Jews Don’t Count is an Exercise in Special pleading for Jewish Exceptionalism, Jewish Privilege & Jewish Victimhood

Starmer supports Baddiel and opposes BDS

It says everything about the superficial nature of the mass media that I even have to write this. Baddiel has received massive publicity for Jews Don’t Count, his pathetic plea for Jewish Exceptionalism and for Jews to be recognised as what they are not, victims of racial oppression.

When Sir Keir Stürmer felt the need to display his ‘anti-racist’ credentials to Labour Friends of Apartheid Israel, who better to praise than Blackface Baddiel's Jews Don’t Count.

The man who declared Black Lives Matter was just a ‘moment’ and who attacked calls for defunding the Police was more than happy to support Baddiel’s campaign for Jews to be treated as the prime victims of racism.

Anti-racism is, by its very nature, a threat to the power structures of British capitalism. It challenges the super exploitation that Black people experience. Baddiel’s campaign against ‘anti-Semitism’ threatens no one who is privileged. It targets the oppressed. That is why the media has been so eager to promote it.

It is no accident that it was two Black women – Whoopi Goldberg and Dawn Butler who Baddiel criticised because his targets are the left and Black people, not the racist right or the rich and powerful.

The crux of Baddiel’s argument is that Jews should be treated as specially oppressed and persecuted despite being privileged and White. He provides no evidence of Jewish oppression besides the existence of ancient prejudices and stereotypes, most of which are dying out.

Baddiel himself is the best example of why Jews do count and why it is Black and Muslim communities who are marginalised. Baddiel has a long history of racism with Blackface attacks on Jason Lee coupled with his refusal to apologise until 25 years later, his derogatory comments about Gypsies and a disgusting Guardian article Black men can jump. Despite being a 24-carat racist Baddiel lectures us about racism! It’s like Harold Shipman hosting a programme on care for the elderly.

What Baddiel wilfully ignores, which is why his argument elides into Zionism’s anti-Semitism narrative, is how ‘anti-Semitism’ has been weaponised against supporters of the Palestinians.

When the EU decided that goods produced in West Bank settlements should be labelled as such, it was described by Israeli Minister, Yuval Steinitz, as ‘disguised anti-Semitism’. When the US abstained on UN Security Council Resolution 2334, which condemned West Bank settlements, Obama was called‘a Jew hating anti-Semite.' Yet Baddiel has nothing to say about this.

Baddiel cannot bring himself to condemn this

There are hundreds of similar examples. I’ve not met a single Palestine solidarity activist who hasn’t been called an anti-Semite. Yet Baddiel simply ignores the way allegations of ‘anti-Semitism’ are used and abused and how the IHRA ‘definition’, which conflates criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism, has been used to targetacademics for example.

Thoughtful article’s such as that of former Jewish Court of Appeal Judge, Sir Stephen Sedley, Defining Anti-Semitism,  which point this out are not on Baddiel’s radar. His victim centred, Jewish exceptionalist rant, which the media are always happy to publicise, gives the lie to the very case he makes.

It speaks volumes about the degeneration of the Guardian, that its takeon Jews Don’t Count was that it’s a ‘a doc so shocking it sounds like a siren.’ Really? Compared to the Windrush Scandal?

Baddiel makes no attempt to differentiate between racism and prejudice. AmbalavanerSivanandan talkedof the racism that discriminates and the racism that kills. But there is a third form of racism that neither discriminates nor kills – prejudice.

The first two operate as part of the power structure of the state which is why they are so dangerous. The third, prejudice, is merely the leftover of past oppression yet to Baddiel it is the only form of racism.

When the Tory Party and Starmer proclaim their opposition to ‘anti-Semitism’ and use it as a pretext to attackfreedom of speech it demonstrates that Jews have been co-opted as partners in state repression and supporters of imperialism in the Middle East. Jews played the same role in Algeria as they do today in Britain. Convenient pawns at the disposal of the ruling elites.

Zionism

Baddiel makes great play of the fact that he isn’t interested in Israel or Zionism.  But this is disingenuous. The ‘anti-Semitism’ that Baddiel talks about is the same phenomenon as the ‘anti-Semitism’ that defenders of Israel wield like a cudgel against those who support the Palestinians and oppose Zionism .

Throughout Jews Don’t CountBaddiel repeats the myth that Jews have experienced a never ending anti-Semitism for 2000 years. This places anti-Semitism outside of history without any explanation of its causes. It leaves only one explanation.  That Jews themselves are the cause. In the words Leon Pinsker

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

Salo Baron  - the greatest Jewish historian of the 20th Century

Salo Baron, the greatest Jewish historian of the 20^th century described this as the ‘lachrymose conception of Jewish history.’  Baron wrote:

All my life I have been struggling against the hitherto dominant
“lachrymose conception of Jewish history” ... because I have felt that an overemphasis on Jewish sufferings distorted the total picture of the Jewish historic evolution....

Abram Leon similarly wrote in The Jewish Question a Marxist Interpretation:

Zionism transposes modern anti-Semitism to all of history and saves itself the trouble of studying the various forms of anti-Semitism and their evolution

Fundamental to Zionist ideology was the desire to wind up the Jewish Diaspora, the ‘accursed Galut’. This was the ‘Negation of the Diaspora’. It was a ‘return to history’. In other words Jews outside Palestine had no history, because history is a history of peoples.

This was total nonsense. The Golden Era of Jews was in Muslim Spain not Palestine. The Babylonian Talmud was more authoritative than the Jerusalem Talmud. It is as if Maimonides, Mendelssohn, Freud, Einstein, Arendt, Spinoza and Heinrich Heine did not exist.  

Zionism holds that only in a ‘Jewish’ state can Jews once more take part in history. Well we can see what a ‘Jewish’ state has produced. An assortment of bigots, racists and chauvinists such as the present Israeli government of Ben Gvir and Smotrich.

If Baddiel really wants to find examples of anti-Semitism then all he need do is read how the Zionists saw other Jews. Hashomer Hatzair, the ‘left-wing’ Zionist youth movement wrote that:

The Jew is a caricature of a normal, natural human being, both physically andspiritually. As an individual in society he revolts and throws off the harness of social obligations, knows no order nor discipline. (‘Our Shomer’ “Weltanschaung” Hashomer Hatzair, December 1936, p.26).

Arthur Ruppin, the Director of the Palestine Office in Haifa from 1908 onwards retorted, when a friend called him an anti-Semite that:

‘I have already established here [in his diary]that I despise the cancers of Judaism more than does the worst anti-Semite.’

Leading Zionists took pride in their anti-Semitism. Joachim Doron,Classic Zionism and modern anti-Semitism: parallels and influences, (1883-1914), p.186,Journal of Israeli History 8]. wrote that:

a perusal of Zionist sources reveals criticism so scathing that the generation that witnessed Auschwitz has difficulty comprehending them.

No one doubts that there were periods of Jewish persecution but there were also periods when Jews were the persecutors. Jews lived for centuries in peace with their neighbours but Zionism focuses only on the periods of conflict and turmoil.

Zionism offers no explanation for the persecution of the Jews. It is the mere presence of Jews in other peoples’ lands that causes anti-Semitism. In the words of Israeli novelist and poet AB Yehoshua, the Jewish diaspora was a ‘cancer connected to the main tissue of the Jewish people who use other people’s countries like hotels.’[Jewish Chronicle, 22.12.89. 'Diaspora a cancer') There is no attempt to compare the Jews’ situation with other minorities like the Gypsies and Armenians.

Another Zionist myth referred to in the program was the expulsion of Jews from Palestine after the sacking of the Temple in 70 AD. In fact there is no evidence of an expulsion of Jews by the Romans. Very large numbers of Jews had already migrated as a trading people, populating the Hellenised cities of the Middle East. Alexandria had, according to Philo one million Jewish inhabitants by the first century AD.

Baddiel may deny that he is a Zionist but his conceptual analysis of anti-Semitism is framed by Zionist  ideology.

Are Jews are a Minority Ignored by Progressives?

The whole basis of Baddiel’s tirade against the left or ‘progressives’ as he calls it (he has nothing to say about the racial anti-Semitism of the Right) is that Jews in Britain are not allowed to define anti-Semitism (although he never says which Jews). Baddiel ignores the fact that anti-Semitism has been redefined in order to negate Palestinian oppression via the IHRA misdefinition of anti-Semitism.

In the words of Jonathan Freedland, the Guardian’s Zionist propagandist and the epitomy of a dishonest journalist:

On the left, black people are usually allowed to define what’s racism; women can define sexism; Muslims are trusted to define Islamophobia. But when Jews call out something as antisemitic, leftist non-Jews feel curiously entitled to tell Jews they’re wrong, that they are exaggerating or lying or using it as a decoy tactic – and to then treat them to a long lecture on what anti-Jewish racism really is.

The title of Freedland’s article is instructive because it encapsulates Baddiel’s argument: ‘My plea to the left: treat Jews the same way you’d treat any other minority.’ Their argument is that being a minority in itself entitles you to a place in the oppression stakes:

I often wonder whether there is a loose connection in the neutral networks of Zionists like Freedland and Baddiel. Do they not understand the meaning of the language or the concepts they employ?

There is nothing magical about minorities. What the left campaigns for is oppressed minorities. Jews in Britain are not oppressed as Jews. The rich and powerful are also a minority but we don’t campaign in support of them. Billionaires are a very distinct minority but I don’t recall anyone calling for them to have protected status. Fascists are another minority, except in Israel, but I don’t recall going onto the streets to protest against their unfair treatment!

90 years ago Jews were oppressed and scapegoated. They were subject to physical attacks and violence by Oswald Moseley’s British Union of Fascists as well as Police and state racism. Then it was the Left, not Baddiel’s right-wing friends who came to their defence whilst the Zionists and Board of Deputies told Jews to keep their heads down and stay indoors whilst the fascists marched through the East End. At the Battle of Cable Street non-Jewish and Jewish workers in their thousands ignored the Zionist cries of appeasement.

Today Jews are a privileged part of the White community. William Rubinstein, a past President of the Jewish Historical Society, wrote 40 years ago that ‘Post-1945, British Jewry has migrated into the upper-middle class’. (The Right, Left and the Jews, p.51).

Professor Geoffrey Alderman, the historian of Britain’s Jewish community wrote that London Jewry

is, arguably, more bourgeois now than at any time since the mid-nineteenth century, and it is certainly more Conservative… support for Israel has acquired a centrality rivalling, and perhaps even surpassing, that of the synagogue.’ (‘Two Cheers for the GLC’ (JC, 26.3.86.)

Rubinstein’s conclusions were that

The rise of Western Jewry to unparalleled affluence and high status has led to the near-disappearance of a Jewish proletariat of any size; indeed, the Jews may become the first ethnic group in history without a working class of any size.

In other words British Jews, who in the 1930s were overwhelmingly working class had changed. Today they are mainly middle class professionals. As the class nature of British Jews has changed so has their politics.

In 1945 Phil Piratin of the Communist  Party was elected as MP for Mile End. It is estimated that half his vote came from Jews who dominated many branches of the Communist Party. In 1979 Alderman could not detect a single Jewish vote in the Hackney North constituency for the CP candidate but he estimated that about 400 Jews had voted for the neo-Nazi holocaust denying National Front. Yet dishonest journalists like Freedland and racist clowns like Baddiel insist that being a minority makes British Jews as oppressed as Black people.

Sarah Silverman - A good example of Jewish oppression

Baddiel produced a list of the examples of the anti-Semitic persecution that Jews suffer. Sarah Silverman told how she had been told to leave a lesbian march because she was a Zionist. Silverman exclaimed that ‘now Zionism is racism’ in mock horror. Yes Sarah haven’t you noticed the cries of ‘Death to the Arabs’ in Israel or the hundreds of all-Jewish communities in Israel from which Arabs are barred?

Another example of ‘anti-Semitism’ was Jeremy Irons reading TS Elliot’s poetry in 2017. Baddiel complained that no one had called for statues of Elliot to be pulled down. It is true. Elliot was an anti-Semite but he had no involvement in the persecution of Jews whereas Cecil Rhodes and Edward Colston were personally responsible for the death and murder of thousands of Black people. That Baddiel is incapable of grasping this demonstrates that he is as much a racist today as he ever was.

We were entertained to a speech by Dawn Butler at Labour Party conference where she mentions various groups but not Jews. Baddiel complains that Jews were left out. But they weren't. She referred to whether people were Black or White. Jews are White in British society. The Whitest British religious group.

In the Political realignment of British Jews Professor Sobolewska and others from Manchester University concluded that

‘the historical association of the British Jewish community with the Labour party is a thing of the past, and that a large majority now support the Conservatives….

The socio-economic profile of Anglo-Jewry has changed dramatically in a few generations, with upward mobility shifting their profile towards privileged groups who typically support for the Conservatives... A large proportion of British Jews now live in more affluent suburban constituencies where the Conservatives are often locally dominant. Taken together with a significantly older age skew this provides a set of sound demographic reasons for Jews to lean Conservative.; (p.5)

Why the hell should the Left bother with this overwhelmingly reactionary community? Of course we should oppose anti-Semitism whilst recognising that Jewish identity today is largely based on Israel and that many Jews take criticism of this identity as ‘anti-Semitism’.

Playwright and Director Patrick Marber stated (12.51) that ‘We Jews are an oppressed minority and we can cite 2000 years of evidence.’ I don’t know what the quality of the programmes are that Marber produces but the myth of 2000 years persecution is not evidence!

Baddiel pretends that Jews are as much the victims of racism as Black people. We see (16.53) neo-Nazis marching at Charlottesville chanting ‘The Jews will not replace us’. This was indeed shocking but large sections of the Jewish community subscribe to the White Replacement Theory that these marchers were giving  voice to.

Enoch Powell fan and advocate of the White Replacement Theory pays tribute to the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks

Former Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks praised as one of the books of the year Douglas Murray’s Strange Death of Europe which argued that Muslims were replacing White people. The neo-Nazis variant of this is that Jews are responsible for Muslim immigration. Gary Mond, former Senior Vice President of the Board of Deputies and Samuel Hayek, Chair of JNF-UK are also adherents to this theory.

And who organised the Charlottesville march?  Neo-Nazi Richard Spencer who describes himself as a White Zionist! After Donald Trump had praised the ‘fine people’ who had organised the march Netanyahu refused to criticise it. As the Washington Post observed:

As neo-Nazis and white supremacists marched through Charlottesville chanting “Jews will not replace us,” one may have expected Israel’s response to be swift and unequivocal.

But as President Trump was being criticized in the United States for blaming violence on “both sides,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has styled himself as a leader of Jews everywhere, drew flak for giving no response at all.

Why Jews are the Victims of Prejudice NOT Racism

I know a little about British Jews since I was brought up in an Orthodox Jewish home, the son of a rabbi.

I forget how many times I was told that you cannot trust an Arab. My dad didn’t like schwarzes either. What is schwarze? Literally ‘Black’ in Yiddish. But that is not how it is used. Let Erica Davies explain:

When [my grandmother] was in a nursing home at the end of her life, she’d say, ‘everyone who works here is a shvartze, they’ll steal from you.’

Schvartze is proxy for nigger… anyone who says otherwise is delusional, lying or incredibly naïve,” an Orthodox friend told me. “If it means black then why does no one ever refer to schvartzer shoes when talking about black shoes, why does the black hat community, which sometimes refers to itself as the black community, never call itself the schvartzer community — because the use of the word within the frum community is only as a substitute for nigger.”

My father warned me about working with Arabs. ‘They’ll stab you in the back’ I was told. This kind of anti-Arab racism is very common in the Jewish community, brought up as it is on a series of fables and myths about how Israel sought peace and the Arabs refused their outstretched hand. 

No matter that there is no truth in these fables. Erskine Childers wrote an article, The Other Exodus, in The Spectator of 12 May 1961, in which he laid these myths to rest.

In 1961 The Spectator, was owned by liberal Tory Sir Ian Gilmour. It had not yet been captured by the racist Tory Right under Boris Johnson who combined Zionism with employing neo-Nazi Taki Theodoracopulos. See Conservative anti-Semitism: the strange case of Boris Johnson, Richard Spencer and Gavin McInnes

In The Other Exodus Childers wrote how, on the basis of examining BBC and CIA transcripts of Arab radio stations he found that

There was not a single order, or appeal, or suggestion about evacuation from Palestine from any Arab radio station, inside or outside Palestine, in 1948. There is repeated monitored record of Arab appeals, even flat orders, to the civilians of Palestine to stay put.’

Today despite claims by Israeli Ambassador Tzipi Hotoveli that the Nakba is an ‘Arab lie’ there is no doubting that three-quarters of a million Palestinian refugees were expelled. This is why Israel’s National Archives refuses to release files on the period.

Anti-Arab racism and Islamaphobia amongst British Jews is high. So high that although there have been regular surveys about Muslim attitudes to Jews there have been no equivalent surveys of Jewish attitudes to Muslims. Those who sample the views of Muslims are afraid of what they may find out if they did the same with the Jewish community. But judging  by the racist output of the Jewish Chronicle and companion papers, one can be certain that British Jews are perhaps the most racist section of White British society.

Baddiel Gets a Lesson in Fake Victimhood from his niece Dionna

Ironically it was Baddiel’s niece Dionna who destroyed Baddiel’s argument that Jews are as much a victim of racism as Black people. Baddiel immediately equated what she said as equivalent to Jews changing their names in non-Jewish society, even though that is entirely voluntary. 

Donna has a Jewish father and a Black mother and spoke of not belonging in either community. 

I can’t hide the fact that I’m Black. You know my dad can hide the fact that he’s Jewish. In America if my mum gets stopped by the cops in her car I’m a little more worried than if my dad gets stopped by the cops.

Forced on the defensive Baddiel accepted that ‘there is an element of privilege’ but he immediately switched it to Jews adopting non-Jewish names whereas in fact most Jews chose to Anglicise their names, which is not the same thing. My name was originally the German for Green Stone. I assume my grandparents wanted to Anglicise derGrünstein. They wanted to be a British sounding name which was, nonetheless instantly recognisable as a Jewish name.

What Baddiel can’t or won’t get into his head is that Jews are not victims of racism today. Jews don’t get stopped for driving whilst Jewish whereas this is the experience of Black people. Jews don’t experience death in police custody or police violence, Black people do. Jews aren’t singled out by immigration control or deported because they are Black. This simply did not fit into Baddiel's narrative because his whole programme was based on Jews not being White.

At 33.38 there was a section ‘What About Israel’ (33.38). Baddiel asked ‘Isn’t Israel actually an oppressor’ to a backdrop of Israel’s Apartheid Wall, which divides Palestinian communities from their land and which resembles the ghetto walls that Jews experienced. Yet Baddiel hurriedly moved on without answering his own question. Why?

Baddiel felt unable to say a word about Israel's Apartheid Wall

Baddiel couldn't bring himself to answer the question either because he doesn't believe it or because those applauding him might have had second thoughts about his whole argument. Instead he turned the conversation back to 'antisemitism':

Well I think there are many things to say about anti-Semitism, a racism that goes back centuries since well before the establishment of the State of Israel.

There could be no more clearer example of Baddiel’s refusal to confront the fact that Israeli Jews, acting with the support of a majority of the Jewish diaspora, are the oppressors. Instead his main concern was the fact that Jews keep getting asked ‘‘What about Israel’. A terrible form of oppression, to be sure! Stephen Fry complained:

‘I’m not a citizen of Israel. Do I have to tell you how upset I am that Palestinians are treated so abominably.’

At least Fry made his position clear whereas Baddiel consistently refuses to give an iota of support to the Palestinians.

And then we have slippery Sarah Silverman, the archetypal Jewish supremacist, feigning shock (34.31) ‘and now Zionism is racism’. Silverman is incapable of understanding why a State whose Prime Minister proclaims that it is a state only of its Jewish citizens not its Arab citizens is racist.

Then there is Howard Jacobson, who can’t even bring himself to utter the word ‘Palestinian’. He asserts that ‘however the Israeli government sorts itself out… the country was always going to be hated’ to the accompaniment of pogrom like flames devouring a Star of David. It is that old myth of 2,000 years of anti-Semitism. What Jacobson is really saying is that it’s not land theft or ethnic cleansing which motivates Palestinians but a 2000 years old hatred of Jews. Very convenient of course. Baddiel replies: (34:57)

No-one is suggesting that the State of Israel has not done many bad things but British Jews are not responsible for those actions.’

But that isn’t true. The Board of Deputies has repeatedly issued statements and organised demonstrations in support of Israel’s attacks on Lebanon and Gaza, the last one being attended by that well known anti-racist Tommy Robinson.

The Board of Deputies claims to be the ‘Voice of British Jewry’. What Baddiel really wants is for British Jews to be able to support Israeli war crimes whilst not being held to account. It is a good example of chutzpah. Baddiel claims it is racist to expect Jews to condemn Israel whereas in fact it is Baddiel and his establishment supporters who are the racists by demanding an unfettered right to support Israel without suffering any consequences.

Miriam Margoyles who has a long track record of supporting the Palestinians is interviewed (35.15). Miriam cuts through Baddiel’s hypocrisy and cant when she says ‘we have to say the word Israel. Israel is at the root of all this. Israel is the problem’ She accuses Baddiel of being ‘wilful’in refusing to take responsibility for what Israel does. Baddiel refuses to recognise that by associating British Jews with Israel’s actions Zionism helps perpetuate anti-Semitism.

Baddiel immediately responds ‘I disagree with that’. He sees no problem in Israel’s actions as a Jewish state but seeks to avoid making any criticism by taking refuge in identity politics. It is telling that not once does Baddiel take issue with Israel’s claim to act and speak on behalf of all Jews. That is not his concern.

It says everything about Channel 4 that instead of examining the role of Jewish organisations in supporting Israeli war crimes and apartheid it employs a Zionist with a long record of racism like Baddiel to seek to muddy the waters with false charges of ‘anti-Semitism’.

Following my appearance on the BBC’s Big Questions the following article appeared in the Jewish Chronicle Boycotter blames the Board for antisemitism in Britain:

The Board of Deputies is to blame for rising antisemitism in Britain, according to a leading member of a Jewish anti-Israel group.

Tony Greenstein, of Jews for Boycotting Israeli Goods (JBIG), was speaking on the BBC1 debate show, The Big Questions, on Sunday morning.

During the wide-ranging discussion, Mr Greenstein said: “Of course there’s no justification for antisemitism, but there’s also no justification for the Board of Deputies calling rallies in support of the invasion of Lebanon and Gaza in the name of the British Jewish community. That causes antisemitism.

“It associates every Jewish person with the terror in Lebanon and Gaza.”

You cannot support Israel right or wrong in the name of British Jews and then complain if people associate Jews with Israel’s crimes!

