The crucial part of the statement read:

This month saw the IHRA being cited by groups campaigning for an Oxford college to deny space for celebrated film maker Ken Loach to discuss his career. More recently we have witnessed calls from a range of groups, including student groups, for the sacking of David Miller, a Professor of Sociology at the University of Bristol. This followed Professor Miller condemning Zionism as a racist ideology, describing the role of the state of Israel in promoting and coordinating efforts to delegitimise activism for Palestine globally, and outlining the links between some pro-Israel groups and the promotion of Islamophobic narratives.

When addressing such issues, it is crucial to apply depth, context, and clarity, and to avoid narratives that oversimplify the interlinks between groups which oppose actions in support of Palestinian rights, and Israeli state actors. Doing so obscures our understanding of the way political actors’ function. At worst, it can risk drawing on anti-Semitic tropes about Jewish power.

Whilst some have criticised Professor Miller for lacking such depth and clarity in the way he has couched his remarks, those leading the call for Professor Miller to be sacked are straightforwardly asserting that to define Zionism as a movement and political ideology that is racist is inherently anti-Semitic..

Far from giving full support to David, who was subject to a vicious attack by the Israeli funded Union of Jewish Students and over 100 right-wing MPs and Peers, PSC joined in the attack suggesting that David Miller’s writings on Zionist groups and their links ‘risk(s) drawing on anti-Semitic tropes about Jewish power.’

There is one word for this and it is scabbing.  Ben Jamal, PSC Executive don’t understand the meaning of the word ‘solidarity’ in PSC’s name.

Why did this occur?  Because PSC Executive refuses to see the links between Zionism, the movement and ideology that formed Israel, and the racism and human rights abuses that Palestinians experience. It take a particular kind of stupidity to make this arbitrary distinction.

PSC believes if it concentrates on human rights and ignores Zionism then it can continue as usual. This is like a group campaigning against human rights abuses under Apartheid in South Africa refusing to take a stance on Apartheid.

Zionist attacks on Professor Miller stem from his expert witness evidence in the attempted deportation of Raed Saleh, who won his case. PSC in 2011 organised Saleh's speaking tour. They have shown their gratitude to Miller in the way that only Socialist Action knows

The Zionists are not stupid whatever else may be. They know very well that accusations of anti-Semitism have had a chilling effect on free speech on Palestine. You don’t have to take my word for it.  The author of the IHRA misdefinition Kenneth Stern, in testimonyto the House of Representatives admitted that ‘Congress has enshrined a definition that can only help to chill, if not suppress, their political speech.’referring to Palestinian students. What Kenneth Stern can see Ben Jamal, Kamel Hawwash and the rest of the PSC leadership cannot see. If the ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign had no effect on support for the Palestinians the Zionists wouldn’t undertake such campaigns.

I know of at least 4 universities where academics are under attack from the Union of Jewish Students who claim that Jewish students (not anti-Zionist Jews of course) fear for their safety if academics are allowed to speak freely on Zionism and Palestine. PSC is determined to repeat its mistakes of the past four years. It has neither learnt nor forgotten anything.

After the defeat of attempts to debate the 2 emergency motions I moved remitting back of the whole Annual Report.  My arguments rested on PSC’s refusal to support Miller and Pal Action. I began by noting that it is useless having a plan if you have no strategy. 

All PSC does is organise routine activities. It initiates no political initiatives of its own. It never takes the offensive against the Zionists. Uf you do a word search of the Annual Report and Plan you will not find a single instance of the words ‘Zionist’ or ‘Zionism’. PSC presumably believe that Israeli Apartheid fell out of the trees, an accident of nature (or god).

PSC seeks a spurious legitimacy from the political establishment despite the fact that they are regularly spurned. Apart from Jeremy Corbyn there is not one parliamentary patron of PSC.  PSC got rid of Baroness Tonge after the Zionists kicked up a fuss.

The only reason that Thornberry and Nandy speak on PSC platforms is because PSC never questions the right of the Israeli state to exist as a Jewish state

In their desperation to seek recognition PSC has put open Zionists such as Emily Thornberry and Lisa Nandy on its platforms. At one meeting Nandy left the meeting before Omar Barghouti could speak in order that she would not be seen to be associated with BDS! PSC’s leaders think that this kind of appeasement actually brings results!

Lisa Nandy, who was the JLM's candidate for Labour leader and  believes calling Israel 'racist' is antisemitic speaks on PSC Platform, chaired by Hawwash

It was reportedthat after Stephen Kinnock had called Israel’s behaviour on the West Bank "tantamount to profiting from the proceeds of crime".

Nandy told the Jewish leaders that Kinnock, a consistent and long-standing critic of Israel's policy towards the Palestinians, had been given a "dressing down" for his remarks made during the Commons debate.

"Lisa made no secret of the fact she and the leader were angry with Kinnock," the source is quoted as saying. "Especially after all the work that has been done to try and restore Labour's relationship with the Jewish community."

It is a fact that PSC has made no impact on politicians. It has no sponsors or supporters. Its timidity and caution (some would say cowardice) invites contempt not respect. 

But today as activists from Palestine Action face prison for closing down Elbit factories and causing them £2m losses, PSC runs a mile from confrontation with the British state.  In so doing PSC ignores the mass movement that has sprung up against the Police Bill. It seeks to influence opinion makers in the British Establishment oblivious to the fact that support for Israel is a cardinal tenet of Britain’s Foreign Policy Establishment. 

Tony Greenstein speaking at a previous PSC AGM

Anti-Zionism and support for the Palestinians is subversive in Britain today. Under the Prevent programme it is proofof extremism. Retreating in the face of Zionist fire simply emboldens our enemies.

A few words on Socialist Action. It came from the International Marxist Groupwhich split into a number of disparate tendencies in 1982, most of which have set off in a quasi Stalinist direction, abandoning class politics in the process. It used to provide Ken Livingstone’s closest advisors and had at least one member in Corbyn’s coterie.  It also has one member of Labour’s NEC, Gemma Bolton. It is like a submarine except that it never surfaces. It produces no paper simply an email bulletin. It takes over groups like a parasite but never has the courage to declare itself publicly.

The question which arises is whether or not activists should conclude that PSC is beyond saving and that it is incapable of reform. As one of the original founders of PSC in 1982 I would say that the jury is out on this question.

Tony Greenstein

 Lloyd Russell-Moyle MP for Brighton Kemptown Defies the Board of Deputies 10 Pledges & Speaks on the Same Platform as Expelled Labour Member, Tony Greenstein

UPDATE

Labour MP’s platform rally with Tony Greenstein &

For the first time in more years than I can remember, Brighton & Hove Trades Council organised a May Day demonstration. It was held at the Level. The theme of the demonstration was the Police, Crime & Sentencing Bill which will make illegal all demonstrations that cause a ‘nuisance’ or are in any way effective. It is a clear threat to the rights of workers You will be able to hold demonstrations in future only if they are ineffective. A telling commentary on capitalist democracy today.

Howard Beckett - Unite Left Candidate for General Secretary

The main speaker was Howard Beckett, the left’s candidate in the Unite General Secretary election. There were a host of other speakers including Mark Abel from UCU, Sue from the Campaign to Save Brighton University’s One World Nursery, Matt Webb, Secretary of the Trades Council, Lloyd-Russell Moyle MP for Brighton Kemptown, Steve from Save the NHS campaign and myself.

Tony Greenstein (left) and Lloyd Russell-Moyle MP speaking at Trades Council's anti-Police Bill rally

After the rally the Stop the Bill Campaign organised a march to Brighton Clocktower via the Police Station chanting ‘Sussex Police are not innocent’amongst other slogans.

Sue speaking from the Campaign to Save the One World Nursery

Lloyd Russell-Moyle, who was sackedfrom Sir Starmer’s shadow cabinet has been extremely weak and wobbly on the Zionists’ fake anti-Semitism campaign. Indeed when I was suspended from the Labour Party in 2016, Brighton & Hove District Party voted to oppose my suspension.  Lloyd however, as Chair of the Party, wrotesecretly to right-wing General Secretary Iain McNicoll urging that my expulsion be sped up. I obtained his correspondence from a Subject Access Request. Although Lloyd’s name had been redacted it was not difficult to work out the rat who wrote it!

When a Facebook post of Lloyd’s from 2009 was found saying:

“The point is people who are form Jewish descent/Jewish but are not Zionist is that the two are not automatic that you can be proud of being Jewish but realise that idea of inheriting/claim a land that you may have never visited or seen but have a ‘heritage’ claim for is not progressive in its very nature...

Terrorism feeds of violence, that is why it is only Israel that can stop the violence, it was the National Party in South Africa that had to make the first steps.”

All of these comments were true but instead of standing by them Moyle apologisedand withdrew his comments saying that:

“I have now deleted these posts and recognise why they were offensive.”

The Jewish Chronicle quotedMoyle as saying that he would be contacting the Jewish Labour Movement for talks, adding:

“I am completely and unreservedly committed to supporting Keir Starmer and Angela Rayner’s pledge to rid the party of antisemitism.”

This has been typical of the cowardice of the Campaign Group ‘left’ which has consistently retreated on its support for the Palestinians and opposition to Zionism.

I therefore pointed out in my speech that the respected Human Rights Watch last week describedIsrael as guilty of the crime of Apartheid. This followed the declarationby Israel’s main human rights organisation B’Tselem in January that Israel was an apartheid state from the Mediterranean to the Jordan.

