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Whatever You Do Don’t Vote For Starmer – Vote Socialist Independent or Failing That the Green or Workers Party

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Whatever the Results We Have to Build a Socialist Alternative not Resort to Racist Dog Whistles Like Galloway

Four and a half years ago, I wrote an eve of poll blog after campaigning for Chris Williamson in Derby North Labour’s Election Campaign - Expect the Worst – Hope for the Best. I summed up

How then will Labour fare in the election?  This is probably the most difficult election to call. I fear a Tory majority but there may well be a hung parliament though if the Lib Dems continue to slide in the polls that may be less likely. What is clear is that there is no surge to Labour. I cannot see a Labour victory or an increase in the present number of seats. By failing to see that the British Establishment would do all they could, in conjunction with the United States and Israel, to ensure that an anti-imperialist would not become Prime Minister the Left has to face the future with a Labour Party minus Jeremy Corbyn.

In previous elections I had little difficulty in predicting the outcome. In 2015 I wrote a blog Miliband’s Labour Seeks the Safety of Consensus Politics in which I said:

In last week’s Brighton Independent I had an article which suggested that Miliband was determined to lose.  Of course he’d like to win but he refuses to break from the consensus behind austerity.... Labour is going to face a wipe-out in its Scottish bastion because they are perceived as the ‘red Tories’. ...

My prediction?  The Tories will be the largest party.  Labour plus the SNP should be within spitting distance of the magical 324 need for an overall majority.  Hopefully the Lib-Dems, the most disgusting and unprincipled party of all will suffer heavy losses.  UKIP is unlikely to gain more than 2-3 seats and the Greens will keep their one seat.  Who forms a government?  Miliband might unless he proves particularly stupid.

Like most people I was taken by surprise by Cameron’s narrow majority.

In 2017 contrary to all those who believed that Labour’s election campaign would be a rerun of 1983 under Michael Foot, I foresaw that the Tory campaign under ‘strong and stable’ Theresa May would crash, which it did. 

Sir Kid Starver was the first person to welcome my expulsion. the first Jewish person, from the Labour Party in February 2016

On April 20, when May had a 21% lead in the polls I wrote in Labour Can Win if Corbyn is Bold – the Key Issue is Poverty and the Transfer of Wealth that:

It was Harold Wilson who said that a week is a long time in politics.  Seven weeks is a political eternity.  Theresa May has taken a gamble that her 21% lead will hold.  It is a gamble that she may yet come to regret.

There is only one direction that her lead can go and that is down.  Once her lead falls then a snowball effect can take over.  What is essential is that Labour marks out the key areas on which it is going to base its appeal.  The danger is that Corbyn is going to continue with his ‘strategy’ of appeasing the Right and appealing to all good men and women.  If so that will be a recipe for disaster.

No election is guaranteed to be without its surprises.  Theresa May is a cautious conservative.  She is literally the product of her background, a conservative vicar’s daughter.  Reactionary, parochial and small-minded, she is a bigot for all seasons.  What doesn’t help is that she is both wooden and unoriginal.  The danger is that Corbyn tries to emulate her.


On June 3 in General Election - Is Labour on the threshold of victory? I foresaw a hung parliament, or even a Labour victory, was possible.

I do not have a crystal ball.  My initial predictions, that there would or could be a hung parliament was based on my assessment of the situation.  This is still quite possible as the Tories are widely detested for  their attacks on the working poor, people on benefits and the continuous privatisation of the NHS.  They are seen as the party of a vicious class rule, which is what austerity is about.

That does not, however, mean that the Tories will necessarily be defeated.  People do not vote in line with their class interests.  The whole purpose of the patriotic card, used by a succession of ruling class scoundrels from Pitt to May, is to blind people to their real interests.  It is saying that British workers and the poor have more in common with the rich and the ruling class than they do with each other.  The Tory press of course is doing its best to foster illusions in Strong and Stable.

David Lammy Meeting his Constituents


Labour could still become the largest party but I also sense a vigorous fightback by the Right.  It seems that one part of the prediction I made will not come true.  The Lib-Dems are not going to gain enough seats to prop up another Tory coalition  At the moment they are tipped to win just one extra seat.  By ruling out any form of pact with Labour under Corbyn, the Lib-Dems have guaranteed their own irrelevance.

We could be in for a period of political instability such as we have not known for 40 years.  This is one of the hardest elections to call.  A Tory government is still possible if it cobbles together a coalition of the Lib-Dems & the Ulster Unionists-DUP.  Even a majority Tory government cannot be ruled out.

What then will be the result tomorrow? Again I have to confess that predicting the results of any election is not easy. It is clear that Starmer’s rebranded Tory Party will win the election, although I have a feeling that the majority will not be as large as predicted.

Tanushka Mara, Socialist Independent Hove

What is clear is that this has been the dullest election in decades with no real differences between Tory and Starmer Labour. I expect the turnout to be down.

The Lib Dems should pick up disaffected Tories though I doubt that it will be above 50 as has been predicted.

I also expect the Green Party to keep Brighton Pavilion and possible gain one or two more. We are told the Reform party will win up to 5 seats. That is possible though I hope not. Farage certainly annoyed the imperialists with his perfectly reasonable explanation that NATO and the United States provoked Russia into invading.

The Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 was provoked by the US placing nuclear missiles in Italy and Turkey which were then matched by Soviet nuclear missiles in CubaSo it is obvious why Russia didn’t want a nuclear alliance on their borders.  Farage was savaged, called a Putin lover etc. so that may have an effect on their election chances. 

Picket of 'Killer' Kyle MP for Hove


My concerns are different. Which of the bourgeois and pro-capitalist parties comes out on top is to all intents and purposes irrelevant. Whether it is Sunak or Starmer who becomes Prime Minister, racism, imperialism, poverty, exploitation and war will continue. They are Tweedledum and Tweedledee.

Starmer has been ruthless in purging the Labour Party of socialists and left-wingers. Would that Jeremy Corbyn had had half as much bottle he wouldn’t have been fighting as an independent today.

Will Corbyn win in Islington North?  He should do but the polls say otherwise. Let us hope so. However Corbyn has mishandled the withdrawal of the Labour Whip like everything else. When it was clear he would not have the Whip reinstated he should have resigned from the Labour Party and stood in a by–election for the seat. As it is he has an uphill fight. I wish him well against his corrupt opponent

Why I’m against mass immigration

I also hope that George Galloway holds Rochdale but I fear he won’t. I hope he wins because of genocide in Gaza not because I agree with him on much else. His attempt to compete with Farage and the Tories on immigration is despicable.  I have come in for some criticism from my comrades for supporting him but in my view genocide in Palestine outweighs virtually any other consideration, witness Sunak’s ill-judged attack on him when he won the by-election.

A message I sent to George Galloway today

Galloway’s comments in the video above are a disgrace. Immigration doesn’t lower wage levels nor does it prevent people getting doctors’ appointments or children getting places in schools. This is racist scapegoatism at its worst.

What prevents people getting GP appointments is the lack of doctors we train plus the reduction in what we pay them.  Funding for GP practices has been slashed by £350 million in real terms since 2019, House of Commons Library research shows. It was 6.9% lower in 2022/23 compared to 2018/19, once inflation is taken into account. The average funding per patient was £165 in 2022/23, a real terms cut of £12 per patient over the past four years. In other words nothing to do with immigrants.


The same is true of nurses, whose bursaries the Tories stole in order to enrich their cronies. The NHS has been defunded, part privatised and the money transferred to military expenditure.  Indeed but for overseas doctors and nurses the NHS would be in a worse state than it already is.

The same reactionary arguments were used when Jewish refugees came to Britain in the 19 and 20 centuries. The answer to low wages was trade union organisation not immigration controls. Three times in the 1880s the TUC called for ‘anti-alienist’ immigration controls because they preferred not to fight. Jewish workers however formed their own trade unions and launched strike after strike – including two mass tailors strikes in 1889 and 1912 alongside dockers strikes in the same years. That is how wages are raised.


However much you control immigration it won’t affect the export of capital, which is why it is such a bankrupt argument. Unless members of the Workers Party reign Galloway in it is destined to become a pariah on the left.

 ‘Patriotism’ and immigration controls sit uneasily with socialism. Patriotism means the working class doffing their cap to their rulers and dying in their wars. National socialism is a contradiction in terms.

In this video Galloway is compared, quite rightly to Farage, Jenrick and Braverman. This appeal to racism with all the dog whistles about fighting age men and 3 star hostels and ‘illegal migrants’ rather than refugees suggests that Galloway inhabits a very dark place.

“We have already, and its only February, 65,000 people unchartered, undocumented, unvetted. We have no idea who they are, we know most of  them are men, and most of them are fighting age men at that, who are now being put up in three star hotels sometimes a little better even than that at the expense of the public potentially for ever more when our forces cannot interdict a single one of the boats bringing illegal migrants or Refugee claimants for asylum - we can’t know which until their cases are heard and their cases have a backlog of hundreds of thousands.”

However there is a brighter side to this election and that is the number of anti-racist, socialist candidates.

Andrew Feinsteinin Starmer’s constituency, Leanne Mohamad against Wes Streeting, Pamela Fitzpatrick in Harrow West, Sam Gorst in Liverpool Garston, Faiza Shaheen in Chingford and Wood Green and our own wonderful Tanushka Mara in Hove amongst many others I haven’t named.

I was initially despondent about their chances but having taken note of the vibrancy of the campaigns I am hopeful that they will garner a very sizeable vote even if they don’t win. From these campaigns we have the opportunity to rebuild the left but if Galloway continues as he is and the Workers Party doesn’t reject this scapegoating, racist appeal to the most backward section of the working class then Galloway will play no part in rebuilding the left.

I hope that Chris Williamson, who is standing in Derby North, as Deputy Leader of the WP, will make his own position clear on the question of our opposition to demonising asylum seekers, racist dog whistling and attempting to blame our social ills on migrants rather than the tax dodging rich, the Tories’ COVID  cronies and privatisation.


Below is a list of independent candidates and I would also add Samar Ammar in Birmingham Bromsgrove, see here. There are also others including Craig Murray in Blackburn, Chris Williamson in Derby North and Jody McIntyre in Birmingham Yardley. See Pink Floyd star flying in to back Workers Party's Craig Murray.

There are also 40 TUSC candidates standing, which is the Socialist Party’s electoral front, including ex-MP Dave Nellist, who I support. The full list can be found here.

A full list of Workers Party candidates is here but I wouldn’t endorse all of them, eg. I support Sammar Amar in Bromsgrove not Aheesha Zahir who has also made anti-refugee remarks. I support critically the WP candidates, in so far as its Manifesto doesn’t include the racist nonsense that Galloway has been spouting about refugees.

Let’s hope for a  better tomorrow.

Tony Greenstein


Never Before Has A Party Won An Election with Less Than 34% of the Vote – Starmer’s Government Lacks All Political Legitimacy

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The Question is Whether Or Not We Can Unite to Defeat Britain’s Macron & Learn From the French Left How to Defeat ‘Centrist’ Warmongers



This coming Friday at 6.30 the Socialist Labour Network has invited a range of different speakers to give their views on the election that has just gone by and the prospects, as they see them for the Left during the Starmer government.

Register here:

https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_K7IgyMP5TcKfyPnp-5oYYw

Never before has a government been elected with a huge majority to almost universal public indifference if not hostility. The voting turnout, 59.8%, speaks for itself. The second lowest since the war. This says everything about the decay of bourgeois democracy. Anyone who remembers the 1964 election of Harold Wilson’s government with a nail biting majority of 4, after 13 long years of Tory government, cannot help but notice the difference.

1964 was a time of the Beatles and optimism. Change was in the air. It was no mere slogan. With Starmer Change is a PR slogan signifying nothing more than a change in the Board of Directors of UK Ltd. It is the kind of change that Big Brother would have approved of in 1984.

In 1966 Wilson achieved a majority of 98. The Labour government abolished capital punishment, outlawed racial discrimination, introduced equal pay for women, homosexual law reform as a result of the Wolfenden Report and the 1967 Abortion Act.

Unlike Starmer’s toadying to the USA, Wilson refused the request from US President Lyndon Johnson for British soldiers to fight in Vietnam. In a curious reversal of US policy, which up till then had been to eliminate British influence in the Middle East, the Americans argued against Dennis Healey’s decision to retreat from East of Suez. See The Fall and Rise of Britain’s ‘East of Suez’ Basing Strategy

In 1951, 1955, 1959, 1970, 1979, 1992 and 2017 (under Corbyn!) Labour had a higher % of the vote but didn’t win the election. Under Corbyn in 2017 Labour won 40% compared to Starmer’s 33.8% and yet it won 150 fewer seats.

Starmer Labour went out of its way to dampen expectations. His main selling point was that he would be no different from the Tories. Whatever else you can say about Blair people were excited by his victory. Starmer by way of contrast is a personality free zone. A man entirely devoid of charm or charisma. He is the personification of the Coercive State. He is the face of corporate capital.

Nowhere was this more evident than in his own constituency Holborn and St Pancras. In 2017, under Corbyn, Starmer received 41,343 votes, (70.1%). In 2019 he gained 36,641 votes (64.5%). In 2024 his vote halved to 18,884 (48.9%). Socialist Independent Andrew Feinstein came from nowhere to pick up 7,312 votes (18.9%). Starmer repels even his own constituents.

Putting it another way, in 2024 Labour received 600,000 fewer votes than in the ‘disaster’ of 2019. Whichever way you look at it, Starmer’s Labour Party did not receive a vote of confidence.

Starmer’s support for genocide in Gaza has cost it dearly. Four right-wing Labour MPs lost their seats to candidates opposing Starmer's support for Israel's Nazi behaviour.

Despite predictions from the pollsters, Jeremy Corbyn sailed home winning by over 7,200 votes.  Even the BBC found it hard to find critical voices in his constituency. George Galloway unfortunately lost his seat in Rochdale but by less than 1,500 votes.

The Green Party had their best ever general election performance and gained 3 seats compared to their previous one, including a 10,000 vote victory over obnoxious war monger Thangam Debbonaire in Bristol West. However as I have previously warned, the Green Party is not a left-wing party although they make radical noises. They support staying in NATO and want to green capitalism.

The other highlight of the night was the defeat of Jonathan Ashworth, shadow Paymaster General. Ashworth lost his Leicester South seat by nearly 1,000 votes to Shockat Adam, who said: “This is for Gaza.”

Craig Murray - stabbed in the back by Muslim communalists

In Blackburn, the constituency once held by Barbara Castle and Jack Straw, Labour’s Kate Hollern lost by 132 votes to Adnan Hussain. Craig Murray for the Workers Party got over 7,000 votes too.

Ayoub Khan - the new independent MP for Birmingham Perry Barr

In Dewsbury and Batley, Labour’s Heather Iqbal, lost by nearly 7,000 votes to Iqbal Mohamed. In Birmingham Perry Barr the corrupt former Labour MP and Henry Jackson Society member Khalid Mahmood lost to Ayoub Khan causing the Jewish Chronicle’s David  Rose to froth at the mouth over his having questioned Israel’s fictitious rape narrative and stories of beheaded babies.


In Birmingham Hodge Hill, former cabinet minister Liam Byrne won by 1,566 votes over James Giles, the Worker’s Party candidate. In Birmingham Yardley Jess Phillips won by 693 votes against the Workers’ Party Jody McIntyre.

 In Birmingham Ladywood Labour’s Shabana Mahmood defeated Akhmed Yakoob of the Workers’ Party by 3,421. In 2019 Mahmood won by 28,582 votes. Mahmood was the shadow justice secretary before the election. Birmingham Ladywood is another area with a high proportion of Muslim voters.

This produced a backlash by far-right ex-Jewish Chronicle Editor Stephen Pollard who described them as “the rise of sectarian voting”, while Telegraph columnist Sam Ashworth-Hayes condemned their victories as: “Total, utter failures of integration.” It is a bit rich of Pollard to call Muslim voters ‘sectarian’ given the campaign he waged amongst Jewish voters not to vote Labour under Corbyn!

In Bethnal Green and Bow, where many were also angered by Starmer’s talk about deporting Bangladeshi people, Labour’s Rushanara Ali won by less than 1700 votes against independent Ajmal Masroor .

This election saw a determined challenge to Starmer and his most loyal sycophants by two main groups. One was by the Workers Party which fielded 150 candidates and which aimed to build itself through its opposition to genocide in Gaza, aiming at the Muslim vote.

The other was a determined campaign by left and Muslim campaigners that saw Ashworth defeated and Wes Streeting very nearly defeated by Leanne Mohamad in Ilford North. Just 500 votes separated them.  If the Green Party hadn’t stood, Streeting might now be out in the cold.

The example of the French where a united left campaign has squashed the fascist National Renewal’s hopes of winning control of the government, should be a lesson to us. A united left in Britain could also do this but this means burying the tradition of sectarianism which means that one’s differences over who said what in 1917 are more important than today’s struggles.

There is a very useful compilation of all of the left’s candidates that has been compiled by the very public sociologist blog. It includes all the left groups that stood. I have compiled a table of how many candidates each group stood and their average results.

The list is effectively divided into two: on the one hand the socialist and Muslim independents did relatively well.  The Workers Party candidates also did well but not on the scale of the above.

On the other a kaleidoscope of left sects did very badly, making no impression. It is to be hoped that some of the latter might eventually realise that standing candidates who receive only a fraction of 1% achieves nothing other than a lost deposit.

1.           The Socialist Independents

There were 65 candidates and in total they gained just under a quarter of a million votes with an average of 8.9%. This is clearly a promising start.

