When I suggested that DPUK needed to democratise I was cancelled & removed from its WhatsApp groups

Last June, with dire predictions of massive rises in the energy cap, Don’t Pay UKsuddenly appeared on the scene. Where it came from was always a bit of a mystery and how they were able to finance large amounts of leaflets and a slick website, to say nothing of premises/phones/ admin etc. was even more a mystery.

But like most people I was more concerned with mobilizing against the energy price rises than questioning where DPUK had come from. The fight against  the Tories and neo-liberalism was the priority not navel gazing. And if a benevolent capitalist had provided seed money so what?

All this occurred in the midst of political paralysis as the government was convulsed over Boris Johnson’s future as Prime Minister. In essence we had no government for nearly 3 months.

Not only was the rise in energy prices forecast as hitting £3,800 in October, £5,000 in January 2023 and up to £7,000 by April 2023 but the Tory party was engaging in a fantasy contest between two lunatic right-wingers who were competing as to who would hammer the poor most.

I was among a number of those in the labour and trade union movement who were arguing that we had to consider a Can’t Pay Won’t Pay campaign and look carefully at and learn the lessons of the battle against the Poll Tax 30 years ago. Not that the two struggles were the same.  On the contrary there were important differences which DPUK has never seemed to understand

On the socialist left there had already been a vigorous debate about the merits of not paying energy bills and there was an important constituency who said that not paying would not work.  Groups such as Disabled People Against the Cuts were particularly vociferous in arguing that disabled people couldn’t take part in such a campaign.  A position I disagreed with but which many people supported.

Some us had begun to set up a Can’t Pay Won’t Pay campaign in Brighton with the aim of campaigning for a mass refusal to pay.  However we were all aware of the differences between 30 years ago and now and the difficulties we faced.

Brighton & Hove Can't Pay Won't Pay/DPUK Meeting August 30

The Crispin Flintoft Show, which is a twice weekly Zoom show consisting of mainly expelled and suspended Labour Party members as well as those who have managed to cling on despite Starmer, has regular attendances of around 500.  In May the featured speakerwas Tommy Sheridan, the leader of the campaign against the Poll Tax who warned of the differences between the Poll Tax campaign in 1989/90 and the battle against the energy prices today.

On June 24, the Socialist Labour Network held a meeting with Tommy Sheridan, Ian Hodson, President of the Bakers Union and Paula Peters of DPAC on the theme of Can’t Pay Won’t Pay.

In Brighton we decided to hold an inaugural meeting of Can’t Pay Won’t Payand I was approached by Andrew Farrar, an anarchist associated with DPUK, to work jointly together. CPWP agreed to hold a joint public meeting on August 30.

Brighton & Hove Can't Pay Won't Pay/DPUK Meeting August 30

The meetingon August 30 was jointly chaired by Nehaal, who is currently Vice President of the National Union of Students and myself. Speakers included the President and Secretary of the Trades Council, Matt Webb and Andy Richards and Sheila Hall, who was a councillor in 1990 who was suspended along with 5 other Labour councillors for refusing to implement the Poll Tax. Also speaking was the man who served the longest sentence (30 months) for his part in the poll tax riot.

Over 150 people attended and it was judged by all that it was a great success. But then things began to go downhill. Activity fell off and it proved difficult to get people to run a weekly stall in the town centre. The only activity since then was on October 1^stwhen a rally of about a 100 was held at Brighton Clocktower. Given that there was a strike meeting at The Level of nearly 1,000 people it is clear that the campaign had stalled.

Following the public meeting at a weekly coordination meeting an objection by Farrah was made to my attending a regional meeting (in fact a national meeting of regional groups).  No doubt after words in his ear.  However I did get out of him that these meetings were attended by between 20 and 30 people, which for a national meeting is pathetic.

I made several attempts to discuss DPUK’s strategy in the different chat groups and each time they were met with personal abuse by a few anarchists who were more concerned with how oppressed they were and how many identities they could claim than progressing the campaign. Comments such as

I’m a woman. The mother of a disabled person. A teacher in the most deprived area of Brighton. You don’t get to filibuster me into silence. I’m big enough and ugly enough not to stand for this

was one such contribution from an unnamed anarchist who harboured a deep grudge over the role of Militant in the Poll Tax 30 years ago. I pointed out that I too had a disabled child to care for but didn’t see what relevance this crass resort to identity politics had for the campaign against energy price rises.

This particular person was obsessed by the fact that Sheila Hall had spoken at the public meeting because Sheila had been a supporter of Militant 30 years ago. Clearly she spoke for other anarchists.

DPUK's key mistake was in making withholding payments conditional on the number of pledges

It is a fact that the All Britain Anti Poll Tax Federation which was set up in November 1989 was led by the Militant Tendency who had recently been expelled from the Labour Party. Although Tommy Sheridan had made some injudicious remarks about those arrested in the Poll Tax Riot no-one can take away from him the fact that he had been gaoled for 6 months for defying the Scottish courts over his presence at a Warrant Sale or for his leadership of the campaign against the Poll Tax in Scotland, which suffered from the Poll Tax one year earlier than the rest of the country.

The fact that Tommy and 5 others had been elected to Glasgow City Council spoke volumes about how the Glaswegian and Scottish working class felt whereas the anarchist contribution to the campaign was nugatory.  Yet these sectarian comments kept coming up from certain individuals and local Admins acted to protect these sectarians.

When I responded to a few of these characters I received a ‘final warning’ from an unelected moderator of one of the chat groups. Clearly democratic debate is anathema to identity politics anarchists.  As a result I decided to have no personal interaction with any individual and to simply post political observations as to the current state of play. Nonetheless this didn’t satisfy the flaky anarchists who had appointed themselves as Admins and I was removed without warning or explanation last Tuesday.

I should add that at no time was any Admin elected.  All of them were friends who appointed each other, as Nehaal admitted. Anarchists are opposed in theory to leadership but in practice they are opposed to an elected leadership because of course nothing will happen unless some people take the initiative.

Don’t Pay UK Nationally

So what is going on in DPUK? I attended a national meeting of activists about 3 weeks ago. It was chaired by Simon, a well-known Brighton anarchist. There were a total of 112 in attendance. It was made clear that DPUK’s leadership consisted in essence of a group of friends of a similar political persuasion.

All the speakers were pre-selected and no audience participation was allowed. I guess this is anarchism in action. There was though a vigorous discussion in the chat and the main theme in that was the need to discuss a political strategy. However the meeting finished after just one hour and those with their hands up were simply ignored.

What DPUK has are hidden, unelected and unaccountable leaders.  We used to call it the ‘tyranny of structurelessness’in which feminist and other organizations, which were leaderless in theory, ended up with unelected leaders by default and thus were far more undemocratic than those bureaucracy ridden institutions of the labour movement.

From my own impressions a large number of people have been signed up as potential activists or organizers but, as is common with anarchist campaigns, there is no direction or strategy. It has been suggested that DPUK is deliberately engaging in the mass collection of data such and email addresses for other purposes.  Whether this is true I do not know, however there is little sign of any adherence to data protection legislation.

In 2-3 years time DPUK will be calling an energy payment strike

DPUK’s Lack of a Political Strategy

On its websiteDPUK state that ‘We will take this action [withholding payments] when we reach 1 million pledges to strike.’ The only problem is that at the time of writing only 198,551 people have signed up pledging to stop their direct debits.  Three days ago it was 195,510.  In other words the number of people signing up and pledging to stop paying via direct debit is increasing by 1,000 a day. At this rate it will take over 2 years to reach the figure! 

This is simply no way to run a campaign. Before Liz Truss’s pledge that bills would be capped at an average of £2,500 DPUK were receiving 10,000 pledges per day.  In other words there has been a precipitate drop in people pledging to stop their direct debits.  Yet there has been no mention of this. Complete radio silence.

In practice a pledge is unenforceable anyway and it is anyone’s guess how many people who have signed a pledge have thought twice about it.  In any event stopping a direct debit doesn’t mean not paying. There are a number of ways of paying energy bills of which direct debits are just one. In short DPUK have been blind sided by the government’s decision to stuff the mouths of the energy companies with gold to the tune of £170 billion.

As Catherine Furae of Live Chronicle wrote, Don’t Pay UK halts energy strike as it fails to sign enough people. Except that DPUK hasn’t told its own supporters that it has called off the action. Instead they simply urge them to greater efforts.

Where has DPUK gone wrong?

Because DPUK was set up undemocratically without any attempt to involve people in the wider anti-cuts and trade union movement they embarked on what was clearly a very risky strategy without any discussion or prior thought about involving wider forces.

It is obvious that at a time when working class people and trade unions are engaged in mass strike action that there is a need to engage the unions and workers in any campaign against the energy prices rises. But unfortunately these anarchists tend to have little involvement with unions nor do they care much for what they see as just another manifestation of the labour bureaucracy.

In my view there was absolutely no need to make an unrealistic target of 1 million the pivot of a campaign against the energy prices. Instead there should have been an attempt to involve the wider labour movement for example by calling a conference.  The fact is that Britain’s anarchists are not exactly well placed in the trade union and labour movement.

If there had been an attempt to hold e.g. a large zoom conference then the follies and dangers of setting an unrealistic target figure as the be all and end all of the campaign could have been pointed out.  Instead of media gimmicks and there is no doubt that DPUK attracted a lot of media attention, a strategy of building in local communities could have been put in place and leaflets highlighting the estimated energy costs could have been used instead of simply saying Don’t Pay.

Whether even this would have worked is open to doubt but as things stand DPUK have failed at the first hurdle.

I should add that although I disagree with anarchism politically I have respect for many anarchists who are involved in anti-fascist or Palestine solidarity work. But I find it difficult to muster much enthusiasm for those whose contempt for democracy matches that of Sir Keir Starmer.

Has DPUK Anywhere to Go?

Any Can’t Pay Won’t Pay campaign is going to face very serious obstacles not least the fact that 4 million households have pre-payment meters.  To date DPUK has simply ignored this problem. It is also a fact that millions of people are simply going to be unable to pay their heating bills this winter. The question is how to marry these together.

It seems to me that any campaign has to focus on working class areas of high deprivation where the issue is of most concern. The problem of pre-payment meters has to be addressed. I’m no technical expert but if it is possible to physically neutralize or bypass these meters then this should be done – en masse.

I certainly do believe that a CPWP campaign can succeed but it will be difficult if divorced from the wider labour and anti-cuts movement. The current DPUK policy of clamping down on any discussion of strategy and focusing instead on how many leaflets one can distribute, to the point of cancelling and removing troublesome activists, show that this organization, given its secrecy and lack of democracy, isn’t up to the task it has set itself, which is reversing the present price rises.

No mass movement that isn’t democratic can hope to succeed in a battle with this government. Democracy isn’t a luxury it is a necessity.

As DPUK has stagnated it's been overtaken by Enough is Enough

DPUK’s Refusal to Speak About Public Ownership

When I opened the public meeting in Brighton I was interrupted by applause when I mentioned that the crisis could not be resolved until the utility companies were under public ownership again. It is obvious to all and sundry that as long as energy in Britain is owned by private monopolies there can be no solution to the continuing price rises.

The Tories and Starmer Labour are opposed to public ownership. But here is the curious thing. Try as you might, it is impossible to find a single reference to public ownership of the energy companies on the DPUK site. As far as those who control DPUK are concerned such questions are irrelevant because both involve capitalist production. Of course DPUK don’t say what their real position is.  They simply don’t mention it as they hide behind their curious identity politics.

According to We Own It 66% of the public support nationalisation. The fact that both Truss and Starmer are opposed to public ownership might tell our youthful anarchists something about neo-liberalism, which is founded on a hatred of public ownership. However anarchists combine both liberalism and ultra-leftism.  Ultra leftist because they make no distinction between private ownership of energy companies and public or state ownership. Unfortunately bodies like the IMF do make such a distinction.

I have deliberately avoided the speculation of people like Ben Timberleyand othersas to whether or not DPUK is a genuine group or not. I always tend to assume the best but there is no doubt that DPUK is now seriously floundering as its lack of any meaningful strategy has caught up with it. It seems like a good idea that got lost along the way.

I have also sent an Open Letter 'The Silencing of Dissenting Voices'to members of Brighton & Hove DPUK!

Tony Greenstein

British Academics are Incapable of Joined Up Thinking. Why would a Government which wants to Deport Black and Muslim Refugees to Rwanda be concerned about anti-Semitism?

The decision of Aberdeen University to reject the IHRAmisdefinition of anti-Semitism is extremely welcome and long overdue. In fact, as Sir Stephen Sedley, the Jewish former Court of Appeal Judge wrote, the IHRA ‘fails the first test of any definition: it is indefinite.’. In any case who has heard of a definition that is over 500 words long?

It should be a no brainer that a ‘definition’, 7 of whose 11 examples are about Israel and Zionism is not about anti-Semitism but something else entirely. The IHRA itself is quite explicit as to what its real agenda is when it says that

Manifestations [of anti-Semitism] might include the targeting of the state of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity

The idea that Jews form a collectivity is borrowed from the International Jewish Conspiracy theory which posited that Jews, wherever they live, form a separate political entity. In other words the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism is itself anti-Semitic! And if Jews do form a collectivity then how is that compatible with the 11^th illustration of anti-Semitism which states that ‘Holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel’ is anti-Semitic? Either Israel is a Jewish collective or it isn’t.

Calling Israel a 'racist endeavour'is  anti-Semitic according to the IHRA yet how else do you describe the practice of reserving housing only for Jews?

These are just some of the internal contradictions of the IHRA yet academics seem to have difficulty grasping the purpose and intent of the IHRA and what the government’s agenda is in trying to impose it on the Universities.

It was in October 2021 that the then Education Secretary and former toilet salesman, Gavin Williamson, wroteto universities in England and Wales threatening their funding if they did not adopt the IHRA. In response a group of prominent lawyers including two former Lord Justices of Appeal, Sir Anthony Hooper and Sir Stephen Sedley wrotethat the ‘illustrations of anti-Semitism’which accompanied the IHRA definition ‘have been widely used to suppress or avoid criticism of the state of Israel.’

Aberdeen University

After a two year consultation Aberdeen University decided instead to adoptthe Jerusalem Declaration on Anti-Semitism, which unlike the IHRA actually is about anti-Semitism, as opposed to anti-Zionism.

The JDA, despite its faults, especially its Section B, makes it clear that anti-Zionism, BDS and support for equality between Jews and Palestinians in a single state are not anti-Semitic whereas the IHRA holds that criticism of the Jewish state as racist is anti-Semitic.

The JDA definition of anti-Semitism is clear and unequivocal.

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

Compare that to the 38 word definition of anti-Semitism in the IHRA which is a model of obscurity and obfuscation.

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

The above definition is so useless that even the Zionists have abandoned it in favour of the 11 illustrations of ‘anti-Semitism’ by themselves. The IHRA defines anti-Semitism as a ‘certain perception’ but avoids telling us what that ‘certain perception’ is.

In fact anti-Semitism isn’t just a perception but a practice – violence, discrimination, hostility etc. And if this perception of anti-Semitism ‘may be expressed as hatred of Jews’ then what else might it be expressed as? Anti-Zionism?

Even stranger is a definition of anti-Semitism that applies to both Jews and non-Jews (i.e. everyone!). In short the 38 word definition is  totally meaningless yet prestigious universities like Oxford and Cambridge have gone along with this gobbldydook without having the courage or honesty to call it what it is – a load of junk.

Dissident Zionist and Jewish historian Geoffrey Alderman, the Emeritus Professor of Politics and Contemporary History at the University of Buckingham, wrote an excellent article for The Independent back in July 2019 This Labour Party row will not be settled by relying on a flawed and faulty definition of antisemitism. It was because of this that Aldedrman, a columnist for 14 years on the Jewish Chronicle was banned by the Editor of the Jewish Council from its columns. See Former Columnist and Historian of the Jewish Community, Professor Geoffrey Alderman, is Banned by Jewish Chronicle Editor Stephen Pollard.

Alderman wrote in the above article that ‘The 11 examples embed numerous internal contradictions’ before describing the IHRA as ‘deeply-flawed and much misunderstood’.

When the IHRA was adopted by the IHRA in Bucharest in 2016 the forum decided against including the illustrations in the definition but the IHRA Secretariat, by a sleight of hand, has overturned this decision and refused to clarify whether they are part of the definition despite numerous requests to come clean.

The fact that the IHRA Secretariat feel the need to practice the dark arts of deception suggests that its main purpose is not so much defining anti-Semitism as conflating anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism.

Jamie Stein-Warner, a Ph D student at Oxford University reported in International Organisation Is Misrepresenting Its Own Definition of Antisemitism that:

Across the world, pro-Israel lobbyists are promoting a highly problematic list of 11 examples of purported antisemitism. These examples have been used to shield Israel from accountability for its human rights violations.

To push these examples on international organisations, governments and civil society, Israel’s advocates have falsely depicted them as part of the IHRA definition.

In fact, as this report irrefutably documents, IHRA’s decision-making body did not adopt any of the examples as part of its definition.

Shockingly, the report shows how not just pro-Israel campaigners but even senior IHRA officials have effectively misled the public about the examples.

The impact of this misrepresentation has been significant as the examples, misrepresented as the IHRA definition, have been used to stigmatise and stifle legitimate criticism of Israel.

Unsurprisingly the decision of Aberdeen University has provoked fury from the usual suspects. The notoriously racist and Islamaphobic Campaign Against Anti-SemitismaccusedAberdeen University of taking a “scandalous position”.

The Campaign Against Antisemitism which urges support for the IHRA specialises in targeting academics

The Scottish Council of Jewish Communities arguedthat the IHRA definition states “criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as anti-Semitic” in an attempt to prove that it doesn’t prevent criticism of Israel. However they ignored the fact that Israel is not like any other country.

Israel has maintained for over half a century a military occupation of the West Bank, Gaza and the Golan Heights. Israel is uniquely an ethno-nationalist state, which is why White Supremacists love it. Israel grants a right of ‘return’ to Jews who’ve never lived there whilst denying the Palestinian refugees it expelled any such right.

Former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who introduced the 2018 Jewish Nation State Law was explicit when he saidthat Israel is ‘not a state of all its citizens’ but only of its Jewish citizens.’

Stephen Sedley in Defining Anti-Semitism wrotethat the IHRA:

Assume(s) that Israel, apart from being a Jewish state, is a country like any other and so open only to criticism resembling such criticism as can be made of other states, placing the historical, political, military and humanitarian uniqueness of Israel’s occupation and colonisation of Palestine beyond permissible criticism (it)... bristles with contentious assumptions about the racial identity of Jews, assumptions contested by many diaspora Jews but on which both Zionism and anti-Semitism fasten, and about Israel as the embodiment of a collective right of Jews to self-determination.

The Zionists are not happy with the decision of Aberdeen. The Jewish settler news agency Arutz Sheva described how

The selection of the JDA was applauded by various anti-Israel and BDS groups, including the Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign and pro-Corbyn Jewish Voice for Labour whilst the Scottish Council of Jewish Communities accused Aberdeen University of “indulging in second-order antisemitism.”

The Aberdeen University decision should be used by all academics who value free speech and academic freedom to roll back the Tory imposed IHRA. One of the problems of academics, apart from their natural timidity, is that they aren’t very good at joined up thinking.

It doesn’t take much intelligence to work out that a Tory government that has pioneered the Rwandan deportation scheme for non-White refugees (not Ukrainians) and continues to demonise asylum seekers is probably not interested in fighting any form of racism, anti-Semitism included.

In fact prominent Tories such as Boris Johnson, in his 72 Virgins novel, and Jacob Rees-Mogg have repeatedly made anti-Semitic statements.

Michael Berkowitz of University College London describedhow Mogg had attacked 2 fellow Jewish Tories, Oliver Letwin and John Bercow, as “Illuminati who are taking the powers to themselves.” Berkowitz observed how Mogg,

‘while studiously avoiding the word “Jew”, (he) has exhumed, embellished, and rebroadcast one of the most poisonous antisemitic canards in all of history.’

Anti-Semitic Extracts from Boris Johnson's 72 Virgins novel

Yet strangely enough none of the Zionist organisations that were so willing to criticise Jeremy Corbyn for ‘anti-Semitism’, despite him never having made an anti-Semitic comment, had anything to say about either Johnson or Rees-Mogg’s genuine anti-Semitism.

The reasons for this are not hard to find. Zionism has never opposed genuine anti-Semitism. What it is concerned about is rebranding opposition to Israel’s own racist practices as anti-Semitism.

CAA Pamphlet Attacking British Muslims as Anti-Semitic Uses Picture of one person to smear a whole ethnic group - this is usually called racism

The Racism of the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism

One of the most prominent of the Zionist organisations in the anti-Corbyn campaign was the misnamed Campaign Against Anti-Semitism. In its Report British Muslims and Anti-Semitism (the full version of which is no longer on the CAA’s website) they deliberately did their best to stir up Jewish-Muslim tensions. Accompanied by an openly racist figure of a Muslim the CAA wrote:

‘the gradual buildup of understanding and friendship between Britain’s Jews and Muslims has been utterly eclipsed by growing antisemitism amongst British Muslims. On every single count, British Muslims were more likely by far than the general British population to hold deeply antisemitic views. It is clear that many British Muslims reserve a special hatred for British Jews, rating Jews much less favourably than people of other religions or no religion, yet astonishingly British Muslims largely do not recognise antisemitism as a major problem.

It has long been suspected that sections of the British Muslim population harboured hatred towards British Jews. This survey goes some way to identifying pockets of prejudice, but it also shows that the prejudice is horrifyingly widespread.’

The CAA indulged in a good example of racial profiling, publishing a racist silhouette of the ‘typical’ Muslim male. Just imagine that a Muslim organisation had published a similar figure of the ‘typical’ Jewish man. The air would be thick with accusations of anti-Semitism and all the usual culprits, would have joined in the hue and cry.

The CAA waged a vicious lying campaign against Palestinian student Malaka Shwaikh - even the Daily Mail and Express apologised for repeating the lies but not the CAA

The fact that the CAA was one of the 2 complainants to the EHRC, which accused the Labour Party under Corbyn of harassment of Jews, speaks volumes to Establishment hypocrisy.

On the basis of a quote from  David Ben Gurion about how the Arabs didn't see why they should pay the penalty for Auschwitz the CAA accused her of exonerating Hitler for the Holocaust - they hurriedly took the post down when they realised their mistake

The IHRA has been used repeatedly to target dissident academics and professionals from Professor David Miller, who was dismissedby Bristol University, to Shahd Abusalama, who was suspendedby Sheffield Hallam University. The hypocrisy of the Tories, who complain about the threat to free speech on campus whilst at the same time pushing a definition of anti-Semitism whose sole purpose is to restrict free speech on Palestine is breathtaking. Yet the University College Union, which in theory is opposed to the IHRA, has said almost nothing about this threat to their members.

In December 2021 the CAA targetedFranck Magennis, a barrister at Garden Court Chambers for having tweeted that

“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.”

The CAA targeted Sheffield Hallam lecturer Shahd Abusalama

There couldn’t have been a more straightforward example of an attempt to suppress political speech yet the CAA claimed that it was empowered to do so by the IHRA.

Others targeted by the CAA included academics such as Rebecca Gould of Bristol University, Professor Moshe Machover of King’s College University, Dr Goldie Osuri and Professor Virinder Kalra of Warwick Universitys.

Unfortunately Britain’s Palestine Solidarity Campaign has long given up the fight against the IHRA since anything which brings it into conflict with the British political establishment terrifies it.

It is essential that both academics and students who are serious about getting Israeli Apartheid off campus and opening up the debate about the persecution and oppression of the Palestinians should need to campaign to reverse the universities option of the IHRA.

Gideon Falter has no problem serving alongside fellow racists in  JNF-UK

The CAA describedthe Jerusalem Declaration on Anti-Semitism as a “wrecking document intended to undermine the globally-recognised” IHRA definition. In other words they had no substantive criticism to make of it other than its intended effect.

JNF-UK's racist Chairman, Gideon Falter

This should be of no great surprise. The Chair of the CAA is a well-known racist Gideon Falter, who is also Vice-Chairof the Jewish National Fund – UK. The JNF is committed to ensuring that non-Jews in Israel have no access to ‘Jewish’ land, which makes up 93% of the Israeli state. Arabs are even forbidden from working on that land. The JNF is the mainstay of Israeli Apartheid.

Original Letter to the Guardian 7 October 2010

In October 2010 there was an interesting debate in the letters columns of the Guardian between myself and the JNF Chair, Samuel Hayek. Hayek was shown to be a liar when he claimedthat

The Lying Letter of Samuel Hayek Replying to Us

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.

Letters in response to Hayek's lying letter to the Guardian from myself and Barry Stierer

I respondedpointing out that Hayek was

either being disingenuous or he has not read the JNF's own entry on the Charity Commission website, which states that its objects include the "such charitable purposes as benefit persons of Jewish religion, race or origin". (the link is now broken as JNF UK amended the entry)

UK JNF's entry in the Charity Commission register made it clear that the JNF only benefits Jews in Israel thus proving Hayek to be a liar

Even the Board of Deputies in January 2022 found Hayek and the JNF’s Treasurer Gary Mond to be too openly racist to work with.

Jewish Newsreportedthat 46 Deputies had signed an open letter calling for Hayek’s removal as Chair of JNF-UK after he claimed that as a result of Muslim immigration

“maybe in 10 years, maybe less” Jews would no longer be able to live in the UK.... The evidence is the number of immigrants to England.

Asked whether he was referring specifically to issues around Muslim immigration, Hayek said: “You are not wrong.”

Hayek also adopted the far-right Great Replacement Theory claiming that in the UK

“the process is the white Christian majority is shrinking. It shrinks to a degree where there is a point it cannot protect itself anymore.”

Gary Mond, Senior Vice President of the BOD subscribes to the neo-Nazi Great Replacement Theory

The Great Replacement Theory which holds that Muslims are replacing the White population of Europe is a neo-Nazi conspiracy theory. It was citedby Robert Bowers who murdered 11 Jewish worshippers at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. He believed that Jews were instrumental in the plot to replace White people in America with Latino immigrants. Even the Jewish Chronicle acceptedthat this theory was anti-Semitic however Falter has no problem serving as Vice-Chair with a Jewish neo-Nazi.

The JNF's racist Treasurer Gary Mond

Another racist trustee of JNF-UK who Falter keeps company with is the Gary Mond. Mond was suspended from his position as Senior Vice-President of the BOD after it was revealed that he had ‘liked’ statuses by far-right Islamaphobe Pamela Geller, who was banned from entering the UK in 2013 preventing her speaking at a rally of the fascist English Defence League.

Mond saidof Emmanuel Macron’s 2017 election victory over Marine Le Pen in France that France had picked “submission over freedom.” The Jewish News included a Facebook post from Mond saying:

Gary Mond of the JNF had no problem  'liking' the tweets of Jewish racist Pamela Geller (left)

"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."

Respondingto concerns about an increase in Muslim MPs Mond wrote that ‘“When this happens – and the odds are that it will – the Britain that we know will be gone forever.”

None of this bothered Falter in the slightest yet the British media continue to quote from the CAA uncritically without even bothering to do the slightest due diligence.

Gideon Falter, Chair of the racist Campaign Against Antisemitism gives his support to Hindu chauvinists who defend Caste Discrimination -

Falter is an unreconstructed racist. He was reported by the Milli Gazette the main Indian Muslim English paper to have attended a meeting in the House of Commons in 2018 called by racist Hindutva groups in Britain who were campaigning to ensure that discrimination on the grounds of caste was not made illegal under the Equality Act 2010. Although the Act did include caste discrimination as an example of racial discrimination the Tories have never implemented this provision. The Milli Gazette reportedthat:

Britain's most racist MP, Bob Blackman is a patron of the CAA and supporter of Hindutva

At a meeting in the House of Commons about the Caste law, attended among others by Satish Sharma and Conservative Party donor Lord Jitesh Gadhia. Bob Blackman (the rabidly pro-Hindutva Tory MP from Harrow East) welcomed Gideon Falter, the CEO of the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism (CAA). Falter responded by assuring the meeting that he and his supporters would do all they could to help eradicate the ‘duty’ on the government to make Caste an aspect of race in the Equality Act of 2010. Lord Jitesh Gadhia and Bob Blackman then called for the need to learn from the way the CAA had got the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism passed in the Labour Party.

Here we see the real side of the CAA. Caste discrimination in India against the Dalits (Untouchables) is supported by the rabidly racist Indian Government under Narendra Modi.

The National Geographic, in India's "Untouchables" Face Violence, Discrimination described how

More than 160 million people in India are considered "Untouchable"—people tainted by their birth into a caste system that deems them impure, less than human.

Human rights abuses against these people, known as Dalits, are legion. A random sampling of headlines in mainstream Indian newspapers tells their story: "Dalit boy beaten to death for plucking flowers"; "Dalit tortured by cops for three days"; "Dalit 'witch' paraded naked in Bihar"; "Dalit killed in lock-up at Kurnool"; "7 Dalits burnt alive in caste clash"; "5 Dalits lynched in Haryana"; "Dalit woman gang-raped, paraded naked"; "Police egged on mob to lynch Dalits".

"Dalits are not allowed to drink from the same wells, attend the same temples, wear shoes in the presence of an upper caste, or drink from the same cups in tea stalls," said Smita Narula, a senior researcher with Human Rights Watch, and author of Broken People: Caste Violence Against India's "Untouchables."....

India's Untouchables are relegated to the lowest jobs, and live in constant fear of being publicly humiliated, paraded naked, beaten, and raped with impunity by upper-caste Hindus seeking to keep them in their place. Merely walking through an upper-caste neighborhood is a life-threatening offense.

