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A Crowdfunding Appeal to Publish a Very Special Book - Zionism During the Holocaust

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 Hidden from History – The Behaviour of the Zionist movement During, Before and After the Nazi Period

Please Give Generously to My Crowdfunder - Don't Let the Zionists Silence the Truth About Their Record

https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/i-want-to-publish-zionism-during-the-holocaust-1


When Ken Livingstone declared, in April 2016, that Hitler supported Zionism, he was attacked as a ‘Nazi apologist’. This was despite the fact that what Livingstone referred to was a matter of historical fact.

A professor recently remarked to me how strange it is that virtually none of the thousands of books and articles on the Holocaust deal with the relationship between the Zionist movement and the Nazis.

Just one academic, Professor Francis Nicosia has broached the subject. The one other book on this topic, by Lenni Brenner, Zionism in the Age of the Dictators, was published nearly 40 years ago.

Left publishers in Britain such as Pluto Press and Verso have shied away from publishing such a book because, in the words of Max Vickers of Zed Press, ‘the highly inflammatory subject matter.’

The Zionist movement is extremely sensitive to this subject. Books such as Ben Hecht’s Perfidy and Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, resulted in vicious attacks on the authors. They were accused of saying that the Jews had killed themselves. This of course assumes that most or all Jews during the Hitler period supported Zionism whereas, in Germany for example just 2% of Jews were Zionists. Such an assumption is also anti-Semitic.

 When researching for my book I came across this letter in the Jewish Chronicle of 5 February 1993 about how the Board of Deputies Zionist President Selig Brodetsky deliberately sabotaged the rescue efforts of Rabbi Schonfeld, the Chair of the Chief Rabbi's Rescue Committee - the Zionists opposed emigration to anywhere but Palestine - which was impossible during the war

The 1987 play Perdition, written by Jim Allen and directed by Ken Loach, was cancelledjust 36 hours before it was due to begin at the Royal Court Theatre such was the political pressure that was exerted.


For the better part of a decade I have been researching the relations between the Zionist movement and the Nazis. I have now written a book Zionism During the Holocaust. My book examines Zionist historiography and how, through its various holocaust organisations, notably Yad Vashem, the historical record has been manipulated and distorted in order to create a series of myths such as that the notion that Jewish resistance to the Nazis was primarily from the Zionists or that only Jews were victims of the holocaust.

I investigate what happened during the rule of the Military Junta in Argentina (1976-83) when up to 3,000 Jews were murdered yet Israel stayed silent since it considered it more important to sell arms to Argentina’s neo-Nazi  regime. At the same time Israel refused to process visa applications from ‘subversive’ or left-wing Jews.

The Israeli flag flew proudly with the Confederate flag and Auschwitz Was Not Enough T-shirts at Trump's  Capital Hill riot

I researched the Board of Deputies record during WW2 when, under  its President Selig Brodetsky, it activelytried to sabotage attempts to secure entry to Britain of Jewish refugees.

I also ask what collaboration with the Nazis means and in particular the Zionist decision to negotiate a trade pact Ha'avarawith the Nazi regime at the same time as most of world Jewry was boycotting Nazi Germany. I also look at the Kasztner Affair, the trial in Israel of Rudolf Kasztner.

Ken Loach who produced Perdition

During WW2 the Zionist movement prioritised achieving a Jewish state over the rescuing Jews from the Holocaust. Even worse it actively sabotaged all rescue attempts that didn’t involve Palestine as the destination.

The subject matter of my book is highly relevant. The ideological congruity of Zionism and Nazism is being played out in the dominance of an openly racist and eugenicist far-Right in Israel today. The alliancebetween Zionist groups internationally and the neo-Nazi far-Right was witnessed in the hero’s welcomegiven to Tommy Robinson on this May’s pro-Israel demonstration in London.


My book is nearly 190,000 words including over 3,000 footnotes. It covers some of the key historical debates surrounding the Holocaust such as whether the Nazis’ intention from the start was to wipe out Europe’s Jews. It relies primarily on Jewish and Zionist sources.

I also explore the use by the Zionist movement and the Israeli state of the Holocaust as a political weapon to silence opposition and pursue its geo-political goals. Abba Eban, Israel’s Foreign Minister, comparedthe Green Line dividing Israel from the West Bank to ‘Auschwitz borders’. Israeli Professor Edith Zertal wrotethat there hadn’t been a war involving Israel ‘that has not been perceived, defined, and conceptualized in terms of the holocaust.’ Israel had mobilised the holocaust ‘in the service of Israeli politics’.

Unbelievably there were some in the Zionist leadership who actually welcomed the rise of the Nazis. The Zionist national poet, Nahman Bialik statedthat ‘Hitler has perhaps saved German Jewry, which was being assimilated into annihilation.’ For David Ben Gurion, The Nazis victory would become “a fertile force for Zionism.’

The Zionist movement and Israel have tried to draw a line between the Warsaw Ghetto fighters and Israel’s war against the Palestinians. At the time the Zionist movement berated the ghetto fighters for refusing to abandon the fight against the Nazis and get out.

When the last Commander of the Jewish Fighting  Force (ZOB) Marek Edelman died, he was given a 15 gun salute in Warsaw and the Poland President attended. The Israeli Embassy didn’t even send its lowliest clerk to attend. Why? Because Edelman was a member of the anti-Zionist Jewish Bund.

Israel today is a state which inspires admiration amongst anti-Semites, Christian Zionists, White Supremacists and neo-Nazis like Richard Spencer. However this is not new. Anti-Semites have always supported Zionism as a means of getting rid of their Jews. But whereas fascists once chanted ‘Death to the Jews’ in Europe , today Israelis chantDeath to the Arabs’ in Jerusalem.

Just in case you've forgotten how Lansman scabbed against all those expelled and helped bring down Corbyn with his Zionist sympathies

I estimate that this book will be about 550 pages. I envisage that the cost of production and distribution, including launching the book will be of the order of £6,000 and that is why I am appealing to anti-Zionists and supporters of the Palestinians to ensure that the days when Zionism can control the Holocaust narrative is ended.

If you do make a donation please email me your name at tonygreenstein111@gmail.com. This is especially important if you donate to the crowdfunder as I expect the Zionists to try to do their best to have it taken down!

Thank you,

Tony Greenstein 

For those who wish to contribute I have set up a crowdfunder. If you want to avoid them taking 3% it is better to send any donations to the following account. I am not a signatory to the account so please make sure you use the reference ‘BOOK’

Name:                  BHUWC

Sort Code:          09-01-50

Account No:        04094107

Reference:  Book

Or alternatively you can send any donations to my Paypal account

tonygreenstein111@gmail.com


The Zionist Bookburners Get to Work as My Crowdfunder Gets Taken Down

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Crowdfunder Caves In to Zionist Pressure after Just 2 Days


First a riddle. What is the difference between Joseph Goebbels and the Zionist Lobby? Answer: Goebbels burnt books after they were printed.  The Zionists try to burn the books before they are printed!

The decision by Crowdfunder on Tuesday to cancel my appeal was not only predictable but I predicted it! I launched a Crowdfunder for a book I have written, Zionism During the Holocaust, and sure enough pressure from the Lobby (Board of Deputies, CST, CAA, Hate not Hope etc.) guaranteed the inevitable. I received the following email from Christine McCormick [christine.mccormick@crowdfunder.intercom-mail.com]:

Hello Tony,

Your project on Crowdfunder has been flagged as breaching our guidelines. Upon review our team has confirmed that based on the information available the project is in contravention of Crowdfunder’s terms of use.

Unfortunately this means we must now close this project, refunding any pledges back to the supporters. We hope you understand that we have a duty to uphold our Terms of Use and guidelines, in the best interest of the Crowdfunder community.


Christine didn’t of course tell me who did the ‘flagging’ but then again she didn’t have to. My Crowdfunder was ‘in contravention of Crowdfunder’s terms of use’. Christine gave no indication of which terms she was referring to. Perhaps I infringed E (1.1.2(c)) which says that that:

(c) all content posted by you is lawful and not defamatory, abusive, threatening, harassing, obscene, discriminatory, or otherwise objectionable or embarrassing to any other person as determined by us in our sole discretion;

Clearly any reference to the Zionist relationship to the Nazis was bound to be objectionable and embarrassing to the Zionists. The right to offend is what Free Speech is all about. Speech that doesn't offend anyone is what keeps repressive governments in power. Crowdfunder therefore had the right to use their ‘sole discretion’ to take down the Crowdfunder but in so doing they were acting as petty censors without a principle to their name.

As Salman Rushdie, whose book Satanic Verses certainly offended many Muslims said:

“The idea that any kind of free society can be constructed in which people will never be offended or insulted is absurd. 

As George Orwell observed:

“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”

The strange thing is that on Sunday Erin [erin.curran@crowdfunder.intercom-mail.com] had emailed me to say that my Crowdfunder had been extended from 28 days to Always On. Clearly Erin hadn’t spotted my breach of Crowdfunder’s Guidelines:

Hello Tony,

Thank you for your email and for your feedback. Your project has been switched over to Always On so that you can continue to accept donations.

You will receive any future pledges every couple days on a rolling basis in to your bank account within 7 working days of them being pledged once your initial payout has been processed

So what changed between Sunday and Tuesday? One can only surmise that in that time the Zionists decided to pile the pressure on Crowdfunder and that they succumbed to the pressure. Groups like Crowdfunder exist to make a profit not to benefit the public good, so the idea of defending free speech is not on their agenda. Profits come before principles.

By the time Crowdfunder had closed the Appeal, I had raised £710, over 10% of my target of £6,500.

But if Crowdfunder has been economical with the truth in their email to me they have been positively dishonest with those who had contributed.

The Crowdfunder Team [support@crowdfunder.co.uk] emailed all donors with the following message:

Hi XXX,

Unfortunately we have not been able to transfer your payment to the I want to publish Zionism During the Holocaust and we are in the process of refunding your pledge. You should see the payment in your account within 5-10 days.

Thank you for supporting this and we’re sorry this particular cause was unable to achieve its goal.

Crowdfunder is the leading UK platform helping worthy and fantastic causes raise funds to make a real difference. If you would like to explore supporting any of these projects or fundraisers, please use the link below to find a cause that would be extremely pleased to receive your support.

Thanks,
The Crowdfunder Team

Instead of saying outright that they had taken down my Appeal, because the Zionists had objected to the truth, they were told what was an outright lie:

‘Unfortunately we have not been able to transfer your payment to the I want to publish Zionism During the Holocaust’

There was of course no technical problem with the transfer of funds. And then, to compound this lie they told another:  we’re sorry this particular cause was unable to achieve its goal.’ To which the obvious response is ‘If you’re so sorry why did you take it down’. However Corporations never tell the truth when a lie will suffice.

Where Now?

I am pleased to say that the reaction of donors has been one of outrage.  Fortunately I anticipated what was likely to happen and made sure to contact every donor informing them of my fears and giving them my email address and alternative methods of payment. The result is that many donors have increased their donation!

Once again the Zionist reaction to those who tell the truth about their racist movement is censorship. Just as they tried to prevent the play Perditionbeing shown and Perfidybeing sold (by buying up all the copies!) so they have resorted to their tried, trusted and failed methods of suppression.

Of course they will fail in their attempts because I am determined not to let them succeed. So they will resort to their next tactic.  Outright lying. It will be suggested that by referring to Nazi-Zionist Collaboration I am accusing the Jews who died in the holocaust of having killed themselves. Of course this won’t be true but that won’t stop the Zionists from making the claim.

Nor will they tell people that it was an Israeli court which found that the leader of Hungarian Zionism, Rudolf Kasztner, had ‘sold his soul to the devil’ when he made an agreement to sacrifice all but 1,684 of Hungary's 800,000 Jews.

The exact same thing happened to Hannah Arendt, the greatest political scientist of the last century, when she published her book Eichmann in Jerusalem. Arendt’s book gave the background to the Eichmann story and how he had worked with Kasztner. Arendt went over all the things that arose in the Kasztner Trial that the Eichmann Trialhad been designed to erase.

Naturally the Zionists went to any lengths to defame Arendt, who was herself a refugee from Nazi Germany. No lie was too big. Arendt wrote about how:

the campaign, conducted with all the well-known means of image-making and opinion-manipulation, got much more attention than the controversy…. (it was) as though the pieces written against the book (and more frequently against its author) came out of a mimeographing machine… the clamor centered on the image of a book which was never written, and touched upon subjects that often had not only not been mentioned by me but had never occurred to me before.

60 years later nothing much has changed. The Zionists are still trying to suppress the truth about the history of their racist project and they are still shouting ‘anti-Semitism’, even against Jewish holocaust survivors. 

There is one answer to this attack on free speech. Help me get my book out. Unfortunately ‘left’ publishers in this country such as Pluto Press, Verso and Zed Press took fright. My target is £6,500 and my intention is to sell the book, which will be about 550 pages and some 190,00 words long, at around £10 including p&p (but don’t hold me to that as there are still too many variables).

If you want to help defeat the Zionist Censorship Machine please donate in any one of the following ways:

1.              You can send a cheque made out to ‘B&HUWC’ to me at PO Box 173, Brighton BN51 9EZ

2.              You can send a donation to me at Paypal at tonygreenstein111@gmail.com

3.              You can pay by BACS to:

Name of Account:            B&HUWC (if your bank’s software says it doesn’t recognise the account proceed anyway!)

Account Number:             04094107

Sort Code:                           09-01-50 

You can also email the following at Crowdfunder to tell them what you think of their cowardly behaviour:

support@crowdfunder.co.uk

erin.curran@crowdfunder.intercom-mail.com

christine.mccormick@crowdfunder.intercom-mail.com

 Tony Greenstein

Demolishing the Myth that Israel was a Democracy before 1967 and that anti-Arab Racism Began Under Begin and Netanyahu

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 There is nothing that Likud has done that the Israeli Labor Party didn’t do before it

There is a comforting myth beloved of ‘left’ Zionism that before 1967 and the 6 Days War and Occupation, life for Israeli Palestinians (‘Arabs’) was idyllic compared to life under Likud. From 1948-1977 the Israeli Labor Party formed Israel’s governments. Racism in Israel according to supporters of Labour Zionism and the Two State Solution only began from 1977 onwards.

The article When the Shin Bet Chief Warned That Educated Arabs Are a 'Problem' for Israelby Israeli historian Adam Raz in Ha’aretz demolishes this myth and shows what life was really like in Israel for Israeli Palestinians.

Far from life being idyllic if you were an Arab, life was in many ways worse than under Likud. From 1948 to 1966 85% of Israeli Arabs were under military occupation. They couldn’t leave their village to go to the next one without permission of the army and local governor.

As Adam says the typical myth about Israel which racists like Keir Starmer promote, is that it is a ‘rumbustious democracy’. It is anything but. Israel has a permanent State of Emergency, because according to its security mythology, it is ‘under attack’ by the Arabs, despite the fact that it has a peace agreement with Jordan and Egypt. In Syria Israel regularly conducts bombing raids and in Lebanon it is Israel which has always done the attacking though today the border is quieter because Israel knows that Hezbollah has the capability to retaliate to Israeli aggression.

It would not be stretching things to say that Labour Zionism was more racistthan its Revisionist cousins. When the ‘socialist’ Zionists were campaigning to boycott Arab Labour and Produce in the 1920s and 30s, literally picketing orange groves and work places to prevent Arabs working for Jewish employers, the Revisionists were happy to employ Arab labour (because it was cheaper). 

David HaCohen, former Managing Director of Solel Boneh, Histadrut’s building company, described his difficulties explaining to other socialists the dilemmas of socialist Zionism

‘I had to fight my friends on the issue of Jewish socialism, to defend the fact that I would not accept Arabs in my Trade Union, the Histadrut; to defend preaching to housewives that they should not buy at Arab stores; to defend the fact that we stood guard at orchards to prevent Arab workers from getting jobs there... to pour kerosene on Arab tomatoes; to attack Jewish housewives in the markets and smash Arab eggs they had bought... to buy dozens of dunums from an Arab is permitted but to sell God forbid one Jewish dunum to an Arab is prohibited; to take Rothschild the incarnation of capitalismas a socialist and to name him the ‘benefactor’ – to do all that was not easy.’[i]

Not for nothing did the late Professor Ze’ev Sternhell describe Labour Zionism as ‘nationalist socialism’. [Founding Myths of Israel] He made clear that but for the associations with the Nazis he would have called it ‘national socialism’. And before anyone cries ‘anti-Semite’ they might pause to consider that Sternhell was a child survivor of the Nazi ghetto of Przemsyl. The ‘socialist’ Zionists opposed class struggle against Jewish employers because for Zionism unity of Jews, regardless of class, was more important than class solidarity with Palestinians.

David Ben Gurion, the most important figure in Labour Zionism and Israel’s first Prime Minister coined the slogan ‘from class to nation’. In other words the class struggle was to be waged as a national struggle against the Arabs.

This is another example of the similarity of Zionism with Nazism ideologically. For the Nazis, their ‘socialism’ consisted of attacking the Jews as the representatives of capitalism. Whilst German capitalism was to be respected, Jews were fair game. Anti-capitalism was transmuted into anti-Semitism.

As Adam Raz makes clear, archival documentation of the repression of Israel’s Palestinians is very exceptional today. With the advent of digitalisation of archives Israel’s censors have taken it as the opportunity to reclassify what were once declassified documents. This would be unheard of in Britain and the United States yet Israel’s political echelon never misses an opportunity to inhibit any research that demonstrates the historic oppression and structural inequality of the Arab sector.

Adam describes how the ILP government ‘espoused a policy of segregation and of subordinating Arab society to Jewish society’. Of course Israel’s military argued that they hadn’t done enough to ‘suppress the development of Arab society’. Indeed ‘Some thought that it would be useful to exploit a future war to expel the Palestinian citizens.’

You can see in both the security and political sectors all the old attitudes of the British ruling class to native peoples. Amos Manor, head of Shin Bet (Israel’s security service) ‘viewed the traditional clan-based hierarchy among the Arabs as the basis of what used to be called in the British Empire ‘indirect rule’ i.e. rule through collaborators, local chiefs and village elders. “We must not expedite processes with our own hands. The existing social frameworks should be preserved… as a convenient governing tool.”

This is colonisation in its purest form. Manor warned of the dangers of an educated class: ‘“As long as they’re half-educated, I’m not worried.” When the Nazis invaded Poland their first target for extermination was not the Jews but Polish intellectuals. More Jews died in the first 2 years of Nazi occupation because they were intellectuals than died because they were Jewish.

We see the same attitudes amongst Israeli Labor Party’s military apparatchiks as in the officials who ruled the Raj. Manor explained that “Revolutions are fomented not by the proletariat, but by a fattened intelligentsia,”Manor would not have been out of place as a District Commissioner in Nigeria in the 1920s or in an India that was being deliberately under-developed.

Aharon Chelouche of the Israeli Police admitted that it might be “reactionary” to strengthen the Arabs’ conservative social structure, “but… by means of these frameworks, we control the Arab territory better.” In Africa this was called tribalism. The Nazis also followed a policy of strengthening the traditional leaders.

It is fascinating to eavesdrop on these private conversations. Today any discriminatory measures against Israel’s Arab population is justified by the all-embracing term ‘security’.  Jewish security of course. Israel’s Supreme Court bends its knee at the very mention of the word. Everything can be justified by this one word.  Yet in private it was a different story.

Yosef Harmelin, the next head of Shin Bet explained the real “problem”:

“Our interest is to preserve Israel as a Jewish state. That is the central problem. When we say ‘security,’ that is what’s meant. Not necessarily a revolution by the Arabs.”

Pinhas Kopel, the Police Commissioner elaborated and in the process described exactly what a Jewish State really meant:

 “Every such action must be seen not in terms of what’s good for the Arabs, but what’s good for the Jews.”

As Adam explains

‘throughout the 1965 discussion, the question of the possibility of expelling Palestinian citizens from the country kept surfacing’. 

This is the answer to those who pretend that talk of the Naqba is an ‘Arab lie’(Tzipi Hotoveli, Israeli Ambassador).

Aharon Chelouche explained that although he had tried to create “an atmosphere of emigration in Jaffa,” this was not possible in 1965. Too many people were watching but the security echelon were hoping for another war which would provide the pretext for more ethnic cleansing.

Meir Amit, the head of Mossad (MI6) was a hardliner who urged a ‘hard hand, not halfway.” He urged that “Please, if [we have] a whip – strike.” 

Verbin, the commander of the military government, didn’t, as Adam says, beat around the bush.

“We expelled around half a million Arabs, we burnt homes, we looted their land – from their point of view – we didn’t give it back, we took land… We want to say to ourselves, ‘You, the Arabs, should be happy about what we are doing,’ [but] we stole the land and we will continue to steal, and from our view point that is ‘redemption of the Galilee.’”

He warned that unfortunately “to generate a war catastrophe” which would allow further ethnic cleansing “is out of the question,”.

Officials like Meir Amit, the head of Mossad Verbin, Ezra Danin, an Arab affairs adviser in the Foreign Ministry, took a more ‘liberal’ approach. But this too is reminiscent of British imperialism. There were those, like Thomas MacCaulayand Governor General Bentinck who believed in educating a native Indian middle class whereas the majority of British  officials and those like Lord Curzon believed in the efficacy of an iron hand.

British like Israeli colonial policy was a result of intense discussions among colonial officials and their masters.

As Adam says, we will need to wait a few more decades to find out what the top security officials of today think about the country’s Palestinian citizens. I imagine that there will be no surprises because a Jewish state cannot be other than a state of racial supremacy.

Those who pretend that Israel can be a Democratic and a Jewish State are fooling themselves.  Not only because enshrining in its constitution that a certain ethnic/racial group should be in a majority is racist in itself, but because an ethno-national Jewish state cannot be other than racist towards non-Jews.

In his second article How Israel Tormented Arabs in Its First Decades – and Tried to Cover It Up Adam Raz describes the testimony of military officers in the Kafr Qasim Massacre. In 1956, on the eve of the Suez War, when Israel attacked Egypt, the Border Police deliberately massacred 49 inhabitants of Kfar Qasim, men, women and children, on order from the military command. No killer served more than 13 months in prison because, then as now, Arab life was cheap.

One officer was asked, were you “imbued with the feeling that the Arabs are the enemies of the State of Israel?” to which he replied “Yes.” He was asked, “Would you kill anyone? Even a woman, a child?”“Yes,” he reiterated. Another police officer testified that had he been ordered to do so, he would have opened fire at a bus packed with Arab women. Another explained, “I was always told that every Arab was an enemy of the state and a fifth column.”

One officer remarked that if he were to come across an infant who had “violated” curfew – “It might sound cruel, but I would shoot him. I would be obligated to do so.”

This is the State that western politicians defend with every last breath in their body

Tony Greenstein 

Bedouin Arabs outside the military governor’s office in Be’er Sheva in 1950. The clan-based hierarchy worked to the benefit of Jewish authorities.Credit: GPO

When the Shin Bet Chief Warned That Educated Arabs Are a 'Problem' for Israel

Extraordinary declassified documents reveal the reasons cited by Israel’s top security officials for repressing the country’s Arab minorityAdam Raz

Adam Raz

Sep. 16, 2021

When it comes to the state’s attitude toward its Palestinian citizens, the policy of making available historical documents from the archives is made on the basis of several criteria. One of them starts with the assumption that declassifying documentation that reveals a policy of inequality is liable to harm the country’s image and generate a possible reaction from Israel’s Arab population.

Because the state’s approach to the Arab public has long been essentially repressive, it’s not surprising that the documentation available for perusal is very limited. It follows, then, that any attempt to present an ongoing description of the positions taken by senior figures in the security establishment over the years is almost doomed to fail. Nonetheless, two files that recently became available for perusal in the Israel State Archives offer an exceptional look at the bedrock views of the country’s top security officials toward the country’s Palestinian citizens during its early decades, and reveal their guiding principles.

The two documents in question were declassified following a request submitted by the Akevot Institute for Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Research. The first, titled “Summary of a Meeting about the Arab Minority in Israel,” relates to a meeting held in February 1960, at the request of Uri Lubrani, the Arab affairs adviser to Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion. Lubrani convened the heads of the security units that dealt with the “Arab issue,” a term used frequently in discussions during that period. 

The second document, “Basic Policy Guidelines Regarding the Arab Minority in Israel,” from July 1965, contains dozens of pages of remarks made during another meeting by senior government officials and the ranking security authorities. Its goal was to sum up the results of 17 years of policy, since 1948, in regard to Israel’s Palestinian citizens and to recommend both short- and long-term policy on that subject.

In both cases, a clear picture arises. The security authorities were a tool in the hands of those in the government who espoused a policy of segregation and of subordinating Arab society to Jewish society. In both cases, the security officials argued that in the years since the 1948 war the government had not taken sufficient actions to suppress the development of Arab society. Some thought that it would be useful to exploit a future war to expel the Palestinian citizens.

In the 1960 discussion, for example, the police commissioner, Yosef Nachmias, stated, “The Arab sector must be kept as low as possible, so that nothing will happen,” meaning, the status quo would be maintained there. He added that Israel had not yet reached the “limits of exploitation” of the Palestinian citizens, and care must be taken not to arouse the Arab “appetite.” Similarly, Amos Manor, the head of the Shin Bet security service, ‘viewed the traditional clan-based hierarchy among the Palestinian citizenry as providing an advantage for the Jewish authorities.’ Manor was of the opinion that “We must not expedite processes with our own hands. The existing social frameworks should be preserved… as a convenient governing tool.”

Manor warned that educated Arabs could constitute a “problem” and added, “As long as they’re half-educated, I’m not worried.” Israel, he stated, must preserve the Palestinian citizens’ “traditional social regime,” because it “slows the pace of progress and development.” He warned that the quicker the Arab sector progresses, "the more trouble we'll have. In 40 years we'll have problems that can't be solved."

The Shin Bet director had a sociological justification for why Palestinian citizens should be prevent from acquiring education. “Revolutions are fomented not by the proletariat, but by a fattened intelligentsia,” he explained. His next remarks are noteworthy: “All the laws must be applied, even if they are not pleasant. Illegal means should be considered [by the authorities] only when there is no choice, and even then – only on condition: that there are good results… Aggressive governance must be maintained, without taking public opinion into account.” Aharon Chelouche, the head of the special-ops unit in the Israel Police, stated in the 1965 meeting that it might be “reactionary” to strengthen the Arabs’ conservative social structure, “but… by means of these frameworks, we control the Arab territory better.”

Amos Manor, who headed the Shin Bet between 1953-1963.Credit: IDF Spokesperson's Unit

Outwardly, the “Arab issue” was always presented as a security matter, but in the closed meeting in 1965 the participants allowed themselves to comment on the subject with exceptional openness. Yosef Harmelin, who succeeded Manor as Shin Bet chief, laid things on the line: “Our interest is to preserve Israel as a Jewish state. That is the central problem. When we say ‘security,’ that is what’s meant. Not necessarily a revolution by the Arabs.” Yehoshua Verbin, the commander of the military government that Arab citizens were subject to between 1948 and 1966, made it clear to the participants that “there is no public problem that is not a security problem.” 

Pinhas Kopel, the police commissioner, seconded them and added, “Every such action must be seen not in terms of what’s good for the Arabs, but what’s good for the Jews.” Moshe Kashti, the director general of the Defense Ministry, an example of a local “liberal” type, said, “I am in favor of liberalization of the economy. I am somehow against liberalization among the Arabs.” Self-criticism was voiced by Shmuel Toledano, the prime minister’s adviser on Arab affairs. He noted the existence of two schools of thought on the so-called Arab issue and was critical of the leading one, which saw every social problem through a security prism. He was in the minority.

Throughout the 1965 discussion, the question of the possibility of expelling Palestinian citizens from the country kept surfacing. Scholarly research, drawing on historical documentation, previously found that among some decision-makers, a policy and even concrete plans to deport Arab citizens were dominant until the 1956 Sinai War. The newly declassified minutes show that similar ideas continued to exist into the 1960s as well. Reuven Aloni, deputy director general of the Israel Lands Administration, a body that to this day continues (as the Israel Land Authority) to play a major role in the discriminatory distribution of land in Israel, spoke frankly and asked rhetorically, what, “theoretically,” if Israel could act as it wished, “would we want to do?” He also answered his question: “Population exchange.” He said he was “quite optimistic that a day will come, in another 10, 15 or 20 years, when there will be a situation of a certain kind, with a war or something resembling a war, when the basic solution will be a matter of transferring the Arabs. I think that we should think about this as a final goal.” 

The representative of the police, Aharon Chelouche, also spoke about “emigration” and immediately explicated, “In this business, we have a Jew who succeeded and expelled an entire city [after the end of the 1948 war] – Majdal [now Ashkelon], in 1949-1950.” He said he had tried to create “an atmosphere of emigration in Jaffa,” but that it was not possible to rely on such plans today.

Harmelin, the Shin Bet director, agreed with others that the “Arab minority” would never be loyal to the state. In his view, “the solution then was to expel the Arabs,” but today that is “a solution that we are all familiar with, [but] which is not practical.” He added, “I have a number of thoughts”– without elaborating – about how “to prevent an increase in the Arabs’ share” of the country.

Ezra Danin, an Arab affairs adviser in the Foreign Ministry who had dealt with this subject for decades, was concerned not only with the impractical nature of various “emigration” plans, but also their moral implications. “How will we solicit the help of the world, which we need, while we implement actions that the fascists or the Iranians carry out?” He wondered how the government could accept a “satanic proposal” of a “population exchange” and noted, “One doesn’t arrive at a population exchange from a position of comfort. One arrives at population exchange by bringing things to that pass.”

From 1948 to 1966, the military government was the principal instrument for oppressing the country’s Palestinian citizens. Meir Amit, the head of the Mossad between 1963 and 1968, thought that the policy in practice was too polite. He urged a “hard hand, not halfway.” Amit’s view was that “we have a whip, we use it to make a loud noise,” but “we lash the air, and below the surface everything grows.” He concluded, “Please, if [we have] a whip – strike.” 