They included Corbyn. People were primarily campaigning over one issue, Gaza. It included Muslims and the thousands of socialist exiles from the Labour Party that was.

What distinguished many of the campaigns was a wide community involvement. I can only speak from personal experience in Hove where British Palestinian, Tanushka Marah, was elected at an all-Brighton meeting of 150 people. The campaign came primarily out of the wider Palestine solidarity campaign in Brighton & Hove against genocide in Gaza.

Socialists, feminists and environmental campaigners participated in an energetic campaign. We chose Hove because the current Labour MP, Peter ‘Killer’ Kyle, is an ardent supporter of genocide in Gaza and Vice-Chair of Labour Friends of Israel.

Hove is not a naturally left constituency. When I came to Brighton 50 years ago it was one of the safest Tory seats in the country. All three Brighton & Hove seats were Tory. Brighton Pavilion was represented by Monday Club MP Sir Julian ‘gunboats’ Amery. Kemptown’s MP was Andrew Bowden, who finally got caught up in a corruption scandal and was ousted in 1997. Only Kemptown had ever been Labour, during the Wilson era when it was won in 1964 by Dennis Hobden by 7 votes.

Hove was won in the Blair landslide of 1997. Before this year left candidates usually got derisory votes, usually under 500.  So the achievement by Tanuksha of 3,048 votes (5.9%) marked a real triumph. She also saved her deposit.

Overall 27 of the 65 independent candidates got over 5% and thereby saved their deposits. The total vote for the independents was nearly a quarter of a million

2.           Workers’ Party [WP]

The Workers Party is very much the creation of George Galloway whose profile has never been far from the limelight. When George won a by-election in Rochdale in February and slimy Sunak slithered out of 10 Downing Street to condemn the election result (one wonders whether he or Paul Mason had considering making it a criminal offence to vote for George) his reputation was established nationally.

Soon after George announced an intention by the WP to contest 500 seats but that proved too difficult and the final tally was 152. The 152 candidates gained a total of 210, 000 votes with an average of 3.48%. Although some candidates did well, a lot got derisory votes. 26 WP candidates (17.1%) saved their deposit compared to 41.5% of the Independents.

It obviously makes sense for the Independents and the Workers’ Party to join forces in future elections but there are formidable political obstacles to this. The targeting by Galloway of migrants and refugees as a threat to British workers’ standard of living, pay and conditions is unacceptable.

Galloway fails to recognise why it is that the boat people crossing the Channel are scapegoated despite being a fraction of overall migration. Our rulers only rule because they are able to divide and rule, setting one section of the poor against another. Galloway plays into this and thinks he’s being smart by being seen to be tough on law and order and refugees.

Patriotic socialism’ has a long and inglorious history. It resulted in social democratic parties supporting their own ruling classes in World War I. It has been tried, not least by Henry Hyndman of the Socialist Federation, who was an anti-Semite and a supporter of imperialism and the Boers. It has always been a disaster. Patriotism is how the ruling class fools the working class into supporting their imperialist ventures and dying in their wars.

3.      People Before Profit

People Before Profit stood 3 candidates in one of Britain’s remaining colonies, Northern Ireland. They gained an average of 2,80l votes and 7.1%, saving two of their deposits.

4.      The Left Sects

One must not forget the 84 candidates that a variety of the left sects stood. Without fail they gained derisory votes and lost their deposits. One wonders what is the point of such an exercise in futility but to some like Arthur Scargill’s Socialist Labour Party what matters is keeping the flag flying. Scargill has spent nearly 40 years since the Miner’s Strike trashing his own political reputation.  It is rather sad.

The main group is the Trade union and Socialist Coalition  [TUSC]. At one time it was sponsored by the RMT under Bob Crowe but since then it has distanced itself from it. TUSC was the creation of the Socialist Party.

TUSC stood 40 candidates and without exception they did abysmally. Not one of them saved their deposit or gained over 1000 votes. The highest vote was by Dave Nellist, the former Coventry MP, who secured 2.2% in Coventry East. They secured an average of 0.79%.

Given the success of the socialist independents it’s time that TUSC called it a day and threw its lot in with other socialists. It is clear that their project has failed.

The Communist Party of Britain, which prints the Morning Star, stood 14 candidates. They did even worse than TUSC.  They secured an average of 0.46% which is less than 1 in 200. My advice to them is to join with other socialists, ditch your resident ZionistMary Davis and stop plugging the two-state apartheid solution for Palestine.

Scargill’s  Socialist Labour Party was formed after Labour ditched Clause 4. It stood 12 candidates who got an average of 0.7%. Scargill once turned up at a party AGM with more votes in his back pocket than the rest of the delegates put together, representing the previously unknown Lancashire Miners Welfare Organisation! The SLP today is the living dead and is unlikely to survive Arthur’s passing.

The grandly titled Workers Revolutionary Party stood 5 candidates obtaining an average of 0.52%. The WRP has been around a long time and it was led by Gerry Healey before he was expelled for raping women comrades. This did not stop Corin Redgrave extolling his ‘achievements’ and proclaiming that “If this is the work of a rapist, let’s recruit more rapists.”

Other left fragment which stood candidates included the Alliance for Green Socialism (in 2005 I was a candidate for them!) which stood 2 candidates who gained an average of 0.3%.

There is Communist Future, of which I know nothing, which stood one candidate who obtained 0.3%.

Communist Leaguestood 2 candidates who obtained an average of 0.4%. It is one of the splinters of the old International Marxist Group and supports the American Socialist Workers Party, which is no longer on the left, supporting as it does Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

Socialist Equality Partyis anotherTrotskyist sect, an offspring of the WRP, led by David North. It publishes the World Socialist Web Site which often has well informed articles. It also stood 2 candidates, obtaining an average of 0.3%, one of whom stood against Starmer, thus splitting the socialist opposition, or rather they would have done if Tom Scripps had obtained more than 0.2%!

TheSocialist Party of Great Britainwas founded in 1904. They are the Jehovah Witnesses of the left. They stood 2 candidates obtaining an average of 0.25%.

The newly inaugurated Transformalso stood 2 candidates obtaining an average of 0.75%. Clearly they haven’t transformed anything.

One would hope that all these groups would either disappear or join with other socialists but I suspect life would have no meaning for them if they were to make an acquaintance with reality.

Tony Greenstein

If Hamas Had Planted a Bomb in Jerusalem, in an Attempt to Assassinate Netanyahu, Killing Over 90 Civilians, Would the World’s Leaders Remain Silent? Yet that’s what happened in Al Mawasi, Gaza

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Israel Prefers Killing Palestinians to Saving their Hostages - the Palestinian Resistance Should Act Accordingly

John Kirby, US National Security Council spokesperson, is on record as saying that he hasn’t yet seen an Israeli war crime or violation of international humanitarian law. Kirby’s determination not to see anything wrong with exterminating 50,000 Palestinians (at a minimum) extended to describing South Africa’s case at the International Court of Justice as ‘meritless’.

John Kirby – No Violation of Humanitarian Law

How have these apologists for genocide justified Israel’s latest atrocity? Al Mawasi, which was specifically designated by Israel as a ‘safe zone’? Israeli planes bombed the tents in this desolate area on the pretext of trying to murder Hamas leader Mohamad El Deif. Their response is to say nothing.

Israel Bombs Schools

As with Israel’s ignoring of the ICJ’s order not to enter Rafah, Western leaders once again demonstrate that their claims to moral superiority over Russia and China are as hollow as their words. Biden’s ‘red lines’ over entering Rafah vanished the moment the Israeli military entered.

Starmer's selective condemnations of violence - his concern for Ukrainian childrendoesn't extend to Palestinian children 

Keir Starmer condemned Russia’s missile attack on a Kiev children’s hospital but there has been no mention, still less condemnation, of Israel’s strike on al-Mawasi, even though at least 3 times as many people died in the attack. Like you I am sure that this was just an oversight!

However you will be glad to know that Starmer found time to say“I am appalled by the shocking scenes at President Trump’s rally” where someone took a pot shot at Trump.  Not once has Starmer said how appalled he was by Israel’s bombing and attacks on every single hospital and health facility in Gaza. It’s all a question of priorities.

Israel's bombing of children in the 'safe zone in Khan Younis of Al Muwasi

Today Israel flattened UNWRA’s headquarters in Gaza City. It is the 190th UNWRA facility that has been attacked. Why? Because UNWRA was specifically set up to support Palestinian refugees and Israel prefers them to disappear entirely.

Murder at al-Mawasi


Israel's Missile Strike on a School Football Match 

When Israel recently launched a missile strike on a school and football match in al-Awda school in Abasan al-Kabira they murdered 31 Palestinians, mainly children.  Their excuse was that:

“A warplane, using precision munitions, attacked a terrorist from the military wing of Hamas who participated in the hideous massacre on 7 October,”

Seeking to kill Hamas leaders is the favourite excuse for Israel’s perpetration of massacres. An excuse Western leaders are happy to go along with.

Education Minister Yoav Kisch Threatens to 'annihilate' Lebanon - More Nazi Talk

The destruction of Hamas is being used as a pretext for the genocide and destruction of Gaza. There is no difference between this and the Nazis’ shooting of 100 hostages in response to the killing of a single soldier, except that Israel’s massacres far exceed a 100-1 ratio.

Nothing has been said by Starmer or Biden about Israel's repeated attacks on Hospitals

The silence of politicians and newspapers about Israeli war crimes, the same people who were so eager to condemn Russia’s attack on a hospital, speaks volumes. It does not go unnoticed in the Arab world and the Global South. What Starmer, Biden, Blinken and Schultz are saying is that the end justifies the means. That the goal of eliminating Hamas justifies any and every atrocity. Which raises the question:

Is Hamas such a heinous terrorist organisation that any amount of destruction, including the murder of 40,000 Palestinians, which a letter in the Lancet says is far, far higher (186,000), justified? Because that is the sole Israeli declared war aim.

Hamas, which Israel was in large measure responsible for creating, has arisen because of Israel’s 57 year occupation of land that is not theirs. Israel’s occupation of Gaza is illegal. It doesn’t belong to them. There is therefore an international law right on the part of the indigenous population to resist that occupation in exactly the same way as the French resisted the Nazis and the Algerians resisted the French.

Israel and the imperialists brand the Palestinian Resistance as ‘terrorists’. This has always been the label that the West has applied to those who resisted colonisation. The Mau Mau in Kenya were called terrorists. Thatcher and Reagan described the ANC as terrorists. The Nazis too branded the Partisans as terrorists.

As Lord Carrington, Thatcher’s first Foreign Minister once remarked: ‘one man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorists’.

British law, aka section 12(1A) of the Terrorism Act 2000, under which I was arrested last December, may proscribe Hamas as a terrorist organisation but that does not mean it is a terrorist organisation. The law may say that Black = White but that does not mean it is. All it means is that the law has incorporated a lie and made it a criminal offence to disagree.

We can rely on Britain’s police to prosecute opponents of genocide rather than prosecute war criminals like David Cameron for supplying Israel with weapons. Section 52 The International Criminal Court Act 2001 which makes conduct ancillary to an act of genocide a criminal offence seems to be a dead letter as far as the police are concerned.

It is Israel which is a terrorist state and the British and US leaders are the enablers of terrorism for supplying Israel with the means to commit mass murder.

The US has supplied some 14,000 2000lb bombs. Gaza is 365 square kilometers, compared to Britain which is a quarter of a million square kilometres, yet it has been pounded by high explosives for 9 months. More bombs, 70,000 lbs, have been dropped on Gaza than were dropped on London, Hamburg and Dresden in WWII. The US and British governments are accessories to mass murder as long as they supply Israel with weapons of mass murder.

We should be demanding that the new Starmer government immediately ceases supplying Israel with weapons to kill children.

Yet what has Starmer done? Contrary to previous reports he is refusing to withdraw the Tory government’s objection to the ICC issuing arrest warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant.

This is despite Israel deliberately creating famine in Gaza. Aid lorries are no longer entering Gaza since the Rafah operation.

It is abundantly clear that Israel is not interested in any ceasefire that does not allow it to resume its genocide. Given the choice between killing Palestinians and saving its hostages it has chosen the former.

The hostages who have been released have all looked healthy and been well treated. Even the Israeli army, after freeing 4 hostages (and killing 200+ Palestinians in the process) stated that ‘the released hostages were all in good health.’

The hostages have all told how their main fear was of being killed by Israeli bombs. Contrast this with the emaciated bodies, wracked by torture, of Palestinian prisoners who have emerged from Israel’s dungeons. 54 Palestinians have died as a result of torture in Israeli prisons. Israeli doctors in Sde Teiman and elsewhere have, like the Nazi doctors of 80 years ago, participated in torture including the use of medical procedures without anaesthetic.


Hamas is anything but a terrorist organisation. This is simply a term of abuse. After October 7 Netanyahu spoke of ‘Hamas – ISIS’ yet this is one more lie from the world’s most infamous liar. ISIS beheaded those it captured. Hamas has fed them and done its best to keep them alive.

ISIS was elected by no one. It ruled by fear and terror. It was also a product of Britain and America’s illegal invasion of Iraq. Hamas won the Palestinian elections in 2006 but the Israel and the West didn’t like the outcome. Hamas is the most popular political current both in Gaza and the West Bank.

In 2001 Hamas’ military wing was proscribed under the Terrorism Act 2000. This was despite the fact that Hamas have never attacked a target outside Palestine/Israel. Another difference with ISIS (& Israel!). In 2021, for nakedly political reasons, under pressure from the Zionist lobby, Hamas’ political wing was proscribed. The justification for this was non-existent.

Under the Terrorism Act 2000 ‘terrorism’ is defined as

Under this definition the Israeli state should be proscribed. Its war against the Palestinians in Gaza is being conducted for racial, ideological and political reasons – settlement/ethnic cleansing. It has involved serious violence. So it is a political decision not to brand Israel a terrorist state.

During the Troubles in the North of Ireland the IRA was proscribed and still is. Despite Loyalist and Unionist pressure, the British government resisted the temptation to proscribe the IRA’s political wing, Sinn Fein. If Sinn Fein had been proscribed then the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 would not have happened. We would not have had a quarter century of peace in Ireland.

The decision of Priti Patel to proscribe Hamas’ military wing had no factual justification. It was profoundly undemocratic since it is the Palestinian people who elected them as its government in Gaza. Hamas is no more a terrorist organisation than the ANC or Sinn Fein was.

The question is what the Palestinian resistance should do in the current situation given that Israel and Netanyahu have made it clear that they oppose any permanent ceasefire. Israel is determined to continue its attacks on Gaza until it has achieved the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. In January 11 Israeli cabinet members and 15 members of the government attended a conference calling for the ethnic cleansing and settlement of Gaza.

People should remember that the Nazis started with ethnic cleansing and ended up with extermination. The same is true in Gaza which today is a death camp.

Israel has systematically destroyed all civilian infrastructure from schools, hospitals, universities, churches, mosques. It has deliberately killed Gaza’s doctors, 108 journalists, humanitarian and health workers. This has clearly been undertaken to destroy the Palestinians as a people, the classic definition of genocide under the Genocide Convention. Israel knows Hamas comes from the people and is therefore destroying the people. Is it seriously believed that Israel bombed the world’s third oldest church, the Greek Orthodox St. Porphyrius, because it was a Hamas base?

As the BBC reported,

Gaza is home to some of the oldest churches and mosques in the world, but many have not escaped the widespread destruction of Israel's military offensive.

The Israeli army claimed that Hamas were using churches and mosques as bases to launch attacks from without providing one single iota of proof. In the case of St. Porphyrius Al Jazeera reported that

Israel’s military says it is reviewing reports on casualties after Hamas says the attack on the Greek Orthodox Saint Porphyrius Church in Gaza City killed and injured a ‘large number’ of people.

Suffice to say the Israeli military has not reported its ‘findings’. The IDF has a 100% record of acquitting itself!

The choice facing the resistance is quite simple. In a situation where the Israeli government has made clear its preference for ethnic cleansing and genocide over saving its hostages, then the Israeli people should be given a simple choice – either exchange their hostages for Palestinian hostages (of which there are some 10,000) or accept that they won’t be coming home.

Genocidal Zionist woman's hilarious interview with Piers Morgan

The Palestinian Resistance should tell Israel that every time a Palestinian child dies, be it from a sniper, a missile strike or bombing then one of their military hostages will be shot. They should give them a list of who will be shot first. Israel would then face a choice of continuing to slaughter Gaza’s children and have its hostages die or immediately cease its campaign of mass murder.

In addition the Palestinian Resistance should inform Israel that until the aid lorries and food are allowed in unhindered, without Israel shooting those trying to receive it, that none of their hostages will be fed. Palestinian prisoners in Israel are on a starvation diet. The same should apply to Israel’s hostages. That way political pressure will build quickly for a ceasefire. At the moment Netanyahu is playing with the Palestinian resistance like a cat with a mouse.

The double standards of the West and its prostitute press are staggering. Just imagine that the Palestinian Resistance decided that Israel’s war criminals, Netanyahu, Gvir, Smotrich and Gallant should be assassinated and they planted bombs in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv to achieve that object, killing in the process dozens of Israeli civilians. You can be sure the BBC would not fail to document every gory detail. But when it comes to bombing schools, hospitals and tents, there is utter silence.

Our media is as complicit in Israel’s genocide as Biden, Blinken and Starmer. They bear the same relationship to them as Goebbels had to Hitler.

Tony Greenstein

NATIONWIDE IS AN ANTI-PALESTINIAN BANK

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First They Blocked Payments to a Palestinian Children’s Centre & then Lied & Blamed it on Government Sanctions

When I Complained About Their Racist Discrimination They Told Me That They Were Closing My Accounts!