Nearly 90 percent of all the poor Indians and 95 percent of all the illiterate Indians are Dalits, according to figures presented at the International Dalit Conference that took place May 16 to 18 in Vancouver, Canada.

Despite this Falter was happy to add the CAA’s voice in support of caste discrimination remaining legal in Britain. Why? Because it is similar to the discrimination that the JNF practises. India is Israel’s largest arms market. There is a close identity between the ideology of Hindutva and Zionism. Both believe in an ethno nationalist state and India is a long way down the road to becoming a second Israel with Kashmir having become the equivalent of Israel’s West Bank.

I have concentrated on the CAA, a vile Zionist organisation that sprang up in the middle of Israel’s Operation Protective Edge in the summer of 2014, when 2,200 Palestinians, including 551 children, were murdered by Israel in Gaza, to show that these Zionists are not concerned by anti-Semitism but are motivated by their desire to support and defend Israel’s war crimes.

Of course the criticism of the JNF by the BOD and liberal Zionists is hypocritical. What matters is not the individual racism of JNF trustees but the fact that the organisation itself is the main architect of Israeli apartheid. The JNF is the oldest Zionist organisation, having been founded by Theodor Herzl in 1901.

So we should salute the actions of Aberdeen University in rejecting the fake IHRA misdefinition of anti-Semitism. The fact that the openly racist and Islamaphobic CAA seeks to implement it against critics of Israel is in itself proof that the purpose of the IHRA is not to combat anti-Semitism but to redefine anti-Zionists and critics of Israeli Apartheid as anti-Semitic. Jewish critics included.

The task of those who oppose Zionism and support the Palestinians is to campaign to get universities such as Oxford and Cambridge to retract their adoption of the IHRA. If they really need a definition of anti-Semitism then the JDA is a far more suitable definition.

Tony Greenstein

University of Aberdeen votes against using IHRA definition of anti-Semitism

Billy Briggs, the Ferret, 9 October 2022

Aberdeen University has rejected a “working definition” of antisemitism as recommended by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance for governments and organisations around the world to adopt.

After a two-year consultation, the university has adopted the Jerusalem Declaration of Antisemitism (JDA) instead of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) guidance.

The move has been welcomed by a human rights group and a professor at Aberdeen University who argued that parts of the IHRA guidance “define antisemitism as any critique of the state of Israel”. He claimed this would have posed a “real threat” to his teaching.

However, the Campaign Against Antisemitism has accused Aberdeen University of taking a “scandalous position” by not adopting the IHRA definition. The Scottish Council of Jewish Communities pointed out that the IHRA definition states “criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic”.

Supporters of the IHRA definition say it is key in fighting hatred of Jews around the world.

Critics of the IHRA definition argue that it stifles free speech relating to criticism of actions and policies by the Israeli government.

The university’s Race Definitions Task and Finish Group (the Group) had proposed in May 2021 that the IHRA definition should be adopted, according to an internal university document seen by The Ferret.

However at a meeting of the university’s senate in September 2021, concerns were raised that the IHRA guidance “impinged too heavily on academic freedom and the work of academics”.

The principal concerns were it was “too vague” and “narrow in scope” and “does not serve to tackle discrimination against Jewish people”. It was also perceived as posing a “threat to academic freedom”.

The Group said: “It was noted that 100 UK universities had adopted the definition, however it was also noted that there had been recent high-profile cases which had resulted in academics losing their jobs, leading the group to discuss whether the definition had become ‘weaponised’ in the sector.”

As a result of those concerns, the IHRA recommendation was withdrawn and it was proposed the JDA should be adopted instead.

The Group noted that the JDA — which was published on March 25 2021 — was “developed largely as a response to the IHRA definition and to counteract what some saw as the failings of the IHRA definition, namely that it is said to hamper free speech and focus on the Israeli/Palestine political issues”.

The JDA provided “a fairer and clearer definition and set of guidelines” than those presented in the IHRA definition, the Group stated.

The IHRA’s working definition of antisemitism — which is non-legally binding — states: “Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.”

The IHRA says that manifestations of antisemitism include “the targeting of the state of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity”.

The JDA says that evidence-based criticism of Israel as a state is not antisemitic. “This includes its institutions and founding principles. It also includes its policies and practices, domestic and abroad, such as the conduct of Israel in the West Bank and Gaza, the role Israel plays in the region, or any other way in which, as a state, it influences events in the world,” the JDA says.

Welcoming the decision, the Aberdeen Branch of the Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign said: “By rejecting the IHRA definition in favour of the JDA, they have sent a clear message of political impartiality and opposed the undermining of academic freedom to expose human rights abuses.

“We urge all the institutions and organisations who have adopted the IHRA definition to review their stance and reject this shameful political attempt to undermine the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign against Israel and criminalise those who advocate for Palestinian rights!”

Professor David Anderson, chair in the Anthropology of the North at Aberdeen University, also welcomed the move and said: “I am so relieved that the senate did not rubber-stamp the management proposal to introduce the IHRA definition. We all stand firm against antisemitism and injustice. The fact that parts of the definition define antisemitism as any critique of the state of Israel posed a real threat to my teaching."

He added: “In my module on indigenous rights I sometimes ask the students to think through the situation of Palestinians in comparison to those suffering oppression from settler states around the world.

“Even an exercise like this, where there could be arguments for and against would likely be prosecuted under this law. Definitions like this have no place in a university. They stifle creativity and debate.”

Robbie Uriarte, a fourth year student and member of Aberdeen University Jewish Students’ Society, was involved in the consultation. He said: “We are delighted by the university’s decision to adopt the JDA definition of antisemitism. The university has worked closely with the community throughout the decision-making process. This decision demonstrates an ongoing commitment by the university to tackling antisemitism in all its forms and ensuring the University of Aberdeen continues to be a safe and welcoming environment for Jewish students.”

A spokesperson for Campaign Against Antisemitism said the Jerusalem Declaration is a “wrecking document intended to undermine the globally-recognised” IHRA definition.

They added: “The university is the only such institution in the country to take this scandalous position. In rejecting the definition that has consensus support across the Jewish community in favour of the fringe and controversial Jerusalem Declaration, the university has done the opposite of standing with British Jews and Jewish students.”

A spokesperson for the Scottish Council of Jewish Communities said: “If the critics of the IHRA Definition (originally devised by the EU Monitoring Centre for Racism and Xenophobia) had taken the trouble to read it, they would see that far from ‘defining antisemitism as any critique of the state of Israel’, it explicitly says the opposite – the second paragraph begins ‘criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic.’"

The spokesperson added: “Unfortunately however there is no shortage of antisemitism of all kinds on campuses, and universities and their staff should be at the forefront of stamping it out. If they claim to oppose racism but tolerate antisemitism of any kind, they are simply proving David Baddiel’s thesis that ‘Jews don’t count’ and indulging in second-order antisemitism.”

A spokesperson for Aberdeen University said the JDA helps to “identify, address and raise awareness of antisemitism and how it can manifest”, adding it was adopted following an extensive consultation with the “wellbeing of Jewish students” at the core of discussions.

The spokesperson added: “Working with the Aberdeen University Jewish Society and the Palestinian Society, University Senate and other staff and students, it was agreed that the university should adopt a definition of antisemitism to support its Jewish community but that wider options than the IHRA definition should be considered.

“Further consultation indicated that the JDA definition was the preferred option, noting that it offers a clear and fair definition which protects critical open debate.”

IHRA did not reply to our request for a comment.

The IHRA grew out of a task force established by Sweden, Britain and the US in 1998 to promote Holocaust education, research and remembrance. Its membership today comprises 29 European countries plus Israel, the US, Canada, Australia and Argentina.

IHRA policy is agreed at biannual meetings attended by delegates from each member country.

Thirty-eight nations have adopted or endorsed the IHRA working definition of antisemitism including the UK and US and it has been championed by various Jewish and pro-Israeli groups.

In 2019 an author of the IHRA definition — Kenneth Stern — accused right-wing Jews of using it to suppress free speech.

In January this year Palestinian lecturer, Shahd Abusalama, was suspended from teaching by Sheffield Hallam University over an anti-Israel social media post. She was accused of breaching the IHRA working definition of antisemitism, which is endorsed by the university, but reinstated a few weeks later after an investigation into antisemitism was dropped.

The Ferret understands that six higher education institutions (HEIs) in Scotland have adopted the IHRA guidance. They include the universities of Glasgow and Edinburgh.

Seven HEIs have the definition under active consideration, while six have reached the view that their existing policies on equality, diversity and antiracism are sufficient.

A spokesperson for Universities Scotland said: “There is no place for antisemitism in Scotland’s universities. There is no place for faith or race-based hate, discrimination or harassment of any kind in Scottish higher education. All institutions have policies in place that prohibit antisemitism and provide for disciplinary sanctions in cases where it occurs in the university community.”

The Scottish Government formally adopted the IHRA definition of antisemitism in June 2017.

While it is not legally binding, the Scottish Government encourages publicly funded bodies to similarly adopt the IHRA definition of antisemitism, “noting however that it is up to these bodies to make this decision for themselves”.

The UK Government has also adopted the IHRA guidance.

Earlier this year, a Jewish advisory body said that anti-Semitic incidents in Britain reached a record high in 2021, driven by reaction to a rise in violence in Israel and Gaza.

The annual report by the Community Security Trust (CST), which advises Britain’s estimated 280,000 Jews on security matters, found there had been 2255 anti-Semitic incidents reported in 2021, a rise of 34% from the previous year.

It is a Terrible Mistake for Sections of the Left to Support the Corrupt and Repressive Iranian Regime in the Name of Anti-Imperialism

Brighton demonstration in support of the Iranian womens’ struggle

I attended a demonstration today in central Brighton in support of the protests of Iranian women. There were about 200 people there comprising a mixture of forces, including supporters of the Shah of Iran and those who believe that the United States and western imperialism will come to their aid.

Brighton demonstration

It is not surprising that after 43 years of this repressive regime that many have illusions in the good intentions of the Western imperialists. If such illusions were to persist after the overthrow of the Mullahs, Iran’s population would exchange the frying pan for the fire.

And that is precisely why the anti-imperialist left in the West has a duty to support the current struggle because it is only on this basis that our warnings against trusting Biden, Israel and western imperialism can be trusted.  To side with the Mullahs would only convince Iranians that the left is their enemy.

Iranian womens protest

It would also be a terrible mistake to believe, as some on the Left do, that the ‘anti-imperialism’ of the Iranian regime demands that we sacrifice the democratic and social rights of the Iranian people for the greater good of the people of the Middle East.

The overthrow of imperialism in the Middle East cannot take place on the backs of the repression of women, national minorities and workers.  Quite the contrary, the struggle against Iran’s corrupt and brutal theocratic regime is perfectly compatible with the overthrow of US imperialism.

It is clear that the United States and Israel support the even more murderous regimes of Saudi Arabia, the Gulf and Egypt. They are hardly likely to be a supporter of democratic and workers’ rights in Iran.

It is in any case a mistake to see the Iranian or Syrian regimes as anti-imperialist. They are regimes which would be happy to make their peace with US imperialism and Israel if they had half the chance. The problem is that the US and Israel want no challenge to their regional hegemony.

Demonstrations in Iran

The sanctions that the United States has imposed on Iran have not hurt the corrupt clerics but the people of Iran. It was the same with Iraq.  Sanctions killed ordinary people not Saddam Hussein. The United States has no interest in freedom for the people of Iran.

Brighton demonstration

Some people have forgotten the Iran Contradeal under Reagan when Israel supplied Iran with billions of dollars of weaponry in return for money which was used to fund arms to the Contras who the United States were using to try and overthrow the Sandanistas in Nicaragua.

Also forgotten is that under Jimmy Carter the United States came to the aidof Ayatollah Khomeini in ensuring the loyalty of the Shah’s army in order to ward off a workers’ revolution.

On 27 January 1979, Ayatollah Khomeini... the man who called the United States ‘the Great Satan’ sent a secret message to Washington.

If President Carter could use his influence on the military to clear the way for his takeover, Khomeini... would calm the nation. Stability could be restored, America's interests and citizens in Iran would be protected.

At the time, the Iranian scene was chaotic. Protesters clashed with troops, shops were closed, public services suspended. Meanwhile, labour strikes had all but halted the flow of oil, jeopardising a vital Western interest.

Persuaded by Carter, Iran's autocratic ruler, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, had finally departed on a "vacation" abroad, leaving behind an unpopular prime minister and a military in disarray - a force of 400,000 men with heavy dependence on American arms and advice....

Khomeini told the White House not to panic at the prospect of losing a strategic ally of 37 years and assured them that he, too, would be a friend.

"You will see we are not in any particular animosity with the Americans," said Khomeini, pledging his Islamic Republic will be "a humanitarian one, which will benefit the cause of peace and tranquillity for all mankind".

Brighton Demonstration

Khomeini's message is part of a trove of newly declassified US government documents... that tell the largely unknown story of America's secret engagement with Khomeini...

This story is a detailed account of how Khomeini brokered his return to Iran using a tone of deference and amenability towards the US that has never before been revealed.

Iranian school girls chase out Basij

This is the background to the ‘anti-imperialism’ of Iran. The Iranian clerical regime is a byword in brutality, from hanging Kurdish freedom fighters, gays and others from cranes to torture and brutality. The economic policy of the mullahs could be taken out of Thatcher’s playbook. Privatisationand corruption are the order of the day.

Brighton demonstration

The Iranian workers movement has consistently fought the regime of  Ayatollah Khameini.  Workers representatives have been repeatedly arrested, torturedand in some cases executed. There is nothing progressive in this regime.

Ayatollah Khameini

The Iranian regime would happily come to terms with the Zionist regime in Tel Aviv given half the chance but Israeli leaders prefer confrontation as a means of ensuring their regional hegemony.

Of course the politics of the protesters in Iran differ enormously. There are supporters of the Shah, people who believe that Biden is sincere when he pledges his support as well as revolutionary workers and students. What is essential is that workers and students in Iran retain their independence and don’t align themselves with forces which will undoubtedly turn against them when the time is right.

police sexual assault on Iranian woman

The United States and Israel don’t want to see a revolutionary workers’ regime replace the regime now in power. They wish to replace the theocratic regime with a regime that does their bidding whilst keeping the repressive apparatus of the state in place.

Above all it is for Iranian socialists and communists to make this point and win over the Iranian masses. No revolution is pure and the protests in Iran are taking on a revolutionary form.  However to support the reactionary rulers of Iran is the precise opposite of socialist solidarity and anti-imperialism.

The current wave of protests began on September 16 after the murder of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, following her arrest by Morality Police for not wearing her hijab ‘properly’. Since then, dozens of videos posted online show schoolgirls protesting in their schools and in the streets, chanting, waving, and burningtheir head coverings.

ripping up Ayatollah Khomeini's picture

Nika Shakarami was 16 when she burned her headscarf at a Tehran protest. She was last seen alive on September 20 being followed by security forces. The government claims she fell from a building, the same fate of Sarina Esmailzadeh, also 16, in Karaj, west of the capital on September 24. According to media reports, both families were pressured not to contradict the official story.

As of October 11, the Iran-based Society to Support Children claims that 28 children have been killed during the protests, most in Sistan and Baluchistan province, and 9 children have been named by rights groups and media outlets as having been killed by security forces.

I do not see how anti-imperialists and socialists can condemn Israel for shooting dead children and civilian protestors and then turn a blind eye to Iranian state repression. Socialism is not built on hypocrisy.

Police Thugs Attack Woman

The deputy commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps stated on October 5 that“the average age of most people detained during the protests is 15.” This in itself should tell people something about the nature of the protests.  It is as much a youth rebellion against the Tyrants of Tehran.

The repression has fuelled outrage among Iranian youth. Videos on social media show that in Saqez, the home of Mahsa Amini, scores of schoolgirls marched through the streets in protest, while girls in Karaj crowded a man, an official – out of their school gate, chanting “Dishonorable.” In another video on Twitter, schoolgirls remove their head coverings and chant against a man from the Basij, a volunteer paramilitary force that is part of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, who had come to the school to speak about the Mahsa Amini protests.  

Senior officials claim that youth have been “trapped” by exposure to the internet, but videos posted online indicate the schoolgirls’ stand is earning solidarity: men and women are seen joining them, and boys are burning headscarves too.

In July, a video began circulating online of an altercation between two women on a Tehran bus. One, in full hijab, attacks the other, a 28-year-old called Sepideh Rashno, for not wearing a hijab.

In the weeks leading up to the incident, footage of similar episodes had been spreading with increased frequency online, evidence of the growing pressure being exerted on women by the regime. But this particular video went viral, and led to Rashno being arrested, abused and forced into making an apology on state television.

For a few weeks, Rashno was the face of a crackdown on women’s freedom in Iran that has intensified, sometimes violently, in the last year. Her arrest was

“a turning point for many women who had been resisting the morality police and fighting the mandatory hijab and slowly pushing the limits of what the state considered proper attire

said Negar Mortazavi, an Iranian journalist and political analyst.

When news broke of Mahsa Amini’s death protests that began outside the hospital where she died spread across Iran within a week. Women burned their headscarves and cut their hair, leading the protests in which thousands of Iranians demanded the end of Ayatollah Khamenei’s rule and chanted Amini’s name.

The hijab is not just a piece of cloth. It’s one of the key pillars of the ideology of the Mullah’s regime. One of the most striking images of these protests is the sight of schoolgirls hanging signs that read “woman, life, freedom” in classrooms. 

“It takes immense courage and bravery for any woman to do this, but especially for young girls who are risking arrest, expulsion from school, and even death when joining these protests,”

said Mortazavi.

Among the over 200 people who have been killed by Iranian state security during these protests is Nika Shakarami, a 16-year-old whose death has been shrouded in disinformation. Her family have described being threatened for going public about her death.

Her mother told journalists she received a call from Nika who said she was running away from security officials before her phone went dead. The family went looking for her at hospitals and police stations but were told they had no one with that name. Meanwhile, videos of her singing and joking around were shared around the world.

Nine days later, the police showed images to her mother to confirm that the dead body in the photograph was Nika. “Her cheeks were broken. Her teeth were broken. She had received a severe blow behind her head, and her skull was dented,” her mother said.

The Iranian government says Nika was thrown from the top of a building and died and that it is a criminal matter and has nothing to do with the protests and security forces. In her burial certificate, obtained by BBC Persian, the cause of death is stated as multiple blows caused by a hard object.

“This has been part of the regime’s playbook in previous crackdowns of mass protests where security forces commit brutal violence against protesters, while denying that violence and those who are killed by it. It happened in 2009 with the state trying to deny that Neda Agha-Soltan and other protesters were killed by security forces, it happened again in 2019.”

Religious Zionism – a Jewish Nazi Party - is Set to Become the 3^rd largest party in the next Knesset

Jewish Power poster - may our enemies be gone

On November 1^stIsrael will have its fifth general election in three years and it is unlikely, even then, that a stable government will be formed. Israeli politics are drifting inexorably to the far-Right as the number of settlers in the Religious Zionism West Bank and East Jerusalem gain a critical mass (about 700,000).

In June 2021 in House built on sand I wrote that ‘It would be a brave person who gave this government even a year before it breaks up.’[1]As it turned out the Anyone But Netanyahu coalition of the Zionist ‘left’ and ‘right’, including one Arab party, the United Arab List (Ra’am) lasted one year and ten days.

Zionism was always at its heart a form of political Messianism. It rested on the belief that Palestine had been given by god to the Jews and it was through settlement, the ‘return’ of the Jews and the rebuilding of the third temple that the Messiah would return. Religious Zionism in Zionism’s early years was very much a minority amongst the Orthodox as it developed a theology in which irreligious even atheistic nationalist Jews would nonetheless do god’s work.[2]

Opinion Poll for 2022 elections

In fact messianic religious Zionists bear an uncanny similarity to their Christian counterparts who also rest their believe in salvation on the Jews return.

David Ben Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister explained in October 1941 as the holocaust was getting under way, that it was the role of Zionism ‘to cast the great Jewish tragedy in prodigious moulds of redemption.’ [3]   Zionism had ‘redemption’ and rebirth at its core and through redemption one would obtain salvation, politically and religiously.

This is the backdrop to the formation of Israel’s present governing coalition under first Naftali Bennett and now Yair Lapid. Although the coalition consists of 13 representatives of the Zionist ‘left’ (7 Labor, 6 Meretz) it has been the Right that has dictated the agenda. Indeed it is difficult to think of a single political gain or achievement that the Zionist ‘left’ has made from entering this coalition, apart from keeping Netanyahu at bay. One reason for this is that the Zionist ‘left’ has no separate agenda from its ‘right-wing’ counterparts.

In April the defectionof Idit Silman of the far-right religious nationalist party Yamina caused the coalition to lose its wafer thin majority of 61-59.[4]In June Coalition Whip Nir Orbach also defected making an election almost inevitable.[5]

The Knesset

But the issue that caused the Coalition to collapse was the Emergency Regulations that the Knesset is obliged to pass every 5 years in order to ensure that Israeli civil law applies to the settlers and military law to the Palestinians.

These Regulations have been enacted ever since the occupation of the Palestinian territories in 1967. They are the legal basis of Apartheid in the West Bank by creating two parallel legal systems – one for Jewish settlers and another for Palestinians.

You would expect the Zionist left and in particular Meretz, which supports a two-state solution, to be implacably opposed to such legislation. After all they are the legal basis of the Occupation that they purportedly oppose.

Not a bit of it.  Not only did five Meretz MKs go into the voting lobby alongside the Zionist Right but they turned against their sixth member, Ghaida Rinawie Zoabi, whose vote against the Regulations, alongside that of Ra’am MK Mazen Ghanaim, sealed the fate of the Coalition.

You might have thought that her four Jewish colleagues in Meretz would have understood and sympathised with Zoabi’s dilemma.  Not a bit of it. Health Minister and Meretz leader Nitzan Horowitz attacked Zoabi in an interview with the Army Radio calling her resignation from the coalition "disgusting and dishonest behavior." He went on to say that

"We have no connection to this woman. She lost her way, even in our politics, in which people do dishonest things, I think it's an act that has really crossed all the red lines."[6]

Likud and its partners, for tactical reasons, voted against the regulations making an election inevitable since, in an election period, the regulations are automatically extended. Meretz couldn’t countenance a situation in which Palestinians and Jewish settlers achieved legal equality because, their support for a two state solution notwithstanding, they are not opposed to the Occupation and at no time have they called for a unilateral withdrawal from the West Bank.

Not content with this Jewish activists from Meretz picketed Zoabi’s home in Nof Hagalil calling on her to resign as an MK. The reasons being that her actions could ‘lead to a government of darkness.’ [7]

The protesters said Zoabi’s conduct could bring down the coalition “and lead to a government of darkness led by [Itamar] Ben Gvir, [Bezalel] Smotrich and [Benjamin] Netanyahu”. Images from the demonstration in the northern town of Nof Hagalil showed a handful of protesters near Rinawie Zoabi’s home.

Ahead of the protest, Kan news said that Meretz and Ra’am told Bennett that they had lost control of Zoabi and Ghanaim, who rejected calls to resign and promised to vote against the bill if it was brought to a vote again.

A similar crisis was narrowly avoided in July 2021 when the Coalition failed to enact the Citizenship and Entry into Israellaw. On that occasion two members of Raam, Mazen Ghnaim and Said al-Harumi, abstained resulting in the law falling as 59 members voted for the law and the same number voting against it. The law, first enacted in 2003 and renewed every year, aims at preventing Israeli Palestinians from bringing into Israel spouses from the Occupied Territories and granting them resident status. Although justified as a security precaution its primary aim is demographic, to prevent the dilution of Israel’s Jewish majority.[8]

Both Zoabi and Ghanaim were pressurised to resign after voting with the opposition. Ra’am’s three other Knesset members abstained, as did rebel Yamina MK Idit Silman. The bill failed to pass by 58-52.

Although predictions are hard to make, on the basis of opinion polls Netanyahu is more likely to be able to cobble together a narrow coalition than his rivals. Likud is predicted to gain 1 or 2 more seats from its present 30, the Orthodox Haredi parties are likely to stay the same (15) and the Labour Zionist are predicted to lose 3 of their current 13. Yesh Atid, the ‘centrist’ (in Israeli terms) party of current Prime Minister Lapid is forecast to gain 7 seats. The former New Hope, led by Gideon Saar, formerly of Likud and Benny Gantz, of Blue and White have combined to form the National Unity Party. They are predicted to lose two seats.

The Arab parties Hadash-Ta’al and Ra’am are predicted to gain 8 seats, down two.  However it is extremely disappointing that the Arab nationalist party Balad, which is explicitly in favour of Israel as a state of all its citizens was forced to break from the Joint List. Interestingly Balad has put Jewish actor Einat Weitzman on its list in 6^thplace.

The forecast number of seats for what remains of the Joint List and Ra’am, which split from the Joint List in the 2021 elections, is down from 15 in March 2020 when the Joint List became the third largest block in the Knesset. Ra’am, led by Mansour Abbas is the political wing of the Southern Islamic Movement and a conservative party that seeks to achieve concessions for Israeli Palestinians, in particular the unrecognised Bedouin villages in the Negev by agreeing to hold its nose and support nakedly racist legislation when applied to Palestinians under occupation.

However the main feature of the election is the prediction that the Religious Zionism party of Bezalel Smotrich, in conjunction with the Jewish Nazi party Otzma Yehudit of Ben Gvir is predicted to more than double its number of seats from 6 to 13.

Ben Gvir is a supporter of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane of Kach, who supported making sexual relations between Jewish women and Arab males a criminal offence punishable by 5 years imprisonment. A ‘crime’ straight out of the Nazi Nuremberg Laws and what was known as Rassenchande (racial hygiene). Kahane was explicit in calling for the expulsion of all Israel’s Arabs. Until recently Gvir had on the wall of his home a poster of Baruch Goldstein, a Jewish settler who opened fire in 1994 on Palestinians worshipping in the Ibrahimi mosque in Hebron killing 29.[9]

Gvir has recently tried to tone down his image claiming that he is ‘only’ in favour of expelling ‘disloyal’ Palestinian citizens of Israel but since most Palestinians don’t accept that Israel should be a state only of its Jewish citizens this is just playing with words.

It is clear though from Israel’s equivalent of 60 minutes and a defector from the settler Hilltop Youth, Ronit Chem, that Ben Gvir has been up to his eyes in fomenting Jewish terrorist attacks against Palestinian civilians in the West Bank.[10]

However the fact that more than 10% of Israelis can entertain voting for a party which wants to be rid of Israel’s Arab citizens demonstrates the direction that Israel, as a Jewish state, is taking. The obsession with demography and racial purity, is common to all wings of Zionism. From Meretz to Likud there is a consensus that Israel is a Jewish state and there should be separation from the Arabs.  The belief that Jews and Arabs cannot live together in one state with equal rights is common to all Zionist parties.

Is it any wonder that those with radical solutions to the ‘problem’ of Israel Palestinian minority should prove attractive. Their simple ‘solution’ to the Arab problem is their transfer.

What is shocking is that the Kibbutzim, formerly the bastion of Labour Zionism, are inviting Gvir to address them during the elections.[11] But if the present situation is bad then future developments in the Zionist state all point to the openly fascist wing of Zionism, which Ben Gvir and Religious Zionism represent, becoming even stronger. Some 30-40% of young Israeli Jews support Religious Zionism.[12]

The leader of the Religious Zionism coalition, Bezalel Smotrich, is little better than the rabble rousing Ben Gvir. Smotrich called for a ban on Arab parties on the grounds that Israel’s Palestinians might massacre the Jews.[13]

And the third wing of the holy trinity that is Religious Zionism is the anti-gay party Noam, whose inspiration is Rabbi Thau. The person who was the marriage broker who oversaw the inclusion of Noam in Religious Zionism was none other than Benjamin Netanyahu who when he visits the West engages in pink washing, pretending that Israel is a welcoming place to be if you are gay.[14]  As Yossi Verter of Ha’aretz wrote: ‘In going to Rabbi Zvi Thau, Noam’s spiritual leader, Netanyahu “lost whatever was left of his liberal, enlightened humanity.”

As the Israel state moves further to the religious right it is also becoming more anti-gay. The chances for example of gay marriage in Israel being enacted are minus zero. After all it is impossible for a Jew and an Arab to marry in Israel let alone two people of the same sex.

The Israel lobby in the U.S. is already terrified at the potential damage that Ben Gvir will do to Israel’s already deteriorating image. Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NY), a pro-Israel Democrat, has already warnedNetanyahu that he has “serious concerns” about including “extremist and polarizing individuals like Ben Gvir” in the government. Rep. Brad Sherman has called for Gvir to be ostracisednot included. None of this however has affected the New York Times, which like the reaction of the British media to Al Jazeera’s Labour Files has found a simple solution to the problem of a Jewish Nazi being a government minister in Israel.  It simply says nothing! [15]

What is clear is that given the pivotal position that Religious Zionism is likely to hold in a Netanyahu government it is likely to hold a number of ministries. Smotrich has said that he will be seeking the defence, finance and justice portfolios.  In other words the Minister in charge of Justice will come from a party of pogromists and open racists.[16]

Zionism and its racism, once hidden but now open is today openly proclaiming its intentions, shorn of all the euphemisms and subterfuge of the Labour Zionists. Unlike the pretence of Meretz and the Israeli Labor Party that you could reconcile a Jewish State and a Democratic State Ben Gvir and Smotrich are now open in their belief that Israel should, first and foremost be a racially pure Jewish state.  Democracy is for the Gentiles. After all there is nothing in the Bible about democracy!

But we should be clear. Those who cleared the path to the Kahanes, Gvirs and Smotrich’s were those ‘liberal’ Zionists who moved heaven and earth to whitewash Zionism. It is the Louise Ellmans and Ruth Smeeths, the Jewish Labour Movement and the Board of Deputies who spent their political capital accusing opponents of Zionism of being ‘anti-Semites’, a charge intended to intimidate Israel’s critics.