In November 2019 Baddiel joined in the Zionist attacks on Corbyn. Instead of pronouncing Jeffrey Epstein’s name “Ep-steen” Corbyn said “Epshtine” which is the correct German pronounciation. Anxious to add his bit to the Zionists’ ‘anti-Semitism’ attacks on Corbyn before the election, Baddiel created a completely bogus controversy.

Baddiel assertion that he feels no connection with Israel is disingenuous. If that is true why does he refuse to dissociate himself from the actions of a state that claims to act on behalf of all Jews? Labelling such call’s ‘anti-Semitic’ betrays a guilty conscience.

Baddiel says ‘we have no collective responsibility for Israel as Jews.’ So has Baddiel criticised the IHRA which describes Israel as having been ‘conceived as a Jewish collectivity?’ Zionism is, to paraphrase Samuel Johnson, the last refuge of the Jewish scoundrel.

Unfortunately Miriam’s response, that Israeli Jews are ‘my people’ misses the point. I feel nothing in common with Israeli Jews. The reason that Jews should speak out is because Israel claims that its crimes are perpetrated on behalf of all Jews.

Channel 4’s decision to screen this superficial tirade of deceptions and half-truths instead of making a serious documentary about racism such as the killing of ChrisKaba, a Black man murdered by the Metropolitan Police, is telling. They would prefer to pander to White Jewish privilege rather than tackle the racism of the British state.

The Labour Party’s decision to reinstate Trevor Philips, a notorious Islamaphobe who believes Muslims are a ‘nation within a nation’ demonstrates that it’s not Jews but Muslims who don’t count.

Baddiel himself is a performing monkey working to a Zionist script. Starmer praises him because he fits in with the ‘anti-Semitism’ narrative. If you question British Jews about support for Israel then that is anti-Semitic but if you criticise Israel that too is anti-Semitic. Such is the hypocrisy of Israel and its perfumed supporters.

Below is an excellent article by Gavin Lewis about Baddiel which is well worth reading. It first appeared on Labour Heartlands.

Tony Greenstein

Jewish & Black Experience vs Baddiel

Black history month, a little modern history: Further Reflections on‘Jewface and Other David Baddiel Racisms’.

image left, right Baddiel blacked up as Jason Lee center image image David Baddiel courtesy of Amnesty International UK, CC BY 2.0

By Gavin Lewis 

Introduction:

Jewface and Other David Baddiel Racisms (Labour Heartlands, republished JVL), responds to Jewish comic David Baddiel’s self-promoting claims that he and his white ethnic group are ‘uniquely oppressed’, that feature in his contentious monograph Jews Don’t Count, now controversially being made into a tv polemic by Channel 4.  It does so by examining the history of Baddiel’s racist provocations against Black people, and the comparative historical Black experience, of white settler oppression.

As sourced in the original article, Baddiel’s career includes, his Guardian article Black men can jump, in which he describes Black men on the basis of natural-sense-of-rhythm and physical primitiveness stereotypes; picking out a Black soccer fan for public ridicule; mocking the ethnic appearance of the footballer Jason Lee using slurs like ‘Pineapplehead ‘and inciting thousands of others to do so – incitements that also resulted in countless copycat abuses of other Black youngsters.  Baddiel has never compensated victims or apologised to Jason Lee.

Re-tweeting the article Jonathan Cook, noted that ‘Baddiel has gone from “Blackface to Jewface”, given that Baddiel is not only recorded practising Blackfacein mocking Jason Lee, but has subsequently attempted to culturally appropriate the term, as ‘Jewface’.  By comparison, comedian Sarah Silverman has – in light of Jewish participation in Blackface– advised her fans/followers, not to repeat this appropriation.  

In fact, Jewish actors were also prominent among those chosen to pass as Native Americans in Hollywood productions.  Among these Tony Curtis donned greasepaint to play Native American Marine, Iwo Jima flag raiser Ira Hayes in The Outsider (1961), Ann Bancroft as an Apache widow in Walk the Proud Land (1956), Janet Margolin as a Kiowa girl in Nevada Smith (1966).

In response to the ‘uniquely oppressed’ claim the article also cites the numerous white settler societies in which western Jews have prospered, that have simultaneously been hazardous and even most often off-limits to global Black citizens.  It also cites the extent pro-Israel anti-Semitism claims have been used to obscure the colonial settler country’s 2014 killings of 2251+ people in Gaza including 551 children, all – as confirmed by the UN– via a bombardment consisting of many thousands of shells.  Despite his racist past, Baddiel has been able to reinvigorate his career ridding on the back of this public relations campaign, even as Israel’s crimes against the middle-eastern indigenous innocent, worsen from year to year.

In light of the public response to the article, it is worth going on to explore just how poorly Baddiel and the Israel lobby’s self-serving, ethnic elitist,  rhetorical victim strategies compare with a much finer tradition of selfless Jewish artists/activists, embracing equality movements and showing solidarity with the oppressed. Historical reflections also demonstrate the Baddiel/Israel-lobby claims don’t make even much sense in comparison to basic lived sociological reality.

International Cross-Community Jewish Solidarity

Harold Pinter,   Miriam Margolyes,  Miriam Karlin, Jewish Artists/Activists practising cross-community solidarity.

A much more substantial work than this could not adequately represent the extent of Jewish prominence in equality and anti-oppression movements.  But it is worth mentioning Nobel Laureate Harold Pinter, whose activism included support for the Anti-Apartheid Movement, for CND, participation in Stop the War events opposing Blair and Bush’s Wars, Patron of the Cuban Solidarity Movement, co-founder of Independent Jewish Voices (independent of Israel’s lobby)[iv]and as a signatory forJews for Justice for Palestinians.  

Unlike the self-serving actions of Baddiel and the pro-Israel media industry, very little of this was advantageous to Pinter either collectively to his ethnic group, or as individual material gain or career advancement.  Pinter’s campaign against the torture of writers in Turkey in which he pointedly confronted the American ambassador with “the reality … of electric current on your genitals” actually got him thrown out of the US embassy’s dinner, along with Playwright Arthur Miller.

Actor Miriam Margolyes is also a signatory of Jews for Justice for Palestinians. She began her career sharing the broader societal collectivist socialist sensibilities of Vanessa Redgrave and Frances de la Tour.  She is a Jewish Labour member who defended the Party and Jeremy Corbyn against vexatious accusations of anti-Semitism that had been made, for rightwing pro-Israeli strategic political reasons.  She told Middle East Eye“you have to be able to criticise Israel”.  Once again, particularly in our rightwing McCarthyite media reality, these are not positions that are necessarily personally, career benefiting, or financially enhancing.

Jewish actor, the late Miriam Karlin was a much loved figure in British popular culture.  As well as her stage work, she was a hit playing a shop steward in the tv sitcom The Rag Trade (1961-63 & 1977-78) and enjoyed character roles in prestige film productions including The Entertainer (1960) and Clockwork Orange(1971).  Packing a lot into her life, Karlin was also a Trade Unionist off-camera, active in Equity and a member of the Labour Party.  She was a committed anti-Fascist, a member of the Ant Nazi League[viii]and prominent in protests against Holocaust denier David Irving. She also targeted Austrian politician Jörg Haider over his Nazi sympathies.  Karlin was Patron of the human rights group Burma Campaign UK. 

Craig Murray recalls her politics and personal loyalty.

“David Aaronovitch had published an article calling me anti-semitic. Miriam was even more furious on my behalf than I was myself, and wrote a letter to the paper (it wasn’t published). But I won’t forget what she said; she said her own mother was an Aaronovich, and that many of their family had been killed in the holocaust, and that those who had suffered would be horrified to see their legacy perverted to a neo-conservative agenda.”

Like Pinter, Karlin protested the Iraq War, like both he and Margolyes she supported Jews for Justice for Palestinians.  Her policy demands on behalf of Palestinians, still features on the ‘who-we-are’ section, of the organisation’s website.

“Israel must withdraw from all the settlements and dismantle the wall within Palestinian territory. Then, perhaps, we may, at last, see some justice for Palestinians.”

It’s worth noting that a lot of this altruistic selfless solidarity by prominent British Jews occurred over the adult period of David Baddiel’s life.  Equivalent public activism from Baddiel has been nowhere to be seen.  The current pro-Israel ‘hierarchy of victimhood’ has allowed Baddiel the option of playing the social ‘commentator?’despite his lack of scholarship, activist pedigree, and his reputation having been justifiably torpedoed by his previous racist incitements.

Jewish Black Civil-Rights – Anti-Racism

The inappropriateness of these ‘hierarchy of victimhood’ and ‘uniqueness’ claims are best exposed by the actions of those Jews who have actively combated racism against Black people or supported them in their struggle.  Veteran Jewish Cockney actor Harry Landis joined Labour – like Denis Healy and Eric Heffer – after being with the Communist Party.  He recalls warmly the times he spent with Paul Robeson, though reflects sadly on his “haunted look”. Doubtless, working-class Landis would not claim to have had things worse than the persecuted great African-American artist-activist.    

Martin Luther King in his journals now held by Stanford University recalls fighting an African-American rent strike against exploitative Jewish Landlords in Chicago. However, he juxtaposes this reality with the experience of Jews as “partners in the civil rights struggle”.   One such example was Rabbi Israel Seymour Dresner, dubbed America’s ‘most arrested Rabbi’ due to his activism on Freedom Rides (in other activisms he was also a critic of Israeli annexation, and Israel’s PM Netanyahu).

Martin Luther King with Rabbi Israel Dresner

Voter registration activists African-American James Chaney plus Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner – the latter two both from Jewish families – were murdered in events later fictionalised in the movie Mississippi Burning (1988). 

Despite in that era some elite facilities – golf clubs and the New York Sporting Club (NYAC)– still excluding Jews along with, African-American members, clearly Schwerner and Goodman were not subject to routine segregation.  They enjoyed comparatively enhanced economic opportunity and had the vote, yet put themselves at risk anyway.  Nor could Jewish activists be accused of merely opposing racism, because of some conscious ‘thin-end-of–the-wedge’ self-interest. 

Most of the studies of Nazis using Germany’s 1904 human-experimentation and genocide of the African Herero tribal people of Namibia as a policy model and/or copying segregationist countries, occurred after these activists’ era.  And obviously, in opposing segregationist racism, these activists were not like Baddiel, manipulatively placing themselves at the apex of a ‘hierarchy of racism’. 

More than stealing Blackface!

David Baddiel’s repeated historical practices demonstrate he is the antithesis of this Jewish anti-racist tradition; though any direct advocacy for Israel by him is yet to be established.  However academic David Miller draws attention to the fact that Baddiel is a former pupil of the privileged Haberdashers fee paying school, whose other alumni have also been guilty of Blackface and ethnic bullying.  This Miller attributes to an overt Zionist ideology at the institution. 

Whatever the relevancy of the school, the more telling evidence of a shared pro-Israel agenda is the fact that against every tradition of Jewish cross-community anti-racist solidarity, represented in this article, Baddiel’s Blackface to Jewfaceethnic exclusive, racist cultural theft, is a public relations tactic, repeated by the lobby.   

Jeremy Newmark the disgraced former leader of the pro-Israel Jewish Labour Movement (JLM) is alleged to have taken Malcolm X’s expressions house slave and house n*gg*r and rebranded them as ‘court Jew’ in reference to Jewish pro-Palestinian activist Jackie Walker.  He also took the ancient uppity n*gg*r slur and changed it into pushy Jew.  The sentiment expressed as variants on “only Black people know what racism feels like”– was changed, for the purposes of advocating for Israel in a Guardian column by Howard Jacobson, into “Jews know what anti-Semitism is and what it isn’t.” Items selected for the follow-up letters page material were framed by this misappropriation. 

Zionist Guardian writer and former opinion editor Jonathan Freedland took an expression so old it changed from

“I’m not racist some of my best friends are colored,”

to

“I’m not racist some of my best friends are Negro,”

which evolved over time to

“I’m not racist some of my best friends are Black,”

and now finally in the United States

“I’m not racist some of my best friends are African American”, and spun it as a uniquely a Jewish experience and phrase.

This strategy is not restricted to stealing the Black experience.  Put ‘ethnic child-stealing’ into any search engine and a list of sites will be provided, documenting a racist smear historically directed at Gypsy Roma people. The Daily Beast and New Europe returned to this topic a few years ago, followed more recently by Travellers Times.  At the height of the 1960s tv western craze, the Barbara Stanwyck series The Big Valley critiqued the racist slur against Gypsy Roma in a double-episode entitled ‘Hide the Children’.

Yet in an era of increased secularisation, if challenged over Israel’s history of killing and imprisoning Palestinian children, Israel supporters as policy, accuse critics of repeating a supposedly unique ethnic blood libel of Jewish threat to children, dating back to the middle-ages. 

The same strategy is initiated, if mention is made of the eugenics policy known as the Yemenite Children Affair. Israel’s settlers subjected middle-eastern Yemeni Jewish children to human experimentation.  Yemeni-Jewish newborn babies were also stolen to be given to childless settler couples, with the birth mothers told the infants were stillborn.  In pro-Israel PR, the Gypsy Roma experience gets sidelined-appropriated in favour of a narrative suggesting western critics who mostly can’t even name the 12 Apostles, have 12^th C anti-Jewish blood libels, committed to memory.  

Such blatant cultural thefts do have their unintentional amusing sides.  When Baddiel was condemned for his Blackface racist incitements he responded by culturally appropriating the term into Jewface.  When then condemned for his cultural appropriation, he again simply copied this term and used it to attack a Twitter critic who’d used Yiddish derived idiom – the critic turned out to be Jewish.

Given the original term – schtum– was assimilated from the German stumm meaning silent, Baddiel in stealing other people’s anti-racism demonstrates he can’t differentiate between cultural appropriation and cultural hybridity.  Imagine Baddiel having to debate with intellectuals like Paul Gilroy or the late Stuart Hall – this is why Baddiels work is not sent out to academics for review.   

Racism and Jewish/Black interracial marriage

Sammy Davis Jr & May Britt.  Jake & Mary Jacobs (married 70+ years)

The one group of people who know Baddiel’s awful ethnic elitist notion of victimhood to be rubbish are Jewish women that historically have married Black men.  When African-American entertainer Sammy Davis Jr converted to Judaism he understandably wasn’t anticipating it making his status any worse – segregation already meant Davis often could not stay at the hotels where he entertained.  However, plans for his interracial marriage to blonde May Britt who’d also converted, generated “threats against the synagogue” that had offered to perform the wedding.

Jewish girl Mary Jacobs married her Caribbean husband Jake, in 1948.  Jake had come over from Trinidad, for Air Force training to serve during WWII.  After announcing her marital intentions her father threw her out of the parental home.  She recalled “People would point at us in the street”.  And Mary also couldn’t get a roof over her head.  By having a Black husband, Mary found that the post-war British landlord prohibition ‘No Blacks, No Irish, No dogs’ now applied to her. 

“In effect, mere proximity to Black ethnicity had acted as a sort of taint against the synagogue marrying Sammy Davis and May Britt.  For Mary Jacobs having a Black husband actually dropped her social status. 

Over the years white women – many of whom are Jewish – who chose to be wives and mothers in Black mixed-race families have had to heroically contend with an entire vocabulary of racist sexualised abuse that would be vilely inappropriate, even if applied to modern sex-workers.  Another form of heroism often forced upon these mothers occurs in instances where they find themselves in public transport, social spaces etc, where racists are spouting their nonsense.  In these situations, mothers would often try to protect their children from the fact hatred exists in the world against them, by using their very bodies as a physical shield.  Would white Jewish mothers subscribe to a ‘hierarchy of victimhood’ that excluded their own mixed-race children?

Landlord Prohibition No Irish, No blacks, No dogs

As the landlord housing prohibition demonstrates in post war Britain arguably the most oppressed white ethnic group was actually Irish Catholics.  Just as there is no UK phenomenon of Jewish BLM-type deaths at the hands of the police, also nothing like the practice of Irish suspects dying from state collusion and loyalist death squads, has been replicated in the Jewish community.  Nor have the beatings and fit-ups exampled in the Birmingham Six, and Guildford Four injustices been repeated among UK Jews.  One reason the Baddiel/Israel-lobby narrative is media-pushed, in comparison to Black and Irish experiences, is because it would require confronting, state, police, foreign-policy, institutional societal and capitalist participation in oppression.  Instead this narrative supports the continued manifestation of western power, in the expansionist, colonial example, of Israel.

Conclusion Baddiel’s Straw-man racism

Words like bias, prejudice, and bigotry have long existed.  Superseding these, the term Racismwas subsequently invented to describe the societal structural condition of people-of-colour who in various combinations, were once owned and colonized; whose original lands, culture, languages, and more were taken by force; and who, in modern society, have little or no collective institutional or financial power to combat their ghettoization in, predominantly, the lower reaches of Western class systems. The term’s specificity makes it difficult for Baddiel to repeat his Blackface-to-Jewface-type cultural theft of this experience, so he has created a straw man argument about this just being about ‘Jews having money’.

The easiest way to rebut this is straight comparison.   If Baddiel as a boy had exchanged racist and anti-Semitic slurs in an argument with a Black child in a local play area, any adult intervening would most likely have blamed the Black child.  On their way to their respective homes, the Black child has the greater risk of stop-&-search.  When Baddiel goes on to his fee paying school, the Black child goes to a state school.  Here unless blind marking is practised, the child will likely never be given the benefit of the doubt in coursework.  Getting strip-searched at some point in the Black child’s school career is not out of the question, nor is the possibility of having to fight school racists. 

Baddiel will go to Cambridge.  The Black youth will likely be failed by the education system or if lucky enough to make it to university, it will be a former Polytechnic.  As Baddiel gets into his career, the Black individual will experience lesser employment opportunities, less likelihood of getting pay increases or promotions.  The Black individual is more likely to be failed by the health services and treated as a scrounger by the welfare authorities and media.  Periodic police stop-&-searches and potentially even death at their hands, will be the Black adult experience.

Historically there were also certain forms of segregation that uniquely applied to Black Britons. From boxing’s earliest 20^th C legalisation, working-class Jewish fighters like Jack ‘kid’ Berg enjoyed success.  By comparison for many decades Rule #24 would demand that a boxer must have two white parents.  Writing in the Empire News, Hugh Cecil Lowther (Lord Lonsdale) of the National Sporting Club, explained the legality of boxing was made conditional on having no ‘inter-coloured contests’, following talks with Winston Churchill at the Home Office.  Dick Turpin – older brother of future world Champion Randolph Turpin – finally became the first Black British champion in 1946 after the prohibition on Black title participation was lifted.

Martin Luther King mentioned exploitative Jewish Chicago landlords in his journals.  Jackie Walker mentioned Jewish participation in the slave trade – easily evidenced by the Jewish Museum in the former slave economy of Jamaica, and by the mirror-cracked copy of the religious mythology of the Jewish colonial class that is Rastafarianism (one section of Rastafarianism is the 12 Tribes of Israel).  The opportunist neoliberal right will suggest repeating this is some sort of slur.  All it means is that at certain historical times, when presented with racial, class and economic privilege some Jews will opt to commit the same offences as other white ethnic groups. 

Given this reality, only makes the fact that Jews have continuously punched so far above their weight as human rights activists, all the more praiseworthy.

Sadly instead of these numerous Jewish anti-racists Ch4 and our corrupted media market Baddiel.

For complaints, Ch4 Commissioning Editor is Shaminder Nahal 

& Complaints/Contact Ch4 https://www.channel4.com/4viewers/contact-us

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

GAVIN LEWIS

Gavin Lewis is a freelance Black British mixed-race writer and academic. He has published in Australia, the United Kingdom, Canada and the United States on film, media, politics, cultural theory, race, and representation. He has taught critical theory and film and cultural studies at a number of British universities. He is a member of the British trade union Bectu.

See also

Response to 'David Baddiel: Jews Don't Count' - Heather Mendick

Insisting Jews Don’t Count Helps Nobody

Do Jews count?, Leah Levane, Counterfire

Smith Did the Israel Lobby’s Dirty Work Targeting a Black Opponent of Israeli Apartheid with a Series of Zionist Lies

It was only in August that I wrote a blog Focus on the Corrupt GMBwith an emphasis on General Secretary, Gary Smith. Smith is unfortunately in a long line of right-wing misogynists, racists and general reactionaries to hold the post.

On 16 May 2022 Smith took time out of his busy schedule selling out his members, to writea letter to the Regional Secretary of South Wales TUC, calling for Lowkey, the well known Black anti-racist to be cancelled at the forthcoming Tolpuddle Festival in July.

This is GENUINE racism unlike the fake 'antisemitism' that the Zionists shout about, usually involving Israel

This is of course understandable. Lowkey has been one of the foremost advocates for the Palestinians and opponents of Zionism, whose project in Israel is now led by open fascists.

You might think that the GMB had better things to do than support the Zionist lobby’s witchhunting of a Black anti-racist rapper. However you would be wrong. The GMB under Gary Smith takes a particular pride in being a symbol of racism, sexism and militarism in the trade union movement. Politically it is bankrupt.

In August 2020 the GMB was found, by a Report that it was forced to commission, to be institutionally sexist. It found, paragraph 3 that:

Theimmediatetriggerfortheinvestigationwasthereceiptofanundatedletter addressed toBarbaraPlant, the President of the GMB. The letter containedallegations of a“serious sexual assault (rape)”,drug useand sexually predatory behaviour,bya senior man within the GMB.

The letter also alleged that a number of named people were aware of the incident (the alleged rape)and those included senior members of staff.

Gary Smith, a careerist who was originally based in Brighton - he wouldn't know what anti-racism was if it bit him on his nether regions

Karen Monaghan QC, who wrote the report, hinted very strongly that the union was also institutionally racist. At paragraph 115, although strictly beyond her terms of reference, Monaghan observed that:

I was also contacted by a number of people fromBlack andminorityethnic groups. They recognised that this investigation is concerned with sexual harassment but wanted to draw to my attention the veryreal andseriousproblems that exist formembers and employees fromBlack and minorityethnicgroups.Havingreadwrittencommunicationsandspoken to some who contacted me, I am satisfied that the GMB is not a comfortable place to be formany employees and members fromBlack and minority ethnic groups.

Tim Roache - previous GMB General Secretary resigned under a cloud

The unnamed ‘senior man’ within the GMB is believed to be Tim Roache, the former General Secretary and as vicious a right-winger as Gary Smith. Roache resigned abruptly in April 2020, just 5 months after having been ‘reelected’ and at the same time as Monaghan began her investigation.

Despite these damning findings, Labour List asked, in April 1921, ‘Has anything changed in the GMB after the report on institutional sexism?’ It went on to inform readers that

A number of staffers have reached out to LabourListto tell us they believe things are “worse”, not better.