When people think of Building Societies they think of what is the fluffier side of British financial institutions. Most building societies like the Woolwich, Halifax and the ill-fated Northern Rock demutualised and became private banks in the 1990s and 2000s.

Most of them were subsequently taken over by the big banks or nationalised in the financial crash of 2008/9. Nationwide emerged as the largest of the remaining building societies.

Today it is clear, with its acquisition of Virgin Money for £2.9 billion, that Nationwide aims to be one of the big banks. It has also removed the accounts of critics of its expansion plans, so I am not the only casualty of its aversion to free speech. Despite having members’ AGMs building societies are anything but democratic. The same old Establishment worms its way in along with their amoral culture.

My problems with Nationwide began on February 2 and 12when I sent £2,000 and then £1,500 to the Al Tafawk Children’s Centre in Jenin. Little did I know that 4 months later it would end up with me being told that they were closing my accounts. I’ve been with Nationwide for 25 years but that counts for nothing.

The first indication that something was amiss was when I received 2 emails from the Accounts Review Team [ART] (9 & 12.2.24) asking:

• Why is this payment is being sent via your personal account, on behalf of The Brighton Trust, and not directly from the registered charity’s own bank account? Will this payment be a one-off or an ongoing arrangement?

• We require evidence that beneficiary account details are associated to Al Tafawk Centre.

On 13 May Hannah from ART rang me and we had a perfectly pleasant conversation. Hannah told me she was happy with my responses. After we spoke I emailed her to confirm the details of our conversation. My email began:

Good to talk to you and glad we have resolved this though I am really unhappy that it was because of a payment to a Palestinian NGO.  I'm sure that this would not have happened with an Israeli Children's Centre.

If as I suspect your concern was that we might be funding 'terrorism' then I can lay your concerns to rest. Our charity only funds a children's centre - it used to be toys and equipment but today water and food is the priority

Clearly I trod on some raw nerves as the ART clammed up. Hannah didn’t reply. They also failed, until 5 March, to recredit my account with the money that they had refused to transfer. For a month I could get no explanation as to what had happened to the money and whether it had been sent on as Hannah had promised.

I made a complaint about their behaviour and Louise from Member Service ‘investigated’ my complaint and found nothing amiss. At which point I protested at her barely literate, contradictory letter and demanded a proper investigation. I began my appeal thus:

In her letter to me of 20 February Louise Morris stated that: ‘I hope this letter explains things clearly’ and goes on to say that ‘If you think I’ve missed anything... please email me. Clearly Ms Morris has a sense of humour.

My appeal was upheld on 6 March by Simon, a Team Manager at Member Service and I was awarded £250 compensation. My complaint concerned the behaviour of the ART. I emphasised, once again, that this would not have happened if I’d tried to send money to an Israeli children’s centre.

On 7 March I sent an email to the ART asking a simple question viz. ‘Will you hold up future payments? I went on to say that

‘your discrimination against a Palestinian children's centre is an outrageous example of racism as this would not happen in the case of Israel. Presumably Jewish children are kosher and Palestinian children are not.

The latter remark was humorous but I suspect that a sense of humour is something that is alien to the Israel’s supporters in the ART.

On 26 March I received a ‘Final Warning’ from Haleema, a Member Relations Consultant (!) which began:

‘I've been told that on 07 March 2024, you sent our Review Team emails consisting of abusive and racial comments. This type of behaviour goes against our account's terms and conditions and we won't put up with it.

My first reaction to this letter was to wonder whether Member Service employees have any training. If Haleema was minded to issue me with a final warning (it was the first!!) she might have bothered to read the email she was commenting on. Or is it general practice for Nationwide staff to accept allegations at face value?

The email in question contained nothing abusive or ‘racial’ (unless a reference to Israel is considered ‘racial’). Clearly this letter had been cooked up behind the scenes and was the product of a ‘revenge complaint’ from the ART at having had an adverse finding made against it.

I attempted to resolve matters informally with Haleema but she didn’t comprehend the points I was making. As a result, on 5 May, I made a complaint.

On 21 May I chased up the complaint and on 23 May I received a letter turning down my complaint from Rhianna. She too seemed to have difficulty reading but whereas Haleema had accused me of sending abusive emails Rhiannon changed this to a question of perception. The problem was that:

I appealed this and on 19 June Fay Ingram asserted that

I called the Israeli army ‘bastards’ which is descriptive not swearing. The phone call in question was terminated when I challenged the staff member as to why no information could be provided about my funds.

But it’s not clear why that should cause upset. It’s simply a comment unless of course members of ART have some form of emotional attachment to Israel’s genocidal army.

I also emailed a number of people about what had happened to me and they wrote to Nationwide. It is clear that Nationwide actively discriminates against sending payments to Palestinians.

This is especially shocking given that Israel’s illegal occupation of the West Bank openly flouts the 4th Geneva Convention relating to the protection of civilians at time of war. The International Court of Justice at The Hague has just ruled that Israel’s occupation of the West Bank is illegal. Yet despite this Nationwide is refusing to transfer money to Palestinians on the West Bank whilst placing no obstacles in the way of transfers to Israel’s settlers.

In a letter to Mr T on 8 May Nationwide wrote:


we’re unable to send monies to countries currently under sanction by the UK government...  we regrettably cannot make transfers to countries on the high-risk list... We’ve to abide by this list and cannot give any more information on why we cannot send to this relevant country.

The relevant country in question was Palestine. Then on 17 July Andrea Doyle wrote a second letter apologising for the ‘confusion’ that their first letter caused. Doyle wrote:

Within our response we noted that payments cannot be made to any countries that are sanctioned by the UK Government. Given the context of your letter, you may have understood our letter to be suggesting that Palestine is a sanctioned country. I apologise for the confusion this appears to have caused. To clarify, Palestine is not a sanctioned country under the UK Law.

... we do occasionally need to stop payments and seek further information about the nature/purpose of the payment. In some instances, again in order to comply with our obligations, we do need to refuse payments. However, such decisions won’t have been based on the fact that the payment was being made to an unsanctioned or non-proscribed organisation operating in Palestine.


Describing Palestinian organisations as ‘unsanctioned’ or ‘non-proscribed’ casts a pall of suspicion and guilt over them. Would Israeli organisations be so described?

This letter was disingenuous. There was no confusion. The first letter made it clear that Palestine was subject to sanctions. That was wrong. Why not admit you were wrong?

In an email to David, also of 17 July, Doyle wrote that:

I can tell you that we wouldn’t restrict payments solely on the basis that they are intended for an unsanctioned or non-proscribed Palestinian organisation. (my emphasis)

Identical comments were emailed to Mrs E, Mr R, Mr W, Ms M, Mr B, Mr R, Mr  W, Ms D Ms R – all on 17 July by Andrea Doyle and in one case Emily Draper. Note the word ‘solely’. In other words if you are trying to send money to Palestine, a country the subject of an illegal occupation, it may not be the only factor in a refusal to transfer money but it is clearly a major if not principal factor.

It is clear that Nationwide is in practice refusing to make payments to Palestine. Why? Well one can only assume that members of the ART sympathise with Israel’s military and therefore took exception to me criticising the ‘world’s most moral army’ as bastards!

This was expressed in a letter of 23 May by Rhiannon which stated

The hypocrisy of this beggars belief. It is the behaviour of the Three Wise Monkeys who refused to see, hear or speak evil.

The reason that the ‘conflict’, in fact occupation of Palestine by Israel, was raised was because Nationwide refused to transfer payments to a Palestinian children’s centre. It was they who allowed the situation in the Middle East to intrude on their decisions. Nationwide took and still takes a position that anything Palestinian is suspect. This is confirmed by the letter which has been issued which says that being Palestinian won’t be the ‘sole’ reason for refusing transfers.

In her email to me of 19 June, Fay Ingram, asserted that the ART

‘doesn’t have to answer specific questions about a block that has been placed’ and ‘that we actively review all payments and can stop payments when we hold concerns.

Of course the ART doesn’t have to answer questions but what possible reason can there be for not doing so? It is a lie that they ‘actively review all payments’. Over time I’ve made a number of international payments from Nationwide. They have never been subject to any hold-up. These are camouflage words.

This is especially relevant when the ART provide a false explanation to another customer about Palestine being a sanctioned state.

However much Nationwide twist and turn it is clear that in practice they are operating a policy of sanctioning Palestine. When I’ve tried to send money from other banks I haven’t had this problem. If Nationwide is to maintain that it’s not treating payments to Palestine differently then it needs to challenge the anti-Palestinian racism which permeates the ART. They should lay down clear rules and guidelines about not discriminating against the Palestinians whose only crime is suffering under an illegal and brutal occupation.

I have quoted only brief excerpts from the email correspondence. If you wish to see the full emails, then they are saved here.

One final matter. The first time I learnt that my accounts were being closed was on 24 June when I receive a ‘reminder’ that my accounts were being closed. I had not previously had any such notice although Nationwide maintains that a letter was sent out on May 10. Given my post is reliable my suspicion is that this letter was never sent.

What is interesting is that on 19 June, over a month after the letter of May 10 was apparently sent, Fay Ingram wrote to me stating that

Why was Ingram saying that my accounts could be closed when elsewhere Nationwide are asserting that such a decision had already been made?

Likewise Rhiannon sent an email on 23 May saying of Haleema’s letter that ‘I can’t agree that we...  threatened we’d close your accounts.’ She may not agree but how else should I interpret Haleema’s threat that

if we hear about any further incidents or similar behaviour towards our colleagues, we'll close your account immediately without telling youfirst. [bold in the original]

Rhiannon’s email was sent nearly a fortnight after the letter closing my accounts was apparently sent. It reveals how shallow Nationwide investigations are that they are unable read their own correspondence.

It is clear from my recent experiences with Nationwide that their attitude to Israel/Palestine is that of the Britain’s Political Establishment which is to penalise the Palestinians and treat Israel as a normal western democracy. This means ignoring the fact that Israel is illegally occupying Palestinian land and adopting a mentality that conflates Palestinians with terrorism and sanctions.

What You Can Do?

Although some people have written threatening to close their accounts if Nationwide doesn’t change their stance I’m not asking people to do this. Nationwide’s institutional racism and amorality is par for the course in the capitalist banking world.

What you can do is to bombard them with complaints about their behaviour and demand accountability for decisions to stop transfers to Palestinian organisations such as children’s centres. This is especially the case if you are a member.

Tony Greenstein

To Counter the Riots & Attacks on Refugees We Need a New Anti-fascist/Anti-Racist Movement – We Can't rely on the Police or State

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Stand Up to  Racism is NOT that movement – it is a recruiting vehicle for the SWP & a cosy alliance with the Trade Union Bureaucracy


Tony Greenstein's speech at Palestine solidarity rally in Liverpool 4 August 2024


Tomorrow there will be a mobilisation in Brighton against the Fascists

Last Sunday I spoke at a Palestine solidarity rally in Liverpool. There was going to be a demonstration first and then a rally but fears of fascist attacks led to the demonstration being cancelled (although there was an impromptu one after the rally).

On the previous evening the fascists had rallied outside a mosque and burnt down the Spellow Library and Community Hub library, a 'one stop shop for one of the most deprived'. This story has been repeated throughout the country.

A remarkable achievement for fascist goons in Liverpool - they burnt down a local library and advice hub

Al Jazeera Rioting in Liverpool

Unfortunately Skwawkbox’s report did not tell the whole story about what happened in Liverpool. The previous day a thousand fascists had mobilised at the Pier Head, the traditional rallying place of the Labour Movement and just six anti-fascists were present. Although they were unable to attack the mosque in Walton the fascists did considerable damage.


If anyone bears responsibility for the riots today it is the disgusting coconut Suella Braverman. The irony is that she is the child of immigrants.

Although the catalyst was the murder of 3 young girls in Southport a week ago, the months and years of demonisation of refugees and Muslims have taken their toll. Sunak and Braverman, who were so voluble about ‘hate marches’ against genocide in Palestine and who were so concerned about ‘anti-Semitism’ have had nothing to say about the violent attacks on Black and Asian people and Mosques. Their indignation about racism is reserved exclusively for Jewish supporters of Israel’s genocidal attack on Gaza.

If anyone bears responsibility for playing the same theme tune as Farage its Yvette Cooper - instead of changing the racist discourse she continued where Braverman left off - this is where bourgeois feminism has ended up


Those who talked about ‘swarms’ of migrants (David Cameron) and an ‘invasion’ of refugeees (Braverman) bear the responsibility for what has happened today. So does Yvette Cooper who only a week ago was proudly boasting about how she would wage war on refugees earning a crust washing cars. What a terrible crime it is to want to work!

Instead of attacking the obvious anti-Black and Islamaphobic racism of the rioters Starmer and Cooper frame what is happening in terms of thuggery and violence. 

We should not accept this . The violence and thuggery is a consequence of the politics of racism and scapegoatism and both Starmer and Cooper are equally guilty of creating the conditions in which it took place. The answer is NOT more legislation restricting the right to protest. The irony of restricting the right to protest against genocide in Gaza has been lost on these hypocrites.

As it is dozens of peace activists and protesters are in gaol, some with lengthy sentences, because direct action to prevent climate catastrophe is considered more dangerous than whipping up race hatred.

Starmer and his Zionist supporters went on about ‘anti-Semitism’ repeatedly although no Jewish synagogues were attacked nor were Jewish people. But when Mosques are attacked NOTHING IS SAID.

Cooper talked of the  ‘billions’ the asylum backlog is costing us which is a straightforward lie. Asylum seekers want to work and house themselves. It is the immigration rules that prevent this that is costing money.

Greater Manchester Police Attack Victim of  Race Attack

Scapegoating refugees is so much easier than tackling the real criminals such as Boris Johnson and Sunak who handed out billions of pounds of COVID contracts to their corrupt cronies - something the Met is refusing to investigate

What has cost us an estimated £15 billion is the COVID Contract frauds perpetrated by the last government when they established a VIP track to allow their friends and cronies, such as Baroness Mone, to secure lucrative contracts to provide Personal Protective Equipment, much of which was defective and never used.   Mone and her company Medpro was given over £200 million pounds for PPE that was unfit to use. The whole scheme was later judged illegal but the CPS and Metropolitan Police have not prosecuted anyone. Over £40 million was handed to Matt Hancock’s pub landlord, Matt Bourne, who had never before manufactured PPE.

Just imagine this corrupt pair, including Tory Peer Lady Mone, trousered over £200m & a profit of over £100m for PPE that was useless. The Met has done fuck all - however this is not newsworthy for the BBC

But the thugs and idiots who have run rampage in the last week know nothing of this because we have a ‘Labour’ government which is as much in hock to the rich and privileged as the last Tory government. Far better to attack refugees and Muslims than those who are really to blame. Starmer’s Labour has pledge to continue with austerity with Rachel Reeves removing the winter heating allowance from most pensioners.

Sussex Police actively tried their best to prevent the launch of my book on fighting fascism in Brighton - the Quakers of Friends Meeting House literally quaked, giving in to Police threats that they would provide no protection - the eventual EDL picket was barely enough to fill a phone box

Twice the Independent Police Complaints Commission upheld my complaint about Sussex Police trying to prevent an anti-fascist book launch - we should never think that the Police are neutral when it comes to racism or fascism

Sussex Police did their best to obstruct attendance at my book launch - their sympathy for the fascists was all too clear

The EDL picket of my book launch then moved to Churchill Square where they tried to attack the Palestine stall and got the shock of their lives as hundreds of shoppers turned on them - they had to seek police protection in the end - Tony Greenstein is speaking  with the megaphone

The Book that Brighton/Sussex Police tried to ban - demonstrating once again that the Police will never be our friends

The BBC have actively promoted the charlatan Farage and his racist agenda - and there are still those who call themselves anti-racists who pay the BBC licence fee

The attacks we have witnessed have political roots which have been exploited by charlatans like City money man, Nigel Farage, who the BBC have shamelessly promoted for years. We have to set our own agenda and the labour movement has been pitifully weak at doing this or combating the growth of the far-right.

The answer @FigureSpeech is not to pay the BBC Licence Fee

National Front march 1976 Bradford

I was active in the 1970’s in fighting fascism when the National Front was talked about as the third major party after having come third in the 1973 parliamentary by-election in West Bromwich with 16%, securing 18% of the vote in Leicester council elections and over 100,000 votes in the Greater London Council elections. But despite this I can't remember a fascist rally when the Left was outnumbered by the fascists. This is what is different this time around.

Oswald Moseley speaking at the Brighton Dome in 1936 - canny electricians wired up the speaker system that gave the assembled fascists a chance to listen to the Internationale!

At the EDL demonstration in London on 27 July there were approximately 15,000 fascists and just 5,000 anti-fascists.  This is something we have to reverse. Of course times have changed. 40 years ago the labour movement was strong with a closed shop in the docks, cars and mines. There were major industrial battles between the working class and the government. Today the working class is atomised and depoliticised. Production has been transferred to the Global South and what used to be referred to as the proletariat has been dispersed. Today it is doctors not dockers who go on strike.

South Yorkshire which was at the heart of the mining industry and an incredibly political working class now sees the effect of deindustrialisation as lumpen youth turn their attention to easy scapegoats such as refugees and Black people.

In sleepy Lewes the NF tried to hold an election meeting in the 1979 General Election but it was surrounded by hundreds of anti-fascist protesters

We need to make our arguments based on class not the liberal diversity agenda which ends up with the Sunaks, Bravermans and Priti Patels of this world. Yorkshire was made an industrial desert by Thatcher and neo-liberal economics. It wasn’t migrants who closed the mines and the docks but those  who own the billionaire press and their friends.