It was the Labor Zionists who organised the Nakba who gave way to Likud and now Religious Zionism. Even in the coalition government it was Labor Security Minister Omar Bar-Lev who gave the okay to thousands of settler youth marching through Arab East Jerusalem on Jerusalem Day chanting ‘death to the Arabs’ whilst attacking Palestinians who lived there.  Just as two years ago it was Netanyahu who vetoed such a march.

Today we see where Zionism has ended up – in a Jewish state whose government includes an openly Jewish Nazi Party.

Tony Greenstein

 ALSO - A Roundup of Life in the ‘Only Democracy in the Middle East’ and the attack of 4 Border Police Thugs on a 16 Year Old Palestinian Boy

Readers of this blog may know that about 6 months ago I was forced to moderate comments, not because I want to prevent people who I disagree with posting but because a foul mouthed Zionist, who is clearly psychologically disturbed, who began posting a series of vile posts in which he carries on an imaginary conversation with me.

The latest comment of his takes pleasure in the murder of 5 Palestinian youth in Nablus this week by the Israeli Occupation Forces. I post a number of his comments to demonstrate the depths of sickness of some Zionist minds.

It is clear that this freak, lacking anyone to converse with, has taken refuge in an imaginary conversation with me. The chore of deleting his idiotic comments, in addition to having to sift out genuine comments from the abusive, mean that I would like, if possible to be able to block the nutter through his ISP.

It has been suggested that he might be Paul Besser, former Intelligence Officer (despite being anything but intelligent) for the  neo-Nazi Britain First. Jonathan Hoffman, the former Zionist Federation Vice-President is a friend of him and he operates in the netherworld of Zionist supporters of the EDL and Tommy Robinson.

Nutter’s comments do though given an insight into the sickness that infects so many Zionist minds. He protests the killing of civilians in the Ukraine and Iran but rejoices over the murder of civilians by Israel or ‘the Jews’ as this racist would have it. He also adopts the persona of other activists like Asa Winstanley in an effort to fool me.

Not being technically minded I thought I’d make the problem public.

My apologies for not having posted a blog in the past week. There are two reasons for this.  Firstly I am engaged in the final preparations for the issue of my book Zionism During the Holocaust and secondly I am working on a long blog on Al Jazeera’s Labour Files which has necessitated me watching all four episodes again and taking notes.

A Roundup of Life in the ‘Only Democracy in the Middle East’

Israeli and Palestinian flags waved at demonstrations at Ben-Gurion University in the southern city of Be'er Sheva, in May.Credit: Eliyahu Hershkovitz 

There are so many stories about the iniquities of the world’s only apartheid state that it is sometimes hard to know where to start. A good place might be the contempt that Israeli universities have for freedom of speech when it comes to Palestinian students.

Watan Madi, a member of the Communist  Party of Israel, Hadash, has been found guilty of the heinous crime of quoting the word ‘Martyr’from a poem by Mahmoud Darwish, the Palestinian national poet. The idea that Palestinians have martyrs as opposed to being terrorists is something that Israeli universities have difficulties understanding.

So when someone complains about the Academic Boycott you can tell them that as long as Israeli universities are complicit in Israeli apartheid and its military occupation so long will they be the target of Boycott. The complaint against Watan was made by Im Tirzu, a group which even the Jerusalem District court foundto be fascist. See:

Student Convicted of Disobeying Campus Authorities Over Mahmoud Darwish Quote

The exterior of ruruHaus, one of the venues hosting documenta fifteen in Kassel, Germany, June 16, 2022. (Baummapper/CC BY-SA 3.0 DE)

Uniting behind Palestinians, German art festival hits back at antisemitism charges

There is also a good article in Israel’s +972 Magazine about a pushback against attempts in Germany to ban Palestinian artists from an art festival documenta fifteen.

One of the ironies of politics in Germany today is that it is the neo-Nazis who are the most ardent supporters of Zionism. The German state itself, is eager to offload its guilt over the Holocaust onto the Palestinians by painting the victims of Israeli ethnic cleansing as no better than Nazis.

Perhaps someone can remind German politicians that when Hitler was in power the policy of the Nazis was to single out the Zionist movement, which represented no more than 2% of German Jews, for favourable treatment. So the present day demonisation of Palestinians by the German state and their support for Zionist attacks on Palestinians are really no different from the policy of Hitler!

Curators and artists at the renowned documenta fifteen exhibition faced a torrent of denunciations, including from German officials, for hosting Palestinian collectives and exhibits on Palestine solidarity.

By Hebh JamalOctober 24, 2022

For months prior to opening day, documenta fifteen— the 15th edition of one of the world’s largest art festivals — had been the subject of a major smear campaign by the German media. Held from June 18 until Sept. 25 in Kassel, Germany, the festival’s organizers were accused of antisemitism, primarily relating to issues around Palestine-Israel, leading many artists involved to believe the quinquennial exhibition was doomed from the very start.

Art on display at documenta fifteen, Kassel, Germany, June 17, 2022. (Birte Fritsch/CC BY 2.0)

While Palestine-Israel played a marginal role in the months-long exhibition, Ruangrupa faced a torrent of criticism, including from German political officials, for showcasing allegedly antisemitic collectives, as well as pressure to shut down an exhibit by Palestinian artists.

Read on

Protestor holding a sign against the far-right party Alternative for Germany (AfD) in Berlin. June 9, 2018. (Hossam el-Hamalawy/Flickr)

Bloodstains and Destruction at This Palestinian Home Tell the Whole Story 

I am also copying an article from Gideon Levy and Alex Levac in Ha’aretz. The home of a Palestinian living in East Jerusalem was raided by 4 thugs from the Border Police. They wanted to arrest a 16 year old boy, Shadi Khoury who was living with his parents.

The boy asked them to leave while he got dressed and this was the cue for a vicious assault on him by 4 grown adults equipped with batons etc.

The Police, when contacted by Ha’aretz of course had their lies already prepared:

The suspect was arrested on suspicion of his involvement in a serious violent event in which Jewish vehicles were attacked and stoned in Beit Hanina last week. During his arrest, [which was backed] by a court order, he attacked the police officers with his fists and by kicking, and he pushed, went wild and tried actively to prevent the execution of the arrest.

And if you believe that then I’m a Martian.  Note the term ‘Jewish vehicles’. It’s the first time that vehicles have been know to adopt a religion!

The Jerusalem Magistrates Court, which regularly frees on bail Jewish terrorists accused of attacking Palestinians bought this Police story wholesale and continued to remand Shadi in custody.

https://youtu.be/JG8uoO3P5xc

Jeremy Corbyn, in one of his more idiotic statements, praised the separation of the judiciary from the legislature in Israel. The reality is that there is no separation. Israeli courts have always been a rubber stamp for Zionist land theft and the military repression of the Palestinians.

Israel’s thuggish Border Police raided the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Beit Hanina to arrest Shadi Khoury. When the 16-year-old refused to disrobe in their presence, he was beaten in front of his parents, then taken away. No one told the parents – who both run local cultural institutions – why their son was arrested

Shadi Khoury's mother, Raina. He began screaming as he was beaten. His mother tried intervening: "He’s a boy, give him two minutes to get dressed." Nothing helped. Credit: Alex Levac

Oct 22, 2022

Blotches of blood streak the spacious, elegant mansion. Wherever the police dragged their victim, he left behind a narrow trail of drops of blood, drop after drop, as though to mark the path of the arrest and the beatings. The boy screamed; the neighbors heard his shouts and were terrified.

Beit Hanina is an affluent and relatively quiet neighborhood, and it’s not every day that violent events like this occur there. The youth involved, Shadi Khoury, lives with his parents and older brother in a family compound on a street that bears the name of one of the family’s forebears, Yusuf Khoury, the engineer who founded the street and this handsome group of homes on the northern slopes of Jerusalem.

Everything is stained with blood. The rug in his room, the marble floor in the corridor, the stairs, the yard, the garden and the street, even a paper ticket on his table is bloodied.

When we arrived, a few hours after Shadi’s brutal arrest, this past Tuesday, the blood hadn’t yet dried and the family was distraught. Shadi Khoury, 16, an 11th-grader at the Quakers Friends School in Ramallah, was forcibly taken into custody, barefoot and in his pyjamas. When the police ordered him to get dressed, he refused to disrobe in front of them and requested them to leave him momentarily in his room, whose windows are barred. In response, the officers started to beat him savagely – four hooligans in black, hunched over a terrified youth and pounding him with their fists, on his head, his face, his chest. All while his parents watched, appalled, unable to come to the aid of their son. Imagine if it was your children.

Early Tuesday morning, I got a phone call from Lora Khoury, a 91-year-old woman who reads Haaretz and occasionally calls to comment, but who this time was overcome with emotion. Her neighbors’ son – they are her relatives – had been arrested before dawn, and she heard his screaming in her home, a luxurious structure a few houses away from theirs.

“They come to make an arrest, so why do they hit people? What kind of army and what kind of police did you create for yourselves?” she asked in her excellent English. When we arrived, this elegant woman was waiting for us at the entrance to her house and she led us to Shadi’s home. This is an attractive compound of several stone homes owned by the extended Khoury family and other families, amid well-tended gardens and paths, shaded by pine and olive trees. The wealth and the stylishness are apparent, but understated.

The way to Shadi’s room is dotted with his blood, and the room itself is in a state of chaos following the violent police search. Everything is scattered on the floor in this teenager’s room – clothes, books, among them textbooks about film, history and literature; the posters have been ripped from the walls. The raiders hurled the standing fan and mattress onto the floor, and then jumped on the wooden bed frame until it broke, according to the parents who were present. 

In the living room is a large library, the furniture is European in design, refined. A framed, American-style wedding photo stands on a chest; it was taken at the wedding of Shadi’s sister, Zeina, in the Catholic church in Jericho, three years ago. Shadi is standing on the right, in a black suit and a bow tie. He’s the youngest child of Rania, the director of the Gideon Levy and Alex Levac in Ha’aretz Jerusalem Magistrates Court, Jeremy Corbyn, Beit Hanina Yusuf Khoury, Quakers Friends School in Ramallah Lora Khoury, Jericho, Yabous Cultural Center in East Jerusalem, and Suhail, a composer and musician and the general director of the Edward Said National Conservatory of Music, also in East Jerusalem (it also has another four branches). The couple have three other children: another son, Yusuf, 18, who this year began architecture studies at Bir Zeit University; and two daughters – Rand, 21, a musician who is a veterinary student in Hungary; and Zeina, a musician who is the director of the Palestine Youth Orchestra and is holding her newborn baby when we visit.

On Monday this week, Shadi went to sleep around 11 P.M. “He has school,” his mother says. “Had school,” a relative corrects her. Everyone in this house, whether elderly or young, speaks fluent English.

At 5:45 A.M. on Tuesday the family awoke to pounding on the door and incessant ringing of the doorbell. Together with their German shepherd, the parents, in their pajamas and groggy with sleep, opened the door, with Shadi and Yusuf standing behind them. The callers were six black-clad, armed police officers, who ordered them to remove the dog. They had smashed the parking barrier on their way into the compound and had tried to get to the main entrance of the house, but it is accessible only with an entry code, so they came in from the back, entering the stairwell.

“Who is Shadi?” they asked. “You? Yalla, you’re under detention.”

They told the family to take them to Shadi’s room, into which the men in black now squeezed, along with the teenager and his parents. Suhail asked to see an arrest warrant; they showed him a document in Hebrew, which he can’t read. “And do you have a search warrant?” he asked. One of the officers in black replied, “We have a warrant for everything.” The parents tried to argue that the 16-year-old had the rights of a minor, to which the reply was, “We know the law. Don’t teach us.’

They demanded Shadi’s cell phone, he said he would give it to them but wouldn’t unlock it. They then ordered Shadi to get dressed in order to be taken into custody, but before putting on his underwear he had to take off his pajamas. He refused to undress in their presence. The officers began shouting, before knocking Shadi to the floor, at which point four of them began to pummel him. Four against one.

Shadi started to scream, they went on beating him. His mother tried to intervene: “He’s a boy, give him two minutes to get dressed.” Nothing helped.

He was dragged outside, in his bare feet. On the street were Border Police vehicles and other officers. Shadi hands were bound behind his back, and he was blindfolded with a rag – standard procedure. He went on screaming. His parents are certain the officers went on hitting him in the vehicle.

It’s not clear where he bled from, but later that morning the stains and drops remained everywhere. The force left with their booty. They told the parents that they were taking him to the detention facility in the Russian Compound, in downtown Jerusalem. Suhail left immediately in the wake of his son; Rania was afraid to go outside – she doesn’t have a residency permit in her city.

On July 22, 2020, units of the Israel Defense Forces had invaded the two cultural institutions that Suhail and Rania manage, confiscated equipment and shut them down. That was preceded by the arrest of the two parents in their home – the same house they raided this week to detain their son. The couple were released after being questioned about the cultural centers they run and their sources of financing, but Rania’s temporary-residency permit, which she received within the framework of a family unification request, was revoked, and since then she has been waging a legal struggle to remain in her home.

Rania was born in Bethlehem, and since 1998 she has been living in Jerusalem with her husband and children, on a temporary permit. She appealed the cancellation of the permit through the Hamoked Center for the Defense of the Individual, and her expulsion was suspended until the conclusion of legal proceedings. Now she’s reluctant even to go into the street, fearing she will be expelled. She can’t visit her family in Bethlehem, because she might not be allowed back in, and they can’t visit her, because they don’t have entry permits for Jerusalem. After the interrogation and the shuttering of the institutions – they have since reopened – Suhail wrote an article and posted it in the social media with the headline, “We love Beethoven.”

A police spokesperson this week stated in response to a query from Haaretz:

“This is what a distorted description of reality looks like. The suspect was arrested on suspicion of his involvement in a serious violent event in which Jewish vehicles were attacked and stoned in Beit Hanina last week. During his arrest, [which was backed] by a court order, he attacked the police officers with his fists and by kicking, and he pushed, went wild and tried actively to prevent the execution of the arrest.

“The members of his family who were in the house at the time also tried to thwart execution of the arrest. As a result of the suspect’s grave and unacceptable behavior, the police officers were compelled to use force in order to subdue him, stop the attack on them and complete the execution of the arrest. Following his arrest he was taken for questioning by the police, and he will be brought to court for a remand and for the full course of the law to be taken against him.”

One’s heart goes out to the naïve and innocent guys in black from the Israel Police. A boy of 16 “attacked” them, they say – and his father, the composer, and his mother, who runs a cultural center, also joined in. And maybe Lora, the elderly neighbor and relative, also took part in the wild attack on the keepers of the law. A brief acquaintance with the occupants of this house is sufficient to grasp how ludicrous the claims of the police are.

Around dusk on Tuesday, Shadi was ordered remanded for 48 hours. All that day his father stood on the street, outside “Room No. 4,” the notorious interrogation facility in the Russian Compound in downtown Jerusalem, to which Shadi was taken.

When asked on Thursday for an update on her son’s situation, Raina Khoury reported that her husband and the other children had had been in court that day when Shadi’s detention was extended through Sunday, a decision his lawyer is appealing. “I’ll keep you posted,” she said.

The Labour Files is Janus Faced – its revelations about Starmer’s Police State of a Party contradict the lie that Labour had an anti-Semitism problem

I decided that rather than write an instant review of Al Jazeera’s Labour Files that I would first watch them again.

Although they don’t explain how they obtained them, Al Jazeera received the largest leak of internal files of a political party in history. They reveal that in the fight to overturn the election of Jeremy Corbyn, there was no tactic that was too dirty, no lie that was too far-fetched, no smear that was too outrageous and no crime that was not worth committing.

Corbyn was the victim of his own disciplinary machinery 

It is to be hoped that people other than those featured will be given an opportunity to access these files and see what was the real reason behind their expulsion and the lies and deceptions behind it. I would be interested to know whether I was given every document in my Subject Access Request.  Hopefully Al Jazeera will set up an on-line database for all to access. I have raised this with producer, Richard Sanders.

From the day of his election the Labour Right and the British Establishment were determined to remove Corbyn. At first the Establishment’s prostitute press, led by the Guardian, cast around for a suitable weapon – Republicanism, support for Terrorism, spying for Communists, the Economy and Homophobia.

However all of the above had a limited purchase. ‘Anti-Semitism’ provided the right combination of moral righteousness which, when allied to identity politics and masquerading as anti-racism, packed a punch like no other. Anti-Semitism had been raisedby the Daily Mail and Guardian even before Corbyn was elected.  It became the tried and trusted weapon of the Labour Right before Starmer decided that proscribing organisations retrospectively and expelling anyone associated with them was an easier route to being rid of the Left.

After all who doesn’t condemn anti-Semitism? Even the foulest racists like Tommy Robinson would protest that they aren’t anti-Semitic. Why?  Because the myth has been created that Jews and only Jews were victims of the Holocaust. A myth that the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust assiduously promotes.

Eric Pickles -a racist who opposes 'antisemitism' but loves Zionism

The extermination of the Gypsies and Disabled, who were murdered in the same proportion as Europe’s Jews, barely gets a mention. That is why notoriousanti-Gypsy racist Eric Pickles, former Chair of Conservative Friends of Israel, can become the British delegate to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance.

There are so many allegations of wrongdoing, corruption, rigging of elections, dishonesty, bullying and lawlessness in the Labour Files concerning Starmer’s Labour Party that genuine journalists in a free press would spend weeks investigating them. Instead The Guardian has clearly taken an editorial decision to ignore the Labour Files. Its fake radical journalists, Chakrabarti, Owen Jones and George Monbiot, have never once sought to challenge this censorship.  Why? 

What is revealed in The Labour Files demonstrates that for four long years Jonathan Freedland, Raphael Behr, Marina Hyde and co. engaged in Black Propaganda worthy of the press in a police state. Freedland and his fellow presstitutes practised disinformation on an industrial scale. Stopping the Labour Party falling into the hands of those determined to challenge the neo-liberal consensus struck fear into the hearts of the liberal Establishment..

There are a number of conclusions that can be drawn from the Al Jazeera programmes but the main one is that Corbyn’s promise of ‘kinder, gentler politics’ was precisely the wrong approach to adopt to a vicious and feral Labour Right who would do anything in order to ensure that Labour remained a safe, alternative party of capitalism.

The second conclusion flows from the first. Instead of pushing back against the fake ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign the Labour Left, with notable exceptions such as Labour Against the Witchhunt and Chris Williamson MP, accepted the allegations as made in good faith and went about demonising good anti-racists and anti-imperialists who were under attack by apologists for apartheid.

Corbyn and Judas Jennie

Particularly shameful in this respect was Jennie Formby, aptly called Judas Jennie by Chris Williamson. From a position of support for the Palestinians and opposition to Zionism, to the extent of questioning Baroness Royal’s chairing the inquiry into ‘anti-Semitism’ at Oxford University Labour Club in January 2016 she became the most rabid of witch-hunters.

It was Formby who insisted that Chris cancel a showing of the film ‘Witchhunt’at the House of Commons in 2019. Why?  Because it contradicted the Zionists’ ‘anti-Semitism’ narrative.  Instead of resisting the Zionists’ attempts to cancel any opinion bar their own, instead of asking why the Jewish Labour Movement were so keen that the film should not be shown, JJ became a McCarthyist.

Even worse, when Tom Watson called for Williamson to be resuspended after he had been reinstated by an NEC Panel, instead of defending due process JJ hurried to comply. And when it seemed likely that the High Court would overturn this outrageous breach of natural justice JJ then resuspended Chris for having given offence to Margaret Hodge. JJ also declared, that motions condemning Chris’s suspension were ‘not competent’.

When Corbyn was also suspended Starmer and Evans used the same trick, declaring that motions of solidarity were ‘not competent’. Thus Corbyn and JJ laid the ground for what was to follow! Likewise when she and Corbyn proposed fast track expulsions.

But the major failure belonged to Corbyn himself. Corbyn repeatedly stressed his opposition to anti-Semitism without once understanding that when Zionists and the Board of Deputies talk about ‘anti-Semitism’ what they really mean is anti-Zionism and opposition to Israeli Apartheid. Which was why all of Corbyn’s protestations made no impact. They entirely missed the point.

And by promising to ratchet up the number of expulsions Corbyn and JJ gave credence to the idea that there was some truth in what was being alleged about anti-Semitism in the Labour Party. From the start they assumed that the allegations were being made in good faith. Corbyn’s emphasised that the fight against anti-Semitism was an ‘absolute priority’meaning that genuine anti-Black and Islamaphobia was not a priority.

In any case anti-Semitism in Britain is a prejudice not a form of racism, which is allied to state power. Jews don’t suffer from institutional racism, police violence, economic discrimination or fascist attacks unlike Black and other ethnic minorities. Jews are the most privileged section of the White population. There is no offence of Driving Whilst Jewish unlike Driving Whilst Black.

Not once did Corbyn or McDonnell (who played a particularly disgraceful role) appreciate that when the Board of Deputies talked of anti-Semitism that they meant was something entirely different. It wouldn’t have taken much effort to look up Clause 3d of the Board of Deputies Constitution which statesthat the Board shall:

Take such appropriate action as lies within its power to advance Israel's security, welfare and standing.

The only MP who got it was Chris Williamson whose omission from The Labour Files, along with Ken Livingstone is all the more surprising.

One person comes out particularly well from the Labour Files for the coherence of her argument and as a spokesperson for the Palestine solidarity movement in Britain. I refer to Huda Amori, one of the leaders of Palestine Action.  It is ironic that Ben Jamal and Palestine Solidarity Campaign is nowhere to be seen.  That is because they said nothing and did nothing throughout the entire period. ‘Anti-Semitism’ seemed to them to be an irrelevance to supporting the Palestinians even though it was consciously used to undermine support for Palestine solidarity. Because it was the Palestinians who were the real victims of the ‘anti-Semitism’  campaign.

Huda made the obvious point that the Palestinians didn’t choose the religion of their occupier. If Jews feel affronted at support for Palestine, as many do, then that is because they have signed up to a  racist agenda.

The ‘anti-Semitism’ allegations were designed to exclude Palestinians from the conversation. If you associated Jews with the actions of Israel then you were almost guaranteed to be expelled. This despite the fact that Israel carries out its actions as a Jewish state.

After all one of the 11 illustrations of ‘anti-Semitism’ according to the IHRA misdefinition of anti-Semitism that the Zionists fought to get the Labour Party to adoptwas ‘Holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel.’ Elsewhere in the IHRA, in one of numerous contradictions, Israel is defined as being ‘conceived as a Jewish collectivity'.

It is inevitable that people will talk of Jews and Israel/Zionism in the same breath. Israel defines itself as a Jewish state and it claims to represent not just its own citizens but world Jewry. The Jerusalem Programme of the World Zionist Organisation talks about the

‘centrality of the State of Israel and Jerusalem, its capital, in the life of the (Jewish) nation.’

Likewise when Palestinians blame ‘the Jews’ for their misfortunes this is not anti-Semitism but their experience of the fact that those who come to kill and dispossess them do so as Jews.

Ghada Karmi, a British Palestinian asked the rhetorical question at the core of the Labour ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign – ‘why should I and my family have left our homes?’ Her answer was that

‘we were not allowed to return because we are of the wrong race – if that is not racism I don’t know what is.’

When Ghada Karmi was invited to speak to Hackney North CLP she was almost immediately shut up by the Chair because she had dared to challenge the basis of the ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign.

‘I was cut off. It was like a slap in the face. It was like being elbowed out physically.’

Much of the Labour left, especially that around Jon Lansman’s Momentum, was engaged in the censorship of the Palestinian voice. All in the name of a fake anti-racism.

On the left Luke Akehurst and Jon Lansman - on the right Akehurst defends Israel's use of snipers against unarmed demonstrators

The Board of Deputies claimed to be the representative body of British Jews at the same time as defendingIsrael’s actions, right or wrong, even when Israeli snipers were executing unarmed demonstrators in Gaza. As Huda observed people ‘had to walk on egg shells to get the terminology exactly right’.  Mention the fact that those doing the shooting were Jewish and you would be suspended.

Israel deliberately bombed Gaza's civilian population and then cried 'antisemitism'

Huda summed up the feelings of many of us when she said [1.07.40] ‘I wish Jeremy Corbyn had stood up for what he believed in at that time.’ For his first two years as leader Corbyn was silent on Palestine. He actively courted the JLM which he didn’t realise had been refounded to get rid of him.

In what was a particularly disgraceful episode Corbyn handedthe Del Singh Award to the JLM despite the vehement opposition of his family. The award was named after a Labour activist and aid worker who was murdered by the Taliban. To hand the award to an apartheid supporting organisation was a disgrace yet Corbyn was pathetically eager to appease these racists. Even the Jewish Chronicle sub-headline was

‘Labour Party has disrespected Del Singh's memory by giving honour to Jewish organisation that supports Israel, says family’.

His appeasement of the Zionists didn’t do Corbyn much good. In 2019 the JLM overwhelmingly passeda motion of no confidence in Corbyn despite him having begged themnot to disaffiliate from the Labour Party, which was nothing more than grandstanding.

Corbyn never understood what Zionism was. He was an active patron of Britain’s Palestine Solidarity Campaign which has excised opposition to Zionism from its constitution. Unfortunately rather than education its membership PSC keeps them in ignorance, all the better to control them.

The whole ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign was about getting one’s language right. It was a social media witchhunt which should have been called out from the start.

This is what passes for humour amongst Labour's racist senior staff - none of whom have been dismissed

Did we always get the terminology right on South African Apartheid? Activists referred to Afrikaaners when they meant South African Whites.  The Afrikaaners were the first victims of concentration camps yet no-one was accused of racism for misspeaking. As Andrew Feinstein, a former Jewish ANC MP, said in the programme, the oppression of the Palestinians and a liberation struggle by its very nature is going to include huge anger and suffering.

People struggle to explain the West’s backing for Israeli and the support of the United States. They often mistakenly believe that Israel is calling the shots rather than seeing that it is the United States’s racist rottweiller in the Middle East. Sometimes this is often conflated with America’s Jewish population rather than seeing support for Israel stemming from the interests of US imperialism.

Since Israel calls itself a Jewish State it is not surprising that people see Israel’s strength lying in the strength of Jews collectively. This is not racism. Israel openly declares it speaks for all world Jewry. The Israel Lobby speaks in the name of Jews. Yet it was on this basis of this confusion that Labour’s witchhunters began trawling peoples’ social media.

Unfortunately The Labour Files never tried to understand what it was that underlay the ability of the ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign to gain traction. Although nominally about hatred of Jews it was in reality about opposition to Israel and Zionism. Criticism of Israel’s behaviour such as the murder of 4 little children on Gaza’s beach by Israeli missiles was nonetheless deemed anti-Semitic. Indeed just about any critical mention of Israel ended up, under Jennie Formby, being deemed anti-Semitic.

The Labour Files veer between saying that on the one hand there was a phenomenon of Labour anti-Semitism and saying it had been manufactured to be rid of Corbyn.

The Labour Filesbegan with Greg Hadfield, the elected and deposed Secretary of Brighton & Hove Labour Party, declaring that Keir Starmer leads a lawless party. The programme provided many examples of this lawlessness and disregard of rules and the law.

Perhaps the main lesson was that Corbyn and his dysfunctional office ignored what Tony Benn had said, namely that the first job of a socialist minister was to get on top of the civil service.  It was this failure that doomed the Corbyn Project. McNicol, Stolliday and co. should have been targeted as soon as they started trying to remove supporters of Corbyn from the party during the 2015 election.

There will be people who make apologies for Corbyn citing the pressure he was under. This is true but the fact remains that Corbyn never once fought those seeking to destroy him. One such was ‘crooked’ Iain McNicol, the General Secretary. On being elected McNicol offered Corbyn his resignation. Instead of grabbing at the offer with both hands Corbyn asked him to stay on.

But Corbyn could still have gone on the attack against Labour’s bureaucracy and created the pressure necessary to remove these agents of the ruling class. When Corbyn defeated Owen Smith in 2016, after McNicol had tried to stop him standing, it was the ideal opportunity to call for him to step down. Even after the election result of June 2017, which McNicol, Stolliday and all had done their best to prevent, Corbyn didn’t criticise McNicol openly.

According to Al Jazeera there was a major antisemitism problem with all these expulsions but then again there wasn't - politically all over the place

The political incoherence of the Labour Files was demonstrated most graphically when Peter Oborne, displayed a large chart showing how expulsions under Jennie Formby had increased ‘exponentially’ compared to her predecessor Crooked McNicol.

Peter Oborne's Chart Showing  How Successful Judas Jennie and Corbyn Were At Expelling Anti-Racist Members

It is true that expulsions under JJ increased but that was a sign of just how weak and desperate  Corbyn and her were. If they had stopped to think about what they were doing they would have realised that by expelling so many good Labour activists all they were doing was confirming the false allegations of the Right that there was an anti-Semitism problem in the Labour Party.

And what was the result?  Was Corbyn and Formby given credit for their stupidity?  Not at all. The EHRC Report didn’t even mention all Corbyn’s endeavours.  Instead they said that all these ‘anti-Semites’ had been drawn to the Labour Party by Corbyn himself.  It was utterly futile and an act of total stupidity.

Unfortunately the Labour Files are not totally honest and I have written to Richard Sanders to ask that this be corrected. In the second programme (28.59) the voice over says that ‘Our unit has discovered links between [Jonathan] Hoffman and a far-right organisation.’

This is to say the least disingenuous. This blog revealed this a mere 12 years ago!  It is hardly a revelation.