LabourListcan reveal today that a group of women working at the GMB have lodged a formal dispute with the organisation, as they say the grievances of female staffers are not being heard fairly.

Who is responsible for the implementation of the Report if not the General Secretary, Gary Smith. However I understand that Smith too is currently under investigation for sexual harassment and he might therefore not be best suited to take this forward.

However this has not stopped Smith, an ardent Starmerite from launching a McCarthyist attack on Lowkey on behalf of the Apartheid State’s lobby in this country.

Gary Smith's Lying Letter

Lowkey has been a dedicated fighter against racism and oppression, in particular Zionism and Israeli apartheid. It was this last which motivated Smith. The ‘anti-Semitism’ that Lowkey was accused of is of the kind that got Chris Williamson suspended, in other words a deliberate distortion of what Lowkey actually said. Indeed it is far worse than what happened to Chris Williamson

Smith’s letter was full of lies and innuendo. Smith had ‘severe doubts about the suitability of Mr Dennis (Lowkey) as a performer at the TUC’s Tolpuddle Festival. Smith gave 3 reasons:

According to Gary Smith, mentioning Israel's supply of weaponry to neo-Nazis is 'antisemitic' - the truth has now become antisemitic

Lie No. 1    Lowkey had ‘promoted conspiracy theories’that Israel had plotted to promote conflict between Ukraine and Russia.

What Lowkey has done is to highlight Israeli arms shipments to Ukraine’s neo-Nazi Azov battalion. Highly embarrassing to the Zionists but anti-Semitic? If this is anti-Semitism then presumably the articlein Ha’aretz Rights Groups Demand Israel Stop Arming neo-Nazis in Ukraine is also anti-Semitic. Ha’aretz noted that:

In the past, Israel has armed anti-Semiticregimes, such as the generals’ regime in Argentina, which murdered thousands of Jews in camps while its soldiers stood in watchtowers guarding the abducted prisoners with their Uzi submachine guns.

According to a freedom of information petition to Israel's defense ministry from last January, Israel also armed Bolivia's military regimes, knowing that Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie was part of the regime.… Barbie's death squads used Israeli Uzis….

The Azov militia was established in Ukraine following the Russian invasion of the Crimean peninsula in 2014. The militia’s emblems are well-known national socialist ones. Its members use the Nazi salute and carry swastikas and SS insignias.

Moreover, some of them openly admit they have neo-Nazi sentiments and that they are Holocaust deniers. One militia member said in an interview that he was fighting Russia since Putin was a Jew. An Azov sergeant said that he was a national socialist, although he was not in favor of genocide, and as long as minorities in Ukraine did not demand special rights he would have no problem with them.

As the example of Israel’s Relations with Argentina’s Neo-Nazi Junta, 1976-1983, proves, Arms Sales and Military Alliances took Priority Over Saving Jews

The mainstream Zionist narrative is that the Holocaust was ‘an unshakable justification’ for the establishment of a Jewish state.[1]Yet as the case of Argentina under the military Junta proved, the only guarantee against a revival of anti-Semitism is opposition to fascism and racism. Zionism simply reproduces European anti-Semitism as anti-Palestinian racism.

If we follow the logic of Zionism, all victims of racism should flee their persecutors and set up their own racially based states.[2]If this were adopted universally then it would mean the triumph of racism. The Zionist answer to racism is to replicate it not fight it.

It is one of the most powerful and enduring myths that Jews hold onto that if times get bad and anti-Semitism raises its ugly head, Israel, as a Jewish State, will provide them with a refuge. What happened in Argentina proves that Israel will provide no refuge from fascism.

The Commemoration Plaque to the Jews Murdered in the Kielce Pogrom

It was understandable, in the wake of the Holocaust, when Jews returning from the concentration camps to Poland were met with pogroms, at Kielce in Poland over 40 Jews died and a similar number injured, that the idea of a Jewish state proved attractive. 

The Holocaust represented the defeat of the Left and Anti-fascism in Europe. The failure of the Communist Parties in Eastern Europe to confront anti-Semitism, in Poland and Czechoslovakia they actually stimulated it, led to Zionism being an attractive solution.  However Zionism was yet one more false messiah.

Israel is a far-right settler state and it is natural that it seeks allies amongst similar regimes. During the years of Apartheid in South Africa it became the closest military partner of the Apartheid regime. 

Prime Minister John Vorster had been interned for his openly pro-Nazi sympathies during the war but that did not prevent the Israeli Labor government of Yitzhak Rabin inviting him on a state visit.  Nor did it prevent the Holocaust Propaganda Museum (Yad Vashem) inviting him in as an honoured guest.

Israeli Prime Minister Rabin and future PM Menachem Begin greet the Apartheid Prime Minister & former Nazi John Vorster in 1976

Little more than 3 months ago I wrote an articleasking why Israel was supporting a law, proposed by the heirs to Hitler’s allies, the Ustaše, which prevented Jews in Bosnia standing for election.

The answer is simple. Israel has no interest in combatting anti-Semitism or defending the rights of Jews in the diaspora. Instead they redefine anti-Zionism as anti-Semitism. Where there have been anti-Semitic attacks such as the murder of four Jews in the Hypercacher Supermarket in Paris, the adviceof Israeli leaders was to leave and go to your ‘natural’ home in Israel.

Avi Gabby - Leader of the Israeli Labor Party's Advice to Victims of the Terror Bombing in Pittsburgh was to Emigrate to Israel and become racists like him

When 11 Jews were murdered at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Avi Gabbay, leader of the Israeli Labor Party told the survivors to emigrate to Israel. The Jewish Forwardaccused him of having a ‘tin ear’.

Zionism has never had an interest in opposing anti-Semitism because without anti-Semitism there is no Zionism and no ‘Jewish’ State. As  Theodor Herzl, the founder of Political Zionism observed in his Diary:

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

The Junta

In 1976 the Argentinian army staged a coup. Nothing unusual about that, especially in Latin America. But this was a coup with a difference. It was not merely a right-wing coup but a coup by  officers imbued with an anti-Semitic hatred who were convinced that a variation on the International Jewish Conspiracy, the Andinia Plan, was being waged against Argentina and they were its defenders. At the centre of this plan were Marx, Freud and Einstein!

The far-right had a long history of infiltration and involvement in the Argentinian military and in 1976 their time had come. Immediately they came to power anyone on the left was arrested and tortured. All told at least 30,000 Argentinians were murdered. It is estimated that up to 12.5% of their victims were Jewish despite Jews being less than 1% of the Argentinian population.

An articleJews targeted in Argentina's dirty war referred to a

196-page report presented to the Spanish judge Baltazar Garzán in Madrid on the sufferings of Argentina's more than 300,000 Jews during the dictatorship that lasted from 1976 to 1983 also reveals that at least two international Jewish organisations requested support from the governments of Brazil and the United States in case an evacuation of Argentine Jews proved necessary.

"Jews represented more than 12 per cent of the victims of the military regime while constituting under 1 per cent of Argentina's population," said Juan Pablo Jaroslavsky of the Barcelona-based Commission of Solidarity with Relatives of the Disappeared (Cosofam), which presented the report this month.

Anyone who has heard about the Zionist Campaign for Soviet Jewryin the 60s, 70s and 80s would be familiar with the massive publicity and the appeals to peoples’ heart strings about how Russian Jews were being denied the ‘right’ to emigrate to Israel.  Of course this ‘right’ did not entail the right to go where they wanted. The Zionists leaders campaignedincessantly to persuade the United States to refuse them admission and for non-Zionist welfare bodies like the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society and the Joint Distribution Committee not to aid them if they didn’t want to become settlers in Israel. [See Refugee Status for Soviet Jewish Immigrants to the United States, p.425]

Menachem Begin even made a special trip to the United States to lobby Ronald Reagan to refuse entry to Soviet Jews. No effort was spared in the Cold War Soviet Jewry Campaign. Allegations of ‘anti-Semitism’ were rife. Yet no one alleged that Soviet Jews were being tortured to death or murdered, which was the case in Argentina. Why then the Zionist silence when it came to Argentina? 

Jacobo Timerman

Jacobo Timerman

The most famous victim of the Junta was Jacobo Timerman, the editor of the liberal paper La Opinion. As his NYT obituary recounts:

Early on April 15, 1977, 20 armed men broke into Timerman's home… He was held in three clandestine houses of confinement and two regular prisons for more than a year, during which he was beaten, given electric shocks to his genitals, put in solitary confinement under humiliating circumstances and interrogated endlessly.

It was only Timerman's high-profile which elicited a diplomatic response from Israel. According to Raanan Rein and Efraim Davidi,

"Israel's official policy can be described as an effort to show the junta that it had committed a serious error in arresting the journalist but to avoid rousing international public opinion against the regime and, even more important, to avoid attributing antisemitic proclivities to the leaders of the dictatorship."

The Israeli government secretly pressured Argentina to free Timerman, but it did not make public demands as it did on behalf of Jews in the Soviet Union.[3]

When Timerman asked Israel Gur Arieh, the Director-General of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, why there was a massive public campaign over Soviet Jewry whilst in the case of Argentina there was no campaign, he answered:

Very simple: the Soviet Union was in the enemy camp and Argentina was a strategic ally.

Timerman ‘wondered if that was why Argentina could torture prisoners because they were Jews’.

Yishayahu Anug, director-general of Israel's Foreign Ministry, wrote:

"I would say not that Timerman is crucial for us but rather that we are crucial for his release. It is not an emotional issue but one of cool judgment. The formula consists in creating the sense that his release is vital for Argentina's image and also for Israel and the positive development of our relations with them." Rein & Davidi, "Exile of the World" (2010), p. 12]

On at least one occasion the former Undersecretary of State for Human Rights in the Jimmy Carter administration, Patricia Derian, discussed arms sales to Argentina with the Israeli government and received a response that Israel does not discuss issues of security and that arms sales fall into that camp... Derian told them that the weapons in question were used to kill Jewish prisoners. [4]

As Ben Gurion had laid down, when there is a choice between the Jews and the Jewish State, the latter wins out.

Relations between Israel and Argentina flourished after the Junta took power despite the Junta’s virulent anti-Semitism.[5]This was under both the Labor Alignment and Likud governments of Yitzhak Rabin and Menachem Begin.

Argentina had long been Israel’s largest trading partner in Latin America. When in 1978 the US decided to restrict arms sales to the Junta on human rights grounds, Israel stepped into the breach.One-third of Israel's total arms sales of $1.2 billion in 1980 went to Argentina and El Salvador alone. By 1981, Argentina was buying 17% of its arms from Israel.

The perception was that ‘the Jewish state’s concern for the disappeared was subordinated to political and commercial considerations.’[6]

Marcel Zohar of Yediot Aharanot reported that Israel preferred friendship with Argentina over saving Jews.[7]

Israel’s Silence Over the Persecution of Argentinian Jewry – A Mirror Image of Zionist Behaviour During the Holocaust

Not content with refusing to campaign against the Junta’s anti-Semitism, in March 1981 the American Jewish Committee sent a delegation to General Viola, just before his inauguration as President, in an effort to improve the Junta’s reputation. Delegation members were impressed with his knowledge of Jewish affairs. Eichmann too was reputed to have a good knowledge of Hebrew and Yiddish.

Israel Shahak, a noted Israeli human rights activist and a holocaust survivor, wrote that

‘in the face of this well-known anti-Semitism in Argentina the State of Israel, the Jewish state, the defender of the Jews, made not a single protest...’ [8]

A report presented to Spanish judge Baltazar Garzán revealed that HIAS had secured a promise from Brazil to provide temporary asylum for 350,000 Argentine Jews and that Rabbi Alexander Schindler of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations had obtained a promise from US State Department officials in 1976 to provide 100,000 visas to Jewish refugees from Argentina if necessary.[9]

The Knesset Refused to Even Debate the Plight of Argentina’s Jews

Shulamit Aloni, the founder of Ratz, Israel’s Civil Rights Party, described how she tried to get the situation in Argentina debated in the Knesset:

‘Not only did they shut me up, but the late Knesset member Yigal Horowitz threatened me personally and ordered me not to open my mouth.’

She was told that the subject could not be debated despite the fact that the parents of children who had disappeared came asking members to raise their plight.[10] Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir made sure that ‘in the name of security’the issue was not aired in the Knesset.[11]

Menachem Savidor, the Speaker, refused to allow a debate until the parents appealed to the Supreme Court. Only in late June 1983 did the Knesset hold a debate. Six months later the Junta was toppled.[12]Savidor admitted that he had prevented a Knesset debate on the situation of Argentina's Jews at the Government's request in order not to harm Israel's military links with Argentina.[13]

Members of the Knesset presented eight urgent motions regarding the issue between 1976 and 1981. None were approved for debate. Years later the Knesset debated the issue and formally demanded extradition of killers of Jews. It acted following reports that 40 former officers of the military Junta were arrested in Argentina on the orders of President Nestor Kirchner, who was prepared to extradite them to Spain. MK Yossi Sarid (Meretz) proposed the move, saying that it was a

“hypocritical discussion since all the facts have long been known and the government of Israel never once lifted a finger and cooperated with the Argentine murders because of their interest in arms deals.”^[14]

Sarid told how ‘In Argentina, Israel sold even the Jews for the price of its immediate interests.’[15]In 1985, President Raul Alfonsin cut off military contact with Israel entirely. What Israel did in Argentina was no different from what the Zionist movement did during the Holocaust.

While the Jewish factor has an effect on Israeli foreign policy, it is not a decisive one nor the main one taken into account in the policy calculations of the Israeli government. The heritage of David Ben-Gurion determined that ‘in our relations (with foreign countries) we should be guided by one criteria…and that is whether it is good for the Jews.’[16]

The ‘Jewish factor’ refers to actual living Jews whereas ‘the Jews’means Israel as the collective Jew. Ben-Gurion believed that

‘the state constitutes the highest goal of Zionism and the Jewish people…whose mere existence serves the needs of the Diaspora.’[17]

On 2 April 1982 the Falklands war broke out between Britain and Argentina. Israel became Argentina’s major arms supplier.It supplied Argentina with emergency replacement military equipment. After its defeat, Argentina spent more than $1 billion on arms from Israel.

Like a Victorian grave robber, Israel called for the murdered Jews who were not wanted when they were alive to be brought to Israel for burial. Israel’s last service for the Junta occurred in 2017. It ignored an Interpol warrant and refused to extradite to Argentina an Israeli citizen, Teodoro Gauto, accused of war crimes. Gauto, a non-Jew, came to Israel from Argentina with his Jewish wife.[18]

Jacobo Timerman

The person who brought the Junta’s anti-Semitic terror to the world’s attention was Jacobo Timerman, a liberal Zionist and editor of La Opinion. Arrested and tortured from April 1977 onwards, Timerman was released under house arrest a year later and expelled to Israel in October 1979.

At his ‘trial’ before a military tribunal, every session of Timerman’s interrogation began with the question, ‘Are you a Jew?’ [19]Whilst interrogating non-Jews was a job, interrogating Jews was a pleasure. A political opponent could be turned, but a Jew remained a Jew forever.[20]The Buenos Aires Herald told how Jews took it for granted that if ‘they go to prison, they will be treated far more harshly than Gentiles.’ [21]Jewish prisoners were given ‘a double dose of torture and harassment’which ‘was known to the Israeli embassy which maintained relations with “moderates” within the military junta.’[22]

According to Timerman's son, Héctor, Israeli Ambassador Ram Nirgad visited their house, after he had been released and asked Timerman to sign a letter saying that he was well-treated. Timerman refused and said he'd rather remain in detention.[23]

Once in Israel, Timerman came under attack. The Jewish Chronicle’s correspondent in Argentina, Jose Smilg, an apologist for the Junta and Argentine’s Jewish leadership, alleged that it was Timerman’s fight for human rights which was ‘inspiring a rash of anti-Semitic articles in the Argentine press.’[24] He also alleged that La Opinion had ‘supported the Left wing of the Peronist Party’. It was a lie. Timerman’s real offence was that it had protested against acts of anti-Semitism. The Jewish community organisations stayed silent because, according to Nehemias Resnizky, the former President of Daia, Argentina’s Judenrat ‘that would create a confrontation with highly powerful sectors of the army.’

Ma’ariv withdrew from agreeing to publish Timerman’s book Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number because it was ‘not interesting’ and would not sell. It became an international best seller.

The ‘Jewish’ state was more important to the Zionist lobby in the US than Argentina’s Jews. Timerman was attacked by right-wing Zionists who believed he ‘asked for what he got’.[25]US neo-cons argued that the Junta enjoyed good relations with Israel, which was ‘an important supplier of arms and military equipment to Argentina.’ This was cited as evidence that the Junta could not be called anti-Semitic. Once again Zionism and Israel was used to kosher anti-Semitism.

During a visit by former Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Yigal Allon, Timerman told him that he had not been humiliated by the torture but by the ‘silent complicity of Jewish leaders.’ [26]This was equally true of Israeli leaders. Israel normally takes great pride when its citizens are given international awards. Not so when Timerman received the Golden Pen of Freedom Award. The venue was shifted from the Knesset to the Hebrew University.[27]

In Israel Timerman wrote The Longest War, criticising Israel’s invasion of Lebanon. He became ‘almost persona non-grata’. Israel’s Deputy Foreign Minister, Yehuda Ben-Meir, described his book as ‘a collection of calumnies and lies arising from his own self-hatred.’[28]When Timerman died, on 11 November 1999 he received glowing obituaries internationally but Israeli papers ‘provided only terse reports of his death.’ [29]

The Jewish Disappeared

In 1988 Dr Marcus Weinstein set up the Asociación de Familiares de Desaparecidos Judios for Jews who had disappeared.[30]Marcus’s son Mauricio was the only Israeli citizen to be murdered.

The relatives of the Jewish Disappeared wrote that they were

‘deeply disappointed by the fact that the Israeli state, the international Jewish organisations and the Jewish leadership in Argentina are taking no interest in this subject’.

Weinstein told how ‘Israel's indifference to the matter began back during the days of the dictatorship, and has continued to this day.’ [31]

Marcel Zohar, Yedioth Ahronoth correspondent in Argentina between 1978 and 1982, described how Israel’s government refrained from processing immigration applications from left-wing Jews.[32]The unwritten instruction was to refuse any help to Jews defined as ‘too left-wing.’ [33]And who did the defining? The Junta.

In 2002 the Israeli Government set up a committee to investigate the disappearance of Jews but it took care not to offend the Argentinian Government. Its interim report omitted Israel's role during the dictatorship. It also rejected the demand to take legal action against the officers who tortured and killed Jews. Weinstein recalled how:

We and other Jewish families knocked again and again on the door of the embassy, and we were always sent away…. Was this a policy that was dictated from Israel, was it a policy that was decided upon at the embassy … I did not find even a single word about this in the report^.[34]

The anti-Semitism of the Junta set it apart from other repressive regimes that Israel co-operated with.[35]The Israeli state had a choice between selling military equipment to the Junta or waging a campaign against the torture and murder of Argentina’s Jews. It chose the former.

Mothers of the Disappeared

Daia and Amia – The Judenrat of Argentinian Jewry

Renee Sofia Epelbaum,[36]mother of three desaparecidos and one of the leaders of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, accused Daia of silence and extreme caution towards cases of arrests and disappearances of Jews.[37]In sharp contrast, the paper Nueva Presenda expressed its support for the cause of the Mothers and the Jewish desaparecidos. Daia even tried to improve the image of the Junta abroad, ‘particularly in the USA’. Shockingly ‘prominent sections of the Jewish community’ even pressurised Israeli representatives ‘not to interfere in Argentina's internal affairs’.[38]

The Mothers of the Disappeared at their regular spot in Buenos Aires

After the fall of the Junta, Amia held its 90th anniversary celebration:

A group of women whose children disappeared during the Argentine military regimes crackdown on Left-wing opponents shouted ‘Nazi-Nazi’ at those attending the Congress here of Amia …

The guest of honour was Mr Itzhak Navon, formerly President of Israel. The mothers attempted to prevent his entrance to the Conference as well as that of the Israeli Ambassador to Argentina. ^[39]

Zionism had not changed since the Nazi era. Geoffrey Paul, the then Editor of the Jewish Chronicle, described how a senior American diplomat denounced to him ‘this spineless Jewish community...’ But it wasn’t the community but its Zionist leadership that was spineless. What Argentina demonstrated was that an anti-Semitic regime will be a creature of US imperialism. In other words, a regime with which Israel is only too willing to do business with.

Zohar recounted the struggle between Danny Rekanati of the Jewish Agency, who tried to help Jews escape and Israel’s ambassador, Ram Nirgad who argued that people defined by the Junta as subversive should not be rescued.[40]

Nirgad’s successor, Dov Schmorak, recalled how the Junta’s interior minister, General Albano Harguindeguy congratulated him on how well he had done ‘not to allow the main leaders of the Jewish community in Argentina to intervene on his [Timerman’s] behalf.’ Israeli representatives had discouraged his family from any public campaign on the grounds that this would hinder his release. This later extended to blackmailing Timerman not to go ahead with a series of six articles in Ma’ariv detailing his experiences. 

Menachem Begin had previously stated that ‘Israel has to help every persecuted Jew…. They can associate with Matzpen in Israel for all I care.’Yet once in power, Begin reneged on this.[41]Above all Israel avoided attributing anti-Semitic proclivities to the Junta’s leaders.[42]

The New York Times has always been a propagandist for the US State Department - the 'defector' was bribed to confess

When Timerman’s son Hector became Argentina’s Foreign Minister, Israel raised the 1994 bombing of the Amia centre and the alleged connection with Iran. Timerman told Israel’s ambassador:

Israel has no right to ask for explanations. …Israel does not speak for the Jewish people… Jews who live in Argentina are Argentinian citizens. The attack was against Argentina, and Israel’s desire to be involved in the matter only gives ammunition to anti-Semites who accuse Jews of dual loyalty. [43]

Bergoglio, the future Pope Francis enjoying a joke with President General Videla.  He was reputed to be a strong supporter of the Junta

In May 2013 Videla died in prison having been convicted of the murder of 31 prisoners and the kidnapping of children:

‘To this day... local Jewish leaders are embarrassed by the role played by Jewish organizations or by their avoidance of action during the years of dictatorship.’

Daniel Muchnik told Ha’aretz how ‘Throughout this awful period of oppression, most Jews... had a problem. This was the relations of Israel with the dictatorship.’ The Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires ‘kept a stance of non-intervention in internal affairs’.[44]

The aftermath of the fascist bombing of the Jewish community centre that killed nearly 100 Jews.  Israel preferred to exonerate the culprits and blame Iran/Hezbollah instead

The Bombing of Buenos Aires Jewish Community Centre

In 1980 when bombs exploded in Argentine synagogues and Jewish schools Israel said nothing but when a bomb exploded at the AMIA Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires on 18 July 1994, it lost no time in blaming Iran and Hezbollah. Evidence has since emerged that points to a deliberate attempt by the US and Israel to deflect attention away fromthereal culprits, Israel’s anti-Semitic friends in the Argentinian state.