Yosef Nachmias, the police chief, suggested that "The Arab sector must be kept as low as possible," adding that "we haven't yet reached limits of exploitation” of Palestinian citizens.

Verbin, the commander of the military government and one of the country’s “experts” on the “Arab problem,” wasn’t someone who beat around the bush. He explained the problem facing the Jewish authorities: “Today’s Arabs are not the Arabs of 17 years ago. The generation of the desert is dying out. Those we harassed, those from whom we took their homes, are the good ones, with them we get along.” The worst of the lot, he said, were those who were born around the mid-1940s. He didn’t mince words:

“We expelled around half a million Arabs, we burnt homes, we looted their land – from their point of view – we didn’t give it back, we took land… We want to say to ourselves, ‘You, the Arabs, should be happy about what we are doing,’ [but] we stole the land and we will continue to steal, and from our view point that is ‘redemption of the Galilee.’” He added that “to generate a war catastrophe” in the shadow of which the Arabs will be expelled “is out of the question,” and there was no knowing what the future would bring.”

Not all the participants espoused identical views, but it’s clear that the majority agreed that “we’re not talking equality.” Danin, for example, was critical of the isolationist stance that was taken in the discussion. While Shmuel Ben Dor, the deputy director general of the Prime Minister’s Office, wondered, “How can we talk about all the means that have been raised here and at the same time talk about means that display a just approach to the citizen?”

Verbin rebuffed the criticism of the military government’s toughness and broadened the scope of the discussion: “If someone is harassing the Arabs, it is the State of Israel…  The Yishuv [i.e., the state] and the [national] institutions are the biggest anti-Semites regarding the Arab problem… If there is anyone that is being cruel when it comes to the Arab subject, it is the whole Yishuv… The Yishuv is harassing them and will continue to harass them for many years to come.”

In December 1966, a year and a half after the 1965 meeting, the military government was abolished. The result was the lifting of some of the restrictions and of the supervision that had been imposed on these Israeli citizens, and a heightening of their equality with the country’s Jewish citizens. But that wasn’t enough. It’s clear that many among the Jewish public thought that with the justified abolition of the military government, the segregationist policy toward the Arab citizens had also been terminated. That was not the case then and it is not the case today. 

In practice, the viewpoint expressed by the ranking security officials in the 1960s continues to define the state’s attitude toward its Palestinian citizens. We will need to wait a few more decades to find out what the top security officials of today think about the country’s Palestinian citizens.

Adam Raz is a researcher at Akevot Institute for Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Research.

How Israel Tormented Arabs in Its First Decades – and Tried to Cover It Up

Military policemen inspect a suspicious sack of onions found in possession of Arab citizens, in 1952. Credit: Beno Rothenberg/National Library


A person who violates a curfew shouldn't be killed, but they can be slapped and hit with a rifle: Newly declassified documents reveal the ways military rule embittered the lives of Israeli Arabs

The origins of the brutality documented in all its ugliness last week – an Israeli soldier shooting an unarmed Palestinian who was trying to protect the electric generator he needs to function, amid the abject poverty of the South Hebron Hills – date back quite a few decades, to the period of military rule in Israel proper. Testimony from recently declassified documents, together with historical records in archives, shed light on the acute violence that prevailed in the “state within a state” that Israel foisted upon extensive areas of the country where Arab citizens lived, from 1948 until 1966.

For more than 18 years, about 85 percent of the country’s Palestinian citizens were subject to an oppressive regime. Among other strictures, any movement outside their own villages had to be authorized, their communities were under permanent curfew, they were forbidden to relocate without formal approval, most political and civil organizing was prohibited, and entire regions where they had lived before 1948 were now closed to them. Although this part of the past has largely been repressed among most of Israel’s Jewish population, it constitutes an integral part of the identity and collective memory of the country’s Arab citizens. Those memories include, in addition to the regime of authorizations, daily abuse and a web of informants and collaborators.

In practice, for those subjected to the military government, Israeli democracy was substantively different than it was for the Jews. Yehoshua Palmon, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion’s adviser on Arab affairs, wrote to the headquarters of the military government – in a letter from October 1950 culled from the State Archives – that reports had been received according to which military government personnel in the Triangle (a concentration of Arab communities adjacent to the Green Line, in the center of the country) were employing “illegal pressure during interrogations of residents, such as using dogs [against them], threats and the like.” 

A year later, Baruch Yekutieli, Palmon’s deputy, explained to the cabinet secretary that the situation in the Arab areas sometimes required “a strong hand on the part of the authorities.” Although he did not go into detail about that policy, testimonies that have been made public describe its implementation – and all of them reflect an experience of humiliation and subjugation. 

Thus, it became known that representatives of the military government threatened citizens so as to prevent them from complaining about actions taken against them; a military governor (there were three, for the Negev, the Triangle and the north) demanded that people frequenting a village café show their respect by standing up when he entered and threatened anyone who disobeyed; soldiers amused themselves when intimidating an Arab citizen by leaning on him by placing a firearm on his shoulder; and others prevented Muslim citizens from praying. In other cases, military government representatives harassed farmers and destroyed their property; people were humiliated regularly and addressed in coarse language; violence was perpetrated on children; and military government personnel made threats against Arab citizens if they didn’t vote in elections for the candidates favored by the authorities.

The military governor in the south, Yehoshua Verbin, maintained in testimony he gave in early 1956 to a government committee – and recently made public at the request of the Akevot Institute for Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Research – that “the military government is too liberal and gentle. Let us not speak of cruelty at all, because that is groundless, it is a calumny for which there is no basis in any case.”  

However, remarks by the governor of the Triangle, Zalman Mart, in his 1957 testimony in a trial relating to the Kafr Qasem massacre the previous year – when Border Police shot and killed 49 Arab villagers who were unaware that a curfew had been imposed – refute Verbin’s assertions. According to Mart, there was no obligation to kill a person who violated a curfew, but there was a sort of protocol for punishment: “You can slap him, hit him with a rifle on the leg, you can shout at him.”

A cluster of lengthy testimonies by Border Police personnel, who acted as the police force in the Arab villages, offers a picture of day-to-day life under the shadow of the military government. The officers’ unabashed candor in their testimony in the Kafr Qasem trial is harrowing. Were you “imbued with the feeling that the Arabs are the enemies of the State of Israel?” one officer was asked – to which he replied, simply, “Yes.” The police officer was asked, “Would you kill anyone? Even a woman, a child?”“Yes,”he reiterated. Another police officer testified that had he been ordered to do so, he would have opened fire at a bus packed with Arab women. And another explained, “I was always told that every Arab was an enemy of the state and a fifth column.”

The officers showed little sense of pity when asked about shooting helpless individuals, most of them affirming that they would do so if required. One of them noted that if he were to come across an infant who had “violated” curfew – “It might sound cruel, but I would shoot him. I would be obligated to do so.”

Men interrogated by an Israeli army officer, 1952.Credit: Beno Rothenberg/National Library

Some of the complaints made by the subjects of the military government were submitted anonymously. A report of the Jewish-Arab Association for Peace, sent in 1958 to a ministerial committee, opened by explaining the reasons for the anonymous charges: “In previous cases the military government apparatus employed threats and pressure against people [meaning Palestinian citizens of Israel] who gave testimony against it.” The association compiled a large number of accounts and appended the complainant’s name to each one, requesting that “the honorable ministers ensure that there be no such pressure and that people not be made to suffer because of their testimony.”

Several testimonies from the village of Jish (Gush Halav) dating from 1950, stored in the Yad Yaari Archive, shed light on what the military government tried to conceal. A local resident, Nama Antanas, related how its personnel had burst into his house in the middle of the night and taken him for an interrogation. Antanas was accused of buying a pair of smuggled shoes. The interrogators told him that if he wasn’t going to talk, they would see to it that he did. According to his testimony, “Amid this, I was ordered to take off my shoes and remove my head covering. When I did so, I was forced to sit on the floor and my legs were lifted and placed on a chair. At that moment, two soldiers approached me and started to beat me on the soles of my feet with a wooden stick made from the rough branch of a date tree.” Afterward, he was thrown out, unable to walk.

For those subjected to the military government, Israeli democracy was substantively different than it was for the Jews.

Another person, who was identified as al-Tafi, also related that security forces had burst into his house and beat him mercilessly. One military government official explained that they were going to execute him and ordered him into a car, as his wife stood by, distraught. After a short drive the car pulled over to the side of the road and a pistol was pressed against Al-Tafi’s head. After he was pummeled again and thrown into an animal pen, where, he said, he languished for two weeks. 

Hana Yakub Jerassi was subjected to similar treatment, after the military governor told him he was “garbage.” He was beaten on his hands until they bled. “Afterward I was taken out and one of my friends was brought in, and they did the same to him as to me. Then a third was brought in and they did the same.” 

For many, that was the routine.

The diverse sets of testimony we have uncovered compel us to doubt the words of Mishael Shaham, the commander of the military government between 1955 and 1960. In 1956 he told a government committee that was debating the future of that body that it was “not serious,” and that it even “constitutes an element for education to good citizenship.”  

What’s clear is that the state took steps to conceal from the public information about what went on within the realm of the military government. In February 1951, then-Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff Yigael Yadin was furious at the publication of a report about the expulsion of 13 Arab villagers from their villages. According to Yadin, “Reports of this sort are liable to be harmful to the state’s security, so a way needs to be found for the censorship to delay their publication.” The poet Natan Alterman knew what he was talking about when he wrote “Whisper a Secret,” a poem that criticized the tough censorship regime, a year later.

The military government apparatus was dismantled years ago, but its spirit lives on in Israel and outside it – in the occupied territories. Back then this apparatus supervised and ruled the country’s Palestinian citizens within the Green Line, whereas now policing actions are conducted by soldiers against a civilian population across the Green Line. And there is another similarity. Now, as then, the majority of the Israeli public lives with the wrongs being perpetrated and is silent.

Adam Raz is a researcher at the Akevot Institute for Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Research. This article is based upon the book “Military Rule, 1948-1966: A Collection of Documents,” published this month by Akevot.



[i]                        David Hirst, The Gun and the Olive Branch, p.185, Faber, 2003 citing Ha’aretz 15.11.69.

The Tory Party’s Annual Xmas Party at Downing Street – Let’s Not Play Scrooge!

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 I am Launching a Crowdfunder to Help Ensure that No MP Goes Hungry this Xmas – Please Give Generously

Seen on a bus indicator in Brighton & Hove - as a punishment they should get the wit who wrote this to spend his vacation with Ugly Patel


There are some unkind, mean spirited people who begrudge our loyal and hard working MPs their £81,000 annual salary (plus expenses). Despite the feral press, most of us realise that many of them are struggling to make ends meet.

It cannot be right that many MPs are struggling to put food in their children's mouths whilst scroungers galore are bleeding the welfare state dry with their claims for universal credit.



Whilst the disabled live the life of Riley on benefits, Boris Johnson, who like George Washington cannot tell a lie, is forced to go cap in hand in order to raise enough dosh to wallpaper his Downing Street flat. And then they accuse him of corruption.  Unbelievable.


I can't tell you how demeaning it is that Britain's First Minister is on the bring of penury and poverty, especially now that Carrie has made an honest man of him. Indeed with a young baby Boris is forced, with his poverty pay of £161,000 to go, cap in hand, to Zac Goldsmith to provide him with a free holiday chalet.

I shall therefore be setting up a Crowdfunder, which I hope this time won't be taken down. Do please give generously.  You know they are worth it.

Michael Fallon, former Defence Minister’s famous interview in which he decried Corbyn’s attempt to explain the reason why terrorism came to the streets of Britain


 

The Elbit 3 Victory last week should be the beginning not the end of the campaign to end British military collaboration with Israeli ’s Apartheid regime

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Israel exports arms that endanger human rights because it serves us, top defense official admits

Last week the first trial of Palestine Action activists trying to close down Elbit arms factories in Britain ended with the acquittal of all 3 activists. This is the first of a series of such trials. Unlike the defendants at Newcastle, those on trial will be able to appeal to juries and argue that the very existence of such companies, dedicated as they are to the murder and maiming of civilians, is contrary to both British and International Law. Below is a summary of the main points of law that led to the acquittals by John Nicholson, a former barrister and himself a Palestine solidarity activist.

In January three activists threw bottles of red paint and locked themselves across the entrance gates, closing down UAV Systems in Shenstone as part of Palestine Action’s campaign against Elbit Systems. UAV is a subsidiary of Elbit which manufactures drones used against Palestinians in the occupied territories. 

Eleven months later, they appeared at Newcastle-Under-Lyme magistrates court accused of committing criminal damage. On Monday, at the end of a two-day trial, Judge Waites found them not guilty.

For nearly 18 months there have been a series of sustained protests at many of Elbit’s offices and factories around the country which police claim have caused a total of around £15 million of damage. While activists gave evidence in open court the Elbit witness gave their evidence hidden behind a screen. 

The Judge ruled that the Crown Prosecution Service had not proved that convicting the defendants would be proportionate to their right to protest, adding that Palestine and the arms trade were important issues and the activists had specifically targeted the drone manufacturer in accordance with their strongly-held beliefs.

UK police have offered 24 hour rapid-response at Elbit sites and have regularly raided and arrested activists in an attempt to disrupt the campaign. See UK's Palestine Action wins Israel protest court battle. This contrasts with their virtual decriminalisation of rape as they plead 'lack of resources'.

Legal Summary 

The judge found that:

1.     This was an important issue. Palestine and the arms trade were serious concerns. In Ziegler the Supreme Court said that the court cannot judge on the merit of the protest, but the right to protest is important and this particular protest was on serious and important issues.

2.     The defendants believed in what they were doing. Defendants’ views came across clearly (time in Palestine, campaigning and friendship with a Palestinian family [most of whom had been killed by a drone attack]) and they were serious people who were strongly motivated.

3.     The location was deliberately chosen– UAV Engines. There were a number of aims, educating, stopping production, symbolic blood, all linked to the location.

4.     The duration was limited. 7 hours (4.30-11.30 am). One gate. The second part of the protest was not said to be criminal, the CPS only charged on criminal damage, throwing the red paint and although it was not just the time taken to throw the paint (a few minutes) but the time to clear it up, the fact that Elbit took two days and charged £900 was not realistic. It was just that they hadn’t got round to it – really it was an hour or so as only 5-6 car parking spaces were affected.

5.     The disruption was limited. And there was no evidence the paint/bottles went near the dog handler or his dog. He gave evidence that he felt “not happy” but made it clear that there was no violence. There was no especial trauma caused to him. The CPS mentioned private houses opposite – but there was no evidence that anyone was upset. They might have been out or even sympathetic. The nature of the area was otherwise commercial. Extent of obstruction was broken glass, limited to a few bottles, not all were broken, and one of the defendants graphically described how it was swept up! No obstruction to members of the public.

6.     No danger to public order. It could have been different if it had been during the day.

The judge then summarised – important issues, limited duration, focused on objectives, limited impact on workers or public, no significant danger. They did however commit a criminal offence. But... the legal authorities make clear that judgment requires more than just consideration of blocking the highways (Ziegler). There is also Articles 10 and 11 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and that this could include cases involving criminal damage (one such included red paint on a statue). The degree of damage is part of the balancing act – at one end cutting off a petal, at the other bulldozing a building. This was in between. Symbolic use of paint (not disputed it was water based and washed off easily – if it had been done more quickly by Elbit that is). It was at the upper end of the scale of proportionality and the judge was therefore not sure that the interference (by the CPS) with the right to protest was justified. Not guilty!!

The Judge emphasised that there are consequences to this. It is not a precedent (i.e. don’t do it again and expect to get away with it and don’t expect other cases to be able to say “we won here so we can win again”). Every case depends on the individual facts.

This was a legal judgment based on Ziegler, the Supreme Court case (which is binding on all courts). Ziegler is about proportionality, which the court agreed is not limited to blocking the roads. This was much more likely to succeed than other defences (which were also put), such as necessity, because the action taken here may not so easily be linked to the desired outcome there, that is, it may not be effective enough to stop bombing of Gaza and the link between the two may be too remote.

The judge was absolutely insistent that this was not a precedent. Legally that is correct. The barristers made clear that the judge could and should find in our favour here, irrespective of any other possible future cases. One of the defendants made it pretty clear that she would be going back to protest every day she could – and that everyone in the court had a moral duty to go and do the same! So the judge was trying to say we can’t do that and expect to get away with it. But – in all human and political terms – this is a precedent. If we had lost, the CPS would be using it the other way. Maybe (just maybe) the CPS will have to rethink some of the other charges in the light of this.

An EXTRA artillery rocket system developed and manufactured by Israel Military Industries.

The CPS didn’t charge for anything other than throwing the red paint (and criminal damage resulting). This meant they artificially separated the aspects of the action, and the defendants did well to say that all of the bits of the action were part and parcel of the one action. It did not seem to be clear to the judge why the CPS didn’t go for other charges, such as preventing workers going to work or other trade union related “offences”. I think that all the other PA protesters have had charges dropped when they just blocked the road or locked on, while this one was “lock-on plus”, ie they threw red paint (soluble, symbolic, red paint to represent the blood of the Palestinians killed by Elbit). So the CPS fought this on the “plus”. [Doesn’t anyone know about the suffragists??]

There is a tension between our arguments – on the one hand the actions do aim to maximise the stopping of production at Elbit and/or damage; on the other hand, in court our arguments are that it was limited and didn’t do very much. No way of getting round this, other than the more “political” defences of necessity and crime prevention. Elbit’s crime is far worse than ours, international law is on our side etc.

Support in the court is essential. It hopefully did help the defendants, to feel they had an audience, and they were very well prepared and “performed” brilliantly. END

Israel – A Military With A State

In 2020 Israel spent $22bn on its military, $2,508 per capita and some 12% of total government spending. This is the highest in the world.

Compare this to Israel’s treatment of its holocaust survivors. When it comes to defending Israeli apartheid Israel’s propagandists never fail to use the holocaust as a justification for Israel’s crimes. Yet what is the reality of Israel’s treatment of the survivors?

According to the Times of Israel over half of Israel’s holocaust survivors require food handouts, ‘with many saying they don’t have the funds to pay for essentials such as eyeglasses and hearing aids’.

In a poll conducted by the Holocaust Survivors’ Welfare Fund, 51% said they relied on food given to them by various charities, with a third saying they were in “dire need” of assistance.

According to the poll, many Holocaust survivors say they are forced to give up essentials in order to have enough money for food. Forty-three percent of respondents said they didn’t have enough money for spectacles, 33% said they couldn’t afford dental care and 27% said they couldn’t pay for hearing aids.

The reality is that the holocaust survivors have subsidised the Israeli state ever since its foundation. The reparations that Germany paid to Israel did not go to the survivors but to the Israeli state and the Jewish Claims Conference, where much of it was embezzled away.

But if Israel is generous to its military and arms industry it is parsimonious to those who survived the holocaust. Below is a graph of Israeli spending compared to other countries.

Israel is a key global supplier of advanced weaponry, including drones, missiles, radar technology and other systems. In 2020, it was the 12th-biggest arms supplier with more than $345m in weapons sales to 16 countries, according to the SIPRI database. 

See Infographic: What you need to know about Israel’s military

Israel exports arms that endanger human rights because it serves us, top defense official admits

Top defense official at the event: 'We should have defended NSO rather than caving to the Americans'

Avi Bar-EliDec. 7, 2021 11:46 AM

It’s been nearly five months since the last scandal involving the cyber offense firm NSO Group. In the time since, it has become abundantly clear that it was one scandal too many.

An international inquiry has produced a long list of journalists, social activists and politicians, including VIPs, all of whom were ostensibly targeted by NSO’s Pegasus software. At the top of the list is French President Emmanuel Macron.

'If we did not collaborate with this or the other dictatorial regime we would not have the defense that we do have'

The list also sheds light on the states that are evidently in possession of Pegasus, and its suspicious correspondence with the states that Israel’s government has identified as geopolitical targets. From there, it’s a short road to the assertion that not only does NSO have a light trigger finger when it comes to providing services to controversial regimes around the world, but that Pegasus virtually serves as a down payment on the establishment of unofficial diplomatic relations between these countries and Israel. These revelations led to a procession of apologies and clarifications from high-ranking Israelis.

These efforts did nothing to keep the United States from placing NSO on a blacklist – a death blow to the company. Moreover, on Saturday Reuters published a report claiming that the mobile devices of at least nine U.S. State Department serving in Africa were hacked using Pegasus, driving a final nail into the company’s coffin.

Eli Pinko, the first director of the Defense Export Control Agency.

Throughout this entire period, official Israeli sources have failed to offer any response to the NSO affair, even when the debate focused on theoretical issues, such as the role of Israeli defense exports in a changing world.

Given all this, interest ran high when Eli Pinko – who had been the first director of the Defense Export Control Agency, appointed in 2006 – addressed a closed conference at a Ramat Gan law firm last week dealing with Israeli defense exports. According to materials obtained by The Marker, Pinko didn’t disappoint the attendees, who were drawn from the ranks of the defense export industry.

“The Defense Ministry should have come out in defense of NSO,” Pinko said, “rather than caving to the Americans and the French and sending [Defense Minister Benny Gantz to France] to explain what did and didn’t happen.” As such, Pinko was expressing the prevailing mood in the ministry, even though he is no longer a civil servant.

 “Did NSO receive a license? Were they working in accordance with that license? If so, then defend them!” Pinko admonished the audience.

‘Those arrogant Israelis’

Behind closed doors, NSO is claiming that their sales received government approval. The company has appealed to the Foreign Ministry and the Prime Minister’s Office with a plea for help. At the gathering in Ramat Gan, the company’s narrative was practically taken for granted.

This whole ordeal is a match-up between the U.S. National Security Agency and NSO,” one participant said, insinuating that NSO had “stepped on the toes” of the NSA. “Those arrogant Israelis eliminated the technological edge that the Americans had been building up over 20 years, ever since 9/11 – and began selling this know-how to every good-for-nothing leader in Africa,” he explained. “I’m convinced that NSO has no idea why they ended up on the list over anyone else,” another participant said.

Office buildings in Ramat Gan, central Israel.

The gathering was held at the offices of the Meitar law firm. Along with the Association of Corporate Counsel, the meeting was chaired by Yuval Sasson, a partner at Meitar and one of the most senior attorneys in the world of defense exports. The audience included the legal counsels of Israeli defense contractors. Through his questions, Sasson adeptly zeroed in on the state of distress his colleagues find themselves in.

Everyone in this room has fielded a request of some sort from a state agency, or someone serving a state agency. Doesn’t that imply some obligation toward us?” Sasson wondered aloud.

“If a company that has aided a state agency, as a result of that action, finds itself on the American watch list – or is hit with a civil suit in Europe – isn’t the State of Israel obligated to stand by its side, to protect it, to handle the situation?”

Pinko responded authoritatively: “There are quite a few examples of times Israel stood behind companies and these sort of activities – not only through legal defense, but even by paying fees that the defense contractors were compelled to pay in the face of various sanctions – without asking for repayment.”

“In Turkey, for example, Israel defended the interests of two large Israeli companies,” Pinko recalled (possibly referring to the canceled export permits of Elbit and Israel Aerospace Industries in 2011, which caused the loss of contracts with the Turkish air force valued at $140 million).

What we have here is a matter of reasonable expectations,” Sasson contended, likening the situation to the approval of a prospectus by the Israel Securities Authority. “Anyone working in a regulated area, assuming he abides by the regulations, can reasonably expect that if he suffers damages as a result of those activities, then the state should enter the fray and not shirk its responsibility.”

Yuval Sasson, a partner at Meitar and one of the most senior attorneys in the world of defense exports.

‘We were silent until their release’

The conference was called “Considerations of Ethics, Morality and Human Rights in Defense Exports.” An oxymoron, one might say. On the other hand, it indicates the increasingly critical global discourse regarding defense exports and the increasing accessibility to no-less-dangerous technological weaponry.

“Are weapons exports ethical at all? If you’re asking in a utopian world, then the answer is no,” Pinko said. “But we live in a different reality – globally and regionally.”

In his view, the Defense Ministry’s behavior as it pertains to the protection of human rights – vis-a-vis serving the political interests of Israel – is “complex,” but with a clear inference as to which way the balance should skew.

“Human rights [in the target countries of the exports] are on the agenda – both at the Defense Export Control Agency and the Foreign Ministry – but rights do not always take top billing,” he admitted. “There are state interests that need to be taken into account, and more than once the decision regarding the dilemma has been left to the highest political echelons,” said Pinko.

“The defense of the state depends on many systems. If we did not collaborate with this or the other dictatorial regime we would not have the defense that we do have,” said Pinko, likely hinting at the useful relationships that Israel has developed with Iran’s neighbor Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Azerbaijan.

The SPYDER, an Israeli short and medium range mobile air defence system developed by Rafael.

According to foreign reports, these relations include the export of sensitive weaponry in exchange for an additional layer of protection for Israel. As such, based on the most recent report by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Israel is the source of 70 percent of Azerbaijani weapons imports.

“We are facing a unique situation. Nothing will change that. There is no other possibility. Take this into account: It’s either the civil rights in some country or Israel’s right to exist. I would like to see each of you face this dilemma and say: ‘No, we will champion human rights in the other country.’ Gentlemen, it doesn’t work.”

“If we were Sweden or France, perhaps we’d be in a different position, but take, for example, the recent incident in Turkey,” Pinko said, referring to the arrest of Mordi and Natalie Oknin. “We avoided saying a single word about the involvement of Hamas-Turkey in the recently exposed terror activities in the territories, even though it originated from there – until after the couple was released. So to sit here and spin theories about what should be done and optics – that’s fine, but you constantly have to see the other side of the coin, as well,” Pink said.

‘Even Merkel offered the Saudis a submarine fleet’

Pinko repeatedly expressed his contentions regarding the world’s double standard and hypocrisy in its attitude toward Israel.

“I have yet to see publications referencing American attacks in Afghanistan where women and children were killed, nor any reference to massacres committed by French forces in Africa. The world accepts those incidents with equanimity. But when it comes to NSO, which sold a system in accordance with government permits? Suddenly there’s a global outcry. Guys, this is the duplicitous nature of the world.”

“The French company Thales is the number one exporter of cyber technology in Europe. Who don’t they sell to? Just name it, they’re already there. Places we wouldn’t dare touch. So they have an ethical code, or so they say. Very nice,” Pinko said.

The only state that upholds the human rights issue is Germany. Germany will not sell to Saudi Arabia or other such countries, out of considerations of human rights and the character of the regime in these countries. But still, that didn’t prevent [German Chancellor Angela] Merkel from offering the Saudis a fleet of submarines. The fact that they didn’t buy it is a different matter, but the world is hypocritical.”

Pinko further demonstrated his point, referring to Microsoft’s withdrawal last March from purchasing the Israeli startup AnyVision (now called Oosto). AnyVision developed facial-recognition tracking technology. According to reports in foreign media outlets, Israeli security forces have made use of this system to surveil Palestinians. “Pressure from the Palestinian lobby on the Democratic Party is what stopped the sale,” said Pinko. “Microsoft did not withdraw because it did not want the company. It wanted it. But at the same time it was under pressure.”

Pinko insinuated that some of the negative publicity surrounding the Israeli industry results from commercial competition in the export markets among three blocs: the United States, Europe and China. As such, he alluded to another role for the Defense Ministry as a sales agent of the local defense industry.

None other than lawyer Eitay Mack was asked to give his seal of approval at the gathering.

“The regimes in Beijing and Moscow have not changed, and will not change. Wherever we exit, they will enter, and wherever the Americans and the French exit, they will enter,” Pinko said. “Does that still mean that we should leave? I’m conflicted. What is certain is that we have to be more deliberate and to do a better job of taking these things into account.”

Pinko, it should be noted, bears the scars of the drones that Israel sold to China in the 1990s, provoking American ire. In general, regarding recent U.S. pressure on its allies to cut commercial ties with China, Pinko was critical of the Israeli course of action: “Being in the middle of the West’s demands and what the Asian bloc is doing is a very difficult task. The regime is proceeding cautiously, and trying to cover its ass. Nowadays, there’s no imagination, there’s no long term vision. It’s all short term.”

‘You’re alone in the fray’

New European Union regulations that took effect in September require that human rights be considered in all defense export transactions. Meanwhile, in early November, the United States released a draft of its own regulations for preliminary public discussion. These included specific supervision of cyber exports.

The rules of the game are changing, all of the speakers at the session agreed. Legal threats are not the only new factor under consideration when export companies make more vigorous efforts to assess whether a sale is worthwhile.

Investments in problematic places bring bad PR,” noted Sasson. “People want to work in companies with a good reputation, and some companies are having a hard time recruiting personnel due to the publicity about their actions.”

None other than lawyer Eitay Mack was asked to give his seal of approval at the gathering. Mack is one of the most prominent individuals in the human rights niche. In recent years, he has (voluntarily) taken it upon himself to engage in public supervision of Israel’s defense exports.

You’ve been left alone in the fray,”Mack informed the legal counsels of the defense contractors. “It seems to me, that even though you’re inundated by the bureaucracy of the defense and foreign ministries, at the end of the day, they’re incapable of defending you. The Defense Export Control Agency is not an insurance policy either. Obtaining a permit from them isn’t like getting approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.”

Mack did not spare his criticism for Israeli administration officials. The Foreign Ministry, he contended, has been caught making mistakes more than once and “doesn’t always know what is going on.” The Defense Ministry consistently foils parliamentary supervision of defense exports out of its fear of leaks.

The two ministries, Mack contends, oppose amending the Defense Export Control Law, as it would impose restrictions on the export of arms – even to countries that are not subject to UN Security Council embargo. He no longer holds out much hope for the courts either.

A smartphone with the website of Israel's NSO Group.

The High Court of Justice recently ruled that public criticism of the Defense Export Control Agency decisions is inadmissible to the court (Mack: “That track has ended, which I feel very sorry about.”) Ultimately, Mack says, after the government refused to recognize its obligation to the defense contractors, the Knesset and the courts followed suit. “From here on out, the responsibility you bear has grown very heavy,” he told his colleagues, “even before you get into questions of ethics.”