In a blog on 3 June 2010 Zionist Federation & fascist EDL Join Hands in Supporting Israel's Murder at SeaI pointed to a Zionist Federation demonstration outside the Israeli Embassy in support of the murder of activists on the Mava Marmari where members of the EDL had been welcome to participate and did participate.

On 14^th August 2010 I broke the story Jonathan Hoffman of the Zionist Federation and the EDL’s Roberta Moore Hold a Joint Demonstration in the street containing Ahava. It included the now famous picture of Hoffie and Moore with the EDL pictured behind them. I have written numerous blogs since e.g. Focus on Fascism - More News from Tommy Robinson’s Zionist Supporters & Reactions to My Revelations so the suggestion by Labour Files that they have just broken the story is inaccurate and I would expect the programme credits to acknowledge that fact. I have emailed Richard Sanders to this effect.

The programme also stated (30.37) that ‘Hoffman and (Richard) Millett distanced themselves from EDL in 2011 (whereas) others do not.’ This is untrue. Hoffman’s distancing was entirely bogus and only came about after I had exposed him. Hoffman cited emails he had sent to the Police after the joint demonstrations at Ahava with the EDL. He then went on to demonstrate alongside Paul Besser, former Intelligence Officer for Britain First, as well as to work with a host of Zionist supporters of Tommy Robinson.

Below I look at the content of The Labour Files and what it says about the Labour Party today under Starmer and Evans.

Tony Greenstein

The Labour Files

The Suspension of Wallasey and Brighton Labour Parties - the playing of the Gay Card by Angela Eagle and the Right

Angela Eagle and the fake allegations of homophobic abuse

The first programme The Purge details how lies were spread by New Labour clone, Tessa Jowell, that Angela Eagle, the lesbian MP for Wallasey had been subject to homophobic abuse at the 2016 AGM of the party. The only problem was that Eagle hadn’t actually been present at the meeting!

This didn’t stop former councillor Paul Stuart submitting a note about Momentum activists’ undemocratic practices, which was literally copied from a review of Michael Crick’s book on Militant 30 years ago! Tom Watson used Stuart’s note as proof  of subversion in a memo to Corbyn. As James Schneider from Corbyn’s office said, we were in the realm of the creation of facts. Peter Oborne, one of the few honest journalists around made the point that this could only happen because of a lack of media questioning.

The local rag ran with the lies of Warren Morgan

In one ludicrous scene we see Stuart demanding a police investigation into the distribution by Paul Davies, Vice Chair of Wallasey Labour Party, of flyers. Davies was alleged to have used Labour Party databases in breach of the data protection laws. The only problem was that Davies was in London at the time of the leafletting!

Nonetheless Davies was suspended after challenging Eagle and her fellow liars to take a lie detector test. 3 of the 4 ‘witnesses’ at Wallasey’s AGM who heard the dyke comment about Eagle just happened to have the surnames ‘Stuart’. We also see how Eagle, who was challenging Corbyn for the leadership at that stage, despite not having the support of her own party, worked in tandem with Sam Matthews, Head of the Disputes Team and John Stolliday, the racist head of the Compliance Unit. Stolliday is, to this day, employed alongside Emily Oldknow, another known racist by UNISON.

The Lies of Warren Morgan

On July 9 2016 in Brighton there was an AGM for what was the largest party in Britain, more than 6,000 members. Before  the meeting Momentum held a massive rally at the Brighthelm community centre. In all my years in Brighton I’d never seen such a large meeting. About 800 people crammed into their hall, the cafeteria behind it and spilled over into the gardens outside.

After leaving the meeting people went directly to the AGM at the nearby Brighton College of Technology. The meeting was so big that it had to be held in 3 sessions. All the left candidates achieved 65% of the vote. Democracy in action.

Warren Morgan - Liar-in-Chief

The spitting that never was

What was the reaction of the Labour Right in the person of Warren Morgan, the Blairite Leader of Brighton and Hove Council?  To make a series of false allegations of spitting and bullying. Morgan knew he would have the backing of Labour officials. In the words of Stolliday:

overturn AGM, deal with individuals. Shows what we're up against - a bunch of SWP & Trots marching straight from a rally to invade a CLP meeting and stuff handfuls of ballot papers in boxes even when they;re not members of the party

Extract from the Labour Leaked Report

Karen Buckingham, GLU’s [Governance and Legal Unit] Head of Disputes was later appointed as an ‘investigator’ into the allegations.  She said:

“I say act now and worry about [rules and legal issues] later, so long as we don't do something that'll end up fucknig everything else up”. [Labour Leaked Report [LLR], p.113]

The reaction of Corbyn’s officials was a sign of what was to come. When Hadfield was rung up he was told ‘We’ve got to do something about the spitting’ to which he replied ‘what spitting’. There was no allegation that was too far fetched for Corbyn’s useless office.

In the end even Buckingham could not uphold the allegations of spitting since Greg had got hold of the CCTV covering the entrance to the College.  It proved that there was no spitting. Buckingham refused to watch it on data protection grounds!!

I wrote a number of blogs on what was happening at the time and they convey my own impressions of what happened and the lies of Morgan, councillor Emma Daniels and other New Labour supporters on Brighton and Hove Council.

Massive Pro-Corbyn Rally in Brighton & Hove as Left Sweeps to Victory in AGM

Brighton & Hove Labour Party Suspended by National Labour Party

Progress and the Labour Right Declare War on Democracy - It's the Politics of Pinochet

Suspension of Brighton & Hove Labour Party Shows the Hatred of Progress and Labour Right 4 Democracy

Warren Morgan, Emma Daniels & The Spitting Incident That Never Was

The Lies that led to the Overturning of Elections & the Suspension of Brighton & Hove Labour Party

Time to say Goodbye to Ann Black on Left Slate for National Executive

Black Suspends Brighton & Hove Labour Party & Invalidates Election Results at Whim

Ann Black - suspended Brighton/Hove Labour Party on a Lie

NEC member Ann Black was the Head of Disputes. She sanctioned the immediate suspension of Brighton and Hove Labour Party without even bothering to ask local members whether the allegations were true. Greg Hadfield, the elected Secretary was suspended in order to ensure that a new Executive had a right-wing majority.

Ivor Caplin's email to Iain McNicol re Becky Massey

Meanwhile in Hove constituency, its MP Peter Kyle, who is now Vice-Chair of Labour Friends of Israel, is revealed as sending an email to McNicol calling for the suspension and expulsion of  Rebecca Massey, a prominent activist and Chair of the branch of which Ivor Caplin, a former Zionist MP was a member.

WAR CRIMINAL WHO CHAIRED THE JEWISH LABOUR MOVEMENT

Caplin is a bona fide war criminal having been a junior defence minister at the time of Blair’s invasion of Iraq. He also became Chair of the right-wing Jewish Labour Movement. Caplin quoted from an articleon the website of the Israeli funded Campaign Against Anti-Semitism which spoke of Rebecca’s ‘Black heart’! 

Becky was an active member of Brighton and Hove PSC and a fine, articulate activist. The picture painted in the CAA’s scurrilous article, that she was an anti-Semite, was simply a lie. Becky summed up the situation when she said that activists in the party, who believed in fair play and sticking to the rules were simply 'lambs to the slaughter'as the Right disregarded any rule that was inconvenient, lied to order and engaged in what can only be called the tactics of destabilisation learnt at the knee of the CIA in Latin America.

Email from Peter Kyle urging the expulsion of Rebecca Massey

Where Al Jazeera slipped up was in saying that the publishing of this article was ‘the day that anti-Semitism was used for the first time in Brighton and Hove’. It wasn’t.

The first use of ‘anti-Semitism’ was when I was suspended in March 2016 by Stolliday quite explicitly because of criticism of Israel. I was targeted by the Zionists from the start and even then there were those in Momentum locally, like Clare Wadey, the Vice Chair of the Labour Representation Committee, who gave credence to the allegations.

But as Hadfield said ‘from that one story there have been 6 yrs of abuse’.  The CAA was formed at the time of Operation Protective Edge, Israel’s genocidal attack on Gaza which killed 2,200 Palestinians including 551 children, with the express purpose of labelling criticism of Israel ‘anti-Semitic’.

Ella Rose, who threatened violence against Jackie Walker, was given special treatment by the Disputes Team and Sam Matthews

At no time did Corbyn or McDonnell protest the suspension of either Wallasey or Brighton & Hove Labour parties. They were content for their supporters to be attacked, votes to be annulled and dirty tricks to continue whilst they continued their policy of appeasement. They could have mobilised the membership to oust these bureaucrats but they chose to tolerate and work with them.

The treatment of Ella Rose, Director of the JLM and a former Israeli Embassy employee, contrasted markedly with that of Rebecca Massey and Greg Hadfield.

Rose had been filmed in the Al Jazeera programme The Lobby threatening violence against Jackie Walker, the suspended former Vice-Chair of Momentum.

“I saw Jackie Walker on Saturday and thought, you know what, I could take her, she’s like 5’2 and tiny,”

Rose did what all suspended people do in such a situation. She emailed Sam Matthews telling him that she wouldn’t have said this ‘if I had known the conversation was being recorded’. Which is much like a bank robber asking to be acquitted on the grounds that if he had known the Police were waiting for him then he would never have robbed the bank!

Founded in 1760 the Board of Deputies has only once ever organised a demonstration against 'antisemitism' - not against the British Union of Fascists, not National Front nor the BNP or the EDL - only against Corbyn - fascist antisemitism is not its concern

The Abuse that the Guardian & the BBC Never Got Around to Mentioning

For Britain’s media the only victims in the 4 year fake ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign were Zionist Jews.  The only heroes were people Luciana Berger MP who used harassment from a few fascist oddballs, notably Joshua Bonehill Paine to smear the left with ‘anti-Semitism’.  Berger had been parachuted into the Wavertree seat in 2010 by Blair, having been the girl friend of his son Euan.

Wavertree CLP hated her, not because she was Jewish but because she was a right-wing implant who hadn’t even known the name of the legendary Liverpool football manager, Bill Shankley. Of course Tom Watson and the Right conflated the political opposition of Wavertree CLP,  whose Chair was Jewish, with fascist attacks on her.

Other heroines included Ruth Smeeth, the charlatan who claimed Marc Wadsworth’s criticism of her was because she was Jewish.  Smeeth or rather Lady Smeeth after Starmer’s ennoblement, blatantly lied in claimingthat she had received 25,000 hostile messages.

Another heroine was Louise Ellman MP for Liverpool Riverside (she too was parachuted into the constituency). Ellman specialised in defending Israel’s torture and treatment of Palestinian children. She was literally the vilest of Zionists. When I called her the MP for South Tel Aviv I was accused of racism by the Jewish Chronicle until I pointed out that John Carlisle, a notorious supporter of South Africa’s apartheid regime had been called the MP for Pretoria!

On 16^th January 2016 a Parliamentary debate initiated by Sarah Champion was held on Child Prisoners and Detainees: Occupied Palestinian Territories. Up stood Ellman to defend the practices of the Israeli military in arresting children early in the morning, blindfolding and beating them, holding them without access to lawyers or their parents and trying them in military courts.

does she accept that the context in which these situations occur is an organised campaign conducted by the Palestinian authorities of incitement, to try to provoke young Palestinians to carry out acts of violence towards other civilians, some of which result in death, including the death of young children?

A  classic example of victim blaming but when I was expelled one of the main reasons was my ‘shaming’ Ellman by calling her a supporter of Israeli child abuse.  My response was that Ellman was shameless.

Also omitted from all mention of Smeeth and Berger was the fact that Smeeth had been employed by Zionist propaganda group, BICOM and Berger had been a Director of Labour Friends of Israel. But when you are running a smear campaign, facts can be awkward things.

Dianne Abbot

The MP who did receive the most abuse was Dianne Abbot, an MP for over 30 years.  Not only vile fascist abuse but abuse from within the Labour Party, not least from its staff. But this went unmentioned. Only ‘anti-Semitism’ was considered important.

Jenny Manson

The media followed Orwell’s script to the letter in making Black= White. Jewish Zionists were allowed to invent attacks that never took place (see Izzy Lenga) whereas Jewish anti-Zionists who had been abused were comprehensively ignored.

The second episode of  Labour Files, The Crisisbegan with Jenny Manson, an elderly Jewish woman who is co-Chair of Jewish Voices for Labour [JVL]. Jenny described a number of examples of abuse, in particular one anonymous phone call.  A Zionist left a message on Jenny’s ansaphone along with his phone number!  The Police were therefore forced to take action but unlike the situation where Zionists have been harassed, they issued a caution.

The real Zionist attitude to the holocaust and Jews who died at Auschwitz is revealed in the message that Jenny received.

“you fucking Nazi bitch, you fucking Nazi scum, You should burn in the gas oven,

You dirty fucking bitch,

Fucking, fucking Nazi cow you are

Stinking, stinking swine

I hope you die in a gas oven

You deserve everything, to burn in hell

To burn in acid 

After having been called a ‘Nazi bitch’ the caller then told her that she should die in a gas oven!  It is a favourite line of attack by Zionists on Jewish anti-Zionists to tell them that they deserve to die like the millions of Jews in Europe who also rejected Zionism and died in the holocaust as a result. I have experienced the same.

Tony Greenstein confronts Stanger at Brighton's clocktower

It is a favourite  taunt of Zionists to tell Jewish anti-Zionists that ‘Hitler was right’. Where I think Jenny went wrong in the programme was to suggest that

For the first time ever the Labour Party has walked into a disagreement between Jews over Zionism and said one form of Jews are wrong, anti-Semitic.

This is wrong. The ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign was never about Jews or anti-Semitism. What happened was that Jews were used as political stool pigeons in order to give a moral base to the right-wing attack on Corbyn.

Pauline Hammerton

Pauline Hammerton was the 80 year old woman mentioned by Halima Khan (though not by name) in Al Jazeera's 'The Labour Files' who was killed by Labour's witchhunters. The machinery for her expulsion had been established by Jeremy Corbyn and Judas Jennie Formby not Starmer.

On 14 February 2020 I wrote 'Expelled for Supporting the Palestinians on the 7th February (‘anti-Semitism’ in Labour Newspeak) Found Dead One Week Later'

The sub-heading was: 'Pauline was Killed by Lansman, the Jewish Labour Movement and all those who supported the IHRA, a Charter for making false charges of ‘anti-Semitism’ against anti-racists'

In 2017, Pauline had been one of over 500 signatories to a letter to the Guardian protesting at the suspension of Ken Livingstone. You can see the full list of signatories here. On 14 February 2020 I wrote 'Expelled for Supporting the Palestinians on the 7th February (‘anti-Semitism’ in Labour Newspeak) Found Dead One Week Later'

The sub-heading was: 'Pauline was Killed by Lansman, the Jewish Labour Movement and all those who supported the IHRA, a Charter for making false charges of ‘anti-Semitism’ against anti-racists'

In 2017, Pauline had been one of over 500 signatories to a letter to the Guardian protesting at the suspension of Ken Livingstone. You can see the full list of signatories here. I wrote:

'A cursory look at Pauline's Facebook page shows that she was anything but a racist. She was a decent, kind, concerned person who hated all kinds of oppression. Pauline was Chair of Manchester Socialist Health Association. That was why she supported the Palestinians. Pauline was the kind of person who should be welcomed and respected. Instead she was expelled at the instigation of Mike Katz and his fellow war-criminals in the JLM, the overseas wing of the Israeli Labour Party....

Repeatedly I have been told by good socialists, suspended and expelled by the Labour Party, how depressed they felt at being falsely accused of anti-Semitism by those whose only purpose in life is to defame supporters of the Palestinians, anti-Zionists and anti-racists.It is outrageous that good socialists and anti-racists have been defamed and smeared for opposing the world's most racist state, Israel.We have had 4 long years of fake and false allegations of ‘anti-Semitism’ by hypocrites, liars and defamers such as Luciana Berger and Ruth Smeeth. Racists whose only mission was to defame anti-racist activists....

When the Labour Party adopted the IHRA misdefinition of anti-Semitism in September 2018 and when at last year’s conference, with the support of the pathetic Corbyn, ‘fast track’ expulsions were agreed, i.e expulsions without even a hearing, it was inevitable that sooner or later, that it might have fatal consequences and cause great shock. Fast-track expulsions, of which there were 25 in just one day this month, were obviously a ticking time bomb.If any one person had the ability to stop the adoption of these proposals and the IHRA in its track it was Jon Lansman

It is and remains an utter disgrace the fact that good socialists like Pauline Hammerton were hounded to their deaths. This was one of the by-products of Corbyn's cowardice in not standing up to the fake anti-Semitism campaign.

Luke Stanger- the racist thug who specialised in the harassment of women

The only thing that can be said in support of Luke Stanger, a gormless buffoon who was used by Peter Kyle and the Labour Right, is that he clearly suffers from mental health problems. However this is no excuse for his behaviour in harassing Labour Party activists.

Lukey Stanger engaged in dirty tricks against Pamela Fitzpatrick

Stanger harassed Pamela Fitzpatrick, a local Harrow councillor and eventually their parliamentary candidate, after the local CLP voted to affiliate to JVL. Pamela was accused in a series of vile tweets of being an anti-Semite and holocaust denier.

Ex left MP and former Campaign Group member Lloyd Russell-Moyle gives a glowing tribute to Luke Stanger

Pamela was suspended following a completely fabricated complaint of bullying by Cllr. Michael Borio. Local MP Gareth Thomas joined in, writing to McNicol urging her expulsion even whilst he was sending emails to local members supportive of Pamela!

Anne Mitchell, a member of Hove Labour Party Executive and a prominent supporter of the Palestinians was accused by Stanger of being a ‘filthy racist grandma’. The Labour Party eventually suspended Stanger, not because of his harassment of women but because he had tweetedthat:

The traveller community are frequently a nasty blight on communities who wreak civil unrest onto areas

If someone had substituted ‘Jew’ for ‘traveller community’ they would have been expelled instantly. However as Al Jazeera showed Stanger’s letter rejecting the accusations which began

I wish to state at the outset that in my eight years of obsessive activism and seven years of party membership, I have never intended to cause the party any harm or offense.

was written by another Luke, Luke Akehurst, who was employed by We Believe in Israel. Akehurst is now a member of Labour’s National Executive Committee. Of course this made sense as this oaf is all but illiterate but it shows the deep complicity of the leading lights in Labour’s Right in the abusive activities of Stanger.

The 2 Poisonous Lukes

Stanger didn’t however confine his activities to women. A particularly distressing and upsetting series of incidents involved Damian McCarthy, a prominent activist in Hove Labour Party and Chair of a local Unite branch. Stanger stalked Damian and a child he was taking to school.

The message sent to Damian McCarthy by a Zionist abuser - the Police refused to take action and the media of course said nothing

Damian’s workplace was rung up by Stanger and then Jonathan Hoffman.  One particularly vile tweet threatened to behead Damian’s family and ‘skull fuck’  his dead mother. Damian described how the attacks on his mother led to the premature death of his step father.

The only good news that has come out of this is that as a result of the publicity surrounding Stanger’s activities he was sacked by WJ Ltd who employed him at Gatwick Airport! A taste of his own medicine.

Poetic Justice - Stanger was sacked after the Al Jazeera programmes were broadcast!

Perhaps the strangest thing about the case of Luke Stanger is that although the National Constitutional Committee voted to expel  him, this was never implemented. He has been welcomed back into Hove CLP by the Right. There is no rule which allows an expelled member to continue in membership. It demonstrates the contempt for Labour’s rule book when it comes to protecting the Right, even if, as in Stanger’s case he has been found guilty of abusive, racist behaviour.

Starmer’s Police State Democracy in the Labour Party

In his first speech to Labour Party conference Starmer took no chances. Armed police stood in the aisles to try and deter heckling. After Corbyn had been suspended the Black Mayor of Liverpool, Anne Rothery spoke up in his support which resulted in her being removed from the shortlist for the mayoral elections.

The same tricks were used by the Right against Rothery. False allegations were made by local councillor Allan Dean who alleged that she had physically attacked a corrupt local Labour councillor, Nick Small.  The pattern is familiar.  Get a local councillor to write a letter making a series of false allegations and then the target of the attack is suspended. Once again Corbyn and his office failed to speak out against these tactics.

Liverpool's right wing Cllr. Nick Small - corrupt and obnoxious

Peter Oborne, the former Telegraph political correspondent provided a running commentary. Despite being a Tory Oborne is alone among right-wing journalists for his decency and integrity which is why he parted company with the Daily Mail. Oborne’s comments on Starmer’s contempt for democracy in the Labour Party was that

If that is the way the Labour Party is conducting itself in Opposition, under Keir Starmer, former DPP, is Keir Starmer going to behave like that in power’

The BBC has refused to explain why they only interviewed members of the JLM who took part in the programme, why they didn't identify them or include any other Jewish viewpoint

BBC Panorama’s Is Labour Anti-Semitic?

The Lies of Labour Investigator Ben Westerman

In July 2019 with an election in the offing, the BBC fulfilled its traditional role on behalf of the British Establishment. Of one thing the ruling class was certain of –a Corbyn premiership was to be avoided at all costs. So naturally the Islamphobic anti-Corbyn journalist John Ware presented a hit job on Corbyn’s Labour Party.

Starmer handed John Ware thousands of pounds of members' money in order to reinforce the allegations of 'antisemitism' against the Labour Party

In Liverpool Riverside Jewish member Rica Bird was under investigation. Her investigator was Ben Westerman who alleged that Rica had asked him ‘where are you from? Are you from Israel? which he took as referring to Israel. If Rica had said this it’s difficult to see how that could be anti-Semitic but Rica had said nothing of the sort.

What she had said was ‘‘so I’m just curious about what branch are you in?’ and when Westerman said it wasn’t relevant Rica accepted it. There is a world of difference between asking what Labour Party Branch someone was in and asking if someone Jewish is from Israel.

The interview was recorded so it is clear that Westerman was lying. But this and other instances of bias and failure to properly investigate (for example contacting Rica for her response before broadcasting) were ignored by Ofcom, the regulator of the broadcast media which simply refused to investigate, despite there being a record 2,000+ complaints. Like other wings of the Establishment Ofcom was not prepared to scrutinise the fake ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign.

As the Labour Files (42.00) rightly said, the Jews interviewed in the Panorama programme were drawn entirely from the officers of the anti-Corbyn JLM. Not one Jewish anti- Zionist was allowed to speak. It was (48.30) the ‘BBC’s momentous intervention in British politics.’

The aftermath of the Panorama programme came when Corbyn and his office alleged that the Disputes Team staff were themselves politically motivated. They sued for libel. [1.10.17-1.2.18]

Despite this legal advice Starmer was eager to concede the racist staff and Islamaphobe John Ware's libel case

The reaction of Starmer was to settle the libel case and pay the liars £700,000 despite Labour’s own lawyers advising that the Party was likely to successfully defend their claims. As Peter Oborne remarked ‘This is the most unambiguous legal advice I’ve ever seen’

What was the reason Starmer settled? Oborne suggests that he was ‘defining himself against Corbyn’. I think a more simpler explanation is that Starmer wanted the staff to succeed in order that he could say that Corbyn’s Labour was anti-Semitic. Starmer wanted the EHRC Report to be as damning as possible in order that he could use it against the left. This is why he suspended Corbyn and anyone else who questioned the EHRC report. In the process Starmer all but bankrupted the Labour Party.

John Ware’s claim for £150K was aimed at chilling free speech. There were a number of defences including fair comment, qualified privilege and honest opinion that could have been used but the last thing Starmer wanted was for Labour’s defence to succeed.

The Lies of Izzy Lenga

Perhaps the most unbelievable section of Is Labour Anti-Semitic was when the JLM’s International Officer (& a Reserve Officer in Israel’s Occupation Army) Izzy Lenga stated that ‘everyday’ she was told ‘Hitler was right’ and that  ‘he didn’t go far enough’ in the Labour Party.

To anyone who has every attended a Labour Party meeting this is simply unbelievable. It was a straightforward lie without the slightest evidence being produced.  Had Lenga put forward a complaint to the Labour Party about this abuse?  Had she named culprits?  Of course not.  It was simply a false allegation that John Ware ran with because of its shock effect.

Peter Oborne did a google search of Lenga and ‘Hitler was right’ and lo and behold Ms Lenga had complained about this but at Birmingham University where posters ‘Hitler was right’ had appeared.  In other words nothing to do with the Labour Party but for the BBC any lying allegation that discredited the Left in the Labour Party was worth airing, especially when no one was called to rebut it or even question her lies.

Criticising Israel or Zionism was ‘anti-Semitic’ according to the IHRA misdefinition of anti-Semitism

The Labour Party and Corbyn were facing a full-scale attack from the BOD over ‘anti-Semitism’. But instead of fighting back they, and especially the leader of Momentum, Jon Lansman, gave way.

James Schneider of the Leader of the Opposition’s Office said [1.07.03] that ‘We adopted the IHRA because it was politically impossible not to do so’ whereas ‘the counter pressure from Palestinian voices in the media was absent’. Len McLuskey of Unite believed that by adopting the IHRA the false anti-Semitism campaign would come to an end whereas the exact opposite occurred.

Of course if Corbyn and LOTO had pushed back, if they had questioned the JLM as to its links with the Israeli Embassy and its descriptionof the racist Israeli Labor Party as its ‘sister’party, then it could all have been very different.

Schneider, like the even more useless Seamus Milne, was a product of the public school Oxbridge system. Socialism to these people was an abstraction. The idea of standing up to the ruling class’s ideological offensive never occurred to them. One can only speculate about what they thought would happen if Corbyn had gained power.

We see [1.03.39-2] Margaret Hodge and Luciana Berger demanding that the ‘NEC has to adopt the internationally agreed IHRA code’. ‘No ifs, not buts no caveats’ parrots Berger, the former director of Israeli Embassy front Labour Friends of Israel. Not once did Corbyn or LOTO wake up to the fact that the whole of the IHRA was rotten, designed to redefine anti-Zionism as anti-Semitism. In September 2019 Labour’s NEC adopted the IHRA misdefinition wholesale. People forget that Corbyn voluntarily adopted the 38 word IHRA definition at the end of 2016.

Andrew Feinstein argued [1.04.56] that by approving the right of self-determination for the Jewish people you are removing it from the Palestinian people. Unfortunately this is not correct. It is not a question of two conflicting rights, which is the narrative of the left Zionists. The real problem is that there is no one single Jewish people. Jews are not a nation and therefore self-determination doesn’t arise. The idea of a single Jewish people is itself the basis of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories which the Zionists adopted.

A good example of the hypocrisy of this campaign was seeing Gordon Brown arguing that Labour must adopt the IHRA to combat anti-Semitism. This is the same creature who usedthe National Front slogan of ‘British Jobs for British Workers’

Ken Livingstone and Nazi  Comparisons

When Ken Livingstone, remarked to Vanessa Feltz that Hitler had supported Zionism all hell broke loose. This rapidly turned into Hitler was a Zionist. It resulted in a media ambush involving John Mann calling Livingstone a ‘Hitler apologist’ outside Parliament.

This was the same John Mann who had issued an Anti-Social Behaviour Handbook which described Travellers as an example of anti-social behaviour. He was subsequently interviewedby the Police. Mann had supported the racist Labour MP Phil Woolas who was removed by an Electoral Court from Parliament for lying about his election opponent and who had run an election campaign in 2010 designed to ‘make the White folk angry’ at Muslims.

As Geoffrey Bindman QC explained anti-Semitism has traditionally been understood as a hatred of Jews as Jews.  The IHRA transformed that into hatred and criticism of Zionism and Israel. Criticising Israeli settler terrorism had become anti-semitic.

The Elephant in the Room – the Links Between British Zionists, Tommy Robinson & the Far Right

In the second episode of Labour Files we came across the detritus of the Zionist movement in the persons of Daman Lenzner & Jonathan Hoffman. They were both convicted of harassing and abusing Palestinian protestors outside a Puma shop. Prior to their trial they had had a warrant issued for their arrest for failing to answer bail.

The programme (29.13) described how Hoffman ‘is photographed alongside Roberta Moore’ a member of the Jewish Defence League, the EDL’s Zionist wing and that she had expressed admiration for neo-Nazi Andrei Breivik, the Norwegian fascist who killed 77 people, mainly young socialists, in Oslo.

What was new in the Labour Files was the revelation that Dan Fox, Stella Creasey’s foul mouthed boyfriend had been at a meeting of the Zionist far right and that he considered himself close friends to Sharon Klaff, an open Tommy Robinson/Pegida/AfD supporter.

Where Al Jazeera Goes Wrong is in its take on Corbyn’s Alleged Interference in Labour’s Disciplinary Process

Al Jazeera seemed unsure as to whether or not there was a problem of anti-Semitism in the Labour Party.  If there was no anti-Semitism phenomenon then the Zionist allegations were false. But if there was an anti-Semitism problem, even if it was exaggerated, then the campaign itself was justified.

The Labour Files argued that if Corbyn did interfere in the disciplinary process it was only to speed it up. Thus they accepted the thrust of the Zionist attack. Unfortunately Al Jazeera went along with this completely muddled take on what happened. It was the narrative of Lansman, the Alliance for Workers Liberty and some of Corbyn’s supporters, including those who compiled Labour’s Leaked Report. They argued that Corbyn did his best to fight ‘anti-Semitism’ but was undermined by the ‘factionalism’ of his opponent thus not getting that the ‘anti-Semitism’ had but one purpose – getting rid of Corbyn.

The Forde Report [1.18.18] found no evidence of any attempt by the Corbyn leadership to interfere in disciplinary processes. Maybe but the real problem was not that Corbyn interfered but that he didn’t interferein the disciplinary process. The GLU should have been prevented from pursuing people for false allegations of anti-Semitism.  Instead Corbyn was content to let the witchhunters have a clear field.