In an immediate response to HRW’s 231 page report, the Board of Deputies of British Jews, which describes itself as the ‘voice of British Jews’ ‘condemned’HRW’s report and defended Israeli Apartheid by pointing to a few token Arab ambassadors, judges and professors, as if this  somehow negates the demolition of Palestinian homes, the destruction of Palestinian villages, the segregated education sector and the refusalof Israel to vaccinate the 5 million Palestinians living under its military rule.

It was the Board of Deputies which accusedthe Labour Party of ‘anti-Semitism’. A campaign  which led to the overthrow and then suspension of Jeremy Corbyn and hundreds of expulsions and suspensions in the Labour Party including myself. It should be clear even to the most stupid member of Momentum or the Campaign Group of MPs that the ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign was concerned about one thing only – Corbyn’s support for the Palestinians. It had nothing to do with anti-Semitism.

It is therefore to be welcomed that Lloyd defied the McCarthyist 10 Pledges (in fact Commandments) of the Zionist Board of Deputies.

When I spoke (see above) I recalled that the last time I spoke at a Stop the Police Bill demonstration I had only just been released from Birmingham’s Winson Green Prison where I had been remanded as a result of the arrest of 6 supporters of Palestine Action who had intended to redecorate Elbit’s Shenstone factory of death where engines are manufactured for their killer drones.

At today’s march I laid into the Labour Party which is led by someone who describes himself as a Zionist (i.e. racist) without qualification. Starmer had originally intended to abstainon the Police Bill as he had ordered Labour MPs to do on the Spy Cops Bill. This was in order to demonstrate that the Labour Party, now it was ‘under new management’ would be a responsible party and not challenge neo-liberal economics or imperialist foreign policy.

Speaker from Labour Party Black Socialists

It was therefore extremely welcome to see hundreds of people at the rally, not only older trade unionists but hundreds of younger people with a variety of posters and banners.

I also learnt from Sue who spoke from Save One World Nursery at Brighton University that their nursery is under threat of closure. I have a very personal interest in this.

44 years ago I led the campaign, as Vice President of Brighton Polytechnic Student Union, to establish a nursery at the Poly. In 1979 we were successful. Now the contribution of Brighton University's VC and Administration to women's equality and the provision of workplace based child care is to abolish the nursery on grounds of cost.

This outrageous decision should not be accepted. Please sign the petition and join the campaign.

Tony Greenstein

 By saying it is‘the voice of the UK Jewish community’ the Board is associating all Jews with Israeli Apartheid – isn’t that anti-Semitic?

The IHRA Definition of Anti-Semitism saysthat ‘Holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel’ is anti-Semitic. It is one of the few examples of anti-Semitism in the IHRA on which we can all agree. Yet what does the BOD do? It defends Israeli Apartheid in the name of all British Jews!

The sheer brass-necked hypocrisy of the Board is staggering. They are deliberately associating Jews with Israel’s crimes in the knowledge that this can result in an increase in anti-Semitic attacks. When people learn of Israel’s wanton murder of Palestinians and the torture of children they naturally become angry. What the Board is doing is providing people with an easy target, British Jews.

Even the Mossad front, the Community Security Trust, which monitors and fiddles the statistics of anti-Semitism on behalf of Israel, admittedin respect of the Israeli attack on Gaza in 2014 that

Antisemitic reactions to this summer’s conflict between Israel and Hamas resulted in record levels of antisemitic hate incidents in the UK.

According to their own IHRA definition, the Board must be classified as an anti-Semitic organisation!

When the Labour Party initially refused to adopt the IHRA definition, including its 11 examples, the Board reactedwith ‘fury’. It was proof that Labour was overrun with anti-Semitism.

None of this is any surprise. The BOD has support for Israel hardwired into its constitution, clause 3(d) of which states that the

‘Board shall Take such appropriate action as lies within its power to advance Israel's security, welfare and standing. ’ [the constitution is no longer on the Board’s website but can be found in google cache]

In January Israeli human rights group B’Tselem issued a reportA regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This is apartheid’. Last week, in a 213 page report‘A Threshold Crossed’Human Rights Watch provided detailed evidence of Israel’s apartheid crimes. It argued that Israel was ‘Seeking Maximal Land with Minimal Palestinians’. Under ‘Discriminatory Restrictions on Residency and Nationality’ it showed how 270,000 Palestinians outside the West Bank and Gaza when the territories were captured in 1967 have been denied residence and another ¼ million Palestinians who were abroad ‘too long’ have also had their right of residency revoked. This would not happen if they were Jewish and is prima facie evidence of an apartheid state.

What does the BOD statementsay? Does it rebut even one of the numerous examples in the Report? Of course not. The Board had no time to read the Report let alone rebut it. Instead it said that:

The ridiculous ‘apartheid‘ slur in this report is belied by the fact that, as it stands, Israel’s next Government may well rely on the support of Arab parties, voted for by the country’s fully-enfranchised Arab citizens. Israel’s Arab citizens have been appointed as ambassadors, professors, Supreme Court judges, hospital directors, and other key roles throughout Israel’s socio-economic landscape. 

The Board doesn’t refute what HRW said because it knows it is true. Instead it resorts to typical Zionist talking points about a few token Arabs who became ambassadors or professors. 

In fact Arabs are underrepresented in all sectors of Israeli higher education. Despite being 20% of Israel’s population Arabs form12.1% of undergraduates, 8.2% of MA students and just 4.4% of Ph D students.

Arab students, unlike their Jewish counterparts, don’t receive grants as these are dependent on army service and Arabs don’t serve in the Zionist army. Contrary to the Board's lies about there being equality between Israeli Palestinians and Jews the former are barred from buying or leasing 80% of Israeli land. Even Israel’s Prime Minister, Netanyahu statedthat Israel is a land of its Jewish citizens not all of its citizens.

The Board’s statement is dishonest since no Arab party has ever been part of an Israeli government coalition. Although Arabs are allowed to vote in Israel their representatives are demonised as ‘terrorists’ and excluded from the corridors of power. Hence its use of the phrase ‘Israel’s next Government may well rely on the support of Arab parties.’ The last Israeli Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin, who did rely on Arab support was assassinated.

The Board’s claim to represent all British Jews is hollow. It barely represents 30% of British Jews since the Orthodox have their own organisation, the 30,000 strong Union of Orthodox Hebrew Congregations. Nor does it represent the secular 50% of Jews.

In defending Israeli Apartheid on behalf of Britain’s Jews the Board is deliberately risking an increase in anti-Semitism in order to defend the Israeli state. That is the measure of their sincerity when accusing Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour left of anti-Semitism.

In an articlein Ha'aretz Gideon Levy wrote that

‘There’s no longer any way to challenge the diagnosis of apartheid. Only lying propagandists can claim that Israel is a democracy.

The Reportby B’Tselem was largely ignored by the mass media. This time it was different.  Although the New York Times and other papers sought to discredit HRW’s Report they could hardly ignore it.

Even The Guardian, which led the campaign against Corbyn, despite Jonathan Freedland's desperate attempts to defend Israel, was forced to carry an article Israel is committing the crime of apartheid, rights group says.

In Abusive Israeli Policies Constitute Crimes of Apartheid PersecutionHRW levelled 3 main charges that together constitute irrefutable proof of apartheid:

1.    An intent to maintain domination by one racial group over another.

2.    A context of systematic oppression by the dominant group over the marginalized group.

3.    Inhumane acts.

The statement accusedthe Israeli government of an

overarching policy to maintain the domination by Jewish Israelis over Palestinians and grave abuses committed against Palestinians living in the occupied territory, including East Jerusalem.

The report, “A Threshold Crossed” goes on to say that

the present-day reality (is) of a single authority, the Israeli government, ruling primarily over the area between the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea, populated by two groups of roughly equal size, and methodologically privileging Jewish Israelis while repressing Palestinians, most severely in the occupied territory.

This analysis is similar to that of B’Tselem earlier this year:

In the entire area between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, the Israeli regime implements laws, practices and state violence designed to cement the supremacy of one group – Jews – over another – Palestinians. A key method in pursuing this goal is engineering space differently for each group.

For years we have been warned that Israel is fast approaching the point of no return. That it will become an apartheid state. For liberal Zionists this time never came. It was always 5 minutes to midnight. The reality is that Israel always been an apartheid state. It’s just that it has taken groups like HRW a long time to accept this. Kenneth Roth, HRW’s Executive Director stated that

“This detailed study shows that Israeli authorities have already turned that corner and today are committing the crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution.”

HRW saythat

The crime against humanity of persecution, as defined under the Rome Statute and customary international law, consists of severe deprivation of fundamental rights of a racial, ethnic, or other group with discriminatory intent.

In particular,

the elements of the crimes come together in the occupied territory, as part of a single Israeli government policy. That policy is to maintain the domination by Jewish Israelis over Palestinians across Israel and the occupied territory. It is coupled in the occupied territory with systematic oppression and inhumane acts against Palestinians living there.

This could not be clearer. What is the responseof the Israeli government? HRW’s Report was “preposterous and false”. It accused them of having a “long-standing anti-Israeli agenda” and carrying out an ongoing campaign “with no connection to facts or reality on the ground”.

HRW accused the Israeli state of seeking to

mitigate what they have openly described as a “demographic threat”from Palestinians. In Jerusalem, for example, the government’s plan for the municipality, including both the west and occupied east parts of the city, sets the goal of “maintaining a solid Jewish majority in the city” and even specifies the demographic ratios it hopes to maintain.