In an August 1994 cable to the State Department, US Ambassador James Cheek boasted of a ‘steady campaign’ the embassy had waged that ‘kept the Iranians in the dock where they belong.’ In 2007 Cheek admitted that ‘To my knowledge, there was never any real evidence’ of Iranian involvement. Bill Brencick, chief of the political section in the US embassy from 1994 to 1997, acknowledged in a 2007 interview that suggestions of Iranian responsibility were based solely on a ‘wall of assumptions’ and that there was ‘no hard evidence’.[45]

In 2014 a former police spy, Jose Alberto Perez, who had infiltrated the Jewish community in Buenos Aires on behalf of Argentina’s Federal Police, revealed to two investigative journalists, Miriam Lewin and Horacio Lutzk, that he had been ordered to turn over blueprints to the AMIA building to his Federal Police case officer.

Perez became consumed by guilt about having enabled the bombing. He had since married a Jewish woman. Perez was convinced that the building plans were used by the real culprits behind the bombing. His revelations prompted a series of articles in the Argentine press.

Perez also revealed that those who had employed him as a spy were motivated by the same anti-Semitic beliefs that had led the military dictatorship to single out Jews during the “dirty war”. His case officer, “Laura”, had ordered him to find out as much he could from the Jewish community about the “Andinia Plan.” 

Another key factor was the role of the state intelligence agency, SIDE, in influencing prosecutor, Judge Juan Galeano. Not only was a special unit within SIDE tasked with overseeing Galeano’s investigation, another SIDE unit operated directly inside his office.[46]

As Moreno and Termine reported in La Prensa(28.11.94.) the SIDE unit handling the AMIA investigation was notorious for its hatred of Jews. The group consisted of veterans of the dirty war known as the ’Cabildo’ group, inspired by the magazine of the same name.[47]

There has been no resolution of this case because the Argentinian secret state still wields enormous power. Both Israel and the US preferred to divert attention from the real culprits, who were the same forces who had tortured and murdered Argentinian Jews

That Israel, even after the collapse of the Junta with which it was such close friends, could attempt to deflect blame away from Argentinian neo-Nazis onto Iran and Hezbollah, demonstrates that the ‘Jewish’ State’s military and foreign policy interests will always trump the needs of diaspora Jewish communities.

Whilst there are very few anti-Semites who support the Palestinians – Gregson is the exception that proves the rule

Many people involved in Palestine solidarity activism in Britain are likely to have come across Peter Gregson. He has often been unfairly treated, such as when the GMB union expelledhim in March 2019 for ‘anti-Semitism’. His expulsion was effected by the rabidly racist and misogynist Gary Smith, then Regional Secretary of Scottish GMB and now General Secretary of the union.

I even testified at the kangaroo court that the GMB had assembled and wrote a documentin his defence. However if one week is a long time in politics 3 years and 9 months is an eternity. Peter’s politics, which were always flaky, have now become anti-Semitic.

Nick Kollerstrom - Holocaust 'sceptic'

Peter has to his credit expulsion from a number of organisations. I initiated the first from Labour Against the Witchhunt when he put up a petitionon his website linking to an article by Holocaust denier Nick Kollerstrom who had written a ‘literature review’ on ‘The Auschwitz “Gas Chamber” Illusion’.

Peter decided to publish on his blog my entire correspondence with him over this. The Jewish Chronicle then published it verbatim. It is probably the only article that ‘liar’ Lee Harpin has written that didn’t contain the obligatory quota of mistakes!

PSC and I believe Jewish Voices for Labour have also expelled him and Jewish Network for Palestine has rebuffed his attempts to join.

Peter is notorious for setting up his own ‘campaign’ groups such as LAZIR (Labour Against Zionist Islamophobic Racism) and now the Campaign Against Bogus Anti-Semitism (which he tells me has 60 members!).

In April 2022 Gregson emailed me asking me to comment on a document he’d written Why Zionists Are Not Jews.There are many arguments in the anti-Zionist armoury but this is not one of them.

My response was as diplomatic as I could manage:

Obviously many Zionists are Jewish according to the halachic definition of being born to a Jewish woman.  Being Jewish is not just a matter of belief.  Of course Jewish identity has changed throughout the ages and Zionism is one such identity.  Anti-Zionism is another but to go down this road is extremely dangerous and completely besides the point.  The fact is that the religious establishment and most rabbis do believe in Zionism.

Indeed this whole debate over whether someone is Jewish or not reminds me of the Nazis trying to define being Jewish.  The Law of Return then adopted the Nazi definition almost wholesale.

Totally misplaced and your campaign will go the way of your previous campaign I suspect

Peter has taken to heart the ideas of Neturei Karta that ‘true’ Jews do not support Zionism but NK are not Marxists. They are well meaning but politically naïve. Orthodox Jewry, which historically was anti-Zionist, has changed its position though even now the United Torah Judaism party in Netanyahu’s coalition is officially non-Zionist.

The majority of Haredi Jews in Israel are Zionists and indeed are among the most anti-Palestinian elements in Israeli society.

Gregson’s political degeneration began with his articleDo Jews in the UK have significant leverage on Israel? on the anti-Semitic Redress Online site which has itself published articles by holocaust deniers.

The article is historically illiterate. It asserts ‘Right from the outset, rich Jewish bankers such as Lord Rothschild backed Zionism. It is unlikely we would have Israel now were it not for his influence.’The first Rothschild that Theodor Herzl, the founder of Political Zionism encountered, was Edmond Rothschild, who opposed Zionism.

Contrary to the assertionof WikipediaLord Walter Rothschilds was not a ‘Zionist activist’ but an obsessive Zoologist. He was considered the leader of British Jewry by virtue of his aristocratic rank, which was why the Balfour Declaration was addressed to him (also contrary to Wikipedia he wasn’t President of the Board in 1917 but 1925-6). In 1919 Walter Rothschild stood for Vice President of the Board against both Anthony de Rothschild and the Zionist candidate, Samuel Duiches. who obtained just 21 compared to Walter’s 123, which is a good indication of the strength of the Zionists amongst the Jewish bourgeoisie then. In 1918 the anti-Zionist Leopold de Rothschild was unanimously elected President of the United Synagogue.

In 1917 the anti-Zionist League of British Jewswas formed at a meeting in New Court, headquarters of the Rothschilds’ business interests. Its first AGM in March 2018 was attended by over 400 members. Lionel Rothschild, a Conservative MP was elected President. Gregson’s attachment to the Rothschild’s legend is in itself telling. Gregon’s articleasserts that

Around 75 per cent of the UK’s 300,000 Jews support Israel (if they didn’t, we wouldn’t have the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism).

The idea that the IHRA only exists because of Jewish support is indicative of Gregson’s drift to the anti-Semitic right. Jews were convenient political pawns of the political establishment. The reason for the IHRA is to outlaw as far as possible opposition to British foreign policy in the Middle East by calling it ‘anti-Semitic’. For example Lord Eric Pickles is a White non-Jewish racist and the British delegate to the IHRA.

What Gregson is doing is suggesting that Jewish Poweris responsible for British support for Zionism rather than seeing support for Israel as a consequence of imperialist politics. Jews are convenient political pawns or as Barnaby Raine described them,

‘favourite pets: heroic colonists in the Middle East… Jews are conscripted as the alibi of white society…. We are the useful props for a moral panic.’

But Gregson doesn’t do subtle. He goes on:

Jews have significant leverage. And the majority of them throw their wealth and personal resources into ensuring Israel maintains its immunity from criticism.

But it was the wealthy and influential Jews in politics and the media who foisted the IHRA definition upon us, the tool now widely used to silence pro-Palestine campaigners and used by the Labour Party to expunge activists. If Jews had not been behind demanding the new definition and claiming it was essential for their safety, we would not have it.’

That this analysis is complete nonsense hardly needs stating. The British bourgeoisie adopted the IHRA definition, as did open anti-Semites like Trump and Viktor Orban in Hungary.

Gregson assumes that Jews act as one homogenous mass. You can accuse British Jewry of many things, not least stupidity, but to suggest that they acted in concert to foist the IHRA on gullible Gentiles is simply untrue. Gregson’s defence, for what it is worth is that:

To say Jews in the UK have great leverage is not anti-Semitic, it is just a statement of fact. Like saying an Eton education gets you into Parliament. Or Muslims don’t like alcohol and fear speaking out about Islamophobia. Or Scots are “good with money”, i.e. not profligate. Or Germany has an enormous collective guilt over the holocaust, while Austria, its partner in crime, has not. Or London has many rich Russian oligarchs…

It should not take a genius to see why Gregson is comparing apples to oranges. To suggest that Jews, as a collective group, have ‘great leverage’ makes assumptions about Jewish political power whereas saying Muslims don’t drink alcohol (untrue, many do) is a generalisation.

Gregson goes on to say, on the basis that Jews are eight times over-represented in the UK Parliamentthat

they are powerful, in proportion to their share of the population (300,000 out of 66 million), comprising 0.4 per cent of us.

The fact that the Zionists encourage such conspiracy theories by claiming to speak on behalf of all Jews, doesn’t make what Gregson says any the less anti-Semitic. Gregson’s assertion that

It is because of these wealthy Zionist Jews, steered from the British Board of Deputies of British Jews and the like, that nobody in this country, including our media, dare point out the blindingly obvious: that we have utterly lost our freedom of speech on Israel because everybody is frightened of what Zionist Jews will do to them.

One wonders why, if Jews are only 0.4% where they get all this power.

Historically the British Jewish bourgeoisie was determinedly anti-Zionist until 1940. The only member of Lloyd George’s War Cabinet to vote against the Balfour Declaration was its only Jewish member, Sir Edwin Montagu, who accused his fellows of ‘anti-Semitism’.

It was the adoption of Zionism by the non-Jewish bourgeoisie that eventually led the Jewish bourgeoisie to realise that it was ‘patriotic’ to support Zionism.  In other words Gregson gets cause and effect the wrong way round.

However it is his latest article Against Zionist invaders: Why race matters in Palestine on Redress (where else) that should put him beyond the pale for Palestine solidarity activists.

I leave to one side his mistaken position, derived from Neturei Karta that ‘up until 1940 most Jews refused to move to Israel on religious grounds.’What should be condemned is Gregson’s assertion that

These were the people that Hitler gassed. With Zionist support. Proof? Over the period 1942-44, Rabbi Weissmandl of Hungary made a deal with Adolf Eichmann… (my emphasis)

I won’t quote the rest of this rubbish. Weissmandel didn’t make an agreement with Eichmann, nor was he from Hungary! Having read Zionism During the Holocaust Gregson has failed to understand any of it.  There is absolutely no proof that the Zionist leaders, supported the extermination of European Jewry. It is simply not true.

There are many criticisms that can be made of the Zionists during the war and I make them, at length. Their obstruction of rescue attempts not involving Palestine, their playing down of the holocaust because people would be distracted into giving money for the refugees rather than their own fundraising, but to say that the Zionists supported the gassing of Jews is both false and anti-Semitic.

Ironically the main criticism of the Zionists for what I and Lenni Brenner before me write, is that what we are saying amounts to saying that the Jews murdered themselves. Once again Gregson has acted to reinforce the Zionist narrative rather than the other way around. Instead of reading my book and reflecting Gregson has cherry picked a few quotations and put his own crazy interpretation upon them. For those interested in the debate on this issue on my blog go here.

Gregson is apparently organising a tour of Britain in April/May involving both Rabbi Yisroel Dovid Weiss of Neturei Karta and Dr Azzam Tamimi. I shall write to the former but if anyone has any contact with Dr Tamimi he would be well advised to pull out.

Tony Greenstein

 Those Who Think Israel is Becoming a Fascist State do Not Understand What Fascism is

To paraphrase Rudyard Kipling, when all those around you are losing their heads, it’s a good idea to keep a firm grip on your own head! Never has so much hysterical nonsense been written by so many as in the past few weeks following Netanyahu’s unexpected triumph in Israel’s elections.

The election of the new coalition government, including the far-right messianic settler party Religious Zionism, itself made up of 3 parties, does not herald the dawn of Israeli fascism. Israeli democracy is not under dire threat if only because such a beast never existed.

This pogrom against Palestinians in East Jerusalem was allowed to go ahead by Israeli Labor Party's Omar Bar-Lev

Of course liberal Zionists find it difficult to defend the street thug and criminal Kahanist Ben Gvir as Police and Security Minister. It would be far better for Israel’s image if the Labor Party’s Omar Bar Lev was still in place. But let us remember, it was Bar Lev who, last May, gave the green light for Gvir and his settler mob to rampage through East Jerusalem chanting ‘death to the Arabs’, ‘may their villages burn’ and other delightful ditties from the settlers’ prayer book.

According to Richard Silverstein, ‘Zionism has finally embraced the fascist ideology that inspired major sections of the movement… a century ago.’ It is true that fascism did indeed inspire the Revisionist Zionist movement but it was untrue, even then, to say that the Revisionists were fascists, despite the taunt‘Vladimir Hitler’ that Ben Gurion regularly hurled at its leader Vladimir Jabotinsky.

One thug inspects other thugs

If anything the opposite was true. It was the ‘Socialist’ not the Revisionist Zionists who most resembled the National Socialists. It was Labour not Revisionist Zionism that had cordial relations with the Nazis and which negotiated a trade agreement Ha'avara with the Nazis and whose agent, Feivel Polkes, offered to spy for the Nazis.

Labour Zionism saw the role of Labour as a national not a class force. The late Ze’ev Sternhell, a Zionist and holocaust survivor, described Labor Zionism in The Founding Myths of Israel as ‘nationalist socialism’. He would have used the term ‘national socialism’ but it ‘has been contaminated by association with the Nazis.’

It was the Revisionist movement which opposed Ha'avara and it was Revisionists Peter Bergson and Shmuel Merlin who campaigned for the rescue of Jews, wherever their destination and who led the campaign which led to the US setting up the War Refugee Board in January 1944 against the bitter opposition of the Labour Zionists.

Palestinian demonstrator in Beit El near Ramallah 8.10.15

Let us put it another way. Was the America of Andrew Jackson and the Indian Removal Acta fascist state? Was it any less terrible for the Indians that it was not fascist? Was South Africa a fascist state?

Fascism is a specific political phenomenon that seeks the atomisation and destruction of working class organisations. Nazi Germany, Mussolini’s Italy and Franco’s Spain are the most obvious examples. In more recent times Chile under General Pinochet and the military Junta in Argentina bore a close resemblance to fascism.

Israel on the other hand, like South Africa and the United States before it is a settler colonial state. The key difference between fascism and settler colonialism is that the latter involves an alliance of the settler working class with its own ruling class. Rather than the destruction of working class organisations, it is the settler working class which is usually the most racist and chauvinist section of settler society as for example in Northern Ireland.

Ben Gvir - a Genuine Jewish neo-Nazi

Ben Gvir and Smotrich Do Not Represent a Break with Previous Zionist Governments

Gvir and Smotrich represent the logical outcome of decades of rule, by Labour Zionism and Likud. They do not represent a fascist break from Zionism. The agreed platform of the coalition was:

“The Jewish people have an exclusive and unquestionable right to all areas of the Land of Israel. The government will promote and develop settlement in all parts of the Land of Israel – in the Galilee, the Negev, the Golan, Judea and Samaria.”

How is this different from previous governments? Support for ‘Jewish settlement’ has always been the policy of both wings of the Zionist movement. It was not a Likud/Religious Zionist government which began the policy of Judaisation of the Galilee.

The 1976 Koenig Memorandum, named after Yisrael Koenig, a member of the Israeli Labor Alignment and Director General of the Northern District outlined the policy. It was a nakedly racist document which spoke of the Israeli Arabs having a "Levantinistic Arab character" whose "imagination tends to exceed rationality."

Koenig advocated denying work, educational opportunities and benefits to Israel’s Arab population and the thinning out of the Arab population through Jewish settlement. It took for granted that Israel’s Arab population were a threat to Israel’s Jewish character.

The document put forward a number of strategic goals and tactical steps aimed at reducing the number and influence of Arab citizens of Israel in the Galilee region. The Memorandum was the first publicly available document to outline some of the policies of discrimination and containment that Palestinian citizens of Israel had been subject to since 1948, reflecting “planning and deliberations at the policy-making circles.” See The Koenig report and Israeli policy towards the Palestinian minority, 1965-1976: old wine in new bottles.

Judaisation of the Galilee was the policy and practice of Israel even before the conquest of East Jerusalem in June 1967. This began under a Labour not a Likud or Religious Zionist government.

On 24 June 2013, the Israeli Knessetapprovedthe Prawer-Begin Planfor the mass expulsion of the Arab Bedouin community in the Naqab. It proposed the destruction of 35 ‘unrecognized’ Bedouin villages and the forced displacement of up to 70,000 Bedouin citizens of Israel, and the confiscation of their historical lands.

It is clear that the new government in Israel represents a continuation of the policies of previous Israeli governments not a break with them. Those who talk of the destruction of democracy speak exclusively to Israel’s Jewish society. As Ahmed Tibi MK once noted, when Zionists talk of a Jewish Democratic state this is an oxymoron. Israel is Jewish towards Arabs and Democratic towards Jews.

No-one doubts that the accession to government of Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, two Jewish neo-Nazi settlers, will result in an intensification of repression in the West Bank although it is hard to see how much further the repression of the military dictatorship in the West Bank can be intensified.

It was not under Gvir and Smotrich that 6 Palestinian human rights groups were bannedas ‘terrorists’ but under the ‘Change Government’ that included the Labor Party and Meretz. When Smotrich describedhuman rights organisations as an ‘existential threat’ he was simply picking up from where Merav Michaeli of the ILP and Nitzan Horowitz of Meretz left off.

The real threat of the new government is two-fold. Like in South Africa we are going to see an erosion of the democratic rights of Israeli Jews. It is this which has produced panic in what is left of the Israeli left. The settlement of the West Bank is coming home.

This will involve an erosion of the difference between Palestinians in Israel and those on the West Bank. In its eyes they are all ‘Arabs’.

Desecration of Christian graveyard

Only a few days ago we saw the open desecration of a Christian graveyard in Jerusalem. Imagine the howls of protest if this took place in Britain with the desecration of a Jewish graveyard? Attacks on churches, mosques and graveyards are a regular occurrence in Israel.

As the platformof the Coalition outlines, the Golan Heights, the Negev, the Galilee and the West Bank are considered the same. In all these areas the demographic threat of the Arabs is a problem.

And not only in these areas. Gvir led the way in May 2021, with the support of the Israeli Police, in pogroms and attacks against Israel’s Arab citizens in the mixed cities of Bat Yam, Lod etc. Their intention is to recolonise these cities and drive their Arab inhabitants out.

It is Jewish ‘Democracy’ which is now under threat

At the weekend largely Jewish demonstrationsof 20,000 in Tel Aviv reacted with alarm at the judicial reform proposals of the present coalition because they saw that it was their rights which were now under attack. Former Defence Minister Benny Gantz, who took pride in bombing Gaza back to the stone age warnedof civil war in Israel.

Israeli Gays, who have been complicit in pinkwashingIsraeli colonisation, have reacted with alarm to the inclusion of the anti-gay Noam party and leader Avi Maoz in government. Those who were happy to collude in the repression of Palestinians now realise that Messianic Zionists have no place for alternative sexual lifestyles either. It is hard to work up much sympathy for these pink racists.

Racist?  Perish the thought!

The protestors in Tel Aviv were divided on the question of Palestinian rights. A large section was extremely unhappy about mixing up the threat to Jewish rights with the threat to Palestinian rights. Assaf Agmon, a leader of one group, was particularly upset:

“The protest on Saturday night is led by extreme leftist groups that are not prepared to move one millimeter from the ‘stop the occupation’ and Arab rights, which are super-important issues but they are on the agenda after we leave ourselves a democracy to advance them in."

"People may come and find themselves surrounded by Palestinian flags and stop the occupation flags and that is how [Netanyahu’s supporters] will brand all of our protests as pro-Palestinian and anti-Zionist.”

Stav Shaffir, an ex-member of the Knesset was concerned that:

Netanyahu and his mouthpieces will lie afterward and say the protest was organized by the treasonous left and funded by foreign money and supports our enemies. Let them say it.

This resulted in there being 2 separate marches.

The real fear of liberal Zionists is the coalition’s proposals for reform of Israel’s judicial system. Israel’s Supreme Court is their pride and joy. It is the symbol of Israeli Democracy. What is proposed is an override clause whereby any legislation that is rendered unlawful by the Supreme Court can be overridden by a majority in the Knesset. The Judicial Appointments Committee will be stacked with government appointees. They fear the death of Jewish democracy.

This is a battle that liberal Zionism is going to lose. There is nothing democratic about unelected judges not having the power to veto legislation. Of course Israel, being an ethno-nationalist state, is not a democracy anyway. Arabs have always been excluded from power and that includes the last ‘Change’ government in which an Arab party was nominally part of the coalition.

Israel’s Supreme Court and Torture

The position of Israel’s Supreme Court on torture is instructive. It has ruled that torture is allowed under the ‘ticking timebomb’ scenario.

In 1987 the Landau Commission into the use of torture the use of torture, but it acceptedtheir argument that physical pressure was necessary for efficient interrogation.

The Landau Report recommended psychological pressure and "a moderate amount of physical pressure" i.e. torture against Palestinian detainees. Israel was thus the only state in the world to legalise torture. HaMoked, the Centre for Defence of the Individual, foundthat 85% of Palestinians were tortured.

In 1994 the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel petitioned the High Court to protest Shin Bet interrogation tactics. The following year the Association for Civil Rights in Israel petitionedthe High Court demanding an end to vigorous shaking of prisoners.

In 1999 the High Court ruled that Shin Bet can't use violence in interrogations, but interrogators could use the "necessary defense" argument if they used torture in "ticking bomb" situations. Thus the Court allowed Shin Bet to continue to use torture because every case of torture and abuse uses the same ‘ticking bomb’ excuse.

It was the ‘liberal’ Supreme Court President Aharon Barak who presided over this decision. Fast forward 23 years and we find Barak so enraged by the plans to reform the Supreme Court that he has offered to go before a firing squad if that would prevent the enactment of the new legislation! If I was Netanyahu I would take Barak up on the offer! Barak explained that:

he sought to be neither overly activist nor overly conservative and to deliver verdicts that took heed of Israel’s history, Zionism and the country’s security needs.