We learn (37.33-2) that ‘factionalism’ had prevented the investigation of anti-Semitism cases implying that there was a problem but the determination of McNicol and co. to pursue Corbyn supporters had detracted from the fight against anti-Semitism.

This is political illiteracy. The primary fight was against Corbyn and his supporters. ‘Anti-Semitism’ was the means to conduct that fight. Thus Momentum Chair Andrew Scattergood reactedto Corbyn’s suspension by saying that it ‘undermined the fight against anti-Semitism’! We had a 5 minute segment of the second programme whose theme (37.33) was that it was McNicols staff who had stopped Labour from tackling anti-semitism. We were told (38.16) that

‘Corbyn is frustrated and writes to McNicol in February 2018 angry that Disputes Team is so ineffective in tackling anti-Semitism cases.’

It was like a chicken complaining that the fox had indigestion and couldn’t eat it!

When Judas Jennie took over from McNicol as General Sec retary there was no record keeping, according to Halima Khan, the former member of the Disputes Team.

John Stolliday - the head of the GLU who ignored genuine racists and misogynists  - has now transferred to UNISON - a union which ostensibly has policy opposing racism and misogyny

Now it might be true that Stolliday and Matthews were inefficient in keeping track of the ‘evidence’ of ‘anti-Semitism’ in those that they had suspended but so what? Perhaps that was because the ‘evidence’ was so thin.

This (40.07) culminated in Peter Oborne & his graph in which he demonstrated that expulsions under JJ had increased ‘exponentially’  since taking over from McNicol. Oborne states that ‘This graph alone raises questions about dominant media narrative in the Corbyn era’

The only problem is that the graph proves nothing of the kind. Indeed the massive increase in expulsions under JJ ‘proved’ that there was indeed a massive anti-Semitism problem in the Labour Party. In other words the faster Corbyn and JJ expelled people the more they proved that the Zionists had been right after all!

In fact nearly all of those JJ had expelled, including Chris Williamson MP (whom JJ excluded from running as a Labour candidate) were not anti-Semites. The same Labour Filesfeatured Anne Mitchell who had been expelled under JJ's not McNicol’s watch. It was surprising that (41.32) Andrew Feinstein, who is politically very good, fell into this trap saying that the ‘key failings of the Labour Party took place before April 2018) when McNicol was finally prised out.’

The Labour Files take on the EHRC programme was, as a result of this political muddle, extremely weak.  So it says (50.46) that prior to the period when JJ became General Secretary none of the staff were investigated. That is true but irrelevant to the main question which is whether there was an anti-Semitism phenomenon at all.

Yes Corbyn and JJ were trying to speed up the expulsion of people who were not anti-Semitic. Indeed he introduced at the 2019 conference the ‘fast track’ expulsions which we were assured would only be used against ‘egregious’ cases of anti-Semitism.

That was a lie. The fast-track expulsions were used against every case of alleged anti-Semitism. All those who were expelled were denied a hearing. Anonymous bureaucrats made the decision. Ironically Corbyn himself was later suspended under the same procedures.

Towards the end of his leadership Corbyn was running on a treadmill of the Right’s making. Of course the EHRC Report was absurd to suggest (52.06) that by trying to speed up Ken Livingstone’s case Corbyn was discriminating against Jewish members?  But what does that say about Corbyn? What The Labour Files didn’t mention was the fact that its author, Alisdair Henderson, was a supporter of the far-Right who defendedthe fascist philosopher Roger Scruton and who ‘liked’ or retweeted social media posts criticising Black Lives Matters protesters. Henderson described the words misogynist and homophobe as “highly ideological propaganda terms.” Again The Labour Files were extremely weak politically.

Other criticisms of the EHRC, such as their redefinition of harassment as political disagreement weren’t touched upon.

Marc Wadsworth

Marc is a Black anti-racist activist who did more than any single person to bring the Stephen Lawrence affair to the public’s attention by arranging a meeting between his parents and Nelson Mandela. The refusal of Corbyn and his apparatchiks to speak out in his defence was particularly disgusting.

As Marc said (53.15) of the NCC Panel under Magi Cosins, a supporter of the right-wing Labour First, ‘they’d already decided I was guilty whatever evidence put before them.’   Marc was the only person on the programme to make any criticism of Corbyn: (53.34 ) ‘Jeremy Corbyn threw me under a bus.’

Was There a Hierarchy of Racism?

One of the main catch phrases of much of the left about Labour is that there is a hierarchy of racism with anti-Semitism at the top and Islamaphobia and anti-Black racism at the bottom. I disagree.

For there to be a hierarchy of racism Labour Party must have been concerned about actual anti-Semitism whereas all the evidence is that if you were one of the few genuine and bona fide anti-Semites in the Labour Party the chances were that Matthews and his cronies were not be interested in you. Labour’s Disputes Team were only interested in expelling anti-Zionists.

In Episode 3 ‘The Hierarchy’we hear  from Marcia Hutchinson, a Black councillor in Manchester, who said that she had faced more racism in the Labour Party than in the whole of her life. (5.27) Yet this was never tackled by Corbyn who allowed himself to be diverted by the fake ‘anti-Semitism’ allegations, made by the same anti-Black and Islamaphobic racists.

The programme includes audio by a Black worker detailing her experience of racism working at Southside, Labour’s HQ. ‘I brought my experience to the party and I was held to different standards than White men.’ There was an hour long meeting with her line manager about her where she wasn’t given a right of reply. As Marcia remarked: ‘It is utterly sickening that this is happening in a party that claims to be anti-racist.’

We learn of a 17 strong WhatsApp messaging group that included McNicol which was replete with racist attacks on Dianne Abbot who it had just been announced had Type 2 Diabetes. The following exchange speaks for itself:

Sarah Mulholland:       Diane Abbot suddenly ill for today’s vote so wasn’t able to make it.

Emilie Oldknow (now UNISON Assistant General Secretary) ‘Hahaha’

Patrick Heneghan ((Executive Director - Elections, Campaigns and Organisation) ‘Dr’s note please’

Sarah Mulholland: ‘She literally makes me sick’

Julie Lawrence:           ‘She looked perfectly fine when I saw her slithering down Vic St.’

Marcia Hutcheson had a brief response:  ‘Slither is what a snake does.’ (55.47) Labour’s racist staff had utterly dehumanised Diane.

Starmer promised the Black staff at Southside that there would be an inquiry into this racism.  What happened?  It was Black staff like Halima Khan who were dismissed. ‘Sir Keir Starmer’s leadership is giving succour to racists within the party’remarked Hutcheson. The racists stayed put as this ‘Zionist without qualification’ proceeded to  instigate a racist purge of the Labour Party.

The Forde Report concluded that ‘the Labour Party is not a welcoming place for people of colour’. Halima Khan told how ‘anti-Semitism is the organisation’s priority’ (13.41) and that everything would drop if there was an email from the Jewish Chronicle. Complaints about Islamaphobia were binned or forgotten about.

Labour member and Sunday Times ‘journalist’ Rod Liddle had declared that Islam is ‘an unpleasant ideology’ (16.29) Oldknow decided to sit on the complaint because Liddle was chummy with Ian Austin and Tom Watson. It took two years before was he suspended. Trevor Philips, who was eventually suspended for a whole series of racist statements such as that Muslims are a ‘nation within a nation’ was quietly reinstated under Starmer. Halima Khan was dismissed on suspicion that she had leaked this  decision.

A reluctance to take action against a genuine Holocaust denier Chris Crookes

In August 2016 a member of Labour International complained to the Disputes Team about Chris Crookes, who was an open holocaust denier (Labour Leaked Report pp. 277-281).

It was only in February 2018, after Sam Matthews had done nothing, when 289 members of Labour International signed a petition demanding action, that the wheels slowly turned.

On 26 March 2018, Matthews finally initiated a case. Between August 2016 and February 2018 the case of Chris Crookes was raised with Matthews twelve times, Stolliday four times, with other GLU staff four times and McNicol twice. Crookes was finally suspended in March 2018 and expelled in July 2019. Unfortunately Labour Files failed to ask why the difference in approach between anti-Zionists accused of anti-Semitism and a genuine holocaust denier.

Halima Khan told how the word ‘Palestine’ became a search term when seeking evidence of ‘anti-Semitism’. This was the result of adopting the IHRA.

We also learnt that 23% of all complaints involved 1 person and 12% came from the racist Labour Against Anti-Semitism. We also learnt that LAAS’s Director, Euan Philips used the pseudonym David Gordstein, a clearly Jewish name for someone who is not Jewish.

Starmer’s Purge of the Left and Anti-Semitism

Halima Khan stated  [1.08.41] that

‘the criteria for anti-Semitism changed quite dramatically within Keir’s leadership. It was clear that anti-Semitism was going to be used under the new leadership to strike out as many left-wing members as possible.’

The ground had been laid by Corbyn for what happened under Starmer. As  Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi explained at least 56 Jewish members have been investigated, suspended or expelled for ‘anti-Semitism’. Jewish members are 6.3 times more likely to be investigated by the Labour Party for anti-Semitism than non-Jews.  Jenny Manson exclaimed ‘How dare they tell us we are anti-Semitic’

Board of Deputies Amanda Bowman makes it clear at a meeting with Steve Reed that the 'antisemitism' campaign is really about criticism of Israeli Apartheid

We also saw a classic example of the BOD interfering in something that was none of their business, viz. Labour’s attitude to Tory legislation on BDS. Amanda Bowman, Vice President of the BOD, [1.13.35] advised Steve Reed MP who is on Starmer’s front bench, not to oppose the legislation. Reed committed the Labour Party never to accept attempts to ‘exceptionalise and delegitimize Israel.’

The Labour Files - The Hierarchy

Stalking in Newham

You cannot understand the flagrant disregard of all democratic norms, the flouting of inconvenient rules and the willingness to tolerate and encourage skulduggery and dishonesty, without understand that all this comes from the top. Starmer is a man without an ounce of principle or honesty. Socialism is not a word in his vocabulary.

In Oliver Eagleton’s book The Starmer Project we learn of Starmer’s reaction to Extraordinary Rendition, when Binyamin Mohammed was arrested in 2002 in Karachi and tortured under the supervision of the CIA.  Overseeing his treatment was an agent of MI5.  When Mohamed was transferred to Morocco he experienced far worse torture with his penis and chest being repeatedly slashed with a razor. All of this under the direction and supervision of an MI5 agent.

Mohamed eventually returned to the UK via Guantanamo and produced evidence of the involvement of MI5.  Starmer’s response as DPP was to announce that there was ‘insufficient evidence to prosecute.’ The Head of MI5 Jonathan Evans was ‘delighted’ and described the MI5 agent as ‘a dedicated public servant who has worked with skill and courage over many years to keep the people of this country safe from terrorism.’

Starmer preferred to pursue people who overclaimed welfare benefits with fraud charges carrying 10 years sentences and prosecuting women whose rapists were acquitted for lying. And of course pursuing Julian Assange on behalf of the Americans.

When Gary McKinnon an autistic hacker hacked into US military databases to find information on UFOs Starmer was determined to extradite him to the US criminal ‘justice’ system.

When his mother confronted Starmer face to face he robotically told her that ‘I’m feeling very uncomfortable.  Speaking to you is making me feel very uncomfortable.’ He must have felt the same when Audrey White confronted him over his betrayal of Liverpool’s Hillsborough fans. Even Boris Johnson described a decision to deport McKinnon as ‘extraordinary cruel and inhuman.’ But Starmer is above such considerations. He is a process man.

When Theresa May decided to turn down the extradition request Starmer reacted with ‘fury’. He flew immediately to see Obama’s Attorney General Eric Holder to plead that this should not jeopardise their relationship.

Corbyn’s failure to do due diligence on Starmer is one among many of his calamitous failures and one which he has paid dearly for since. Starmer should have been sacked not promoted to Brexit Secretary.

In Newham where, according to Halima Khan, members of the Labour Party were stalked. Children were followed to their school. Detailed files were built up on activists, where they worked, what they owned and who lived in their properties.

Newham was a 100% Labour borough and the party was controlled by a clique of mainly White politicians who ensured that the Labour Party was a closed shop. When Corbyn was elected leader all this changed and there was an influx of Muslims and Black people.

Carl Morris, the Regional Organiser and Amy Fode, the Regional Director, were not happy with what was happening. Morris (23.03) alerted Southside to a group of predominantly Asian men on the pavement waiting outside for Newham AGM to start. Fode took a picture of them. They spoke of a group of Pakistanis infiltrating the Labour Party. Muslims were good enough to vote for the Labour Party but they were not expected to become members and active around their own issues.

When local Councillor Obaid Khan was suspended from the Labour Party local community groups sent a letter to Newham’s Mayor, Robin Wales alleging racial discrimination. It accused Wales of having ‘contrived and manipulated the Party processes to get him unfairly expelled with trumped up and false accusations.’ Wales sent this to Stolliday who, without bothering to examine the allegations, expressed his sympathy with Wales and accepted that the letter was libellous. Today Stolliday does the same in UNISON.

Starmer's Secret State - Labour's surveillance of its South Asian members in Newham

Carel Buxton described how, when Starmer was elected, Mehmood Mirza and Tahir Mirza were victimised and expelled: ‘it was like warfare’.  A 100 page dossier was compiled, mainly on S Asian residents. New Labour members were identified by race (32.08). People were racially profiled into dialects. Much of the information had been obtained from Labour files. The GDPR requires reports on data breaches within 72 hours yet nothing was reported. Mirza was suspended within weeks. Halima Khan described the dossier as ‘potentially criminal’ (39.28) from which she was removed.

Halima Khan asked if supporting Palestine meant her job would be at risk. She was told that by the person she asked that they would have to get back to her on that. (45.42)

What is amazing is how non-Jewish racists felt qualified to speak about what Jews feel

At Southside they set up a Black Community Engagement Plan whose purpose was not to tackle racism but to regain the Black vote. All but one of the team writing it was White. The plan focused on appeasing Whites. (52.00) As Peter Oborne observed it was the Battle for the Bigoted White Vote.

In the Labour Files – Part 4:The Spying Game we learn of clearly criminal conduct in Croydon and  how the Labour Right deals with dissent among councillors.

Steven Downes, the Editor of Inside Croydon, dedicated to uncovering the many scandals, cronyism and corruption amongst Croydon councillors, found himself locked out of his own email account. He had been hacked.

Downes first learnt about the purpose of the hack when he came across a tweet naming 3 Labour Councillors as sources for Inside Croydon. (3.40)

Ruth Bannister, a local right-winger, was the source of the leak. How did the Labour Party react to this?  Did they emulate Tom Watson’s outrage when he pursued the News of the World and the Murdoch press about the hacking of peoples’ phones?  Not a bit of it.

Councillor Clive Fraser, the chief whip, sought to speak to Andrew Pelling, one of the 3 councillors about 6 emails he had sent to Croydon Inside. London Region informed Fraser that he could use these criminally obtained emails in Fraser’s determination to pursue the councillors. In other words the Labour Party itself was complicit, if not in the hacking then in using the illegally obtained emails. (7.44)

London Region informs Fraser that the hacked emails, obtained illegally can nonetheless be used

Bannister herself then levelled a complaint against the 3 councillors, Andrew Pelling, Stephen Mann & Robert Canning, for ‘leaking confidential and damaging info from Council and Labour Group.’ One wonders what was so damaging about the info and why it was that she thought that members of the public weren’t entitled to know what their elected representatives were up to. (7.44)

Croydon Labour Groups' new Chief Whip was very unhappy about the ethics of hacking computers and then using the information

Steve Reed, the local MP and Shadow Justice Minister, also emailed the leaked dossier. Reed must, as Downes said, know what to do with what are stolen goods yet he said nothing. The Party didn’t even alert Downes to the hack.

David Evans was informed of what was happening in his own backyard but his only concern was with any Labour Party members in contact with Inside Croydon. Fraser made a complaint against David White, a veteran Labour Party member and Corbyn supporter, using some of the hacked emails. White was expelled for ‘anti-Semitism’ as a result of the trade in hacked emails. As someone who has met White on numerous occasions I must confess I never detected any anti-Semitism in him but then again, unlike Evans/Starmer I’m Jewish!

It was only when Jerry Fitzpatrick, a lawyer, was installed as the new chief whip at Croydon, that the alarm was sounded. Fitzpatrick called the emails ‘stolen goods’ whereas the Labour Party’s own lawyer Alex Barros-Curtis raised no objection. Consideration should be given to making a formal complaint about Barros-Curtis to the Solicitors Regulation Authority. He seemed to be quite at home with illegality by Labour Party witchhunters.

But the hacking was not over. Emails from Downes to people were being blind copied to Hamida Ali, Leader of Croydon Council & Clive Fraser. Downes computer settings had been tampered with. Fitzpatrick sent multiple emails to the GLU and Evans asking whether Hamida Ali and Fraser had to inform the police. He got no response. Andrew Pelling was later expelled as a result of the hacking. As Pelling observed, what is a party that associates itself with hacking of the press going to do when it’s in government? Will it condone it with national newspapers or are they exempt? The Labour Party’s response was that it wasn’t a lawless organisation but a rules-based one. To my knowledge there are no Labour Party rules that condone hacking. Not even under Sir Starmer.

 The Elections Are Not All Bad News As the Hypocritical Zionist ‘Left’ is All But Eliminated and Meretz Loses Its Last Representatives

It’s an ill wind that blows no good and so it is with Israel’s recent elections. While no one can be happy with the increase in the number of seats for Religious Zionism/Jewish Power from 6 to 14, making it the third largest bloc in the Knesset, at least now there can be no hiding behind the pretence of peace negotiations to justify the Occupation of Palestinian territories.

Apologists for Zionism, like the Board of Deputies will claim that what has happened is an aberration and that they are ‘gravely concerned’ at the election of Otzma Yehudit. In one sense they are gravely concerned but only at the damage to Israel’s reputation.

Labour Friends of Israel have gone one better in rationalising that it was ‘only’ 10% who voted for the fascists or that Israel is suffering from the same growth in the far-right as other countries and we should therefore not be surprised. This is a common phenomenon.

Keir Starmer, a ‘Zionist without qualification’toldJewish News that the rise of Israeli far-right would not alter his belief in a 'strong relationship between Britain and Israel'. For once I think he is telling the truth.

The Lies of LFI - Israel's 'founding principles' were based on ethnic cleansing

I suspect that if Israel were to announce a policy calling for the killing of Palestinian first-borns that Starmer’s faith in Britain’s relationship with Israel would be as strong as ever. Indeed he would probably praise Israel’s moderation in allowing the remainder of Palestinian children to live!

The phenomenon we have seen in Italy, Sweden and other European countries of a growing far-Right has nothing whatsoever to do with what we are seeing in Israel.

LFI fall back on the idea that Israel's neo-Nazis are just part of the same phenomenon as Europe's far-Right

The growth of the European far-Right is caused by the influx of refugees, a result of Western wars in the Middle East and elsewhere and the resulting determination of to scapegoat them. It is compounded by the severe economic crisis affecting Europe, partly as a result of the war in Ukraine and the energy crisis, which results in a competition for resources such as housing.

There is no connection whatever between Israel’s far-Right, whose origins lie in Zionism, Jewish Supremacy and settler colonisation and the growth of the far-Right in Europe and America.

This thug, who is now an MK, boasted of his torture of a Bedouin family

Although it is always easy to label parties ‘fascist’, far-Right parties in Europe are, with some exceptions, not fascist. On this I disagree with those like Richard Silverstein who arguesto the contrary. Fascism comes to power in order to defeat and destroy the organisations of the working class. It is accompanied by fighting squads. In Hitler’s Germany the first concentration camp Dachau was set up for communists and trade abolished and their offices occupied. Likewise in Italy Mussolini came to power in order to smash the working class.

All the evidence in Europe is that a large section of a depoliticised working class is voting for the far-Right. Where once the Communist  Party dominated Paris’s suburbs today their place has been taken by Marine Le Pen.

Whilst figures such as Le Pen and Giorgia Meloni are hostile to trade unions and working class struggles there is no indication that they are intent on setting up a police state which will abolish the unions and conscript the working class.

Noam, is a vehemently anti-gay component of Religious Zionism

Israel’s far right is likewise not a fascist right. Indeed arguably it is worse than fascist. Its support comes to a large extent from Israel’s Jewish working class. Zionism like all forms of settler colonialism involves an alliance between the settler working class and ruling class. Ben Gvir is not advocating making Histadrut, the Jewish trade union illegal. Saying something is abhorrent or evil is not the same as fascism.

The racism directed against migrants, as we have seen with Suella Braverman over migration to Britain and the calamities at Manston, are not of the same order as Israeli racism. There has been a very welcome pushbackagainst what has happened and Braverman visitedthe facility with her tail between her legs yesterday, chastened at the response to the appalling conditions there.

We do not have thousands of Italian or Swedish people chanting ‘death to refugees’. Yet this is a regular occurrence in Israel and when it does happen, as with the pogrom in Jerusalem last May, the Police attack the victims and defend the perpetrators.

Racism in Israel doesn’t originate in antagonism towards outsiders or refugees but from Zionism itself, the founding ideology of the state. That is why the position of the BOD and LFI is totally hypocritical.  For years they have consciously ignored the racism inherent in an ethno-religious state.

Ben-Gvir celebrates his electoral triumph

It wasn’t Ben Gvir of Otzma Yehudit who saidthat ‘Israel is the nation state of the Jewish people – and only it.’ but Prime Minister Netanyahu. It wasn’t Bezalel Smotrich of Jewish Home who saidthat Palestinians ‘are like animals, they aren’t human.’ but Rabbi Eli Dahan, who later became Israel’s Deputy Defence Minister and ran on the Likud ticket (albeit as a member of Jewish Home).

Racism in Israel is a consequence of settler colonialism not an influx of refugees or a legacy of past colonialism. Every single Zionist party from the ‘left’ Meretz to Likud subscribes to the idea of a Jewish state. People need to understand that the very concept of a ‘Jewish’ state is inherently racist. Zionist settler colonialism had, from its very foundations, ethnic cleansing built into it. How else to create a ‘Jewish’ state in a land where the majority of inhabitants were non-Jewish other than to expel the indigenous population?

It wasn’t Otzma Yehudit or Religious Zionism which drew up plans to ‘Judaise’ the Galilee, Jerusalem and the Negev but the Israeli Labor Party who subscribed to the Koenig Plan and the Judaisation (in Germany it was called Aryanisation) of the Galilee or the Prawer Plan in the Negev.

A comparison between 2021 and 2022 results

Both ‘left’ and ‘right’ Zionism were agreed about the fundamentals of Zionism. Where they differed were on tactics. In general the Labour Zionists understood the need to say one thing to their sponsors in the West whilst saying and doing different things in Israel itself.

There was an almighty row when Bezalel Smotrich called for the separation of Jewish and Arabs in maternity wards and all the hypocrites condemned him. It later turned out that a majority of Israeli hospitals do exactly what Smotrich was condemned. They too separateJewish and Arab mothers in maternity wards.

Meir Medical Center in Kfar Saba, told the reporter that it couldn’t guarantee a segregated room but that the maternity staff always tries to keep Jews and Arabs separate. “We try not to mix,” even when patients don’t request it, a representative was recorded as saying.

The Board of Deputies, Jewish Leadership Council and Labour Friends of Israel all call themselves Zionists. In that case they, along with Keir Starmer should be honest and accept that they are racists. The major difference between them and Ben Gvir is that for all his vicious racism, he is at least an honest racist.

This is why we should welcome the almost complete annihilation of the ‘left’ Zionist parties, the Israeli Labor Party and Meretz, whose only role has been to sanitise Israel’s ethnic cleansing. The ILP’s number of representatives has gone down from seven to four and Meretz has been eliminated completely.

Both Meretz and the ILP voted for the Citizenship Law that prevents the spouses of Israeli Palestinians who are from the West Bank obtaining Israeli residence and citizenship. Meretz voted for the apartheid law that extends civil law to Jewish settlers whilst at the same time putting Palestinians under military law. It even demanded that its sole Arab Knesset member, Ghaida Rinawie Zoabi, who votedagainst the law, resign from the Knesset.[1]

For the first 30 years in Israel there were continuous Israeli Labour Party coalition governments. In 1949 Mapai (ILP) and Mapam, the forerunner of Meretz, obtained 65 out of a total of 120 seats in the Knesset. As late as 1992 under Yitzhak Rabin they gained 56 seats. Today they have just 4 seats. They prepared the way for the Right and in the process lost any reason to exist.

Why do I welcome their demise? Because it was the ‘left’ Zionists who kept alive the idea of a two state solution. The right-wing Zionists were open about their desire to colonise the whole of Mandate Palestine. Indeed before 1948 Herut, the forerunner of Likud, claimedboth the West and East banks of the Jordan.

Member of a racist rabbinical tradition and Religious Zionism MK

Nothing has enabled the settlement of the West Bank more than the illusion that a Palestinian state might be established. This despite the fact that at no time did either the ILP or Meretz call for an end to the Occupation or even the dismantlement of the settlements. Meretz/Mapam was always implacably opposedto Yesh Gvul and Israeli Jews who refused to serve in the Occupied Territories (with the honourable except of their founder, Shulamit Aloni).

Whatever their other virtues right-wing Zionists are at least honest about their intentions. They openly declare that there is no place for a Palestinian state.

Zionists in the West will mourn the disappearance of the Labour Zionists but they would do well to save their tears. No longer will it be possible to pretend that a negotiated solution is possible. No longer will an Israeli government be able to disguise its ethnic cleansing behind a smokescreen of excuses for an eventual Palestinian state.

The primary purpose of Labour Zionism today is to kosher right-wing Israeli governments abroad. Labour Zionism has been in steep decline since 1992 when it gained 56 seats. Even as late as 2015 the ILP and Meretz gained 29 seats but since then the decline has been meteoric.

No one who wishes to see an end to Israeli Apartheid should mourn their demise. 40 years ago I wrote, ‘Begin & Sharon Have Done Nothing that Labour Zionism didn't do before them’.[2]Thiswas no rhetorical flourish.

It wasn’t Herut (Likud) who organised the Nakba, the expulsion of over three-quarters of a million Palestinian refugees from their homeland nor was it right-wing Zionist militias who perpetrated the majority of the massacres that ‘encouraged’ the Palestinian refugees to flee. That was the Labour Zionist militias Haganah and Palmach.

In November 1948, Eliezer Peri, the editor of Mapam’s Al Hamishmar, received a letter describing a massacre at al-Dawayima on 29 October. Benny Morris estimated that there were hundreds dead.[3]Agriculture Minister Aharon Zisling referred to a letter he had received declaring:

I couldn’t sleep all night ... Jews too have committed Nazi acts.’ [4]‘The children they killed by breaking their heads with sticks. There was not a house without dead.[5]

Mapam’s Political Committee was briefed by former Chief of Staff of the Haganah terror group, Yisrael Galili, about the killing of civilians during Operations Yoav and Hiram. Aharon Cohen, head of Mapam’s Arab Department, led a call for an independent inquiry.[6]Their only problem was that the commanders of these operations were senior Mapam members, Yitzhak Sadeh and Moshe Carmel.

Likud’s crimes against the Palestinians were more than matched by their ‘socialist’ counterparts. In 1956 it was the Labour Zionists who presided over the massacre at Kafr Qasim when 53 villagers coming back from the fields were mown down with machine guns. A curfew had been imposed on the first day of the Suez war but the workers had not been informed before setting out for work.

The criminals who carried out the massacre were pardoned within the year and the Brigade Commander, Col. Shadmi was fined a symbolic 10 prutot, less than one cent.

With the release of the transcripts of the trial of the soldiers involved it has become clear that this was no rogue operation. The intention had been to ‘encourage’ another exodus of the Palestinians. Soldiers surrounded the village on three sides. The fourth leading to Jordan was left open in accordance with Operation Hafarperet, a plan to transfer the Arabs in the Little Triangle area, in the event of war, to Jordan.[7]Israel’s Palestinians had, since 1948, been treated as a hostile fifth column and until 1966 they lived under martial law.

Rabbi Meir Kahane.

People in the West are surprised at the election of Ben Gvir, whose hero is Rabbi Meir Kahane. Kahane first gained a seat in 1984 standing for Kach, a Jewish Nazi party. Kach was banned from fighting the 1988 elections to the Knesset. However the reasons for the ban had nothing to do with his racism, quite the contrary. Kahane was resented because he said aloud what others preferred to hide. Kahane held up a mirror to the hypocrisy of both Labour and Likud.

Kahane was the honest Zionist who dared to say what others would only whisper. In August 1986 the Knesset passed, in response to Kahane’s election, an Anti-Racism Law which Kahane voted for! The reason being that while the law made ‘incitement to racism’ illegal, it exempted discrimination based on the grounds of religion or which was intended to preserveIsrael's ‘unique character.’ [8]

It is of course the ‘unique character’ of Israel as an ethno-religious state which necessitates discrimination against the Palestinians. The law has  mainly been applied to Israeli Palestinians. Otherwise it has remained a dead letter.

Kahane punctured the hypocrisy of the Labour Zionists who pretended that Israel could be both a Jewish state and a democratic state. This oxymoron pretends that it is possible to grant Jewish citizens privileges such as sole access to 93% of Israeli land whilst at the same time maintaining a democratic society. Kahane was clear.  Israel could either be a Jewish state or a democratic state, however it could not be both.

In 1985 the Knesset passed amendment 7A to the Basic Law: The Knesset preventing parties that incite racism from standing for election. It also prevented parties standing that denied the existence of the State of Israel as a Jewish or a democratic state.[9]The real reason for its passage had little to do with Kahane’s racism but with the fact that Kach was forecast to gain up to 12 seats in the 1988 election.[10]This would have been a public relations disaster.