A good letter from the 5 independent MPs but where were the useless Campaign Group of MPs like Abbot and McDonnell

When the rioters say they ‘want their country back’ the obvious question is when did you ever own it? Those who own the wealth of this country don’t have a moment’s hesitation in transferring their money abroad or moving their factories to India or South Korea. Unfortunately the most basic arguments for socialism have been abandoned by a Labour Party which wraps itself in the Union Jack to hide its political bankruptcy.

What we need is to create a mass anti-fascist and anti-racist movement in Britain which can challenge the racist ideas in the heads of young white kids who, lacking any future, target vulnerable minorities. Most of those taking part in the riots are not fascists or neo-Nazis but they are easily recruitable fodder for those who are.

Thousands of anti-fascists came out to prevent an NF march in Wood Green in London

The 1970’s saw major pitched battles between fascists and anti-fascists such as that at Wood Green in April 1977 (where Corbyn earned his spurs) and at Lewisham in August 1977 where the riot police made their first appearance on the mainland. The SWP led the physical force mobilisation on the afternoon of the National Front march. In the morning Mervyn Stockwood, the Bishop of Southwark led a march of liberals and other worthies anxious to avoid any confrontation.

The Metropolitan Police did their best to baton their way through for the National Front as a rain of bricks and missiles landed on them from the local Black youth. After completing just one-third of the route the police gave up. That is the spirit we have to rekindle. Physical force opposition to fascist groups is based on the idea that if you allow fascists and their supporters to control the streets you will lose the battle.

Brighton Anti-Fascist Mobilisation 1981 Against NF March - The Level

In 1976 Brighton & Hove  Anti-Fascist Committee was created, based on the labour movement and a year later the Anti-Nazi League was created. It became, along with Rock Against Racism (which came into being after Eric Clapton gave his support to Enoch Powell) a mass movement. The only mass movement that the SWP has ever initiated.  

When Brighton ANL was created we had mass meetings every month in the old Resource Centre in North Road (where Brighthelm is now) of 400-500. In April 1978 the ANL and RAR organised a massive carnival in London of over 100,000 people which gathered in Trafalgar Square to march the 6 miles to Victoria Park in Brixton. Bands like the Clash and Tom Robinson played. There were a number of other carnivals. The political cultural aspect of the struggle rather than paper selling knocked the stuffing out of the white and old, stale and male National Front. NF stood for No Fun.

Brighton Anti-Fascist Mobilisation Against the NF early 80s

 After the General Election of 1979 when Thatcher came to power and the NF got a derisory 0.6% of the vote the NF took to thuggery and street violence. As Secretary of Brighton ANL at the time I helped organise the anti-fascist response which drove them from the streets of Brighton although not before there had been 3 fascist demonstrations. I record these events in my book in 2012 The Fight Against Fascism in Brighton and the South Coast.

Today’s Stand Up To Racism is a pale shadow of the ANL at its height. It is not only an SWP recruiting vehicle it has effectively become the subcontractor for the trade union bureaucracy allowing them to hive off anti-racism to SUTR whilst actually doing nothing to combat racism amongst their own members.

National Front and British Movement members give the Hitler salute at the 1981 demonstration in Brighton at which I was arrested (& acquitted)!

We urgently need to recreate a mass anti-fascist and anti-racist movement that involves both the labour movement and Black and Asian communities. At the moment Asian communities themselves are heavily split on communal lines, not only between Hindutva supporters and Muslims but between Sunni and Shi'ite.  It is worth reading an article on The Muslim Vote by Craig Murray about the Muslim vote in Blackburn where he was a Workers Party candidate.

George Galloway on the Boat People and the Royal Navy

It also means that there is a responsibility on those like George Galloway not to echo and amplify the message of the racists. If refugees stay in hotels it is because they are not allowed to work not because they wish to do so.

The far-right have established themselves all over Europe in countries where social democracy once reigned, such as Sweden and the Netherlands. We have a duty to ensure that this does not happen here and that means there is no room for left sectarianism and using anti-racism as a party building exercise. Nor is there room for the kind of communalism that Craig Murray experienced. Black is a political not a physical colour. The fact that the murderer of the girls in Southport was a Christian fundamentalist did not affect in the slightest the belief that ‘the Muslims’ were responsible.

After the fascists had attacked a lone Black man in Manchester Greater Manchester Police set upon him, leaving the fascist thugs alone

What we are also witnessing is a coming together of the Zionists and the far-right. For the fascists the best opponents of Muslims are Zionists and the Israeli state. Tommy Robinson is an open admirer of the Israeli state and its wars. Fascist symbols and the Israeli flag go together very well. Zionism has no problem with holocaust deniers. It's Palestinian supporters who are their enemies. As Geert Wilders, the leader of the Netherland’s Freedom Party, which became the largest party at the 2023 elections saidIf Jerusalem falls into the hands of the Muslims, Athens and Rome will be next.’

SUTR has consistently refused to take up the issue of anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian racism. That was why Brighton & Hove PSC disaffiliated from them locally. In Scotland they have marched for 5 years with Glasgow Friends of Israel. SUTR seems unable to understand that Israeli Apartheid is racist and worse even than its South Africa counterpart was 30 years ago.

The SWP is still cowed by ‘anti-Semitism’. Like dinosaurs, they are incapable of understanding that the patterns of racism change. Jews were once the victims of racism. Today they are mostly the supporters of racism in the form of the Israeli state.

Of course not all Jews are Zionists. Those who are anti-Zionists are not deterred by the mention of Palestine. So it is Zionist Jews that SUTR are directly appeasing. They don't understand that Zionists have no interest in fighting fascism. When the Board of Deputies organised a march against ‘anti-Semitism’ recently Tommy Robinson went along to join it.

Support for the Palestinians and opposition to Israeli Apartheid must be central to any anti-racist and anti-fascist movement today. There is no room for the participation of Zionists and supporters of Jewish Supremacy.

Joe Solo responds to HOPE not hate controversy – Not The Andrew Marr Show

That is why anti-fascists should have absolutely nothing to do with the Zionist HatenotHope group run by Nick Lowles. It is an anti-left Zionist organisation and its former Deputy Director and Company Secretary, ex-Labour MP Ruth Smeeth (now Baroness Anderson) led the false ‘anti-Semitism’ smear campaign.

In particular she targeted for expulsion Marc Wadsworth, the veteran Black anti-racist activist after making false allegations of anti-Semitism. She was also a member of the Jewish Labour Movement .


HnH led the attacks on Chris Williamson and even withdrew a ‘Hero Award’ from Jo Solo, a socialist musician, when they learnt that he was also a supporter of Chris Williamson, the former Labour MP.

Such was the backlash to what they had done, that they later rescinded their decision and decided after all to give him the £5,000 which he had all along intended to give to other organisations anyway. A crowdfunder for Jo had raised double that so Jo was in a good position to say ‘no thank you’.  Egg on HnH’s faces all round.

Lady Smeeth was named in a Wikileaks US Embassy Cable as a ‘strictly protect asset’.  In other words she was an intelligence asset. Lowles came from Gerry Gable’s Searchlight Magazine which was well known for trading information on fascists in exchange for handing over information on left activists and anarchists.

HnH is clearly an MI5/Mossad Intelligence Cutout and should be avoided like the plague.

Tony Greenstein

See The BBC condemns the riots and sanitises the far right in the same breath

Brighton Says No to the Fascists as Thousands Rally to Send the Rats Back to the Sewers

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 Largest Ever Anti-Fascist Rally in Brighton Said No to Farage, Tommy Robinson, the BBC, Starmer and their Media Friends

The Night that Brighton Sent the Fascists Back to their Sewers

Ever since the murder of 3 little girls in Southport, the air has been thick with calls for revenge. Aided by the media which emphasised the Rwandan origins of the alleged killer, coupled with disinformation on social media that the killer was a Muslim and Nigel Farage hinting that information was being withheld, mobs of fascist thugs were encouraged to attack mosques, beat up Black people and set fire to and try to burn alive refugees in asylum centres.


Tonight was the night that people came onto the streets in their thousands, all over Britain, to say no to the fascists and their GB News and BBC sponsors. Farage and the rest of the Westminster political slime can eat their heart out.

The Master Race

Sir Kid Starver had a phone round to Labour MPs instructing them not to attend the anti-fascist mobilisations and Stella Creasy in Walthamstow had people chanting ‘where are you’.


When I went to see my probation officer yesterday I was told they were closing the offices today because information had been received, presumably from the police, that fascists and neo-Nazis were going to descend on Brighton in order that they could attack.

Comrades of mine were worried about whether we would be sufficient in numbers to be able to confront and see off the fascist hordes who were set to descend on Brighton. Careful plans were laid to go to the rallying point in large groups just in case.


I even advised my two twenty something children not to go because I didn’t want them to get hurt but I needn’t have worried. Thousands turned up.  I would estimate that between 4,000 and 5,000 occupied half of Queens Road leading up to Brighton station. If the Police hadn’t been there doing their usual job of protecting fascists they would, literally, have been massacred.

I am the historian of Brighton fascism having written the only history of Brighton’s fine anti-fascist record. We have had large demonstrations against the fascists in the past.  In 1981 we mobilised about a thousand people. A similar number put Oswald Moseley’s henchman Geoffrey Hamm in hospital with a broken jaw in 1948. In 2012 up to 1,500 took to the streets to send the EDL back to the sewers but last night was  by far the largest anti-fascist mobilisation ever seen in Brighton.


And not just in Brighton. There was a massive demonstration in Walhamstow in London. People have become sick to the back teeth of corrupt and rotten politicians like Yvette Cooper, Sunak and Farage demonising asylum seekers. It is these scumbags who create the atmosphere in which Tommy Robinson can exist. They accept that refugees are a problem and of course the fascists have much more simply solutions than a drawn out deportation process. They either force them out immediately or kill them.

After all that’s what our politicians are supporting in Gaza.  Israel’s genocidal ethnic cleansing.  So why not here?  And of course it wouldn’t be limited to refugees. Every non-White person would be a target as we have seen with the attacks on Black people. And like the Greater Manchester Police, the filth will protect the fascists and arrest their victims.

We should be clear. Refugees are welcome in Britain. The reason they are here is because we were and still are in many cases in their countries. That is what our ‘defence’ budget is about. Intervening in other countries to change their regimes if they don’t serve our interests. The £80 billions on ‘defence’ could be spent on the NHS, schools etc. Instead it goes on imperialist wars and supporting the fascist state of Ukraine.


Economically migrants benefit a country because they tend to be young people who don’t use social services or claim benefits because they want to work. This idea that a migrant takes someone’s job is economic   illiteracy.  As if unemployment is a function of the size of a population.

Likewise this argument about it lowering the cost of wages. What lowers the price of labour isn’t immigration but weak and useless trade unions. When British unions were militant they served their members interests.

So we should rebut the whole of the racist narrative of the main parties and also challenge the media monopoly of the racists – be it the BBC, Sky or GB News. They each sing from the same hypocritical song sheet.



Of course even the bourgeois abolishment became somewhat worried that the right-wing riots were getting out of hand with their smashing up of property. So we had the absurd and once-in-a-lifetime experience of the Daily Express and Mail paying tribute to the thousands of anti-racist/anti-fascist demonstrators last night. Even the BBC had a half-decent report.

As the old saying goes, hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue!

Tony Greenstein

The Board of Deputies has made British Jews Accomplices to Genocide in Gaza

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If Jews Are Concerned About Anti-Semitism Then They Should Stop Acting As a Moral Alibi for Extermination, Torture and Famine

 There can be no greater obscenity than using the Nazi Holocaust to justify Gaza’s Holocaust


Joint statement with the @JLC_uk: “We are concerned that the cumulative effect of these announcements, in quick succession, signal a significant shift in policy, away from Israel being a key UK ally. This would not only be a strategic error but a moral one.” pic.twitter.com/pu8tRin5Gd


One of the most embarrassing things when speaking at a Palestinian demonstration is when people applaud simply because you are Jewish. People take it for granted that most Jewish people support Israel’s war crimes.  Unfortunately this is true.

It’s not that Jewish anti-Zionists deserve praise so much as Jews who support genocide carried out in their name deserve condemnation.

That was why I objected to a contest on Twitter to find the top 10 Jews ‘who don’t hate themselves’, the Nazi-style accusation that Zionists deploy against anti-Zionist Jews. It should not be remarkable that Jews should condemn a state which has turned Gaza into a death camp.

It is a sign of the political and moral decay in the Jewish community that creatures like Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis and Board of Deputies President Phil Rosenberg, are able to claim that British Jews support Israel’s genocide, without any seeming comeback from Jews.

It is a symptom of the amorality of most British Jews that they don’t protest when their self-proclaimed leaders protest in their name against Britain resuming its funding of UNWRA, the UN Agency charged with preventing famine in Gaza. These wretches even complained that Britain was withdrawing its objection at the International Criminal Court to the issuing of arrest warrants for Israel’s war criminal Prime Minister, Netanyahu and Defence Minister Gallant.

Rosenberg warned that prosecuting war criminals would pose a threat to British national security and that feeding Palestinian children by funding UNWRA would cause irreparable harm to the Zionist cause. ‘Most worryingly of all’ Rosenberg said, ‘is the speculation that Britain may impose an arms embargo on Israel this week.’

Imagine what might happen. Israel wants to bomb one of the few remaining schools left in Gaza and all of a sudden Israel’s Chief of Staff discovers that they’ve run out of bombs. Palestinian children are likely to run amok unless you can smother them with White Phosphorous. God forbid Israel might not be able to massacre women and children at the drop of a hat. It would be an ‘astonishing decision to take against a key UK ally and security partner’ Rosenberg proclaimed.  Yet the sound of British Jews dissociating themselves from these scoundrels is deafening in its silence.

For all their memorials most Jews have learnt nothing from the Holocaust. This is Zionism. Drawing universal lessons such as anti-racism might interfere with their settler colonial project. If non-Jews in Europe had behaved in the same way as Jews do today, then not 6 but 7 or 8 million Jews would have perished in the Holocaust.

Labour Friends of Israel, funded by the Israeli Embassy, leapt into action at the prospect of Netanyahu facing the International Criminal Court for War Crimes

Support for Israel, right or wrong, is a reflex action of most Jews. By their silence British Jews are complicit in the genocide in Gaza. Unlike Germans under Hitler, British Jews do not have the excuse of living in a state based on police terror.

When Britain’s Suella Braverman and Rishi Sunak claimed that marches against genocide were anti-Semitic and that Jews were fearful of entering inner London where were the protests? Most British Jews went along with this nonsense and in the process what they did was to cement the identification in the public mind between Israel’s atrocities and ordinary Jews.

Jewish Bloc on Palestinian Demonstrations

That these claims were evidence free, all the demonstrations had a Jewish bloc, didn’t deter them in the slightest.  Anti-racist Jews are invisible to the British Establishment and their Zionist monkeys.

The time has long gone when Jews could sit on the fence and proclaim their indifference to what is done in their name. To be an onlooker when a Holocaust is being perpetrated in your name is to take sides. As Archbishop Desmond Tutu said, ‘If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.’

Most British Jews know little about the holocaust. They rely on Simon Schama’s coffee table books. They know even less about the Zionist record, not only collaboration with the Nazis but their blocking of escape routes for Jews who tried to get out of Europe.

As in Gaza, the Warsaw Ghetto was subject to a siege. Some 92,000 Jews died as a result of hunger even before the deportations. In Lodz, the second largest ghetto, about 45,000 Jews died. In all some half a million Jews died of hunger or starvation. This was deliberate Nazi policy. ‘Death by Hunger’ as Hans Frank, the Nazi Governor General of Poland said. This is Israel’s template today in Gaza.

In July 1941 Zionist activists picketed the offices of Agudat Israel in the USA in protest at them sending food parcels to starving Jews in the Polish ghettos. Joseph Tenenbaum, a former Vice-President of the American Jewish Committee, wrote that Jews must not interfere with Britain’s war needs, ‘even if this comes at the expense of victims in Poland or elsewhere.’ Zionists have form in this sort of thing.

I can remember debating with those on the Left who argued that it was anti-Semitic to expect someone, just because they were Jewish, to take a position on Zionism. Today when the so-called leaders of British and French Jews openly support what Israel is doing in Gaza, it is incumbent on Jews to speak out. Silence is complicity.

The Catholic Church was bitterly criticised for not having openly opposed the Nazi Holocaust despite having been aware of it from an early stage. This was crystallised in The Deputy, the 1963 play by Rolf Hochhuth which portrayed Pope Pius XII as having been indifferent to the extermination of the Jews.

What then is one to make of Jews who remain silent when the Zionist puppet Ephraim Mirvis openly supports the extermination of the Palestinians of Gaza and protests against funding UNWRA?

The situation today is that Palestinians are not only dying from bombs and bullets but from Israel’s deliberate encouraging of the spread of disease.  The Blocking of aid convoys means that Israel is deliberately creating a famine and the conditions for disease to spread. Medical researchers in the Lancet estimated that not 50,000 but 187,000 people– a tenth of Gaza’s population – have died. Jonathan Cook has suggested that unless immediate action is taken then 600,000 will die. 600,000 is the figure that Israel’s Ambassador in London, Tzipi Hotoveli, looked forward to in an interview with Piers Morgan.