Sasson posed a scenario to Mack.

“Let’s say I sold a rifle. I told the customer that he must not enter opposition territory with it. But what can I do? A few months later, you see five soldiers entering a village and massacring people with my rifle. What can I do? Sue my customer? What am I expected to do, aside from not selling to him anymore?”

Mack responded:

“When you’re talking about low-tech, there isn’t really much you can do. Even when Israel decided to stop exports – it couldn’t simply round up the weapons. But when it comes to high-tech technologies, such a possibility must exist. If the exporter has implemented all means of prevention, kept its finger on the trigger and stopped its use at the right moment, then, maybe, it has fulfilled its legal obligation.”

The offices of NSO Group in Sapir, a community settlement in southern Israel.

“It is true that the world is hypocritical and politics plays into it, but everyone has to take responsibility for their own square on the chess board. Defense companies have to look after their own interests – and we can all agree that there are enough extreme instances in which the legal counsels are the ones that should be hitting the off switch,”

 Mack concluded.

Another speaker at the gathering was Matan Gutman, founder of CybeRighTech, and the advisor to former state comptroller Joseph Shapira. “Each company should look at itself first of all, at its own obligation to loyalty. And at the minimum requirements that it must comply with in order to prepare for a moment of crisis,” he said.

“Even if the company is scrupulous about preliminary actions that will respond [in the event of an entanglement] – that may not be enough, because the world is moving ahead too quickly,” said Gutman.

Pinko concluded the technical discussion of the issue of arms exports – we are, after all, speaking of a professional gathering – with a tip for the defense contractors: “I am familiar with the license granted by the Defense Ministry. If any change needs to be made – it is in the clauses of this license. It is by means of these clauses that the ministry frees itself from all responsibility for the licensing process.”

 See:

 

Why We Won’t Allow Starmer to Kill Off the Corbyn Project and Bury the Hopes of the Hundreds of Thousands Who Joined Labour After Corbyn was Elected

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 Come and Join Us in Founding a new Socialist Movement as Labour Against the Witchhunt and Labour-in-Exile-Network Merge


To Join Click Below

Three weeks ago Labour-in-Exile-Network and Labour Against the Witchhuntvoted by large majorities to merge. Both organisations have worked closely together this year on a range of activities – the picketof Labour’s National Executive Committee on July 20th against Proscriptions and the Resist at the Rialto series of events in Brighton during Labour Party Conference, including the Not the Forde Inquirywith Ken Loach and Chris Williamson.

Ever since the LAW All Members Meeting on November 27 a Joint Steering Committee  of LAW and LIEN members has been preparing for the merger which will formally take place this Friday evening at 6 pm.

Protest at Party Conference in September

LAW and LIEN are joining together to advance the fight for to retain socialist politics both inside and outside the Labour Party and to fight the witchhunt. The merged group will provide a rallying point for all who came together under the Labour banner of “For the Many, Not The Few,” but now find themselves under attack.

Lobby of Labour Party HQ on July 20 - Andrew Fenstein speaking

The meeting is for members of the two groups only, and if you’re a member you’ll get an email invite. If you are not a member of the newly merged group go to https://membermojo.co.uk/labouragainstthewitchhunt

Inaugural matters will cover discussing including a new name, aims and priorities and lastly the meeting will be voting in a new Steering Committee. The deadline for committee nominations and motions is midnight Wednesday December 14th.

To be eligible to register to attend and vote, please join as a member by midnight on Thursday 16 December 2021.

The Shameful Expulsion of Anne Belworthy –a member for 63 years

Last Saturday night Labour’s anonymous witchhunters were burning the midnight oil, busy expelling long-standing members of the party for things like ‘anti-Semitism’. However the real reason in all cases was speaking out against the move to the neo-liberal right by Starmer. Free Speech has been abolished in the Labour Party - that is why it is futile to believe that the main arena of struggle is inside the Labour Party.

Our main unit of organisation will be Grassroots CLPs comprising both those who were in the Labour Party, those who still are members and those who have never been in any party.

Among those who were expelled last Saturday was Anne Belworthy. She joined the Labour Party 65 years ago aged just 19. It is outrageous that Starmer, who only joined Labour recently himself, has the audacity to expel someone like Anne. This shows the depths to which the Right have sunk and the contempt for those who have given their life for the Labour Party. Julie Wassmer, Anne’s friend has written:

PLEASE BEAR WITNESS - to a NEW VICTIM OF shameful LABOUR PARTY McCarthyism: my friend and fellow campaigner, Anne Belworthy - thrown out of the party after 65 YEARS of active membership!

Anne has written to me as follows :-

"On Saturday evening I received an email saying that my membership of the Labour Party was terminated. I will hear shouts of joy from one or two members on here but I know that my many friends recognise what I have put into the Labour Party since the age of 19 which has resulted in 65 years of active membership.

None of my first submission was acknowledged and I received no acknowledgement for answering the accusations and so it goes on. I made a full submission in July, answering the accusations of "anti semitism", and with a potted history of my years of activism plus letters of support from the Branch Chair and a long term member of Herne Bay Branch. I had no response.

I answered all of the 4 accusations. I then got a further email on 17th November and replied below to G&LU: Membership A035209

I have today received a further email from the G&LU with accusations of supporting Facebook posts of LIEN (Labour in Exile).

I received a previous letter of allegation dated 26th July (Case No. CN-12705) to which I gave a full response to the accusations. I have never heard anything about my response to the accusations, even though some of today's allegations precede that date.

In response to today's email I can only say I am not a member of LIEN. There is nothing in the posts that I have supported that states I am.

All I would ask is are we now banned from looking at sites on the internet that your department has decided we must not look at? Is it not worrying that this is nothing to do with the so called driving out of anti Semitism but something entirely different. Please could my first submission be read and responded to before you put before me these further accusations? Thank you, from a member of 65 years length.

They appear not to have read any of the first submission but then looked for further "wrongs" with no reference to the first. They have never acknowledged any of my submissions.

Last evening I got an email terminating my membership only citing the LIEN accusations. All of this happens to members if they are reported by another member. Ironically I have "liked" on FB, posts by others in our party whose names appeared on the photo shots of the accusations. They posted it but were not reported, I was because someone reported me. That's how it works. Democratic? Fair?"

Elizabeth Anne Belworthy

Julie wrote that ‘Anne tells me the 4 "anti-Semitism" accusations consisted of "likes" on Facebook sites of posts in support of Palestine's struggle against the Israeli government. Anne says,

"It hurts because I have never uttered a racist remark in my life. The second letter I got, 3 months after the first, ignored my previous submission and just said my membership was suspended because I had supported Labour in Exile. A page that contains posts from LP members who have been thrown out for similar reasons. But the party leadership has proscribed that group so I am out for supporting it."

Anne also tells me that the letter she received said that she must not tell anyone - or the media. As you can see, she is defying that - and so, in my opinion, she should. The allegations are SHAMEFUL. Anne is 84 years old and has fought racism all her life - including anti-semitism.

There aren’t words to describe how disgusting how Starmer and Evans and his apparatchiks were. They talk of ‘anti-Semitism’ but if they had lived in Nazi Germany they would have been the first to sign up to the Nazi party. Starmer and Evans are nothing if not conformists to the existing system.  There isn’t an anti-racist bone in any of their bodies. This is another example of  racists expelling anti-racists for the crime of ‘anti-Semitism’.

As Julie said:

‘This is NOT the Labour Party. It's McCarthyism, pure and simple. Please share this post and please send your solidarity to Anne,. Thank you. Jx ❤

Starmer and Evans care nothing about racism. That is why, when Starmer addressedLabour Friends of Israel recently he described Apartheid Israel as a ‘rumbustious democracy’.  He cited as his mentor on ‘anti-Semitism’ the racist David Baddiel who spent his formative years blacking up and tormentingBlack footballer Jason Lee by portraying his Afro haircut as a pineapple. 

Starmer and Evans and the rest of the right-wing rubbish in the Labour Party are the true racists.  They are the ones who have supported Priti Patel’s proposals to turn back refugees in the middle of the Channel regardless of how many deaths it causes. They care nothing about anti-Semitism.  They are like the boy who cried wolf. They use ‘anti-Semitism’ as a means of intimidating those who object to the pogroms and violence of apartheid Israel.

That is why, as part of his promise to protect ‘all Jews’ in the Labour Party Starmer has been busy expelling dozens of Jews.  If you are Jewish today in the Labour Party you are 5 times more likely to be expelled or suspended than if you are non-Jewish.

Starmer is a liar and a crook who gave away £3/4 million pounds to Labour’s racist senior staff, ‘whistleblowers’ they called themselves, in order to ensure that the EHRC on Labour ‘Anti-Semitism’ was not compromised.

Starmer’s 10 Pledges, which promised to embrace Corbynism was one long lie. As soon as he was voted in Starmer abandoned each and every one of them.

JOIN US AND HELP BUILD THE OPPOSITION TO STARMER AND EVANS

There is No Rule of Law When the Police decide that Crime Minister Johnson has Immunity from Prosecution

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 Illegally Handing Over Workers’ Details for Blacklisting, Covering up for Murder and Raping Women by Deception - the Met is Above the Law and Institutionally Corrupt

There has been a noticeable decline in hits on this blog. At one time it reached ¼m a month. For many years it averaged 100K. Today it averages 30-40K.  The Canary, has seen a greater decline from 8+ million in 2017 to ¼ million today. The major cause of this is Facebook changing its algorithms to relegate the alternative media.

What can you do?  Please share these posts on social media and ensure that Mark Zuckerberg, Google and Big Tech are not allowed to silence radical and socialist voices.


A lesson to the Police on how they should be doing their job

In 1990 Boris Johnson, then a Telegraph reporter in Brussels, agreedto supply his friend Darius Guppy with the details of a journalist, Stuart Collier, in order that he could have him beaten up. Guppy was later jailed for a jewellery heist. The conversation was recorded. Suffice to say if you or me had been party to a conspiracy to cause grievous bodily harm, the Police would have prosecuted. But Johnson was cut from different cloth.

Darren Copeland caught on CCTV

Johnson plots to beat up Stuart Collier

From the 1960’s onwards the Met formed a secretive Special Demonstration Squad whose task was to infiltrate left-wing, environmental and other radical groups. What the Met have never done is to infiltrate fascist groups. In 1999 three bombs planted by neo-Nazi, Darren Copeland exploded in Brick Lane, Brixton and the Admiral Duncan, a gay pub in Soho. Three people were killed and 79 injured.

Bombing of the Admiral Duncan pub in Soho, Brixton and Brick Lane

The Police had no prior intelligence because fascist groups have never been a target for the Police or Special Branch, despite their gospel of hatred and racism. After all many in the Police share much the same views. Fascists aren’t a threat to capitalism, they are the last resort of the system.

Mark Kennedy – the Secret Police Rapist

The film above shows one particular specimen Mark Stone aka Mark Kennedy, who formed a relationship with a female activist based on deceit and lies. What he and other officers had done was commit rape by deception. There was no informed consent. But of course the Police don’t prosecute their own unless they are forced to.

In the case of Wayne Couzens, whose affectionate namefrom fellow officers was ‘the rapist’, police were left with no option but to prosecute as he had both raped murdered Sarah Everard and left a trail of clues that even the most stupid police officer could not ignore.

Police Attack on Peaceful Women’s Vigil at Clapham Common

However the Police got their revenge when they physically attacked a peaceful womens’ vigil at Clapham Common. All of this presided over by lesbian Commissioner, the appropriately named Cressida Dick. The seething anger of the Met at the humiliation they had suffered, with the murder by a serving officer, was visited on the women at the vigil. The Police have absolute discretion as to how they enforce the law and in this case they used the COVID regulations as a pretext for an unprovoked attack.

In 2009 ICO investigators from the Information Commissioner's Office raidedthe offices of the Consulting Association in Droitwich, Worcestershire. The nature of the information in them could only have been supplied by the police or security services. The information was for the purposes of a blacklist funded by eight of the country's major construction firms. It resulted in thousands of people being unable to get work for decades. Although Ian Kerr, who ran the Consulting Agency was fined £5,000 the construction firms who financed the operation, such as Balfour Beatty, and Robert McCalpine, escaped any penalty.

The workers concerned had committed no crime apart from standing up for their rights. But in the eyes of the Met this was a crime. The Met refusedto name those they had spied on. Operation Reuben found an officer called Mark Jenner had collected information after he infiltrated the construction union UCATT between 1995 and 2000.

The report says that Jenner, who used the alias Cassidy, provided information on 300 people - and 16 of those appeared in the illegal blacklist database.

Roy Bentham, joint secretary of Blacklist Support Group, said

The police are supposed to uphold law and order, not spy on perfectly democratic organisations such as trade unions,’.

‘Blacklisting is a national scandal and confirmation that the police colluded with this shameful and unlawful activity is beyond the pale.’

What all of the above demonstrates is that the Police, in particular the Met, which also functions as a national police force, are a highly political force. That is why its Commissioner, Cressida Dick, is appointed by the Home Secretary.

In short the Met is not only institutionally corrupt but it is racist, sexist and anti-working class. This should not be any surprise as the function of the Police is to preserve and uphold the existing political order which is a society where a tiny but rich elite preside over poverty and deprivation.

That is the function of the Police in all societies. The last institution to fall in any popular uprising or revolution is the Police which is why those on the left who consider them ‘workers in uniform’ rather than agents of the State are wrong.

It is no surprise that Keir Starmer reacted with furyto the suggestion of Black Lives Matter that the Police should be defunded.  Instead he turned on BLM describing it as a ‘moment’. At the 2021 Labour Party Conference we were treated to the spectacle of armed police patrolling aisles and intimidating delegates (including removing one heckler) during Starmer’s one and half hour speech about his family.

The Police are an integral part of the British state. The state is there to defend the existing class inequalities in society and that is why it targets the left, not the right. However friendly individual officers might be they are there to serve the interests of our enemies. That is why, when the Miners went on strike in 1984-5 the Police acted as Thatcher’s cavalry.

Hence why it is so absurd that a party that calls itself a party of labour should have formed a Friends of the Police group to sit aside Labour Friends of Apartheid Israel. MPs Jessica Morden, Holly Lynch and Liz Kendall who fronted this pathetic organisation can be considered Labour Traitors of the Year, or more succinctly scabs.

All of this is the backdrop to a new raft of repressive legislation from Boris Johnson from the Spycopsto the Police, Crime and Sentencing Acts and Nationality and Borders Bill which Starmer has barely opposed. As the economic crisis develops, exacerbated by the COVID crisis – which itself is a crisis of capitalism – we shall see an ever more repressive police force with the pretence of ‘community policing’ dropped. There is no doubt whatsoever which side of the class struggle Starmer and his Zionist friends will stand.

We should also not forget the Nuala O’Loan Inquiry into the murder of Daniel Morgan which found the Metropolitan police was “institutionally corrupt”.  Cressida Dick was personally censured for obstruction by an independent inquiry set up to review the murder of the private detective Daniel Morgan.

The findings of into Morgan’s killing in 1987 triggered calls for Dick to resign. His brother, Alastair, denounced the actions of Britain’s biggest police force.


The panel’s findings were a victoryfor the 34-year long struggle for justice by the Morgan family during which they said they endured being “lied to, fobbed off, bullied [and] degraded” by the Met.

Within hours the Met rejected the report’s key findings, and dismissed Morgan’s call for Dick to step down. The two people who could oust Dick – the Home Secretary and Mayor Sadiq Khan instead gave her their ‘full confidence’.

Corrupt officers shielded the killers and the panel said a murder inquiry that was probably “solvable” was undermined, perhaps fatally.

Concerns about police wrongdoing, and links between corrupt officers and sections of the tabloid media, led the government to order an inquiry in 2013. Dick, instead of cooperating with the panel obstructed it. The panel accused the Met of placing concerns about its reputation above fighting corruption in its ranks.

We should remember the lack of accountability of the police when we hear talk of the ‘rule of law’.  The law is a class instrument used by the rich and powerful to cement their rule. As the old saying went:

The law locks up the man or woman

Who steals the goose off the common

But leaves the greater villain loose

Who steals the common from the goose.

The law demands that we atone

When we take things we do not own

But leaves the lords and ladies fine

Who takes things that are yours and mine.

The poor and wretched don’t escape

If they conspire the law to break;

This must be so but they endure

Those who conspire to make the law.

The law locks up the man or woman

Who steals the goose from off the common

And geese will still a common lack

Till they go and steal it back.

Tony Greenstein

How the Jewish Chronicle and the Zionist Press Turned My Acquittal Into a Conviction

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 I was found NOT GUILTY of harassing Megan McCann, Patrick Smith and Labour’s Vile Disputes Team but Guilty By the Yellow Press

In October 2020 I was asked to attend an interview by Brighton Police. The interview was voluntary but, having a clear conscience, I was happy to attend. The matter that concerned the Police was a series of friendly emails that I had sent to Labour’s Disputes Team.

I would be the first to admit that my language, ‘fuck off and die’ ‘scumbags’ etc.was colourful and, in normal circumstances, abusive. However, when compared to the actions of the Disputes Team, who literally did tell people to fuck off and die when they sent their Investigation/Suspension/Expulsion letters to people, regardless of their circumstances and who, in some cases, literally did die, my words were an understandable response.

What was the background to my correspondence with members of the Disputes Team? Well it is laid out in the statementof Witness C.

C is a 74 year old woman. She has been a member of the Labour Party since the age of 16, well over half a century. In her own words:

In 2015... I “discovered” Jeremy Corbyn & was soon deeply committed to supporting his vision, promoting it actively on that platform. On 24th August 2016 Iain McNicol suspended my membership in the name of The Labour Party, for breaking some rule I never knew existed.

Out of the blue ‘crooked McNicol’ suspended C for, in reality, supporting Jeremy Corbyn. Many of us were in that position.

Mike Katz - Chair of the Jewish Labour Movement - which together with the far-right Campaign Against  Antisemitism organised the opposition to Corbyn

C has had Bipolar since her early teens and took early retirement on health grounds. It was, as she says, a time of ‘unstable mental health’. Throughout this period C was ‘mentally very unwell, near suicidal’. Like many people she was reinstated on 16th December 2016 after a telephone conversation with Sam Matthews. On 28 March 2017 C was autoexpelled for having said something complimentary about George Galloway, which was taken to mean she had supported another party. Of course if Labour members said nice things about Boris Johnson nothing would have happened. C was expelled, without any hearing at all.

Sam Matthews - the 'whistleblower' that Starmer paid off had blood on his hands - he refused to take a phone call from Carl Sergeant and was only appointed to his job because of who he knew

It was the day in which her long-term partner told her he was terminally ill and her ‘mental health took a dive’. She described how:

I appealed, repeatedly, but Sam Matthews in the name of the Party was at first abusive then ignored me, for years

When someone has spent nearly all their adult life in the Labour Party it becomes a home and place of support. For people like Mathews and McNicol to expel such people at the drop of a hat for supporting a candidate, Corbyn, whom they didn’t approve of, was despicable. Nonetheless C was reinstated on 1st October 2019 after a formal interrogation via conference call with an NEC member chairing & various others making up the panel. C described it as ‘gruelling’.

Throughout this time, as a result of lobbying from her friends, the Disputes Team was more than aware of the state of C’s mental health.

Carl Sergeant - committed suicide - another success for the Disputes Team

C was not alone. Carl Sargeant, a Minister in the Welsh Assembly, had committedsuicide after being suspended without warning. Pauline Hammerton, who was 80 years old and a member of the Labour Party for decades, as well as being Secretary of Manchester Socialist Health Association, died a week after being summarily expelled. As Vox Political put it: ‘Deaths mount as people buckle under the strain of false accusation.’

Pauline Hammerton - killed by false accusations of anti-Semitism - Formby and Corbyn went along with her treatment and countless others

Dorset Eye, describedhow:

Pauline Hammerton, a long-term Labour activist from Hulme in Manchester, was fast-track-expelled from the party on the 4th of February for supposed ‘anti-Semitism’ – in reality, just for her support for the Palestinian people, who are being slowly crushed by Zionist occupation.

Pauline was found dead just seven days later. She had been left distraught by her expulsion, and although the cause-of-death has not yet been confirmed, the suspicion is that she suffered a haemorrhage brought on by the shock.

The false allegations of anti-Semitism against anti-racists by racists like Tom Watson and McNicol, was nothing less than evil. Unfortunately Corbyn went along with this abominable treatment of his supporters instead of speaking up. See Expelled for Supporting the Palestinians on the 7th February (‘anti-Semitism’ in Labour Newspeak) Found Dead One Week Later

By the time C was reinstated her partner had died. She described how she suffered great mental health decline following the defeat in the 2019 General Election’. On 20th May C was prescribed anti-depressants. On 7th July C was informed that she was being investigated for ‘anti-Semitism’ i.e. support for the Palestinians. This despite the Disputes Team being more than aware of C’s fragility.

By this time I was part of what C calls her ‘support network’. I was outraged by her treatment and on 9 July I sent an email to the Disputes Team, including McCann. In my email I wrote:

C is elderly, has been a member of the party most of her life and does not need utter filth and tory scum like you to harass her.

So FUCK OFF AND LEAVE HER ALONE OR ELSE

My language was entirely justified by the behaviour of the reptiles who inhabit the Disputes Team. The Prosecution, McCann and Patrick Smith, the Head of Disputes, later tried to claim that they were unnerved by my ‘Or else’. As I told the Police, who developed a tin ear, ‘or else’ did not mean I was going to go up to Labour Party HQ and sort them out physically but that I would expose them to some publicity. Which is what I am doing now!

It was Jon Lansman who, by giving legs to the false antisemitism allegations, did most to destroy Corbyn

I was so disturbed by the behaviour of the Disputes Committee, which seemed to be deliberately courting tragedy for C, that I sent a second email with the line ‘Now fuck off and die’. In the circumstances it was too polite.

On 28 October the Police interviewed me and weren’t in the least concerned about the harassment of the Disputes Team. They were worried by the tone of my emails. So on 29 October I penned an email to the Disputes Team, including McCann.

I began: ‘In June and July I sent some ofyou a series ofemails.  I am told by the Police that these made you upset.  Good.’ I considered members of the Disputes Team as desk killers who were not in the least concerned about the effect of their ‘Investigation Letters’. Their only concern was to purge as many decent socialists as possible from Labour. using bogus ‘anti-Semitism’ charges. I also said that

‘If your allegations against me were to come to a trial I would want to call you as a witness in order to ascertain what due diligence you did in Pauline's and other elderly peoples' cases before sending your scurrilous missives.  Of course the answer to that is none.

Quite unbelievably the Head of the Disputes Team Patrick Smith, took offence at my telling him that if there was a prosecution, then I would want to call him and other members of the Disputes Team to give evidence! I suppose, in retrospect, that it is understandable that liars who would put Boris Johnson to shame, were afraid of having to testify on oath! Smith said:

I believe here he is threatening to call whoever he has sent emails to court, which I feel is an attempt by him to intimidate us into not supporting a police prosecution .

Smith also objected in his witness statement to my use of the term ‘bastards’ to describe him and his fellow creatures in Disputes, though any reasonable person might think that I was being far too polite:

He goes on to then call us 'bastards'before asking us to inform him of how many cases we have under way for fast-track expulsions and how many Jewish members from the Labour Party are suspended or under Investigation. I and my team find the use of the term 'bastards' as clearly intended to cause offence to the reader that being all members of the Disputes team.

I also had two other witnesses lined up, both of whom had been expelled from the Labour Party for ‘anti-Semitism’.

Jennie Formby was worse than Iain McNicol - under her reign Jo Bird was prevented from being selected as MP for Liverpool Riverside

Witness A in her witness statement wrote how she had received a Notice of Investigation in May 2018 but heard nothing more for 9 months. On 7 February 2019 she received additional charges and just over 2 weeks later she was suspended. She described how she wrote a lengthy response refuting all the allegations and how she awaited notification of the date of the National Constitutional Committee Panel. Prior to Corbyn and Jennie Formby’s introduction of the fast track expulsion procedure, people who were facing expulsion had the right to a hearing. In A’s own words:

In the event any semblance of natural justice in the Labour Party has been abandoned and I was expelled, without access to a hearing, in October 2019

Unfortunately, thanks to Formby and Corbyn, the right to a hearing had been abolished at the September 2019 Labour Party conference. It was supposed to be for ‘egregious cases’ but it has been used for virtually all cases since then. Corbyn literally fashioned the weapon that Starmer has taken up with such relish, not least against him.

Witness A described how:

From May 2018 when this process began up until this year has been one of the worst times in my life. I have suffered repeated bouts of anxiety for which my GP prescribed anti-depressants. I not only had my reputation traduced but suffered repeated vile online abuse and harassment.

Witness A went on to describe the arbitrary and unjust nature of the Labour Party disciplinary process, which targets those on the Left whilst excusing any amount of abuse from the Right. Cllr. Pamela Fitzpatrick has described similar behaviour in Harrow:

While the Labour Party vindictively pursues cases against certain people it protects others, irrespective of how abusive and threatening their behaviour.... 

It cannot be acceptable for a political party, knowing the highly deleterious effects its actions may have on physical and mental well-being, to shift responsibility for that care to GPs or the Samaritans.

Labour Party staff continue to hide under a cloak of anonymity, ignoring serious complaints made to them, replying to some while studiously ignoring others. While they do so they permit the abuse we experience to continue.

Over 15 women have submitted complaints with evidence of abuse and harassment, against a particular Labour Party member.

At least 5 women in Brighton & Hove, including an elected representative, have made a number of complaints with screenshots as evidence, regarding the abuse and harassment they have experienced to Sussex Police. Another complainant to the police provided evidence of threats and intimidation to his family, yet despite this catalogue of complaints, Sussex Police has repeatedly refused to take action.

I am deeply shocked and cannot help but wonder on what basis the police and CPS have chosen to pursue the case against Mr Greenstein, whilst studiously ignoring the serious complaints made by myself and others? Frankly, it is not surprising that the public is losing respect for both the police and justice system when it is so clear that there is no longer protection nor equality of treatment for all. 

Witness B's complaint that her name had been on a Board of Deputies hitlist and the Disputes Team had searched for 'evidence' to expel her

Witness B gave similar evidence.

I am writing to make clear that unnamed Labour Party members of staff in the disputes team are themselves the ‘harassers’ of ordinary members of the Labour Party.

Out of the blue, on 18 May 2020, I had a letter from The Governance and Legal Unit. The letter was not signed by any individual. The letter informed me I was suspended from the Labour Party. The evidence prayed in the letter was one tweet from November 8, 2019. The tweet said, “The 99% of people will have the best friend in Chris Williamson as an MP who, if re-elected, will work for them.”

I was very upset by this suspension referring to one, seven month old tweet.

The letter said, “The Party would like to make clear that there is support available to you while this matter is being investigated.”  Of course, the “support” was not available from the Labour Party itself. What follows are suggestions of whom I might contact – My GP, The Samaritans, Citizens Advice. During the pandemic, my GP was closed, Samaritans were stretched and my guess is that Citizens Advice were closed too. The disputes team were simply being insulting and trying to cover their own backs with this advice.

The next I heard from the disputes team was a letter 02 June 2020 expelling me from the Labour Party. Again, the letter was not signed by an individual, just The Governance and Legal Unit. There was no comment on my reply to the suspension letter, in fact, I have no idea if anyone ever read it. I was simply cast out the Labour Party, with no offer of appeal, and this time there was no advice about where I might seek support….

I made a subject access request to Labour on 22 May 2020. What I found from my SAR was that members of the GLU/disputes team had conspired with LOTO/Keir Starmer to go through my social media to find something to expel me for. They hunted for evidence on May 18, 2020, in the middle of a pandemic.

I can see from the redacted email exchanges between GLU/Disputes and LOTO that at 13.00 on 18 May a staffer finds the offending tweet about Chris Williamson, “I believe this tweet warrants auto-exclusion…”.

13.04 Reply, “ Good spot. I think that it definitely qualifies as support for a candidate standing in opposition to an official Labour candidate. Would appreciate the thoughts of others though.”

13.07 Reply, “Heya. Yes I agree. It appears to be clearly supporting him to be re-elected as an independent MP against a Labour candidate.”

13. 48 Reply, “I agree. Can we get a suspension letter out with that evidence today? I guess we give seven days for the reply. Thomas”

14.03 Reply, “Would you be able to draft a suspension letter, based on that one piece (redacted) today, and send to me and (redacted) to check?”

14. 26 Reply, “Sure. I’ll do that now. Regards.”

There are further exchanges of emails as the ‘team’ discuss what questions to pose to me in the suspension letter.

Anonymous staff in the disputes team, trawled my social media, on orders from LOTO (who were ordered by a third party [the Board of Deputies named in my SAR), in order to find something to expel me for. I am not sure how one would characterise such an organisation, but behaving like the Stasi does come to mind.

Since I received my SAR and discovered what went on between the disputes team and LOTO I have sent at least six emails to the Labour Party, none of which has been given a reply. I have included the substance of my emails in the two screen shots below.

I have the evidence of a confected expulsion by largely unnamed individuals, an expulsion confected in the middle of a pandemic, and no possibility of redress for the injustice.

You cannot imagine how frustrating it is to have no named individual to contact and the disempowerment of sending emails into a void, emails with significant legal concerns about procedure and data protection. Emails which are never answered.

If the Labour Party GLU/Disputes and Complaints Teams acted in an ‘above board’ manner, consistent with natural justice, perhaps people like Mr Greenstein would not be provoked into sending them emails these teams deem harassment. These anonymous people hold all the ‘power’, they are not able to be held accountable for their behaviour, and I can assure the reader/s of my statement that I feel far more harassed and abused by this team of people than they can ever feel reading a few emails calling out what they do and how they conduct their business.