How can this be other than racist? If in Britain the government declared that it wanted to dilute the number of Jews in Golders Green, by reserving housing for non-Jews there would be an uproar. Yet what would be anti-Semitic in Britain is accepted without batting an eye lid in Israel. That the BOD seeks to defend this demonstrates that it is a racist organisation. It was the stupidity of Corbyn and McDonnell in not calling their bluff that led to their defeat.

What is quite remarkable about the HRW report, just like that of Btselem before it, is that they don’t hesitate to call out the racism against Israel’s Palestinian citizens which includes:

laws that allow hundreds of small Jewish towns to effectively exclude Palestinians and budgets that allocate only a fraction of resources to Palestinian schools as compared to those that serve Jewish Israeli children.

HRW accuses Israel of committing a range of abuses against Palestinians. These include:

sweeping movement restrictions in the form of the Gaza closure and a permit regime, confiscation of more than a third of the land in the West Bank, harsh conditions in parts of the West Bank that led to the forcible transfer of thousands of Palestinians out of their homes, denial of residency rights to hundreds of thousands of Palestinians and their relatives, and the suspension of basic civil rights to millions of Palestinians.

The excuse for all this is ‘security’. Security means that the Israeli army turns Palestinian (never Jewish) land into firing zones and then later it hands it over to Jewish settlers. HRW go on to say that

Even when security forms part of the motivation, it no more justifies apartheid and persecution than it would excessive force or torture

Roth goes on to say that.

“These policies, which grant Jewish Israelis the same rights and privileges wherever they live and discriminate against Palestinians to varying degrees wherever they live, reflect a policy to privilege one people at the expense of another.”

HRW goes on to call for countries to

‘condition arms sales and military and security assistance to Israel on Israeli authorities taking concrete and verifiable steps toward ending their commission of these crimes.’

Those who argue for a 2 state solution are contributing to Israel’s apartheid regime by creating the illusion that Israel’s presence is temporary. As HRW accept ‘the oppression of Palestinians has reached a threshold and a permanence that meets the definitions of the crimes of apartheid and persecution,”

A new Opinion Poll by B’tselem shows that 45% of the population of Palestine/Greater Israel, including 25% of Israel’s Jewish population, accept the fact that Israel is now an apartheid society.

What should we do? PSC has been describing Israel for years as an Apartheid State but it has met with minimal impact. Why? Because they deliberately refuse to come out and say that they oppose the existence of Israel as a Jewish supremacist state. 

Today one of the talking points of the Zionists is that Israel is the ‘only Jewish state in the world.’ Our answer should be that that is one too many. We should oppose anyreligious ethno-nationalist state. Religious states like Pakistan or Ulster tend, almost by definition, to be racist states because they privilege those of their inhabitants who are of a particular religion.

Just as American Jews rightly reject the idea that the United States is a Christian country, valuing the separation of church and state, so Israel too should become a secular, democratic not a Jewish state.  Pro-Palestinian organisations need to be crystal clear about this.

Tony Greenstein

The recent Loyalist riots should remind us that the Good Friday Agreement was a palliative not a solution – only the end of Partition will achieve that

Yesterday was the anniversary of the death of Bobby Sands, MP for Fermanagh and South Tyrone. Sands died on hunger strike 40 years ago. Despite being elected to parliament he was allowed to die because Thatcher was determined not to concede to demands for political status for the IRA prisoners.

 In the end the demands of the hunger strikers were conceded because even the stupidest member of the British ruling class came to understand that their intransigence had simply resulted in massively increased support for the IRA and Sinn Fein. In 1983 Gerry Adams was elected as MP for West Belfast displacing Gerry Fitt ‘the Brit’.

Of course Bobby Sands was deemed a ‘terrorist’ as have all those who took up arms against the British in the colonies.  And Ireland was our oldest colony. If you are a British racist then the British army could do no wrong wherever it ventured whereas those who took up arms against it were always in the wrong.

Israel has the same policy today. Anyone who opposes Israel’s occupation army is considered a terrorist whereas Israel, despite its atrocities against children even is never considered a terrorist state.

However the days of Unionism are numbered. Britain no longer has a strategic interest in maintaining the union. British investment today is in the South not the North.  The shipyards and engineering factories of Belfast are gone. That is why successive governments from Harold Wilson onwards have refused to resurrect the Protestant Supremacist police statelet that existed between 1921 and 1969.

Brexit has produced some uncomfortable truths for the Unionists. Large sections of the Protestant farming community look towards the South and the European Union today, not the mainland. That is why Boris Johnson, despite promises to the contrary, reneged on his promises to the DUP and placed a tariff border down the Irish sea in order that Northern Ireland could stay in the customs union.

The days of the Unionist veto are long since gone. The Protestant community itself was split during the 2016 referendum over Europe. The DUP, being a stupid party, never thought that Brexit would hasten the end of Unionism.

There is probably a majority for Irish unity today in the north of Ireland. I would expect that if such a referendum were held and Boris Johnson will resist one to the end, that a chunk of the Protestant community would also vote to unite.

History is against the Loyalists of Ulster. They are an anachronism of the Empire. The days of the Curragh Mutiny are long since gone. Of course the Protestant paramilitaries would promise civil war and violence should a referendum be held on the border.

When I visited Northern Ireland in the 1980s as part of a Labour Party delegation from Brighton we visited the headquarters of the UDA, a Protestant terrorist group who were legal at the time, because some forms of terrorism were acceptable to the British army.

Speaking to Andy Tyrie, the commander and John MacMichael, who was later assassinated by the IRA, was like being taken back in time. They looked to the golden days of Empire. They told us of the days in Liverpool when there was a sectarian Protestant party on the Council which allied with the Tories never asking themselves why working class people should vote Tory. In Liverpool that party disappeared but not in Northern Ireland.

The Protestant working class voted against its own interests and for Unionist parties allied to the Tories since 1922. That is the effect of settler colonialism. It creates an alliance between the settler working class and ruling class even if, as in the case of Northern Ireland the privileges that the Protestant working class gained over their Catholic neighbours were minimal.

The Good Friday agreement which ended the struggle of the IRA and led to a power sharing agreement in the Northern Ireland Assembly was in essence a palliative. The British ruling class was under immense pressure from the American ruling class  to resolve the crisis, which Blair did. However the situation in the North has not been resolved as the latest riots demonstrated.

Beneath the surface the old antagonisms remain. The Protestant working class is embittered that they have been ‘sold out’ as if the British ruling class every owed any loyalty to those who pledged fealty to them.

At the heart of the problem is the border, Partition. Of course today it is a notional border without customs posts. It is a border without any natural geographical features such as rivers.  Its basis for existing was the need to produce an artificial majority for the Protestants in the North.

As James Connolly, the revolutionary socialist who was executed for his part in the Easter Rising said, Partition would create ‘a carnival of reaction on both sides of the border’. He was of right in his prediction Not only in Ireland but India, Cyprus and Palestine. Partition and communalism were the favourite divide and rule tactics of the British in their efforts to maintain neo-colonial rule.

The British working class has never been distinguished by its support for the struggle of Irish people or the IRA but during the miners’ strike, when there were massive confrontations with the British state, the Police and reputedly the army in civilian uniforms, this began to break down,

I worked closely with miners from Kent coalfield and visited and stayed with strikers in Yorkshire. I heard repeatedly the same sentiment after the failed IRA attack on the Grand Hotel in Brighton in 1984: ‘Pity they didn’t get her.’ Indeed to my surprise, as I was volunteering in an old peoples’ home at the time (when Councils ran such things) one of the cooks in the kitchen expressed her disappointment that Thatcher had survived.

During the bitterest episode of class struggle in the last century, elements of the British working class began to see that the struggle of colonial peoples against the British ruling class was also their struggle.

Below is  the article I wrote last year and beneath that Peter Bolton’s article in the Canary.

Tony Greenstein

The Stupidity of Thatcher and the British Government in Refusing Political Status for Republican Prisoners led to the growth of Sinn Fein North and South

Bobby Sands wasn’t the first Irish hunger striker nor was he the last to die. Terence MacSwiney, the elected Sinn Fein Mayor of Cork, died in Brixton prison in October 1920 after 74 days on hunger strike. He had been arrested by the British government on a charge of sedition, a clearly political ‘crime’. 10 hunger strikersdied in 1981.

Their demands were for the  return of political status which had been removed on March 1 1976 by Merlyn Rees, Labour’s Northern Ireland Minister. He was succeeded by the hated Roy Mason who was worse than any Tory imperialist ruler.

At first the reaction to the removal of political status was the blanket and dirty protest where faeces were spread on the walls.  Eventually that led to the hunger strikes. The behaviour of Roy Mason in provoking what became the hunger strikes led to the defeat of the Labour government when Frank MacGuire, the Independent Republican MP for Fermanagh and South Tyrone abstained in person.

Of course there are racists and imperialist dupes who chime up that the IRA were ‘men of violence’ and ‘terrorists’. The same people have no problem in supporting the ‘men of violence’ when it comes to the invasion of Iraq, the bombing of Libya, Israel’s war against the Palestinian people and any other imperial adventures. But when people fight back against colonialism and imperialism it is terrorism.  The same is true in Palestine.  The only ‘terrorists’ are the Palestinians, never the Israeli state.

During the 16^th and 17^thcenturies Ireland and in particular Ulster was subject to the Plantation, the colonisation of Ireland by thousands of settlers from Britain, Scotland in particular. This was enabled through the confiscation, i.e. theft of land from the indigenous population. This Protestant population was then used as a foil by the British state in order to undermine and subvert Irish unity.