Barak claimed that ‘the rights of everybody — Jew, Arab, ultra-Orthodox, not ultra-Orthodox — are in grave danger.” This is a lie. Not once has the Supreme Court used its powers to overturn nakedly racist anti-Arab legislation. Always it has bowed the knee to Zionism’s concern about a Jewish demographic majority. In the West Bank /Gaza it has explicitly disregarded international law and the Fourth Geneva Convention.

The Supreme Court has refused to override the 1950 Absentee Property Law which allowed the confiscation of thousands of dunums of Arab land for Jewish settlement since the establishment of the Israeli state. Jewish land has never once been confiscated for the benefit of Arabs but the Supreme Court had no problems with its racist intent. The Supreme Court also approved the use of this law to confiscate Arab homes in East Jerusalem in order that they could be handed over to the right-wing Ateret Cohanim settler group.

In the West Bank the Supreme Court has openly connived in the use of fraud and trickery in the theft of Palestinian land, including private land that was stolen in ‘good faith’. A thousand Palestinians are, at this very moment facing eviction from their homes in Yasafer Mata yet the Supreme Court happily allowed the Israeli army to establish a firing range on peoples’s land and next to their homes in order to facilitate yet more ethnic cleansing.

In the process the Supreme Court dismissedevidence proving that Palestinians had lived in these homes for generations. They preferred the lies of the State that Palestinians had only lived in the area recently. Not once did they ask why it was only in Arab villages, not Jewish settlements, that the Israeli Army established firing zones.

Likewise in the Negev the Supreme Court approved the destruction of the village of Umm Al-Hiram to make way for a Jewish only town of Hiram. Never, not once, was it the other way round.  Not once were they asked to approve the confiscation of Jewish land for the benefit of Arabs.

Israel detains hundreds of Palestinians, including Israeli citizens, under Administrative Detention without any trial whatsoever. When used by the British under the Emergency Regulations future Israeli Justice Minister Ya’acov Shapira remarkedthat ‘Even in NaziGermany, there were no laws like this.’

Not once has the Supreme Court overturned such a detention, even though the Defendant cannot challenge the ‘evidence’ because the Defendant and their lawyer are unable to see it. Every scrap of rumour by Shin Bet is accepted in good faith by the Supreme Court.

On 8 July 2021, the Supreme Court in a 10 to 1 decision, upheld the 2018 Jewish Nation-State Basic Law, which enshrines Jewish supremacy and racial segregation as a Basic Law with constitutional status in the State of Israel. The only dissenting opinion was issued by the only Arab justice on the court, Justice Kara.

As a matter of course the Supreme Court has failed over the years to challenge or even scrutinise the openly anti-Arab evidence of the Shin Bet secret police. The Supreme Court has colluded in the State’s refusal to open the archives and release information concerning the Nakba. There can be no possible national security reason for not releasing 70+ year old files other than a refusal to countenance evidence of Zionist ethnic cleansing.

This deference to Shin Bet even extended to the Court’s refusalto order the release of evidence concerning the State’s suspected involvement in the murder of Nazi collaborator Rudolf Kasztner in 1957, 62 years previously. The Supreme Court accepted Shin Bet’s rationale – ‘national security and lack of resources’. How could national security possibly be damaged by the revelation that Shin Bet had murdered an Israeli citizen over 60 years ago?

Far from the Supreme Court being the last ditch defender of Israeli  democracy, it is a supine creature in all but one respect. It is the decisions of the Supreme Court to challengethe monopoly of Orthodox Jewry, such as conversion by other strands of Jewry, which has antagonised Religious Zionism and Orthodox Jewry. The current proposals have nothing to do with Netanyahu’s legal problems.

The Supreme Court has rejectedevery petition aimed at forcing the Israeli state to reveal which repressive states it arms and equips. Arms to Ukraine’s neo-Nazi Azov Battalion? In a ruling on 27 June 2021 the court ruled that no future appeals would be discussed in court. As lawyer Eitay Mack commented:

“It’s incredible that in a state which defines itself as Jewish and democratic, it was decided that preventing aid to genocide, to crimes against humanity, to war crimes and to severe violations of human rights is not a topic with which courts should engage,”

Since 2007 the Israeli government has approvedevery single arms deal brought to it. The Supreme Court was happy to allow Israel to equip every mercenary, fascist and genocider. This is the figleaf for Jewish supremacy that liberal Zionists fear will be stripped away.

If I was a member of the Knesset I would have no hesitation in voting for the reforms proposed by the governing coalition. The Supreme Court is a Zionist body complicit in the colonisation of Palestine.

Another proposal, which I would support, would be to remove the ‘grandfather’ clause from the 1950 Law of Return which allows the partner of someone whose grandparent was Jewish to obtain entry to and citizenship of the State of Israel. 

Given the racist nature of the Law of Return, in allowing Jews who weren’t even born in Israel to claim citizenship as of right whereas Palestinian refugees have no such rights, I can see no possible objection to this proposed law. It is the logic of racial supremacy that the racists are always seeking to redefine who is and who is not part of the ubermenschen. That is why the question Who is a Jew has for Israel been an insoluble question ever since its inception.

In so far as this proposal furthers the already existing breach between American Jewry, most of whom are not Orthodox Jews, and Israel, then this legislation can only be welcomed.

Of course there is much reactionary legislation proposed by the coalition such as a refusal to ratify the Istanbul Convention against violence to women.

Budgets will be increased to strengthen “Jewish settlement in Arad,” a city in the Negev. The planning procedures for the city of Kasif, a future planned ultra-Orthodox city in the Negev region, will continue and approximately 14 settlements in the Negev will be continued and accelerated and NIS 800 million ($227M) will be budgeted each year.

In compliance with Smotrich’s demands regarding human rights associations, the government will dissolve organizations financed by external parties and international funds. This will severely harm Palestinian Arab civil society and will further entrench human and civil rights violations against minorities in the country.

This is a government of open racists. In a 2018 radio interview, Likud MK Miki Zohar claimed that the Israeli public will never believe that Netanyahu is guilty of corruption because he “belongs to the Jewish race, and the entire Jewish race is the highest human capital, the smartest, the most comprehending.”

But how is this different from ‘centrist’ Prime Minister Yair Lapid’s declaration that “My principle says maximum Jews on maximum land with maximum security and with minimum Palestinians”?

If I had any doubt about my position then arch-Zionist and Trump supporter, Alan Dershowitz, laid them to rest when he saidthat:

“It will make it much more difficult for people like me who try to defend Israel in the international court of public opinion to defend them effectively, It would be a tragedy to see the Supreme Court weakened.”

But it is Aharon Barak, who has provided the definitive argument in favour of the legal reforms. Barak said that

the High Court has acted as a kind of legal “Iron Dome,”. Without a credible independent court, deemed as ensuring Israel’s democratic functioning, including in its treatment of the Palestinians, “our chief of staff and government ministers will immediately be arrested when they travel overseas…  The leaders of the country will be put on trial in the International Criminal Court in The Hague.”

Could there be any more persuasive argument for giving Justice Minister Yariv Levin’s proposals our full support?

Tony Greenstein

Kevin Higgins was the Poet Laureate of the Socialist Left and an Inspiration to the Oppressed

It was with shock and a deep sadness that I awoke to the news that Kevin Higgins, the great socialist Irish poet had passed away. 

I first heard of Kevin when, on my expulsion from the Labour Party, he wrote a poem We Are Delighted To Announce according to which I had been executed for using ‘inappropriate language’. Later I saw Kevin regularly on the Crispin Flintoff Show. 

I first met Kevin Higgins at the fringe Future of the Left Events last September at Labour Party Conference. I was there to do an interview about my book, Zionism During the Holocaust. Kevin introduced himself to me and invited me to the October Over the Edge bookfair that he and his wife Susan Millar DuMars ran in Galway for non-fiction writers each year.

I was one of three authors who had been invited. Unfortunately I had not read the travel details very carefully and I arrived one week early! Kevin and Susan took it very well and booked me into a B&B. I met both Kevin and Susan later that night and it was there that I learnt that Kevin was not a well man. 

We exchanged books and Kevin gave me a signed copy of his first poetry collection, The Boy With No Face. Unfortunately I can't remember what the anecdote was!

After the reading on 27 October Kevin told me that he had been diagnosed with Acute Myeloid Leukaemia and would likely be in hospital for a couple of months. ‘Hopefully during my confinement I'll still manage to cause a little bit of politico-poetic mischief.’

All I could do was tell him that he was ‘too valuable to lose with your wonderful gifts and impish wit. I look forward to seeing you on The Crispin show from hospital.’ Kevin’s response was that ‘Yes, I must do the Crispin show from the hospital. That would be fun.’ Kevin did do one further show before he was sadly taken from us.

Six weeks later Kevin told me that he was ‘feeling way way better than when I saw you in Galway. Not out of the proverbial woods yet. But first two rounds of chemo have done their thing.’ Unfortunately this was premature.

Kevin could not resist telling me how the Israeli Embassy had phoned him to try to persuade him to call off my reading:

Great that we prevailed over those few Embassy trolls. One of them actually phoned me while I was still in the A & E department before there was a room from me in the Haematology Ward. Very funny conversation. I can't believe how reasonable I managed to sound. He was calling from London and thought I'd be really shocked to hear you had been expelled from the Labour Party; and so must then obviously be a total reprobate. I thought, mate, you don't know who you're talking too; I've been expelled twice. I think he thought we were liberal arts admin types who would just collapse. After the reading a nurse came into my room and immediately said: well, you're looking better! (And I hadn't started the treatment yet and was in bad way). Your reading going so well really helped my mood at about the worst possible time.

I wasn’t aware that Kevin’s diagnosiswas much more serious than he had let on.  Below are a few reviews, articles and interviews that give some idea of Kevin’s writings and activities.

In Mentioning the war. Kevin was described as being:

Best known for his dark, satirical poems. Kevin Higgins published his first book review in The Galway Advertiser in June 1999. Reading Mentioning the War, it becomes obvious that Higgins is not like other critics. An enthusiastic advocate for the work of the new generation of poets who have emerged from Ireland’s thriving live poetry scene; he is also a merciless opponent of hypocrisy and pretentiousness wherever he finds it. His writing is overtly political in a way that draws comparison with George Orwell – the subject of two extended essays here. It would be impossible to agree with everything in this book; it is a book which often disagrees with itself. But on subjects as diverse as socialist poetry and neoconservatism, funding for the arts and the anti-war movement, Higgins informs, infuriates and entertains, as any good critic should.

“The importance of Higgins, in particular, in spearheading a whole new poetry reading/performance movement in Ireland over the last decade cannot be overstated…he is important not just to readers who might agree with his political or ideological critiques but also to practitioners and students of poetry itself regardless of their ideological inclinations.”

Philip Coleman

“There’s an arresting phrase, a new angle on a writer or a political position you thought you already knew about, in just about every piece here…The insights range from the literary to the existential to the seriously amusing…one of the things Mentioning the War offers, almost incidentally, is an insider’s account of how to learn to write.”

John Goodby

An interview in The Monthly explains how Over The Edge came to be set up.

When did you set up Over the Edge?

We set up Over the Edge in January 2003, that was the first reading in the Galway City Library and it was Susan’s (Susan Millar DuMars) idea.

And what was the idea?

At the time we really weren’t thinking about things like the differences between spoken word or poetry or anything like that. We were thinking about writing and writers, poetry and fiction, and especially those at an in-between stage in their careers; those people who wrote poetry and fiction and who were somewhere between getting their poems published in magazines and releasing their first collection or going from reading at various open mics to being selected for a literary festival. At that time there wasn’t really any opportunities for those people to get a platform for their work.

We were, I think, looking to build a community which could sustain people, rather than, what tended to happen then, a situation where people wrote and read for a while and then slowly drifted away. We wanted something that could keep people going when things get a little difficult.

Do you think Over the Edge was a bridge between the established poetry scene and the more underground activity?

I think there may have been a bit of that although to be honest I’m not sure we thought of it in those terms.

There were open mics in Galway that tended to be quite chaotic, and I’m sure other events which came and went, but we wanted to build something that was sustainable.

We wanted to have Over the Edge as something that had some permanence about it. And there would be spaces for people so that if something else disappeared, we would still be there. You could always come back to Over the Edge.

That was another element in that we wanted to build and develop an audience. By doing that we improved the situation for everyone in that there would always be people who wanted to come just to listen, to be at the event, rather than poets and writers reading to each other.

And it is still going?

Yes and in some ways I think that it matters more now than it ever did.

I think over the years there has been a dramatic shift in the way culture is approached and viewed generally and that approach trickles down to poetry. The idea that you can create something, maybe one thing, that will get you famous; that seems to be an approach which has taken hold lately. It’s an X-Factor approach to culture and I think an event which values quality and continuity is essential.

We have maintained Over the Edge for nearly 20 years with the rock solid format of 3 featured readers and an open mic. We are going to have a 20th anniversary celebration which we have already started the organising for.

Over the Edge was known for the quality of the readers. Do you feel you have been able to sustain that?

We would never put anyone on a platform if we didn’t think they were up for that and capable of doing it. It is quite different reading for 15 minutes than it is doing 1 poem at an open mic. We also have always put a fair bit of effort into who reads with who so there is a good mix and balance for the audience. We were always looking for contrast between writers and poets.

I do think that is something that is missing from Literary Festivals over the years in that the readers tend to be very similar. I have the view that this has happened since the crash of 2008, where poetry and fiction, and from there the programming of Literary Festivals, has become much more defensive, much more protective since 2008.

Could you expand on that thought?

Back in 2008, people like myself and Dave Lordan were seen, and perhaps tolerated, as amusing reminders of the politics of the past because until the crash of 2008 we were not seen as having anything resembling a live relevance or threat, and this was despite the anti-war movement and other movements which emerged before the crash.

In the South of Ireland you had articles in the Irish Times asking why people were not up in arms about cuts and things like that and of course the water charges movement seemed to shift attitudes when it emerged.

Since then you have had the situation with the Mother and Baby Homes, the Repeal of the 8th Amendment , the electoral collapse of the Labour Party, the rise of Sinn Fein (and other left forces) and the overarching of the Trump years and I think because of all that there is, or has been, a tendency, particularly in Literary Festivals, to try and cling on to the ideas of prior to the crash

Effectively, when there was a Liberal consensus of some sort it allowed more people who might have been seen as eccentrics into the mix but almost all of that has gone now.

Over the Edge is an antidote to that situation.

Going back to Over the Edge, how was it funded?

When we started off we couldn’t pay anyone because we had no funding. Then we received 400 Euros from Galway City Council which we used to pay travel expenses for people travelling outside of Galway. At the time we really did think that we were very privileged being able to do that.

We have always been pretty careful with the funding we got because in the early days, funding was pretty scarce and you could lose funding through no fault of your own through austerity and various other reasons. We still pay people, travelling writers and people who have published a book.

Below are some tributes to Kevin from those who knew him best:

Galway Arts Community heartbroken as 'legend of all trades' who went 'over the edge' Kevin Higgins sadly dies

 ‘The Arts in Galway’

“So sorry to learn of the passing of the passionate poet Kevin Higgins. He was a skilled satirist, a deft wordsmith, a romantic with real powers of evocation, a gentle presence too.

Galway Arts Centre:

“We at Galway Arts Centre, are deeply saddened to hear of the loss of poet, writer and friend Kevin Higgins. Kevin, along with his partner Susan Millar Du Mars have inspired generations of Galway writers through their initiative "Over the Edge" and through the extremely popular classes in writing that he ran in Galway Arts Centre for many years. Our deepest sympathies go to his family and friends.”

Below is one of the last poems Kevin wrote. It perfectly sums up the  shallow and insubstantial rich boy who has become Prime Minister. Barely a week before I had suggested it might be a good subject for a poem.

Monday, 07 November 2022 11:58

Meet Your New Leader

Published in Poetry

by Kevin Higgins, with images by Mick O'Dell

When a boy, his mother used to
prop him on the ironing board
and steam out the creases.
Since he was about five
he's been the adult in the room
coming up with solutions
the gods of the Market will like.
He arrived with a birthmark
which, under a magnifying glass,
appears to read
Head Prefect.

He'll be more efficient
than the previous occupant
at reducing the indigent
to ribcages which will act
as a necessary warning to others;
is the sort theatre aficionados
who enjoy browsing articles
about poverty on free Sundays
can imagine sitting beside
at a dinner party and being surprised,
he's actually quite familiar
with the dramas of Ibsen and being
beyond impressed to find themselves
in the presence of as icy and expensive
an intellect as this.

I cannot recommend highly enough Kevin’s Thrills and difficulties: Being a Marxist poet in 21st Century Ireland for a political insight by someone who had been a member of Militant in his youth, his disillusion with left groups and then his reengagement as a political poet.

I am though a different kind of Marxist to the one I was thirty years ago, far less party orientated, far more concerned with the broader movement. I again have people all around the world who I consider comrades. People who, though their faults may be many, try to resist the current fashion for putting oneself up for sale at what usually turns out to be a pretty low price.

Kevin and I conducted a conversation on Whatsapp in the wake of my appearance on October 27^th at Over The Edge. Below is a precise of our conversations. In the short time I knew Kevin I came to realise that he was a very special and unique talent, with a political integrity that is rare. My heart goes out to Susan.

[20:42, 28/10/2022] Kevin Higgins: Hi Tony, … Some rough news today. I've been diagnosed with Acute Myeloid Leukaemia. Will be in hospital, they say, for at least a couple of months. Likely start to chemo mid/late next week. Hopefully during my confinement I'll still manage to cause a little bit of politico-poetic mischief, though it won't be easy. It's been great getting to know you, and congrats on the brilliant book sales last night. Warm best  Kevin

[20:52, 28/10/2022] Tony Greenstein: Hi Kevin

I'm really sorry to hear this. Good luck with the chemo. I know it will be really tough but try and persevere as you are too valuable to lose with your wonderful gifts and impish wit. I look forward to seeing you on The Crispin show from hospital.

 [20:58, 28/10/2022] Kevin Higgins: Thanks Tony. Yes, I must do the Crispin show from the hospital. That would be fun

[23:30, 28/10/2022] Tony Greenstein: Yes that would be great.  You could write a poem about Rishi Sunak visiting a hospital today and being told to pay health workers more by a patient and when he replied that he was trying was told that he wasn't trying hard enough!!...

 [07:09, 12/12/2022] Kevin Higgins: Hi Tony, thanks. am feeling way way better than when I saw you in Galway. Not out of the proverbial woods yet. But first two rounds of chemo have done their thing. Need a wheelchair to go out of house as breathlessness is big issue, though also very slowly improving. But it looks like I'll be able to go to this week's December Over The Edge reading which will be the first time since September. Hope all good your side. I was delighted with how your reading in October went; I watched it on Facebook live in the hospital ward. Great that we prevailed over those few Embassy trolls. One of them actually phoned me while I was still in the A & E department before there was a room from me in the Haematology Ward. Very funny conversation. I can't believe how reasonable I managed to sound. He was calling from London and thought I'd be really shocked to hear you had been expelled from the Labour Party; and so must then obviously be a total reprobate. I thought, mate, you don't know who you're talking too; I've been expelled twice. I think he thought we were liberal arts admin types who would just collapse. After the reading a nurse came into my room and immediately said: well, you're looking better! (And I hadn't started the treatment yet and was in bad way). Your reading going so well really helped my mood at about the worst possible time. Brilliant that you sold all those books too. Only sorry I wasn't around for the afterwards at the House Hotel. Hope you're doing well. Warmest wishes, and thanks for getting in touch, Kevin

[07:15, 12/12/2022] Tony Greenstein: Hi Kevin,

Yes it was great to see you today looking better. I know you have a long way to go….  I heard there were 1 or 2 complaints but I didn't know that it came from the Israeli Embassy. Perhaps you could write t his up and I'd blog it.  What a cheek for an Embassy to try and interfere in local politics especially given the Jewish neo-Nazis who are now in control in Israel. Yes being expelled from the Labour Party must indeed be a crime to them but we all know that if you are Jewish today you are 6 times more likely to be expelled from the LP.  I was just the first.

Glad he cheered you up though!

Take it easy and maybe when you are better I can return for another reading!!

[12:18, 17/12/2022] Kevin Higgins: Hi Tony, sorry to take this long to get back to you. I'd be happy to write up a piece for your blog about the Zionists we dealt with around your reading. Some of it was even quite comical really. If it would be okay for me to write that up for you in the early new year, that would be great. Still settling into being back at home - which is great- but taking it easy (which being a workaholic is not my best area!) Hope all good your side. Best always, Kevin

[12:45, 17/12/2022] Tony Greenstein: Yeah that would be great. Yes please take it easy.  You are too valuable to lose. Your health is your main priority.  When I had a liver transplant and leading up to it I dropped all political work to concentrate on my health.  You must do the same.  Take care

Tragically Kevin was not able to write up his experience with the Israeli Embassy trolls but I think people will be able to get a sense of what happened.

Tony Greenstein

Zionist Historiography & the Distortion of the Lessons of the Holocaust 

Please register in advance:

https://tinyurl.com/mrynckda

Also livestreamed on YouTube 

Many people have asked me why did I write Zionism During the Holocaust? My answer is simple - Because the history of the Nazi holocaust and its place in history needs rescuing from Zionist falsifications, myths and distortions.

I am not of course disputing the fact that millions of Jews were exterminated by the Nazis, including half in gas chambers. That is for the political equivalent of flat earthers. What I am referring to is the role of the Jewish Resistance, their defence of the Judenrate (Jewish Councils which collaborated with the Nazis), the erasure of anti-Zionist Jews in the Resistance, the rewriting of the memoirs of even the Zionist fighters in the ghettos and the absence of any mention of Zionist collaboration and their obstruction of rescue attempts.

Yehuda Bauer - Zionist first, historian second

All this has been achieved by the Zionist holocaust historians based in Yad Vashem, led by Yehuda Bauer and Dina Porat, in order that the holocaust can accord with a Zionist national narrative.

The Zionist holocaust narrative has drawn a straight line between the fight against the Nazis and Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. In his address to the 2015 World Zionist Congress, Netanyahu attempted to transfer the blame for the holocaust from Hitler to the Palestinian Grand Mufti, Haj al Amin Husseini.

Nothing better illustrates this than the annual visit of thousands of Israeli school children to Auschwitz. Instead of being a profound educational event, that teaches the dangers of a resurgence of racism and fascism, it has become an orgy of Israeli national chauvinism.

It is no wonder that Israeli teenagers are even more racist than their elders. Or Kashti in Ha’aretz Israeli Teenagers: Racist and Proud of Itquoted a 10^th grade high school girl as declaring:

“For me, personally, Arabs are something I can’t look at and can’t stand. I am tremendously racist. I come from a racist home. If I get the chance in the army to shoot one of them, I won’t think twice. I’m ready to kill someone with my hands, and it’s an Arab. In my education I learned that ... their education is to be terrorists, and there is no belief in them…. every day I see these Ishmaelites, who pass by and whistle. I wish them death.”