20 February 2021

Witness B described a sinister operation whereby the Board of Deputies supplied a list of who they wanted expelled to Starmer’s office and they passed it on to the GLU. The GLU then searched B’s social media until they could find something they could expel her for.

The final witness statement was from Megan McCann who used to work for Disputes. When I wrote my emails I was not to know that she had transferred jobs within Labour’s bureaucracy. Judging by her witness statement she is on the far-Right of the Labour Party.

Owen Jones - the political weathervane who gave support to the Apartheid supporting JLM's fake 'antisemitism' attacks on socialists - NEVER TO BE TRUSTED

She said ‘I felt angry that Mr GREENSTEIN had seemingly identified me from a document on the internet and then thought it appropriate to seek me out and find my email and email me direct.’ This is untrue. I have been sent dozens of letters of investigation over the years by Labour Party members bewildered at the false and confected accusations against them. Up until a certain point of time, letters had a name and email address on them identifying a particular staff member dealing with their case. That is how I identified McCann as being a member of the Disputes Team.

McCann found my salutation, ‘Dear Racist Scumbags’ as ‘deeply offensive, and quite aggressive’ but accusing thousands of Labour Party members of ‘anti-Semitism’ is not offensive or aggressive?

It is a lie that I have ever ‘worn tee-shirts or produced posters with staff names on’. But what is one lie among many?

McCann said ‘I don’t know Mr GREENSTEIN well enough to know what threat he would pose’ but she does know me well enough to know that I am ‘an extremist and so are a number of his friends and supporters. They are fanatical about their ideological beliefs.’ Of course to the likes of Megan McCann anyone who is a socialist is an ‘extremist’.

McCann is not above using the fact that she is a woman to suggest that I was targeting women in particular. In fact I was targeting any member of the Disputes Team, regardless of sex. She wrote:

This email was awful and I found it really upsetting and I felt exasperated. As this email was directed to females I found the language used particularly offensive.’

These snowflakes are so concerned about language and subliminal attitudes but when it comes to sending out threatening letters, to people who are elderly or vulnerable, most of them women, they have no such concerns. This is bourgeois feminism at its best (or worst).

Apparently David Evans ‘telephoned me for a welfare check to see how I was’. Touching. I wonder whether he has ever phoned a Labour Party member to find out how they are after receiving a letter from McCann or her fellow abusers?

The reality is that it was the anti-Semitic far-Right which supports Israel 

McCann found my final email ‘exhausting’. My 3 witnesses found their ‘investigation’ letters (itself a lie since there were never any genuine investigations) a damn sight worse than exhausting.

On page 13 of her witness statement McCann says she ‘believes’ that I have worn tee shirts with staff’s name on them. By page 15 this becomes ‘I’ve seen with Mr GREENSTEIN wear a t-shirt with people’s names on.’ This is quite remarkable because on page 12 she says ‘I have never met this male and have had no dealings with him personally, however I was aware of his existence.’

So despite never having met me or having had any dealings with me, she is certain that she saw me wear tee shirts with the names of members of staff on them, even though she wouldn’t have recognised me! This is the quality of evidence for which people are being expelled.

What this demonstrates is that Megan McCann is a liar who is prepared to perjure herself and lie about anything and anybody. That was why she fitted in so well with the Disputes Team.

All the stuff about feeling nervous opening her emails or being afraid of people handing out leaflets in case I was amongst them can be taken with a shovel full of salt. Dispute Staff and Regional Staff are so used to lying about members of the Labour Party that they think nothing of giving evidence on oath which is also a tissue of lies. Her sole intent was to see me convicted of the offence of ‘non-violent harassment’ itself a minor charge not carrying a custodial sentence.

I have no doubt that her whining witness statement emphasising how hurt and vulnerable she was was crafted with fellow staff members.

McCann’s final statement that ‘I was the whistle blower against the party for its conduct in handling anti-Semitism complaints. I wonder if this is part of the reason why Mr GREENSTEIN has emailed me.’explains her motives perfectly.

Actually I was unaware of McCann’s grubby little role in extorting members’ money (which Starmer handed over in order not to derail the EHRC Report). However my choice of McCann was fortuitous as she is a nasty little red baiter.

You can read McCann’s lying statementat your leisure as it gives an insight into the mentality of the average witchhunter.

The hearing of my case was supposed to be on July 7 and McCann, eager to perjure herself, had travelled down all the way from the Midlands to appear in person whereas Patrick Smith was going to give evidence by video. It was to turn out to be a very frustrating day for her, as the CPS had badly timed the case management resulting in the magistrates deciding that they didn’t have time to hear the case! Hence they postponed it till November for a full day’s hearing.

However by November agreement was reached between my solicitor and the Crown Prosecution Service that the latter would offer no evidence in return for which I would agree to what is called a Restraining Order that I would not contact the Disputes Team, try and enter Labour Party premises, contact McCann or Smith or use expletives, abusive or offensive language’ in any communication with the Labour Party.

A fifth condition that I should email the Labour Party if I intended to demonstrate outside their premises was dropped at my insistence. In other words I was acquitted and found not guilty. How therefore did the Zionist press and Brighton and Hove News report it?

The Jewish Chronicle headline was Tony Greenstein ‘handed restraining order’ and a subheading ‘Anti-Zionist activist reportedly charged with two counts of harassment in connection with various emails sent to the party’. No mention of the fact that I was acquitted of these 2 charges! No doubt the anonymous JC reporter forgot that he wasn’t in Palestine where being charged with something is tantamount to being found guilty (if you are a Palestinian).

The Jewish News article was by my favourite Zionist ‘journalist’ ‘Liar’ Lee Harpin whose main claim to fame, besides being arrested for hacking other peoples’ phones when at the Daily Mirror, is that he has never written an article without at least one error in it.

The JN article was headed ‘Tony Greenstein restraining order stops him from contacting Labour disputes team’ and the subheadline was ‘Expelled Labour activist and 'notorious antisemite' handed two-year punishment, charged with two counts of harassment’. Except that a Restraining Order is not a punishment. It is an agreement not to do something you are unlikely to do anyway! Again there was no mention of my acquittal. Zionist propagandists seem to lie in harmony. The agenda was obvious.

I said that Liar Lee has never written an article without at least one mistake and sure enough he wrote: ‘Greenstein had originally pleaded guilty to the charges back in March.’ That’s news to me and I expect to the CPS too.

There was no mention of the fact that I was acquitted as that would have defeated the whole purpose of the story which was to convince its readership that I had been found guilty of something. And given the stupidity of the average Zionist they don’t need much convincing!

What Harpin doesn’t know he simply invents. The Jewish News is not bound by any press regulator, neither IPSOS nor IMPRESS. In other words it is unaccountable to anyone and can lie its head off.

The all-White lynch mob of MPs that marched to the hearing of Marc Wadsworth, a Black anti-racist with fellow racist Ruth Smeeth who is now, laughably, CEO of Index on Censorship

In the Brighton and Hove News, a local online rag with 1 reporter, its editor Jo Wadsworth, there is a headline Expelled Labour member given restraining order preventing contact with party’s complaints team. Actually the Restraining Order prevents contact with the Disputes not Complaints Team. There are also 3 poisonous readers’ comments which are counterbalanced by a fourth reader who points out what should be obvious.

The article itself is vile, pointing out that I was wearing a Free Palestine badge. Wadsworth is to journalism what Harold Shipman was to geriatric medicine. In other words a scab journalist writing for a news media that no one reads!

Marc Wadsworth - the Black anti-racist the target of Ruth Smeeth, the Zionist MP who lost her seat at the General Election

This whole episode has been an interesting insight into the mentality of the Disputes Team and their paranoid vision of the world and their opponents in the Labour Party, who are uniformally branded ‘extremists’.

I am of course forbidden from contacting Ms McCann and Mr Smith so I won’t be sending them copies of this blog! I would ask people not to send it on as that might be construed as me having indirectly tried to contact them!

Tony Greenstein


Shahar Peretz and Eran Aviv, Gaoled for Refusing to Serve in Israel's Army - These Are the Israelis We Should Be Supporting - Not the Zionists

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To Starmer, Lammy and the Jewish Labour Movement Israel’s Refuseniks are the ‘Wrong Sort of Israelis’



In today’s Labour Party Starmer and Evans are expelling anyone who is seen as supporting the Palestinians.  According to Starmer this is because ‘every Jew in the Labour Party matters’ although if you are a Jewish member of the Labour Party you are 5 times more likely to be expelled or suspended.

The reason is because we are the wrong sort of Jew.  Opposition to Israeli Apartheid and its settlement enterprise is equated with anti-Semitism. That is their justification for opposing BDS, the only means of putting pressure on the Israeli state.

The fact that the same hypocrites are only too eager to support sanctions on Iran, China and a host of other countries points to their selective opposition to sanctions.

To Starmer and Johnson young Israelis who refuse to serve in Israel’s army are the ‘wrong sort of Israeli’. That is why it is important to support them.


We should be under no illusions that these brave young people are a tiny minority, a sliver, of Israel’s Jewish population who come under immense social and political pressures. That is why they need, more than ever, our support.

Shahar has been sentenced to imprisonment for the third time. She describedhow life is made as difficult as possible for those who break the national concensus. She wasn’t allowed, as of right, to have access to writing materials:

Some days I could only get a pen for 10 minutes; on Saturdays or holidays you don’t get a pen at all.Privacy is a luxury I don’t get to have as a prisoner and I was not allowed to write anything without the rest of the inmates, guards and commanders getting to see what I’m writing.’

In prison, ‘writing is in itself a form of activism’

the prison authorities  hindered my ability to document what goes on behind bars, write articles and develop ideas and plan on how to share my experiences once I am released for a few days. The military does not want me to write, speak or share my thoughts. They are trying to silence me. 

The silencing of political refusers is a small part of a more violent pattern of behavior - The silencing of the Palestinian struggle for human rights in the West Bank and Gaza

Shahar wrote that

‘it is this silencing, this attempt to erase, hide and deny what is really happening, that makes me stand proud and declare my refusal publicly.’

As Amira Hass wrote for female prisoners ‘writing is the rarest of ‘privileges’. The Israeli Army doesn’t allow female soldiers to write. This  has been applied in the new military prison at Neve Tzedek (in Hebrew, Oasis of Justice). ‘They’re not allowed to hold writing implements, except for a half hour or 20 minutes a day at best.’

MK Gaby Lasky (Meretz) asked why this was so and Gali Ofir, an adviser to Defense Minister Benny Gantz, answered that: “The decision to restrict the use of writing implements was made by the commander of the prison base.” Which is no explanation at all.

Israeli soldiers help built illegal settlement

Amira Hass was told that there are no restrictions on writing implements. ‘In short, the anonymous military official lied to me.’ In the wings of imprisoned male soldiers, this ban is not enforced. 

Tair Kaminer, who was imprisoned in two different military jails in 2016, said that she and fellow inmates kept using writing implements for painting, writing journals and letters to family and friends, which was essential for breaking the boredom. “We could ask for paper and pens any time of day and the wardens would give it to us,”

The writing ban was not the decision of one governor alone. This decision was a premeditated attempt to prevent detailed descriptions of life inside prison to be circulated outside. 

Peretz spent 58 days in military prison. She told Haaretz:

In my first and second sentences I was told that we could ask for a pen between 1 o’clock and 4 o’clock in the afternoon. But the pen was given according to the commanders’ timetable. Sometimes only for 10 minutes

Eran Aviv 

Eran Aviv said that in the men’s wings there were pens on the table all the time for their use. During Peretz’s third term in prison

The new military prison Neve Tzedek, near the Sharon Junction in central Israel.

 “it had been decided that there would be a single writing time for all the women. From 20 minutes to half an hour... Every day it was different. Sometimes the commanders told us that today’s writing would be allowed only for women who want to write requests to the prison authorities. And so I didn’t get a pen on Sunday or Monday last week. You can only write in the yard... Sometimes 20 girls come out to write, but there are only five pens. And still everyone has to go back to their cell after the half-hour. The commanders stand over us and read what we write. I wrote a letter to my boyfriend and one of the commanders asked me: ‘What, you have a boyfriend?’”

Afterwards the commander-wardens count the pens to make sure all were returned. Shahar described the regime of petty punishments:

 “We can be in the yard and suddenly the commander says: ‘Who wants to write?’ It’s completely random. And I don’t have time to go back to my cell and get my sudoko booklet. It can be at 3 P.M. or 6 P.M. And it might not happen at all. When one day we mentioned to the commander that we hadn’t received pens, she answered ‘Right, and you won’t get any today.’ I tried to understand the reason for the ban. The main answer is that we might stab one another. So why is there a ban on felt-tip pens, which can’t stab? The commanders bring razor blades to the girls. That’s not dangerous? Another answer is that they don’t want us to scribble on the walls and the uniforms. There are cameras in every cell except in the showers and toilets. In the yard they are listening everywhere. All the time they can see what we’re doing and punish us. One of the commanders told me, angrily, that a pen is a privilege and not a right. I came here with sudoko and writing booklets, with all kinds of plans to document what goes on in prison. And I came home with everything almost empty.”

Lasky was told that it had been decided to lift the ban on writing “as long as the prisoners do not make wrongful use of writing implements.” The mind boggles as to what the Israeli military consider a ‘wrongful use’.

Donate to help the Refusers

Oren Feld

At the end of Octobera protest was organised by Yesh Gvul (There Is a Limit) and supported by conscientious objector support network Mesarvot and the Communist Party of Israel, Maki, demanding the release of three refuseniks, Eran Aviv, Shachar Perez and Oren Feld — at Tzedek prison, near Netanya. Feld, who is the Hadash (Democratic Front for Peace and Equality) Jerusalem branch secretary, which is part of the Joint List. He was just released after 14 days in military jail. Feld is 29 years old and an MA student.

SeeProtests to demand release of Israeli communist and other military refuseniks

Eran Aviv and Shahar Peretz

On December 16 Eran Aviv wrote a letter ‘as a free man’.

After spending 114 days in military jail for refusing to enlist to the Israeli military and not be complicit in the occupation of the Palestinian territories, I finally received an exemption from military service.

Eran spoke about how

Just a few months back we facilitated the Shministim letter (Shministim meaning high school seniors in Hebrew) that was signed by 120 high school students declaring their intention to refuse to enlist and become soldiers of the occupation.

Eran appealed to people to ‘Join our growing community by donating today to help support our objection to the occupation.’ 

Oren wrote about how, when he was first drafted to the Israeli military as an 18 year old,

‘I did not have the strength to resist it. Now I do. I spent 3 years of my life in a military service I did not believe in and over the years I have witnessed numerous injustices and wrongdoings performed by the army.’

That is why now, at the age of 29 years, I said ENOUGH when I was called to do reserve duty. I will no longer be a part of an institution that oppresses, kills, and exploits innocent people. It is time to speak the truth about the history of our land, - starting with past expulsions of Palestinians and continuing with the multiple present day measures aimed at the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, that are part of everyday life. Only truth will stop the occupation.

The occupation manifests itself in many forms. It has controls over the Palestinian leadership; It controls transportation routes through the use of lockdowns and blockades; It performs mass arrests; It has the power to prohibit gatherings and demonstrations. The occupation is undeniable, and it is a political choice: there is no justification for an endless, limitless foreign rule over millions of innocent people.

I choose peace. That is why when I received the order to report for reserve duty, I told my army commander that I will not comply. He sentenced me to 14 days in jail for my refusal. I sent a request to the conscientious committee asking them to release me from reserve duty, but they denied my request and I went to military jail. Serving time was a harsh and humiliating experience but I will continue to stand firm in the face of oppression!

Sentenced to 14 days in prison for refusing to serve the occupation

Tom Kearneydescribed how at the end of August 2021 when many students had just left school Shahar Peretz in the town of Kfar Yona, Israel, was drafting a statement to present at the local army induction base. On the 31 August, she attended the Tel Hashomer base, refusing to enlist in the Israeli Defence Force (IDF). Her actions resulted in her being sentenced to be detained in a military prison.

Shahar Peretz - conscientious objector

Shahar, 18, is one of 120 teenagers who signed the “Shministim Letter” (an initiative with the Hebrew nickname given to high school seniors) in January, in which they declared their refusal to serve in the Israeli army in protest of its policies of occupation and apartheid in Gaza and the West Bank.

While Shahar was drafting her statement Eran Aviv, 19 from Tel Aviv, was preparing for his fourth period of imprisonment as a conscientious objector.

In a recent interview, facilitated by the Refuser Solidarity Network both Shahar and Eran described how young people, from an early age, are habituated through school and the wider society to their joining the IDF. They described seeing uniforms or machine guns being carried on buses as a natural part of the public arena, which they argued has resulted in a space that sanctifies soldiers, death, and dead heroes and where streets are named after commanders.

Shahar remarked that she had decided to refuse to join the army after participating in a summer camp between Palestinians and Israelis. She said that she could not become part of system that oppresses them and their families daily.

“I do not want to wear a uniform that symbolises violence and pain. I do not want to become their enemy

Eran expressed the view that there are two systems in Israel and the Occupied Territories (OTP), Israeli civil law and Israeli military law and that Palestinians live everyday subjected to military law. He described how conscripts in the military service are taught that the only way to protect Jewish people is through force. They are therefore expected to practice violence and of course many Palestinians object and are violent in return.

Shahar concurred with Eran’s view by describing witnessing, whilst volunteering to assist Palestinian farmers in the Hebron hills in the West Bank, Palestinian children being attacked and harassed by Israeli soldiers as they walked to school.

Both Shahar and Eran have found their immediate families supportive of their actions, but many in the local community have expressed criticism accusing them of negating their national and civic duty to undertake military service. Shahar appears to have experienced more verbal abuse through social media and at times has felt fearful for both herself and her family though she has not been threatened with physical violence. Eran expressed the view that he has experienced more criticism whilst in prison than from his community, even though some soldiers he has met in prison were there because they had gone AWOL due to their dislike of the army and their experiences in it.

Both Eran and Shahar admitted that their prospects may be adversely affected by their decision, but 

both passionately expressed their need to be an active contributor to the struggle to make conscientious objection a legitimate option and to work towards peace and reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians.’ 

Shahar Peretz was sentenced to 10 days in a military prison on 1st September after refusing to join the Israeli army. She has subsequently served a second term of imprisonment, during which she had her 19th birthday and on 24th October was imprisoned for a third time for 30 days.

Eran Aviv returned to a military prison on 1st September and was recently sentenced for a 6th term of imprisonment on 24th October. He has now completed a total of 114 days in jail and there are recent concerns expressed by his supporters that he is finding his time in prison increasingly difficult.

You can sign up for monthly updates at https://www.refuser.orgFacebook Page for Refusers International

Ha’aretz reported that 60 High School Seniors Refuse to Serve in the Israeli Army Because of the Occupation

Departing from previous letters of this kind, the signatories call out the country’s education system for various issues, such as encouraging enlistment in the Israel Defense Forces and emphasizing the Jewish narrative in Bible and history classes.

They also draw attention to issues they say the curriculum ignores, such as the expulsion of Arabs in 1948 and the current violation of human rights in the occupied territories. The teens wrote:

“The state demands that we enlist into an army that is ostensibly meant to ensure the existence of the state. But in practice, army operations are not directed mainly at defending against enemy armies, but at subjugating a civilian population. Thus, our mobilization has a context and implications.” They say their refusal to enlist is not an act of disengagement or turning away from Israeli society, but rather “the taking of responsibility for our actions and their implications.”

They added:

“We grew up with the ideal of the heroic soldier, we sent them care packages, we visited the tanks they fought in, we dressed up as soldiers in premilitary training camps and we elevated their deaths on memorial days. The fact that this is the reality we’re all used to does not make it a-political. Enlistment is a political act, no less than refusal to do so.”

Supporters gather at the IDF induction base

The letter referred to “the policy of apartheid as expressed in two separate legal systems, one for Palestinians and one for Jews” and to the occupation, as expressed in “societal racism, an inflammatory political discourse and police violence.”

One of the signatories, Daniel Paldi of Tel Aviv, said:

“From a very young age we are raised to be soldiers. Civic classes don’t do much to change the one-directional course of the school system, its pinnacle arriving with the preparations for enlistment in high school.”

Paldi added:

“Why is refusal to enlist perceived as a political action, but school activities meant to encourage enlistment seen as self-evident? It starts with school trips to Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, in which no political contexts are discussed. We’re only told about the battles. There’s an elephant in the room that no one is talking about.”

Paldi noted that on a school trip to southern Israel, the guides warned that “If we don’t work the land, someone else will take it.”

Members of Israeli border police walk at the scene of an incident, at Qalandia checkpoint near Ramallah in the West Bank, December 7, 2020. Credit: Mohamad Torokman / Reuters

“Until we talk about the Nakba in class, how it happened that most of the Palestinians who lived here fled or were expelled, or about the theft of their possessions, we won’t understand how much the problem remains part of our lives. This is sweeping history under the rug. When I began to understand this, I immediately started thinking about what else we were ‘sold’ in school.”

After a struggle lasting months, including spending 56 days in a military prison, one of the signatories of the letter, Hallel Rabin of Kibbutz Harduf, was awarded an exemption from military service as a conscientious objector.

Rabin says the schools only teach the Jewish narrative. In history and civics classes, they present a zero-sum game, in which the right and justification for Jews to live freely automatically denies the rights of the other population.”

Supporters gather at the IDF induction base to show their solidarity with Shahar Perets and Eran Aviv over their refusal to join the Israeli army, Tel Hashomer, central Israel, August 31, 2021. (Oren Ziv)

·         See Israeli woman jailed three times for refusing to join the army

·         Israel: Conscientious objectors Eran Aviv and Shahar Peretz resist for peace

The attack on Christian Palestinians as Jerusalem Church leaders warn of “a systematic attempt” to drive out Christianity

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Xmas in Palestine as Israel bans Pilgrimages but allows Birthright Tours to Enter

In 1947 as part of Christian Palestinians Resolution 181 partitioning Palestine into Jewish and Arab states, the UN proposed the internationalisation of Jerusalem under a separate regime. The UN sent Count Folk Bernadotte, the Swedish statesman to Jerusalem to make arrangements. The Zionist terrorist group Lehi/Stern Gang, a commanded by future Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, assassinatedhim on 17 September 1948 with the connivance of the main terrorist group Haganah.

Bernadotte had personally saved 11,000 Jews at the end of the war from Nazi concentration camps. As Donald Macintyre observed ‘no blue Israeli plaque marks the spot, as it does for so many military and Jewish underground exploits of the period’.

The statementby the Patriarchs and Heads of Churches in Jerusalem less than 2 weeks ago, about the harassment of the Church and the threat posed to its continued presence in Jerusalem was met by a predictable Zionist response. ‘What about Christians in other parts of the Middle East’ they cried as if that had anything to do with the treatment of the Christian Church in Jerusalem.

Of course the plight of Christians throughout the Middle East is a subject worthy of discussion in its own right. It might for example have something to do with the Western and Israeli attack on secular regimes throughout the region and their own promotion of fundamentalist Islamic regimes. For example it was the attack on Iraq which led to the demise of Christians in that country. Likewise the Saudi sponsorship of jihadi militias in Syria, aided and abetted by Israel and the United States, also led to attacks on Christians.

Justin Welby

The statement was endorsed in an articleby the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby together with the Anglican Archbishop of Jerusalem Hosam Naoum in the Sunday Times.

Naturally the statement was “heavilycriticisedby the Board of Deputies” as “deeply troubling”even though it’s none of their business. It has nothing to do with British Jews. But the Board’s main function today is to operate as an Israeli propaganda group. What didn’t trouble the Board was the attempt to displace Christians in the Christian Quarter or the attacks on Christian clergy.

The Zionist defenceboiled down to the fact that ‘Israel’s 182,000-strong Christian population grew by 1.4 per cent in 2020’. Which was entirely irrelevant since the statement was issued on behalf of the Jerusalem churches in Occupied Jerusalem, where the number of Christians is declining, not on behalf of Israel’s Palestinians.


Instead of dealing with the actual complaints of harassment, violence and the expulsion of Christians from the Christian Quarter of Jerusalem, the statementfrom Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs resorted to the usual blank denials: They termed the statement ‘baseless, and distort the reality of the Christian community in Israel.’ They went on to say that:

The statement by Church leaders in Jerusalem is particularly infuriating given their silence on the plight of many Christian communities in the Middle East suffering from discrimination and persecution.

Israel describes itself as ‘the only democracy in the Middle East’. Why then does it insist on comparing itself with all the dictatorships it’s in alliance with in the region rather than say Europe?

The overall number of Christians in Israel has risen but in east Jerusalem there is a steady decline GETTY IMAGES

What Israel’s defenders did not do was to address any of the points in the statement. It’s worth enumerating them.

Throughout the Holy Land, Christians have become the target of frequent and sustained attacks by fringe radical groups. Since 2012 there have been countless incidents of physical and verbal assaults against priests and other clergy, attacks on Christian churches, with holy sites regularly vandalized and desecrated, and ongoing intimidation of local Christians who simply seek to worship freely and go about their daily lives. These tactics are being used by such radical groups in a systematic attempt to drive the Christian community out of Jerusalem and other parts of the Holy Land.

Arson at the Church of the Multiplication of Loaves & Fishes

There has been a wave of attacks on both churches and moques in Israel. For example the arson attack at the Church of Multiplication of Loaves and Fishes. As the National Geographic reported:

The June assault was the latest and most dramatic sign of tension between Christians in Israel and a growing movement of Jewish extremists who seek to cleanse their nation of religious minorities.

A nun surveys the damage after an arson attack

The Church statement went on to say:

the failure of local politicians, officials and law enforcement agencies to curb the activities of radical groups who regularly intimidate local Christians, assault priests and clergy, and desecrate Holy Sites and church properties.

The statement called on Israel’s leaders to:

1.     Deal with the challenges presented by radical groups in Jerusalem to both the Christian community and the rule of law, so as to ensure that no citizen or institution has to live under threat of violence or intimidation.

2.     Begin dialogue on the creation of a special Christian cultural and heritage zone to safeguard the integrity of the Christian Quarter in Old City Jerusalem and to ensure that its unique character and heritage are preserved for the sake of well-being of the local community, our national life, and the wider world.

Suffice to say there was no response to this call. Responding to the statement, the World Council of Churches (WCC) acting general secretary Rev Dr Ioan Sauca said Christians in the Holy Land were a "threatened minority". They went on to say that:

"The statement issued by the Patriarchs and Heads of Churches in Jerusalem highlights the increasing threat to the Christian presence in the Holy Land posed by attacks and incursions by radical groups who seek to destroy the religious and cultural diversity of the region," he said.

There was no response to this statement either. When they referred to ‘radical groups’ what they meant is the efforts of Ateret Cohanim which aims to build a 3rd Temple in Jerusalem by demolishing the Al Aqsa Mosque and Golden Dome and ethnically cleansing Jerusalem’s Palestinian inhabitants. These settlers are supported by the Israeli state itself. See Warnings of 'systematic attempt' to drive Christianity out of the Holy Land

There is an ongoing threat to evacuate two large buildings in the Christian Quarter, the Imperial Hotel and Petra Hotel. According to Ha’aretz

After a long legal battle, the hotels were transferred to the ownership of a Jewish organization that had bought the buildings, and which is now trying to evict the Palestinians who are running the hotels – and bring in Jewish families to live there. The heads of the Christian communities now fear that the change in ownership of the hotels – which were bought in a controversial deal by Ateret Cohanim 15 years ago using shell companies – could change the character of the Christian Quarter.

Israel’s courts have also played their part. They have consistently upheld the crooked land deals of Ateret Cohanim, often made with intermediaries who hold forged documents. The land deals were riddled with corruption yet Israel’s courts turned a blind eye.

According to Ha’aretz one of the churches that suffers most from this is the Armenian Church, which is located near the Jewish Quarter of the Old City.’

“I’ve been in Israel since 1995 and never before have there been so many incidents like this,” said Father Koryoun Baghdasaryan, the chancellor of the Armenian Patriarchate of Jerusalem.

“Every day that I leave my home for the Church of the Holy Sepulcher or to visit family, I’m afraid something will happen to me. There were always curses and spitting, in recent years physical violence also started.”

Ha’aretz described how “Christians in the Holy Land want Jews to stop spitting on them”

‘A few weeks ago, a senior Greek Orthodox clergyman in Israel attended a meeting at a government office in Jerusalem's Givat Shaul quarter. When he returned to his car, an elderly man wearing a skullcap came and knocked on the window. When the clergyman let the window down, the passerby spat in his face.’

‘On Sunday, a fracas developed when a yeshiva student spat at the cross being carried by the Armenian Archbishop during a procession near the Holy Sepulchre in the Old City. The archbishop's 17th-century cross was broken during the brawl and he slapped the yeshiva student.’

In February 2018 the Church of the Holy Sepulchre was closedin a standoff with the city's municipality in protest at a proposed land expropriation law. The closure was prompted by two developments: the Jerusalem municipality's plan to tax the church's assets around the city and a bill to expropriate land already sold by the churches to private companies which violated a longstanding status quo.

The systematic campaign ... reaches now its peak as a discriminatory and racist bill that targets solely the properties of the Christian community in the Holy Land is being promoted. This reminds us all of laws of a similar nature which were enacted against the Jews during dark periods in Europe.”

The Dishonesty of the Guardian Knows No Limits – Its Obituary for Desmond Tutu Not Only Failed to Mention his criticism of Israeli Apartheid but they DELETED Professor Mond’s Comment pointing this out!

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 Unlike Starmer and the Guardian’s Pathetic Censors, Archbishop Tutu was consistent in his Opposition to All Forms of Apartheid


Desmond Tutu  lambasting Israeli Apartheid in 2013

‘I have visited the Occupied Palestinian Territories and have witnessed the humiliation of Palestinian at Israeli military checkpoints. The inhumanity that won’t let ambulances reach the injured, farmers tend their land or children attend school. This treatment is familiar to me and the many Black South Africans who were corralled and harassed by the security forces of the Apartheid government.’

One can only assume that the cowardly Guardian editor Kath Viner and Jonathan Freedland aren’t keen for people to draw connections between the apartheid that Tutu fought and the Israeli apartheid system that they support.