Despite the Zionist outrage when I described Israel in 2019 as Hitler’s Bastard Offspring’, my words have been proved correct. When Israel’s war against the Palestinians began last October, ‘Defence’ Minister Yoav Gallant called the Palestinians ‘human animals.’ There were no protests at this by Mirvis or the Board despite it being first coined by Heinrich Himmler, to describe Jews in in a speech to senior SS Officers in Poznań on October 4 1943.


Nor was Gallant alone in identifying with the Nazis. ‘Finish them’ is the most popular car bumper sticker in Israel today. When the war began Tel Aviv was flooded with stickers exterminate now’. Former Likud MK Moshe Feiglin compared Hitler’s desire to annihilate every last Jew with Israel’s need to eliminate every last Palestinian.

Israel has based its claim to reparations from Germany on the fiction that it inherits the memory of the Jews who died in the holocaust. The reality is that it inherits the memory of those who killed the 6 million.

How many Jews have walked out of a synagogue sermon when the rabbi defends what Israel is doing? How many have openly criticised the Board of Deputies when they justify Israel’s policy of starvation and its repeated massacres of a civilian population?

Of course there are many thousands of Jews who have refused to remain silent such as those who participate in the Jewish bloc on the demonstrations in London. But it has to be faced that the few thousand British Jews who have participated in solidarity actions with the Palestinians are still a small percentage of Britain’s Jews.

Zionism and its interpretation of the holocaust have become, for most Jews a substitute religion. From not wanting to know about the holocaust immediately after the war, American Jews embraced holocaust theology at the same time as the United States openly backed Israel post-67. During the McCarthy era mention of the holocaust was seen as evidence of communist leanings.

How is it that worship of god has been transformed into worship of real estate, the preposterous claim that god gave the land of Palestine to the Jews? The Prophets would have called this idolatry, a Golden Calf?

How is it that Jews, who were once synonymous with the Left and subversion of the established order - trade unionist, anarchists, socialists and communists – have become the dupes and pawns of the Islamophobic far-Right?

The unspoken assumption is that Jews today have nothing in common, apart from religious rituals, with their counterparts in Eastern Europe a century ago. British Jews today are completely dissimilar to Jews in the East End of the 1930s. When anti-Semitism was a problem in Britain Jews naturally turned to the left – the Communist Party and Independent Labour Party and assorted groups. The Labour Party dissociated itself from the anti-fascist struggle.

In 1945 the only Communist MP ever to have been elected in England, Phil Piratin, was elected for Mile End in the East End.  Over half his votes were estimated to come from Jews. When Geoffrey Alderman surveyed Jewish voters in Hackney for the 1979 general election, some 1.8% of Jews said they were voting for the neo-Nazi National Front but none said they were voting for the Communist Party.  In other words not only have Jews become more prosperous but they have moved to the right politically.

Anti-Semitism – the False Anti-Racism of the Right

As traditional anti-Semitism has disappeared so, in the minds of many Jews, anti-Zionism is seen as opposition to their identity as Jews and anti-Semitism. But opposition to identity is not racism. There are many groups in which female genital mutilation [FGM] is seen as part of their culture. By this reasoning opposition to FGM is also racism.

The majority Jewish identity today is support for Israel and therefore the IHRA ‘definition’ of anti-Semitism which is about Israel not Jews. No longer is anti-Semitism ‘hostility to or prejudice against Jews as Jews’, the Oxford English Dictionary definition. Zionist Groups like the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism set about increasing the fears of Jews about anti-Semitism. 

When my father took part in the Battle of Cable Street he didn’t need a definition of anti-Semitism. He knew what anti-Semitism meant from daily life. The mere fact that the British and US governments have pushed the definition so hard upon universities and other public bodies testifies to its fraudulent and phony nature.

From 2015 onwards the CAA produced an ‘Anti-Semitism Barometer’ which was criticised even by other Zionists for its sloppy methodology.

Writing about this survey Anshel Pfeffer accused the CAA of an eagerness to see the anti-Semitism in Britain, which inarguably exists, as much more widespread than it really is’. Pfeffer is a mainstream Zionist. About the finding that 56% of Jews agree that “the recent rise in anti-Semitism in Britain has some echoes of the 1930s.” Pfeffer remarked that:

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

Since the CAA, CST and the Metropolitan Police all use the IHRA misdefinition of anti-Semitism then any statistics they produce can be discarded as not merely unreliable but meaningless.

Concern about ‘anti-Semitism’ by racists like Suella Braverman has been used to both flatter and frighten British Jews with the express purpose of claiming that opposition to a key plan of British foreign policy, support for Israel, derives from anti-Semitism.

Why else would Sunak rush out of Downing Street when George Galloway was elected MP to profess his concern that ‘Jewish students were fearful to wear their school uniforms’?  The man who made support for the Rwandan scheme for refugees his flagship policy.

What is it about Jews that touches the depths of Braverman’s black heart when she expressed no such concerns about the attacks on mosques and Muslims following the murder of 3 girls in Southport?

Or put it another way? Would Braverman, Jenrick and the rest of the Tory slime have extended their support for Jewish refugees fleeing the pogroms at the end of the 19th century?

According to Matthew Hendley [Anti-alienism and the Primrose League, 250]

the late nineteenth century critics of sweating "indulged in blatant racism, blaming foreign immigrants (mainly East European Jews who settled in the principal industrial areas) for causing sweating through their competition and low living standards.

In the debate on the Immigration of Destitute Aliens on 29 January 1902, William Evans-Gordon MP had this to say:

"The main cause of the present unpopularity of aliens in East London remains to be stated. The inflow of the foreign Jew has brought with it an immense amount of overcrowding, the direct and indirect effects of which have been alike injurious. The number of families occupying one-roomed tenements is very great, too many lodgers are received and illegally occupied basements are far too common."

Mr Forde Ridley followed up:

All they [British workers] know is that they are being turned out of their homes and the neighbourhoods in which they are obliged to live, in order to carry on their work, and that their places are being taken by Russian and Polish Jews, and you cannot persuade them that it is not a racial question. They naturally take a hatred to the Jewish people.... It is argued by some that if a foreigner can live on so much less than an Englishman, then it is high time that the British working man went to the wall.

William Evans-Gordon, the Tory MP for Stepney, formed the British Brothers League in 1901 in order to keep Jewish immigrants out. In 1903, Evans-Gordon wroteThe Alien Immigrant, in which he asserted that "the settlement of large aggregations of Hebrews in a Christian land has never been successful", and that the

"Hebrew colony ... unlike any other alien colony in [Great Britain], forms a solid and permanently distinct block – a race apart, as it were, in an enduring island of extraneous thought and custom", to the extent that "east of Aldgate one walks into a foreign town".

Sound familiar? This is what is said today about Muslims. The target may have changed but the argument about different ‘races’ not mixing remains the same. In his autobiography Chaim Weizmann, the future President of Israel wrote favourably of Evans-Gordon:

our people were rather hard on him. The Aliens Bill in England and the movement which grew around it were natural phenomenon which might have been foreseen... Sir William Evans-Gordon had no particular anti-Jewish prejudices... He acted as he thought, according to his best lights and in the most kindly way, in the interests of his country… he was sincerely ready to encourage any settlement of Jews almost anywhere in the British Empire, but he failed to see why the ghettos of London or Leeds or Whitechapel should be made into a branch of the ghettos of Warsaw and Pinsk [Trial and Error, pp. 90-91)

Stuart Samuel, the Liberal MP for Whitechapel was opposed in 1900 by a Conservative, David Hope-Kydd, who had the support of the English Zionist Federation. Geoffrey Alderman described how Kydd

cleverly coupled his desire for an aliens’ immigration bill with heart-rending support for the infant Zionist movement.’  Hope-Kydd referred to Jewish immigrants (aliens) as  the very scum of the unhealthiest of the Continental nations.’  [The Jewish Community in British Politics, pp. 68, 75]

The BBL was instrumental in securing the passage in 1905 of the Aliens Act which aimed to stop the entry of Jewish refugees from Czarist Russia.. Richard Thurlow wrotethat

The League also left behind a legacy of support for far-right groups in east London and this was exploited by the British Union of Fascists, the British League of Ex-Servicemen and Women, the Union Movement and the National Front who gained followings in the same environs.

If Braverman and Sunak had been living at the beginning of the 20th century then the hostility they display to refugees today would have been directed with equal venom against Jewish refugees.

Today British Jews are the most prosperous segment of the White population and also the most reactionary and racist. If a survey was conducted of attitudes of Jews to Moslems it would show that Islamaphobia and anti-Arab racism was off the scale.

Even without a scientific survey there are intimations of this. In January 2022 the Senior Vice-President of the Board of Deputies, Gary Mond, was forced to resign. Mond had written on Facebook and tweeted that ‘all civilization’ is ‘at war with Islam.’ Mond is also a trustee of the Jewish National Fund-UK, as is Gideon Falter, its Vice Chair and CEO of the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism.

In July 2018 the BOD suspended Roslyn Pine for describing Arabs as “the vilest of animals.” Three years previously Pine had said that it was a pity that the pro-Palestinian Swedish foreign minister was “too old to be raped.” She has also called fellow deputies “kapos.”

Jewish News reported that ‘the Board’s executive ruled that she could return early if she apologised, showed contrition and expressed remorse’. Contrast that with the life-time expulsions that the BOD demanded for Labour members expelled for ‘anti-Semitism’.

What was the reaction of Finchley United Synagogue? Did it change its representative? It was reported that

Finchley Synagogue will look into the plight of its suspended deputy Roslyn Pine as a matter of “urgency”.

Note that word ‘plight’.

There are many reasons for the changing political allegiances of British and European Jews. One of the most important is socio-economic. Jews have almost entirely emigrated from the East End of London to the north London suburbs such as Golders Green.

According to Alderman by 1961, over 40% of Anglo-Jewry was to be found in the upper two social classes compared to less than 20% of the general population.’ William Rubinstein, a past President of the Jewish Historical Society, wrote 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. [The Left, the Right and the Jews. p.51]

In December 1990 I wrote, in REDEFINING ANTI-SEMITISM The False Anti-Racism of the Right

It has long been the practice to accuse supporters of the Palestinians and opponents of Zionism, including Jewish anti-Zionists of 'anti-Semitism'.... Today the New Right claim to be opponents of anti-Semitism. ...  Reagan's Republican Party... voted at its 1984 Party Convention to condemn anti-Semitism unanimously. Even neo-fascist groups, eg. the French cultural and academic racist group, GRECE, opposes 'anti-Semitism'.’

Anti-Semitism was the new and false anti-Semitism of the Right and one reason for this is because it barely exists.  Anti-Semitism is an extremely useful weapon with which to attack the Left and the Palestine Solidarity Movement and that is what we are experiencing today. 

Many on the left, were slow to understand this. It became clearer when ‘anti-Semitism’ became the main weapon used against Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the Labour Party.

How was this possible? Quite simply as Jews changed so did anti-Semitism. Racism changes its contours. It doesn’t stand still. Yesterday’s victims of racism may be today’s racists.

We can see that clearly with people like Priti Patel and Braverman, both of whose parents were immigrants. When the Jews of the East End faced the violent anti-Semitism of Moseley and the British Union of Fascists, their allies were the left and ordinary workers.  In October 1936 at the Battle of Cable Street an estimated 200,000 demonstrators successfully defied the attempts of the Metropolitan Police to force a path through the East End for the fascists. The march had been approved by the Tory Home Secretary Sir John Simon.

Today the Met purport to oppose anti-Semitism but at that time their ranks were full to the brim with BUF sympathisers. Racism towards Jews has been replaced by hostility to Muslims in police ranks.

The same is true of the Tory Party. Until recently the Tory Party was infested by anti-Semitism.  Zionism’s hero, Arthur James Balfour was a dedicated racist and anti-Semite. As Prime Minister he introduced the Aliens Act 1905.

During a conversation with Weizmann, Balfour recalled an exchange with Cosima Wagner, the widow of Richard Wagner. Balfour explained that ‘he shared many of her anti-Semitic postulates.’ Instead of protesting Weizmann

‘pointed out that we, too… had drawn attention to the fact that Germans of the Mosaic persuasion were an undesirable and demoralizing phenomenon…’ [Leonard Stein, The Balfour Declaration p. 154].

During the 1930s the Tory Party was riddled with anti-Semitism. The pro-Nazi Anglo-German Fellowship claimed among its members, fifty members of both Houses of Parliament and ‘many generals, admirals, bishops and bankers.’

Members included Bank of England director Frank Cyril Tiarks, Admiral Sir Barry Domvile, Prince von Bismarck, Governor of the Bank of England Montagu Norman and Geoffrey Dawson editor of The Times. Corporate members included Price Waterhouse, Unilever, Dunlop Rubber, Thomas Cook & Son, the Midland Bank (now HSBC) and Lazard Brothers amongst others.

This was why The Times (along with most of the British press including the pro-Hitler Daily Mail) and the BBC refused to allow criticism of Hitler’s anti-Semitism to interfere with their coverage of German affairs. When anti-Semitism was a genuine form of state racism, the mainstream press weren’t interested. Today when ‘anti-Semitism’ means criticism of Israel then the media are all over it.

One of the most ardent pro-Zionist politicians was Winston Churchill.  Apart from warm words of sympathy he did nothing to help alleviate the plight of Jews under Nazi occupation, still less to admit to British territories Jewish refugees who had escaped the Nazis.

In a speech in Sunderland in January 1920 Churchill spoke of ‘the international Soviet of the Russian and Polish Jew’. Churchill was espousing a version of the international Jewish conspiracy theory.

Churchill followed this up in 1920 with Bolshevism v Zionism in the Illustrated Sunday Herald where he stressed how important it was

that the national Jews in every country who are loyal to the land of their adoption should come forward on every occasion, as many of them in England have already done, and take a prominent part in every measure for combating the Bolshevik conspiracy.

Churchill’s answer to the support among Jewish people for socialism was Zionism. The Nazis too saw Zionism, in Hitler’s words, as ‘a great movement’. (Mein Kampf, p.41).  Zionism has always been a racist and counter-revolutionary movement.

Long before Zionism took hold amongst British Jews it had become the adopted policy of the British Establishment. The only member of the Lloyd George War Cabinet to oppose the Balfour Declaration was Sir Edwin Montagu, its only Jewish member.

The organisation that is charged with monitoring and collating statistics of anti-Semitism is the Mossad Project, the Community Security Trust. As Tony Lerman documented in his essay Antisemitism Redefined in the 1990’s the Israeli state moved to take over the monitoring of statistics on anti-Semitism. Lerman wrote

I had close personal experience of the role the Mossad played in establishing Israeli hegemony over the monitoring and combating of antisemitism. While I was director of the Institute of Jewish Affairs (IJA)... in the 1990s, I founded and was principal editor of the annual Antisemitism World Report, the first objective, independent , country-by-country survey of anti semitism worldwide. The London Mossad representative dealing with antisemitism made it clear to me that they were very unhappy about our independent operation and then tried to pressure us into either ceasing publication or merging our report with one that the then new Project for the Study of Antisemitism at Tel Aviv University, headed by Professor Dina Porat and part-financed by the Mossad, was beginning to produce. [On Anti-Semitism, p.12].

Every year the CST produces Anti-Semitism Incident Reports and every year it documents a continuing increase in anti-Semitism. This fits in well with Zionist ideology that holds that Jews will never be safe living outside Israel which is their ‘real home’.

Sure enough their report for 2023 found that ‘anti-Jewish hate recorded across the UK in 2023... is the highest annual total ever reported to CST.’ What even the CST could not avoid is the conclusion that it is Israel’s attacks on Palestinians which is responsible for this increase. In other words the ‘Jewish’ State is the main cause of anti-Semitism today. They wrote that:

These spikes (in anti-Semitism) also reflected the surge in anti-Jewish reactions to the escalation of conflicts involving Israel. In 2023, the increase in antisemitism following 7 October occurred on a larger scale. Between 1 January and 6 October, CST had recorded an average of five antisemitic incidents per day; from 7 October to 31 December, this rose to an average of 31 antisemitic incidents per day.

Note how the reaction of people to Israel’s genocide is termed ‘anti-Jewish’. I shall leave a detailed analysis of their figures to Alan Maddison’s article for JVL ‘Will the latest CST report do more to protect British Jews or Israel?’ I have just one observation.

The CST report recorded 266 incidents of Assault in 2023, a rise of 96% from the 136 incidents reported in 2022. They tell us that this was ‘the most ever recorded in a year.’  So if the CST are right then two Jewish people will be attacked every three days. This figure is, in itself, quite strange because the CST tells us that there were 4,103 incidents of anti-Semitic hate in 2023.

Normally, for other examples of racism, assault forms about a third of total incidents which suggests that the CST are vastly over inflating the number of anti-Semitic incidents and padding them out with social media posts which are unquantifiable.  What is even stranger is that not one of these incidents was severe enough to be classed as Extreme Violence, compared to one incident in 2022.’ Extreme violence is where there is a case of actual or grievous bodily harm. In other words not one Jewish person was actually hurt in 2023 and just one was hurt in 2022.  Compare these figures to attacks on Muslims.

The CST's Opposition to 'anti-Semitism' didn't stop it inviting Britain's racist Home Secretary as its Guest of Honour

The CST’s decision to invite Braverman as the guest speaker at its 2023 Annual Dinner, gives the lie to CST’s claim to oppose racism.