The same happened in Palestine with the settlement of Jews from Europe and it is what the Indian government today is intending to do in Kashmir.

I was a member of the Troops Out Movement and I arrived on a fact finding/solidarity tour on 8^th August 1981 as the 9^th hunger striker, Thomas McElwee died.  I’ll never forget the scene on the Falls Road, the main road through the Catholic ghetto of West Belfast, with hundreds of women banging dustbin lids on the road to announce the death.

Here was a working class community basically in insurrection. I had never seen anything like this and wasn’t to see anything like it until I stayed during the miners’ strike in the South Yorkshire village of Armthorpe in December 1984.  Armthorpe had been subject to a siege by the corrupt and murderous South Yorkshire Police.

Although he died, it was Bobby Sands who won out against Thatcher

The British strategy in Northern Ireland was criminalisation. According to this fiction the IRA and INLA were merely common criminals like any bank robber. This has always been the reaction of the British to colonial uprisings. Whether it was the Indian Mutiny or the Mau Mau Uprisingin Kenya the only reason that people rebelled against British rule was for base criminal reasons. There was nothing political about it. This was the self-deception that the British comforted themselves with. It was an illusion and a lie.

The fact is that the Catholic population of Northern Ireland had never accepted the constitutional set up.  In 1918 Sinn Fein won the all-Ireland general electionwinning 73 out of 105 seats. The Liberal government under Asquith had refused to implement the Home Rule Act of 1914 as a consequence of the Curragh Mutiny by army officers. After the Easter Rising in 1917 and Sinn Fein's election victory, which the British refused to accept, there began the war of independence.

There was a civil war in the Free State in Southern Ireland between 1922 and 1923. The British had threatened war and destruction unless the Irish accepted Partition. Partition, the favourite solution of imperialism to its divide and rule tactics in settler colonies, was imposed on the Irish people. The nationalist population of the north of Ireland had never accepted Partition and the IRA was the consequence.

Partition has had disastrous consequences wherever it has been imposed in the world, be it Cyprus or India or indeed Palestine. As James Connolly predicted, Partition

would mean a carnival of reaction both North and South, would set back the wheels of progress, would destroy the oncoming unity of the Irish Labour movement and paralyse all advanced movements whilst it endured.

The Northern Ireland police statelet was created in 1921 and until 1972, when direct rule was imposed, there was what was called a Protestant state for a Protestant people with gerrymandering widespread. For example in Derry, there was a perpetual Unionist council even though Catholics formed the majority of the population by the simple device of making Catholic wards larger.

There grew up a civil rights movementin northern Ireland. In 1967 the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association was formed. It was a completely peaceful movement but it was met with state and unionist violence.

On 4 January 1969 a People's Democracy march from Belfast to Derry was violently attacked at Burntollet Bridge. This was the beginning of the Troubles in Northern Ireland.

The march had been called in defiance of an appeal by Northern Ireland Prime Minister Terence O'Neill for an end to protest. The Northern Ireland Civil Rights Associationand some Derry nationalists had advised against it. Supporters of Ian Paisley, led by MajorRonald Bunting , denounced the march and mounted counter-demonstrations along the route.

At Burntollet an Ulster loyalistcrowd numbering in the region of 300, including 100 off-duty members of the Ulster Special Constabulary (USC), attacked the civil rights marchers with stones as well as iron bars and sticks spiked with nails. Nearby members of the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) did nothing to prevent the violence.

In the Battle of the Bogside, from 12-14 August the B-Specials, an all-Protestant paramilitary force and Unionists tried to invade what became Free Derry. It was repelled by a civil insurrection and barricades were thrown up. It was a colonial rebellion by the Catholics of the north. It was euphemistically called ‘The Troubles’. 

At that time there was no IRA.  The IRA was reformed and split into the Officials ‘stickies’ and Provisionals.  The former claimed to be Marxist but ended up as the right-wing Workers Party in Southern Ireland. In 1969 the IRA stood for ‘I Ran Away’.

In 1981 the Hunger Strike began on March 1^stwith Bobby Sands, the officer commanding the IRA in Long Kesh refusing his breakfast. On March 5^th the sitting nationalist MP Frank MacGuire died.  Bobby Sands was nominated in the by-election that followed and he defeated the sole Unionist candidate, Harry West by some 1,400 votes. Sands never took his seat.  He died 26 days later.

This was the context in which the hunger strikestook place and the sacrifice of Bobby Sands and the other 9 men.  Eventually the relatives of the hunger strikers insisted that the strike was called off but the demands were effectively won by then. In any event the British government had lost politically and northern Ireland would never be the same again. 

The hunger strike led to the rise of Sinn Fein and in 1983 Gerry Adams was elected as the MP for West Belfast defeating the sitting MP, Gerry ‘the Brit’ Fitt. The continual accusation by supporters of Britain’s occupation was that the IRA didn’t have the support of the Catholic population. The election of Bobby Sands by the voters of Fermanagh and South Tyrone and then the victory of Gerry Adams proved once and for all that the IRA had the passive, if not active, support of the working class Catholic population of Northern Ireland.

In the succeeding years the right-wing Social Democratic and Labour Party, the ‘moderate’ nationalist party, was eclipsed and Sinn Fein became the majority party of the Catholic population.

British colonialism has always been led by stupid and arrogant imperialists and none was more stupid than Thatcher who believed that her attempts to criminalise the Republican struggle would somehow stop the march of history.

With the Good Friday Agreementunder Blair in 1998 the violence in Northern Ireland stopped, at least for the time being but as long as Ireland is partitioned, there will never be peace.

Below is an excellent articlefrom Canary.

Tony Greenstein

We should never forget Bobby Sands, nor the brutality of the Thatcher government in Ireland

Today marks the 40^thanniversaryof the death of Bobby Sands inside the H-blocks of Long Kesh internment camp. On 5 May 1981, Sands laid down his life for his and his comrades’ right for recognition as political prisoners. On this day, we should remember the sacrifice he made for the cause of Irish freedom. But his struggle does not just provide an example that all anti-imperialists should follow. It also serves as an important reminder of the ruthless brutality of the British government in Ireland under the leadership of then-prime minister Margaret Thatcher. And that is equally something that we should never forget.

‘Criminalisation’ leads to ‘blanket protest’

On 1 March, 1976, the British government announcedan end to ‘Special Category’ status for members of paramilitary organisations imprisoned for offences related to the conflict in Ireland. This formed part of a multi-pronged propaganda strategy to falsely portray the republican insurrection against British rule as some kind of aggravated crime wave.

In response, republican prisoners begana series of protests to regain the lost privileges, as well as the symbolic importance of prisoner of war status. This included the right to wear one’s own clothes, free association and exemption from prison work. IRA volunteer Kieran Nugent beganthe ‘blanket protest’ when he refused to wear a prison uniform. Thrown into his cell naked, he draped himself in the only thing available – a grey, prison-issue blanket.

The ‘dirty protest’ and the 1980 hunger strike

After sufferingbeatings from prison officers on their way to the shower areas, republican prisoners beganthe ‘no wash protest’, in which they refused to bathe, cut their hair or shave. When prison officers refusedto empty their chamber pots, republican prisoners were forced to smear their own excrement on the walls, which marked the beginningof the ‘dirty protest’.

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In 1979, their prospects became even bleaker with the electionof the right-winggovernment of Margaret Thatcher in Britain. When it became clearthat Thatcher wouldn’t grant even the most modest of concessions, republican prisoners begana hunger strike in 1980. It endedwithout any deaths when her government appeared to concede some of the strikers’ demands. But the document containing the terms of the agreement turned out to be vague and open to interpretation, and the prison regime was quickly returned to a situation little better than how it was before.

A second hunger strike, and this time to the death

Determined not to be double-crossed again, the new Officer Commanding (OC) of the republican prisoners, 27-year-old Bobby Sands, launcheda second hunger strike with a crucial difference from the last. The strikers would staggertheir joining of the fast one-by-one and two weeks apart so that each would near death one at a time. As OC, Sands volunteeredto go first, making him the most likely to die. On 1 March, 1981, Sands refusedhis prison food, beginning the second hunger strike in Long Kesh just over two months afterthe end of the first.

On 5 March, less than a week into Sands’ fast, Frank Maguire, the independent nationalist member of parliament for Fermanagh and South Tyrone, died suddenly and unexpectedly, leaving his seat in Westminster vacant. The republican leadership on the outside hatched a plan. They were forever getting dismissed by political opponents for not having a mandate, but if they stood Sands as a candidate in the resultant by-electionand won, they could demonstrateto the British government and the wider world that the hunger strikers’ demands had popular support in the community.

A bittersweet victory

On 9 April 1981, Bobby Sands wonthe election with over30,000 votes – almost 10,000 more than Thatcher had won in her home constituency of Finchley in the 1979 UK general election. The victory provided the republican movement with a powerful morale boost and demolished the British government’s argument that they had no support.

But in spite of Sands’ victory, along with international pressure from the Irish diaspora abroad and others around the world, Thatcher refusedto budge. On May 5, 1981, Bobby Sands diedof starvation 66 days into his fast at 27 years of age. Over 100,000 mourners lined his cortege in one of the largestpolitical funerals in Irish history.