There is little doubt that we are entering a new stage with the election of a bloc of 14 Kahanists, overt racists and homophobes. Repression in the West Bank is intensifying as the 700,000 settlers gain a critical mass. This year has seen a massive increase in settler attacks such as the burning of olive groves and attackson individual Palestinians.[11]The Israeli army has not only refused to prevent such attacks but have accompanied and indeed participatedin such attacks.

This has been accompanied by army attacks and assassinations in Jenin, Nablus and their closure. The battle for the land of Palestine is increasing as the settlers seek to further expand. The goal is first to transform the Palestinians into landless labourers, a long colonial tradition, and then to enact their transfer. This is where support for Religious Zionism comes in. It is a vote for ethnic cleansing, not only of the Palestinians of the Territories but Israel’s Palestinian citizens.

One of the major disappointments of the election was the decisionof Hadash-Ta'al to force Balad, an Arab nationalist party out of the Joint list. Their primary reason was their desire to support from the outside the anti-Netanyahu coalition of Zionist parties.[12]It proved a disaster. Hadash/Ta'al gained 5 seats, down 1 from 2021, whilst Balad just failed to clear the 3.25% barrier. Ironically it was this decision that gave Netanyahu a clear majority.

The number of seats gained by the ultra-Orthodox parties Shas and United Torah Judaism increased from 16 to 18. As Israel becomes more overtly racist it is also becoming more religious. The bible is used to justify expulsion and racism. Traditionally seen as politically moderate, religious Zionists have now become more overtly messianic with the demand for the demolition of the Dome of the Rock and Al Aqsa Mosque and their replacement by a Third Temple.

The presence of Religious Zionism in the governing coalition with a clutch of senior cabinet posts heralds a new era in Israeli politics. Religious Zionism is committed to expel Israel’s Palestinian citizens, which they disguise as the expulsion of ‘disloyal’ Arabs.

There will be those who will decry the description of Otzma Yehudit of Itamar Gvir as a Jewish Nazi party. However the programme of Kach, from which they take their inspiration, was clear. They calledfor prison sentences for “every Arab who has sexual relations with a Jewish woman.” This is straight from the Nazis’ Nuremberg Laws. Also like Hitler, who opposed the prosecution of Jewish women who had relations with ‘Aryan’ men, Kach did not consider sexual relations between Jewish men and Arab women a crime.

The reaction of Israel’s friends in the West to the accession to power of a neo-Nazi party is one of open dismay. It is likely that pressure will be exerted on Netanyahu to form a coalition with the National Unity party of former chief of staff Benny Gantz and Gideon Sa’ar, ex-Likud, in order to keep Religious Zionism at bay. The next few months will be devoted to the process of forming a coalition.

Tony Greenstein

 Jewish Network for Palestine is hosting the Book Launch Sunday 13 November 5 pm

Jewish Network for Palestineis hosting the Book Launch Sunday 13 November 5 pm

Please share with your networks and register here:https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_7N3bCglHRJ-kYwCW3QKtUw

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the webinar.

It has been a long time coming but my book Zionism During the Holocaust – The Weaponisation of Memory in the Service of State and Nation is due to be released this week in time for the book launch which is being hosted by Jewish Network for Palestine.

You can order the book by contacting me at tonygreenstein104@gmail.com and sending me your name and address. The paperback will cost £12.50 and the hardback £18.00. Alternatively you can transfer the money to the following account and then contact me to let me have your details:

Name:                             Brighton and Hove Unemployed Workers Centre

Sort Code:                      09-01-50

Account Number:           04093879

Reference:                      Your Name

Alternatively you can send a cheque made out to B&HUWC, with all your details, to

BUWC, PO Box 173, Brighton BN51 9EZ

Interviews & Readings

During the Labour Party Conference on September 27 I was interviewed about the book by Tina Werkmann for the Beyond the Fringe – Future of the Left Events

and in October I was interviewed by Electronic Intifada's   Asa Winstanley and Nora Barrows-Friedman, for a Podcast  How Zionists collaborated with the Nazis,

Tony Greenstein reading extracts at the Over the Edge book fair in Galway City Library

On October 27 I was invited to read extracts from the book by the Over the Edge Literary Events at Galway City Library in Ireland, alongside two other writers, Rob Doyle and Riley Johnson. The video of my talk is here.

I was also interviewed by Tony Gosling of Bristol Community Radio about my book and you can hear the interview here:

A Brief Summary of My Book

My book covers the relationship of the Zionist movement to anti-Semitism before, during and after the Holocaust and looks at how the Holocaust has been weaponised by the Zionist movement. It particularly focuses on the period of the Holocaust itself.

Despite the efforts of the Zionists to prevent my Crowdfunder the book has been published and it is over 500 pages with more than 3,000 footnotes, mainly from Zionist sources.

Of course the mainstream media are not interested in anything that contradicts the Establishment narrative that Zionism was the answer to anti-Semitism and the Holocaust. A narrative that totally eliminates the anti-Zionist leaders of Poland's Jews from history. 

In Poland in the last free elections in 1938 in Warsaw the anti-Zionist Bund took 17 of the 20 Jewish Council seats. The Zionists obtained one. Throughout Poland, in conjunction with the Polish Socialist Party, the Bund were victorious. Jewish and Israeli students today know nothing of this history.

In Germany the Zionists were even more of a fringe minority.  They constituted no more than 2% of its Jews.

It will make uncomfortable reading for Zionists and supporters of the State of Israel because I rely on mostly Zionist sources to show how the Zionist movement was a Quisling movement.

In my reading in Galway I quoted David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first Prime Minister and the then Chair of the Jewish Agency, the Zionist government in waiting. After the British had accepted the entrance of nearly 10,000 Jewish children from Nazi Germany in the wake of Kristallnacht, the November 1938 pogrom against Germany's Jews, Ben Gurion made a speech to Mapai’s Central Committee (Israeli Labor Party) on 9 December 1938. Ben Gurion explained that:

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.

This quote can be found in multiple sources includingthe official biography of Ben-Gurion by Shabtai Teveth 'The Burning Ground - 1886-1948' (p.855)  as well as in Yoav Gelber’s ‘Zionist policy and the Fate of European Jewry,’ Yad Vashem Studies (1939-42) p. 199 and Tom Segev’s, The Seventh Million, 28.

Many Zionist leaders saw the rise of Hitler as a good thing. Of course they did not foresee the Holocaust but whereas most Jewish people did see the Nazis as a dire threat to German’s Jews the Zionists only saw opportunities.

Emil Ludwig, the world-famous biographer, ‘expressed the general attitude of the Zionist movement’:

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

Nahman Bialik, the national Zionist poet, volunteered that

‘Hitlerism has perhaps saved German Jewry, which was being assimilated into annihilation.’

 Germany’s remaining Jews were of course annihilated, but not by assimilation. Berl Katznelson, a founder of Mapai (the forerunner of Israel’s Labour Party) and editor of its paper Davar, as well as Ben-Gurion’s effective deputy, saw the rise of Hitler as ‘an opportunity to build and flourish like none we have ever had or ever will have.’

Ben-Gurion himself was even more optimistic. ‘The Nazis’ victory would become “a fertile force for Zionism.’ One of the leaders of German Zionism, Rabbi Joachim Prinz admitted that:

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

Today the Zionists keep quiet about this because they know how appalling their record is. Their only response is to cry ‘anti-Semitism’.

The Zionist movement even betrayed its own young Zionist fighters in Warsaw and the other ghettos of Poland. Their writings and diaries were falsified and edited in such a way as to remove any criticism of the Zionist movement. Tuvia (Tova) Altman, a leader of the Hashomer Hatzair underground in Poland, wrote in December 1942 that ‘Israel is dying before my eyes and I wring my hands and cannot help.’ What they didn’t publish was the following:

After all, you have erased me from your memory and what are we.... It takes all the restraint I can muster not to vent the bitterness that has accumulated for you and your friends for forgetting me so completely... Only the realization and the certainty that we will never again meet led me to write…. Do not give regards to anyone. I don’t want to know about them.

Another victim of the censorship was Hayka (Chajka) Klinger who, when she went to Israel, couldn’t find anywhere to publishher experiences. When she diedher Ghetto Diary was published. However it had so many changes and erasures that researchers were recommended to consult the original. The originals have now been republished, see Chajka Klinger, I am Writing these Words to You: The original diaries, Będzin, 1943. https://tinyurl.com/4trn2dtd.

When Chajka went to Palestine in 1944 she made a speech to the Zionist Executive. However the extracts below were not mentioned in references to the speech by Dina Porat, the Chief Historian at the Zionist propaganda museum Yad Vashem, in her book The Blue and the Yellow Stars of David. Chajka told how the Jewish Councils, the Judenrate, were hated by the masses for their collaboration with the Nazis and how they were largely staffed by members of the Zionist movement:

 [the] various Jewish communities [in Europe] were headed by members of the Zionist movement and most of them understood that if [the Nazis] said A they would need to carry on and [do] B.

And after they began assisting the Nazis to collect gold and furniture from Jewish homes, they had no choice but to go on to help them prepare lists of Jews for labor camps... And precisely because those who stood at the head of most of the communities were Zionists, the psychological effects on most of the Jewish masses vis-à-vis the Zionist idea was devastating, and the hatred towards Zionism grew day by day...

One bright day we will need to try these people. It must be said clearly and publicly that many Zionists betrayed [their people] ... Yes one must try Haim Molchadsky, the head of the JNF in Bedzin...

Today the Zionist movement claims credit for the Warsaw Ghetto Resistance but at the time the leadership of the Zionist movement in Palestine urged them to abandon the fight against the Nazis and go to Palestine via Aliya Bet, the secret emigration of Zionist pioneers from Nazi occupied Europe.

Hayka Klinger, who arrived in Palestine in March 1944, told the Histadrut Executive that ‘we received an order not to organize any more defence.’ To the Zionist leadership the ghetto fighters were more valuable in Palestine. Klinger observed that

‘Without a people, a people’s avant-garde is of no value. If rescue it is, then the entire people must be rescued. If it is to be annihilation, then the avante-garde too shall be annihilated.’

Never was the ethical and moral distinction between the Jewish diaspora and Palestine’s Zionist leaders clearer.

The Zionist leaders saw the risings in the ghettos as ‘a kind of betrayal of the overriding principle of the homeland.’ Yet despite opposing the uprisings at the time, the ghetto fighters were ‘retrospectively conscripted’ into the Zionist terror groups. ‘We fought here and they fought there’ according to Palmach commander Yitzhak Sadeh. Except that the Jewish partisans were fighting against the fascists whereas the Zionist militias fought with fascists.

The anti-Zionist leadership of the Warsaw Ghetto resistance, of which the Bund was the main component, has been eliminated by the Zionists from history.

The Israeli state was extremely hostile to the last commander of the Warsaw Ghetto Resistance, Marek Edelman, who had written an Open Letter to the Palestinians asking them to stop the bloodshed and enter into peace negotiations. The letter caused outrage because Edelman did not mention the word ‘terrorism.’ Israeli leaders were particularly incensed by its title: ‘Letter to Palestinian partisans’. Paul Foot wrote in an obituary to Edelman:

Mr Edelman … wrote in a spirit of solidarity from a fellow resistance fighter, as a former leader of a Jewish uprising …He addressed his letter to ‘commanders of the Palestinian military, paramilitary and partisan operations – to all the soldiers of the Palestinian fighting organisations.’ This set up a howl of rage in the Zionist press, who reminded their readers that Mr Edelman, despite his heroism in the 1940s, is a former supporter of the anti-Zionist socialist Bund and can therefore not be trusted.

What was particularly irksome was that Edelman had compared the structures of the Jewish resistance movement in Warsaw to that of the Palestinians. Although he occasionally came to Israel to visit old friends, Edelman retained the Bund’s hostility to Zionism. In an interview he described Israel as a:

chauvinist, religious state, where a Christian is a second-class citizen and a Muslim is third-class. It is a disaster, after three million were murdered in Poland, they want to dominate everything and not to consider non-Jews!

When Edelman died on 9 October 2009 he was honoured with a state funeral and a fifteen-gun salute. Not even the lowliest clerk at the Israeli Embassy attended. Edelman received Poland's highest honour and the French Legion of Honour but he died unrecognised and forgotten in Israel.

The President of Poland spoke at his funeral… held in the old Jewish cemetery of Warsaw. Two thousand people attended the grave-side ceremony. But no one from the Israeli government attended… No official representative of any international Jewish organisation attended either: not even from the holocaust memorialisation organisations.

You can read about all of the above and much more besides, including the story of Ha’avara, for which Ken Livingstone was forced from the Labour Party  in my book 

The Refusal of the Trade Union Leaders to Meet the Challenge of the Conservative's Class War is Why These Traitors Need to be Replaced

Registration Link

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‘Crisis What Crisis’is the phrase that Labour Prime Minister James Callaghan was reputed to have uttered as he returned from a visit abroad to the Winter of Discontent in 1979. It could equally apply to the Labour and Conservative front benches.

As the Royal College of Nursing, which is more of a professional association than a union, vote for their first ever strike, the political class seems to have taken Callaghan’s message to heart.

Under Starmer it is difficult to put a piece of paper between Labour and the Tories. Instead of defending refugees against Suella Braverman’s racist rhetoric of an ‘invasion’, Rachel Reeves attackedher for not deporting more asylum seekers.

When Sunak contemplates ‘eye-watering’ cuts in public expenditure, Labour fails to point out that a wealth tax and clamping down on tax evaders would more than fill the fiscal gap.

Of course Starmer has more urgent priorities such as eliminatingwhat is left of the Labour Left. Deselecting one of the few socialist Labour MPs, by hook or by crook (mainly the latter) is of far more importance than confronting the Tory agenda.

It was therefore no surprise that when a rash of strikes broke out in the summer, led by the RMT, that Starmer’s response was to refuse to    support the strike and to forbidthe Shadow Cabinet from joining the picket lines.

It would look bad apparently and detract from Labour as a serious party of government to be seen on picket lines. This despite the massive public support for the strike.

Schmoozing with hedge fund owners and multi-millionaires was not seen as a problem of optics. Supporting further privatisation of the NHS is no problem for Starmer and Wes Streeting, the Shadow Health Secretary.

We should bear in mind that Shirley Williams, a founder of the SDP, when she was Education Minister in the Callaghan Government, joinedthe picket lines at Grunwicks. This demonstrates just how right-wing Starmer is.

Energy has risen 100% in one year and coupled with the crisisfor food banks and child poverty it might be thought that this would prompt a concerted trade union response. Especially since the government has announced proposalsto outlaw any effective strike in the public sector.

Yet what is the response of the trade union leaders to the gauntlet thrown down by this government? A determined attempt to avoid any confrontation with the Tory government. It is as if they have learnt nothing from the halving of trade union membership since Thatcher became Prime Minister.

In the early 1970s when unofficial strikes were extremely popular and union leaders struggled to control their own members, the TUC was forced into organising an Emergency Conference which voted to defy the union laws. When Ted Heath and Sir John Donaldson at the National Industrial Relations Court confronted the Pentonville 5 dockers who were sent to gaol the TUC called a general strike.

This was enough for a hitherto unknown figure called the Official Solicitor to make an appearance before Lord Denning at the Court of Appeal.  The result was the decision of Donaldson was overturned and the dockers freed. Never before in its history had the Court of Appeal acted so fast! The House of Lords later reversed the Court of Appeal but by then the dockers had won anyway.

The most popular and well supported strike this summer has been that of the RMT.  But instead of calling an all-out strike and demanding that the TUC provide them with the means to sustain it, Mick Lynch and the RMT leadership have instead staged a series of one day strikes whose only effect is to postpone the day of reckoning.

Even worse they have called off the strikes as they begin negotiations with the employers. Instead of ensuring that the rail bosses feel the heat during their negotiations they have demobilised their own membership.

The CWU leadership is even worse. When Royal Mail threatened legal action if a series of strikes went ahead, they rushed to call off all the strikes, including those which weren’t under threat.  Royal Mail has meanwhile derecognised the union yet its fake left leadership still pose as class fighters at Campaign Group rallies.

The key problem facing the trade unions today is a historic one. The divorce between economics and politics. Even those trade union leaders who advocate greater militancy, like UNITE’s Sharon Graham, have little or nothing to say politically.  Graham, like Lynch, has pledgedher support for Starmer saying that she was ‘not interested in the internal game-playing within a political party’ as if the battle between left and right is simply a game of football. In the battle between Left and Right in the Labour Party Graham has no position.  All she supports is a limited militancy divorced from         political change.

The idea, beloved of the Socialist Workers Party, that all that matters is increasing the number of strikes and everything else will take care of itself, is a classic case of syndicalism. That you don’t need to forge a political leadership or challenge the capitalist system itself, in all its manifestations. All that is necessary is to win the battle for wage increases with the employer. The problem is that in a society based on profit employers can plead poverty and blackmail workers into accepting wage increases if they want to keep their jobs.

Strikes take place within a legal framework set by the government. If striking is made more difficult because of onerous legal restrictions then it is going to be harder to win a strike. And if rail unions are prevented from staging effective strikes by new laws then militancy by its own is not a solution.

We face the most bitter class war offensive in living memory. The energy costs cannot be brought back down unless the energy companies are nationalised. Strike action cannot be successful if trade unions have one hand tied behind their backs. Yet who among the union leaders is willing to make a stand or call for generalised action?

What is needed is the equivalent of the action the ‘markets’ i.e finance capital took when it went on strike when Lizz Truss decided to finance tax cuts by increasing government borrowing, i.e. a general strike. The only way to defeat the anti-trade union laws is to break them. Yet the TUC, whose only historical function has been to betray the working class, runs a mile from the idea of confrontation with the government and the courts.

What is worse is that even the ‘left’ trade union leaders – Mick Lynch, Sharon Graham, Dave Ward – concentrate on sectional disputes and avoid the idea of a political confrontation with the government like the plague. The fact that the capitalists use extra parliamentary pressure to secure what they want makes no difference. They are content to feed off the crumbs from the table. The RMT has a wage claim for less than the rate of inflation.

The cost of living crisis that now faces millions of people demands a political challenge to the neo-liberal system that transfers wealth from the poorest to the richest.

The one group of people to benefit from the pandemic was British billionaires. Their numbers increasedby 24% to 171 and their total wealth increased by 21.7%. Whilst health workers faced death and exhaustion at work, the super-rich did very well out of others’ misery. This is the neo-liberal ‘trickle-down’ economics that Liz Truss but also Rishi Sunak and Starmer represent.

This is why the Socialist Labour Network had decided to hold a public meeting with a range of speakers including:

Ken Loach - award-winning film-maker and socialist, will share his ideas on how to advance towards a new party

Lindsey German - author, socialist activist and spokesperson for the People's Assembly against Austerity, on how to build the fightback against the Tories

Candy Gregory - independent socialist councillor, Thanet District Council, on the campaign against conditions at the Manston Refugee Centre

Carel Buxton - SLN national Steering Group, Newham Socialist Labour and Newham Enough is Enough, will put the case for SLN's appeal for the formation of a new mass working class party.

As Sunak struggles to stabilise the Tories, Starmer lurches ever further to the right.

This Socialist Labour Network Online Public Meeting therefore comes at a critical time. How can we step up and unify the fightback against the Tories? Can we break Starmer's stranglehold? Above all, how can we take forward the fight for a new, mass, working-class party?

Please register below

https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_7N3bCglHRJ-kYwCW3QKtUw

A Short Quiz:

1.     Was Ken Livingstone a ‘Nazi apologist’ (John Mann) when he said that Hitler and the Nazis supported Zionism?

2.     Who was it who said that Palestine was an ‘Institute for the fumigation of Jewish vermin’?

3.     Which leading Zionist spoke of ‘their common toleration of Nazism’

4.     Which prominent Zionist, when accused of being an anti-Semite said ‘‘I have already established here [in his diary] that I despise the cancers of Judaism more than does the worst anti-Semite.’

5.     Which leading Zionist insisted that ‘Jewish Agency Executive funds be used only for rescue by immigration to Palestine, whereas rescue by assisting Jews to survive elsewhere was to be funded solely by private and organizational donations.’ ?

6.     Who was it who said that ‘the activity of the Zionist-oriented youth organisations … lies in the interest of the National Socialist state’s leadership…. (they are) not to be treated with that strictness that it is necessary to apply to the members of the so-called German-Jewish organisations (assimilationists).'

7.     Who wrote that ‘Zionism must be vigorously supported in order to encourage a significant number of German Jews to leave for Palestine or other destinations.'

8.     Who said ‘I accuse certain Jewish leaders of one of the most ghastly deeds of the war. This small group of quislings knew what was happening to their brethren in Hitler's gas chambers and bought their own lives with the price of silence. Among them was Dr Kasztner.’

9.     Who said ‘It was morally disturbing to seem to be considered as the favoured children of the Nazi Government, particularly when it dissolved the anti-Zionist youth groups, and seemed in other ways to prefer the Zionists. The Nazis asked for a more Zionist behaviour.’?

10.                        Who wrote:

‘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.’ 

Find out the answers tomorrow!

 Watch Eran Torbiner’s Film About the Man who Helped Fund the anti-Zionist Left and Stood in the Forefront of the Fight for the Rights of Israeli Palestinians

DAVID EHRENFELD - THE RED DIAMOND MERCHANT

It’s not often that a rich capitalist or member of the ruling class crosses class lines to support the left. Of course there are exceptions such as Friedrich Engel, Tony Benn and the Countess Markieviczand one would expect, if capitalism was in danger of being overthrown, for others to join the side of the revolutionaries. However it is very much the exception.

Class traitors usually come from the ranks of the oppressed not the oppressor because that is, after all, the way rich and powerful minorities maintain their grip on society. David Ehrenfeld was one such exception to the norm.

David Ehrenfeld  was the majority shareholder and head of the Israeli diamond company Keren Or. By all accounts he was a brilliant businessman and as such he was very rich.

However unlike most of his class he used this money to support a variety of organisations on the Israeli left, including Matzpen, the Socialist Organisation in Israel, an anti-Zionist political group.

Matzpen, Anti Zionist Israelis

This would sometimes cause difficulties on a personal level. One such friend, Gideon Freudenthal, spoke about how when David went out he took him to an expensive restaurant which Gideon could not afford to reciprocate, so they reached a deal. David would take him to an expensive restaurant and Gideon would in turn take him to a workers’ cafe!

The film deals primarily with the 1950s and 1960s and includes footage of the struggles of Israeli Palestinians against land confiscations, police repression and the Zionist state as well as Israel’s Black Panthers who were from Israel’s Arab or Oriental Jewish community. David was always on hand to help fund an activity and take part.

David was placed number 3 on the elections slate of Haolem Hazeh, an anti-establishment magazine edited by Uri Avneri which came repeatedly into conflict with the governments of David Ben Gurion. Since Haolem Hazeh secured 2 seats in the Knesset David must have been in with a chance of becoming a member of the Knesset.

We also see plenty of evidence of the hostility of other diamond merchants in Tel Aviv to David’s activities.  They expected him to act and behave like a capitalist not a socialist.

David paid the deposit for an openly revolutionary socialist party which was standing for the Knesset and which was supported by members and supporters of Matzpen (though it did not stand officially on behalf of Matzpen). He helped to fund many other activities, demonstrations, leaflets etc. by which the Israeli left spread its propaganda.

The film covers Israel during the period of the Israeli Labor Party governments. We can see how these governments behaved in the same way to the Likud governments that succeeded it. This is important because it shows that contrary to those who believe Israel was corrupted by the post-1967 occupation, Israel was always an apartheid and settler colonial society where different laws, rules and regulations applied to its Arab population.

Interviewed is his friend and Matzpen member, Giyora Neumann, who was gaoled for 6 months as a result of his refusal to serve in the Israeli army.  Giyora must have been amongst the first, if not the very first, refusenik in Israel.

The film handles very skilfully David’s character and the difficulties experienced by someone who mixed with the wealthy and powerful as well as those struggling against the society those people represented. His sister, Mira Eran described how, when he was dying, David could not handle the interest shown in his welfare by others. Mira quotes him as saying that: ‘I’ve been alone my entire life all of the sudden I have 50 visitors.’

David died in December 1975 aged 47. His funeral was a strange mixture of diamond merchants and ‘long-bearded friends’, ‘wealthy diamond dealers and members of Rakah (Israeli Communist Party) and Matzpen. The rich and powerful meeting, probably for the first and last time, his friends on the Israeli left and Arabs. The Committee of Arab Students brought a huge bouquet of flowers.

His friend Ahmad Massarwa, who lived in the Arab village of Ar'ara, said that people thought it was an Arab funeral!

The impression that I got coming across was that David was a thoughtful but lonely individual, extremely empathetic and understanding, who saw the ugliness in Israeli society and the way it treated its ‘minority problem.’ He was someone who could be called a beautiful soul who hated injustice and yet had found himself at the pinnacle of society with riches he could find little use for.

His niece, Orly Eran, told of their shared family history, through a variety of press clippings, photographic archive materials and interviews with his family and comrades.

David made a strange political journey from the vehemently anti-Arab Revisionist Etzel (Irgun) to the far-left of Israeli politics. David was an unobtrusive person, rarely putting himself forward and yet he consistently attended socialist and left-wing protests.

This film is well worth seeing just for the archival footage and its periodisation. It shows the build up to and aftermath of the 6 Day War when Israel captured the West Bank, Gaza, Sinai and Golan Heights and how some supporters and members of Matzpen put an advert into Ha’aretz, opposing the occupation and predicting that it would lead to resistance, counter-resistance and what is called ‘terrorism’ i.e. resistance. All of this was inevitable and yet the Israeli Labour government was determined to ensure that its conquests would not be returned to the people who lived there.

Mira describes him as someone who was never truly happy despite his business success. Although he was surrounded by many friends, he was fundamentally lonely.

Director Eran Torbiner has also produced the film Bunda’imabout the remnants of the Bund in Israel and a film on Matzpen. The film was shot in Israel, Palestine, Jordan, U.K and Germany between 1999 – 2003.

Bunda'im  בונדאים

Tony Greenstein

At the Book Launch for Zionism During the Holocaust I described how the Zionist Leaders Obstructed the Rescue of Jews from Hitler where Palestine wasn’t the destination

Below is an extended essay based on my talk.

Zionism During the Holocaust is the first comprehensive book on Zionist relations with the Nazis innearly 40 years. This is surprising at first sight. There have been hundreds if not thousands of books on the Holocaust yet mainstream historians, with the exception of Francis Nicosia, have avoided discussing the role of the Zionist movement in relation to the rescue of Europe’s Jews.

It is as if historians of the Holocaust know that there are some areas of history best left unexplored. Historians operate within an imperialist paradigm and Zionism is nothing if not a movement born of imperialism. What is surprising is that information on the Zionist role during the holocaust is not hard to get hold of if you know where to look. Most of the information I obtained is from Zionist sources.

Mainstream historians understand that exploring too deeply in certain subject areas might not be good for their career. That is why it has been left to people like Noam Chomsky, a linguist, to uncover the depredations of US imperialism in Latin America and elsewhere.

Look what happened to Norman Finkelstein after he wrote The Holocaust Industry. He came to the attention of Trump supporter Harvard’s Alan Dershowitz, lawyer and friend of Jeffrey Epstein and defender of the American Nazi party and the Jewish Defence League.

Dershowitz lobbied De Paul University, a private Catholic University in New York, to deny Finkelstein tenure. De Paul buckled under the pressure despite unanimous academic recommendations from his department and the college wide Faculty Committee. As Inside Higher Ed noted regarding the Dean of Liberal Art’s opposition:

Much of the criticism from the dean focuses on Finkelstein’s book The Holocaust Industry. The book argues that supporters of Israel use the Holocaust unreasonably to justify Israel’s policies.

Yet it is a matter of fact that Israeli politicians use the holocaust to justify their wars of expansion. In November 1969 Abba Eban, Israel’s foreign minister, in an interview with Der Spiegel, described the Green Line separating Israel from the West Bank as Auschwitz borders.Netanyahu later repeated this. As Ali Abunimah noted:

Eban’s meaning was clear – by comparing Israel to the most notorious and emblematic Nazi death camp, he was in effect saying that Arabs in general and Palestinians in particular are Nazis no less capable and desirous of exterminating Jews than was Hitler.

Last Sunday evening nearly 200 people attended the launch for my book. It lasted nearly 2 hours. I spoke for just over 40 minutes and the rest of the time was taken up by discussion. Even so there were people who were unable to ask questions because time had run out.

I want to thank Jewish Network for Palestine for agreeing to host the launch, Haim Bresheeth for agreeing to chair, Becky Massey for helping out behind the scenes with the technology and David Cannon, the Chair of JNP for all the support and help he has given.

David tells me that this is the largest meeting that JNP has ever held and it is fitting that it should be devoted to this topic, a subject that even the most ardent anti-Zionists approach with trepidation.

Betar, the young Herut, train in full uniform in Nazi Germany

For the past 60 years the Zionist movement has mercilessly used the Holocaust in order to provide a justification for their racist, land thieving, ethnic cleansing State of Jewish Supremacy. It is as if the Afrikaaners, who were the first victims of (British) concentration camps had used that as a justification for Apartheid.

I started off with quotes from Idith Zertal, who was Professor of History and Cultural anthropology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, visiting professor at the University of Chicago and the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris as well as teaching at the University of Basel. Zertal has also appeared on the Anti-Israel Israeli Professor site of the fascist Im Tirzu.

Edith Zertal

In the Politics of Nationhood Edith Zertal wrote about how the propaganda use of the Holocaust by the Zionist movement had resulted in

the transference of the holocaust situation on to the Middle East reality… it not only created a false sense of the imminent danger of mass destruction. It also immensely distorted the image of the holocaust, dwarfed the magnitude of the atrocities committed by the Nazis, trivializing the unique agony of the victims and the survivors, and utterly demonizing the Arabs and their leaders Edith Zertal

Zertal wrote how

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.’