In a parliamentary debate on Tackling Islamaphobia we learn that almost half of religiously motivated attacks last year were against Muslims, a trend that has stayed consistent for the last six years. 42% of mosques have experienced some form of attack over the last three years (Andy Slaughter MP). I doubt if even 1% of synagogues have been attacked. The scenes outside Southport, Hartlepool and other mosques have never occurred outside synagogues yet the Home Office channels £15m into the coffers of the CST, consistently greater than that to tackle Islamaphobia. Why? Because the British State has an interest in promoting the idea that ‘anti-Semitism’ is on the increase as a way of buttressing support for Israel. Jews are the moral alibi for a central plank of British foreign policy.

Although the BOD is very concerned about ‘anti-Semitism’ today it wasn’t always like that. In 1942 when news about the deportation of Jews from Slovakia to Auschwitz emerged, the Federation of Czechoslovakian Jews published a protest against what was happening. It asked the BOD to join with them. The Board refused.

It would seem that Brodetsky and his colleagues wished to maintain a distance between themselves and the organisations of recent arrivals, whose demands went against the grain of the BD policy which was to work ‘decently’ and refrain from making noise.

In June 1942 the Federation held a public rally. ‘Invitations were sent to Brodestsky and Brotman but they declined to attend.’ Selig Brodetsky was elected as the first Zionist President of the Board in December 1939 and Brotman was its Secretary. Meier Sompolinsky wrote about how

‘the shrewd action of the World Federation of Czechoslovakian Jews made a strong impression and led to a conflict between the advocates of the quiet and the public approaches....

At the demonstration Rabbi Hertz, as chairman, expressed disappointment at Brodetsky’s absence. Even (Anthony) Eden (Britain’s Foreign Secretary) and Cardinal Hinsley, the Catholic primate had sent statements to be read in public, but all the president of British Jewry did was to send an indirect letter.

Sompolinsky comments that

The way the Slovakian issue was handled was characteristic of the hesistant approach of the JFC [Joint Foreign Committee of the Board of Deputies] in the period before the Final Solution became public knowledge. [Meier Sompolinsky, The British Government and the Holocaust - The failure of Anglo-Jewish Leadership, pp. 68-9, 1999]

When it came to opposing genuine anti-Semites the Board of Deputies has always run away from opposing them

This has been the reaction of the BOD throughout its history. In 1936 it opposed Jews taking part in the Battle of Cable Street. The BOD opposed the 43 Group of Jewish ex-servicemen who physically put Moseley and his Union Movement to flight after the war. During the 1960s and 1970s, when the NF was active, the BOD told Jews to keep silent. The only form of ‘anti-Semitism’ that the BOD has ever been prepared to be vocal about is opposition to Zionism and Israel.

The first time the Board held a demonstration against ‘anti-Semitism’ was in 2018 when Corbyn was leader! Last year they also held a demonstration against ‘anti-Semitism’ – this time in support of genocide in Gaza. This is the reality of the ‘anti-Semitism’ scare. It is about keeping British Jews as their docile political pets.

It means British Jews like Heidi Bachram, a Jewish Chronicle correspondent in Brighton and Hove, acting as a spy for the British police against Palestinian solidarity activists. This is a continuation of a long and inglorious Jewish tradition which began when Haganah agent Feivel Polkes acted as a Gestapo agent informing on the left. Thousands of Jews living under cover were betrayed to the Nazis by Jewish informers, such as Icek Glogowski (Fat Jacques). Jewish informers were far more effective than their non-Jewish counterparts because many Jews in hiding trusted them. Zionism informers today carry on the tradition.

French Jews support for Le Pen

One example of how Jews in Western Europe have moved to the right is the recent elections in France. Contrary to all expectations the Left came out on top and Marie Le Pen’s National Renewal came third. You might expect that French Jews were overjoyed that a party founded by a holocaust denier and containing many anti-Semites had been defeated. Not a bit of it. Many French Jews voted for them and according to the Israeli press they were most disappointed that the ‘anti-Semitic’ left came out on top.

Zionism has managed to transform the far-right enemies of Jews into their friends and the left, who hid Jews from the Nazis in France, into their enemies. Not only are Western Jews the most racist, right-wing section of the White population, they are also the most stupid.

Tony Greenstein

In 1941 the Stern Gang Twice Proposed a Military Alliance to the Nazis – One of its Leaders, Yitzhak Shamir, Became Israel's Prime Minister

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 In Stern: The Man, the Gang & the State We Learn About the Mentality Behind the Nazi-style Genocide in Gaza Today

Last summer I was contacted by Hossam Sarhan who asked if I would agree to be interviewed for a program on Yair Stern, the founder of the Stern Gang or Lehi, Loḥamei Ḥerut Yisrael (Fighters for the Freedom of Israel).

The Zionists have done their best since the Hitler era to suggest, on the basis of the undoubted collaboration of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj al-Amin Husseini with the Nazis, that whereas they supported the Allies the Palestinians supported Hitler.

In fact there is no truth in this. It was the ardent Zionist British High Commissioner Herbert Samuel who appointed Husseini as Mufti despite the fact that he came fourth in the elections to the post in 1921.

Stern did his best to form a pact with the above

The British and the Zionists always preferred reactionary, feudal leaders of the Palestinians to secular nationalists like the Istiqlal Party which was severely repressed.

Husseini was a minor war criminal compared to Walter Rauff, the inventor of the gas truck which was used at the first extermination camp Chelmno. Rauff became an Israeli agent after the war.

This did not stop the Mufti playing a starring role in Yad Vashem of the Holocaust. The article on the Mufti is longer than the articles on Himmler and Heydrich combined and longer than the article on Eichmann. It is only slightly exceeded in length by the entry for Hitler. [Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life p. 158].

The Stern Gang was founded in 1940 from a split in another terrorist group, Irgun, which was commanded by former Israeli Prime Minister, Menachem Begin. Lehi was a Blood and Fire Zionist group and its rehabilitation in Israel today says everything about the Zionist attitude to genuine terrorism.

Ilan Pappe

I had just written a book, Zionism During the Holocaust, which contains a section on The Zionist Group that was openly pro-Nazi. This was probably why I was interviewed.Also interviewed by the program makers were Ilan Pappe, the foremost historian of Zionism and its misdeeds and Tom Suarez who has written a couple of very interesting books on Zionism and its antecedents, including its  terroristic proclivities. Another person who was interviewed was Yair Stern, the son of Abraham Stern, the founder of the Stern Gang.

The Stern Gang distinguished itself in 1940 by its offer, not once but twice to Nazi Germany to form a military pact. The idea was for them to recruit 40,000 European Jews and thence, with help from Nazi Germany, to invade Palestine and set up a Jewish State under the auspices of Nazi Germany.  Stern was convinced at that point that Germany was going to win the war and he wanted to be on the winning side.

The Program Interviewed Yair Stern, the son of Abraham Stern

Naftali Lubenchik, from the Stern Gang met a senior representative of the German Foreign Ministry, Otto von Hentig and Alfred Roser, a Military Intelligence agent, in Beirut on 11 January 1941. Lebanon at that time was under the control of Vichy France. The Nazis however ignored the proposal. The Stern Gang had previously sought to work with Mussolini although they were not alone in this.

Covering letter attached to proposed agreement between Stern Gang and Mussolini

The Irgun’s youth wing, Betar, had trained at the Italian naval base of Civitavechia as a result of  an agreement with Mussolini, as had some of Lehi’s cadre. The President of the Zionist Organisation, Chaim Weizmann had made no less than 4 trips to see Mussolini. The Zionist Organisation made it clear, in the words of Weizmann’s predecessor Nahum Sokolow, who also visited Mussolini, that the Zionists had no problems with fascism, just anti-Semitism (or rather too much anti-Semitism!).

Tony Greenstein being interviewed

On 11 January 1941, Vice Admiral Ralf von der Marwitz, the German naval attaché in Turkey, filed a report (the "Ankara document") conveying the offer by Lehi to ‘actively take part in the war on Germany's side’ in return for German support for ‘the establishment of the historic Jewish state on a national and totalitarian basis, bound by a treaty with the German Reich.’

Major Morton killed Stern

In December 1941 Nathan Yellin Mor was sent on another trip to Beirut to meet the Nazis but this time he was intercepted in Syria by the British and arrested. Thus ended the dreams of a greater Zionist and Nazi Reich. In February 1942 Stern was killed by the British Major Morton.

The Stern Gang became notorious for its bank robberies and assassinations. It had an eclectic political philosophy which combined extreme racism (Arabs were to become slaves under a Jewish master race) and yet an orientation to the Soviet Union at one time and what was termed ‘National Bolshevism’.

In November 1944 Lehi also assassinated the resident British Minister in Cairo, Lord Moyne, who was a personal friend of Churchill. The assassins were quickly caught and hanged.

A wanted poster for Stern

Churchill had been a long-term friend of the Zionists and he declared that:

If our dreams of Zionism are to end in the smoke of assassins’ pistols and our labors for its future are to produce a new set of gangsters worthy of Nazi Germany, many like myself would have to reconsider the position we have maintained so consistently.

In fact this is exactly what has happened. Zionism has indeed produced a new set of gangsters and they are led by the Al Capone of Zionism, Benjamin Netanyahu.  However this has not stopped British or American imperialism from supporting the Israeli state unconditionally.

Menachem Begin - Irgun leader

As I argued in the film Lehi was not a break with Zionism anymore than Begin’s Irgun had been. Their differences with the mainstream Labour Zionists were ones of tactics not principles. Indeed at times they were very useful for the Labour Zionists who could at one and the same time dissociate themselves from Lehi’s actions whilst at the same time supporting them.

This was true of the first and most famous massacre of Palestinians in the Nakba, in the village of Deir Yassin (now Givat Shaul) which lies literally a stone’s throw away from the Zionist holocaust propaganda museum, Yad Vashem.

Although Haganah dissociated itself from the massacre of over 100 Palestinians in a forerunner of what is happening in Gaza today, to the extent of David Ben-Gurion sending a letter of apology to Transjordan’s King Abdullah, they had in fact secretly agreed to the massacre, as Ilan Pappe explained in the program.

Supporter of the Stern Gang

Haganah had also agreed to the assassination of UN mediator Count Folk Bernadotte in 1948 although in public they had condemned it to the point of making Lehi a banned organisation, describing it as a terrorist group.

The Zionists today say that it was the Palestinians who had rejected the UN Partition Plan of November 29 1947 (UN Resolution 181). But this is one more Zionist lie. Not only did they expand beyond the boundaries of the Jewish State that the UN had agreed before May 1948 but they had also rejected the UN proposal that Jerusalem, being the home of all 3 religions, should be internationalised. 

After Stern's death, the Stern Gang was led by a triumvirate including Yitzhak Shamir

This was rejected by all wings of the Zionist movement, hence the assassination of Bernadotte. 

As Tom Suarez pointed out in the programme Bernadotte has personally saved 20,000 Jews from the concentration camps when he reached an agreement with Himmler that 100 white buses with Red Crosses on their roofs took Jews and other prisoners from the concentration camps in February 1945.

Bernadotte had single-handedly rescued more Jews than the Zionists (whose collaboration with the Nazis has since become notorious) yet that was no reason for them not to murder him. See Newsweek’s The Swedish Schindler: How Count Bernadotte Saved Thousands of Jews From Death

How you might ask has Israel remembered the Stern Gang and its founder Yair Stern. Bearing in mind that Israel considers itself at the forefront of the fight against ‘terrorism’ you would be forgiven for assuming that mention of his name would be verboten in Israel today.  Not a bit of it.

Abraham Stern Who Was Killed by the British

The street where Stern was killed by the British has been renamed Stern Street. "Avraham Stern” streets are ubiquitous across Israel. The town of Kochav Yair was established in his memory. Even the Israeli  Postal Service got in on the act issuing a stamp commemorating him with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu naming his firstborn son Yair.

In How should Avraham Stern be remembered?  Mark Regev, the former Israeli Ambassador to London, noted that the first Israeli Prime Minister, Ben-Gurion found some positive words with which to describe Lehi’s founding commander:

There is no doubt that Avraham Stern was one of the greatest and most admired people to emerge during the Mandate. I venerate… his steely courage and boundless dedication to Israel’s liberation.

Regev wrote‘the once Zionist renegade is now Israeli mainstream’.

So when Zionists tell you that they oppose terrorism, it is worth remembering that they only oppose ‘terrorism’ when it comes to Palestinian violence. Terrorism committed by Zionists is fine because it serves their objectives, notably the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

Yitzshak Shamir

The fact that Stern had tried to negotiate a military pact with Nazi Germany, of which Ben-Gurion was all too aware, was irrelevant. The fact that he was a racial supremacist was even more irrelevant. Regev asks innocently if Ben-Gurion was ‘

retrospectively whitewashing a Zionist terrorist merely because Stern was a committed Jewish patriot, seemingly confirming the dictum that “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter”? 

Regev’s conclusion was that

Stern’s attacks against the organs of British subjugation – officialdom, military and police – should be viewed as justified insurgency. Even in the politically questionable case of Lord Moyne, was not Lehi’s chosen victim the senior representative of British colonial rule?

Being a myopic Zionist Regev is unable to see why Palestinian ‘terrorism’ is equally justified if not more so since the Zionists were the catspaws and creation of the British state. Their fight against the British was not about a fight for freedom but about their right to expel and subjugate the Palestinians.

This is the hypocrisy that is now playing out in Gaza where Palestinian organisations like Hamas are deemed ‘terrorist’ but the actions of bombing schools and hospitals, cold-bloodedly killing civilians including children is seen as justified.

Zionism was born in blood and fire and it is likely to end that way too.

Tony Greenstein

See https://www.aljazeera.com/program/al-jazeera-world/2024/8/13/stern-the-man-the-gang-and-the-state


Israel Claims it Inherits the Memory of the Jews Who Died in the Holocaust – The Reality is that it Inherits the Memory of Those Who Killed Them

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Interview with Rania Khalek of Breakthrough News about my book Zionism During the Holocaust

Rania Khalek Interviews Tony Greenstein

Zionism Before, During and After the Nazis: A History of Collusion, w/ Tony Greenstein

I’ve been interviewed twice by Rania Khalek this year. The first time, in early April, took place partly in Hungary and then in the UK. It was based on an article I wrote for Electronic Intifada about how the lazy explanation for the genocide in Gaza is the myth of ‘holocaust trauma’.

I explained that Israelis were suffering, not from holocaust trauma, but settler colonial trauma. Their reaction was typical of the slaveholders in the Caribbean who, faced with uprisings by their Black slaves, reacted with unbridled violence. It was the reaction of those who have their foot on the neck of the slave or subjugated and then react violently to any rebellion. It is always the nightmare of the oppressor that their victims will rise up and take revenge.

That was what October 7 was about. That was why almost immediately after October 7 Israel began fashioning a narrative about the terrible cruelties and atrocities of the Palestinian resistance attack.

First we had the stories of the 40 beheaded babies, the baked baby and even the baby hung up to dry on a clothing line.

The problem was that none of this was true. Only 2 of the 1139 Israelis who died that day were babies. The 2 babies who did die were killed accidentally. Compare this with Israel’s slaughter of 20,000+ Palestinian children.

Then we had the ‘rape narrative’ which the New York Times did so much to give legs to with its now discredited article Screams Without Wordsby an Israeli reporter Anat Schwartz, a supporter of Israel’s genocide, and two others. It has since been comprehensively discredited by The Intercept and other publications.

This fabricated narrative was the justification for the genocide that followed in Gaza.

My second interview a month ago, was about my book Zionism During the Holocaust.

How Israel Weaponizes the Holocaust to Justify Killing Palestinians

The interview about my book was a very wide-ranging interview, much like my interview a year ago by Asa Winstanley and Nora Barrows Friedman, which has attracted over 300,000 views.

We started out with an overview of pre-holocaust anti-Semitism and I made the point that in the feudal era anti-Semitism was a popular movement from below against the role that Jews played, the agents of money in an economy based on use values. It was the indebted peasants who reacted at times violently to the Jews.

But in the modern era, from around the last third of the 19th century anti-Semitism took on a different character from Christian anti-Semitism. It was no longer based on religion, i.e. the economic role that Jews played in society but on race.

For Martin Luther once a Jew had converted to Christianity that was the end of the matter. Their soul was saved. For Hitler it was of no account if a Jew had been baptised. Once a Jew always a Jew. It was Wilhelm Marr, the founder of the League of Anti-Semites, who, in 1879 coined the term ‘anti-Semitism’. It was based on the false premise that Jews were Semites, that is they didn’t belong in Europe but were really from the Middle East. Semite was a linguistic not a racial term.

Count von Plehve - instigated pogroms in Czarist Russia including at Kishinev in 1903 - but as an anti-Semite he also supported the Zionist movement 

From this point onwards, anti-Semitism was a movement from the top not the bottom. It was the ruling class who used anti-Semitism as a weapon to divide the working class and oppressed. After the assassination of Czar Alexander II in 1881 the Czarist regime under Interior Minister Vyacheslav von Plehve consciously sought to promote pogroms and anti-Semitism as a means of dividing the enemy. That was why the Bolsheviks held that anyone who was an anti-Semite was a supporter of the Czar.

For Hitler it was ‘Marx the Jew’. Jews were the biological parents of Bolshevism/socialism. Zionism was a reaction to the support of Jews for the revolutionary and socialist groups. Zionism was a consciously counter-revolutionary current. It accepted the characterisation of Jews as foreign interlopers who didn’t belong and they sought instead the creation of a Jewish state mirroring that of the anti-Semitic countries. In this they have succeeded. Israel is, as I once said, Hitler’s Bastard Offspring.

The Zionists often outdid the anti-Semites in their description of the diaspora Jew who they hated. They accepted the caricatures and stereotypes of the anti-Semites. Being separated from what they saw as their ancient land the Jews had developed asocial tendencies. Zionism, especially in Germany, was of the Blood and Soil type, mirroring as they did German nationalism. With ‘national’ soil under them the Jews would be like all others, only more so.