International outcry

Sands’ death led to international outcry at the treatment of the prisoners and Thatcher’s intransigence in meeting their demands. Critics pointed out that as members of a guerrilla army operating in contested territory, republican prisoners were entitledunder the Geneva Convention to be recognised as prisoners of war. One letter, sent from one Bernard Sanders (then-mayor of Burlington, Vermont in the US), stated:

We are deeply disturbed by your government’s unwillingness to stop the abuse, humiliation and degrading treatment of the Irish prisoners now on strike in Northern Ireland…

We ask you to end your intransigent policy towards the prisoners before the reputation of the English people for fair play and simple decency is further damaged in the eyes of the people of Vermont and the United States.

In October 1981, the British government eventually concededmost of the prisoners’ demands; but not before nine more republican hunger strikers had followedSands to the grave.

This episode perhaps shows more than any other the utter depravity, brutality, ruthlessness and lack of humanity that lurked within the twisted soul of Margaret Thatcher. All but one of the men were under 30 years old and left behind grieving mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters and, in some cases, children– all for the ‘crime’ of fighting back against foreign oppression and discrimination in their own country.

Whatever caused the Idiots of the North to vote Tory it wasn’t Brexit - Even now Momentum are afraid to say what everyone knows – that the ‘anti-Semitism’ crisis was a gigantic hoax

 It never ceases to amaze how the repetition of a lie quickly becomes a received truth. Goebbels must be turning in his grave. If only Labour had supported Brexit then all would be well. The statistics demonstrate that regardless of the position Labour took it would have done badly. 

The Hartlepool by-election result was not unexpected, even if the size of the 16% swing took most people by surprise. I have conducted an analysis of 31 Red Wall seats and they make grim reading.

Hartlepoolis a good example of the problems Labour faces. Created in February 1974 Labour gained 54.3% at the first election reaching a high of 60.2% in 1997 before dropping precipitously to 40.7% in 2005 under Blair. It dropped a further 5% in 2015 before recovering to 52.5% under Corbyn in 2017. In 2019 it dropped to 37.7%, still higher than under Ed Milliband. Under Starmer it has dropped a further 9%.

Or take Dennis Skinner’s old seat of Bolsover. When it was created in 1950 the Labour candidate gained over 80% of the vote. During the 1970s there was a slow decline to 66% in 1979. In the 80s it declined still further to the mid-50s recovering to 74% in 1997. By 2010 Labour had lost a third of its vote recovering slightly in 2017 to 52%. In 2019 just 36% of voters supported Labour and Skinner lost his seat.

Or let us take uber-Blairite Caroline Flint in Don Valley. In 1945 and 1951 Labour gained 74% reaching a high of 74.9% in 1966. By 1979 this had declined to 55%. Climbing slightly to 58% in 1997 the Blair years saw a loss of over a third of voters to 37.9%. In 2017 under Corbyn Labour regained most of these voters and obtained 53%. In 2019 Labour gained 43.2% and lost the seat.  However it still gained 5.3% more votes than in 2010, the last years of the Blair/Brown partnership.

Hartlepool voting shares 

Hartlepool Labour Votes 2001-2021

The picture is repeated everywhere with the exception of Batley and Spen and Hemsworth. Despite the malevolent and dishonest explanations of those like Tom Watson and Mandy Mandelson who put Labour’s defeat down to Corbyn’s ‘long shadow’ it is abundantly clear that the problem was the utter failure of the Labour Right to offer any answers to the problems of neo-liberalism – the destruction of whole industries, the cuts to the NHS, the increasing proportion of national wealth spent on the military, the attacks on civil liberties etc.

It was during the Blair years that Labour suffered its most staggering lossesdeclining from 43.2% in 1997 to 29% in 2010. There was a small recovery (1.4%) under Ed Miliband (with the lost of all but 1 Labour seats in Scotland!) and a gain of 9.6% under Corbyn in 2017, the highest swing to Labour since 1945. Even the 32.2% Labour vote in 2019 was higher than Labour gained under Gordon Brown in 2010 and Miliband in 2015.

The evidence is crystal clear. What caused Labour to lose in 2019 was not Corbyn’s radical manifesto but the determination of the Labour Right that given the choice they would prefer to see Boris Johnson in power than Corbyn. The Labour Right, Hodge, Tom Watson, Wes Streeting, Mann and Austin, acted as a fifth column. If Corbyn and McDonnell had shown the guts to expel half a dozen of them it would have sent a signal to the coup mongers that their days were numbered.

Having done his best to destroy the Corbyn Project Lord John Mann becomes a Tory Antisemitism 'Czar'

It is a lesson that has yet to sink into the thick skulls of Momentum and the Campaign Group. You can’t form an alliance with the pro-capitalist, racist Right in the Labour Party. They have to be purged like they have purged us. To those who say that Labour is a broad church I agree.  But even the broadest church doesn’t tolerate non-believers and atheists.

The Right in the Labour Party is as wedded to neo-liberal capitalism as the Tories. It was under New Labour that PFI and private involvement in the NHS took off.  Racism and hostility to migrants and asylum seekers was the norm. It was under New Labour that Britain went to war in Iraq and Afghanistan.

It should have been a no-brainer that the Right’s ‘anti-Semitism’ offensive, in conjunction with the Tory Press, the Guardian, Board of Deputies and virtually every Establishment talking head (with few honourable exceptions such as Peter Oborne) was their chosen method of attacking the Left. It was as dishonest as it was all-embracing.

Mike Gapes was one of the rats who deserted Labour's ship for Change UK/Independent Party only to be soundly defeated at the General Election

Today we see Tory MPs so concerned about ‘anti-Semitism’ that they call for the dismissal of Professor David Miller at Bristol University. Robert Halfon MP is so worked up that he comparesthe situation at Bristol University with that of German universities in the 1930s. Presumably, as an extra-curricula exercise Miller takes his students on book burning expeditions! What is it that motivates Tory MPs to protest about ‘anti-Semitism’ when they are silent over the continuing Windrush scandal or the daily discrimination that Black British people face?

But it was not simply the Labour Right who lost Labour the 2019 election and who, under Starmer are determined to ensure that Labour faces future electoral oblivion. The fault is equally that of the Labour left which not only failed to stand up to Tom Watson, Ian Austin and the Zionist lobby, but actually adopted their narrative.

Unfortunately Corbyn allowed Snake Starmer to work his way back into the fold after taking part in the chicken coup

We were told by Jon Lansman, Momentum’s Fuhrer, that Labour suffered from ‘unconscious’ anti-Semitism. Proof? There was none. John McDonnell ran around like a headless chicken telling all the Zionists targets to apologise. Ken Livingstone told me that McDonnell advised him to apologise ‘because the Jews are a forgiving people.’ With that kind of idiocy you don’t need friends.

There seemed to be no recognition of the fact that the threat of a Corbyn government had put the shivers up the ruling class. The threat of even mild reforms to its power and privilege was more than enough to unleash a barrage of vitriol and utterly bogus claims of ‘anti-Semitism’. What happened between 2015 and 2019 was one long dirty tricks campaign that went by the name ‘anti-Semitism’.

The Left made strategic mistakes. When Corbyn presented a radical manifesto in 2017 against Theresa May, she of the ‘strong and stable’, it was met with enthusiasm. The turning point for me was a crowd of 8,000 in Leamington Spa of all places.  Nowhere more symbolizes Middle England than this county town. Yet in his moment of triumph Corbyn and those around him snatched defeat from victory.

Corbyn should have immediately called for the head of Iain McNicol rather than allowing the slimeball to stagger on for more months. The anti-Semitism fusillade should have been well and truly buried. The Board of Deputies should have been called out for their support of Israeli snipers mowing down Palestinian children and unarmed protesters in Gaza. Instead Corbyn continued to appease the Right and betray his friends.

Neither Corbyn nor his friends and supporters understood the nature of the attack upon them. Corbyn himself reacted with pain to the accusations of anti-Semitism. He denied that he was personally an anti-Semite whilst condemning it as vigorously as he could. But the Zionist accusations of ‘anti-Semitism’ simply meant that he didn’t like Zionism and Israel. The proper reaction to such accusations should have been both to condemn anti-Semitism, such as exists in the Labour Party and to condemn the egregious racism of Israeli Apartheid that the Board of Deputies supports.

Instead Corbyn turned on his friends. In Labour’s Leaked Report there is a passage which read:

Well we were all expelled or forced out yet what was the result?  Was trust rebuilt? Of course not.  Their real goal was the removal of Corbyn not the removal of Jackie Walker or Tony Greenstein. We were just collateral damage.

That is why it was so absurd when Corbyn was suspended by Starmer that the Chair of Momentum, Andrew Scatterbrain attackedthe suspension as ‘undermining the fight against anti-Semitism’.

Scatterbrain and Momentum failed to understand that there never was a fight against anti-Semitism. It was always a fight against the left. That is why today there are dozensof Jewish Labour Party members suspended or expelled/forced out of Labour. The anti-Semitism campaign was about making Labour a safe home for apologists for Israeli Apartheid.

All this should have been obvious since if the campaign against ‘anti-Semitism’ was at all sincere then the Zionists would not have tried to foist the IHRAmisdefinition of anti-Semitism on the Labour Party.  A definition, 7 of whose 11 illustrations concern Israel not Jews.

Starmer’s Last Throw of the Dice?

The choice of Keir Starmer to be the Right’s standard bearer is no accident. His lack of anything approaching a personality is symptomatic of the whole of the Labour Right. They have nothing to say and no alternative to offer to Boris Johnson.