Israeli teenagers annually walk from Auschwitz to Birkenau covered in Israeli flags, the message being one of Jewish militarism. Their visit to Auschwitz actually reinforces their racism. As Gideon Levy observed

I have yet to hear a single teenager come back from Auschwitz and say that we mustn’t abuse others the way we were abused. There has yet to be a school whose pupils came back from Birkenau straight to the Gaza border, saw the barbed-wire fence and said, Never again. The message is always the opposite. Gaza is permitted because of Auschwitz.

Anti-fascists in the 70s campaigned around the slogan ‘Never Again’ meaning that never again must any people experience genocide. Yet to the Zionists Never Again meant it must not happen to Jews again. To Zionism the lesson of the Holocaust entitles Jews to be genociders.

Zionist Historiography and Yad Vashem

Zionism has constructed a Holocaust historiography which is based on a rejection of any universal lessons from the holocaust. At the forefront of this hegemonic narrative stands Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Propaganda Museum in Jerusalem.

When a guide, Itamar Shapira, referredto the proximity of Deir Yassin in a talk to visitors to YV, where in April 1948 Zionist militias slaughtered over 100 Palestinian villagers, he was sacked.

When Netanyahu attempted to deport up to 60,000 African refugees for the ‘crime’ of not being Jewish. Ha'aretz journalist Nir Gontarz describedhis 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.

Yad Vashem has played host to a variety of neo-Nazis and anti-Semite such as Viktor Orban, John Vorster, Premier of South Africa and the  Hitler loving Presidents Bolsonaro and Duterte of Brazil and the Philippines respectively. Daniel Blatman, a Holocaust historian at the Hebrew University described YV as a

‘hard-working laundromat, striving to bleach out the sins of every anti-Semitic, fascist, racist or simply murderously thuggish leader or politician.’

The Holocaust Educational Trust took a full part in the fake 'antisemitism' attack on Corbyn

Holocaust Uniqueness

Fundamental to the Zionist narrative is that the Nazi Holocaust was unique and that only the Jews experienced a holocaust. All other victims experienced genocide not holocaust. The Holocaust Memorial Day Trust describesthe holocaust as an ‘attempt by the Nazis and their collaborators to murder all the Jews in Europe.’ There is no mention of Gypsies or the Disabled. They are genocides.

Yehuda Bauer, the most prominent Zionist holocaust historian, argued that holocaust only applied to Jews. Why? Because the "Roma were not Jews, therefore there was no need to murder all of them," [Sybil Milton, The Context of the Holocaust, p.270] Bauer’s assumption was that the Nazis’ sole concern was annihilating the Jews.

The Holocaust Educational Trust and its CEO Karen Pollock attacked Corbyn for chairing a meeting addressed by anti-Zionist Auschwitz survivor,  Hajo Meyer

Bauer didn’t see the extermination of the Jews as part of a wider eugenic policy to ‘purify’ the Aryan race, rassenchande (racial defilement) or rassenhygiene (racial hygiene). Bauer completely ignored the evidence that the Nazis criminalised sexual relations between all non-Aryans and Aryans, e.g. Gypsies and slave labourers. He also ignored the fact that before 1941 Nazi policy was expulsion of the Jews not extermination. Sybil Milton, senior resident historian at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) observed:

The emphasis on antisemitism and the exclusivity of the Jewish fate has, for obvious political reasons, also been the official Israeli interpretation and as such has profoundly influenced the historiography of the Holocaust. [Milton, Gypsies and the Holocaust, p. 377] 

Bauer argued that the Nazi extermination of the Gypsies was a product of their anti-social and criminal behaviour rather than their ‘race’. Milton witheringly observed:

Defining an entire ethnic group as anti-social and criminal is a classic example of racism. I do not know why Mr. Bauer does not understand this. Milton, Bauer Correspondence, Gypsies and the Holocaust, p. 517. 

Like most Holocaust organisations, the Holocaust Educational Trust and its CEO Pollock are Zionists first and foremost plugging away at Labour's anti-racist leader and ignoring Boris Johnson's genuine anti-Semitic outpourings in 72 Virgins

Milton noted that:

the current preoccupation with antisemitism and the "uniqueness" of the  Jewish Holocaust in historical literature has limited our ability to recognize the connections between Nazi ideology, German social policy, and Genocide. [Gypsies and the Holocaust, p. 382, 1991]

Drawing Universal Lessons from the Holocaust

For Zionism the Holocaust was the sole possession of the Jews. Drawing universal lessons from the Holocaust meant the ‘plunder of [Jewish] moral capital’’. [Peter Novick, the Holocaust in American Life, p.156] According to Gerhard Riegner, the representative of the World Jewish Congress in Geneva during the war, ‘Auschwitz was not only a national memory belonging to the Jewish people… it was also an important political asset.’[Tom Segev, The Seven Million, p.474]

In March 1988 Yehuda Elkana, a child survivor of Auschwitz and Rector of the Central European University in Budapest, before being evicted by Netanyahu’s friend Viktor Orban, wrote an article for Ha'aretz, The Need To Forget citing Thomas Jefferson’s maxim that democracy and worship of the past are incompatible:

The very existence of democracy is endangered when the memory of the dead participates actively in the democratic process.

Elkana warned against the misuse of the lessons of the Holocaust:

a profound existential “Angst” fed by a particular interpretation of the lessons of the holocaust … that we are the eternal victim. In this ancient belief… I see the tragic and paradoxical victory of Hitler. Two nations, metaphorically speaking, emerged from the ashes of Auschwitz: a minority who assert, “this must never happen again,” and a frightened and haunted majority who assert, “this must never happen to us again.”

The Holocaust is inexplicable

Zionism holds that anti-Semitism has nothing to do with class relations or the socio-economic nature of society. It exists because the Jews exist, the product of the Jews presence as strangers in other people’s countries. For the Zionists the Holocaust was inexplicable, an irrational and demonic phenomenon.

For Elie Wiesel, a survivor of Auschwitz and an ardent Zionist, the Holocaust was beyond history. It was a ‘sacred and essentially incomprehensible event.’

The Holocaust and the Arabs

Idith Zertal, Professor of History at the Hebrew University described in Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood, how:

‘The transference of the holocaust situation on to the Middle East reality… 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.

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 mobilisedthe Holocaust ‘in the service of Israeli politics.’

Why the Contemporary Concern with the Holocaust

Holocaust Memorial Day was only established in 2001, more than half a century after the liberation of Auschwitz. The USHMM was first opened in April 1993. Why the delay?

As John Cummings noted

The U.S. has 35,000 museums. Why is only one about slavery? And that one was opened in December 2014.

Why is the Nazi holocaust considered more important, with a budget for the USHMM of over $100m, than slavery in which the United States was so heavily implicated that it fought a civil war over it?

The answer in a nutshell, is imperialism and in particular US imperialism. Adopting the holocaust narrative is part of the United States attempt to incorporate a sanitised version of its war against the Nazis into its imperialist narrative.

As Yitzhak Laor explained the current preoccupation with the holocaust is about

‘consolidating a new ideology of exclusion. Now it is the Jews who are the insiders… the genocide and the Jews served in the construction of a European identity

The version of history presented in the USHMM is a rewriting of American culpability. No mention is made of the role of the United States in turning away Jewish refugees from the Nazis, the most famous example being the St. Louis, a boat carrying Jewish refugees from Germany which was turned away from first Cuba and then the United States.

In the late 40s and 50s 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. The first time the holocaust became part of the syllabus, in 1953, just two hours were devoted to it. The same was true in the US where mention of the holocaust indicated communist sympathies.

Erasing the Heroes of the Anti-Zionist Resistance

On April 10 1944 Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler escaped from Auschwitz and reached Slovakia on April 24. There they wrote the first first hand accounts of Auschwitz, the Auschwitz Protocols. Until then Auschwitz was believed to be a labour not an extermination camp. Yet when the Protocols were given to the leader of Hungarian Zionism, Rudolf Kasztner, he promptly suppressed them. Vrba wrote:

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

When Professor Jacob Talmon criticised Hannah Arendt for referring to the Kasztner Affair, Vrba asked:

Rudolf Vrba

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

These letters are not to be found in Hebrew history text books. The Protocols were erased from Zionism’s holocaust historiography because they did not accord with its narrative.

Vrba and Wetzler were rendered anonymous. Oskar Neumann, head of the Slovakian Judenrat referred to ‘two young Jewish chaps…’ in his 1956 memoirs. Oskar Krasniansky, his deputy referred to ‘two young people’ and Livia Rothkirchen, a Zionist holocaust historian, to ‘two young men’. In Bauer’s The Holocaust - Some Historical Aspects they are referred to as ‘two Slovak Jews’  Dina Porat wrote about ‘two young Slovak Jews…’ Porat cited Martin Gilbert’s Auschwitz and the Allies as her source, yet Gilbert named both.

In the 1990 edition of the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, Wetzler and Vrba are mentioned by name but in the 2001 edition they are referred to as ‘two Jewish prisoners.’ The USHMM and the inscription of the Auschwitz escape in YV refers to ‘two young Slovak Jews.’

Yehuda Elkana

The silencing of Vrba and Wetzler was exploited by holocaust deniers such as Arthur Butz. Butz argued that if the content of the Protocols were true, Israeli historians would certainly know their names and publicise their report.’ Butz alleged that the Protocols were invented by the War Refugee Board. Another holocaust denier who adopted this line of argument was Robert Faurisson.

In 1994, at a conference at the USHMM, Vrba asked who was the better historian? Those who had direct experience of the Nazis or those who wrote about them? Vrba’s crime was that he was neither a Zionist nor a historian.

Jewish child in terror of Nazi soldiers, Palestinian child in terror of Israeli soldiers

The same was true of the last Commander of the Warsaw Ghetto Resistance, Marek Edelman.

Like Vrba, Edelman never ‘ascended’ to Israel, refusing to become the ‘dead and obedient hero who could be moulded along with the political order of that time…. extremely inconvenient for the creation of a heroic Zionist condensing and compensating myth… Israel was not their home.’

Paul Foot wrote about how:

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.

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

Israel even falsified the record of the Zionist fighters

Hayka Klinger, who fought in the Warsaw Ghetto, told the Histadrut Executive in March 1944 that ‘we received an order not to organize any more defence.’[Porat, p.242]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.’

Ronen, her second son, described how Klinger ‘was apparently not satisfied with the way they [her Diaries] were edited, shortened, and censored.’ In 1958, Hayke took her own life on the 15th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

Klinger couldn’t find anywhere in Israel 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 originals which have now been published.

The Zionists ‘amended’ the writings of their own dead comrades. 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.

The Zionist Rehabilitation of the Judenrat

Hannah Arendt wrote in Eichmann in Jerusalem [p.125] that

Wherever Jews lived, there were recognized Jewish leaders, and this leadership, almost without exception, cooperated in one way or another, for one reason or another, with the Nazis… The whole truth was that if the Jewish people had really been unorganized and leaderless, there would have been chaos and plenty of misery but the total number of victims would hardly have been between four and a half and six million people.

Gideon Hausner

This caused a storm of protest by the Zionists. Gideon Hausner, the Prosecutor in the Eichmann Trial, described Arendt’s ‘vicious and compassionless attitude to the Judenrat’. But the Zionist fighters had a different story:

Zivia Lubetkin, a resistance fighter from Warsaw, told how:

The Germans issued decrees and their despised work was carried out by Jews from the Jewish Council... And in this way, each Jewish Council, without exception, in each and every town, played a treacherous part.’

A straight line was drawn between the Warsaw Ghetto & Palestine

Shneur Zalman Rubashov, at a Histadrut Executive Committee meeting, imagined that in the streets of the Warsaw Ghetto ‘the banner of Tel Hai was being raised.’Moshe Dayan, Israel’s Chief of Staff, in his eulogy to Roi Rotberg, a settler who was killed by Fedayeen spoke of the

Millions of Jews, who were exterminated because they had no country, are watching us from the ashes of Israeli history and exhorting us to settle and to build up a land for our people.

According to Yitzhak Tabenkin,

‘The pre-5 June borders have brought down shoah on our heads, and this shoah is graver than the Nazi Holocaust…

When the holocaust survivors had first arrived in Israel they were treated with contempt and called ‘sapon’ (soap) after the myth that the bodies of murdered Jews were turned into soap.

But beginning with the Eichmann trial Zionist contempt for the Holocaust survivors was played down as the Holocaust became a foundational Zionist myth. Yitzhak Gruenbaum felt shame because ‘the Jews went to the slaughter without any zeal arising in any of them to defend himself.’  The emphasis in the trial was on Jewish resistance, the Warsaw Ghetto in particular. The message conveyed was that Israel’s war against the Palestinians was a continuation of this resistance. According to Israeli President, Yitzhak ben Zvi, ‘What a difference between those who died in combat and those killed in the Nazi ditches!’ According to Yitzhak Tabenkin, ‘The pre-5 June borders have brought down shoah on our heads, and this shoah is graver than the Nazi Holocaust…’ Zertal, p. 189.

But in reality the Zionist attitude to the holocaust survivors has not changed. Despite Israel spending the second highest amount on ‘defence’ Israel keeps the survivors in poverty and penury. See ‘Israel Is Waiting for Its Holocaust Survivors to Die,’

 The Failure of Starmer & Streeting to Give Any Support to the Nurses Proves the Irrelevance of the Labour Party - We Need a New Working Class Socialist Party

As you can see from the video the NHS strikers have overwhelming public support.  But public support doesn’t translate into victory against a government which is committed to transferring wealth from the poor to the rich.

We have had neo-liberal governments for the past 40 years and in that time the rich have grown richer. Since 2020 the richest 1% have, according to a new Oxfam report, grabbed nearly two-thirds of all new wealth worth $42 trillion created since 2020, almost twice as much money as the bottom 99 percent of the world’s population. During the past decade, the richest 1% have captured around half of all new wealth. 

The table below showshow, beginning with Ronald Reagan in the United States, wealth flowed from the poor to the rich. In 1967 the richest 20% had 43.6% of wealth. By 2014 this had increased to 51.2%, whereas the share of the poorest 20% declined from 4% to 3.1%. This continued under the Democrats and under Trump, with his tax cuts for the rich and Biden, the trend has continued.

According to Statistaand the Sunday TimesRich List the UK’s top 10 richest people are wealthier than ever. The cumulative wealth of the top 10 billionaires in the UK has grown from £47.77 billion in 2009 to £182 billion in 2022 - an increase of 281%.

Following the 2008 crash, UK’s billionaires have seen a steady and steep incline in their wealth. The upward trend continued despite the pandemic, which saw the UK’s economy shrink by 20.4% in the second quarter of 2020. 30.5m people in Europe were pushed into poverty. By way of contrast the UK’s 250 ultra wealthy saw their collective wealth surge to a record high of £653 billion in 2022.

George Dibbs, the head of the Center for Economic Justice at the Institute for Public Policy Research, explainedhow we are seeing a widening wealth gap

As we enter a once-in-a-generation cost of living crisis, the Sunday Times rich list shows us again that vast wealth often begets more wealth. That has proved particularly true during the pandemic, when the wealthiest accumulated more wealth than poorer people, who saved nothing.

As most people faced a cost of living crisis Rishi Sunak and Akshata Murty joinedthe UK rich list with a combined £730m fortune. Dominic Raab, now Deputy Prime Minister, saidit was “fantastic” news that Sunak had joined the rich list.

“He’s a fantastic example of someone who’s been successful in business, who’s coming to make a big impact in public service. I think we want more of those people. I think it’s fantastic that you’ve got someone of British-Indian origin, showing all people in our country that you can get to the top of politics.

The UK now has a record 177 billionaires, up six on 2021. Their combined wealth is up 9.4% to a record £653bn.

Nurses Picket Outside Brighton's Sussex County Hospital

This is the background to the current strike wave. It also explains the new anti-strike laws and the further attack on public protests with the new Public Order Bill. These bills have nothing to do with preventing ‘disruption’ to the public despite government’s lies. They have everything to do with defending the right of the rich to get richer.

The refusal of Starmer and Streeting, both of whom support further privatisation of the NHS, is contemptible. If they had a shred of honesty they would change the name of the Labour Party to ‘The New Tory Party’ but Honesty and Starmer is an oxymoron.

At the same time we have seen massive corruption arising from giving COVID contracts to friends and cronies of the Tories. Just 10 Conservative MPs and peers referredcompanies to a “VIP lane” that won £1.6bn of PPE contracts. The “VIP lane” was recently declared unlawful by the High Court but no one has been prosecuted by the Police because their sole focus is on benefit claimants. Government corruption is not their concern.

One Fifthof Covid contracts ‘raised red flags for possible corruption’. We have a corrupt government and a corrupt capitalist system where wealth flows upwards, away from workers to the parasites who preside over this system.

When Sunak and Starmer tell workers that we ‘cannot afford’ 19% pay increases for nurses we should bear in mind that the average pay packet of Chief Executives in the FTSE 100 companies jumpedby 39% to £3.4 million. The average UK CEO now collects 109 times that paid to the average British worker, up from 79 times in 2020.

About this Starmer, Reeves and the rest of the traitorous Labour MPs have nothing to say. After all Labour is now ‘business friendly’.

What we need to create is a genuine working class socialist party that defends the poor against the spivs, speculators and parasites who have plundered the economy whilst telling us that we ‘cannot afford’to pay decent wages and benefits. Neo-liberal capitalism means privatising the public sector and allowing the capitalist pigs to hide their ill gotten gains in tax havens whilst avoiding paying taxes.

Corbyn still does not understand that the ‘anti-Semitism’ allegations were designed to remove him and nothing more

People should sign up to the Socialist Labour Network’s appeal for a new mass working class party. The time is for socialists to get together and organise after the debacle of Corbyn who has proven that he couldn’t fight his way out of a paper bag with his appalling interviewwith Liz Kendall when, despite everything, he still accepted that there was a genuine ‘anti-Semitism’ crisis in the Labour Party.

Nurses Picket Outside Brighton's Sussex County Hospital

It is time for the trade unions to fight back. Individual strikes are not enough. Only a general strike that challenges the privileges of the idle rich and their supporters in parliament will challenge the Tories. It is clear that although welcome, the current strike wave, uncoordinated as it is, is not enough.

Nurses Picket Outside Brighton's Sussex County Hospital

Meanwhile everyone who can should join the strike picket lines and reject the divide and rule tactics of the ruling class. The trade union bureaucrats want a quiet life and would prefer to accept minimal concessions rather than lead a fight back. They need to have their feet held to the fire. We need a strategy of outright defiance of the trade union laws. Anti-strike laws are a negation of the most basic principles of a democratic society. It was Hitler who outlawed strikesand unions on May 2 1933. The anti-strike laws are nothing but a continuation of Hitlerism by other means.

Tony Greenstein

 Israel’s Supreme Court is and always has been a Court of Ethnic Cleansing, Colonialism and Zionism

80,000 people, almost all of them Jewish, demonstratedlast weekend against the judicial reforms of the new Coalition Government which would allow the Knesset to override any Supreme Court judgment by a one vote majority and which would enable the government to hand pick new Supreme Court judges.

Conspicuous by their absence were Israeli Palestinians. The message that went out was that this demonstration wasabout ‘protect(ing)  democracy in Jewish and Zionist Israel – and not democracy in Israel.’ In other words, Jewish Democracy.

It had already been made clear the previous week, when there were two demonstrations in Tel Aviv, that slogans such as ‘End the Occupation’ were not welcome. Mansour Abbas of the United Arab List, an Islamist Party which accepts that Israel is a Jewish State, in return for minor concessions, calledfor people not to bring the Palestinian flag.

The Supreme Court has always been a Zionist court. Although it has a token Arab judge that is for the sake of appearance. Not once has the Supreme Court struck down a racist piece of legislation whose purpose was to reduce the rights of Arab citizens. The Supreme Court is fully wedded to the idea of a Jewish Supremacist state.

From the Law of Return, which granted Jews a right to ‘return’ to Israel at the same time as Palestinian refugees were excluded, to the Absentee Property Law 1950, whose sole purpose was to confiscate land from Palestinians, the Supreme Court has been consistent in supporting anti-Palestinian laws.

Jeremy Corbyn, when asked, during the debate against Owen Smith in 2016 for leadership of the Labour Party, what he most admired about Israel and its achievements, said:

“I admire the verve and spirit of the towns and cities in Israel. I admire the separation of legal and political powers in the system of democratic government that’s there.”

It was one more act of appeasement by Corbyn, thus demonstrating his ignorance of the supremacist nature of the Israeli state.

The Supreme Court has presided over the theft of Palestinian land in the West Bank using a variety of legal tricks. In July 2022 it ruledthat the Mitzpeh Kramim settlement could stay because the land was stolen in ‘good faith’.

The Supreme Court has create the legal architecture of Israeli Apartheid. The most notable cases are those involving the question of whether Israel is a state of all its citizens or whether it is a state of the Jewish ‘nation’.

In 1972 this question was decided in George Tamarinv State of Israel.Tamarin wanted his nationality changed from ‘Jewish’ to ‘Israeli.’ Justice Agranat ruledthat

‘the desire to create an Israeli nation separate from the Jewish nation is not a legitimate aspiration. A division of the population into Israeli and Jewish nations would… negate the foundation on which the State of Israel was established. ‘There is no Israeli nation separate from the Jewish People. The Jewish People is composed not only of those residing in Israel but also of Diaspora Jewry.’

Why is a nationality embracing all of a State’s citizens, as opposed to the metaphysical ‘Jewish nation’, not legitimate? The Supreme Court did not say. In the process the Supreme Court clung to the Zionist fiction that Jews, from China to Argentina, India to Brazil, are members of a single Jewish Nation.

In 2013, in Uzzi Ornan v the State of Israel,the Supreme Court  confirmed the Tamarin rulingthat there was no such thing as an Israeli nationality. It statedthat ‘there is no proof of the existence of a uniquely 'Israeli' people’, ignoring the fact that every other state in the world accords the same nationality to those possessing the same citizenship and living within its borders.

What the court was doing was ruling that Israel is not a state of all of its citizens but only of its Jewish citizens and notionally Jews living outside Israel. The idea that Israel is a state of Jews, wherever they live, is the fiction that underpins Israeli Apartheid. Effectively it was saying that Jews are a race.

Today Zionists don’t talk openly of a Jewish race except for overt racists like the new ‘Culture’ Minister Miki Zohar MK who opinedthat ‘the “Jewish race” is the smartest in the world and possessing of the “highest human capital,”’

A mythical Jewish nation/race trumped the rights of Israel’s Palestinian citizens, which is why Israeli citizenship is meaningless because Jewish and non-Jewish citizens have very different rights  in a Jewish state.