It’s not often that the person who wins the Nobel Peace Prize, as Desmond Tutu did in 1984, actually deserves it. All too often it is war criminals like Henry Kissinger, Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Rabin and Barack Obama who pick up the gong or at best some nonentity or UN agency.

The International Committee of the Red Cross has won in 3 times, most notably in 1944 when it won it ‘for the great work it has performed during the war in behalf of humanity.’ despite refusing to raise the holocaust with the Nazis because they considered it an ‘internal German problem.’ In 1919 they awarded it to the White Supremacist President of the United States, Woodrow Wilson.

Desmond Tutu however richly deserved the prize. He was the second South African winner of the Nobel prize after the founder of the ANC, Albert Luthuli won it in 1960.

Throughout the 1980s Tutu played a key role in drawing national and international attention to the evils of apartheid. He supported Boycott Divestment and Sanctions against South Africa as a means of putting pressure on Apartheid’s rulers and drew the ire of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.

Born on 7 October 1931 in Klerksdorp, South Africa, Tutu became the general secretary of the South African Council of Churches [SACC] in 1978. This was widely seen as sending a message to South African President P.W. Botha’s administration that the days of Apartheid were numbered.

In 1985, at the height of the township rebellions Tutu was installed as Johannesburg’s first Black Anglican bishop, and in 1986 he was elected the first Black archbishop of Cape Town, becoming the primate of South Africa’s 1.6 million-member Anglican church.

The Anglican, Catholic, Methodist churches condemned apartheid, while the Dutch Reformed Church and the South Africa’s Jewish Board of Deputies supported it. It was not until 1985 that the BOD realised the writing was on the wall and changed its position. Although now we remember the Jewish giants of the Apartheid struggle – Joe Slovo, Dennis Goldberg, Ruth First, Ronnie Kassrills and Albie Sachs – what isn’t often understood is that they were ostracised by the Jewish community, which is the most pro-Zionist in the world.

It is worth bearing in mind that in 1982, the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Runcie, sent a five-member delegation to South Africa to demonstrate world support for the SACC

to make the point [to the apartheid government] that you are not simply dealing with a domestic matter. If you touch Desmond Tutu, you touch a world family of Christians.”

Fast forward  to today and the Establishment toady who is the present incumbent at Lambeth Palace, Justin Welby, offers comfort to the oppressors and stays silent about the plight of the Palestinians. On his visit to Palestine in 2017 he carefully avoided an ‘own goal’ by saying absolutely nothing about the oppression of the Palestinians.

The Guardian's 'liberal' censors filter out a comment asking why there was no mention of Tutu's support for the Palestinians

Instead Welby made the usual visit by dignatories to Israel’s holocaust propaganda museum Yad Vashem, which was describedby holocaust researcher Daniel Blatman as a

hard-working laundromat, striving to bleach out the sins of every anti-Semitic, fascist, racist or simply murderously thuggish leader or politician like Hungary’s Viktor Orban, the Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte and Italy’s Matteo Salvini

Welby even rowed back an articlewhich he had co-authored last week in The Telegraph complaining of Israel’s attack on the church in Jerusalem.

You wonder how this Tory toe rag has the audacity to talk about oppression

But the person who deserves a prize for his chutzpah is Keir Starmer, who is presently busy expelling Jews from the Labour Party (in the name of fighting ‘anti-Semitism’. Starmer, who carefully avoided all mention of the word ‘Apartheid’ in his statement describedTutu as "a tower of a man and a leader of moral activism" who "dedicated his life to tackling injustice and standing up for the oppressed".

That is of course true, but coming from a moral pygmy and a habitual liar, his tribute is worthless. It was, after all, Jeremy Corbyn who got arrested opposing Apartheid. Starmer’s only contribution to the world of injustice is to do his best to increase it. If anyone is responsible for the incarceration and slow death of Julian Assange it is Starmer.

There are many heart-felt tributes to Desmond Tutu from groups such as Africa4Palestine Statement which talked about how peace-loving peoples across the world are ‘mourning the loss of Archbishop Desmond Tutu – a dear friend of the Palestinian people.’

The Guardian's shameful censorship is another reason why people should boycott this mouthpiece of corporate neo-liberalism

#Africa4Palestine Board Member, Professor Farid Esack, a personal friend of the Archbishop, paid this tribute:

“We and the Palestinians have lost an indomitable fighter, a courageous leader and a moral icon without equal. We are bereft of a prophet who consistently warned against ideas of cheap peace which may come without justice. I am immensely grateful for having travelled and worked with the Archbishop in the struggle against Apartheid in South Africa, in solidarity with the Palestinians against Israeli occupation and in supporting various other causes. His boundless love, his wit and humour and his unflinching and principled commitment to a better world will always inspire us”.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZaMvQbIoWs

Archbishop Desmond Tutu addressing a 2014 rally for Palestine in Cape Town - the march, attended by over 250 000 people, was the largest that South Africa has witnessed since the dawn of democracy.

See My Letter to the Guardian 

Open Letter to the Guardian's Editor Kath Viner & its Zionist Gatekeeper, Jonathan Freedland

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 Do You Not Have a Shred of Decency? Why did the Guardian remove from its coverage of Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s death any reference to the Palestinians?

Dear Kath and Jonathan,

Yesterday’s Guardian has 4 pages dedicated to the life of Archbishop Desmond Tutu. 60% of the front page was also devoted to his death. As someone whose first political activity, as a 16 year old schoolboy, was demonstrating against the 1970 Springbok Rugby tour, I am the last person to quarrel with the extent of your coverage.

What I find amazing though is that there wasn’t even a passing mention of Tutu’s support for the Palestinians or his descriptionof Israel as worse than its South African counterpart:

your struggle will be harder than ours, as Israel’s apartheid is even worse than South Africa’s. We never had F-16s bomb our bantustans killing hundreds of our children. Remember that.”

Tutu never lost an opportunity to criticise what he termed an apartheid state. This was well before B’Tselem’s Reportdescribing Israel as ‘A regime of Jewish supremacy’ and Human Rights Watch’s ReportA Threshold Crossed - Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution’.

Perhaps I can make a more general observation? When people pay a tribute to someone and deliberately, for unspoken political reasons, excise a part of their life, they end up saying more about themselves than their subject. Your coverage of Desmond Tutu’s death says more about the Guardian than it does about him.

To do all these things and distort someone’s life, because it’s politically inconvenient to tell the truth, and is at variance with the Guardian’s editorial line, is not merely dishonest but politically odious. It suggests that the tribute you paid to Archbishop Tutu’s struggle against Apartheid is just hot air. Pious and empty words aimed at convincing your readers that you retain some integrity.

We all know the reasons for the Guardian’s dilemmas. You spent five years demonising Jeremy Corbyn and the Left as ‘anti-Semites’. You lost no opportunity to portray people who were opposed to apartheid as racists. Even worse you did it in the company of genuine racists and anti-Semites.

People like Boris Johnson, who in his 2004 novel ‘72 VirginsdepictedJews as controlling the media and being able to “fiddle” elections. Not forgetting Jacob Rees-Mogg who, apart from tweeting in supportof the neo-Nazi AfD in Germany, describedfellow Jewish MPs John Bercow and Oliver Letwin as “Illuminati who are taking the powers to themselves.” A comment describedas ‘expressly anti-Semitic’ by Professor Michael Berkowitz of UCL.

Let me remind you both of one of Desmond Tutu’s most famous speeches when he said:

 “I have witnessed the systemic humiliation of Palestinian men, women and children by members of the Israeli security forces. Their humiliation is familiar to all black South Africans who were corralled and harassed and insulted and assaulted by the security forces of the apartheid government.”

What is there in this that you or your fellow scribes at the Guardian don’t understand? Either your opposition to what happened in South Africa, the subjugation of people according to the doctrines of racial supremacy, is a principle or it is a narrow political calculus dependent on the circumstances of the time.

The omission of any mention of Desmond Tutu’s longstanding support for the Palestinians was not accidental, an unfortunate oversight but a deliberate editorial decision. We know this because a critical comment from Professor David Mond, who pointed this out, was deletedby the Guardian. It did not accord with your ‘community standards.’ Likewise two comments from Mark Seddon, the former Editor of Tribune, were also deleted.

Desmond Tutu was a strong supporter of Boycott Divestment and Sanctions against Israel, just as he supported sanctions against South Africa. That was the real reason for your selective editing.

Of course you did not want to mention Tutu’s position on Palestine. Tutu’s opposition to Israeli apartheid routinely attractedcries of ‘anti-Semitism’ from those who refuse to understand that opposing the Israeli state for what it does is not the same as hostility to Jew.

I fully understand your dilemma. The Guardian has spent so much of its time making false accusations of anti-Semitism that you don’t know how to handle the legacy of someone who, according to your definition, was anti-Semitic. Desmond Tutu was an opponent of apartheid in all its forms, including its Jewish equivalent, Zionism.

Just one final thing. The Guardian seems to have gone quiet on Labour ‘anti-Semitism’. I presume that you are satisfied with the fact that in order to eradicate ‘anti-Semitism’, Starmer is expelling dozens of Jewish members? If you are Jewish in the Labour Party today you are 5 times more likely to be expelled as non-Jews. It seems a strange way to oppose anti-Semitism which is presumably why the Guardian says nothing?

Is it too much for you now to come clean and admit that the campaign against Labour ‘anti-Semitism’ was never about Jews and always about Israel and its apartheid practices?

Yours truly,

Tony Greenstein

Tim Llewellyn, former BBC Middle East Correspondent, on the BBC’s Wilful Distortion and Manipulation of News About Israel’s Oppression of the Palestinians

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 The Contrast Between the BBC’s Treatment of Russia’s Banning of Memorial Whilst Ignoring Israel’s Banning of Six Palestinian Human Rights Groups is Striking

I was watching the midnight edition of BBC News 24. The top story was Russia’s banning of human rights group, Memorial. Fiona Bruce and the BBC’s Russia correspondent Steve Rosenberg didn’t even bother to give Russia’s reasons for the ban. It was taken as given that this was an egregious and indefensible act.

Bruce told us that it had come ‘at the end of a year when the Kremlin has cracked down vigorously on its critics.’ Rosenberg told us that

‘more and more it feels as if Russia is turning the clock back. ‘Liquidate’ the judge says.... The organisation was found to have broken Russia’s draconian foreign agents law. ‘Disgraceful decision’was the reaction from the gallery.’

Grigory Yavlinky of the Yabloko Party was then interviewed who stated that it’s just ‘one more step from an authoritarian, totalitarian regime’ with an extended description of how Memorial was shining a light on ‘one of the darkest chapters of Russian history’ namely Stalin’s terror.’ 

Rosenberg told us that the founding of Memorial30 years ago was a ‘symbol of the Soviet Union opening up, facing up to its past’. But the ‘shutting down of Memorial is a symbol also of how the past is being reshaped, rewritten and how civil society is under attack.’


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWwCX0AjjNI

BBC 24 Hours makes the banning of Memorial a Russian Human Rights Group the lead news item

We were then shown a picture of Putin and the military, as a backdrop to the decision and we were told that Putin has been ‘using history to try to foster patriotism’.  Of course this is not something that would happen in the West!  Clearly the competition between Boris Johnson and Keir Starmer as to who can fit most Union Jacks into one photo shot is about something entirely different.

The BBC’s concern with human rights, be it in Russia, China or Hong Kong is selective and runs in tandem with British and Western Foreign Policy. When do we have similar reports on America’s client regimes such as Colombia or US support for coups against popular regimes that threaten its interests? When was the last BBC documentary on Saudi Arabia’s bombing of Yemen’s civilians or the threat that Israel poses to its neighbours?

In October Israel bannednot 1 but 6 Palestinian human rights groups. One of them, Al Haq, was founded in 1979, some 43 years ago. Nearly half as long again as Memorial.  Did the BBC give us an insight into its work and film its staff at work?  B’Tselem, the main Israeli human rights group describedIsrael’s banning as ‘an act characteristic of totalitarian regimes’. Did the BBC interview anyone who described Israel’s actions in these terms? Of course not.

Memorial was banned by order of Russia’s Supreme Court, which is about as independent of government as our own Court of Appeal when it decided to hand over Julian Assange to the tender mercies of America’s judicial and prison system. Yet Israel didn’t even bother with the fig leaf of an order from Israel’s Colonial Courts. It was banned by edict from Israel’s War Minister Russia Fiona Bruce Steve Rosenberg Grigory Yavlinky of the Yabloko China or Hong Kong Benny Gantz. On this the BBC also had no comment

What limited coverage the BBC gave to Israel's banning of 6 human rights groups gave prominence to the accusations of 'terrorism' not the attack on the freedom of Palestinians

Who were the groups which Israel described as a front for the Marxist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine?

1.           Al-Haq, Law in the Service of Man,

2.           Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association, Bisan

3.           Center for Research and Development,

4.           Defence for Children International-Palestine (DCI-Palestine),

5.           the Union of Agricultural Work Committees (UAWC) and

6.           the Union of Palestinian Women’s Committees (UPWC).

Anyone who has any acquaintance with the work of these organisations knows that Israel’s motives in banning the groups was political and related to their opposition to the Occupation. The allegations were made without a shred of evidence.

The BBC included a picture of PFLP guerillas as part of its McCarthyist guilt-by-association techniques - not once did it ask where the proof was that PFLP military operations were funded by groups like Defence of Children International-Palestine

The idea that these organisations cannot employ members or supporters of the PFLP is preposterous. The PFLP is a legitimate Palestinian organisation. Settler groups that regularly terrorise Palestinian farmers are describedby Israeli Interior Minister Ayelet Shaked as the ‘salt of the earth’ but Palestinian civil society groups or indeed any group opposing Israel’s occupation are ‘terrorist’.

The background to the BBC’s bias, in which every Israeli attack on the Palestinians is ‘retaliation’ whereas Palestinian attacks on settlers or the military is ‘terrorist’ is laid out in Tim Llewellyn’s excellent talk which the Balfour Project hosted in August.

Tim Llewellyn, a former BBC Middle East reporter, described how the BBC has adopted the viewpoint of the British and American Establishment on Israel and how it systematically distorts its news output in favour of Israel. Of course if the Palestinians lived in Hong Kong or Tibet then the BBC would be all over them like a rash.

We can get some measure of the BBC’s attitude by its response to Tim’s article in the Guardian where it says that:

Although Tim Llewellyn was indeed a BBC correspondent some years ago, we note that he subsequently was active for a period with the Council for Arab-British Understanding (CAABU).

Having nothing to say to rebut the substance of Tim’s article the BBC resorted to attacking him personally because he is a member of CAABU, an organisation devoted to fostering British-Arab understanding.

But when Danny Cohen, a former BBC Director of Television signed a letterin the Guardian opposing a cultural boycott of Israel, the BBC merely saidit was ‘inadvisable’. There was no condemnation.

The BBC was born in the womb of the British state. It has a record of racism, support for colonialism and hostility to the working class and trade unions. I expect no different from it which is people should not pay the TV Licence fee.  There is no reason why ordinary people should pay to fund this anti-working class organisation.

The BBC’s present Chairman Richard Sharpe, has donated £400,000 to the Tory Party over the last 20 years. As Richard Oborne detailedSharpe donated a further £35,000 to the Islamaphobic charity Quillam, which itself was funded by some of the most virulent ‘counter Jihad’ organisations such as the John Templeton Foundation.

I disagree with Tim’s suggestion in the Guardian article that the responsibility for complaints should be taken out of the hands of the BBC Trust (which has been abolished) and handed to Ofcom, the state regulator.  Why? Because this has already been done and we saw how effective Ofcom was when it refusedto investigate last year’s BBC Propaganda Film by John Ware, Is Labour Anti-Semitic?

I include below two previous articles that Tim Llewellyn wrote for the Guardian in 2009 and 2011 before Jonathan Freedland seized control of the Comment columns and before the Guardian’s dire editor, Freedland Kath Viner, gave the MI5 a veto over what the Guardian is allowed to print on Britain’s security state.

Below is Tony Benn’s interviewon BBC Today programme where he defied the edict of BBC Director General Mark Thompson, who had banned an Appeal by the Disaster Emergency Committee. In 2008 Israel launched Operation Cast Lead in the course of which it killed 1400 people, 85% of whom were civilians, including 288 children.

Tony Greenstein

BBC is 'confusing cause and effect' in its Israeli coverage

A controversial book concludes Corporation still fails to present a fair and balanced picture of conflict

Israeli soldiers attack Palestinians during a demonstration marking al-Nakba Day in Bethlehem Photograph: Rex Features

Tim Llewellyn

Mon 23 May 2011 07.00 BST

British broadcasters' coverage of the Arab awakening over recent months has been brave and honest. These are difficult and dangerous stories. But the BBC– and in this article I am going to concentrate on the BBC, because it is the broadcaster we are taxed to enable and sets worldwide standards of fairness – and its teams have made every effort to report with balance and application.

However, the BBC coverage of Israel and Palestine, where another state continually kills and oppresses Arabs, is replete with imbalance and distortion.

I covered the Middle East for the BBC from the mid-1970s to the early 1990s, and am aggrieved by my ex-employer's continuing inability to describe in a just and contextualised way the conflict between military occupier and militarily occupied. There is no attempt to properly convey cause and effect, to report the misery, violence and pillage that demean and deny freedom to the Palestinians and provoke their (limited) actions.

Greg Philo and Mike Berry, in their book More Bad News from Israel, prove by textual analysis and follow-up interviews with viewers and listeners that I am right – and so are an increasing number of people who are becoming aware that the BBC sells them short on Israel. Philo and Berry's book, an updated edition of Bad News From Israel (2004), examines coverage of the Israeli blitz on Gaza, analysing BBC TV and ITV early evening bulletins between its beginning on 27 December 2008, and the ceasefire on 17 January 2009.

Siege and blockade

They find that the Israeli explanation of why it went to war on a mainly defenceless Gazan population is the one broadly accepted by the BBC. It was a "response" to Palestinian rockets. The Palestinian case, that the Israelis violated a ceasefire that had held for nearly five months in November 2008, and that the Gazans had endured many years of intensifying siege and blockade, which had reduced them to stagnation and penury, was rarely put, if at all. "The story was unpacked," the authors write, "in the manner of the Israeli view."

In the bulletins they examined, the BBC gave 421.5 lines of text to Israeli explanations of why they attacked Gaza: the "need for security", "enemy rockets", "to stop the smuggling of weapons". The BBC devoted 14.25 lines to references to the Israeli military occupation of the Palestinian territories and 10.5 lines to the blockade. The BBC repeatedly stressed the word [Israeli] "retaliation", and also implied that police stations bombed by the Israelis were military targets, describing other casualties as "civilian". It described these civilian installations as "targets". Newspapers such as the Guardian did point out the distinction.

"The offer that Hamas was said to have made, to halt this exchange [rockets v shells and air strikes] … was almost completely absent from the coverage,"

say the authors. They cite a BBC reporter saying: "Israel feels itself surrounded by enemies, with reason." They add: "We have not found a commentary noting that 'Palestinians feel themselves to be subject to a brutal military occupation, with reason.'Israel's official view is given as fact, they say, but the Palestinian view, on the rare occasions it is found at all, is not. Israelis "state", Palestinians "claim".

When the BBC and ITV did start reporting the horrific civilian casualties in Gaza and the use of phosphorus, Israeli spokespersons were immediately on hand to deny, explain or obfuscate. The Palestinians, especially Hamas, were rarely able to answer allegations. The Palestinians in situ usually lacked the resources or opportunity to make their case. The many articulate Palestinians in London available to help were rarely called on, whereas, as one BBC insider said, "the Israeli ambassador was practically camped at TV Centre".

More than two years on, the BBC continues to confuse cause and effect – Israeli attacks are always reported as retaliation to Palestinian violence or rockets, and the idea that Palestinian rockets, however ineffective, are armed resistance to Israel's hammering from land, sea and air is rarely broadcast. The daily indignities and brutalities of the siege and the occupation and the shelling and shooting of civilians are virtually absent from BBC consciousness unless an attack on Israel sparks interest.

Headline news

Philo and Berry quote the BBC correspondent Paul Adams, a Middle East expert: what is missing from the coverage, he says, is the view that the Palestinians are engaged in a war of national liberation, trying to throw off an occupying force. Any Israeli casualty is headline news, shown in high quality images. BBC teams are based in West Jerusalem, de facto Israeli territory, and are on hand. Arab casualties may be shown in reports of a funeral, usually agency film, the victim anonymous. The Israelis, it seems, are for the BBC "people like us". The Arabs are "the other".

Philo and Berry go on to interview viewers and listeners, all in higher education. They find that these focus groups were largely unaware of the Israeli occupation, often believing the Palestinians are the occupiers. Few knew that Hamas had been democratically elected in January 2006. "I had the impression they were a terrorist group from watching the BBC," said one respondent. In most cases, the assumption was that Palestinian rockets brought the invasion onto their own people's heads.

To complain means the official complaints procedure and dealing with the army of lawyers and layers of bureaucracy the BBC now deploys to see off all but the most assiduous. Editors and producers rarely respond individually to complaints and, if they do, do so with question-raising answers and self-justification.

For example, the BBC consistently describes illegal Israeli settlements as "held to be illegal". But they are illegal. Even the Foreign Office says so. The BBC always adds "Israel disputes this." Well it would, wouldn't it? Why these caveats? Why this reporting of a shout of denial from the convicted prisoner in the dock?

The BBC still has explained why it interviewed members of the Zionist Jewish Labour Movement without once revealing their identity

More than a month after I made an official complaint about this I have had no reply or acknowledgement. People who complained about Panorama's travesty of a documentary on the deaths caused when Israeli commandos boarded the Mavi Marmara, part of the Gaza aid flotilla, had to go through an obstacle course of form-filling and stonewalling.

The BBC Trust found the programme guilty on some counts but said it had not breached BBC guidelines of accuracy and impartiality. Why negotiate all this to end up with such contortionist, self-serving judgments?

Final arbiter

The BBC is on the defensive: the castle wall is the labyrinthine complaints procedure. It must be time for an independent body like Ofcom to be the final arbiter on BBC journalism, not the BBC itself. The BBC Trust, the highest court of appeal in these matters, is now chaired by Lord Patten, who has told us all how closely he intends to work with the director general, Mark Thompson: judge and potential defendant.

Why is BBC reporting like this? The book addresses this in Chapter 4. In my view, the rot set in during 2001, after 9/11. Israel and its friends were quick to capitalise on "terror" and "Arabs" and massively enhanced their propaganda effort here, gaining access to BBC staff at all levels. BBC managers and editors do not like being shouted at, and they are soft toys when someone makes a loud and apparently convincing case. The Palestinians have no such machinery. As one BBC producer says in More Bad News: "We all fear the phone call from the Israeli embassy."

The BBC's main Middle East bureau in west Jerusalem is liable to Israeli pressure, and it is in Israel that the BBC perspective on the regional conflict is formed.

Editorially, Israeli spokesmen are easily available and producers love that. As Peter Oborne pointed out on Channel 4 in late 2009, each of our three main political parties is amenable to the "Friends of Israel" lobby. Our coalition leadership duo have both pledged themselves publicly to Israel. So did Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.

The BBC, like a well-kicked hound, does not in its post-Hutton malaise wish to antagonise politicians. It goes with reporting that's as low-profile as possible on this most sensitive of issues. It lives in horror of being accused of anti-semitism, Israel's ultimate smear. Reporters and editors know they have to pitch the Israel story in a certain manner to get it on the air – in effect, self-censorship.

Perhaps the most overwhelming distortion of the BBC in its coverage of Israel and Palestine is what I term "spurious equivalence": that the Palestinians and Israelis are two equal sides "at war" over "disputed" territory and may the best man win. Or, come on chaps, shouldn't reason prevail? The BBC knows that the Palestinians are a people fighting for independence, but its coverage does not tell it like it is.

In 2006, an independent panel appointed by the BBC governors assessed impartiality in coverage of the Israel-Palestine conflict. Their review came after many complaints and the first edition of this book, which examined in similar form the BBC's distorted reporting of the Al-Aqsa (second) intifada and the subsequent Israeli bombardments and invasion of the cities of the West Bank.

The commission confirmed many of the Philo/Berry criticisms:

"BBC output does not consistently give a full and fair account of the conflict. In some ways the picture is incomplete and, in that sense, misleading."

Five years on, it remains so, and the BBC has put the commission's report under "File and Forget".

Tim Llewellyn was BBC Middle East correspondent from 1976-80 and 1987-92. More Bad News from Israel, by Greg Philo and Mike Berry, is published in paperback by Pluto Press at £15

BBC response to Tim Llewellyn's story

BBC News endeavours to report on all matters in the Middle East – as elsewhere – impartially, objectively and accurately.

We have extensive editorial guidelines which all reporters and producers are required to observe.

In a highly charged political atmosphere any impartial and accountable broadcaster will rightly find itself under scrutiny by all shades of opinion.

In the Middle East debate there are organised, motivated and effective lobby groups on both sides of the argument.

We listen to their concerns and act on them where we think they are justified, but in doing so we bear in mind that our audiences expect us to remain independent of political pressure.

Although Tim Llewellyn was indeed a BBC correspondent some years ago, we note that he subsequently was active for a period with the Council for Arab-British Understanding (CAABU).



This cowardly decision betrays the values the corporation stands for

Tim Llewellyn

Sun 25 Jan 2009 00.01 GMT

On Tuesday, speaking from a pulpit in Westminster Abbey, the director general of the BBC, Mark Thompson, paid tribute to one of the corporation's greatest journalists and broadcasters, Charles Wheeler, who died last summer at the age of 85.

Thompson spoke in reverential terms of Wheeler: his independence; his dislike of authority, any authority; his relentless search for the truth, in postwar Germany, in the United States of the 1960s and 1970s, LBJ, Vietnam, Nixon; in India, Kuwait, Kurdistan. Thompson was right. Wheeler was a giant among BBC journalists, rightly hailed as one of the best of his generation.

But even as Thompson spoke, the corporation was traducing every tradition that Wheeler, and many of us who still work for the BBC, have tried to live by. The corporation's chief operating officer, Caroline Thomson, had refused to allow it to broadcast an appeal on behalf of the Disasters Emergency Committee for Gaza. She said that one reason was that "the BBC's impartiality was in danger of being damaged". Could the BBC be sure, she added, that money raised for this cause would find its way to the right people?

How is the BBC's impartiality to be prejudiced by asking others to raise money for the victims of an act of war by a recognised state, an ally of Britain, using the most lethal armaments it can against a defenceless population? What sly little trigger went off in her head when Thomson questioned whether the aid would reach the right people? What right people? Hamas, the elected representatives of the Palestinian people? The hospitals and clinics run by private charities and the United Nations Relief and Works Agency? The mosques? The citizens of Gaza, persecuted beyond measure not only by their Israeli enemies but by the western powers who arm and sustain Israel and defy the democratic vote of the Palestinian people?

Is Thomson more fussed about some imaginary "war on terror" that even the new White House is shying away from than she is about upholding the free speech and freedom of action of the corporation?

This pusillanimous obeisance to some imagined governmental threat has aroused unprecedented anger across the BBC. Reporters and correspondents still on the staff, and who will not name themselves, are beside themselves with rage against a corporation that is traducing the very ideals it is supposed to uphold, and for which the director-general seemed to speak in Westminster Abbey.

This is what one former BBC World Service current affairs producer wrote to his colleagues yesterday:

"... I am rarely moved to comment on aspects of the BBC I can no longer influence. But I confess I am deeply saddened and confused - and frankly pleased to be distanced from such decisions - after listening to Caroline Thomson's obfuscating defence on Today of the refusal to broadcast the joint charity appeal on behalf of the suffering in Gaza. The question of partiality is a red herring. It is for the general public to respond to a humanitarian disaster as they choose."

Having dealt with different news managers at the BBC over the past 30 years or so, I can safely say that the modern BBC has become a body of lions led by donkeys. Reporters of the calibre of Jeremy Bowen, David Lloyn, Lyse Doucet, experts in their field and brave people all, will be appalled by the directions they are being given. Edward Stourton and the Today programme rightly produced Tony Benn yesterday morning because they knew he would articulate what their bosses have failed to: reason and humanity.

The big question that remains is this: what are the suits scared of? Why do BBC managers try to second-guess our government and even outreach it in grovelling to the United States and Israel?

BBC journalists, extant and retired, not the "usual suspects", not disaffected radicals and high-octane lefties, are incandescent with rage over this extraordinary piece of institutional cowardice.

The episode makes a travesty of the institution's posturing in Westminster Abbey last week, and discredits the honest reporters the BBC still has on its books and in the field.

Tim Llewellyn is a former BBC Middle East correspondent

EXCLUSIVE: Daniel Allington, the Academic Fraud from King’s College, who Assisted John Mann's Attempt to Close Down the Canary & Skwawkbox

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 Why Does King’s College allow Allington to use its name to mount an attack on freedom of the press using bogus and distorted ‘research’?

Daniel Allington is no stranger to this blog. He describeshimself as a ‘computational social scientist’. He was also the ‘Head of Online Monitoring’ for the far-right Zionist Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, a McCarthyite organisation, widely suspected of being Israeli funded, which specialises in targeting Palestinian students, anti-Zionists and academics for 'antisemitism'. It uses false accusations of anti-Semitism in order to chill free speech.

According to Allington and Mann Emma Watson is an anti-Semite

It also says that anyone who calls out the tactic of smearing individuals as 'anti-Semites' for their support of the Palestinians is itself anti-Semitic. So presumably anyone who criticises former Israeli Ambassador to the UN, Danny Danon, for calling Emma Watson an anti-Semite, for her support for the Palestinians, is also an anti-Semite. 

Last April I wrote an article on how Allington had pioneered an entirely new Research Methodology. Historically science has been evidenced based, which means, on the basis of previous experimentation, you propose a theory and then test it against the evidence. If the theory can predict future behaviour then you have probably been successful.