Starmer’s statement that he would take the blame for the election disaster lasted precisely one day before throwing the useless Angela Rayner under the bus! Since he is surrounded by a useless Shadow  Chancellor Anneliese Dodds and the equally useless Lisa Nandy as Foreign Secretary, he has a lot of bodies to bury. At present the Shadow Cabinet has all the impact of a wet paper bag.

Corbyn showed in 2017 that it was possible to halt the decline in Labour’s support in the Brexit heartlands of the North.  Unfortunately he was incapable of facing down the Right. Determined to appease his opponents Corbyn opposed the one hope of reigning them in, Open Selection. Having sealed his own fate Corbyn then went on to stab Chris Williamson in the back.

Perhaps most pathetic of all was Jennie Formby who saw it as a badge of pride that she had expelled so many people for ‘anti-Semitism’ under the fast track procedures compared to her predecessor. The only problem was that the more people she expelled the more she ‘proved’ that Labour did have an anti-Semitism problem.

Since nearly all of the people were expelled for what they said about Israel Corbyn and Formby did the Right’s job for them.

Starmer is unlikely to last long. The knives will be out for this dishonest knight without a trace of charisma. But whoever is put in his place will not find an answer to the leaching of support from the Red Wall seats unless they face up to and challenge Johnson’s neo-liberal politics and the austerity that will be come in the wake of COVID.

With the loss of the Red Wall in tandem with the loss of its 50 seats in Scotland, the Labour Party faces a dismal future. Just as Israel has no right to exist as a racist state, so the Labour Party has no right to exist as another conservative party.  In France and Italy social democratic parties have all but disappeared.  All over Europe social democracy is in retreat. There is no reason why Britain should be the exception.

Tony Greenstein

See Red Wall Election Results – 1945-2021

Israeli Police invade Al-Aqsa mosque, ethnic cleansing in Sheikh Jarrar and mobs chanting‘Death to the Arabs’ - this is what Labour's fake 'antisemitism' campaign was designed to defend 

Another child victim of Elbit

Interview Mona al Kurd

Today we are seeing a repeat of the events of October 2000:

In early October 2000, Palestinian citizens of Israel staged mass demonstrations in towns and villages throughout the country to protest the government’s oppressive policies against Palestinians in the Occupied Territories at the beginning of the Second Intifada.

During these demonstrations in Israel, the police and special police sniper units killed 13 unarmed Palestinians (12 citizens of Israel, 1 resident of Gaza) and injured hundreds more using live ammunition, rubber-coated steel bullets (“rubber bullets”), and tear gas. Israeli Jewish citizens also attacked Palestinian citizens of Israel, their property and their holy sites in early October 2000. 

Despite the Or Commission finding no justification for these murders, not a single officer was ever charged with the killings. Just one Jewish demonstrator has been killed by Israeli security forces in the entire history of the Israeli state. This statistic in itself demonstrates the racist and apartheid nature of the Israeli state.

Israeli settlers and pogromists, to say nothing of Orthodox Jews, throw stones and engage in violence but Israeli Police always manage to contain them without using live fire which is reserved solely for Palestinians.

The attacks  on Palestinians in Bat Yam, Jaffa, Acre and other cities throughout Israel is not the first time that Israeli Jews have engaged in pogroms against the Palestinian minority in Israel.

As Israel resorts to the only thing it knows, the murder of Palestinians, bombing and mass destruction in Gaza, the background to what is happening can be summed up in a nutshell. It is Israel's colonial momentum towards ethnic cleansing and the racial purification of Jerusalem, symbolised by the attack on Al Aqsa mosque last Friday. 

Itamar Gvir MK and Aryeh King, Deputy Mayor of Jerusalem taunt Palestinians

Just imagine that Iranian police had invaded a Jewish synagogue in Tehran and attacked worshippers. Iran has the largest Jewish community in the Middle East after Israel. There would have been no shortage of voices denouncing what had happened.

Despite the lies and false accusations of ‘anti-Semitism’ directed at supporters of the Palestinians over the past 5 years, the truth about Israel and what a ‘Jewish’ state means, is becoming more widely understood.

2021 began with Btselem, Israel’s principal and most respected human rights organisation, issuing a statement‘THIS IS APARTHEID - A regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea:’

Human Rights Watch, a conservative human rights organisation which is close to the State Department and whose agenda is subservient to US foreign policy, brought out a 231 page report A Threshold Crossed: Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution,” HRW found the Israeli state guilty of the crime of apartheid. Kenneth Roth, its Executive Director said in a press release:

“Prominent voices have warned for years that apartheid lurks just around the corner if the trajectory of Israel’s rule over Palestinians does not change,” said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch. “This detailed study shows that Israeli authorities have already turned that corner and today are committing the crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution.”

No matter how many times the Zionist lobby and its Starmer-like puppets cry ‘anti-Semitism’, the daily reality of land confiscations, ethnic cleansing, settler and police violence win out.

If I don’t steal your house someone else will steal it!

We even saw Emily Maitless on BBC Newsnight, usually the flagship of Israeli hasbara, giving the Israeli Ambassador Tzipi Hotoveli, a religious nut on the far-right of Likud, who had previously given her support to the fascist anti-miscegenation group Lehava, a grilling.

In March Israel held its fourth general election in two years and once again there was a political stalemate. Two-thirds of the Knesset, some 80 seats, belong to the far-Right. The two Labour Zionist parties – the Israeli Labour Party and Meretz gained just 13 seats between them. When you consider that in 1949 in Israel’s first General Election Mapai (ILP) and  Mapam (now Meretz) gained 65 out of 120 seats, you can see the extent of their decline. Indeed this was a marked improvement over the previous election in which these same two parties gained just 6 seats.

The first rule when forming a government coalition in Israel is that no Arab party can be included. Indeed no coalition can even rest on the support of Arab parties ‘from the outside.’ What probably led to the assassinationof Yitzhak Rabin in 1995 was the fact that the coalition government rested on the support of the Communist Hadash, a largely Arab party, to get support for the Oslo Accords through the Knesset.

Israeli politics is seen through the prism of support or opposition to Netanyahu, its criminal and longest serving Prime Minister. Netanyahu is desperate to avoid being convicted for fraud but it is a mistake to reduce everything to Netanyahu’s individual fate. The crisis in Israeli politics goes deeper.

Likud is the largest party in the Knesset holding 30 seats, a quarter of all seats. His coalition can count on the 16 votes of two religious Zionist parties, Shas and United Torah Judaism. Thanks to Netanyahu acting as a midwife to the amalgamation of 3 far-Right parties, Tkuma/Religious Zionism and the Kahanist Oztma Yehudit, a Judeo-Nazi party and Noam, a virulently anti-gay party, he can count on a further 6 votes making 52 votes in all.

Israeli Police deliberately set out to provoke the disturbances by preventing Palestinians sitting down on the gates outside the Damascus Gate

The opposition is equally divided and disparate. It consists of the remnants of Labour Zionism with 13 seats, Yamina – a religious Zionist party led by Naftali Bennett with 7 seats, Yisrael Beteinu, a secular far-Right Russian party led by Avigdor Lieberman also with 7 seats, New Hope a far-Right party led by former Likud Minister Gideon Saar with 6 seats and the ‘centrist’ Yesh Atid led by Yair Lapid with 17 seats. Blue and White, led by former Chief of Staff Benny Gantz, is currently part of Netanyahu’s coalition with a further 8 seats. The only thing that unites the opposition to Likud is a hatred of Netanyahu, so the ‘left wing’ Meretz is happy to sit in the same coalition with Avigdor Lieberman, who has previously talked of drowning thousands of Palestinian prisoners in the Dead Sea.

The problem for Netanyahu’s Zionist opponents is that the 3 far right parties are unwilling to rely on the support of an Arab party and Religious Zionism is likewise unwilling to rely on the support of the conservative Arab Ra’am party with 4 seats . This is why a fifth election in 2 years beckons. Zionism faces an impossible dilemma - just what does a Jewish state mean? Is it a religious or a secular state?

But if Israel lacks a functioning government there is a racist consensus among all Zionist parties which is that Israeli Palestinians need to be confined to as little land as possible. That is why in the 73 years of Israel’s existence not one Arab town or community has been created whereas hundreds of Jewish communities have been created. 93% of Israeli ‘national’ land is reserved for Jews via the Israeli Land Authority and the JNF. Palestinians, some 20% of Israel’s population, are confined to about 2% of the land.

Throughout Israel’s existence there has been a continuous process of confiscation of what is left of the Palestinian’s land. This has been achieved through the use of two laws – the 1950 Absentee Property Law which should have been called the Legalisation of Theft of Palestinian Land Law. It meant the creation of the Orwellian term, Present-Absentees. Palestinians could move just a mile down the road to avoid hostilities, as happened to the villagers in Kafr Birim and Ikrit, who moved out at the suggestion of the Zionist militias in 1948 after having been promised they could move back in after the hostilities. They ended up being classified as present-absentees and it was the  Mapam kibbutz of Baram which stole their land!

This law was supplemented by the 1970 Law on Legal and Administrative Affairs which was enacted in order that Jews who lost their property in East Jerusalem in 1948 can reclaim their property.

In 1948 as a result of the ethnic cleansing and war that accompanied Israel’s birth, Jews who lived in East Jerusalem relocated to West Jerusalem and took over the property of Palestinians who had fled. The 1970 law allowed them to reclaim their original property in East Jerusalem. However there was no equivalence. The 45,000 Palestinians who lost their property in West Jerusalem had no right to reclaim it. Why? Because Israel is a Jewish state. And that is why in a nutshell Israel, as a Jewish state, is inherently a racist state.