If there was any doubt about this then Netanyahu made this explicit when he said, in 2019, in responseto Israeli actor, Rotem Sela, who had protested that even Arabs are human beings, that

Israel is not a state of all its citizens. According to the basic nationality law we passed, Israel is the nation state of the Jewish people – and only it.

In 2018 this was codified in the Jewish Nation State Law which made any notion of equality in Israel redundant. This law held that:

1 (a) The Land of Israel is the historical homeland of the Jewish People, in which the State of Israel was established.

1 (b) The State of Israel is the nation state of the Jewish People in which it realizes its natural, cultural, religious and historical right to self-determination.

1 (c) The realization of the right to national self- determination in the State of Israel is exclusive to the Jewish People.

Section 4(b) relegated Arabic from the status of a recognised language to one with a ‘special status’ which in practice has meant no status. Section 7 originally supported the creation of Jewish only settlements and communities but, with an eye to how this would be interpreted overseas this became

‘The State views the development of Jewish settlement as a
national value, and shall act to encourage and promote its
establishment and consolidation.’

Even though Israel has been established for nearly 75 years, Jewish settlement, i.e. colonisation and displacement of Israeli Palestinians, is still a ‘national value’. Judaisation of the Galilee, Negev/Naqab and East Jerusalem is an ongoing process of house demolition, land theft and the eviction of Palestinians. In nearly every case the High Court (i.e. the Supreme Court) has ruled in favour of Jewish settlement and applied the Absentee Property Law which allows Jews to ‘reclaim’ properties that they owned prior to 1948 whilst at the same time denying Arab citizens or residents any equivalent right to reclaim homes that they once owned.

In July 2021 the Supreme Court held, by 10-1, that the overtly racist Jewish Nation State Law was constitutional even though it explicitly discriminated against Israel’s Palestinian citizens. In the process they affirmed that that Arab citizenship was all but worthless.

The one Supreme Court justice who ruled against the law was its only Arab member, George Karra. Not one Jewish judge was prepared to leave their Zionism and racism at home. This is the Supreme Court that thousands of Israeli Jews are taking to the streets for.

Adalah, the Legal Centre for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, issued the following statementat the time:

The Israel Supreme Court approved a law that establishes a constitutional identity, which completely excludes those who do not belong to the majority group. This Law is illegitimate and violates absolute prohibitions of international law… the Attorney General and the Knesset decided to ignore and disregard these violations in their responses to the case….

The Israeli Supreme Court has not protected Palestinians from the most racist laws in the world since World War II and the fall of the apartheid regime in South Africa. Rather, the Court upheld the Citizenship Law, banning Palestinian family unification in Israel; the Admissions’ Committees Law, which allows small communities built on state land to discriminate against Palestinian families using the criterion of “social suitability”; the Nakba Law, which prohibits any groups or schools that receive state funding from commemorating the Nakba (the Catastrophe); the Boycott Law, which makes calls for boycott a civil tort, actionable for damages; and now the Jewish Nation-State Basic Law. Adalah will continue to work internationally to expose the discriminatory and racist nature of this law, a law which clearly shows the Israeli regime, as a colonial one, with distinct characteristics of apartheid.

Those who are protesting in Israel are demonstrating for Jewish rights in a Jewish state not for the democratic rights of all Israeli citizens. That is why Israel’s Arab minority, apart from a few professional Arab politicians, ignored these demonstrations.

Below I summarise some of the more egregious decisions of the Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court has never hesitated to defer to Israel’s internal security police, Shin Bet and the Israeli army. There isn’t a single instance in which the Court challenged the judgement of the army or police when it came to infringing on the liberties of Palestinians.

Ha’aretz described how, last September, the court rejected a petition to release a hunger-striking administrative detainee Khalil Awawdeh whose body weight had dropped to 38 kilograms (under 84 pounds). He was going blind and his consciousness was blurred. His hunger strike had lasted at that point for 172 days.

Justices Daphne Barak-Erez, Ofer Grosskopf and Alex Stein wrote that after having reviewed confidential material that Awawdeh’s lawyer could not see, there exists “firm and substantial justification” for Awawdeh’s continued detention.’

As Awawdeh’s condition deteriorated even further another petition was submitted to the High Court and Justice Anat Baron, a ‘liberal’ judge by Israeli standards, ruled that no significant change had occurred in the circumstances that would justify court intervention.

Along with Justices Stein and Chaled Kabub, Baron ruled that the fact that no indictment had been filed had no bearing on the strength of the evidence. Revealing the evidence “might severely harm state security.” In other words, the High Court of Justice decided that the dying man must not be released because of the danger he posed.

And then what happened?

24 hours later, wonder of wonders: The Shin Bet security service agreed to release the detainee upon his completion of the current period of detention, at the beginning of October. Until then he will stay in the hospital as a free man.

Administrative Detention is imprisonment without trial. It is repugnant in any democratic society. Internment Without Trialwas last introduced in the UK in 1971 in Northern Ireland and abolished in 1975 yet in Israel it is a permanent feature of the legal system.

Israel routinely locks up Palestinians without trial, for 6 months at a time, renewable indefinitely, without the High Court saying a word. It accepts, without question, the word of Shin Bet. The ‘evidence’ is not seen by either the prisoner or his legal representatives. The High Court acts as a military court when it comes to Palestinians. Jews rarely experience Administrative Detention, however heinous their offences, because Israel’s Supreme Court is Israel’s Colonial Court.

Ha’aretz commented:

The justices of the High Court must now hang their heads in shame. If further proof were needed that in matters of the occupation the court is nothing more than a hollow rubber stamp, a body that automatically and blindly submits to every Shin Bet caprice, this case is incontrovertible proof. On Tuesday, Awawdeh was still dangerous, on Wednesday he was no longer dangerous, and all this with the approval of the High Court of Justice that, as in many other cases, was led up the garden path by the Shin Bet.

The role of the High Court is to oversee and restrain the Shin Bet, not to become its abject servant. This week the court showed it fails in this duty, and also made a laughing stock of itself.

In September 2022 it was revealed that Israel's Supreme Court Had 74 Interns in the Past Two Years. Only One Was Arab.A Supreme Court internship is highly prestigious, and is considered a springboard to advanced studies at prestigious universities abroad, and to positions at leading law firms and the State’s prosecution. Every Justice among the 15 serving may choose two interns for an internship period of 12 or 18 months. Some become fully-paid legal assistants to the judges following their internship.

Professor Muhammad Watted, Dean of Safed Academic College Law School explained that

an intern doesn’t sit at the Supreme Court to make coffee. They speak their mind, persuade, and can provide the judge for whom they work with a different perspective.

 Prof. Yuval Elbashan, formerly Dean of the law school at the Ono Academic College commented that

Since time immemorial, it has been university graduates interning at the Supreme Court, mostly from Tel Aviv University and the Hebrew University. It is sad to see that nothing has changed. It’s the same old song….

A Supreme Court internship is very prestigious and highly-regarded. It enables admission to advanced studies at the leading American universities.”

Gideon Levy’s in A Hostile Take Over of a Hostile Institutionwrote that:

This pathetic battle over the character of Israeli democracy, a democracy intended solely for the privileged, is the joke of the year. It’s a tempest in an apartheid teacup: Our democracy-for-Jews-only is in danger. Save it! All of the pathos and every piece of artillery has been pulled out to save this fake democracy.

But it is also not a democracy when 5 million people are living under its auspices with no citizenship and no rights, with the approval of the High Court of Justice – that is, the Supreme Court sitting as a constitutional. Consequently, the hysteria that has erupted over the planned injury to the Supreme Court is bizarre and even outrageous….

Through its support for the occupation, the court sowed the poisonous seeds whose fruits we are reaping today. If it had refused to legitimize the occupation back when it had the power to do so, there would be no Itamar Ben-Gvir, there would be no settlements and there might even be no occupation.

It’s impossible to view it as a democracy with the exception of the occupation: The occupation has become an inseparable part of the state, that defines its evil system of government – apartheid with the High Court’s approval.

What did the High Court do to protect democracy against the occupation? Almost nothing. What could it have done? Almost anything. …

the Palestinian people, which lives under occupation, received no relief from this court, the court betrayed its trust. A court that never took a position in principle against the legality of the settlements; that approved administrative detentions, aka detention with trial; that delayed for years before graciously agreeing to take a stand against torture; that approved mass deportation… and home demolitions; and that turned its face against international law is a court that sabotaged democracy.

It’s actually rightists and settlers who ought to be grateful to this court for having legitimized the occupation for them. The left should have come out against it long ago….

The Supreme Court functioned more like a military court than like a gatekeeper. It was the obedient servant of the executive branch. It’s impossible to sing paeans of praise to it now and mourn the fact that it is being weakened.

Great danger now lies ahead for civil rights, freedom of expression and other freedoms in Israel. For instance, we will quickly find ourselves with a Knesset for Jews only, and that will be only the beginning.

Demolishing the Homes of Palestinian ‘terrorists’ but not Jewish terrorists

Perhaps the most egregious example of the ingrained racism of Israel’s Supreme Court concerns its rulingthat the homes of Palestinians engaged in resistance to the occupation which kills an Israeli should be demolished but that the homes of Jewish terrorists should not be demolished.

Demolishing a home because a member of that family engages in ‘terrorism’ is itself illegal under international law because it is a form of collective punishment. However the Supreme Court regularly      disregards international law.

The argument that is used to justify this state of affairs is that Arabs are deterred from attacking Israelis by demolishing their family homes whereas Jews are not deterred.

So in the case of Mohammed Abu Khdeir, a 16 year old Palestinian boy who had petrol poured down his throat which was then set alight, the homes of Yosef Haim Ben David, 33, and two minors were not demolished.  If however the roles had been reversed, then the perpetrators’ family homes would have been demolished.

The bogus argument is made that Palestinian ‘terrorism’ is far  higher than Jewish terrorism.  It is bogus because of course most Jewish terrorism is by the army.  In other words it is legal as befits an occupying arm.

Whatever sophistry is employed the fact is that there are two standards of justice in Israel – one for Palestinians and another for Israelis.

The May 21 Riots and Pogroms

In May 2021 a series of riots and pogroms erupted as the Israeli state attacked the Gaza Strip. True to form the Israeli judicial system, just like the Czarist authorities over a century ago, gaoled the victims of the violence and dealt kindly with the pogromists. Except that in Czarist Russia the victims were Jewish whereas today they are Arabs.

Alan Dershowitz, whose career has included defending Jeffrey Epstein and American neo-Nazis, said that:

“It will make it much more difficult for people like me who try to defend Israelin the international court of public opinion to defend them effectively, It would be a tragedy to see the Supreme Court weakened.”

But it was Aharon Barak who clinched the argument.

The High Court has acted as a kind of legal “Iron Dome,”. Without a credible independent court, deemed as ensuring Israel’s democratic functioning, including in its treatment of the Palestinians, “our chief of staff and government ministers will immediately be arrested when they travel overseas…  The leaders of the country will be put on trial in the International Criminal Court in The Hague.”

In a speech in January 2019 Supreme Court President Esther Hayut said that

one of the important side effects of judicial review is its contribution to Israel’s international legitimization.” Its intervention helps “bolster Israel’s claim of ‘complementarity’ when it deals with criminal proceedings in foreign courts, whether international or those of other countries.”

Hayut was right. The last time Israel dealt with the International Court of Justice in the Hague, the government hid behind the High Court’s apron. The Foreign Ministry argued that the High Court’s rulings (which ordered the state to change the route in some places) prove Israel’s ability to scrutinize itself.

In response to the ICJ’s ruling that the separation fence is a form of annexation and is therefore illegal, the Likud-led government headed by Ariel Sharon said that “Israel will continue acting in accordance with the decisions of the High Court, which has exclusive authority to discuss this issue.”

It is no surprise that Hayut has broken with tradition and entered the political arena with a fierce attack on the proposed legal reforms. As Akiva Eldar wrote:

Castrating the High Court would destroy the warped legal edifice created by Justice Meir Shamgar when he served as the military advocate general. He invented the term “administered territories” as a replacement for “occupied territories” and proposed throwing the High Court’s doors wide open to Palestinian residents of the territories, even though they aren’t Israeli citizens.

Baker Zoubi described a series of cases where the courts dealt leniently with Jewish pogromists and harshly with Palestinian Israelis. In June 2021 Ya’akov Cohen was convicted of violently assaulting Said Musa, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, in Bat Yam. The prosecution sought a sentence of 4-7 years for Cohen, who kicked Musa while he was lying helpless on the ground after having been dragged out of his car by several Jewish assailants, including Cohen. The judge however sentenced him to only 15 months in prison, justifying his ruling by arguing that Cohen “believed in the moment that the victim of the crime [Musa] was trying to carry out a car-ramming attack.”

In November 2021 Adham Bashir was convicted of taking part in an attack on Mor Janashvili, a Jewish Israeli, in Akka. The prosecution requested that Bashir, who threw a stone at Janashvili’s car and broke its windshield, be sentenced to 10-13 years. The three judges agreed and sentenced him to 10 years in prison explaining that: “This was an ugly and dark attack that requires significant punishment.”

Sabrin Bashir, the mother of Adham Bashir, said that a Jewish man rammed his car into several Arab youths, and her son “went to see the youth who was run over and he was a relative of ours.” After he had been arrested

We were prevented from seeing him for several months. They kept telling us that the indictment talks about throwing a stone at the ramming vehicle, even though the driver got out of it and fled. Do you get such an indictment for throwing a stone at an empty vehicle? The sentence does not match the act.

The prosecutor’s office decided not to file charges against Jewish Israelis who were suspected of involvement in the shooting of Musa Hassona in Lydd/Lod in May 2021. At the same time, seven Arabs from the same city were indicted for the killing of Yigal Yehoshua, after they admitted to throwing stones at his car.

According to Mossawa Center, a Haifa-based human rights organization, the police and the Shin Bet arrested about 3,600 Israeli Palestinian citizens since the events of May 2021. Around 360 were indicted, and more than 100 were convicted and sent to prison. In the rest of the cases the accused are under house arrest or in detention until the end of the proceedings. According to Mossawa, in cases where appeals were filed, the Supreme Court increased the sentence.

Data provided in June 2021 to Aida Touma-Suleiman MK from Hadash showed that the prosecutor’s office requested the arrest of 190 Palestinian citizens and 17 Jewish citizens as a result of the unrest. The Al-Mezan Center for Human Rights reported that 77% of indictments for crimes of incitement to violence and racism filed by the prosecutor’s office in recent years were filed against Arab citizens.

At the end of November 2022, four residents of Tamra received prison terms of between five and seven years, after they were convicted of throwing stones and beating a Jewish Israeli who entered Tamra during the May events. Unusually, the Jewish man, Shir Alkalay, actually requested that his attackers receive a lighter sentence after signing a traditional “Sulha” (forgiveness) agreement with them, but the court ruled that

“the harm to the public interest must be considered more broadly here… the personal security and right to freedom of movement of the Jewish population are damaged to the core.”

When has an Israeli colonial court given a moment’s consideration to the freedom of movement of the Arab population?

Muhammad Agbaria from the village of Mu’awiya was convicted after confessing to firing a gun at police officers in Wadi Ara, as well as throwing bricks at police and Shin Bet officers from the roof of his house when they came to arrest him the next day, injuring them. His family claimed that the confession was extracted from him by force.

Ilham Agbaria, Muhammad’s sister, said that her brother had been in detention for a year-and-a-half before being sentenced.

“We’re appealing to the Supreme Court, but we don’t expect his sentence to be reduced. Criminals and murderers aren’t sentenced to 15 years, but when a guy goes out and shouts about respect for him and his people, he gets such an unjust punishment.

“We see how they punished Jews who attacked Arabs, and how they punish armed criminals in our society,” said Nassim Qabha, Agbaria’s son-in-law. “They think they can prevent youths from going out to protest the next time, but it won’t help them, because force doesn’t work against our people.”

In December 2022 dozens of mothers from the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem organized a protest in front of the Jerusalem District Court, where the mother of prisoner Bilal al-Jabari said that her 19-year-old son has been detained for a year without trial, with the prosecution demanding an eight-year prison sentence.

The authorities insist on unfair punishments against young people, despite the daily harm to the residents of Sheikh Jarrah from settlers, all under the auspices of the police.

Balad chairman Sami Abu Shehadeh said that the

unfair rulings are a clear testament to the fact that this system is part of Israel’s apartheid regime, which allows the murderers of Musa Hassuna and Muhammad Qiyan(a Palestinian citizen of Israel who was killed by undercover police in Umm al-Fahm in May 2021) roam free, while the victim who protected his home is being put on trial.

According to Al-Mezan, although there are similarities in the details of the indictments filed against Jews and those filed against Arabs, the sentences against the Arab defendants were specifically tailored to punish young Arabs for their participation in the events of May 2021.

This is a double standard between Jews and Arabs in rulings on indictments regarding national issues… the severe punishments are a dangerous precedent and indicate that the Israeli justice system is racing toward extremism and discrimination.

In May 2022 Ha’aretz describedthe High Court  as ‘the Occupation's Rubber Stamp’ before going on to describe it as

 the kashrut department of the settlement enterprise and the slaughterhouse where petitions against the occupation’s injustices were sent to die. Our supreme legal institution upholds land theft, supports home demolitions as a punitive measure, signs off on detentions without trial, allows the prolonged blockade of two million people in the Gaza Strip and hasn’t prevented entire communities from being evicted from their homes.

It described the High Court as a

‘whitewasher of the injustices of the occupation. In a ruling issued in the dead of night – ironically, between Memorial Day and Independence Day – the court permitted the expulsion from their homes of about 1,000 Palestinian residents of Masafer Yatta… for the benefit of Israel Defense Forces training. As a result, eight Palestinian villages whose residents have lived in them for generations will be destroyed.

David Mintz, Ofer Grosskopf and Isaac Amit, rejected the petitioners’ argument that they had lived there before it was declared a firing zone in 1981. Miraculously, none of the hundreds of Jewish settlers living in the area (most of whom came later) has been asked to leave his home or his settlement for the army’s firing zone. And so, with the imprimatur of the High Court, Israeli apartheid has been legitimized in this area of the South Hebron Hills.

In view of the selective expulsion based on nationality, it will no longer be possible to refute the argument that an apartheid regime has replaced the military occupation in the territories. Occupation is temporary by definition; apartheid is liable to persist forever. The High Court approved it….

These 1,000 residents, over whose heads the sword of expulsion now hangs, were born and raised in this land of caves, in which shepherd communities live in very harsh conditions, without electricity or running water, all while remarkably preserving their traditional way of life. This doesn’t only involve expelling people from their homes but also destroying a living culture. The High Court lent a hand to this.

The court also rejected the argument that the prohibition in international law against forced population transfer is binding on the court or that it applies to Israel…. Justice David Mintz, who is himself a settler, in effect ruled that international law on this matter, and perhaps also regarding other matters, is not binding on one country in the world – Israel – and depends upon its consent….

The fact that it was published in the dead of night may indicate that even within its walls there are those who recognized the disgrace this verdict brings upon the court and the country.

Amira Hass described Masafer Yatta as home to traditional Palestinian cave-dwellers since at least the beginning of the 20th century. The Prosecutor described the area and the structures that have been built alongside the original residential caves – including schools, mosques, and a medical clinic. Because Palestinians are never granted planning permission they were all ‘illegal’.

The Palestinians’ lawyer, Shlomo Lecker, attempted to correct this misrepresentation, fearing the judges would get the wrong impression. The clinic is a tent, Lecker noted. As for the schools, he said,

it’s a shame there are no photos showing how pitiful they are, since Israel has been repeatedly denying Palestinians permission to build.’

The argument that Palestinians rarely if ever receive planning permission, unlike Jewish settlers, made no impression on the ‘justices’. After all that is what Zionism is about.

Lecker told the judges that there was no escaping the conclusion that in the eyes of the state, there are legal people (who are entitled to live comfortably in recently built settlements) and illegal people, who aren’t entitled to the same comfort as the settlers, despite having lived in the region long before them. It is they that the state demands permanently leave their homes.

Removal of Palestinians was precisely the intention of Ariel Sharon in the early 1980’s. Preventing the spread of the Arabs in the area required that it be declared a firing zone, Sharon told the army, according to minutes from a 1981 meeting of the Ministerial Committee on Settlement Affairs. There, like in the Jordan Valley, the genetic code of the firing zones is halting the process of natural Palestinian rural development that has been ongoing for many generations.

Another measure to halt the natural development was the transfer of Palestinian land reserves and water sources to the settlements, contrary to international law. In the early 1980s, Israel built the settlements of Carmel, Maon, Metzadot Yehuda and Susya in the Masafer Yatta area. With the support of Israeli authorities, these settlements have been joined over the years by additional illegal and unauthorized outposts: Havat Talia, built in the 1990s, followed by Avigayil, Havat Maon, and Mitzpeh Ya’ir - all built in the early 2000s.

Prosecutor Bart is a resident of the settlement of Neveh Daniel, east of Bethlehem, in the Gush Etzion Settlements Bloc. One of the three justices considering the petitions is David Mintz, a resident of the settlement of Dolev, west of Ramallah. As a Palestinian folk proverb asks: ‘When the rooster’s the judge, what kind of a ruling can a grain of wheat expect?’

Tony Greenstein

 It’s Time To Reclaim the Memory of ALL Those Who Died in the Nazi Holocaust from Zionism and the Supporters of Israeli Apartheid

Stephen Kapos, Holocaust Survivor, in conversation.

Friday 27^th March is Holocaust Memorial Day and the Socialist Labour Network is holding a meeting to remember and commemorate ALL the victims of the Nazi Holocaust.

Not only did 6 million Jews die during the Nazi Holocaust but so too did 1 million Roma Gypsies, half a million Disabled, over 3 million Russian POWs and up to 3 million Poles as well as millions of Russian civilians who the Nazis decided should not be kept alive.

But to the Zionists only the Jews were victims of the Holocaust. The Jewish Virtual Library wrote, quoting Yad Vashem

By the 1950s, the English term Holocaust came to be employed as the term for the murder of the Jews in Europe by the Nazis. Although the term is sometimes used with reference to the murder of other groups by the Nazis, strictly speaking, those groups do not belong under the heading of the Holocaust, nor are they included in the generally accepted statistic of six million victims of the Holocaust.

According toYehuda Bauer, the principal Zionist holocaust historian,

The problem… is not that non-Jews were not victims [of the Nazis]; they were. It is that Wiesenthal’s arbitrarily chosen tally of non-Jewish victims diminishes the centrality to the Nazi ideology of systematically wiping any trace of the Jewish people from the planet.