This is anti-Semitic according to Allington

Allington’s revolutionary research methodology is blindingly simple. I suspect it’s not innovative either! What he does is first he decides what what his conclusions are and then he decides how to fix the evidence and finally he goes about collecting his flawed ‘evidence’.

I don’t call Allington an academic fraud as a form of abuse but because that is what he is. Allington’s research has about as much merit as the studies of Cyril Burt into IQ. Perhaps in years to come the phrase ‘to do an Allington’ might enter the English language.

Allington’s Deception, Fabrication and Use of False Data

Wikipedia defines Academic dishonesty as deception, fabrication and Improper research practices. which involve fabricating, misrepresenting or selectively reporting research data’.

Northern Illinois University defines Academic Dishonesty as including fabrication or falsification which it explains as ‘the unauthorized creation or alteration of information in an academic document or activity. For example, artificially creating data...’ Allington is undoubtedly guilty of this too.

The University of Virginia includes under its definition of Academic Fraud False data which is ‘the fabrication or alteration of data to deliberately mislead. For example, changing data to get better experiment results is academic fraud.’ Allington is bang to rights.

The University of Edinburgh includes underAcademic Misconduct?Falsificationwhich it defines as ‘an attempt to present fictitious or distorted data’. Again Allington is guilty as charged. It also includes Deceitwhich it terms ‘dishonesty in order to achieve advantage.’

Allington is a ‘Police State Academic’. He is the kind of academic who would have given legitimacy to General Pinochet and before that Hitler. Not that he is alone. Many if not most academics are deferential to the State and its attacks on academia.


This is one anti-Semite that the CAA doesn't go after

The silence of academics at the dismissalof Professor David Miller for arguing that an end should be put to Zionism and Israeli Apartheid was deafening. He received no support from the UCU.

Despite paying lip-service to academic freedom when it comes down to it most academics are more concerned about their own status and the financial rewards that come with it.

Noam Chomsky stands very much alone on American campuses where academics service the American war machine with regularity. The number of academics who stood up to the Nazi regime was vanishingly small.

For example Victor Klemperer was Professor of Romance Languages at the Technical University of Dresden who was dismissed for being Jewish.

Richard Evans described in The Third Reich in Power how, when Klemperer was dismissed ‘none of his colleagues did anything to help him; the only sympathy came from a secretary.’ The most notorious academic collaborator with the Nazis being the philosopher Martin Heidegger, whom the Nazis appointed Rector of Freiburg University.

It was no surprise therefore that Allington attracted the attention of the newly ennobled John Mann who was appointed‘anti-Semitism Czar’ by Boris Johnson. Mann tweetedon being appointed that he would be investigating the Alternative Media for ‘anti-Semitism’.

Mann’s title ‘anti-Semitism Czar’ is most appropriate since the Czarist regime was notorious for its anti-Semitism. Thousands of Jews died from pogroms that the Czars instigated.

Throughout his Parliamentary career Mann was known as a racist. He was described by the Guardian as the best friend, best man and political ally’ of PhilWoolas, who was ejected from parliament by an Electoral Court after an election campaign which was based onmaking the white folk angry’, in the course of which he told a number of blatant lies about his Lib-Dem opponent. Mann gaveWoolas unstinting support.

Mann also has a track record of anti-Roma racism and was blamedby local Travellers for making their lives a misery. He was interviewedby police in a hate-crime investigation, after putting out in 2007 the Bassetlaw Anti Social Behaviour HandbookIt told residents how to deal with problems of anti-social behaviour. Included amongst those problems were Gypsies and Travellers.

You can gauge the type of ‘research’ Allington conducts from his previous Report for the Home Office’s Commission for Countering Extremism that was set up by Theresa May in the wake of the Manchester bombing with a remit to brand the left as ‘violent’ and ‘extremist’. In Violent extremist tactics and the ideology of the sectarian far left

Allington wroteabout Left wing radicalism linked to sympathy for violent extremism. Beneath it was a picture of Riot Police goons preparing to do battle. I suspect that Allington missed the irony since the violence of the British and Israeli states is invisible to Allington.

Allington’s real purpose was to criminalise social movements like Black Lives Matter, Expulsion Rebellion and anyone who is anti-capitalist (which is the government’s definition of ‘extremism’).

Normally there should be no relationship between those who commission research and the researcher.  Allington was clearly an integral part of the CAA and shared its philosophy

The Campaign Against Antisemitism

The Campaign Against Anti-Semitism had a problem, which was that all the evidence proved that the far-Right were more anti-Semitic than those on the Left. This is not surprising. It’s like a finding that water is wet!

From 2015 the CAA had been producing a pretentiously named ‘Anti-Semitism Barometer’ which had been criticised even by other Zionists for its sloppy methodology.

The Institute for Jewish Policy Research had this to say about the findings of their 2015 survey of the attitudes of British Jews:

“more than half of all British Jews feel that antisemitism now echoes the 1930s” verges into irresponsible territory – it is an incendiary finding, and there is simply no way to ascertain whether or not it is accurate. Moreover, the very inclusion of such a question in the survey, which most credible scholars of the Holocaust utterly refute, was a dubious decision in and of itself, and raises issues about the organisers’ pre-existing hypotheses and assumptions. Professional social researchers build credible surveys and analyse the data with an open mind; the CAA survey falls short both in terms of its methodology and its analysis.

For the cautious IJPR this was about as damning as it gets. Note the comment about ‘pre-existing hypotheses and assumptions’because this is an integral part of Allington’s methodology too. Nowhere does he make explicit his own bias or assumptions such as his belief that antisemitism and anti-Zionist are one and the same.

Writing about the same survey Anshel Pfeffer in Ha'aretz accused the CAA of an eagerness to see the anti-Semitism in Britain, which inarguably exists, as much more widespread than it really is’. Pfeffer is no radical. He is a mainstream Zionist and Jewish Chronicle columnist. About the finding that 56% of Jews agree that “the recent rise in anti-Semitism in Britain has some echoes of the 1930s.” Pfeffer had this to say:

‘If the majority of British Jews and the authors of the CAA report actually believe that, then it’s hard to take anything they say about contemporary anti-Semitism in their home country seriously.... To compare today’s Britain, for all its faults, with the Jews’ situation in 1930s exhibits a disconnect from reality which borders on hysteria.’ .

Despite this the CAA were forced to concede in their 2017 Barometer that:

‘Supporters of left-wing political parties and ‘remainers’ are less likely to be antisemitic than those on the right or supporters of the ‘leave’ camp’.

What the CAA desperately needed was an academic who would be willing to lend his name and that of his academic institution to bogus ‘research’ that would ‘prove’ that anti-Semitism was primarily a problem of the Left. 

Prior to 2019 the CAA used a series of statements in order to measure the level of anti-Semitism. They were:

1.  “British Jewish people chase money more than other British people.”

2. “Having a connection to Israel makes Jewish people less loyal to Britain than other British people.”

3.  “Jewish people consider themselves to be better than other British people.”

4.  “Compared to other groups, Jewish people have too much power in the media.”

5.  “Jewish people talk about the Holocaust just to further their political agenda.” or in 2015 “Jews talk about the Holocaust too much in order to get sympathy.”

6.  “Jewish people can be trusted just as much as other British people in business.” or in 2015 “In business, Jews are not as honest as most people.”

7.  “I am just as open to having Jewish friends as I am to having friends from other sections of British society” or in 2015 “I would be unhappy if a family member married a Jew.”

It is arguable that some of these statements aren’t anti-Semitic since there is often a factual basis to them. Even those who do believe in them aren't necessarily anti-Semitic since they also consider themselves pro-Jewish. It’s called a fragmented consciousness.

By the time of their 2019Anti-Semitism Barometer the CAA had hired Allington. They needed someone to give academic respectability to an exercise in which they would simply manufacture evidence to 'prove' that it wasn’t the Right but the Left who were anti-Semitic. 

How did Allington achieve this given that historically it has been the Left which has fought racism and anti-Semitism in Britain, from the Battle of Cable Street in 1936 to the Anti-Nazi League and the anti-fascist committees  which sprang up to defeat the National Front in the 1970s? 

David Hirsh - Allington's academic partner, someone who praised Richard Littlejohn for his opposition to 'anti-Semitism'

Allington however up to the task and the 2019 Barometer concluded that ‘anti-Semitic views were most widespread on the far-left.'

Had there been a major shift in public opinion between 2018 and 2019? The Barometer was silent. It would appear that the existing methods of measuring antisemitism had been deficient. It was a simple matter to rectify this.

Under the guidanceof two Zionist academics - Allington and David Hirsh - the CAA added a set of 6 questions. It will come as no surprise to find that all of the new questions were about Israel not Jews! The unspoken assumption of course was that antagonism or hostility to Israel is the same as the same opinions about Jews.  In other words, for the purpose of the exercise, Israel and Jews are one and the same thing.

Now an honest academic would have been upfront about the assumptions they were making but Allington and Hirsch are academics who willingly prostitute themselves in the service of the Israeli state. They are anything but honest. The questions were:

1.  Israel and its supporters are a bad influence on our democracy.”

2. “Israel can get away with anything because its supporters control the media.”

3. “Israel treats the Palestinians like the Nazis treated the Jews.”

4. “I am comfortable spending time with people who openly support Israel.”

5.  “Israel makes a positive contribution to the world.”

6.  “Israel is right to defend itself against those who want to destroy it.”

So if you believe that Israel and its supporters are a bad influence on British democracy you are therefore an anti-Semite! Israel, a state with pervasive censorship, that locks up Palestinians without trial, that demolishes Palestinian homes to make way for Jewish settlements and whose Police violently attack all pro-Palestinian demonstrations, is for them a beacon of democracy and if you disagree you are an anti-Semite.

Or take another question. If you're not comfortable spending time with Zionists you are also an anti-Semite. I and many thousands like me didn't like spending time with defenders of South African apartheid.  Were we racists against White South Africans or Whites in general?  If not why when it comes to Israel does that make you an anti-Semite.

There was no attempt, either in the 2019 Antisemitism Barometer or Allington's Report for John Mann Antisemitism and the ‘alternative media’  (which is based on this definition of 'anti-Semitism) to explain why the 6 questions above are indications of antisemitism.  That was simply an unspoken assumption. Any half decent academic would have explained why the existing questions were inadequate but to have done so would have jeapordised the whole project because Allington would have had to make explicit what was implicit, namely that criticism of Israel and Jews were one and the same thing.

The CAA announcedthat:

Among the very left-wing, 42% believe that Israel’s supporters are damaging British democracy and 60% believe that Israel treats the Palestinians like the Nazis treated the Jews which directly evokes one of the examples of antisemitism in the International Definition of Antisemitism adopted by the British Government.

The CAA proudly told readers that:

For the first time we asked about antisemitism across the range of examples incorporated in the International Definition of Antisemitism

What the CAA didn’t do was explain why they had made the change. To the popular press this was music to their ears. Now they had ‘proof’ that Corbyn’s supporters really were anti-Semitic.

But it was the academic equivalent of a 3 card trick. If you ask the mythical passenger on the Clapham Omnibus what they think anti-Semitism is they will reply to the effect that it’s someone who doesn’t like Jews. That is the definitionof the Oxford English Dictionary– ‘hostility to or prejudice against Jews.’ It is part of the common sense of our times.

That is why the Zionists have invested so much time and money coming up with a definition, the IHRA, that conflates criticism of Israel and anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism. The problem, and the reason why the Zionist equation of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism has such resonance, is precisely because when people think of 'anti-Semitism' they think of the holocaust, hatred of Jews etc. not Israel.

The CAA even had to ignore caveats in the IHRA itself. Phrases such as anti-Semitism ‘could, taking into account the overall context’ are ignored. As are the trenchant criticisms of the IHRA by a range of academic and legal scholars including the principal drafter of the IHRA himself, Kenneth Stern.

Antony Lerman, a former Director of the IJPR, 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 former Court of Appeal Judge and himself Jewish said of the IHRA that it ‘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, Director of the Institute for the Study of Anti-Semitism described it as ‘bewilderingly imprecise” Hugh Tomlinson QC said the IHRA ‘lacks clarity and comprehensiveness’and that it has ‘a potential chilling effect on public bodies’

Geoffrey Robertson QC stated that it would ‘chill free speech’ and was ‘not fit for purpose’. Kenneth Stern said:

‘“The definition was not drafted, and was never intended, as a tool to target or chill speech on a college campus.... It was never supposed to curtail speech on campus.”

In Allington’s Report  any honest researcher would have explained that the IHRA is a contested definition. A definition which has been superceded by the Jerusalem Declaration on Anti-Semitism. Allington does no such thing. In the first section ‘What is anti-Semitism’ we are told that:

According to the IHRA Definition, antisemitism is ‘a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews’

As David Feldman wrote, this is 'bewilderingly imprecise.' As Stephen Sedley remarked, being indefinite it wasn't even a definition. If anti-Semitism is a ‘certain perception’ what is that perception? Defining anti-Semitism in terms of ‘hatred’ ironically raises the bar and if anti-Semitism ‘might be’ expressed as hatred of Jews what else might it be expressed as? Anti-Zionism?

The actual 38 word definition (the 11 examples, 7 of which refer to Israel, are not actually part of the definition) says that

manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals.’

In other words anti-Semitism is directed towards everyone making the definition completely meaningless. As Hugh Tomlinson QC wrote:

The use of language is unusual and therefore potentially confusing. The phrase “a certain perception” is vague and unclear in the context of a definition. The use of the word “may” is also confusing. If it is understood in its usual sense of “possibility” then the definition is of little value:... This does not work as a definition.

The CAA is not interested in actual anti-Semitism

The CAA is disinterested in right-wing anti-Semitism, especially if they are supporters of Israel. Instead it focuses on isolated individuals, like the mentally ill Alison Chabloz who it managed to put in prison. Her holocaust denial was certainly offensive (as well as deranged) but holocaust denial is not a crime and countries who have made it illegal (Germany, Austria) have large far-Right/neo-Nazi parties in their legislature.

Even Jonathan Freedland recognised Mogg's comments as anti-Semitic.  However the CAA has a policy of not criticising pro-Zionist antisemites on the right

If the CAA was seriously interested in combating anti-Semitism it would have vigorously condemned Rees-Mogg, who retweeted the comments of Alice Wiedel, leader of the neo-Nazi German AfD but all you will find is a neutral article Jacob Rees Mogg defends sharing German far-right leader’s speech on Twitter which reports what he said without any of their normal vitriol.

The CAA even played down criticism of the AfD saying that they have ‘a long history of problematic language and policies’. No doubt if the year was 1933 the CAA would have been describing the Nazi Party's 'problematic language' about Jews. They don't describe them as 'anti-Semitic' because the AfD are the most pro-Israel party in the Bundestag.

It is noticeable that the CAA doesn’t criticise pro-Zionist neo-Nazis such as the BNP, Tommy Robinson or Britain First. You will look in vain for anything on their site. The reason is that far-Right Zionists such as Jonathan Hoffman, are part of the CAA’s periphery.


The CAA and Academic Freedom

The CAA spends its time attacking academic freedom. Even Kenneth Stern condemned as ‘egregious’ the CAA’s targetingof a Jewish Professor at Bristol University, Rachel Gould, for having written in 2011 an article ‘Beyond Anti-Semitism’describing how the holocaust intimidates people into self-censoring. Stern described the CAA’s behaviour, in testimony to Congress, as ‘chilling and McCarthy-like’.

The CAA demanded that Gould publicly retract her article and explain why she had retracted her essay. If she declined to do so then they demanded that she be dismissed “and her dismissal should be made public so as to clearly signal the University of Bristol’s values”.

In their determination to defend Israelil Apartheid the CAA don't even acknowledge the concepts of academic freedom and freedom of speech. Partly this is because the Israeli state itself has contempt for them. Allington  also has contempt for these concepts which is why John Mann hired him for his proposed hatchet job on the Alternative Media.

According to the CAA - telling the truth is antisemitic

Freedom of Speech, McCarthyism and the CAA

A good example of the CAA's contempt for freedom of speech is the complaint of anti-Semitism they made against Franck Magennis, a barrister. What was Magennis’s crime? Did he joke about ‘Jewish noses’ or engage in Holocaust denial? Not a bit of it. Magennis made his views about Zionism known and for that the CAA wanted him struck off. He tweeted:

Zionism is a kind of racism. It is essentially colonial. It has manifested in an apartheid regime calling itself "the Jewish state" that dominates non-Jews, and particularly Palestinians. You can't practice anti-racism at the same time as identifying with, or supporting, Zionism.

What in the above tweet was hostile or hateful to Jews? The complaint to the Bar Standards Board was part of the CAA's war on free speech. When informed that their complaint had been rejected they fulminated that the BSB ‘has disgracefully rejected’ their complaint.

The BSB was in fact very mealy mouthed in its judgment. They said ‘although the tweet may be “offensive”, it was not “seriously offensive”. The proper response would have been to say that freedom of speech is meaningless unless it includes the right to offend.

This blog however is not about the CAA so much as the intellectual charlatan, Dr Daniel Allington, who uses King’s College and his academic qualifications to give legitimacy to the CAA and John Mann's attack on free speech and the alternative press. 

London's King's College - leading the attack on free speech on Palestine

Allington’s report on the Alternative Media used all his fraudulent academic skills. For ‘balance’ Allington included two far-right sites, one of which TR News (Tommy Robinson) was found to promote a negative view of Muslims, but not of Jews’ which made it alright. What Allington meant was that Robinson is pro-Zionist/Israel not pro-Jewish.

Allington referred to the mainstream media as ‘high quality’ and argued that

‘In the interests of reducing prejudice, it would appear desirable to encourage use of high quality, reputable sources of information at the expense of low quality fringe sources’.

Pro-Hitler in the 30s, the Mail is reliably pro-Zionist

Anyone who thinks that the Sun, Mail and Express are high quality needs their head examining. What Allington meant was that they were reliably right-wing and pro-Israel. The MSM were held to be associated with lower levels of anti-Semitism but since Allington has redefined anti-Semitism this is a meaningless statement.

‘Partial solutions' to the ‘problem’ that Allington faced demonstrate exactly where he was coming from.  Censorship in other words. Allington proposed:

‘Demonetisation of problematic websites (for example, through withdrawal of

advertising)’, ‘De-prioritisation of content from such websites in social media news feeds and search algorithms’ and ‘In extreme cases, legal or regulatory sanctions against the owners of the websites themselves.’

In other words Allington, in the name of King’s College, recommended that the British state, together with Facebook etc. take steps to reduce the circulation of the radical alternative media.

Allington sets the scene politically when he argues that since 1948, there has emerged a further form of eliminationism, which consists in calling for ‘the exclusion of the Jewish nation from world society’. Eliminationism is a word that has previously been applied to the genocidal policies of the Nazis. Allington deliberately uses it to associate support for the Palestinians and anti-Zionism with the Nazis.

Allington's argument that Jews form a separate nation is in itself an anti-Semitic one. That is what anti-Semites have long argued. Jews belong in their own state not other peoples. In the words of Lucien Wolf, a former leader of the Board of Deputies:

I have spent most of my life in combating these very doctrines, when presented to me in the form of anti-Semitism, and I can only regard them as the more dangerous when they come to me in the guise of Zionism. They constitute a capitulation to our enemies.’

Allington compared the far-right TR News and Radio Aryan with the Canary and Skawkbox by comparing their position on certain issues such as Brexit or opposition to foreign wars. He also described the fascists as ‘anti-capitalist’ thus accepting their bogus claims at face value.

Of course it is true that sometimes the position of the Left and Right/far-right are the same on particular issues, albeit for different reasons but Allington doesn’t do subtle. Because sections of the Left supported Brexit in Allington’s eyes that makes them one and the same. Likewise some on the far-Right opposed the Iraq War, that therefore makes them anti-imperialist!

According to Allington Skwawkbox was anti-Semitic because it made

 ‘throwaway references to ‘a former Chief Rabbi with a history of supporting racism’ and that ‘could contribute to the creation of an impression of Jewishness as inherently suspect.’

So criticism of Jonathan Sacks, who supported the far-Right ‘replacement theory’ (that Muslim immigration threatened White European civilisation) was now to be judged as ‘anti-Semitism’. In other words if you criticise someone who is Jewish then you are anti-semitic!

Another example of Allington's ‘guilt by association’ was his statement

‘In the diatribes of Radio Albion, the argument is that Jews are a corrupting influence and must be expelled from ‘white’ nations such as Britain. In Skwawkbox articles such as the above, the argument is that the world’s only Jewish state is a corrupting influence, and those who have been tainted by it must be excluded from British political institutions.’

A quite unbelievable sleight of hand. Skwawkbox doesn’t talk about excluding Jews, even Zionists, from the Labour Party. It specifically called for the Jewish Labour Movement to be disaffiliated from the Labour Party and not to have the privilegesthat it currently enjoys.

Allington’s justification for the comparison was that:

‘the Jewish Labour Movement is the sole Jewish communal organisation for Labour Party members and supporters. That is, these comments amount in practice to arguments for the exclusion of the Jewish community from the Labour Party.’

But the JLM is not a Jewish but a Zionist group. It excludes anti-Zionist Jews from membership but includes non-Jewish Zionists. As an example of the ‘anti-Semitism’ of  Skawkbox’s readers Allington gives as an example:

‘Zionism is incompatible with Socialism therefore why is the Zionist and antisemitic JLM allowed a place in the Labour Party.’

This is a statement of fact. Zionism is an exclusivist, racial supremacist movement. Racism is incompatible with socialism. Yet immediately afterwards Allington conceded that

‘By contrast, there was much support for the tiny and very recently-founded Jewish Voice for Labour (JVL).’

What riled Allington is that Skwawkbox made ‘counter-accusations of antisemitism against those who raise the issue of antisemitism.’ Yet it is a fact that Zionism and anti-Semitism fit like a hand in a glove. Many if not most non-Jewish supporters of Zionism are anti-Semitic. Tommy Robinson is one example. Donald Trump, Steve Bannon and the neo-Nazi Richard Spencer (who boaststhat he is a ‘White Zionist’) are further examples. Historically anti-Semites supported Zionism as a means of getting rid of their Jews.

Zionism, when it first began was seen as a form of Jewish anti-Semitism. When Theodor Herzl attempted to hold the First Zionist Congress in Munich in 1897, there was such an outcryfrom Munich Jews that the Congress was transferred to Basel in Switzerland.

According to Allington ‘Accusing those who raise the issue of antisemitism of being antisemitic serves to neutralise that issue.’ So one must say nothing about Zionism’s historical appeal to anti-Semites. Arthur Balfour didn’t like Jews coming to Britain but he totally supported the idea of a 'Jewish State' in Palestine. That was why he introduced the 1905 Aliens Act to keep Jews fleeing Russia’s pogroms from these shores. He also issued the Balfour Declaration.

Of course the elephant in the room is the fact that whenever any criticism of Israel or Zionism is made then accusations of ‘anti-Semitism’ are made. Jewish anti-Zionists are termed ‘self-haters’ an accusation the Nazis made against German anti-fascists. 

What Netanyahu means by 'Jewish identity' is Jewish racial purity

When the ICC decided it would investigate Israel for war crimes, Netanyahu calledthis ‘pure anti-Semitism’. When the European Court of Justice ruled that produce from the settlements must be labelled according to origin this was called the lowest kind of anti-Semitism’.

Allington reminds people that according to the IHRA ‘Holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel.’ But when Starmer sacked Rebecca Long-Bailey for a retweet that referred to Israel training the US Police in repressive techniques such as neck holds, he was clearly equating criticism of Israel with Jews. Allington was having none of it:

Recognising a statement about Israel as antisemitic in no way involves ‘conflat[ing] the [S]tate of Israel with Jewish people collectively’, and ‘conflat[ing] the [S]tate of Israel with Jewish people collectively’ is not the same thing as ‘[h]olding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the [S]tate of Israel’.

Anyone with the slightest degree of honesty would understand that if criticising the Israeli state is considered anti-Semitic then obviously the Israeli state is being conflated with Jews. Israel calls itself a Jewish State and grants citizenship to Jews as of right, wherever they live and denies it to Palestinians who have lived in what is now Israel. When 4 Jews were killed by terrorists in Paris in February 2015, Netanyahu statedthat

“I went to Paris not just as the prime minister of Israel but as a representative of the entire Jewish people.”

If Israel is indeed a Jewish state representing all Jews then Jews naturally bear a responsibility for its actions. Just as British people are responsible for their government’s war crimes in Iraq. But Zionist propagandists like Allington like to pretend that Israel can act in the name of Jews whilst disowning the consequences.

Allington reserves his venom for the Canary, which he accuses of supporting ‘violent revolution... (as) a necessary precursor of positive social change.’ He takes particular exception to the assertion by one of its founders that:

‘The row over antisemitism in the Labour Party is actually fuelling antisemitism, whilst simultaneously weakening the term as itʼs applied to genuine antisemitism.’

The Board of Deputies in the name of Jews waged an incessant war against Corbyn. Clearly the implication was that ‘the Jews’ wanted to get rid of him. Everything the BOD did encouraged anti-Semitism.

Allington says of the Canary’s description of Israel as an ‘apartheid state’ that this is ‘trope rather than a ‘fact’.’ In other words it is an anti-Semitic figure of speech. It is here that Allington’s bias comes to the surface. 

Is the eviction of Palestinians from their homes in East Jerusalem a trope or fact? Is the demolition of Palestinian homes to make way for Jewish settlers a trope? When Netanyahu says that Israel is a state only of its Jewish citizens, is that a trope? Are the comprehensive reports of B’Tselem, Israel’s main human rights group and Human Rights Watch that Israel is an apartheid state also tropes? Is having two sets of law in the West Bank, one for Palestinians and another for Jews a trope or is it the classic definition of Apartheid?

A state that defines itself ‘Jewish’ on an ethnic basis cannot be other than racist. The fact that Allington constantly refers back to the IHRA demonstrates how unfit this misdefinition (in reality not a definition at all) is.

Allington complains that Canary’s rejection of the IHRA allows ‘readers (to) respond to Canary articles on Labour Party issues by equating Zionism with racial supremacism’. That’s right. By junking the IHRA one can tell the truth about Israel!

Zionism is the ideology of a Jewish Supremacist state. That is why it is legal, under the Reception Committees Law 2011 for hundreds of Jewish only communities to reject Arabs living there.

The IHRA allows the absurd situation whereby TR News is given a clean bill of health since although

R News is undeniably ‘far right’’ it is ‘just as undeniably pro-Jewish’ despite the fact that it ‘promotes substantial components of what elsewhere functions as antisemitic propaganda. ‘

But this should be no surprise. Israel is in alliance with a host of far-Right governments such as Brazil’s Bolsonaroand Hungary’sOrban. Israel even supplies weaponry to Ukraine’s neo-Nazi Azov Battalion.

What Allington, the CAA and Mann find difficult to understand is that criticising Israel for what it does has nothing to do with attacking Jews as Jews. Allington concludes that:

Israel, its supporters, and, along with them, all major Jewish communal institutions are presented as serially iniquitous in their behaviour.

Given that Jewish communal organisations all support the Israeli state and Zionism they can hardly complain if they are criticised.

In the final section ‘Survey of media use and antisemitic attitudes in the British population’ Allington’s argument rests on his 6 questions designed to paint the left as anti-Semitic. Allington’s explanation is that:

These statements were developed in order to supplement existing measures of antisemitism with measures of forms of antisemitic ideation that, being made in reference not to Jews qua Jews but to the national home of the Jews, were not widely recognized as such until the adoption of the IHRA Definition.

Allington is himself a good example of the Zionist who is an anti-Semite. The national home of Jews is where they live. British Jews are British by nationality and Jewish by origin or religion.

If Israel is our national home then that is an invitation to every common and garden anti-Semite to demand our expulsion as we don’t belong where we live. This is precisely why in Poland, 3 million of whose Jews died in the Holocaust, Polish Jews rejected the Zionists. In the last free elections in 1938, the anti-Zionist Bund gained 17 out of 20 Jewish council seats in Warsaw and the Zionists just one. Throughout Poland the Zionists were defeated because Zionism accepts rather than fights anti-Semitism. 

The main proposals that Allington came up with were an attempt to  financially bankrupt the alternative media. Allington cites with approval the fact that:

the Canary was targeted by a successful demonetisation campaign from Stop Funding Fake News, which led brands such as Macmillan Cancer Care, Ted Baker, the World Wildlife Fund, and Moonpig to cease advertising with the site, apparently forcing it to ‘downsize’ its operations (JC Reporter, 2019).

As things stand King’s College has lent its stamp of approval to this worthless report from an academic who should have been sent packing years ago.

After Rachel Riley launched the attack on the Canary, new subscribers made up for the loss of advertising. The best response to Mann, Allington and those who would destroy the small part of the media that isn’t owned by Tory billionaires, is to sign up to and support Canary’s Appeal. We should not allow Israel’s emissaries to dictate what we can and can’t read.

Tony Greenstein

Israel’s Shameless Treatment of the Holocaust Survivors –Half of Them Have to Choose Between Food and Heat

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Despite Exploiting the Holocaust Financially and in Propaganda Israel Acknowledges No Obligation to the Survivors


German holocaust survivors – Interview with Collette Avital

A friend recently sent me yesterday a clip from a German news programme in which Colette Avital of Israel’s Center of Organisations of Holocaust Survivors, was interviewed about the plight of holocaust survivors in Israel. You might have thought, given the prominent place that the holocaust occupies in Zionist propaganda that Israel would take care to see that the basic needs of the remaining survivors were met. This is my friend’s description.

I saw a short clip on a German news programme last night about holocaust survivors still living in Israel. Apparently half of them live below the poverty line (an increase) and the reporter spoke to a charity putting together food items etc. They said that demand has greatly increased (also due to covid) but that donations have greatly decreased. The male respondent said the govt does not do anything, and the govt did not respond to the programme's request for more information.