What sparked off the current crisis was the continued ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in East Jerusalem by Jewish settlers. Through a variety of legal tricks those who have been living for over 70 years in Sheikh Jarrar are facing eviction after the courts ruled against them. We have to remember that Israeli courts are Zionist colonial courts. Their rulings are based on acceptance of the idea that Israel is a Jewish state. They operate within a Zionist consensus which holds that Palestinians are there on sufferance. They do not recognise international law and in this they are backed up by the United States and the Biden Administration.

It is not even the original Jewish inhabitants of these properties who are attempting to return to them. They have already been compensated with ‘abandoned’ Palestinian property. Their title to the properties has been bought up by Zionist settler companies.

Although East Jerusalem has been annexed to Israel its Palestinians have not been granted Israeli citizenship. Instead they have been given ‘permanent residence’. Except that it’s not permanent and can be revoked at a stroke. For example if you leave Israel to study abroad and don’t return after 7 years you will effectively become stateless. If you are accused of ‘disloyalty’ then your residence status can be removed or if you want to marry a Palestinian from the West Bank then you have to move because you can’t bring your partner to live with you. You can vote in local but not national elections but your services are markedly inferior to those of Jewish citizens even though you are expected to pay the same taxes.

What lies behind the ethnic cleansing is Jerusalem’s 2020 Master Plan which aims to “maintain a solid Jewish majority in the city” by encouraging Jewish settlements in East Jerusalem. There have been three such plans for Jerusalem; the Jerusalem 2020 Master Plan, the Marom Plan and the Jerusalem 5800 Plan. Each of these plans reinforces each other. Their common goal is to increase the number of Jewish residents and reduce the number of Palestinians living in Jerusalem. Details of each master plan can be read in the article Which Jerusalem? Israel’s Little-Known Master Plans. The aim is to achieve a 70/30 Jewish demographic majority.

Although the Israeli government pretends that the ‘eviction’ of Palestinians from Sheikh Jarrar is a ‘real estate problem’ the reality is clear. As Jerusalem’s far-Right Deputy Mayor, Aryeh King openly stated, seizing Sheikh Jarrah homes is part of a wider strategy. It is “the way to secure the future of Jerusalem as a Jewish capital for the Jewish people.” 

Israel unilaterally annexed occupied East Jerusalem in 1980. It has, to date, expropriated from Palestinians nearly one-third of the land in East Jerusalem, and built 11 Jewish-only neighborhoods in them. The permanent resident status of at least 14,701 Palestinians from East Jerusalem has been revoked. Israel has facilitated the settlement of more than 200,000 of its civilian population in East Jerusalem. It has also cut the city off from the occupied West Bank, to which it has been historically closely connected, by settlements and the apartheid wall.

This is the background to the attack by Israeli Police on worshippers at  Al Aqsa mosque injuring over 300 Palestinians on the holiest day of Ramadan. Israeli Police thugs invaded the mosque firing stun grenades and sound bombs and beating all around. This followed the Police provocation at the Damascus Gate when the steps that lead down from the entrance were sealed off by the Police preventing Palestinians sitting down and enjoying their meal after breaking their fast in Ramadan. Palestinians in Jerusalem of course are never consulted by a Police force that considers them lower than human. Israel is a democratic state for Jews and a Jewish state for Arabs.

The attacks on Haram al-Sharif which is the third holiest site in Islam cannot be separated from the ethnic cleansing of Jerusalem. The goal of the Jewish settlers is to demolish Al Aqsa Mosque and the Golden Dome and replace them with the Third Temple at which Jewish Messianic madmen will be able to sacrifice live animals to their god. Messianism has been the handmaiden of the settlements in the attempt to restore the rule of Jewish law in Israel.

It is not well known but there are signs from the Israeli Chief Rabbinate at the entrance to the Temple Mount forbidding observant Jews from entering. Not out of any concern for Islam but because, as the site of the second Temple, it is forbidden for observant Jews to go there in case they trespass on the Holy of Holies which was the preserve of the High Priest who had access to god. The Jewish settlers see the Temple Mount as simply another stage in their desire to Judaise Jerusalem and evict the indigenous population.

Hamas in Gaza decided to offer solidarity by firing rockets into Israel. It seems that these rockets are no longer the  pea shooters of 2014. If Richard Silverstein’s Tikkun Olam is to be believed, Iranian cruise missiles have been imported into Gaza via the tunnels from Egypt. If true then we are entering a new ball game. The destruction of a bus in Tel Aviv and reports of deaths elsewhere suggests that deaths in future attacks on Gaza may not be so one-sided. In which case we may see a new invasion of Gaza with all that that portends being raised by the far-Right.

Tony Greenstein

The Longer Israel Attacks a Defenceless People the More Its Support Drains Away

There was a massive rally at the Clocktower in Brighton today and then an even larger march, with over a thousand people taking part, to the Level in Brighton.  Here are some photographs and videos.

Once again it shows that Brighton is the capital of the anti-Zionist and Palestinian struggle in Britain!  Well the Zionists claim we are the anti-Semitic capital but we know what Zionists mean when they say ‘anti-Semitism’.

Also I am including a wonderful video made by the journalist Abby Martin in Gaza describing life under siege in Gaza.

And below that I include an article on the other aspect of what is happening in Israel itself. For the first time since the beginning of the Second Intifada in 2000 Israel’s Palestinian population have mobilised in support of the struggle against the occupation and in particular the desecration by Israeli police thugs of the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem.

This has been met with vigilante squads of Israeli fascists attacking Israeli Palestinians in their homes, including burning down mosques and Palestinian shops.  This vigilante violence, although condemned by Israeli politicians has been supported if not encouraged by the Israeli police who have stood by as Palestinians have been lynched and dragged out of their cars.

Let us remember that the Zionist movement can trace its origins to the pogroms against Jews in Odessa in 1881. Zionism has now decided to replicate the actions of the anti-Semites with its own pogroms against Palestinians. That is some achievement.

It demonstrates that racism and fascism is not genetic or peculiar to any people or group.  Given the right set of circumstances any people can become racists and murderers and that is Zionism’s achievement in its ‘Jewish’ state.

News has also come in of Italian Dockers Refusing to Load Arms Shipment to Israel in Solidarity with Palestine

Jerusalem protests: The mob ‘breaking faces’ learned from Israel’s establishment

The mob in Jerusalem is happy to enforce Israel’s apartheid now, in hopes of speeding up the process of expulsion. Other Israelis are still in denial. They prefer to pretend that apartheid has not yet arrived, in hopes of easing their consciences a little longer. 

 Boy suspended from Parrswood High School in Manchester for saying ‘Free Palestine’.

See Manchester boy suspended from school for ‘racist abuse’ after shouting ‘free Palestine’ in class

What one wonders was racist about saying ‘free Palestine’ in class?  Was it mentioning Palestine or is the idea of freedom now anti-Semitic too? On their front page they boast that ‘Every child succeeds’.  Clearly the student who exercised freedom of speech has only succeeded in getting suspended.

This is the result of the Prevent programme and the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism.

The letter is here.

Perhaps you could write to

Mark McElwee - the Scumbag Headteacher who doesn't believe in free speech

the Chair of Governors e.caulfield@parrswood.manchester.sch.ukand the Headteacher Mark McElwee at admin@pwh.co.ukas well as s.reeves@parrswood.manchester.sch.uk, l.cray@parrswood.manchester.sch.ukand Ms Mannion j.mannion@parrswood.manchester.sch.uk, 

See below the email sent by a member of Brighton and Hove PSC

From: DAVID ROGER
Date: 16 May 2021 at 13:25:58 BST
To:e.caulfield@parrswood.manchester.sch.uk,Ms E Garryadmin@pwhs.co.uk, s.reeves@parrswood.manchester.sch.uk,
Subject:Racism

I hear you have suspended a child for saying Free Palestine
What does this mean ? That you don’t think Palestine should be free ?
Is there an islamophobia problem in your school ?
Do you know a third of Palestinians are Christian ?
What if a child cried “ long live Zionist Israel “ would they get a gold star ?

This action will traumatise children into not thinking for themselves
It’s smacks of racist bias
David Roger
www.davidrogerproductiondesign.com

Ask Boris Johnson and Sir Starmer how Destroying a Children’s Center has anything to do with Israel 'protecting itself' against rockets 

With all attention on Israel’s genocidal attacks on Gaza and the pogroms against Palestinian citizens in Israel, the situation in the West Bank itself is being ignored. There is currently a reign of terror there to add to the problems with COVID.

Jenin Refugee Camp is being constantly attacked by Israeli troops.

For the past few years the Brighton Trust has been raising funds for the Al Tafawk Centre in Jenin, which is in the north of the West Bank. On Sunday I learnt from an eye witness, who for safety reasons will have to remain nameless, that Israeli soldiers raided the Centre last Saturday night destroying the equipment.

This is Zionism’s idea of peaceful coexistence. It should prove, even to the eternally blind, that Israel is a vicious and murderous settler colonial state that even needs to attack a Palestinian children’s centre to emphasise who is in control.

The Israeli occupation authorities wishes to see the Palestinians of the West Bank ethnically cleansed. It therefore hates any civil society organisations because they help keep the population together. Hence why the Al Tafawk Centre was targeted.

Below is the statement that I received. It speaks for itself and below that is a statement on Facebook from its manager.