In fact, he said, the term “genocide” could accurately be applied to the 2 million to 3 million Poles murdered and millions more enslaved by the Nazis. But the mass murder of the Poles, Roma and others should not come under the rubric “Holocaust,” a term that Holocaust historians generally dislike because of its religious connotations but nonetheless have accepted as describing only the annihilation that the Nazis hoped to visit on the Jews.

“All Jews of the world had to be annihilated,” Bauer said. “That was the intent. There was never an idea in Nazi minds to murder all the Russians

As my bookexplains the uniqueness of the fate of the Jews compared to anyone else is central to Zionist distortion of holocaust history and underpins the racial nationalism of Zionism. It selects Jews out of all other victims as unique.

Bauer is in any case wrong. It was not part of Nazi ideology that all Jews had to be annihilated. Up to 1941 the Nazis wanted to expel not annihilate the Jews of Europe. Annihilation came with war when deportation was no longer an option.

The Warsaw Ghetto burning after the Nazis set it alight

Bauer argued, in a debate with Sybil Milton, that the Roma were not victims of the holocaust because they were singled out by the Nazis because of their wandering, asocial and criminal lifestyle. Milton’s reply was withering:

Defining an entire ethnic group as anti-social and criminal is a classic example of racism. I do not know why Mr. Bauer does not understand this.

Idith Zertal, Professor of History at the Hebrew University, wrote in Israel’s Holocaust – The Politics of Nationhood that 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.’

 ‘The transference of the holocaust situation on to the Middle East reality… 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.

Zionism’s leaders have sought to equate Palestinian hostility to Zionism with the Nazis’ hatred of the Jews. Socialist Labour NetworkYad VashemSybil Milton, Benjamin Netanyahu went even further. In a speech to the World Zionist Organisation Congress in 2015 he blamed the Palestinian Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj al Amin Husseini, (who the Zionists and British   High Commissioner Sir Herbert Samuel appointed in 1921) for the Holocaust. Netanyahu  exonerated Hitler in the process.

When Israel laid siege to Beirut, Prime Minister Menachem Begin compared Yasser Arafat to Hitler in his bunker. In 2008 Defence Minister Matan Vilnai threatened to give ‘Gaza a taste of the 'shoah’. Abba Eban compared the Green Line between Israel and the West Bank as the ‘Auschwitz borders’.

Israel and its Holocaust propaganda museum Yad Vashem specialises in escorting fascists and Hitler admirers such as Bolsonaro and Duterte, Presidents of Brazil and the Philippines, around it, to say nothing of welcoming South Africa Prime Minister John Vorster in 1976. Vorster had been interned during the war for Nazi sympathies.

Nothing gives more encouragement to holocaust deniers than the Zionist attempt to use the holocaust to sanitise Israel’s war crimes. Israel has used the murder of 6 million Jews to intimidate the opponents of Zionism, including Jewish opponents.

For Zionism the Holocaust is unique, a Jewish-only affair. Drawing universal lessons from the Holocaust meant the ‘plunder of [Jewish] moral capital’ according to the American Jewish Committee. Gerhard Riegner of the World Jewish Congress declared that

‘Auschwitz was not only a national memory belonging to the Jewish people… it was also an important political asset.’

The question most often asked is how is it that Jewish people, who have themselves been victims of fascism and racism, can now do to others what they themselves experienced. My answer has always been that any group of people, given the right set of circumstances, are capable of racism, murder and ethnic cleansing.

It is time to call a halt to Israel’s defiling of the name of the Holocaust victims. As my new book Zionism During the Holocaustexplains, during the Holocaust the Zionist movement was not interested in what was happening in Europe.  Indeed it actively fought rescue attempts for Jewish refugees that weren’t directed at Palestine.

In a speech David Ben Gurion gave on 9 December 1938 regarding the Kindertransport scheme which rescued 10,000 Jewish children:

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.

Ben Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister, explained his thinking in a memo to the Zionist Executive of 17 December 1938:

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.

Rudolf Kasztner, the leader of Hungarian Zionism, was the most notorious Zionist collaborator with the Nazis

In other words whenever rescue of Jewish refugees was raised it must be immediately linked to the question of Palestine. On more than one occasion, this resulted in the collapse of rescue schemes. As historian Christopher Sykes wrote about the 1938 Evian Conference which Roosevelt called to try and deal with the Jewish refugee situation:

From the start they [the Zionists] regarded the whole enterprise with hostile indifference... If the 31 nations had done their duty and shown hospitality to those in dire need then the pressure on the National Home and the heightened enthusiasm of Jews with Palestine would both have been relaxed. This was the last thing that the Zionist leaders wished for…. Even in the more terrible days ahead they made no secret of the fact, even when talking to Gentiles, that they did not want Jewish settlements outside Palestine to be successful... The Zionists wanted to do something more for Jews than merely help them to escape danger…. that such was the basic Zionist idea is not a matter of opinion but a fact abundantly provable by evidence... [my emphasis - Crossroads to Israel]

On Friday we have a wonderful line-up of speakers including two Jewish holocaust survivors, Suzanne Weiss and Stephen Kapos.

Suzanne Weiss

Suzanne Weiss was born to immigrant Jews in Paris in 1941 and targeted for death by the Nazis. Suzanne was hidden by a French farm family between 1943 and 1945. After losing her parents in the war, Suzanne was adopted by a New York family in 1950.

Suzanne has been active throughout her life in a variety of social justice movements. She has spoken on the Holocaust and her support for Palestinian freedom to faith communities, community and activist groups, and high school and university gatherings.

Suzanne’s memoir, Holocaust to Resistance: My Journey, was published by Fernwood in October 2019.

Stephen Kapos was a small child when the Nazis came to Budapest. His early life was spent hiding from the Arrow Cross, the Hungarian Fascists who would round up Jews and shoot them into the Danube. Separated from both his parents during the Siege of Budapest, Stephen was hidden in children's homes on false papers. His father was on the Kasztner train and ended up in Bergen Belsen and Tieresenstadt. Because of his early experience of extreme racism, Stephen is an activist for the Palestinian cause.

Dr Adrian Marsh

Dr Adrian Marsh is a Researcher in Romani Studies at the Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul (SRII).  

Ali Abunimah has been describedas a ‘Lightning Rod of the Boycott Israel Movement’. He is also the Founding Editor of the much-loved Electronic Intifada, the premier Palestinian web site.

Tony Greenstein is a long-time Jewish anti-Zionist and Palestine solidarity activist. He has just brought out a new book Zionism  During the Holocaust.

Please come to the meeting and help make it a success. By coming you help ensure that the days when the Zionists used the holocaust as a weapon against the Palestinians have come to an end. Coming to hear the wonderful line up of speakers is a basic act of solidarity.

Tony Greenstein  

 Mann combines Opposition to ‘anti-Semitism’ with Virulent Racism against Gypsies, Black and Muslim People

Loudmouth Mann confronts Ken Livingstone

I have covered John Mann before when he lied about and harassed a 90 year old Jewish Dr Glatt.

In July 2019 John Mann was appointed by Theresa May as her advisor on ‘anti-Semitism’. In September Mann was made ‘anti-Semitism Czar’ and elevated to the Lords by Boris Johnson.

When Theresa May appointed John Mann to lead the fight against ‘anti-Semitism’ it was a case of one racist appointing another racist

As ‘Anti-Semitism Czar’Mann saw it as his duty to try and close down media outlets which didn’t conform to his racist Apartheid agenda. Mann is not a man to appreciate irony because if he did he would have known that before the advent of Hitler, Czar Nicholas II was the world’s most infamous anti-Semite who presided over the deaths of thousands of Jews.

Having failed to close down The Canary and Skawkbox, Mann then set his sights on indoctrinating school children. Citing a report from the Henry Jackson Society, a byword in Islamaphobia, he said that he said that

"It is not enough to teach about the Holocaust," quoting the report and urged ministers to guarantee funding for schools to teach about contemporary anti-Jewish hatred (i.e. anti-Zionism).

You can get a flavour of the HJS's views on racism from its Associate Director (2011-2018) Douglas Murray, author of The Strange Death of Europe’. The theme of the book is summed up in its title:

Europe is dying — being murdered, in fact — by hordes of Muslim immigrants, aided in their task by craven liberal politicians The Far Right Is Obsessed With a Book About Muslims Destroying Europe

Murray gave an intellectual veneer to the White Replacement Theory which found its voice at the neo-Nazi Charlottesville rally in the United States when anti-fascist Heather Heyer was murdered as the marchers chanted‘The Jews Shall Not Replace Us’.

Douglas Murray

The Guardian reported that

Douglas Murray, complained last year that London had “become a foreign country” because white Britons were a minority in 23 of 33 London boroughs.” Murray has also been pictured with Robert Spencer, the far-right US anti-Islam campaigner banned last year from Britain by the Home Office.

In 2012 the HJS's director William Shawcross said “Europe and Islam is one of the greatest, most terrifying problems of our future”.

The White Replacement Theory leads inexorably to the idea that the White races are under threat because the Jews have encouraged and helped stimulate Black and Muslim immigration whilst keeping their own Jewish state racially pure.

Mann is fond of quoting from the HJS because the anti-Semitism he is concerned about isn’t about hatred or hostility to Jews but about criticism of Israel - the ‘new anti-Semitism’.

Mann is best described by the findings of the Employment Tribunal in Fraser –v- University College Union. The case was brought by a Ronnie Fraser against his own trade union, UCU. He alleged anti-Semitism. UCU’s offence was supporting a Boycott of Israel. Their judgment (para. 148) stated:

Mr Mann … told us that the leaders of the Respondents were at fault for the way in which they conducted debates but did not enlighten us as to what they were doing wrong or what they should be doing differently. He did not claim ever to have witnessed any Congress or other UCU meeting. And when it came to antisemitism in the context of debate about the Middle East, he announced, “It’s clear to me where the line is …” but unfortunately eschewed the opportunity to locate it for us. Both parliamentarians clearly enjoyed making speeches. Neither seemed at ease with the idea of being required to answer a question not to his liking.

As his parting shot on leaving the Commons Mann launched an attack on Jeremy Corbyn for having given the ‘green light’ to anti-Semites.

He (Corbyn) has not just hijacked my political party – he has hijacked its soul and its ethics. I will never forgive him for that.

When John Mann talks about ‘ethics’ it is like a mafia chief giving a lecture on crime prevention or Harold Shipman lecturing on care for the elderly.

If Mann was seriously concerned about anti-Semitism then one would assume that in his 18 year parliamentary career that he was equally vociferous about all forms of racism. In fact no other form of racism disturbed him. But that may be because there were no freebies or parliamentary jaunts to be had.

Mann was one of the few Labour supporters of Brexit in Parliament. Brexit, which was motivated by fear and hostility to migrants and dreams of Empire past, was at one with Mann’s toxic views.

Throughout his time in parliament, Mann was distinguished for his pro-war record. He voted in support of the Iraq war in March 2003.

Not once did Mann speak out against New Labour’s Islamaphobia and demonisation of refugees. When racist Labour MP Phil Woolas was ejectedfrom the Commons for lying about his opponent at the 2010 General Election, he had no greater supporter than Mann.

The Guardian described Mann as Woolas’s best friend, best man and political ally since the first day at Manchester University”. When Harriet Harman suspended Woolas from the Labour Party after his ejection from Parliament, she faced“a backbench revolt”

Among those to have spoken out in support of Woolas was John Mann, a close friend of his… (he) has been backing Woolas via telephone calls with a journalist at the Guardian).

When Harman cast Woolas adrift Mann saidthat ‘A period of silence from Harriet Harman would now be very welcome.’ Clearly Mann did not understand the irony of him telling anyone to be quiet.

Mann was quoted as saying that Woolas’s ejection had

profound implications for British democracy... Woolas is the first case of an MP being disbarred by the courts for malpractice since 1911.

Woolas did not just lie when he alleged that his Lib Dem opponent supported violent Muslim Jihadists, he deliberately sought a white working class vote by portraying all Muslims as terrorists and violent jihadists. A decision wastaken by his campaign team:

to 'make the white folk angry' by depicting an alleged campaign by those who they described generically as Asians to 'take Phil out' and then present Mr Watkins as in league with them.

When it came to the 2014 Immigration Act, which led directly to the Windrush Scandal, Mann abstained. Being an Opposition member it was the equivalent of supporting the government. It was the ‘anti-Semitic’ Corbyn who was one of only 6 Labour MPs who voted against the Act.

In 2007 Mann produced ‘the Bassetlaw Anti Social Behaviour Handbook. It describedGypsies and Travellers as “anti-social elements” in terms similar to the Nazi depiction of Gypsies.

This handbook is designed to help you deal with problems you may face in your street or in your community. There are lots of different types of anti-social behaviour…

Amongst these problems were Travellers. Mann’s advice was

The police have powers to remove any gypsies or travellers, and have powers to direct people to leave the land…

In 2016 Mann was interviewedby Police in connection with his pamphlet.  Gypsies are protectedby the Equality Act 2010. 

Ben Bennett, a 13 year old Traveller, who made a complaint to the Police, described how Mann’s pamphlet made him:

‘very upset’. I can’t understand why John Mann MP would choose to talk solely about my community in such a derogatory manner.’

Mann claims he is motivated by the 6 million Jews who died in the holocaust but he has nothing to say about how up to one million Gypsies were exterminated in the Porajmos. The Nazis considered criminal, asocial elements just like Mann.

It is no surprise that Boris Johnson, who was notoriousfor his racist and anti-Semiticcomments, made Mann his ‘anti-Semitism Czar’, elevating him to the Lords.

Mann made his intentions known from the start. He was going to concentrate on the Left press. Someone who was genuinely concerned with racism would have focused on the Daily Mail or Sun. Mann’s targets were the alternative media - The Canary and Skwawkbox.

In an article Corbynite sites feature far-right tropesby ‘liar’ Lee Harpin, whose inaccuracies costthe Jewish Chronicle a small fortune, Skwawkbox and The Canary were accused of a “heavily negative coverage of Jewish issues” to anti-Semitic audiences.

What were these ‘Jewish issues.’ Harpin did not say but we can guess - Palestine and Israel. The same Israeli state which has been condemned as an Apartheid state by the world’s main human rights groups such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.

Mann has consistently engaged in the guilt-by-associationtactics favoured by Joseph McCarthy. If you want a lesson in how to corrupt the English language, take the paragraph below which equates The Canary and Skwawkbox with neo-Nazis on the basis of an alleged opposition to capitalism. Fascists have never opposed capitalism. The Nazis called themselves ‘national socialists’ yet the first thing they did when they gained power was to put trade unionists and communists in concentration camps.

“despite the huge differences in the beliefs that are most foundational to their ideologies, articles published on all three sites share an opposition to capitalism, globalisation, and liberalism, adopt similar positions on many questions of foreign policy, and fulminate against a supposed adversary whose Jewishness is extensively highlighted (even if in different ways).

John Mann - Supports all forms of racism except 'antisemitism'

TR News, the official website of far-right activist… Tommy Robinson, has intentionally attempted to take the side of Jews and Israel, 

Robinson, like most anti-Semites, openly supports Zionism. Mann’s polemics ironically owe their origin to Nazi propaganda techniques which sought to portray opposites as being equal. For example they equated capitalism and communism, which they held were controlled by Jews. John Mann is a walking conspiracy theory:

TR News has resorted to defending those Muslims who were seen to embrace pro-Western right-wing ideology, the two left-wing websites sought to declare allegiance with the minority of Jews who supported their own viewpoint.

In other words fascist Muslims and Hindus, such as supporters of India’s BJP government are no different from anti-Zionist Jews who oppose all forms of racism. This is the kind of intellectual sleight of hand that Mann has made into a fine art.

The ‘research’ for Mann’s Report was carried out by Daniel Allington, a King’s College lecturer. Allington selected 20 articles on each site that featured the words ‘Jew’ or ‘Zionist’ for analysis. It clearly did not occur to Mann that what fascists mean by ‘Zionist’ differs from what socialists mean. The report is based on the assumption that ‘Jew’ = ‘Zionist’.

Allington is the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism’s go to academic. His ‘research’ is starts off with the conclusions and then looks for evidence. In other words he reverse engineers his research!

Together with Zionist ‘academic’ David Hirsh, Allington devised a Generalised Anti-Semitism Barometer for the CAA which found that anti-Semitism was more prevalent on the Left than the Right. The Zionistand Tory press lapped it up.

If true this was a staggering finding. Why then had all previous surveys found that anti-Semitism was the property of the Right? What the CAA didn’t advertise was that they had added 6 questions to the original 6 questions (which were themselves debatable).

That the CAA is a dishonest McCarthyist organisation is one thing. That Allington and Hirsh should allow their support for Zionism to fix the results of ostensibly neutral academic research raises questions as to their academic integrity. The questions they devised to ‘prove’ that the left is more anti-Semitic than the Right were:

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

2.    “Israel has a right to exist as a homeland for the Jewish people.”

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

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

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

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

None of these statements are anti-Semitic. According to the OED anti-Semitism is ‘hostility to or prejudice against Jews.’

The dishonesty of Allington’s ‘research’ is staggering. I wouldn’t be comfortable spending time with supporters of Franco. Does that make me anti-Spanish? Israel’s right to exist as a homeland for Jews assumes that Jews aren’t at home where they live. Israel having the right to defend itself assumes that it is under attack. Obviously Israel’s supporters are anti-democratic, as the IHRA misdefinition of anti-Semitism proves. Supporters of Israel do control the media but who says Rupert Murdoch is Jewish? It’s only anti-Semitic if you assume that supporters of Israel and Jews are the same.

The most popular ‘anti-Semitic’ statement was comparisons between Israel’s treatment of Palestinians and Nazi treatment of Jews. But this is a political statement. Were holocaust survivors Ze’ev Sternhell and Yehuda Elkana anti-Semitic for writing ‘In Israel, Growing Fascism and a Racism Akin to Early Nazism’? and The Need to Forget? Is it anti-Semitic to point out that Nazi mobs chanted ‘death to the Jews’ and Israeli mobs chant ‘death to the Arabs’.

One example of Skawkbox’s ‘racism’ was

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

So accusing Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks of being a racist is anti-Semitic because he was Jewish! Is accusing someone Jewish of fraud, even if they’re guilty, also anti-Semitic because it might imply that all Jews are frauds. This is the infantile level of analysis  of John Mann.

When Sacks died, I wrotethat he was ‘An establishment bigot’. Sacks, who compared Corbyn with Enoch Powell endorsed the Strange Death of Europe.

Dishonesty permeates the Report. Because Jewish conspiracy theories permeate the far-Right, the support of Skwawkbox and The Canary for the undercover Al Jazeera programme The Lobby about the influence and activity of the Zionist lobby was anti-Semitic!

But the latter was true. What these allegations have in common is a deliberate confusion of ‘Jew’ and ‘Zionist’.  And who does this? The same anti-Semites and fascists that Mann purports to oppose.

Liar Lee’s article concludes with a quote from Allington:

 “Government and civil society must encourage use of high quality, reputable sources of information at the expense of low-quality fringe sources,” it said. “We need not be helpless in the face of hatred.”

What Mann and Allington are advocating is state censorship. The reference to ‘high quality reputable sources of information’ is police state stuff. Who decides what’s ‘high quality’? Turkey’s Erdogan would agree with this. Is it the Mail and Sun? Britain’s racist tabloids escapes unscathed. Mann’s concerns are not Jews and anti-Semitism but Zionism and Israel.

The only good thing about Mann’s Report is that it reflects his own intellectual deficit. It was so poorly argued in its deviously dishonest analogies that only a rogue like Boris Johnson could fall for it.

Before becoming a Czar, Mann was Chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group Against Antisemitism. The Committee played an important part in the lead up to Labour’s anti-Semitism smears. The APPGAA was stuffed with members of the Friends of Israel groups such as Luciana Berger, Ruth Smeeth, Wes Streeting and Bob Blackman. None of them had ever criticised Israeli racism. Bob Blackman was a racist in  his own right. See Tory MP accused of Islamophobia after posting anti-Muslim article on Facebook

The Committee, chaired by Labour MP Dennis McShane, gaoled for his part in the expenses scandal, produced a Reportinto Anti-Semitism in September 2006. Its ludicrous observations included:

The Israeli government itself may, at times, have mistakenly perceived criticism of its policies and actions to be motivated by antisemitism, but we received no evidence of the accusation of antisemitism being misused by mainstream British Jewish community organisations and leaders.

Ten years later the President of the Board of Deputies, Jonathan Arkush, attacked Corbyn as an anti-Semite and stated that a Jewish group, Jewdas were ‘the source of virulent anti-Semitism’

The Report stated that ‘anti-Zionist discourse can be polluted with antisemitic themes’ but ignored the far more widespread incidence of Zionist anti-Semites. E.g. Richard Spencer, the neo-Nazi founder of the alt-Right and organiser of the demonstration in Charlottesville, declared himself a White Zionist. As Ha’aretz noted:

‘In a series of tweets, Spencer writes of his admiration for the law, which confers the right to national self-determination in Israel to the Jewish people alone, and says Jews are 'showing a path forward for Europeans'

Israel provides a model for White supremacists. The Jewish Nation State Lawexcluded Arab Israelis from any claim to the land they live in. It was a blueprint for Jewish supremacy. Yet Mann and the APPGAA never once mentioned that the incidence of Palestinian supporters using anti-Semitic rhetoric is far outweighed by Zionist anti-Semites like Spencer and Steve Bannon who combined anti-Semitism with Zionism (see his description of Jewish children, whom he didn’t want his children to go to school with, as ‘whiny brats.’).

There was no understanding that criticism of Israel was motivated by opposition to Israeli racism. In December 2018 the Knesset rejectedby 71-38 a Bill which affirmed a citizens' right to equality and it refusedeven to debate a bill ‘calling for Israel to treat its Arab and Jewish citizens equally.’

Speaker Yuli Yoel Edelstein denounced the bill saying that:

“This is a preposterous bill that any intelligent individual can see must be blocked immediately. A bill that aims to gnaw at the foundations of the state must not be allowed in the Knesset,”

John Mann was one of the main Labour witchunters. In April 2016 Mann staged a confrontation with Ken Livingstone for saying that Adolf Hitler “was supporting Zionism before he went mad and ended up killing six million Jews”calling him a ‘Nazi apologist’ for saying that the Nazis had supported Zionism.

The only problem was that the Nazis did support the Zionists, who were 2% of the German Jewish community. In Zionism During the Holocaust I quote Alfred Rosenberg, the Nazi Party’s main theoretician, who wrotein 1919 that

Zionism must be vigorously supported in order to encourage a significant number of German Jews to leave for Palestine or other destinations.