The journalist then spoke a woman who leads the centre for holocaust survivors and she said she had an angry discussion many years ago to Netanyahu when he was finance minister about providing holocaust survivors with proper support rather than expecting them to rely on charity. He said that Israel was not responsible for the holocaust therefore he could not see why these people should be Israel's responsibility. It was up to Germany to care for them. It is amazing when you think of the political capital he / Israel constantly make from the holocaust.

They then said that a few years ago, due to pressure, all survivors got a pension of 1,200 Euros a month but for most this was not enough to cover rent, heating, food, medication, transport costs to the doctor etc, therefore so many remain below the poverty line.

On three days a year Israel commemorates the holocaust and on the remainder they are forgotten, treated as an embarrassment. In 2013 Ha’aretz ran an article Israel Is Waiting for Its Holocaust Survivors to Die. This is literally true. To the Zionists the holocaust survivors are a burden on Israel. Israel can afford the latest in military equipment, it can bomb its neighbours to its hearts content, it can spend the second highest percentage of its GDP in the world on War (they call it Defence in true Orwellian style) but when it comes to the holocaust survivors there is nothing in the kitty.

To understand this properly you will have to wait to read my new book, Zionism During the Holocaust!  But in essence despite common misinformation, Zionism was never a movement to rescue Jews. That was never its purpose. Zionism saw as its objective the establishment of a state that would perpetuate the Jewish race.

This is not a matter of speculation or wild assertion. As David Ben Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister said, when opposing the Kindertransport scheme in which Britain rescued, in the wake of Krystallnacht 10,000 German Jewish children:


Extract from the official biography of Israel's first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion

‘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.’

You can find this quote in the official biography of Ben Gurion by Shabtai Teveth: The Burning Ground: 1886-1948. (p.855)

This was the attitude to Jewish refugees throughout the war. No one was given a Palestine Immigration Certificate if they were over 35 unless they had specific skills or were rich. Nor was Ben Gurion alone.  This was the consensus view of the Zionist leadership.

Chaim Weizmann, the first President of Israel, held similar views. Like Ben Gurion Weizmann had seen the rise of the Nazis, not as something to be fought by all means necessary but as something to be taken advantage of for the Zionist goal of state building.

Holocaust survivor - not enough food

The Zionist leadership were indifferent to the plight of Europe’s Jews. Weizmann shocked James MacDonald, the Chair of the League of Nations High Commission for Refugees when he

‘expressed his contempt for German Jews as a whole, his indifference to their fate and for that matter his indifference to the fate of millions of Jews elsewhere, just so long as a saving remnant could be preserved in Palestine.’

You can find this quote in Final Solution, the last and best book of David Cesarani, a Zionist historian (pp. 132-133).

Today there are numerous holocaust related organisations such as the Holocaust Education Trust which see their primary job as defending Israel. They vigorously oppose drawing any universal lessons from the holocaust and see their primary purpose as ‘educating’ people to understand that Israel is the living representative of the Jews who died in the camps.

When Netanyahu first began campaigning to deport Black African refugees from Eritrea and the Sudan, Yad Vashem was approached for support.  Ha’aretz journalist Nir Gontarz described how ‘One after the other of the senior staff there, including Mr. Avner Shalev [the director], slammed the phone down on me when I asked to speak to them...’  Ha’aretz, 24.1.18., How Do Holocaust Survivors Feel About Expelling Asylum Seekers? 'We Haven't Learned the Lessons of History

Zionism has fought tooth and nail against drawing any universal lessons from the holocaust such as offering sanctuary to refugees. The only lesson that they draw is that Israel must be strong.

As Israeli historian, Edith Zertal wrote ‘there hasn’t been a war involving Israel that has not been perceived, defined, and conceptualized in terms of the holocaust.’ Israel has mobilised the holocaust ‘in the service of Israeli politics.’ Idith Zertal, pp.4, 91, Israel’s Politics and the Politics of Nationhood

When Israel was in its infancy the holocaust was considered a national disgrace. The dead were seen as symbolising the cowardice and weakness of the accursed galut (diaspora). ‘Why did you go like sheep to the slaughter’ was the favourite question of Eichmann prosecutor Gideon Hausner.  Why did you not fight back.

The holocaust survivors themselves were called sapon (soap) after the myth that the Nazis produced soap out of the fat from the dead bodies and treated with contempt, good only for fighting Israel’s wars.

Hanzi Brand, a Hungarian holocaust survivor, wrote of how, when she settled on Kibbutz Gvata Haim, the other members ‘talked about their war to avoid hearing about hers. They were ashamed of the holocaust.’ [Tom Segev, The Seventh Million, p. 471].Israelis listened to the survivors’ stories with a ‘forced patience’ that was soon exhausted. [Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life, p. 83 citing Yisrael Gutman].

In a 220 page Israeli history textbook published in 1948, just one page was devoted to the holocaust compared to 10 pages on the Napoleonic wars.  [Idith Zertal, p.94, Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood]. Instead Zionism looked to the myth of the heroic zealots who sacrificed themselves at the desert fortress of Masada in the Judean Hills rather than surrender to the Romans in 73/74 AD.

In the early 1950s Israel claimed reparations from Germany on behalf of the holocaust survivors. Despite being claimed on the basis of individual need Ben Gurion was determined that ‘the major portion of the compensation will be claimed by the Jewish people as a collective body [i.e. the Israeli state] not as individuals.’ Knesset Speaker Dalia Itzik, accepted that Israel should apologise for having withheldfunds from the holocaust survivors. See Holocaust survivors accuse State of stealing their welfare funds, YNet, 30.12.07.

The Jewish Claims Conference, which also claimed survivors’ money, was generous, at least with itself. Former President, Rabbi Israel Singer, was forced to resign in 2007.

‘For years, a gang of swindlers siphoned off money from two compensation funds by falsifying thousands of applications from presumed victims of Nazi oppression. There are six JCC staff members among the 17 defendants who stand accused of misappropriating a total of $42.5 million.’

If Switzerland was reluctant to part with the assets of murdered Jews then the same was true of Israeli banks, which hoped that the survivors might die first. It was only under pressure that Bank Leumi agreed to pay NIS 20m to the survivors. In 2004, a parliamentary inquiry found that Leumi owed NIS 300m ($71.65m) to Holocaust survivors and their families.

Israeli medical committees did their best to reduce the entitlement of holocaust survivors to benefits ‘alter(ing) their disability evaluations in a manipulative way.’ Survivors had to choose between buying medicine, food or fuel. This is the ‘Jewish’ state.Israel Is Waiting for Its Holocaust Survivors to Die, Ha’aretz, 6.2.13

 People should bear this in time whenever Zionists like Margaret Hodge compare themselves to holocaust survivors as part of the fake ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign.

Tony Greenstein


Join the Fightback this Friday at the Founding Meeting of the Socialist Labour Network (LAW/LIEN)

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Help Us Build a Socialist Movement by Organising Grassroots CLPs 

To attend the meeting please first join either:

https://membermojo.co.uk/labouragainstthewitchhunt

https://membermojo.co.uk/lien

(£10 waged/£5 unwaged)



At the end of November All Members Meetings of Labour-in-Exile-Network and Labour Against the Witchhuntt voted to merge into a single organisation. LIEN members voted by 4-1 and Labour Against the Witchhunt members voted, despite vociferous opposition from Labour Party Marxism/Communist Party of Great Britain members 47-27 to do likewise.

Ian Hodson, Guest Speaker and President of the Bakers Union

The founding meeting of the new organisation was to have been on December 17. Unfortunately too many people tried to get in! Our Zoom facility only catered for 100. We have ensured that this time around up to 500 people will be accommodated so, just to make sure you get in, please sign in early!

Name

The Steering Committee has proposed that the name of the new organisation should be Socialist Labour Network (LAW/LIEN). There are however 7 other proposals and you can find them all here

The Witchhunt

It is or should be obvious that it is impossible to fight against the witchhunt inside the Labour Party. The reason is very simple. As Ken Loach put it ‘democracy is dead inside the Labour Party.’ If you put your head above the parapet it is chopped off by some anonymous bureaucrat. An insidious culture of informing has been cultivated that is modelled on the Stasi and Gestapo.

Anonymous nerds, incapable of constructing a single coherent sentence or having an original thought don't have to face the task of explaining their reactionary politics. All they have to do is send an email  to Labour’s Disputes Team fingering someone and the suspension letter will go out the next day.

You might not thing that Starmer and his clones have a sense of humour but you would be wrong. Virtually every candidate for suspension/expulsion accused of ‘anti-Semitism’ was also accused of ‘undermining Labour’s campaign against racism.’ You may indeed wonder what this fight consists of given the number of Jewish and Black/Muslim members expelled. However in the Orwellian world of Starmer and Evans fulsome support for Israeli Apartheid is compatible with fighting racism!

Sonali at the  Labour Grassroots meeting on January 2nd

Momentum, CLPD and the Socialist Campaign Group have been cowed into silence

If anyone has any doubts about the fear and cowardice of what’s left of the Left in the Labour Party about fighting Starmer and the Witchhunt then all you need to do is to watch Sonali Bhattacharyya, co-Chair of Momentum. Sonali who appeared on Labour Grassroots on 2nd January. Sonali reacted with a mixture of arrogance and affront to peoples' criticism. 

Crispin got off to a bad start when he asked Sonali about Momentum’s strategy to fight what is happening in the Labour Party and to make it more attractive. So badly did she take the criticism that she has told Crispin Flint, the genial compare of the show, that she will have nothing to do with him or Labour Grassroots ever again.

Sonali Bhattacharyya


When asked why Momentum has failed to campaign against the witchhunt or support expelled members, which Jackie Walker challenged her on, she simply refused to answer parroting the statement that Momentum has supported hundreds of members legally. Even if this is true, and it is open to doubt since no one will admit to having been helped, this is insufficient.

Legal help on an individual basis is not the same as campaigning to end the expulsions, the witchhunt and Starmer himself. Momentum have failed to make it clear that Starmer, Evans and his neo-Blairite strategy is the enemy. They have been cowed into silence. Nearly 2 years ago Sonali and Forward Momentum ousted Lansman’s cronies in the elections. Since then they have maintained a Trappist Silence. They have neither been seen, heard or said anything of note.  

Labour Against the Witchhunt

I was the only 1 of 6 members of the LAW Steering Committee to support the merger. Subsequently 4 of them penned a statement Why we resigned. To his credit Steve Price, although part of the majority that opposed the merger refused to sign that statement. Steve is now standing for the new Committee. I hope that he is elected. Those who decided not merely to throw their toys out of the pram but to junk the pram altogether justified their decision by writing:

We cannot support the view that the struggle against the Labour witch-hunt is over, or that “LAW has outlived its usefulness”, as Tony Greenstein, the proposer of the motion to merge, put it.

The problem is I never said anything of the sort! What I did say was that LAW had outlived its usefulness, but they are not one and the same thing. The fight against Labour’s witchhunt will be carried out largely outsidethe Labour Party and in the unions. Organising within the Labour Party is not possible and that is why nearly 2/3 of LAW members supported my motion.

There has been a considerable debate in the pages of Weekly Worker despite their annoying habit of using headlines and subheadlines, not to describe my articles but to attack them! Innovative journalism. See at the bottom for details of the various articles and statements.

The Agenda

The meeting will be opened by Ian Hodson, the expelledPresident of the Bakers' Union. In addition to adopting a new name we will be electing a new Steering Committee. The joint Steering Committee of LAW/LIEN is proposing that the Committee should be 10 strong. There will be 17 candidates for the positions.

To participate in the meeting, you have to be a paid-up member of either group. To join, you can sign up via this link: https://membermojo.co.uk/lien

We intend to build and network shadow socialist CLPs as part of our local campaigning work.

Agenda

RECONVENED FIRST ALL MEMBERS’ MEETING OF LAW WITH LIEN 

14th January 2022

By ZOOM 

1

18:00

Meeting begins/final entry checks

2

18:05

Welcome from Chair of Meeting (Esther)

3

18:10

Speaker to be confirmed

4

18:20

Debate to inform formulation of Aims and Priorities

Aims and priorities of the consolidated organisation here  (Norman to introduce)

Member discussion (contributions no more than 3 minutes)

 

Draft Priorities to inform debate and based on interim discussion with members and joint steering committee

Priorty 1: Opposition to witch-hunt here

Priority 2: Establishment of Shadow CLPs and networks here

Priority 3: Education Programme (for future agreement)

5

19:20

Name of Consolidated Organisation: SC proposal:

“Socialist Labour Network (LAW with LIEN)”

Proposed by Roger Silverman

Further proposed names to be included in poll- to be returned to SC by cop 12th Jan. Updated list here

Proposers to have one minute to speak.

Members to vote for their preferred name (1 vote)

6

19:30

Election of Steering Committee. Nomination statements here. Data protection role to be assigned by the new steering committee. Each nominee is allocated 1 minute to speak. Zoom poll.

7

19:50

Next Steps

8

20:00

Meeting Close

 

Proposed standing Orders

Voting     

1.. Please click ‘Raise Hand’ if you want to speak (either in ‘Participants’ on the right hand side or ‘Reactions’ on the bottom of your screen). Alternatively write ‘I want to speak’ in the Chat.

3. For items 4, 5 and 6, we intend to use ZOOM polls. If you want to vote, we recommend that you have access to a device of your own. If this is not possible (and you are sharing a device), we will count manually raised hands.

Points of Order  

1. Attendees are urged to raise points of order only when necessary and reasonable. Attendees can raise points of order regarding conduct or procedures by pressing the blue thumbs down button (under ‘More’ at the bottom of the ‘Participants’ panel). Alternatively, describe your point of order in the Chat window.

2. The Chair’s ruling on any point arising from the rules or standing orders is final unless challenged by not less than two members; such a challenge shall be put to the meeting and be carried with a simple majority of those voting at the meeting.

Emergency motions

1. Emergency motions may be accepted at the discretion of the chair (decisions on admitting emergency motions can be overturned by a simple majority of conference).

2. We will accept new amendments to emergency motions only. Please write them down and present them in the ‘Chat’ window, with a clear indication of where it should go.

Discussion on the Merger in Weekly Worker

Why we resigned

Merging into a cul-de-sac

Not a liquidation?

Something serious is needed

Self-declared heretic replies

Which way forward for the Left? a mass Communist Party or a broad left socialist movement?

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 Is it possible to salvage anything from the Corbyn Project or is the socialist left destined to talk to itself?


Register in advance for this webinar here or here

Tonight we had the launch meeting of the new Socialist Labour Network (LAW/LIEN) and 150 people attended. Ian Hodson, President of the Bakers Union was the guest speaker.

The process of forming a new organisation began at the end of November when All Members Meetings of Labour-in-Exile-Network and Labour Against the Witchhunt voted to merge into a single organisation. Both LAW and LIEN had been proscribed by Labour’s National Executive Committee last July 20th.

Orgreave when the Police were used as Thatcher's cavalry to destroy the strike

The decision of the 2 organisations to merge was taken in the teeth of opposition from Labour Party Marxism which is the Communist Party of Great Britain in the Labour Party. 5 of the 6 members of LAW’s Steering Committee were also opposed to the merger and 4 of them explained their reasons in a statement Why we resigned.

This was accompanied by an article both in Weekly Worker and on the LPM website Something serious is needed: confronting Tony Greenstein and Merging into a cul-de-sac. I replied with Not a liquidation? and Self-declared heretic replies.

The fact that the CPGB and its leading theoretician Jack Conrad felt the need to personalise a political disagreement suggests that the CPGB is finding it difficult to mount a sustainable argument.

LPM insisted, contrary to all the evidence, that what was being proposed was not a merger but a liquidation and notwithstanding the evidence they have continued to insist that this is the case.

My article, for which I had provided a heading ‘Why the merger of LAW and LIEN is not a liquidation’ was retitled Not a liquidation? It was also accompanied by a subheadline ‘Abandoning any pretence of class politics, Tony Greenstein defends what he calls the ‘merger’ of LAW and LIEN and advocates yet another ‘transitional’ halfway-house broad front

Despite Conrad admitting that ‘LAW has done very little, has been paralysed even’ my argument that LAW had not been liquidated was described as ‘clearly a pedantic attempt to pull wool over eyes.’ Conrad continues to argue that

while the words ‘liquidation’ and ‘closing down’ did not appear in motion 1, only someone who wants to cover up, to obfuscate, to hoodwink, would object to such an assessment.’

Such an unnecessary expenditure of verbs! To allege that your political opponents are, effectively, lying is not the way to conduct a comradely debate. And the evidence for such an assertion?  Zilch.

Black Lives Matter demonstration in Brighton

As far as the CPGB and other far-left groups are concerned the key task is to form a revolutionary socialist or communist party with which capitalism can be brought to an end. And suffice to say they have the key to the holy grail.

Many of us saw the Corbyn movement as a quite momentous political event. Hundreds of thousands of people joined the Labour Party. It made a profound effect politically and at the 2017 General Election, millions of people voted for a radical, not revolutionary, manifesto.  But for the sabotage of Labour’s right-wing, Corbyn could have won. As it is he obtained the largest swing since 1945 for Labour. One thing is for certain.  It put the frighteners on the British establishment. It also showed the potential for radicalism in Britain.

Elbit's factory in Oldham - they've had enough and are closing

But to the CPGB what happened under Corbyn Project was merely a diversion. An inevitable failure. Jack lays out his stall thus:

What needs to be understood is that socialist - ie, Marxist - parties, are built top-down, not bottom-up. What is primary is the programme: ie, theory. It is from there to the masses and in the process, of course, theory is enriched, concretised, taken to new heights. It should also be understood that Marxist parties do not require revolutionary conditions in order to grow. They can grow in peaceful, seemingly almost uneventful, conditions.’

The idea of even thinking about building a socialist movement outside the Labour Party is given short shrift. It is what they call a half way house, a Labour Party Mark II. What is needed in their eyes is to jump from a small revolutionary group to a mass revolutionary Communist  Party without even pausing for breath.

Labour needs be refounded as a united front of a special kind and politically armed with a Marxist programme and put under a tried and tested Marxist leadership.

BLM demo in Chichester, a town 30 miles from Brighton

What then of the Corbyn movement itself?  Jack doesn’t pull his punches.

what was notable about them - especially, sad to say, the younger generation - is that they were not politically determined, not politically educated and therefore did not fully engage. They voted Jeremy Corbyn against Owen Smith, but had not much of a clue when it came to national executive elections.

My own view is that we are not in revolutionary conditions or a pre-revolutionary period. On the contrary we are in a period of deep reaction, symbolised by Brexit, which was a project of the Right and far-Right.


Black Lives Matter demonstration in Brighton

We need to look to our strengths and weaknesses. Trade union strike action has been at an all time low. Unions today are half the size they were under Thatcher.  Yet at the same time we have seen the rise of social movements like Black Lives Matter, Extinction Rebellion and direct action groups like Palestine Action. The question for socialists is how we can relate to and generalise from the specific. We need to be able to make the connection between climate change and environmental destruction and the nature of capitalism and how it operates. In other words socialism needs to be made relevant.

Only this week we learnt that Palestine Action had chalked up its first victory, the closure of Elbit’s factory in Oldham. I have a personal investment in this campaign as I’m presently out on bail for taking part in an action. It demonstrates that direct action can work. It is no accident that Palestine Solidarity Campaign, which is controlled by the former Trotskyist Socialist Action denounced Palestine Action in the strongest terms.

Black Lives Matter demonstration in Brighton

Other issues include a theoretical assessment of the period we are in, the decline of trade union power, the conservatism of a working class that is supposed to be the agent of revolutionary change and asking questions such as whether revolution is even possible in the heart of the imperialist beast.

Come to the debate and take part!

Tony Greenstein

Is Israel a Jewish or a White Supremacist State?

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Debate between Tony Greenstein and Israeli anti-Zionist Ronnie Barkan

Please join accessing Youtube here

Wednesday January 19th 7 pm

The debate about the nature of the Israeli state is an important one. In the IHRA misdefinition of anti-Semitism anti-Semitism is held to be

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

 Leaving aside the absurd wording ‘democratic nation’ which implies some nations are not democratic, in itself a racist phrase, the IHRA assumes that Israel is a normal democratic state. Of course we all know that Israel may be democratic for Israeli Jews but it is Jewish for Arabs.

The question though is what type of state Israel is. It is now accepted that Israel is a settler-colonial state much like Apartheid South Africa and Algeria. But that doesn’t tell us the specific character of Israel.

Israel describes itself as a Jewish Democratic state which is an oxymoron. A state can either be democratic or Jewish but it cannot be both and in practice Israel promotes the Jewish over the democratic. But Israel as Jewish state isn’t a religious or theocratic state Jewish ethnically.

When Netanyahu’s government introduced the Jewish Nation State Lawin 2018 it gave Israeli Jews only national rights. Although in theory Palestinian citizens of Israel had equal rights on an individual basis, in practice this could not but help impinge on those rights.

Article 7 of the Act providesthat ‘

‘the state views the development of Jewish settlement as a national value, and will act to encourage and promote its establishment and consolidation.’

What this means is being played out currently in the Naqab and East Jerusalem where the Jewish National Fund and Jewish settlers are ethically cleansing the indigenous Palestinian population.

Because Israel defines itself as a ‘Jewish’ state it allows Israelis the right to tell Palestinians, even those who are nominal citizens, that they should be grateful they are allowed to live in a Jewish state.

In January 2019 Al Jazeera published an article by Yoav Litvin The Zionist fallacy of ‘Jewish supremacy’ which argued that ‘Framing Zionism as Jewish and not white supremacy is a dangerous proposition.’ This was because saying Israel is a Jewish Supremacist State would therefore mean all Jews are racial supremacists.

Where Yoav went wrong was when he argued that

To maintain this abusive, white supremacist dynamic, Zionist propagandists have promoted the anti-Semitic fallacy that Israel is a Jewish state, which represents Judaism and thus all Jews.

Unfortunately it is a fact, not a fallacy, that Israel IS a Jewish state. That is what it calls itself. The question is rather ‘what does it mean to say Israel is a Jewish state’.

Litvin went on to compound his error by saying that

If it is accepted, as it is by Zionists, that Israel indeed represents Judaism and all Jews – an expression of “Jewish supremacy” – then those who are pro-Palestinian must also reject Jews and Judaism.

This is a serious error. Israel does not claim to represent Judaism. Certainly it uses Judaism to legitimise itself, in the process transforming Judaism into an idolatrous religion that worships land and power, but Israel has never claimed to represent Judaism. Rather it argues that Zionism is rooted in Judaism and that the formation of a Jewish state is the culmination of 2,000 years of Jewish history.

In the 1950s thousands of babies of Yemenite Jews were stolen from hospitals and given to White Jews

Israel claims to represent the mythical ‘Jewish people’. Being Jewish in Israel is not a matter of religion but nationality. There are many nationalities in Israel, since there is no Israeli nationality, but there is only one nationality that matters, Jewish nationality. In the Population Registry of Israel you can define yourself as Jewish by nationality and leave religion blank.

Yemenite Jewish children were subject to Nazi-style medical experiments by Israeli doctors in the 1950s and suspected organ thefts

Being Jewish in Israel entitles you to privileges that non-Jews do not possess. For example if you are Jewish your land is not liable to be confiscated because you or one of your family was resident in an ‘enemy’ i.e. Arab state. If you are Jewish you are expected to serve in the army, and consequently receive welfare and social security benefits, e.g. student grants, that non-Jews don’t receive.

Litvin argued that

the framing of Zionism as “white”, not “Jewish” supremacy enables and strengthens the formation of coalitions between all those opposed to Zionist settler colonialism in particular and white supremacy in general and hinders Zionist attempts at sabotage by lobbying cynical accusations of “anti-Semitism”.

It may well be that framing Zionism as ‘white’ and not ‘Jewish’ would make alliances with for example Black Lives Matter easier although I’m not convinced. However it would be deeply dishonest to construct an alliance on such a basis.

That is why I wrote an article for Al Jazeera Why Israel is a Jewish, not a white supremacist statein February 2019 in which I argued thatRecognising Israel as a Jewish supremacist state does not mean rejecting Jews or Judaism.’ I argued that

What Litvin is doing is substituting wishful thinking for reality and that is never a good basis on which to construct an argument.’

Police violence against Ethiopian Jews

Yes Zionism is also racist towards Black people but that is secondary to its racism towards non-Jews and Palestinians in particular. I wrote:

It is of course true that within the Israeli Jewish population, there is discrimination against the Sephardi/Misrahi Jews and even more against the Falashas (Ethiopian) Jews. But while intra-Jewish racism exists, the major division within the Israeli society is not between black and white, but between Jewish and non-Jewish, and in particular between Israeli Jewish and Palestinian. That is inescapable.

I followed this up in November 2021 with an articleIsrael is not just racist towards Palestinians but it is also racist towards Black Jewsin which I reaffirmed what I had previously written. The subtitle was ‘If Israel is primarily a Jewish Supremacist State it is ALSO a White Supremacist State.’ I wrote that

Litvin made the cardinal mistake of saying that if Palestinians reject a Jewish state they reject Judaism.  No they reject Jewish Supremacy.  Irish Republicans have never rejected Protestantism as a religion. On the contrary some of the most famous Republicans were Protestant, such as Wolfe Tone and Sir Roger Casement, executed by the British in 1916 for treason.

Northern Ireland was, in the words of its first Prime Minister James Craig a ‘Protestant State for a Protestant People’. Did that mean that the opposition of Irish Republicans to the Protestant Supremacist nature of that state was anti-Protestant? Of course not. What they objected to was a state of affairs whereby being Protestant entitled you to privileges that Catholics did not have.

Wolfe Tone, a Protestant leader of the United Irishmen

When we say that Israel is a Jewish Supremacist state what this means that Israel systematically discriminates against those of its inhabitants who are not Jewish. Zionism is a matter of race not religion as Max Nordau explainedat the first Zionist Congress in 1897.

This is not an academic debate. Israel systematically discriminates against those whose only crime is not being Jewish.  The Israeli rabbinate fulfil the same role as The Office for Race Classification in South Africa. They are the arbiters of who is and is not privileged.

That is why Rabbi Peretz, the head of the Israeli Conversion Authority, rejectsPalestinian applicants without review because of their ethnic origin’. This is how the Jewish religion has been perverted in order facilitate the requirements of a racist Jewish state.

Because Jews are more privileged than non-Jews it is essential to close a loophole whereby Palestinians might convert to become part of the privileged. There is no religious or halachic reason to refuse requests to convert by Palestinians. On the contrary in the Bible the Canaanites were often converted at the point of a sword. The Jewish religion has prostituted itself on the altar of Zionism.

B’Tselem, Israel’s main human rights group, which began life in 1989 as a liberal Zionist group, issued a reporta year ago describing Israel as A regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This is apartheid’

Why did B’Tselem describe Israel as a ‘Jewish supremacist’ state? Because in the work it does supporting Palestinians it is clear that being Jewish leads to different treatment by the Israeli authorities. Even Israeli anti-Zionists are treated more gently than Palestinians.

In the past decade Israel has tried to deport thousands of African refugees from Eritrea and Sudan - their crime?  Being Black and not Jewish

Of course within the Israeli Jewish community it is also true that White Jews discriminate against the Misrahi/Oriental and Ethiopian Jews. There is no doubt about this. African Jews have been barredfrom even entering Israel because they are not recognised as Jews.

In the case of the Abayudaya group of African Jews, the Jewish Agency, the arm of the World Zionist Organisation, had recognised them as Jews but the Israeli government nonetheless barred them from entry.

Children from the Hebrew Israelite community

There is also the case of the Black Hebrews who came from the USA in the 1960s. Many of them were originally deported back to the USA. A group were allowed to live near Dimona in Southern Israel but earlier last year the Israeli government unveiled a plan to deport them back to the United States.

Zionism has always had considerable difficulty accepting that non-White people can be Jewish. Arthur Ruppin, the most important figure in the pre-state Yishuv, considered that Arab Jews were racially inferior to European Jews because they were Semitic! Ruppin was an ardent devotee of Eugenics and the racial sciences and he visitedProfessor Hans Gunther, who the Nazis had imposed as Professor of Racial Sciences at Jenna University to have a friendly chat about their shared topic of interest.

The Hebrew Israelite community welcome sign

But here is the rub. Black Jews may complain bitterly about their treatment by White Jews but that does not make them express solidarity with the Palestinians. What they are fighting for is equality with White Jews in other words an equal role in the oppression of the Palestinians. They serve in the army, they are entitled to ‘Jewish national’ land (93% of all Israeli land) and other privileges that White Jews enjoy. What they don’t want is to be reduced to the status of Palestinians. They are the ‘poor white trash’ of Israel.

Ronnie Barkan, who was one of the founders of Israel’s Boycott from Within, appeared on Resistance TV last year and claimed, on the basis of my blog article that I had changed my position. He was wrong and on Wednesday we will be debating the issue.

Tony Greenstein

Please access it via Youtube here


Riddled by Racism: The Board of Deputies is Overrun by Islamaphobes and Racists yet it has the nerve to accuse people of ‘anti-Semitism’

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 Beyond Satire – The Union of Jewish Students and Jewish Labour Movement Complain that the Head of a group committed to ethnic cleansing is a Racist!



In October 2010 49 of us had a letter published in the Guardian calling for Ed Miliband not to follow in Blair and Brown’s footsteps and become a patron of the ethnic cleansing JNF.


We were successful and Miliband defied tradition. A few months later David Cameron resigned his sponsorship.

Sam Hayek, the Chair of JNF UK responded to our letter writing:

To accuse the JNF of being "actively complicit in the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians" represents a distortion of the truth on the grandest of scales. Our environmental and humanitarian work is not based on any political or religious affiliation, but rather on supporting Israel and its population – whatever their background.

I wrote

If diplomats are virtuous men sent abroad to lie for their country (Henry Wotton), what is Samuel Hayek of the Jewish National Fund's excuse.... the JNF's own entry on the Charity Commission website states that its objects include “such charitable purposes as benefit persons of Jewish religion, race or origin".

Although JNF UK has now changed the wording it hasn’t changed its activities.