What You Can Do

Please circulate the information in this blog to your MP and ask them to put down/sign what is called an Early Day Motion protesting at the damages by the Israeli Defence Forces to the Centre and in it call for the IDF to pay compensation for the restoration of the Centre.

Ask your MP to raise these abominable acts with Dominic Raab and the Foreign Office.

Please contribute whatever you can afford to the Al Tafawk Appeal which we have been running these past years or donate directly to:

Account Name:          The Brighton Trust

Account Number:       91420311

Sort Code:                   09-01-28

Reference:                   Al Tafawk Appeal (this is important)

By publicising this as much as possible you will be helping to protect the staff and children at the Centre. The Israeli Army and those who command it have to be made aware that there is a price to pay for their actions.

Thank you

Tony Greenstein

Hi,

I just received some horrible news.

Last night they've raided the center. First they started to shoot from outside the center. Then they blew up the front door and entered the center. They threw everything around. Damaging everything of value. Like the printer.

I have been sent some pictures. I have attached them to this email.

Mona [the Manager] is very scared and in shock. She doesn't know what to do. 9 children are also still in shock

The situation in Jenin.

Persona Doll Training enjoys working with Al Tafawk Centre in Jenin. Our programme for working with older children detailed in our publication “Empowering Voices” was developed thanks to this relationship. The centre’s founder, Mona Jalamnh has recently sent us heartbreaking messages, describing what is taking place there. This is what she wrote on May 11th.

“I will try to write what is going on here in the camp from the time the soldiers attacked Jerusalem.. our nights change to nightmare in the camp and also our days

Every night hundred of solders' jeeps come to the camp and start shooting everywhere throw gas at homes from windows as the children are sleeping and if anyone need to save or move his child to hospital or even to safer place he put himself in danger.

Two days ago, the soldiers were hid around the centre as we thought they went away in the early morning so I decided to go as everyday to open the center at 7 am.. but when I reach the center with some children the soldiers start to throw gas at us,

the children start running in street and I couldn't control them

The situation in Jenin now is very hard I go to the center in secret .At day time they don’t shoot as at night

But for 2 days they keep throwing Gas at the children in the center so i had to close it till I feel a little safer.

We are really hopeless like what happen when I was child in 2000..

I do not know how to explain the pain and fair we face I wish I could make pictures but I am sure it would be so dangerous

The children feel bad from the gas and the noise of shooting they spent the time under the tables crying.”

The Jewish Chronicle was hot off the mark with an exclusive no less! ‘EXCLUSIVE: Labour grassroots campaign to jettison IHRA definition of antisemitism’in the shock horror mode normally adopted by the tabloids. And what was this Exclusive?  That the Labour Campaign for Free Speech which lists Chris Williamson, Jackie Walker and myself on its Steering Committee were proposing a motion to Labour Party Conference in favour of replacing the Zionists’ IHRA misdefinition of anti-Semitism with the Jerusalem Declaration of Anti-Semitism.

The IHRA Misdefinition, previously called the Working Definition of Anti-Semitism [WDA], was first proposed by Dina Porat of the Stephen Roth Institue of Tel Aviv University. You can read about the origins of the WDA in a Report on the WDA – Six Years After in a Conference in Paris in August/September 2010.

Particularly interesting is the contribution by Kenneth Stern, the principal drafter of the WDA, "The Working Definition – A Reappraisal"Stern  wrote that

the idea for a common definition was, as far as I know, first articulated by Dina Porat, who leads the Stephen Roth Institute,... in  April 2004. I recall Dina, who gets very animated when she latches on to a good idea,  talking to me, to my colleague Andy Baker, and just about anyone else she could  corner about the need for a definition.  

Dina Porat is today the Chief Historian at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Propaganda Museum and is one of the leading ideologues of Zionism.

It is useful to read Stern’s article because it explains the thinking behind the IHRA. Stern’s criticism of the previous attempts of the EUMC to formulate a definition of anti-Semitism was that it had constructed a list of Jewish stereotypes and come up with what he described as a ‘clunker of a definition’ because it ‘didn’t know how to deal with the problem of a Jew being attacked on the streets of  Paris or anywhere else as a stand-in for an Israeli.’

Stern argued that a definition of anti-Semitism could not be created on the basis of stereotypes of Jews because it was ‘unworkable to require a clear view of what is in the mind of any  actor (many of whom are never found) before making a classification.’

Stephen Pollard, Editor of the Jewish Chronicle is mystified why what is happening in Israel should impact on Jews in Britain - perhaps he should have a quiet word with the BOD!

And in this statement you can see why the IHRA, even if Stern was in good faith, went off the rails. Stern created a definition based on people’s political beliefs. It’s difficult to understand his thinking. Stern says that the WDA was created for the collection of statistics but it’s unclear how someone comparing Israeli policy and the Nazis fits into that. But regardless Stern was wrong. It is is essential to understand the motives of someone in order to classify whether it was an anti-Semitic attack.

If someone attacks me in the street because I’m wearing a rolex watch that is not an anti-Semitic attack.  It is a straightforward robbery. The fact that I am Jewish is irrelevant.  But if I’m attacked because my attacker is of the belief that all Jews are rich and I am therefore singled out, then of course that is an anti-Semitic attack.

If someone is attacked because the attacker believes all Jews support Israel then that is an anti-Semitic attack because the person was attacked because s/he is Jewish. Of course the reason why so many people believe that British Jews are responsible for what happens in Gaza is because Zionist organisations like the Board of Deputies repeatedly support Israeli war crimes whilst, at the same time declaring that they are ‘the voice of the Jewish community.’

No less than Stephen Pollard of the Jewish Chronicle had the gall to send me his Editor’s Letter this week which proclaimed:

Quite why people going about their daily lives in parts of North London should be linked to Israeli military action is something which lies in the mind of the Jew haters and their fellow travellers

Could it have something to do with its support for the actions of Israel in Gaza?  Whilst most of the world condemns Israel as a Apartheid state, the Board intonedon behalf of all British Jews that:

“We are deeply concerned and saddened by the escalation of violence, and the seemingly unremittent  rocket fire against Israeli civilians by Hamas in Gaza. These attacks are abhorrent and, despite the protection of Iron Dome, have sadly already caused loss of life. Israel has the right to defend its citizens and it is the responsibility of Hamas to immediately halt all rocket fire from Gaza.

Not a single word about the devastation and loss of life in Gaza.  Palestinian Lives Simply Don’t Matter. So of course some people will be fooled into believing that all Jews support Israeli war crimes and thus it is the Board itself which has placed British Jews in danger.

The Working Definition of Anti-Semitism was foisted in 2005 on the European Union Monitoring Committee. In 2014 the EUMC’s successor body, the Fundamental Rights Agency, removedthe WDA from its website and in 2016 the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, an obscure inter-governmental body adopted it or rather it adopted the 38 word core IHRA definition. That too is now shrouded in controversy as the IHRA Secretariat have deliberately misrepresentedthe decisions of the 2016 Conference in Bucharest.

The IHRA misdefinition of anti-Semitism has been used to close down free speech on Palestine and at the moment there is a particular targeting of academics. This much is admitted by the person who drafted it, Kenneth Stern, in testimonyto Congress and an articlein the Guardian.

That is why the Labour Campaign for Free Speech is urging local Labour Parties to adopt a Model Motion adopting the Jerusalem Declaration on Anti-Semitism.

See Why We Should Critically Welcome The Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism [JDA]

Below you can see all the dishonest ploys of the Jewish Chronicle, all in one article. We are told that the Zionist Community Security Trust (which acts effectively as an arm of Israel’s Mossad (MI6)) says it “could hamper efforts to tackle antisemitism”. They don’t explain how it will manage this! What they really mean is that efforts to close down campaigns in support of the Palestinians will be less effective.

When Dave Rich of the CST say that the JDA ‘was drawn up without widespread consultation of Jewish community organisations’what he means of course is Zionist organisations.

The IHRA limits the Palestinian right to define their own struggle by branding it as ‘anti-Semitic’. Palestinians who experience racism every day of their lives, as in the vandalism and destruction of the Al Tafawk Childrens’ Centre last weekend by the Israeli Military, are told that they are anti-Semitic if they complain.

Palestinians struggle for their rights against Zionist oppression not because they are anti-Semitic but because they, like most people, don’t like being oppressed! It really is that simple.

But David Rich, an academic prostitute on hire to Mossad’s CST, gives the game away when he complains that:

While IHRA warns against comparing Israel to Nazi Germany, the Declaration suggests such comparisons are “contentious” but not antisemitic.

That is true. When Jewish demonstrators march in Israel to the chant of ‘death to the Arabs’ we should call them for what they are – Judeo-Nazis. And when people like the late Profess Ze’ev Sternhell wrotean article ‘In Israel, Growing Fascism and a Racism Akin to Early Nazism’ no doubt Rich would call him anti-Semitic despite Sternhell being a child survivor of the holocaust. 

Rich also complains that denying the ‘Jewish people their right to self-determination’ would not be anti-Semitic. Why should it? Only nations have such a right and Jews are a religion not a nation.

Clearly the JDA has got the Zionists and their academic puppets worried that their chosen instrument of demonisation of anti-Zionism, the IHRA, is meeting more resistance than they bargained for.

If you are in the Labour Party please move this resolution

Tony Greenstein

See:

Unlike the IHRA Misdefinition of Anti-Semitism the JDA Makes a Clear Distinction Between Anti-Semitism and Anti-Zionism

Why do we need to define anti-Semitism?

Model motion: Abandon IHRA and adopt the Jerusalem Declaration