In the words of the founder of Revisionist Zionism, Vladimir Jabotinsky, the Jews were ‘a very nasty people and its neighbours hate it and they are right.’  If one didn’t know that the speaker was a Zionist one would assume that they were a typical non-Jewish anti-Semite. As Joachim Doron, an Israeli political scientist wrote in an article, Classic Zionism and Modern Anti-Semitism – Parallels and Influences:

rather than take up arms against the enemies of the Jews, Zionism attacked the ‘enemy within’, the Diaspora Jew himself and subjected him to a hail of criticism…. Indeed a perusal of the Zionist sources reveals a wealth of charges against the Diaspora Jew, some of which areso scathing that the generation that witnessed Auschwitz has difficulty comprehending them. (my emphasis)

Zionism was seen by the ruling class as, in the words of Count Vyacheslav von Plehve, as an ‘antidote to socialism’. It was a reactionary nationalist diversion. Churchill in 1920 wrote a famous article for the Illustrated Sunday Herald Zionism vs Bolshevism. Support for Zionism was seen as a way of weaning Jews off their revolutionary habits.

Zionism always had one and only one objective. The creation of a Jewish State and it didn’t mind how it got there. Although whilst they were weak they didn’t openly call for such a state, relying on euphemisms such as a ‘Jewish Homeland’, the Zionists had one and only one objective in mind.

It is crucial that people understand, because of the myths that abound about Zionism. There was never any difference between the ‘left-wing’ and the ‘right-wing’ of Zionism. Both wings agreed on the need for a Jewish state.

In May 1948 Ben Gurion instructed the Israeli Army to fire on the Revisionist arms boat, the Altalena - here burning off the Tel Aviv shoreline

Their only differences and sometimes these were quite violent, were about tactics and on occasion blood was spilt as with the shelling of the Revisionist boat Altalena.

Although the holocaust is an essential part of the Zionist narrative today, when the holocaust was actually happening the Zionistsdid not want to know. It was a distraction from their project of state building. Even worse it threatened to disrupt their funding because Jews were more likely to give money to saving refugees and keeping them alive than a nationalist project in the Middle East.

The Zionists worked hard to tie the refugee problem to Zionism. If refugees were to be saved anywhere it had to be in Palestine. All other places were to be opposed because if you could save Jews elsewhere what was the point in having a Jewish State? They disparagingly talked of ‘refugeeism’.

This was the ‘logic’ behind the obstruction of any and all attempts to rescue Jews if the destination was not Palestine. It was summed up by David Ben-Gurion, the Chairman of the Zionist Organisation and first Prime Minister of Israel. When Britain offered to accept 10,000 Jewish children in the wake of Kristallnacht, the Nazi pogrom in November 1938, Ben-Gurion was outraged. In a speech to the Central Council of Mapai (Israeli Labor Party) in December 1938, he said:

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.

Zionism was in essence a racial preservation project. The Zionist idea was based on race, not religion. Most of the early Zionists were atheists but they rested their claim to Palestine on the promise of a god they denied.

My book details how the Zionists wilfully obstructed the efforts of others to save Jews by always shouting ‘what about Palestine’ whenever alternative destinations were proposed. Saving Jews from the gas chambers always came second to building their state.

To the end, they opposed the setting up of Roosevelt’s War Refugee Board in January 1944, which was instrumental in saving some 200,000 Jews. In Hungary their deals with the Nazis amounted to the saving of 1684 Jews of the Zionist and Jewish elite in exchange for keeping quiet about and even misinforming the 437,000 Jews who were deported about where they were heading – Auschwitz.

All of this came out in Israel’s Kasztner trial when the leader of Hungarian Zionism during the war, Israel Kasztner, brought a libel trial against a Hungarian Jew who had called him a collaborator. He lost and was then assassinated by the Israeli secret service Shin Bet. Although acquitted on appeal the facts found by the lower court were not challenged and one charge of collaboration was upheld.

When the Nazis first came to power in January 1933 most Jews were horrified and they began boycotting Nazi German goods. It was a spontaneous Boycott that grew up which nearly all Jews, except the Zionists and the bourgeois Jews, supported. The Zionist leaders welcomed Hitler to power sensing that in the carnage that followed and the inevitable exodus of Jews from Germany and elsewhere in Europe, they could only prosper.

Noah Lucas, a critical Zionist historian wrote that

‘As the European holocaust erupted, Ben-Gurion saw it as a decisive opportunity for Zionism... Ben-Gurion above all others sensed the tremendous possibilities inherent in the dynamic of the chaos and carnage in Europe…. In conditions of peace,… Zionism could not move the masses of world Jewry. The forces unleashed by Hitler in all their horror must be harnessed to the advantage of Zionism. ... By the end of 1942… the struggle for a Jewish state became the primary concern of the movement.’ 

In August 1933 they negotiated a trade agreement, Ha'avara, with the Nazis. For mentioning this Ken Livingstone was forced out of the Labour Party.

Hayim Nahman Bialik, the Zionist national poet, welcomed Hitler to power

Some Zionists openly welcomed the advent of Hitler. Hayim Nahman Bialik wrote that:

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

Emil Ludwig was another Zionist who welcomed Hitler to power

Emil Ludwig (1881-1948), the world-famous biographer, ‘who expressed the general attitude of the Zionist movement’ wrote that:

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

The more important point though is that the Zionists seriously believed that because they had no ideological differences with the Nazis, because they too accepted that German Jews did not belong in Germany, that they could do business with them. They even believed that the Nuremberg Race Laws of 1935, which established that German Jews were aliens and a separate race from Germans, established a basis for living side by side until the Jews could emigrate. In this they were to be proved wrong.

On June 21 1933 the Zionist Federation of Germany [ZVfD] wrote in to Hitler saying that

On the foundation of the new state, which has established the principle of race... fruitful activity for the Fatherland is possible…. Our acknowledgement of Jewish nationality provides for a clear and sincere relationship to the German people and its national and racial realities. Precisely because we don’t wish to falsify these fundamentals, because we, too, are against mixed marriage and are for maintaining the purity of the Jewish group… The realization of Zionism could only be hurt by resentment of Jews abroad against the German development. Boycott propaganda… is in essence unZionist, because Zionism wants not to do battle but to convince and to build.

What the ZVfD wrote was true. The Zionists also believed in race and nation, hence their desire to co-operate. Today they hold exactly the same beliefs and they are determined to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians because they are not of the same race, the Jewish race.

I recommend that you listen to the interview with Rania.

Tony Greenstein


I have recently taken stock of 300 paperbacks which are going fast.  They are selling for £12 inc. p&p in the UK, which is a third less than Amazon.  Unfortunately I have to charge for postage outside Britain (£15 tracked to Europe and nearly double that to the USA).

You will also get a signed copy!!

If you want to order one and avoid Amazon please email me at 

tonygreenstein104@gmail.com




Why did Jonathan Freedland Defend the Silencing of anti-Zionist Auschwitz Escapee, Rudolf Vrba, in The Escape Artist?

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 Freedland Justified the Rewriting of History in order that the Holocaust could be Exploited by Zionism to Justify Genocide & Ethnic Cleansing

 'The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World, by Jonathan Freedland, John Murray (paperback edition, 2023)

 




The Vrba Wetzler Report

My Review of Freedland’s book has just been published by the Electronic Intifada. Below is a slightly amended version.

Freedland is an integral part of Britain’s Foreign Policy Establishment. He is a patron of Chatham House, the Royal Institute of International Affairs where our rulers discuss British foreign policy whilst taking a vow of silence about what they discuss outside its hallowed portals. 

There is no doubt that Freedland has strong Mossad/MI5 connections. He has ensured, with the Guardian's Editor, Katherine Viner, that the Guardian has become a lapdog of the British state, refusing as it did to support Julian Assange.

Freedland played the 'Jews as an ethnic minority' card to undermine Corbyn

Freedland is a ‘liberal’ Zionist which means that he uses multi-culturalism, positing British Jews as an ethnic minority, in order to defend the far-right Israeli state and its government. 

For Freedland, Jews are equally oppressed as Muslims and because most Jews define being Jewish in terms of Israel, we must not criticise the current genocide or Israel's Jewish Supremacist i.e. Zionist ideology.

The job of liberal Zionism is to do what right-wing Zionism cannot do abroad which is to pretend that Israel is the embodiment of Jewish, democratic values..

I confess I was somewhat surprised when 2 years ago Freedland brought out a biography on Rudolf Vrba, the man who, with his friend Alfred Wetzler, escaped from Auschwitz.  The book has had rave reviews in the right-wing press by those who know next to nothing about the holocaust except how to best exploit it for Israel’s genocidal purposes.

Today it is clear that you cannot be an anti-racist if you are a Zionist. When I grew up this wasn’t so clear but today it should be clear to all except the politically blind that a Jewish ethno-nationalist state cannot be anything other than a racist apartheid state. Just as the Christian nationalist states of Eastern Europe were the most enthusiastic about participating in the holocaust so it is with Israel, which today identifies with Nazi values.

When neo-Nazis and the far-right wax lyrical about Israel’s ethno-religious nationalism only the dishonest and stupid can have any illusions about where Israel is heading. It is the job of the Freedlands of this world to paint Israel in rosy colours and hide the fact that it has been a key supporter of fascism and repression the world over. What’s happening in Gaza happened many times over in Guatemala in the 1980s where Israel supplied the arms and training to the genocidal regime there.

Read and enjoy!

Tony Greenstein 

Jonathan Freedland is a senior journalist at The Guardian as well as a columnist for the Jewish Chronicle. He is the latter’s figleaf liberal Zionist. It was therefore a surprise that Freedland should choose to write about Rudolf Vrba, an anti-Zionist Jewish hero of the Holocaust.

Freedland’s problem was that the Zionist movement, because of its collaboration with the Nazis, in its desire to use their rise to power to build a ‘Jewish’ state, has virtually no Jewish anti-Nazi resistance heroes to its credit.

On 10 April 1944, alongside Alfred Wetzler, Vrba escaped from Auschwitz with the aim of warning Hungarian Jewry of the Nazis’ plans to exterminate the last major surviving Jewish community in Europe.

Noah Lucas, a critical Zionist historian described how,

As the European holocaust erupted, Ben-Gurion saw it as a decisive opportunity for Zionism ... Ben-Gurion above all others sensed the tremendous possibilities inherent in the dynamic of the chaos and carnage in Europe In conditions of peace, it was clear, Zionism could not move the masses of world Jewry. The forces unleashed by Hitler in all their horror must therefore be harnessed to the advantage of Zionism ... By the end of 1942 … the struggle for a Jewish state became the primary concern of the movement."

Those few Zionists who did fight in the Resistance, like Chajka Klinger were extremely critical of the role that the Zionist movement played.

My first criticism of The Escape Artist is its title. It gives the impression that Vrba was a circus act, another Houdini. Indeed Freedland makes just such a comparison. Freedland manages, in one short phrase, to both demean and trivialize Vrba’s bravery and heroism. Vrba was no escape artist or magician. He was someone whose survival was a combination of extreme bravery, good judgment and pure luck.

Vrba had very good reasons to hate the Zionist movement but Freedland is careful not to allow them space in his biography. Born Walter Rosenberg, Vrba lived in Slovakia, a puppet Nazi state which had been separated off from Czechoslovakia when Hitler invaded and dismembered it in 1939. It was ruled by the Hlinka or Slovak People’s Party. The president was a Catholic priest Father Tiso.

Freedland describes how as a 17-year-old, in February 1942, Vrba received a summons to report for deportation. Slovakia was the first country to deport its Jews. From March to October 1942 some 57,000 out of 88,000 Jews were deported.

Vrba’s reaction, in March 1942, was to flee to Hungary where he made contact with the socialist underground in Budapest. What Freedland doesn’t mention is that after staying with the underground Vrba visited Hungary’s Zionists. In Vrba’s autobiography, I Cannot Forgive, he describes what happened:

That afternoon I went to OMZsA House, headquarters of the Zionist organization in Budapest. There I told my story in detail to a stern-faced man in his middle thirties.

He pondered a while before he said: “You are in Budapest illegally. Is that what you are trying to say?

 “Yes.”

“Don’t you know you’re breaking the law.”

I nodded, wondering how a man with such a thick skull could hold down what seemed like a responsible position.

“And you expect to get work here without documents?”

“With false documents.”

Had I torn up the Talmud and jumped on it, I do not think I could have shocked him more. His mouth opened once or twice and then he roared: “Don’t you realize it’s my duty to hand you over to the police?”

Now it was my turn to gape. A Zionist handing over a Jew to Fascist police. I thought I must be going mad.

“Get out of here! Get out as fast as a bad wind!”

I left utterly bewildered. It was nearly three years before I realized just what OMZsA House and the men inside it represented.

When his contacts in the Underground warned him that the Zionist official might report him to the police Vrba decided to leave Budapest for Slovakia. Naturally not a word of this appeared in Freedland’s book.

Freedland had access to the personal papers of Vrba from his first wife Gerta Vrbova and his second wife, Robin, as well as other relatives. There is therefore a lot of useful and interesting information that he acquired on the personal life of Vrba but the use to which he put this is questionable, in particular the judgements he made about Vrba’s relationship with Vrbova.

Gerta Vrbova

Freedland never interviewed or met Vrba. He only talked to a bitter ex-wife, Gerta Vrbova, who blamed her ex-husband for the marital breakdown. So what did Freedland think he was doing making an assertion that "their lovemaking lacked the tenderness, the gentleness, she craved. Instead she felt it carried a trace of violence."

This is more than just prurience. It is an attempt to sow the seeds of doubt as to Vrba's character. Jane Bennett, Vrba's step-daughter, had memories of a "lovely, modest man." Freedland comments that "It was Rudi’s side of the acrimonious family story they heard." Well yes, but the same is true of Freedland! [pp. 318, 319]

Because the hardback preceded the paperback by a year, Bennett was able to come forward with another side to the story. According to her Rudi experienced "distress that, when he sent gifts to his two daughters, his presents would be returned, unopened." It would seem that Gerta, who had taken Freedland into her confidence, had a vengeful side to her. Not something she would admit to the credulous Freedland.

This biography is not a disinterested account of Vrba’s life. From the start Freedland had a hidden political agenda, prime amongst which was whitewashing the record of the Zionist movement during the Holocaust. Vrba was prime amongst the critics of the Zionist movement in Hungary in enabling the extermination of Hungarian Jewry.

When Vrba and Wetzler escaped from Auschwitz and reached the Jewish Council offices in Zilina, Slovakia they immediately set down their accounts of what was happening in Auschwitz, the only functioning Nazi extermination camp by then.

The report they compiled, the Vrba-Wetzler Report [VWR] (also known as the Auschwitz Protocols) revealed for the first time that Auschwitz was not, as was widely believed, a concentration and labor camp but an extermination camp.

Vrba and Wetzler were desperate to reveal the deadly preparations being made in Auschwitz to receive the 800,000 strong Hungarian Jewish community.

Rudolf Kasztner

The VWR, which was completed by 26 April by the Slovakian Judenrat [Jewish Council], was handed to the leader of Hungarian Zionism, Rudolf Kasztner by 29 April. Instead of distributing it and using it to inform Hungarian Jews of what would happen if they boarded the deportation trains, Kasztner covered its existence up and then used it as part of his negotiations with Adolf Eichmann, whose task it was to implement the Final Solution, in order to secure a train out of Hungary for the Zionist and Jewish elite.

On June 30 1944, 1,684 ‘Prominent’ Jews left Hungary, first for the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and then for Switzerland. They comprised Kasztner’s extended family along with Jewish and Zionist leaders. Meanwhile, from 15 May to 7 July when Admiral Horthy, the ruler of Hungary called a halt to the deportations, some 437,000 Hungarian Jews had been deported to Auschwitz, the vast majority of whom were led straight to the gas chambers.

Freedland obscures the reasons why Kasztner did not distribute the VWR and omits his role in not only keeping the truth of Auschwitz from its victims but in actually misinforming them.

In Israel some years later, Kasztner was accused by a fellow Hungarian Jew, Malchiel Gruenwald, of collaborating with the Nazis. Because by then he had become a senior government official, Kasztner was forced by the state to sue for libel. However the trial of Gruenwald rapidly became effectively a trial of Kasztner. 

Dieter Wisliceny

Kasztner’s undoing came when he denied giving testimony at Nuremberg in favor of Kurt Becher, a Nazi leader and Heinrich Himmler’s personal emissary in Germany. Gruenwald's attorney Shmuel Tamir (who later became a Kahanist) then produced Kasztner’s affidavit in support of Becher. Later it transpired he had given favorable testimony to a host of other Nazi war criminals including two of Eichmann’s closest butchers, Dieter Wisliceny and Hermann Krumey.

Freedland’s explanation for Kasztner testifying in favor of mass murderers was that "perhaps Kasztner’s motivation was less compassion for Nazis in need than a blackmailed man’s fear of exposure."

This "explanation" is a novel one. Nazi war criminals on trial for their lives in Nuremberg were unlikely to be in a position to blackmail anyone. Kasztner’s efforts were not only on his behalf but that of the Jewish Agency and the World Jewish Congress.