Top: the JNF's Charitable Objects today and Bottom the JNF's Charitable Objects in 2010

Out is ‘benefiting Jewish persons’. In is ‘For the benefit of the population of the State of Israel ’ The only mention of Jews is:

To advance the Jewish religion, Jewish beliefs and religious education (including supporting the education of Jewish culture, history, practices and beliefs).

Hayek did not respond to my letter because he had been showns to be a liar.

It is no surprise that we now learn that Hayek is an Islamaphobe who agrees with the neo-Nazi White Replacement Theory whereby Muslim immigrants are driving out White Christians from Europe.

In an interview with the Jerusalem Post Hayek declaredthat “Jews have no future in England”.He toldthe Jewish News:

The evidence is the number of immigrants to England. The demographic of British society is changing.

Asked if he was referring to issues around Muslims, he replied: “You are not wrong,” adding:

Our problem in the West is that we do not understand Islam. In Islam there is not a term for ‘peace’.

Hayek suggestedthat British Jews should consider emigration, the Zionists’ wet dream:

Gary Mond - Islamaphobic bigot and JNF trustee

Last week the Senior Vice-President of the Board of Deputies, Gary Mond, was forced to resign. Mond had written on Facebook and tweetedthat ‘all civilization’ is ‘at war with Islam.’Mond is also a trustee of JNF-UK, as is Gideon Falter, its Vice Chair and CEO of the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism. The CAA’s 11 trustees are a roll call of some of the most viciously racist British Zionists.

The JNF's 11 racist trustees

The Charity Commission, which has repeatedly been written to regarding its refusal to deregister UK JNF has at last been forced to open an investigationinto this so-called ‘charity’.

Two motions have been submitted to the BOD which criticise the JNF for “failing to disavow the inflammatory and bigoted remarks of its chair Samuel Hayek”. One censures JNF trustees for not disavowing Hayek’s remarks. The other calls on it to suspend the JNF’s Board membership until Hayek steps down. The motions are proposed by Union of Jewish Students president-elect Joel Rosen and Finchley Reform Synagogue member Robert Stone.

Gary Mond, the then Senior BOD Vice-President, spoke of his “respect” for Hayek over the comments.

Mond also liked two tweets by Pamela Geller – a White Supremacist and fascist, who has been banned from entry to the UK. According to the Southern Poverty Law Centre

Geller has a long history of working with extremists and racists in the United States, Canada and Europe, including the Jewish Defense League, the English Defense League and the white nationalist group Bloc Identitaire, among others.

A Facebook post by Mond stated that"We just have to hope that our leaders wake up to the fact that all civilisation-west and east, American, Russian, Chinese, Israeli, whatever - is at war with these evil bastards, and I have to say it at war with Islam. And, just as Islam has lost before in history, it will lose again."

This profile of the average Muslim male appeared in a Report by the CAA - if such a drawing had portrayed the 'average British Jew' you can imagine the hypocritical fury of the Zionists

Mond attacked the Board for ‘leaning to the left’ (news to us!) and being unwilling to take account of different views. He didn’t mean anti-Zionist views either! But it’s true. The Board has silenced Palestinian voices for far too long.

Meanwhile, you will be glad to hear, a defence campaign for Hayek and Mond has been launched and who better to lead it than Jonathan Hoffman, the link man between far-Right Zionists and openly fascist groups like Britain First. Mond’s supporters are a roll call of openly fascist Zionists such as Damon Lenszner, Martin Sugarman, Sharon Klaff, David Collier, Board of Deputies member Yochy Davis and Ambrosine Shitreet of Pegida. In total more than 100 supporters signed an open letter in defence of Mond and Hayek, who has accused the Board of “cancel culture”.

Hoffman et al argue that

“the complex subject of anti-Jewish racism within the Muslim community appears a taboo subject — and those who dare mention it are branded ‘Islamophobic’!”

They declare support for Hayek’s right

to express an opinion without being targeted, subjected to harassment’ or calls for his resignation. Expressing an opinion with which others disagree should not be the subject of cancel culture nor misinterpreted as ‘racist’.

Unless of course it is support for the Palestinians and anti-Zionism in which case it is ‘anti-Semitic’ and they want it cancelled immediately as the case of Professor David Miller at Bristol University shows.

They also make the risible claim that pro-Israel supporters were “nearly lynched” at the pro-Israel rally last May during the attack on Gaza. Even worse:

Many of the anti-Israel protesters were “visibly of Asian heritage.Why would Jews want to live in a country where there is a high risk of life-changing injuries simply for holding an Israel flag in the street?”

The BOD issued a statement saying that “The Board of Deputies believes that there is no place in any Jewish communal organisation for anti-Muslim hatred” which itself is a lie. The BOD is infested with anti-Arab racists.

Roslyn Pine - the Board were quite prepared to forgive her calling Muslims 'the vilest of animals'

Three years ago the Board had to suspendfor 6 years Roslyn Pine for describing Arabs as “the vilest of animals.” Three years previous to that Pine had said that it was a pity that the pro-Palestinian female Swedish foreign minister was “too old to be raped.” She has also called fellow deputies “kapos.”

Jewish News reportedthat ‘the Board’s executive ruled that she could return early if she apologised, showed contrition and expressed remorse’. Contrast that with the life-time expulsions that the BOD demanded for Labour members expelled for ‘anti-Semitism’ i.e. anti-Zionism. If the BOD was at all serious about tackling Islamaphobia in their ranks then they would have expelled her.

What was the reaction of her synagogue, Finchley United Synagogue, for whom she is a Deputy? Did it change its representative? Not at all. The Jewish News reportedthat

Finchley Synagogue will look into the plight of its suspended deputy Roslyn Pine as a matter of “urgency”. Note that word ‘plight’.

For some strange reason Tommy Robinson and Jonathan Hoffman's solicitor, who is a member of the Board of Deputies, has blocked me

If the Board were serious about getting rid of its racists it would have to suspend Robert Festenheim, a solicitor and advisor to Tommy Robinson and Robinson’s solicitor Daniel Berke.

There has been one voice that has been missing in all this. It is that of Gideon Falter. Not a word, not a peep, out of someone who sees ‘anti-Semitism’ behind every stone and pebble. This is not surprising since the CAA has done its best to stir up Jewish-Muslim discord. It is a viciously Islamaphobic organisation.

Nina Friedman - the racist President of UJS

The Open Letter from Young Zionists re Hayek's Comments come from hypocrites like Nina Freedman, President of UJS, Joel Rosen, Hannah Rose, ex-UJS President, and Edward Isaacs, former President of Bristol JSoc, an inveterate liar and Jack Lubner of UJS National Council and JLM.

These young supporters of the Israeli Labor Party, which is in government with the settler-right in Israel, is an example of the hypocrisy of the Zionist ‘left’. They criticise the trustees of JNF UK for racism but have nothing to say about the JNF itself.

The JNF is an organisation which was instrumental in the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. In December 1940, Joseph Weitz, Director of its Lands Settlement Department, wrote in his diary (20.12.40) [Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, p.27):

There is no way besides transferring the Arabs from here to the neighboring countries, and to transfer all of them, save perhaps for [the Arabs of] Bethlehem, Nazareth and Old Jerusalem. Not one village must be left, not one [bedouin] tribe. And only after this transfer will the country be able to absorb millions of our brothers and the Jewish problem will cease to exist. There is no other solution."

What do these young ‘left’ Zionists in UJS/JLM say about the JNF which, at this very moment, is involved in planting trees on Bedouin land as part of the ‘Judaisation’ of the Negev? (see below)

The JNF’s work has been firmly entrenched in our childhoods: many of us have fundraised for the JNF,... we have toured parts of Israel with the JNF. However, now we are gravely concerned about these comments and of JNF UK’s complete inaction on the matter. Our communal institutions... have taught us Jewish values of “loving thy neighbour”, and Hayek’s comments are the antithesis of this.

These hypocrites believe that ‘loving thy neighbour’ is compatible with the forcible dispossession of the Palestinians, the Judaisation of the land and the theft of Palestinian land for settlements in the West Bank.

I therefore thought it might be instructive to see what this ‘loving thy neighbour’ actually involved. Things like the destruction of the Samarin family home in Jerusalem and the planting of trees over Palestinian villages and now the same exercise in the Negev/Naqab.

What are the Jewish National Fund Up to in the Negev/Naqab?

The Times of Israel reportedlast week on a ‘controversial tree-planting project by the Jewish National Fund’. Controversial because the local Bedouin communities protested against the JNF’s afforestation project, a continuation of its historic mission of using tree planting as a means of displacing Palestinians, stealing their land and erasing all traces of Palestinian villages.

There has been extreme violence by the Israeli police which would never be used against Jewish demonstrators. The police treat the Bedouin protests as ‘potential “terror incidents” with a nationalistic motive.’ Only Jewish nationalism is allowed in Israel. The terror, which is all too real, is the terror of being displaced from your home and forcibly transferred to a township as happened to Black South Africans under Apartheid.

Note how the resistance of Israeli Palestinians to efforts to ethnic cleansing is classified as “terrorism”. Attacks by settlers are never described in such terms. Even Israel’s Army Radio notedthat the

JNF had not consulted with police or other law enforcement bodies prior to starting the forestation project.

Nor did they consult the Bedouin of al-Atrash and other ‘unrecognised’ villages. The Times of Israel describedhow:

Negev Bedouin have a contentious relationship with the state. For decades, the government has sought to move them into recognized, planned cities, but many still live in a constellation of illegal hamlets that sprawl across Israel’s southern desert.

Bedouins accuse JNF of seeking to displace them, but the organization says it is merely fulfilling a request by other government bodies on public land. JNF works across Israel on nature and conservation projects

The ‘illegal hamlets’ are the villages where the Bedouin have lived before the State of Israel was founded. No Jewish villages are ever termed ‘illegal’. Note the reference to ‘public land’. This is a euphemism for Jewish National Land.

Far from the JNF’s Greenwashing preserving the environment it is destroying it

The ToI describedhow

Those with ideological objections call it colonialist, and environmentalists call it harmful because it has allowed a single species to spread unchecked, diminishing biodiversity and increasing the risk of forest fires.

The latter is a reference to the JNF practice of planting non-native pine which has enabled wildfires to spread rapidly.

The colonialism claims have resurfaced periodically in international media as part of their coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, linking forestation to the “Judaization” of previously Arab-owned land.

In fact the Israeli government drew up the Prawer Plan specifically aimed at Judaisation. Yaakov Franko, a lawyer specialising in landscape legislation claimed:

the trees, mostly Aleppo pines, are an invasive species and that each pine tree is like a gallon of petrol. The sap, the needles, the acorns, the trunks burn rapidly, spreading through the broken limbs near the root system, where no other plants can grow and moisten.

That’s why a single cigarette butt can light up the area between Hadera and Gedera,” he continued, naming cities at opposite ends of Israel’s center.


Far from benefiting the environment the JNF’s tree planting is causing environmental destruction. As befits European colonisers  the JNF

boasts about the Europe-like feel of its forests. One promotional article on their website from 2013 declares that Germany’s Black Forest “has got nothing on us.” And many hikers enjoy them. On a recent Saturday, Daniel Kobi, a father of two from Kiryat Ata, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that he enjoys coming to the forest named for his suburb of Haifa because “it feels like the Swiss Alps right around the corner” from his home.

The ToI claimedthat

While JNF did use some invasive species, including the eucalyptus from Australia, the Aleppo pine has grown in Israel for millennia.

Except that Israel has only existed since 1948, hardly a century let alone a millennium. The reference is to the small city state Israel that existed in the 10th Century BC, 3,000 years ago. But I forget. Palestine was a “land without a people for a people without a land”. In other words its people were invisible. To the colonialists indigenous people were always invisible. As even the Toi admits:

With their large crowns, Aleppo pines leave very little sunlight for lower shrubs. And they shed a thick blanket of needles that prevents the growth of most plants, and almost all of the flowers gracing the Israeli countryside — including its 30 species of orchids and 16 Iris species.

This means that the forests planted by JNF tend to have a much lower biodiversity than naturally occurring Mediterranean forests that nurture a multitude of insects, reptiles, birds and mammals.

The JNF give the game away when they saidthat

the tree planting began as an effort to “demonstrate ownership” over non-urban Jewish-owned land that could not be farmed.

In other words the JNF’s tree planting activities has nothing to do with the environment and everything to do with ‘demonstrating ownership’, Jewish ownership i.e. theft of Bedouin land.

Dozens of Palestinians in the Naqab (Negev) have been injured and arrested, as Israeli police attacked protests against the JNF that is threatening the livelihood of Bedouin communities in the area. 

The protests are focused in the al-Naqe area of the Naqab, a fertile area of land in the desert, which is home to around 30,000 Palestinians living in a cluster of several Bedouin villages.

Since December the JNF has been razing Palestinian lands and uprooting trees belonging to Bedouin communities in order to prepare the area for forestation.

The JNF’s campaign in the Naqab, with the full assistance of the Israeli police, has sparked widespread protests by Palestinian Bedouin communities in the area, who say the forestation campaign is just another effort to dispossess them from their land.

Videos and photos on social media have shown Israeli forces teargassing and violently detaining protesters, as well as demolishing tents in the area.

Middle East Eye reported that Israeli police have arrested at least 35 Palestinians from the Sa’awa and al-Atrash villages. Al Jazeera reported that more than 80 Palestinians, including minors, have been detained since the protests began.

Local media also reported Israeli police setting up checkpoints and blocking the entrances and exits to villages in the area in order to prevent people from attending the protests, which have swelled in recent days, and which have sparked solidarity protests in other Palestinian cities in Israel.

A history of violence & displacement

The Naqab makes up around half of Israel’s entire land mass, and is home to an estimated 300,000 Palestinian Bedouins who hold a nominal Israeli citizenship.

The Bedouins living in the Naqab are the descendants of those who remained after an estimated 80,000-90,000 Bedouins were forced to flee the area during the Nakba in 1948.

Around half of the Bedouins reside in 40 “unrecognized” villages, which Israel calls “illegal clusters.” Despite the fact that many of the Bedouins are living on the ancestral homelands, while others were internally displaced after 1940, Israel views them as “trespassers” and does not recognize their ownership over the land.

Due to their “unrecognized” status, Israel does not offer the Bedouins living in these communities any services and they are excluded from state planning. That means they have no local councils, are offered little-to-no government services in terms of education and sanitation, and are not connected to the electric grids or water networks.

Because they are considered “illegal”, these communities are under constant threat of demolition, with Israel having destroyed some villages close to 200 times.

For decades the state has aimed to remove these communities from their homes and put them in planned residential areas, which rights groups say amounts to forcible transfer, a war crime under international law. All the while, Israel has invested billions of shekels to develop and promote Jewish settlement in the area.

The JNF: Colonialism disguised as environmentalism

Founded in 1901 as a non-governmental organization, the JNF was established to purchase land for European Jews to settle in Palestine, in order to create and maintain a Jewish-majority state.

The JNF purports to be an environmental organisation. Its tree-planting initiatives are designed to cover up the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Today that means actively dispossessing Palestinian communities in the Negev.

The areas where the JNF plants its forests are often the sites of destroyed Palestinian villages which the JNF aims to erase any trace of. Today the JNF owns an estimated 15% of all Israeli land.

In occupied East Jerusalem, the JNF has been tied to shadowy purchases of Palestinian homes which the organization then turns over to Israeli settler groups. In the West Bank the JNF purchases privately owned Palestinian land in Area C — where Palestinians are not allowed to build — for settlement expansion and construction.

The group has worked with the Israeli government to make it nearly impossible for the country’s Palestinian citizens to gain access to state lands for residential, commercial and agricultural use. In the Negev the group has advocated for the destruction of Palestinian Bedouin villages in order to plant trees as part of its “Ambassadors Forest” initiative.

See What’s happening in the Naqab? Israel uproots Palestinians to plant trees

This Blog and others like it are Slowly Being Strangled by Facebook and the Social Media Giants – We Need Your Help

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The use of Algorithms will Lead to the Demise of Alternative Media if they are Starved of an Audience unless Readers also take on Responsibility

This blog is 14 years old. It began on January 29th 2008 with An Open Letter to Indymedia asking why they were allowing anti-Semitic articles by Gilad Atzmon to be posted. I was myself suspended from posting on UK Indymedia. The political incoherence of Indymedia, its failure to distinguish between right and left in the case of Atzmon and its lack of class politics or perspective, coupled with state repression and the growth of social media, led to its death in 2016.

Gilad Atzmon - the anti-Semitic Jazzman

I ended 2008 with 11 articles which represent a fair summary of the kind of article this blog has carried. Charles Tannock - Zionist and Apologist for anti-Semitesshowed how a far-right pro-Zionist Tory MEP, Charles Tannock, had defended an openly anti-Semitic Ukrainian paper, " Silski visti (Village News). Silski visiti published a paid for article ‘Jews in Ukraine Today: Reality Without Myths’ which stated that ‘some 400,000 Jews had taken part in the Nazi invasion of the Ukraine?’ That anyone could really believe such garbage is in itself breathtaking.

This story was consistent with many blogs which I have published since. It describes how Zionists and supporters of the Israeli state have no hesitation, like Israel itself, in backing open fascists and neo-Nazis whilst at the same time crying ‘anti-Semitism’.

The 11 articles included one comparing the Warsaw Ghetto to the Gaza Ghetto during Operation Cast Lead. Another took Atzmon to task for writing stuff that the neo-Nazi Red Watch site had printed wholesale.

Ali Abunimah, Editor of Electronic Intifada

Contrary to the allegations of the Zionists that the struggle against anti-Zionism and in support of the Palestinians is anti-Semitic, it was the statement Granting No Quarter: A Call for the Disavowal of the Racism and Antisemitism of Gilad Atzmon by Ali Abunimah, Joseph, Massad, Omar Barghouti and a host of other Palestinian and Arab personalities that delivered the coup de grâce to Atzmon and his anti-Semitic supporters.

Another article mourned the passing of Harold Pinter (is it really that long ago that he died?). Another supported the Shministim, Israeli youth who refused to serve in Israel’s occupation army. I have always tried to highlight those brave few Israelis who stand up against Israeli Apartheid just as socialists stood with White South Africans who rejected Apartheid a generation ago.

The Arab baby that wasn't wanted by Jewish parents in Tel Aviv

An articleon the Arab baby that wasn’t wanted at a kindergarten by racist Jewish parents set the tone for hundreds of articles that followed. Institutionalised Israeli racism. I quoted YNet about

Parents at (Tel Aviv’s) Hatikva neighborhood' s Hagalil School outraged by decision to integrate Arab students in classes, say their concerns are for school's academic level, not racially motivated.’

Bernie Madoff

The blog also had its lighter side. An article ‘Bernie Madoff - It's an ill wind that blows no good!!’ on one of the major collapses in the banking crisis took a more benevolent view of the malefactor. I wrote

Never was someone more appropriately named. Bernie literally made off with the proceeds of others' ill-gotten gains!’ To listen to some people the collapse of Bernie Madoff's $50 billion dollar investment operation, in reality the world's largest pyramid scheme, is the end of capitalism. Chance would be a fine thing. In fact it seems that the hand of providence is upon us. To listen to the squeals coming from the Jewish Chronicle it is the poor and vulnerable, the beneficiaries of Jewish charities, who are going to suffer.

I pointed out in mitigation that

this may be the best thing that has come out of the financial crisis. Zionist operations in both the USA and Israel have, in some cases been crippled

Many of those who had lost money were Zionist institutions!

In the intervening years I have written over 3,000 posts and there have been some 6¾ million hits. The blog started off quite slowly and built up to a crescendo in 2018 when I had over ¼ million hits in one month. For a long period I had around 100,000 hits a month. Today it is between 30 and 40,000 a month. The decline for other social media groups like The Canary has been even more pronounced. From some 7.5 million page views at the time of the 2017 General Election it has about 700,000 today.

Total Number of Hits Over Time

A Statistical Analysis of Tony Greenstein’s Blog

Over the 14 years 22.35% of all hits have come from Facebook. Today that number is 8.5%, a decline of two-thirds.

A third of hits have come from the UK, with 21.8% from the United States and 13.9% from Germany, followed by France, Norway and Russia.

In the last year there has been a slight decline in UK hits from a third over the whole period to 30.59%. In second place is France with 22.9% compared to 4.9% over the 14 years. The number of hits from the United States has declined from 21.8% over the whole period to 14.8% now. Germany has declined from 13.9% to 4.4% now. Make of these what you may. Japan has gone from 19th to 4th. Taiwan is 10thtoday have not even registered 13 years ago. Likewise Romania is now 12thhaving not figured in the statistics before.

Another blogger with similar problems is Jonathan Cook, an ex-Guardian journalist. Two days ago Jonathan wroteon a similar theme: Is it already too late to say goodbye?

My blog posts once attracted tens of thousands of shares. Then, as the algorithms tightened, it became thousands. Now, as they throttle me further, shares can often be counted in the hundreds. “Going viral” is a distant memory.

What distinguishes this blog from all others?

I have tried, not always successfully, to concentrate not only on current events but also to analyse those events and provide a theoretical background. A number of themes have come to the fore:

i.              Unlike many pro-Palestinian blogs (I except Electronic Intifada) I consistently defended Ken Livingstone when he referred in passing to the Nazis’ support for Zionism. This is a matter of historical fact and I am currently bringing out a heavily footnoted book on the subject. Indeed the Zionist record was far worse than Livingstone gave them credit for.

ii.            I have always insisted that you can’t understand what Israel is doing to the Palestinians if you don’t have an analysis and understanding of Zionism as a settler, colonial movement. It is this refusal to draw conclusions from Zionism, that from the start it sought to colonise the whole of Palestine, that led the Palestinians and PLO into making the fatal error of agreeing to the Oslo Accords. [see my articledebating the Oslo Accords with Julia Bard of the Jewish Socialists Group in 1993].

iii.         I have always opposed anti-Semitism in the Palestine solidarity movement because genuine anti-Semitism is the ally of Zionism. Literally they are Siamese twins. Although Zionism is not in the least concerned with genuine anti-Semitism it welcomes manifestations (rare as they are) in the Palestine solidarity movement as ‘proving’ that their opponents are motivated by hatred of Jews rather than hatred of what Israel does to the Palestinians. There was no better friend of the Zionist movement than Hitler. Without the flood of immigrants from Germany and elsewhere, the Zionist movement would have found great difficulty in achieving a critical mass in Palestine.

Noah Lucas, a critical Zionist historian in the Founding of Modern Israel observed that:

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.

Ben Gurion wrote, in October 1941, that:

Disaster is strength if channelled 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. [Shabtai Teveth ‘The Burning Ground 1886-1948’ p.853]

Other themes have included a focus on Israelis opposed to Zionism and who refuse to serve in the IDF, a focus on Israel’s abuse and torture of Palestinian children.

My blog is, as it says, socialist, anti-racist and anti-Zionist.  In no particular order! My most popular blogs may come as a surprise to people but for the first time I publish a list of them.

Which were the most popular posts?

The most popular with an incredible 165,000 hits was in April 2018 Winston Churchill – a Mass Murderer to whom history was very kind. Quite why this was so popular I simply do not know. Maybe it caught the mood of the time and the attacks on this war criminal’s statue.

The second most popular blog, on New Year’s day 2018 was Feminist silence over Ahed Tamimi exposes the racist consensus at the heart of western feminism with 105,000 hits. Ahed Tamimi was the 16 year old girl who slapped an Israeli soldier and was put in prison for 8 months.  It highlighted the imprisonment of Palestinian children and the racism at the heart of their lack of justice system since no Jewish child would have served a single day. Both these blogs appeared within 4 months of each other.

My third most popular in April 2012 was Israeli Shop Sodastream (Ecostream) Opens in Brighton to Large Picket with 51,900 hits. I am an activist not just a writer and I was involved from the start in the campaign to remove Sodastream’s shop from Brighton.

My 4th most popular blog was Open Letter to John Mann MP from a 90 Year Old Jewish Dr Glatt in October 2016 with 35,900 hits. Dr Blatt, a Jewish doctor who has since died, was so angry that he wrote a letter to John Mann, the Tory Lord and anti-Corbyn Labour MP who had alleged that Glatt’s letter criticising him was in fact written by Alan Madison, a Momentum supporter. Mann put up a Facebook post which blatantly lied. I produced Glatt’s letter on my blog and Mann was shamed into taking down his lying post.

The 5th most popular blog was a curious one The Framing of Kelvin Hopkins MP with 18.9K on 5 November 2017 which drove holes in the allegations of a member of Progress Ava Etemadzadeh  that she had been sexually assaulted by this staunch left-wing MP. Unfortunately Corbyn abandoned Hopkins just as he did so many others. Despite criticism from some on the left I was convinced the allegations were false.

The 6th most popular blog in November 2018 with 17.8K was NW Friends of Israel, Tommy Robinson and the EDL, are Holding a Demonstration Against ‘Anti-semitism’ in Manchester this Sunday. The Zionist didn’t like that one but what I said came true with a vengeance last May when Tommy Robinson was given a hero’s welcome at the Board of Deputies demonstration outside the Israeli Embassy.

The 7th most popular blog in October 2017 was Professor Moshe Machover Israeli Anti-Zionist Expelled from Labour today for ‘anti-Semitism’ with 16,300 hits.

The only blog from 2021 to make it into the top 10 at number 8 is May Day 2021 – Brighton & Hove Trades Union Council Says Stop the Police Billwith 15,000 hits.

Number 9 was Israel is not only the world’s most racist state it is a nation of murderers from September 2019 with 14.9K hits.

Number 10 was a humorous How do you tell if someone is a Nazi? with 14.2K hits in August 2017.

There is just one blog in the top ten from last year and 2019. None made it in 2020. By contrast there were 3 in 2017 and 3 in 2018 with 1 each in 2012 and 2016.

In the past 12 months, apart from the blog on the Trades Council demonstration against the Police Bill, the only ones to gather more than 5,000 hits were Defend Bristol University’s Professor David Miller – Defend Academic Freedom – Defend Free Speech in February 2021 with 7.65K and Open Letter to the Guardian's Editor Kath Viner & its Zionist Gatekeeper, Jonathan Freedland on December 28 2021 with 5.07K.


Numbers 11-20 were:

A Desperate John Mann MP Tries to Undermine 90 year old Jewish Doctor's Letter by Falsely Alleging It was a ForgeryOctober 2016

Destroying the Myths of Israel’s Birth – the Mass Gang Rape & Murder of an Arab Child,July 2017

Support Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu, January 2011

Brighton & Hove Labour Party Suspended by National Labour Party, July 2016

Open Letter to the Lying Leader of Brighton and Hove City Council, Warren Morgan, October 2017

The Zionists admit that the IHRA is about defending Israel NOT Jews, September 2018

Owen Jones – the Final Betrayal - Supporting Zionist Apartheid & the Jewish Labour Movement, February 2017

Labour’s Expulsion of Cyril Chilson, a Child of Holocaust Survivors, Says Everything You Need to Know About Labour's 'Antisemitism' Witchhunt, April 2018

Torture couldn’t happen to a Jewish child - 16 year old Ahed Tamimi’s Detention is Extended by Israel's Military Court, December 2017

Crooked Iain McNicol Revives the Noble Nazi Role of Informer,August 2016

There was one post from 2011, three from 2016, four from 2017 and two from 2018. So of the top 20 posts:

1 was from 2011,

1 was from 2012,

4 were from 2016,

7 were from 2017

5 were from 2018

1 was from 2019 and

1 was from 2021

It is clear that the peak number of hits were from 2016-2018 and then there was a decline coinciding with the effect of Facebook's tampering with its algorithms as it affected other social media.

What Can You Do To Combat Social Media Censorship?

It is clear that after the shock of the 2017 General Election which Corbyn nearly won, with The Canary getting more hits than the mainstream media sites, that the corporate social media and Mark Fuckerberg’s Facebook have altered their algorithms in order to weed out people like Jonathan and me. Writing about Palestine is not welcome in the corporate boardrooms.

Part of the reason why this blog has weathered the storm better, proportionately than many other similar blogs, is because I post links to a large database that I have built up over the years. So one thing you can do, if your name is not already on it, is to send your email address to azvsas@gmail.comand I shall add you to it.

Another thing you can do is to share my blogs so as to overcome the dirty tricks of Facebook and Twitter. Twitter even banned me after I had responded to Zionist trolls abusing me. Calling a Jewish person anti-Semitic is not an offence in Twitter’s eyes but calling your detractors racists is.

Many people, like Jonathan Cook, depend on their blog for an income. I don’t. However it does cost money to maintain. I employ a local charity Sussex Community Internet Project. It isn’t cheap but without them the site would be vulnerable to attack. At the moment they are redesigning my site.

I should point out that I have two sites – Google’s blogspot www.azvsas.blogspot.com  but also  www.tonygreenstein.com. I took the decision in around 2017 to set up a mirror site because of threats from Zionists that they would get Google to remove my blog altogether. It was a precaution but it didn’t come cheap.

I also discovered that some posts had simply disappeared. Google had never notified me about them but they were no longer there. If the Zionists had hacked the site then they would have simply erased everything. For example one post on the activities of a particularly nasty Tammi Rossman Benjamin disappeared. Fortunately I have backed up all files on disc and shall be replacing it in the course of time.

There are 3 things you can do:

i.                   Share, share, share

ii.                Get added to my mailing list. No amount of algorithms can get round that!

iii.             Donate what you can afford, however little or however much, to my web appeal. I am happy to write articles (I know there have been fewer in the past few weeks but I am heavily involved in the production and editing of my forthcoming book on the Nazis and Zionists). You can donate in 3 ways:

a.     Straight to my Paypal account tonygreenstein111@gmail.com

b.    By bank transfer to

Brighton and Hove Unemployed Workers Centre,

Sort Code 09-01-50

Account Number: 04094107

but pleaseput in the reference ‘Web’ or ‘Blog’

c.     By snail mail to:

BUWC, PO Box 173, Brighton, BN51 9EZ

Tony Greenstein

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