After Baron von Mildenstein, head of the Gestapo's Jewish desk, Kurt Techler of the German Zionist Federation had spent 6 months in Palestine as the guest of the kibbutzim, he wrote a series of articles in Goebbels Der Angriff praising the Zionist project

Israel’s enemies – Arafat, Ahmedinajad, President Nasser, Saddam Hussein – all became the ‘new Hitler’ whilst at the same time Prime Minister Netanyahu consciously sought to exculpate Hitler at the 37^thZionist Congress in Jerusalem in 2015, laying the blame for the holocaust on the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj al-Amin Husseini. Husseini had been imposed on the Palestinians by British High Commissioner Sir Herbert Samuel, an ardent Zionist, in 1921, despite coming fourth in the elections to the post.

Haj Amin al-Husseini went to Hitler and said, “If you expel them, they’ll all come here.” “So what should I do with them?” he asked. He said, “Burn them.”

This account of a conversation between Hitler and the Mufti was entirely fictional since a transcript of the meeting on November 28 1941 is available. There is no mention of the Mufti urging Hitler to exterminate the Jews.

Israel and the Zionist movement have not always been so keen on exploiting the holocaust. Immediately after the war and right up to the Eichmann Trial Israeli politicians preferred not to mention the holocaust at all.  The holocaust survivors were a source of shame. It was held that they had, like typical weak diaspora Jews, gone to their deaths like ‘sheep to the slaughter’ in the words of Gideon Hausner, Prosecutor in the Eichmann Trial in 1961.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s the Holocaust was barely mentioned in Israel. 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. [Zertal, Politics of Nationhood, p.94]

It was only after the 1954-8 Kasztner Trial, a libel claim by a notorious Zionist collaborator and leader of Hungarian Zionism, that Ben Gurion and the Israeli government decided that it was time for them to own the holocaust.

The prevailing view in the Yishuv, the Jewish community in Palestine, was that holocaust survivors represented the ‘survival of the worst.’ In Ben-Gurion’s view they were ‘hard, evil and selfish people and their experiences destroyed what good qualities they had left.’ [Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life, p.69]

Betar cadets training at the Italian naval training centre at Civiatevechia under Mussolini

Zionism arose in the late 19^thCentury as a reaction to and a reflection of anti-Semitism. Leon Pinsker, who formed The Lovers of Zion wrote in Autoemancipation that:

‘Judaephobia is then a mental disease, and as a mental disease it is hereditary, and having been inherited for 2,000 years, it is incurable.’

If anti-Semitism was incurable then there was no point in fighting or opposing something that every non-Jew carried with them.

Theodor Herzl

Theodor Herzl, the founder of Political Zionism wrote that

‘In Paris... I achieved a freer attitude towards anti-Semitism, which I now began to understand historically and to pardon. Above all, I recognise the emptiness and futility of trying to 'combat' anti-Semitism.’ [Diaries p.6]

This was in the middle of the Dreyfus Affair. Zionism blamed the Jews themselves for anti-Semitism. Their mere presence among other nations caused resentment. The Jews were a homeless nation, guests who had outstayed their welcome.

David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first Prime Minister

Herzl in his founding pamphlet the‘Jewish State’ wrote that:

“The unfortunate Jews are now carrying the seeds of anti-Semitism into England; they have already introduced it into America.”  p.15

Herzl’s answer to anti-Semitism was not to fight it but to form a Jewish state. The problem was that most Jews didn’t agree. Most of them saw Zionism as a form of Jewish anti-Semitism. The anti-Semites wanted to be rid of the Jews and the Zionists agreed to go.

Between the middle of the 19^thcentury and 1914 over two and a half million Jews left Eastern Europe for the West, mainly the United States and Britain. Barely 1% went to Palestine.

From the start Zionism saw the fight against anti-Semitism as futile. In fact anti-Semitism could be useful. It didn’t take long for Herzl to realise that their only friends were the anti-Semites. Without them there would be no incentive for the Jews to emigrate. He wrote:

‘Greater exertions will hardly be necessary to spur on the movement. Anti-Semites provide the requisite impetus.’ P. 57 JS

Indeed, anti-Semitism was beneficial!

(It) will not harm the Jews. I consider it to be a movement useful to the Jewish character. It represents the education of a group by the masses... Education is accomplished by hard knocks. [Diaries p.10]

Herzl suggested that Anti-Semitism ‘probably contains the Divine will to Good’. (Diaries p.231) As Israeli novelist A B Yehoshua, told the Union of Jewish Students (Jewish Chronicle 22.1.18)

‘Anti-Zionism is not the product of the non-Jews. On the contrary, the Gentiles have always encouraged Zionism, hoping that it would help rid them of the Jews in their midst. Even today, in a perverse way, a real anti-Semite must be a Zionist.’ 

Breivik, the fascist who killed 77 people in Oslo, mainly young socialists, is a fervent admire of Israel's ethno-nationalist state

And so it is that all the best anti-Semites - Trump, Bannon, Tommy Robinson, Richard Spencer, who describes himself as a ‘White Zionist’ - are all ardently pro-Zionist.

During the Dreyfus Affair the leading anti-Dreyfussard was Edouard Drumont who favourably reviewed The Jewish State, in an article ‘Solution de la Question Juive’ published in La Libre Parole on 16 January 1897. Herzl was delighted with the review but the reaction of most Jews to the Zionists was anything but delightful. Lucien Wolfe of the Board of Deputies wrote:

‘I have spent most of my life in combating these very doctrines, [that Jews form a separate nation] 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.’

The Zionists saw, not the anti-Semites but the Jewish diaspora, who refused to go to Palestine, as their enemy. In their eyes these Jews were an abomination. Jacob Klatzkin, editor of the Zionist Die Welt wrote expressing his hatred of those opposed to anti-Semitism:

‘If we do not admit the rightfulness of anti-Semitism we deny the rightfulness of our own nationalism... Instead of establishing societies for defence against the anti-Semites who want to reduce our rights, we should establish societies for defence against our friends, who desire to defend our rights.’

Pinhas Rosenbluth, Israel’s first Minister of Justice, described Palestine as ‘an institute forthe fumigation of Jewish vermin’. Arthur Ruppin, the Founder of Israeli Land Settlement and the second most important figure in Palestinian Zionism, retorted when a friend called him an anti-Semite ‘I have already established herethat I despise the cancers of Judaism more than does the worst anti-Semite.’

Rudolf Kasztner - Leader of Hungarian Zionism and Nazi Collaborator

Herzl  wrote an essay Mauschel (an anti-Semitic term equivalent to ‘kike’) in Die Welt. a long attack on anti-Zionist Jews (the vast majority) which employed every anti-Semitic stereotype in the book.

Chaim Weizmann, the first President of Israel, wrote in his autobiography Trial and Error of his understanding and sympathy for the leader of the proto-fascist anti-Semitic British Brothers League, William Evans-Gordon MP.

our people were rather hard on him. The Aliens Bill in England and the movement which grew around it were natural phenomenon which might have been foreseen... Sir William Evans-Gordon had no particular anti-Jewish prejudices... He acted as he thought, according to his best lights and in the most kindly way, in the interests of his country… he was sincerely ready to encourage any settlement of Jews almost anywhere in the British Empire, but he failed to see why the ghettos of London or Leeds or Whitechapel should be made into a branch of the ghettos of Warsaw and Pinsk.

Evans-Gordon, the Tory MP for Stepney, was the Enoch Powell of his day, yet Weizmann sought to excuse his anti-Semitism because he was only motivated by concern for his country. The same could be said for every common and garden racist, from Nigel Farage to Boris Johnson. All of them claim to be patriots who love their country.

The Polish state funeral for Marek Edelman, the last Commander of the Warsaw Ghetto Resistance. Edelman was a member of the anti-Zionist Bund. Not even the lowliest clerk at Israel's Embassy attended the 16 gun funeral which the Polish President attended

Today when Zionists see ‘anti-Semitism’ under every rock and stone, when ‘anti-Semitism’ is employed against supporters of the Palestinians, many people are fooled into believing that the Zionists are genuinely concerned with opposing anti-Semitism.

The primary concern of Zionist lobby groups – the Board, UJS and the CST is with anti-Zionism notanti-Semitism. Genuine anti-Semitism of the Right does not disturb them.

Captured Jewish fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto - the Zionist parties in Palestine urged those fighters who were Zionists to abandon the fight and make their way to Palestine

From the beginning Herzl realised that the Zionist movement had to form an alliance with an imperialist power. Herzl traversed Europe meeting with a variety of statesman, royalty and diplomats from the Pope to the German Kaiser and the Ottoman Sultan. Herzl died before his dream could be realised but it was continued by the Labour Zionists who began colonisation in 1904 with the second Aliyah.

A young Marek Edelman, Commander of the Warsaw Ghetto Resistance and member of the anti-Zionist Bund

Zionism sought to establish a settler colony in Palestine and in 1917 this became a reality with the Balfour Declaration in which the British promised the land of the Palestinians to the Zionists. The sole concern of Zionism henceforth was building up the Zionist state-in-the-making in Palestine. The needs of the Jews was a distant second. The fight against anti-Semitism was off the agenda. This caused ructions amongst the left Zionists in Poland and in 1919 Poale Zion split in two – a Right and Left Poale Zion, the latter being much the stronger.

Ha'avara

When the Nazis came to power in January 1933 world Jewry was aghast and immediately began boycotting everything German. The reaction of the Zionists was completely different.

Berl Katznelson, Ben Gurion’s effective deputy, declared that the rise of Hitler was “an opportunity to build and flourish like none we have ever had or ever will have”. Ben Gurion was even more enthusiastic: The Nazi victory would become “a fertile force for Zionism.”

Stern Gang Proposals to the Nazis offering military collaboration

Such was his cynical attitude towards the rise of the Nazis and the danger they posed that even Ben Gurion’s official biographer, Shabtai Teveth, was forced to conclude that:

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

Massive Boycott Rally in New York's Madison Sq Gardens

The title of the chapter on the holocaust in Teveth’s biography, The Burning Ground 1886-1948, is Disaster is Strength. To the Zionist leaders the disaster befalling European Jewry was their opportunity. Noah Lucas, a perceptive and critical Zionist historian wrote that:

‘As the European Holocaust erupted, Ben Gurion saw it as a decisive opportunity for Zionism... Ben Gurion above all others sensed the tremendous possibilities inherent in the dynamic of the chaos and carnage in Europe... 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.’

This was also the attitude of the German Zionists. Alone of German Jewish organisations they welcomed the Nuremberg Laws. On 21^st June 1933 the ZVfD (German Zionist Federation) wrote a letter to Hitler:

Famous American actors including Edward G Robinson support the Boycott of Nazi Germany

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

The German Zionists were just 2% of German Jews and were seen as the volkish Jews. One of their leaders, Rabbi Joachim Prinz wrote:

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

Reinhard Heydrich, Deputy to Himmler and the ‘engineer’ of the Final Solution issued an order on 26 January 1935 that

‘the activity of the Zionist-oriented youth organizations that are engaged in the occupational restructuring of the Jews for agriculture and manual trades prior to their emigration to Palestine lies in the interest of the National Socialist state’s leadership.’ 28.1.35. Heydrich Order

Ze'ev Sternhell was a child survivor of the Nazi ghetto  Premszyl in Poland

Heydrich wrote in Das Schwarze Corps (26.9.35.) that the Nazis were

“in agreement with the great spiritual movement within Jewry itself, Zionism, whose position is based on the recognition of the unity of Jewry throughout the world, and the rejection of all ideas of mixing in”

This had been the position of the Nazis since 1920 when Alfred Rosenberg, their chief theoretician, wrote that:

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

As Francis Nicosia noted Rosenberg

‘intended to use Zionism as a legal justification for depriving German Jews of their civil rights’ and he ‘sanctioned the use of the Zionist movement in the future drive to eliminate Jewish rights, Jewish influence and eventually the Jewish presence in Germany.’

Whereas most Jews supported a boycott of Nazi Germany the Zionists sought to trade with them. The concern of the Zionist leaders was not with saving the German Jews but saving the wealth of Germany’s Jews. That was why they agreed to the Ha’avara agreement in August 1933 which enabled German Jews to use their money to buy goods and machinery which would be exported to Palestine.

Those Jews whose funds were so used were allowed to take £1,000 out of the country. The entrance requirement to those without immigration certificates to Palestine was £1,000 which today would be worth about £85,000. Someone with money in the bank to buy industrial goods as well as £1,000 in cash was someone who would have little difficulty in entering most countries.

On May 2nd the Nazis abolished German trade unions and occupied their offices - the Zionists maintained that Hitler was only interested in a war against the Jews

Only the richest German Jews were able to take advantage of Ha’avara. What Ha’avara did do was to enable the Nazis to break the Boycott of Nazi Germany. They proclaimed that whilst the non-Jews were boycotting Germany the Jews were doing a profitable trade using all their anti-Semitic imagery. Ha’avara came to the rescue of the Nazi government at the very time when it was weakest and could have been overthrown. That was why Hitler agreed to it. The Investor’s Review 5 August 1933 reported that ‘authoritative opinion is that Hitlerism will come to a sanguinary end before the New Year.’

Without the Boycott the Nazis would not have agreed to Ha’avara. The Zionists used the anti-fascist boycott movement in order to strike a deal with the Nazi state.

60% of investment in Jewish Palestine between 1933 and 1939 came from Nazi Germany. The Nazis literally built the ‘Jewish’ state. As Elie Wiesel, a Zionist who had survived Auschwitz, bitterly wrote:

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

Today you might think that the Zionist movement’s sole concern during these years was with fighting Nazism but you would be wrong. Their ‘concern’ is of rather recent vintage. During the Hitler period they fought tirelessly to prioritise their own goals, building the ‘Jewish’ state at the expense of Europe’s Jews.

During the war it was the Zionist leadership themselves who attempted to deny that the holocaust was happening, preferring to believe that it was simply a question of a few pogroms.

The Zionist leaders fought against any attempt to rescue Europe’s Jews that didn’t involve emigration to Palestine. Their ‘logic’ was that wherever the Jews went they would carry anti-Semitism with them.

The aftermath of Kristallnacht - the Night of Broken Glass

On 9 December 1938 Ben Gurion spoke to the Central Committee of Mapai. In November Kristallnacht, the Nazi pogrom had occurred. Virtually every synagogue in Germany had been burnt down. This action was deeply unpopular in Germany and even within the Nazi party. 30,000 Jews were imprisoned in concentration camps (those who were Zionists were almost immediately freed).

Under pressure from the Board of Deputies and British Jewry the Conservative government agreed to admit nearly 10,000 Jewish children to Britain. It was known as the Kindertransport. You might have thought that even the Zionists would be pleased. Not a bit of it. In a speech to the Central Committee of Mapai (the Israeli Labour Party) Ben Gurion gave vent to his anger:

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.

This can be found in the official biography of Ben Gurion (p.855 The Burning Ground). Nor was Ben Gurion’s response an idiosyncrasy. Malcolm MacDonald, the Colonial Secretary, recalled:

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

When MacDonald refused to guarantee that the children would go on to Palestine Weizmann told him that: ‘We shall fight you - and when I say fight I mean fight.’

Selig Brodetsky - First Zionist leader of the Board of Deputies - did his best to obstruct attempts to rescue Jewish refugees

Fortunately the Board of Deputies had not yet been captured by the Zionists. This would occur in 1940 when Selig Brodetsky was elected President. Brodestky distinguished himself by sabotaging or blocking every attempt at rescue. If the Zionists had gained control in 1938 then the children of the Kindertransport might have become one more grisly statistic.

Refugeeism

The reason for the Zionist opposition to rescuing Jews for the sake of rescue ‘refugeeism’ was because the ‘logic’ of Zionism dictated it.

On 17 December 1938 Ben Gurion explained his thinking to the Zionist Executive when he made it clear that the Zionist movement did not support ‘refugeeism’, i.e. rescue for its own sake.

The Zionist movement opposed rescue to countries other than Palestine because if successful it would negate the very raison d’etre of Zionism. Zionism held that national ‘homelessness’ had caused anti-Semitism. Taking Jews from Germany to Britain would not solve the problem it would simply recreate it here.

Zionism didn’t believe that anti-Semitism could be defeated. They didn’t see it as the product of political and social forces in the societies where Jews lived. They had a racial conception of society.

Ben Gurion was extremely fearful that people would forget about Zionism and devote themselves to the rescue of Europe’s Jews:

If the Jews are faced with a choice between the refugee problem and rescuing Jews from concentration camps on the one hand, and aid for the national museum in Palestine on the other, the Jewish sense of pity will prevail and our people's entire strength will be directed at aid for the refugees in the various countries. Zionism will vanish from the agenda and indeed not only world public opinion in England and America but also from Jewish public opinion. We are risking Zionism's very existence if we allow the refugee problem to be separated from the Palestine problem.

When rescue was raised the approach of the Zionists was consistent. They asked ‘what about Palestine’ even though its doors were shut. They opposed rescue schemes to Freiland in Australia, Alaska, China, Santo Domingo, Mindano and other places. The Zionist leaders preferred to block any rescue rather than have Jews go to places other than Palestine. This despite knowing that they were therefore being consigned to a certain death. This was the cruel logic of Zionism.

When in 1938 Roosevelt proposed the Evian conference in order to discuss the mounting Jewish refugee problem, the Zionists were greatly troubled. This was the last thing that they wanted. Although Roosevelt’s proposal was only a face saving exercise the Zionists were afraid that it might succeed in rescuing Germany’s Jews.

Stephen Wise, leader of American Zionism, did his best to sabotage rescue attempts that weren't directed at Palestine

Georg Landauer, later Director of the JA’s Central Bureau for the Settlement of German Jews, wrote to American Zionist leader Stephen Wise on Feb. 13,1938:

I am writing this letter at the request of Dr. Weizmann because we are extremely concerned lest the problem be presented in a way which could prejudice the activity for Eretz Israel. Even if the conference does not propose immediately after its opening other countries but Eretz Israel as venues for Jewish emigration, it will certainly arouse a public response that could put the importance of Eretz Israel in the shade...We are particularly worried that it would move Jewish organizations to collect large sums of money for aid to Jewish refugees, and these collections could interfere with our collection efforts." [Boaz Evron, Jewish State or Israeli Nation, p. 178].

Menachem Ussishkin of the Jewish Agency's Executive stated, on June 26,1938 that:

“He is highly concerned at the Evian conference... Mr. Greenbaum is right in stating that there is a danger that the Jewish people also will take Eretz Israel off its agenda, and this should be viewed by us as a terrible danger. He hoped to hear in Evian that Eretz Israel remains the main venue for Jewish emigration. All other emigration countries do not interest him... The greatest danger is that attempts will be made to find other territories for Jewish emigration."

At the same meeting Ben-Gurion stated that:

"No rationalizations can turn the conference from a harmful to a useful one. What can and should be done is to limit the damage as far as possible. He 'doesn't know whether the Evian conference will open the gates of other countries to Jewish immigration, but like Greenbaum and Ussishkin he fears that at this time the conference is liable to cause immense harm to Eretz Israel and Zionism.' It was summed up in the meeting that the Zionist thing to do is 'to belittle the Conference as far as possible and to cause it to decide nothing.'" 

Amazing as it seems, the Zionist leaders greatest fear was that a solution to the refugee problem could be found to the danger that German Jews were then in without involving Palestine. As Ben Gurion had made clear given the choice between finding a refuge in a country other than Palestine and perishing they preferred the latter.

Rabbi Dr Solomon Schonfeld

One of the most egregious cases of obstructing an attempt to rescue Jews was by the President of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, Selig Brodetsky. When the Allies announced on 17 December 1942 that the Nazis were embarked on the extermination of the Jews of Europe, the Executive Director of the Chief Rabbi's Religious Emergency Council Rabbi Dr Solomon Schonfeld acted securing the support of  277 parliamentarians calling on the government to find a refuge in either its own territories or the colonies for Jewish refugees.

Germany's far-Right AfD, which is riddled with neo-Nazis was the most fervent opponent of BDS in the Bundestag proposing that it be outlawed

Immediately the Zionists leapt into action, raising the demand ‘what about Palestine’. The British, in response to the demands of the Palestinians, had strictly limited Jewish immigration. The Zionists were deliberately using Jewish refugees from Europe as a battering ram to open the gates of Palestine. They threatened to oppose the motion if it didn’t mention Palestine. That was their sole concern.  Schonfeld wrote, in a letter to The Times that:

It was useless to argue with a then current Zionist argument: ‘Every nation has had its dead in the fight for its homeland the sufferers under Hitler are our dead in our fight’. (6.6.61)

This issue surfaced 50 years later in a letter (JC 5.2.93.) from Marcus Retter, a close associate of Rabbi Schonfeld and an assistant to Lord Wedgewood. Retter alleged that Brodetsky and Brotman, the Board Secretary, had deliberately sabotaged Schonfeld’s attempts at rescue despite Schonfeld, with Wedgewood’s support, having mobilised considerable parliamentary and ecclesiastical support.

The tireless efforts of Professor Selig Brodetsky, president of the Board of Deputies and Lavy Bakstansky, general secretary of the Zionist Federation, resulted in the collapse of this move. Two incidents are engraved in my memory. Brodetsky instructed Adolph Brotman… to ask MPs to refrain from supporting the proposed motion.[1]

Retter met Brodetsky in January 1943.

At that meeting he admonished me for helping Dr Schonfeld in his effort, stating that only the Board of Deputies and the Jewish Agency were privileged to act in rescue matters.

Retter, was told that as a member of the Board:

I had to obey the rules and abide by the decisions of the Board’s foreign affairs committee.

A few days later he was shown by Bakstansky a letter from Stephen Wise which asked Lord Wedgewood ‘to withdraw his support for Dr Schonfeld’s committee for rescuing victims of Nazi massacres’. Bakstansky told Retter that he and his colleagues ‘would do everything possible to sabotage Dr Schonfeld’s move.’ This was because Schonfeld’s efforts would:

interfere with the Jewish Agency’s plans and politics. The Board did nothing – and prevented Rabbi Schonfeld from doing anything.

The Jewish Agency was the Zionist government-in-waiting in Palestine. Rescue had been sacrificed to Zionist politics. Retter concluded that whether Schonfeld’s efforts would have succeeded is a matter of speculation.

One thing is for certain: the sabotage by Jews of efforts to help Jews met with success. [2]

Geoffrey Alderman, historian of the British Jewish community confirmed (JC 26.2.93) that

Marcus Retter’s account of the steps taken by Professor Brodetsky and his allies in sabotaging Rabbi Dr Solomon Schonfeld’s motion and of their reasons for doing so, is perfectly correct.

Schonfeld had, within ten days, obtained backing for his motion from ‘two Archbishops, eight Peers, four Bishops and 48 members of all parties.’ Their efforts were met by a

persistent attempt on the part of Brodetsky and some of his colleagues to sabotage the entire move… he and his collaborators asked members of the House to desist from supporting the new effort... To do nothing themselves and to prevent others from doing so is strange statesmanship.

The results were predictable:

‘More than one MP has expressed a feeling of becoming wearied of trying to help the victims in the face of such sectarian Jewish opposition.’ [3]

Brodetsky justified his actions on the grounds that

the intervention of an unauthorized individual however well intentioned, in a situation of this sort naturally brings confusion and may have some damaging effects.

While thousands of Jews were burning each day in Auschwitz, Brodetsky and the Board were more concerned with challenges to their power and prestige.

Alderman speculated that Brodetsky’s reaction might have been different if the motion had mentioned Palestine.(JC 26.2.93.)

If we jump forward to March 1944, when the holocaust had already devoured 5 million Jews, Nazi Germany decided to invade its ally Hungary. Admiral Horthy, the leader of Hungary, had begun to get cold feet as it became clear that Germany was losing the war. Immediately the last Jewish community that had been untouched by the holocaust was in deadly danger. Some 800,00 Jews.

Rudolf Kasztner - Jewish Escapee from Auschwitz whose revelations about plan for the extermination of Hungary's Jews were suppressed by Kasztner and the Zionists

On April 24 two Jewish escapees from Auschwitz, Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler reached Slovakia and met the Jewish Council there. They sat down to write what became the Auschwitz Protocols detailing the layout of the gas chambers and the preparations being made to receive Hungary’s Jews. They described the extermination process in the past two years, which they estimated at 1.75 million. Prior to the Protocols it had been believed that Auschwitz was a labour not an extermination camp.

The leader of Hungarian Zionism Rudolf Kasztner came to visit Slovakia at the end of April 1944 and took possession of a copy of the Protocols. But instead of distributing them to Hungarian Jewry he suppressed them and reached an agreement with Adolf Eichmann to keep quiet about the Nazi plans. In exchange he was promised a train out of Hungary for the Zionist and Jewish elite. Some 600 people later increased to 1,600.

Kasztner’s Zionist  friends helped in keeping calm in the Kolosvar Ghetto even reassuring the Jews awaiting deportation that they were being taken to a place of resettlement, Kenyermeze and if they wanted the best places they should get on the trains first.

When the survivors of Auschwitz reached Palestine they sought revenge against Kasztner. Malchiel Greenwald, a pamphleteer and Hungarian refugee, accused Kasztner of having betrayed Hungary’s Jews to the Nazis. Israel’s Labour government made the fatal mistake of forcing Kasztner to sue Greenwald for libel. Clearly they had become rattled at the accusation that Mapai, the Israeli Labor Party, and the Jewish Agency had collaborated with the Nazis.

In 1954 the Kasztner trial commenced but it didn’t go according to plan. A stream of survivors from Auschwitz came to testify against Kasztner. Even worse Kasztner lied on oath denying that he had given testimony at Nuremberg in favour of Kurt Becher, Himmler’s personal representative in Germany. When documentary evidence proved that Kasztner had lied Judge Benjamin Halevi became hostile and reached a verdict that Kasztner had ‘sold his soul to Satan’.

Kasztner himself was later assassinated, almost certainly by the secret police Shin Bet. The verdict was overturned by the Supreme Court on political and legal grounds but by then the damage had been done. The government fell as a result.

In his appeal to the Supreme Court, Attorney General Chaim Cohen explained why Kasztner’s appeal should be upheld:

If in Kasztner’s opinion, rightly or wrongly, he believed that one million Jews were hopelessly doomed, he was allowed not to inform them of their fate; and to concentrate on the saving of the few. He was entitled to make a deal with the Nazis for the saving of a few hundred and entitled not to warn the millions ... that was his duty… It has always been our Zionist tradition to select the few out of many in arranging the immigration to Palestine ... Are we to be called traitors? [4]

Eichmann, the chief exterminator, knew that the Jews would be peaceful and not resist if he allowed the Prominents to be saved, that the Train of the Prominents was organized on Eichmann’s orders to facilitate the extermination of the whole people. … if all the Jews of Hungary are to be sent to their death he is entitled to organize a rescue train for 600 people. He is not only entitled to it but is also bound to act accordingly.

But Hungarian Jewry were not ‘hopelessly doomed’. The Nazis did not have the resources to hunt down Hungary’s Jews. They were running out of time. Eichmann’s Judenkommando had less than 300 staff including secretaries and drivers. They needed the collaboration of the Zionist leaders and their bourgeois counterparts to help round up the Jews.

Zionist historians at Israel’s holocaust propaganda museuem, Yad Vashem have rehabilitated Kasztner. Yehuda Bauer argued that Hungarian Jewry already knew of Auschwitz, which they didn’t. Elie Wiesel told how

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

Wiesel described how their maid Maria came to them ‘sobbing’. ‘She begged us to come with her to her village where she had prepared a safe shelter.’ Because they knew nothing they turned her down. The same was true with many Jews.

I describe Yad Vashem as a ‘holocaust propaganda museum’ deliberately. It is a state  institution funded and financed in order to harness the holocaust to Zionism. It has demonised the Palestinians and refused to speak up against racism in Israeli society. It draws Zionist lessons from the holocaust namely that anti-Semitism is wrong but no other form of racism is to be condemned.

Every visiting statesman to Israel pays homage to Israel and Zionism at Yad Vashem. Even John Vorster, Prime Minister of Apartheid South Africa, included Yad Vashem in his schedule in 1976 despite having been imprisoned during the war for supporting the Nazis. Since then a host of racist and fascist politicians have visited Yad Vashem without a word of criticism from Yad Vashem’s historians.

Bolsonaro and Duterte, the far-Right Presidents of Brazil and Philippines, both of whom have expressed their admiration for Hitler, have been made welcome, So too has Victor Orban, the anti-Semitic premier of Hungary who has called Admiral Horthy, who presided over the deportation of nearly half a million Jews to Auschwitz, an ‘exceptional statesman’. On the latter occasion Orban faced a picket of  holocaust survivors and anti-racists.

It was no different when it came to Netanyahu’s repeated attempts to deport refugees from Africa for the double ‘crime’ of not being Jewish or White. Ha'aretz journalist Nir Gontarz described his reception when he rang YV and asked them to publicly condemn Netanyahu’s attempt to deport the refugees:

 ‘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... I asked them this morning to remove from their database the details I gave them in the past about my family.’

Zionism has used and abused the memory of those who died in the holocaust for its own political purposes. Today in Israel up to half the remaining holocaust survivors, in whose name Israel has extracted billions of shekels in reparations from Germany, live in poverty forced to choose between heating and eating.

Israel, which has the second largest arms budget in the world per capita, is incapable of looking after its few remaining holocaust survivors. But if it neglects those who were actually in the camps it assiduously promotes the myth that Israel can lay claim to the memory of the holocaust dead.

My book destroys some of the main myths concerning Zionism and the holocaust. It is up to you to use it well!

The Answers to the Short Quiz I posted:

1.       Was Ken Livingstone a ‘Nazi apologist’ (John Mann) when he said that Hitler and the Nazis supported Zionism? NO

2.       Who was it who said that Palestine was an ‘Institute for the fumigation of Jewish vermin’? Pinhas Rosenbluth, Israel’s first Minister of Justice

3.       Which leading Zionist spoke of ‘their common toleration of Nazism’  Chaim Weizmann, Israel’s first President

4.       Which prominent Zionist, when accused of being an anti-Semite said ‘‘I have already established here [in his diary] that I despise the cancers of Judaism more than does the worst anti-Semite.’         Arthur Ruppin, the Director of the Palestine Office in Palestine from 1907

5.       Which leading Zionist insisted that ‘Jewish Agency Executive funds be used only for rescue by immigration to Palestine, whereas rescue by assisting Jews to survive elsewhere was to be funded solely by private and organizational donations.’ ?David Ben Gurion, Israel’s first  Prime Minister

6.       Who was it who said that ‘the activity of the Zionist-oriented youth organisations … lies in the interest of the National Socialist state’s leadership…. (they are) not to be treated with that strictness that it is necessary to apply to the members of the so-called German-Jewish organisations (assimilationists).'       Reinhard Heydrich, Deputy to Himmler

7.       Who wrote that ‘Zionism must be vigorously supported in order to encourage a significant number of German Jews to leave for Palestine or other destinations.'        Alfred Rosenberg, main Nazi theoretician

8.       Who said ‘I accuse certain Jewish leaders of one of the most ghastly deeds of the war. This small group of quislings knew what was happening to their brethren in Hitler's gas chambers and bought their own lives with the price of silence. Among them was Dr Kasztner.’          Rudolf Vrba, Jewish escapee from Auschwitz

9.       Who said ‘It was morally disturbing to seem to be considered as the favoured children of the Nazi Government, particularly when it dissolved the anti-Zionist youth groups, and seemed in other ways to prefer the Zionists. The Nazis asked for a more Zionist behaviour.’?          Rabbi Joachim Prinz, prominent leader of German Zionist Federation

10.     Who wrote:

‘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.’Noah Lucas, critical Zionist historian at Sheffield University

 Pogroms in Palestine, Settler Violence & Terror is the precursor to deportation and transfer

Last weekend there was a pogrom in Hebron. 26-year-old Yousef Azzeh described the violence that he and other Palestinians in Hebron experienced from Jewish settlers last weekend.

“There were 50 settlers here. There was no one here to help me. One of them punched me in the shoulders and in the back,”

An estimated 40,000 Jews descended on Hebron. Azzeh describedhow:

“My head started spinning. I ran away so that they would follow me and not come to my house. I didn’t have any strength, and I couldn’t breathe. I fell down and screamed and then I saw soldiers beating my friends while there were settlers above my house,”

Israelis can freely move around Yousef Azzeh Hebron Tel Rumeida while Palestinians are subject to continual limitations. One of Azzeh’s neighbors is Baruch Marzel, the far-right disciple of the neo-Nazi Rabbi Meir Kahane.

Azzeh alerted soldiers, who arrived and whom he showed the stones that were thrown in the yard. Ten minutes after they left, other Israeli civilians appeared and again threw stones at the house. When he walked toward them, they hit him, he said.

The only Jews arrested were an off-duty soldier who attacked a Border Police officer and a settler who attacked the bodyguard of Itamar Gvir. Jews who attacked fellow Jews were arrested because that is a crime whereas attacking Palestinians is no crime.

Soldiers described how

“We tried to gain control over the situation and every time, Jews showed up and threw stones and we didn’t manage to catch them... At the height of the incident, hundreds of Jews came and started calling us Germans and spitting on us.”

Israeli forces stand guard to secure a path for settlers

‘I couldn’t breathe’: A weekend of settler violence in Hebron

According to a soldier, there was no real preparation for dealing with unruly settlers.

“We were warned before the event that it might happen, but we were under pressure, working 24/7. There was no briefing on the matter. [The settlers] felt they could do whatever they wanted. I personally hesitated to handcuff them, or to throw a stun grenade at them, which is a legitimate means [of crowd control]. As a policy, there was no heavy handedness against [the settlers]. I did not see anyone being detained. There were 30,000 people here, so hundreds [participated in the violence]. It’s only a [small] percentage, but they managed to make a real mess.

“There are no clear orders,” the soldier continued.

“I know how to deal with Palestinians, but with Israelis I hesitate. I didn’t have the option [on Saturday]. I was with heavy equipment, and [the settlers] were throwing [stones] and then running away. If we were a bigger force, I hope I would have arrested [them], but it’s hard to say.”

That doesn’t stop Starmer, Sunak and the political class using the IHRA misdefinition of ‘anti-Semitism’ to describe those who call Israel a racist state as anti-Semitic. Well here we have a good example of such racism. Is that anti-Semitic? According to the IHRA ‘yes’.

Ha’aretz describedhow soldiers in Hebron said they had worked diligently to prepare the situation on the ground for the arrival of hundreds of people. But they had not been briefed to expect violence coming from Jews, which had not been anticipated. One soldier described their problem:

 “I know what to do with the Palestinians,” however he hesitated regarding how to deal with the Jews. “I’ve seen disturbances and clashes in my [military] service, but I had never seen anything like this.” The rioters were not local Jewish residents, he said. “They were newly religious and marginal youth from all over the country,” the soldier claimed.

And there you have it. Soldiers aren’t trained to defend Palestinians against Jewish pogromists because their duty is to protect settlers from Palestinians. Here is a clear example of how the behaviour of soldiers is conditioned by whether someone is Jewish or Palestinian. Racist? Perish the thought.

Masked men set Palestinian cars on fire in West Bank

In Hebron Palestinians 'Never Seen Anything Like' Weekend Violence From Jewish WorshippersHa’aretz describes in detail the constant attacks and violence from the settlers whilst the army stood by. But when Palestinians defended themselves then they went into action. Which was exactly what happened to Jews subject to pogroms in Europe. Israel has become a mirror image of European anti-Semitism as racists like Starmer and Labour Friends of Israel defend the indefensible.

But this is not a problem of the military alone. It is their political masters who dictate that they must treat Palestinians and Jews differently.

In December last year, Security Minister Omar Bar-Lev condemned, under pressure from the United States, settler violence against the Palestinians. What was the reaction of Prime Minister, Naftali Bennett? A condemnation of the condemnation.

Killed While Trying to Save a Family from Israeli Soldiers

“Settlers in Judea and Samaria have suffered daily from violence and terrorism for decades,” Bennett tweeted: “They serve as a protective wall for all of us and we must protect them in word and a deed.”

The reaction of Interior Minister, Ayelet Shaked, a notorious racist who once called for genocide in Gaza, was even worse. Bar-Lev was ‘confused’ for condemning settler violence.

“The settlers are the salt of the earth,” she wrote on Twitter. “The violence that one needs to be shocked by is the dozens of cases of the throwing of rocks and Molotov cocktails at Jews that occur every day, just because they are Jews,

This is of course a lie. Palestinians throw stones (against heavily armed soldiers!) because of such trivial matters such as home demolitions, arbitrary arrests, armed incursions etc.

 Fellow Yamina Minister Matan Kahana called for Barlev to retract his statement on settler violence. MK Bezalel Smotrich, head of the far-right Religious Zionism faction, who is pushing to become Israel’s new ‘Defence’ Minister merely called Barlev “a bastard.”

This is from the man who called for Jewish women giving birth to be separated from Arab women in case of racial pollution. Now Bezalel is going to be in charge of the ‘civilian’ military administration in the West Bank. Anti-Palestinian violence has now been all but legalised.

Quoting Ha’aretz, the Times of Israeladmittedthat in just 10 days in October there were 100 settler attacks on Palestinians.

In recent weeks, the security establishment has identified an alarming increase in acts of violence by settlers throughout the West Bank,”

This massive upsurge in violence against Palestinians has a purpose. It isn’t merely random. The aim is to force Palestinians off the land by burning olive groves and attacking those who pick the fruit. In almost every case where there were Israeli soldiers they stood by and watched if not encouraged the settlers.

Masked men throw stones at Palestinians and activists in West Bank village

But for the Zionist Right (who control two-thirds of the Knesset seats) the only violence comes from Palestinians which they call ‘terror’. When Palestinians defend themselves the army and police quickly move in to attack them with tear gas, rubber bullets and worse.

I have compiled a list of such attacks to demonstrate the complicity of the Israeli state in the attacks. These are not one-off incidents but part of a cumulative pattern whose intent is clear – to drive Palestinians off the land as part of the overall project of ethnically cleansing the Palestinians of the West Bank.

This violence and intimidation is widely supported because as the ‘moderate’ ‘centrist’ former Prime Minister Yair Lapid said,

My principle says maximum Jews on maximum land with maximum security and with minimum Palestinians.”

Lapid was praised by Western leaders for supporting a Palestinian state when any such state would be demilitarised, lacking any sovereignty and subject  to Israeli army incursions. But even this parody of a Bantustan is not going to come into existence.

Ayid Mashani,

In an article There's Only One Way to Describe This Settler Attack: A Pogrom Gideon Levy described how on November 3

A Palestinian family was harvesting olives when a group of settlers swooped down and attacked them with clubs, pipes and stones. Five members of the family were hospitalized, including the 65-year-old father of the household and one of his sons, whose shattered leg will need costly, ongoing rehab. The 8-year-old grandson hid under the family’s pickup

Entering the home of the Mashani family in the small town of Al-Shuyukh, north of Hebron in the West Bank, is like paying a visit to a rehabilitation ward in a hospital. Almost every member of the family is hurt, some remain in bandages, a few are limping and all of them have wounds to show us – some of them quite serious.

Needless to say the Israeli Police have done nothing. But if the roles were reversed the Palestinian attackers would have been arrested, probably beaten up, languishing indefinitely in a cell. And then there are some people who claim that Zionism is not racist.

In a particularly egregious case of a settler attack, a Palestinian man had both arms broken and then the army arrested him!

Jewish Settlers break both my father's arms and then the army arrest him

Hafez Huraini, 52, was working on his family’s land with his son Muhammad on the outskirts of their village of at-Tuwani in Masafer Yatta, in the southern occupied West Bank, when a group of armed Israeli settlers from the nearby Havat Ma’on outpost attacked them.

“Five settlers attacked them, some had guns, at least one of them had an M16 rifle, and the others were carrying metal pipes. One of the settlers started hitting them with the metal pipe, breaking my dad’s left arm,”

Sami Huraini, 24, Hafez’s son, recounted to Mondoweiss.

“My dad fell to the ground, and they kept beating him, until they broke his right arm too,” Sami said. “Then the settler with the gun started firing live bullets in the air.”

“Dozens of soldiers arrived at the scene after the settlers called them. My dad was lying on the ground, both his arms were broken, but the soldiers started hitting us and pushing us back while the settlers stood behind them,”

Hafez Huraini, beaten by settlers who broke both his arms. The Israeli army the arrested him for attacking the settlers!

Sami said the settlers were “giving orders” to the soldiers, telling them to arrest his father and other residents of at-Tuwani at the scene. As the Israeli soldiers continued to push around the Palestinians, an ambulance from the Palestinian Red Crescent Society arrived at the scene. “The EMTs started treating my dad and giving him first aid. The whole time they were doing this the soldiers and settlers were pushing and shoving us,” Sami said.

Mohammed Mashani, with his son Tair

“When we picked my dad up on the stretcher and tried to put him on the ambulance, the soldiers started pushing us back, and saying they wanted to arrest him, because the settlers said he hit them,”

he continued.

Late into the night on Monday, the Huraini family learned through their lawyer that their father had been taken to a detention center inside the Kiryat Arba settlement in Hebron, where he was to undergo interrogation.

The family’s lawyer was allowed to speak to Hafez for a few minutes before he was taken in for questioning, though the lawyer was not allowed to be present during the interrogation.

According to Sami, the army is accusing his father of attacking a settler – a crime that could carry a sentence of several years in prison if he’s officially charged and convicted.

“This is a clear representation of the Apartheid system that we live under,” Sami said.

Sami said that the residents of at-Tuwani have long come under attacks from Israeli settlers, who are rarely ever arrested or held accountable for their crimes.

“We know from our experience that the settlers hold the power. They can turn their attacks around on us, and the army will arrest and imprison him [Hafez] for anything, on bogus charges based on settlers’ false testimonies,”  he said.

According to B’Tselem, since 2020, the group has documented 757 incidents of settler violence against Palestinians and their property.

In the rare case that an investigation is opened into settler violence against Palestinians, Yesh Din, an Israeli human rights group that documents incidents of settler violence in the West Bank, says the vast majority of those investigations are closed.

The group says that 92% of investigations into ideological crimes against Palestinians are closed with no indictment filed.

‘It was like a war zone’

Around the same time that Hafez Huraini was detained and evacuated in an ambulance, Israeli forces arrested two other Palestinians from Masafer Yatta who are still in custody.

Shortly after, dozens more Israeli troops raided the village of at-Tuwani, and began a massive detention operation that would last for hours into the early morning

“This is all part of their ethnic cleansing plans, and their efforts to scare us, intimidate us, and coerce us out of our homes,” Sami said, referring to Israeli plans to force over 1,000 Palestinians in Masafer Yatta out of their homes to make way for an Israeli firing zone.

“The settlers can live happily while they attack us, and while the soldiers attack us. They want to threaten us, and scare us so we stop resisting their plans,” Sami said. “But our willpower is strong.”

As of Tuesday night local time, Israeli forces were raiding at-Tuwani for the second night in a row, throwing tear gas and sound bombs at peoples homes.

10 days later, after a video emerged, the military court in Ofer released Hafez with stringent conditions, including staying away from his own land. No such conditions were imposed on the settlers who attacked him because, of course, they were never arrested. See

Israeli settlers attacked a Palestinian man, breaking both his arms. Then the army arrested him.

Settler invasion of Ramallah exposes PA impotence

You may remember how the ‘bubble’ of Ramallah where the PA is based was held up by Israel and the PA itself as a showcase of how economic independence can lead to an improvement in the situation of the Palestinians.

two boys held up by Israeli soldiers outside their homes, in Ramallah’s Al-Tireh neighborhood

Yet on October 13 Israel demonstrated what it thought of its tame Palestinian lapdog. Israeli settlers stormed the Al-Tireh neighborhood in Ramallah, conductingTalmudic prayers and ceremonies. This practice, among other strategies, has been commonly employed by religious settlers as a means of providing the Israeli Supreme Court with legal grounds to take over Palestinian land. The invasion of Ramallah neighborhoods by these settlers indicates that the settler movement has become emboldened in its goal of accelerating the ethnic cleansing of Palestine,

Israeli troops in Jenin on September 28

The PA Prime Minister lives in the Al-Tireh neighborhood, only a few kilometers away from the Muqata’a (the PA’s headquarters in Ramallah), highlighting how easily the Israeli army can creep into the main area of PA sovereignty without repercussions.

Palestinians carry the body of Raafat Issa.

Below are just some of the many stories on the increasing violence and terror of the settlers and their protectors in the Israeli army. With the advent of the new far-Right coalition of Netanyahu this situation can only get worse as Israel is determined to ensure that Area C is ethnically cleansed and that Palestinians living there are driven off the land.

A 12-year-old Boy Goes Out to Sell Water at an Intersection, and Is Shot Dead

Masked Men Throw Stones at Palestinians, Burn Cars as Israeli Soldiers Stand By

Palestinian worker killed by Israeli forces in Jenin becomes “the martyr of daily bread”

‘You Gave an Order to Search a Palestinian Woman’s Private Parts.’ ‘That’s Irrelevant’

Israel’s Relentless War against the Children of Palestine

We should not forget that the Blockade of Gaza could not continue but for Egypt’s Collaboration with Israel 

40 years ago Alexander Haig, Reagan’s Secretary of State describedIsrael as "the largest American aircraft carrier in the world that cannot be sunk". Given that central to US military doctrine has been the creation of unsinkable island aircraft carriers, from Pacific atolls to Iceland and even Britain, this explains more than anything why the United States funds Israel’s military to the tune of $4 Billion a year.

Of course there are a handful of anti-Semites like Michael Rabb, Jeff Blankfort and Gilad Atzmon, who will insist that it’s all because of Jewish Power and a Jewish stranglehold over the US government. Quite how a community of 6 million has come to overwhelm the US Congress and Presidency is one of the miracles of our  time.

But for those of us who live in the real world of imperialist realpolitik, United States support for Israel is dictated by material interests not an affection for Jews.

Former Israeli Ambassador Ron Dermer

There was a time when the United States was not that close to Israel and that was when the Jewish community in the USA was itself lukewarm about Zionism. It was only when, after the 6 Day war in 1967, the US  concluded that Israel was a reliable partner in an unstable oil rich  region of the world, that US Jews became enthusiastic about being seen to support Zionism. They had been given permission to become supporters of the United States’s rotweiller in the Middle East.

That was then, Today the American Jewish community is far from happy at events in Israel and in particular the election of a nakedly far-right, neo-fascist government. One quarter believethat Israel is an apartheid state. 38% of American Jewish youth believethis and 20% of Jews under 40 believe Israel has no right to exist.

Under the influence of the Ultra Orthodox and Religious Zionism parties, a proposal is being made to remove non-Jewish grandchildren of Jews from an entitlement to ‘return’ to Israel under the Law of Return as amended in 1970. This can only widen the chasm between Israel and American Jews. 43% of young Jews seein Israel a replication of the United States’s own racism against Black people

Most Americans are either from Conservative or Reform synagogues and to the Orthodox they are not really Jews. My own rabbi father had more contempt for them than for Christians! When the murder of 11 Jews in Pittsburgh, at the hands of a far-right Trump supporter took place, the Chief Rabbi in Israel David Lau refusedto acknowledge that those who had died were Jewish. He merely said that they had a ‘profound Jewish flavour’!!

Today, it is Evangelicals who form the backbone of political support in the US for Israel. Israel though should not be complacent because the evidence from 3 surveys – in 2015, 2018 and 2021 is of a dramatic switch in allegiances among young Evangelicals to the point where they are almost equally divided between support for Israel and Palestinians.

The notion that the United States supports Israel out of some kind of affection for Jews is not only infantile but assumes that foreign policy is dictated by sentiment. As Alexander Haig explained, US military support for Israel is due to its stability as a settler colonial state with an extremely right-wing Israeli Jewish population, virtually the only Trump loving population in the world.

What then is Israel’s mission? In a nutshell watching over the Arab regimes, the United States’s junior clients, almost all of whom are in hock to the Americans. In 1970 Israel intervenedin Black September to threaten the Syrian regime if it invaded Jordan. In 2011 Israel champed at the bit when Mubarak was overthrown.

Israeli leaders were in shock at what they saw as Obama’s abandonment of Mubarak at the height of the Arab spring. Reuters reported:

Political commentators expressed shock at how the United States as well as its major European allies appeared to be ready to dump a staunch strategic ally of three decades, simply to conform to the current ideology of political correctness....

According to Shimon Peres of the Israeli Labor Party

“We always have had and still have great respect for President Mubarak,” he said on Monday. He then switched to the past tense. “I don’t say everything that he did was right, but he did one thing which all of us are thankful to him for: he kept the peace in the Middle East.”

As DW explainedin 2011

With Egypt's opposition movement gaining momentum and President Hosni Mubarak under increasing pressure, Israel is watching developments with concern as one its few Arab allies in the Middle East teeters on the brink.

Israel has been in de facto alliance with the Saudi, Jordanian and Egyptian regimes for decades. Today with the Abraham Accords Israel has established formal diplomatic ties with most Arab regimes, particularly those in the Gulf. It is Israel’s role above all else to guard and protect the Arab regimes and to ensure that radical nationalist or socialist movements are quashed.

We can be certain that there is close military and intelligence coordination with the Arab states and furthermore that this relationship is not of recent origin. This should give a clue as to how Zionism can be brought to an end and with it a state I once describedas Hitler’s bastard offspring.

The major political mistake of the PLO, apart from accepting the idea of a two state solution was its belief that it could triumph with the support of and in alliance with the Arab regimes. The PLO turned its face away from the brutal, repressive nature of these regimes.  Regimes that were otherwise in alliance with the United States, the main supporter of the Zionist state.

For the sake of money to fund its activities, including its diplomatic missions, the PLO gave legitimacy to regimes which were illegitimate in the eyes of their people. Today it is, or should be, clear to all that these regimes are not only enemies of their own people but the Palestinians too.

The Egyptian regime is a particularly brutal regime with torture and executions common. Al Sisi seized power in 2013 and overthrew the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohammed Morsi. The Muslim Brotherhood, which had refrained from even supporting the movement to overthrow Mubarak until late in the day, then destroyed the movement that had overthrown Mubarak by proposing an authoritarian constitution, attacking peaceful demonstrators and prosecuting journalists. The Muslim Brotherhood, of which Hamas is the Gazan wing, has a history of betrayal and support for imperialism.

Without the support of the Egyptian regime Israel could not maintain a 15 year old siege and blockade of Gaza. Unfortunately people forget this all too often. The articles below describe the extreme humiliation and indignities that Palestinians face when they travel to and from Gaza. This deliberate cruelty is carried out on behalf of the Israeli state and demonstrates the contempt that this illegitimate regime has for the Palestinians.

Below are some articles and extracts detailing the repressive, corrupt nature of the Egyptian regime which ranks among the most barbaric in the world.

On the other side of the bars: the broken families of el-Sisi's Egypt

Egypt - Land of Broken Families

Since the beginning of el-Sisi’s presidency in 2014, the number of prisoners in Egypt has surged. The authorities refuse to disclose the exact number, but the UN puts it at 114,000, which is double the capacity of 55,000. Human Rights defenders say that at least 60,000 of these are imprisoned for political reasons, helping Egypt to earn the 161st place on the Human Freedom Index.

Mona Seif vocalized the general feeling of skepticism among Egyptian Human Rights Defenders regarding the promises of the Egyptian Authorities in front of a European Parliament panel on Human Rights in October 2021:

‘The new strategy for human rights of Egypt doesn’t change anything in Egypt … It’s only made for you. Stop using it as a positive example of change.’

families visiting gaol

February 1 2021 marks the date of Santawy’s forced disappearance. This term is used to describe the period in which a person is held at a police station without being officially arrested yet, leaving the family ignorant of their location. During this time, Santawy was subjected to torture, Amnesty later reported. Officers beat him and kept him blindfolded.

Officers interrogated him about his academic research on women’s reproductive rights in Egypt. He reappeared five days later before the Supreme State Security Prosecution, the legal institution charged with investigating crimes related to national security.

‘Ahmed hardly was an activist. He was just really unlucky to be picked out by the regime.’

Five months later, Santawy received a four-year-sentence, for ‘publishing false news to undermine the state, its national interests and public order and spread panic among the people’.

Egyptian prison

Prison food is very problematic and medical care is almost non-existent, Baoumi describes the situation.

‘So Prisoners, or rather: their families, are expected to provide for their basic needs. The prisoners thus form a financial burden which many families can’t afford, especially not if their most important breadwinner is behind the bars.’

Medical negligence has led to severe health complications and in some instances even death. The fate of deposed president Mohamed Morsi speaks volumes. After six years of imprisonment, he finally succumbed at the age of 67 from a heart attack in court.

When I drive past an empty branch of the El-Tawhid & El-Nour Department Stores, a friend remarks that the chain — as many others — had to close down: its owner, Sayed el-Sewerky, was arrested for allegedly financing a terrorist group (read: the Muslim Brotherhood).

According to Human Rights Watch, the detention of businessmen like him ‘exposes how the government is using Egypt’s flawed terrorism law to punish successful businessmen who refuse to surrender their property to the state’, thereby further tightening the Army’s grip on the Egyptian economy

There is a red line connecting most of the cases. The same three accusations keep popping up: ‘joining a terrorist group’, ‘spreading false news that harms the security of the State’ and ‘misusing social media’. Furthermore, many gaolings are preceded by forced disappearances which lasts weeks to months.

The duration of the pre-detention is often lengthened by tadweer, the rotating of the detainee through existing legal cases. Once a case is handled, the detainee is kept in custody by trying him or her for a new case. Most detainees are subject to torture or other forms of inhumane or degrading treatment and there is a consistent policy of medical negligence. Many prisoners are punished by denying them the right to family visits or other ways of communicating with the outside world.

Over the years, the circumstances have gradually deteriorated for associations like the ECRF. In 2019, the parliament passed a new NGO law, requiring all organizations to register with the government by January 2023 and have their activities monitored by the State, a concession many organizations are not willing to make.

‘The first massive wave of arrests came in 2013,’ Mohamed Lotfi tells me, ‘when Sisi cracked down upon supporters of the ousted president and members of the Muslim Brotherhood.’ Over time, the scope was broadened to liberals, socialists, pan-Arabists and other non-Islamist political members.

‘The international community only noticed this big elephant in the room with the death of Giulio Regeni in January 2016,’ Lotfi states. Regeni was an Italian PhD-student conducting research on Egyptian independent trade unions, a sensitive subject in the country. He was abducted, tortured and eventually killed. In October 2021, a court in Rome opened the trial against four Egyptian police officers in their absence, accused of being responsible for the murder.

‘One cannot underestimate the effects of this mass imprisonment on Egyptian society,’ Lotfi says.

‘There are thousands and thousands of prisoners. That means thousands and thousands of families, friends, colleagues and acquaintances of prisoners who know about the plight and who think this is unfair. So the authorities are giving a signal to society in general that if they open their mouth, they could end up in the same situation.’

Egypt's Expatriation Room

Egypt’s “expatriation” policy is meant to humiliate travelers from Gaza

Hundreds of Palestinians spend long hours waiting inside a huge hall packed with people. Everyone waits for the Egyptian officers to call their names, at which point they will undergo another security check, before being put on buses to head to the Cairo International Airport. 

When we arrive at the airport in Cairo at 3 a.m., we are forced into another line and made to stand again despite the hundreds of empty chairs surrounding us. 

During this time, we are not allowed to leave the room or enjoy the airport’s facilities and amenities like the other travelers.

Cairo Airport, expatriation room, 6 a.m. (Photo: Tareq Hajjaj/Mondoweiss)

We are not allowed to sit, a rule made specially for Gaza residents. We’re then sent to another waiting hall — again, made specially for Gazans — where our passports are taken from us as we wait for our flights.

Feeling less than human: The hell of crossing into Gaza

Yet I, like any Palestinian who wants to travel to Gaza with a hawiyya, had to forgo any expectation of having my basic human rights respected. Instead, I experienced consistent humiliation, utter exhaustion, and total confusion. What should have taken hours took days, slowed down by uninterested and scornful Egyptian border agents, purposefully mismanaged crowds, and a sweeping attitude of dehumanization toward the Palestinians trying to reach their homeland.

The relief, however, lasted about 500 meters, after which we were confronted with yet another meaningless attempt to humiliate Palestinians: a further checkpoint mere minutes away from the last one. My mother in law, who suffers from severe asthma, had almost collapsed from the previous wait. Knowing this, our driver decided to cut the line to ask if we could go through, since we also had my five-month-old son. Unwilling to hear his plea, the soldier raised his gun and threatened to take his driver’s license if he said another word.

‘We are apparently not human’

I counted over 15 checkpoints from El Ferdan to the Arish, which sits on the Egypt-Gaza border and is the largest city in the Sinai Peninsula. At one point all the checkpoints seemed to blend together — there was no distinction between any of them except that they added to the suffering of Palestinian travelers with no regard for women, children, or the elderly.

The Al-Midan checkpoint outside Arish, however, was an exception. We arrived, hungry and tired, very late at night, and were forced to wait over six hours at an arbitrary barrier. We once again left the car and sat on the dirt roads as we waited. Every time we tried to seek comfort or entertain ourselves with fellow Palestinians waiting alongside us, a soldier ordered us back into our cars, with one telling us: “It looks like you like the situation you’re in, don’t you!”.

The Egyptian soldiers who were supposed to inspect the cars were on their phones. One was scrolling through TikTok and another was messaging on WhatsApp, while hundreds of Palestinians were waiting in the middle of the night with nowhere to seek shelter or even a bathroom to relieve themselves. I recall one woman begging a soldier to let her car through, as she had an infant who had soiled herself and developed an intense rash, because the mother had no more diapers left. He brushed her off. Egyptian soldiers looked on, wordlessly. They allowed chaos to ensue. In fact, chaos seemed to be the policy that the Egyptian military had adopted, leading Palestinians to their breaking points. We hated the situation we were in. In these moments, some even hated the fact they were Palestinian. One woman swore she would never repeat this journey ever again.

Trapped like cattle

The hell we were in was not over, however. Inside the Rafah crossing hall, absolute chaos unfolded. Hundreds of Palestinians were lining up to hand over their hawiyyas and passports that Egyptian officials simply needed to stamp. Except this act was far from simple.

The border hall looked like a snapshot from the past, with filthy floors, no trash can in sight, ancient computers, and electricity that cut off every few minutes. In the prayer room there was actual shit on the floor, while the ceiling looked like it was about to collapse on you.

Yet for a select few, the travel to and from Gaza can be easier, maybe even luxurious. While sitting on broken metal chairs, a room adjacent to the border hall was left ajar. Inside I could see leather couches in a nice air conditioned room and people serving drinks to those seated. These very few Palestinians traveled with a VIP travel service called Ya Hala and were sitting in its refurbished lounge away from the chaos and humiliation.

Ya Hala has linkswith the Egyptian government and security establishment and profits off of the siege by charging anywhere from $700 to $5,000dollars per person to travel with the company which skips the checkpoints, the inspections, and the days-long waits. Palestinians without that kind of money, like the hundreds on the journey with my family, have to wait months or even years on waitlists in order to travel.

Abdel al Fattah after father's funeral