Kurt Becher

Freedland’s suggestion that Kasztner’s appeal was upheld by the Supreme Court (by which time he was dead, assassinated by agents of Shin Bet in 1957), because

they accepted that Kasztner had in good faith believed that he was engaged in an effort to save the many, rather than the few

Haim Cohen

is the precise opposite of what happened. The Supreme Court found no such thing. Haim Cohen, Israel’s attorney-general, conducted the appeal. He argued that:

If in Kasztner’s opinion, rightly or wrongly, he believed that one million Jews were hopelessly doomed, he was allowed not to inform them of their fate; and to concentrate on the saving of the few. He was entitled to make a deal with the Nazis for the saving of a few hundred and entitled not to warn the millions ... that was his duty… It has always been our Zionist tradition to select the few out of many in arranging the immigration to Palestine ... Are we to be called traitors?

Judge Cheshin summed up the viewpoint of the majority of the Supreme Court when he ruled that:

A person sees that an entire community is doomed, is he allowed to make efforts to save the minority, although some of the efforts consist in hiding the truth from the majority or must he reveal the truth to all.

The decision of Israel’s Supreme Court was primarily political not legal. Cheshin voiced the fears of Israel’s Zionist Establishment that:

if we rule that Kasztner collaborated with the enemy because he failed to inform those who boarded the trains in [Kasztner's hometown] Kluj that they were heading for extermination, then it is necessary to bring to court today …. many other leaders and half-leaders who also kept silent in times of crisis, who didn’t inform others about what they knew.

Being a modest man, Freedland begins the book with "Praise for The Escape Artist" and there are 39 examples which demonstrate not so much the brilliance of his book as the ignorance of his admirers.

Adjectives such as "riveting,""thrilling" and "fascinating" abound. To Jamie Susskind Freedland’s book is "not just one of the best books I’ve read about the Holocaust, it is one of the most important books I’ve ever read."

To Zionist historian Simon Schama, the book is "immersive, shattering and ultimately redemptive." To Tom Holland The Escape Artist ranks alongside Anne Frank’s Diary and Primo Levy.

All I can say to these "experts" is that they should read Vrba’s book I Cannot Forgive. There is nothing of importance in The Escape Artist that isn’t in Vrba’s book. It is Vrba’s book, not Freedland’s cheap imitation thriller that ranks alongside Anne Frank’s Diary and Is This a Man.

According to the Financial Times, "Vrba died almost forgotten." Melissa Fay Green told how "I didn’t know Vrba’s name previously." For C.J. Carey it was a "little-known story."

The real question is whyVrba was unknown. The Holocaust has produced thousands of books and articles. Why then was it that the names of the first Jewish escapees from Auschwitz (leaving aside Siegfried Lederer who was taken out by an SS man) were almost entirely missing from the history of the Holocaust and Auschwitz?

The simple answer is that a conscious decision was taken by the Zionist Holocaust historians, led by Yehuda Bauer and Yisrael Gutman, to erase all mention of Vrba and Wetzler. Freedland justifies this and Zionism’s distortion of history because of the need to preserve Zionism’s monopoly when it comes to Holocaust history.

Freedland writes that “even in Israel … Vrba and Wetzler were barely recalled at all" and that it was only because of Ruth Linn’s "tireless campaign" that his memoir was eventually translated into Hebrew in 1998.

Even at Yad Vashem, the country's official Holocaust archive, museum and memorial in Jerusalem, the Auschwitz Report was filed away without the names of its authors."

Argentina's Jewish Mothers of the Disappeared Demonstrated Against Israel's Support for a Junta that Murdered Thousands of Jews

Freedland notes that the escapee’s two names had been anonymised yet he found this acceptable "because he was not an easy sell in Israel or in the mainstream Jewish diaspora." But Vrba’s memoirs were published in the diaspora. They were not however published in Israel, despite it being the nation that "stops once a year" to remember a Zionist version of the Holocaust. A sanitized Holocaust which justifies the very racism that European Jews experienced during the Nazi era.

Freedland claimed, in a dishonest rendition of the historical record, that what made Vrba "a more awkward witness still was his tendency to refer to the Jews whom he blamed as 'Zionists." This is untrue. Vrba was careful to distinguish between Zionists and Jews. It is Freedland himself who is guilty of this crime.

Freedland’s book is part of the process of manipulating and changing the historical record to accord with a false narrative of Zionist heroism. Freedland pretends that Vrba was a supporter of Israel "and rooted for it" believing that its existence "was a good thing for Jews."

The idea that Kasztner was some kind of Zionist is absurd. Freedland provides no evidence for his assertion. On the contrary when he first met Ruth Linn, a Haifa University professor of education, he told her that he had no interest in “your state of the Judenrats and Kastners."

After the war Vrba was employed as a researcher in biochemistry in Czechoslovakia. But as time went on he became dissatisfied with Stalinist Czechoslovakia and decided to escape to the West.

Thus it was that Vrba escaped to Israel where he could claim citizenship under the Law of Return. But as Freedland concedes "this was no journey of Zionist homecoming." Israel was a gateway to the West.

(Vrba)did not take to Israel … nor was he much moved by the romance of a perennially persecuted nation … But there was something more painful. He looked around this new state and, often in high places, he saw the very individuals he believed had failed the historic test that had confronted them all less than fifteen years earlier.

Freedland describes how Vrba

could not contain his anger against those Zionists who he felt had betrayed the Jewish people, starting with Kasztner and, in his view the early Israeli leaders.

Freedland takes issue with Vrba’s attitude to the Zionists citing a few who had not collaborated such as Moshe Krausz, the head of the Palestine Office in Budapest.

This is true. In my book Zionism During the Holocaust I explain the  background to the establishment of the United State's War Refugee Board in January 1944, which was responsible for saving 200,000 Jews. It had been undertaken by the dissident revisionist Zionists ShmuelMerlin and Peter Bergson. But this was in the teeth of opposition by America’s Zionist leaders, Stephen Wise and Nahum Goldmann.

Freedland spoke of "a hinted suggestion that Zionism was prepared to sacrifice the mass of European Jewry in order to establish" the Israeli state. It was more than a hinted suggestion. The Zionist leaders repeatedly made it clear that saving Jews was secondary to building a "Jewish" state. For example Ben-Gurion argued that:

“It is the job of Zionism not to save the remnant of Israel in Europe, but rather to save the land of Israel for the Jewish people and the Yishuv.”

As Marek Edelman, the last Commander of the Warsaw Ghetto Resistance said:

“[During the war] it never even entered any of our minds that the Zionists were deliberately remaining passive in regard to the physical destruction of the Jews in order to additionally justify the founding of the State of Israel…

Instead of attacking the resulting distortion of Holocaust history Freedland justifies Vrba’s silencing because "handing a platform to Rudolf Vrba may have come to seem like a risk."A risk to whom or what? The truth or the Zionist rewriting of Holocaust history?

Freedland, despite his exploitation of Vrba’s memory, deplores the fact that Vrba was not minded to "soften his message to make it more palatable." Why should Vrba have softened his message? Is that what historians should do: adjust to the political climate of the day? Or is telling the truth more important?

Even worse Vrba speculated that Zionists such as Kasztner "like Hitler believed in a ‘master race.'" But such a belief is integral to Zionism as we can see today in Gaza.

Freedland justifies Bauer’s attempt to erase Vrba from history because of what the Zionist historian claimed was his "deep hatred for the Jewish leadership, Zionism. etc." Bauer is one of the main defenders of Kasztner, arguing that even if the Auschwitz Protocols and the secret of Auschwitz had been known, Hungarian Jews would not have believed it.

This is not the place to analyze this bogus argument -- knowing yet not knowing. The fact is that Kasztner had no right to make a decision on behalf of Hungary’s Jews to keep the secret of Auschwitz from them after the sacrifice made by Vrba and Wetzler.

As Israel's attorney-general Haim Cohen said at Kasztner’s appeal:

Eichmann, the chief exterminator, knew that the Jews would be peaceful and not resist if he allowed the prominents to be saved, that the "Train of the Prominents" was organized on Eichmann’s orders to facilitate the extermination of the whole people … if all the Jews of Hungary are to be sent to their death he is entitled to organize a rescue train for 600 people. He is not only entitled to it but is also bound to act accordingly.

Moshe Silberg

Moshe Silberg, the sole dissenting Supreme Court Judge, savaged this argument that even if de facto Kasztner facilitated the extermination of the Jews he was not guilty of collaboration:

"I must say that I cannot accept this argument. Is this ‘innocence’? Is there ‘representation’ of despair? Can a single individual, even jointly with some friends, despair on behalf – and without the knowledge – of 800,000 people? … The burning question of ‘By what authority’ and ‘quo warranto’ is an adequate answer to such a claim of Bona Fide.

Freedland tells how Vrba "refused to conform to what the world expects of a Holocaust survivor." Instead of praising Vrba’s determination to tell the truth Freedland sides with those who tried to silence him.

It was the leadership  of the Zionist movement -- whether it was in Hungary, Palestine or the United States -- who collaborated with the anti-Semites and obstructed rescue.

Stephen Wise and Nahum Goldmann tried to get Zionist dissidents Bergson and Merlin deported from the United States. In Israel after the war, Budapest Zionist functionary Moshe Krausz complained to the Jewish Agency about Kasztner only to find himself sacked.

Ruth Linn wrote a book describing how Vrba and the Auschwitz Protocols had remained unknown, not by accident but because of the deliberate decision of Bauer and the Zionist historians of Yad Vashem to erase him from history.

Freedland cites Linn’s book Escaping Auschwitz – A Culture of Forgetting in his bibliography but chose not to quote from it. In many ways Freedland’s biography of Vrba is really a response to Ruth Linn’s description of the process of erasure. Linn wrote that:

Whereas the two escapees accurately predicted the fate of the Hungarian Jews, what they could not have foreseen was that their postwar memoirs and documented report would be kept from the Israeli Hebrew-reading public …

Although I am a native Israeli who graduated from a prestigious private high school, I had never heard about the escape from Auschwitz at the numerous Holocaust ceremonies I attended. Nor had I ever read about it in any detail in any of the Hebrew Holocaust textbooks at school.

Linn told how "no [Israeli] publishing house, including Yad Vashem, would show any interest at all." Linn therefore set out to

trace the use the family of Israeli historians have made of misnaming, misreporting, miscrediting and misrepresenting in the secretive tale of the escape from Auschwitz.

Linn gives as an example the decision of Bauer in his best-known Hebrew textbook The Holocaust: Some Historical Aspects to devote just one sentence to the escape from Auschwitz and to render the two Jewish escapees anonymous. Both Bauer and fellow Yad Vashem historian Yisrael Gutman mention the escape at length in their 1994 English publications, yet it is absent in the Hebrew versions.

In 1999, a year after Vrba’s memoirs had been published in Hebrew, "an account of the escape from Auschwitz was finally included in Gutman’s Hebrew writings for high-school students." As Linn remarks:

Could a narrative of an individualistic escape, by a non-Zionist Jew critical of his Jewish leaders, ever be made to harmonize with the ‘collective aura’ that dominated the state of Israel?"

Netanyahu and Hungary's anti-Semitic Prime Minister - Viktor Orban

Zionism has always found its friends among the anti-Semites. Its founder, Theodor Herzl, wrote in his diaries that

the anti-Semites will become our most dependable friends, the anti-Semitic countries our allies.

Netanyahu’s friendship with Hungary’s Victor Orban is but one example.

Sanitized biography

Freedland had access to the personal papers of Vrba. Now that Vrba and his first wife Vrbova are dead, he has an obligation to place these papers in an academic archive and let others decide for themselves whether Freedland’s interpretation of them is skewed or not.

Freedland used his Guardian column to repeatedly attack Corbyn for 'antisemitism'

Freedland was a leading protagonist in the false anti-Semitism campaign in the Labour Party between 2015 and 2019. His choice of an anti-Zionist Jewish Holocaust hero as the subject of a book is therefore curious to say the least. It appears that one of Freedland’s motives in writing the biography was in order to both justify Vrba’s silencing by Zionism’s Holocaust historians and to obscure his message that Zionism was a quisling Jewish movement during the Holocaust.

What didn’t see the light of day in Freedland’s book was Vrba’s response of 22 September 1963 in The Observer to a letter the previous week by Jacob Talmon, who had complained bitterly when Hannah Arendt's reports of the Eichmann trial were published earlier that month.

Jacob Talmon, a professor at the Hebrew University, criticized Arendt for raising the question of the Judenrate (Jewish councils) and their collaboration with the Nazis in the implementation of the Final Solution. Vrba asked:

Did the Judenrat (or the Judenverrat) in Hungary tell their Jews what was awaiting them? No, they remained silent and for this silence some of their leaders -- for example, Kasztner -- bartered their own lives and the lives of 1,684 other 'prominent' Jews directly from Eichmann.

Nor did Freedland refer to Vrba’s memoirs in the Daily Herald of February 1961 when he 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 … 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.

This is the story that Freedland chose not to tell in his sanitized biography of Vrba.

Tony Greenstein is the author of Zionism During the Holocaust

Gaza’s Genocide Proves that the Terms ‘Liberal’ &‘Right-wing’ Zionist are a Distinction Without a Difference

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What Kind of Person Writes a Biography With the Intention of Distorting What Their Subject Said & Justifying their Silencing? Step forward the Guardian’s Freedland



Rudolf Vrba interviewed by Claude Lanzmann about Rudolf Kasztner & Rabbi Weissmandel

In The Art of Biography Virginia Woolf described how the

biographer must ‘detect(ing) falsity,unreality... His sense of truth must be alive and on tiptoe.

By telling us the true facts, by sifting the little from the big, and shaping the whole so that we perceive the outline, the biographer does more to stimulate the imagination than any poet or novelist save the very greatest.

Jonathan Freedland in The Escape Artist, set out to do the exact opposite of what Woolf advised. Freedland was determined that the ‘true facts’ wouldn’t interfere with his narrative.

In a letter to Arnold Zweig, Freud wrote that ‘To be a biographer you must tie yourself up in lies, concealments, hypocrisies.’ It was as if Freud’s prescient passage was written with Freedland in mind!

Freedland’s concern when he wrote his biography was not to explain why Vrba was hostile to Zionism. He sole concern was to appropriate Vrba’s record of heroism whilst divorcing it from his anti-Zionism. So much so that at one point in his book we are told that Vrba ‘rooted for Israel

A good biography must do more than just tell a story, it must bring to life the person who is the subject, warts and all. It must delve into what made them tick. Otherwise it is just a recitation of who did what and when.

I confess that when I first learnt that Freedland was bringing out a book on Rudolf Vrba I smelt a rat. Freedland is someone who could see ‘anti-Semitism’ in his grandmother’s grave. It was no surprise therefore when I read his book.

Below is the blog that Jonathan Cook, a prize-winning ex-Guardian journalist wrote about my article in Electronic Intifada and my last blog

Freedland caricatures Vrba’s views and erects straw men in order to demolish them. Vrba was someone I knew quite a lot about, having written a chapter about him in my own book. Freedland’s behaviour simply confirms my previous description of him as Britain’s most dishonest journalist, in a field which is crowded with competitors.

Freedland’s purpose was not to research and explain the background to Vrba’s criticism of Zionism but to impose his own views on Vrba and pretend that his anti-Zionism was just an aberration, a misunderstanding that could be excised without harming the heroic narrative that Freedland wanted to construct.

However this caused a dilemma because how could Freedland explain why Vrba was unknown in Israel and why he had been removed by Zionism’s holocaust historians from the history of the holocaust if not because of his anti-Zionist views?

In the end Freedland ends up justifying the silencing of the very person he is writing his Hollywood-style biography about. As Jonathan Cook says, now that Vrba has been politically neutered and made acceptable, he is fit to star in a Hollywood movie that will enrich Freedland.

Freedland struggles to justify the deliberate and conscious decision of Yehuda Bauer and the stable of Yad Vashem’s holocaust historians to erase all trace of Vrba. But he tries!! Vrba was

‘not an easy sell in Israel or in the mainstream Jewish diaspora.’

He was an

awkward witness... (as) was his tendency to refer to the Jews whom he blamed as ‘Zionists.’”

‘handing a platform to Rudolf Vrba may have come to seem like a risk.’

Even worse Vrba refused to

“soften his message to make it more palatable.”

And Vrba even believed that Zionists

 “like Hitler believed in a ‘master race.’”

What is noticeable is that Freedland doesn’t actually quotes Vrba’s views on Zionism.  Such as when he wrote, in his memoirs in the Daily Herald in February 1961 of the Hungarian Zionists that they were a

small group of quislings (who) knew what was happening to their brethren in Hitler's gas chambers and bought their own lives with the price of silence.

Such views must have been painful for Freedland to read and listen to (there are many long recordings of Vrba). The problem for Freedland was that Zionism has no equivalent heroes to Vrba and Marek Edelman. If anyone else had said half the things that Vrba said about Zionism and its collaboration with the Nazis during the Corbyn era, Freedland would have instantly called them ‘anti-Semitic’ and demanded their expulsion. It was indeed a dilemma.

Rudolf Kasztner - the Zionist Collaborator with Eichmann Who Kept Quiet About Auschwitz in Return for a Train Carrying Leading Zionists and Rich Jews Out of Hungary - Freedland naturally defended  him

Vrba was unknown until Claude Lanzmann, who I also have a section on in my book, interviewed him at length for his film Shoah. Lanzmann was a Zionist and he tried to shut down Vrba when he expressed his detestation of Zionism and its Kasztners.

As we know only too well, when it comes to what is happening in Gaza the Israeli state and Zionists lie, lie and lie again. However this is not always true when it comes to the history of Zionism and the holocaust. For many Zionists writing about their own record is cathartic even if they end up excusing it. What they say to themselves in their own journals is different from their propaganda to the world. Most of my book uses Zionist not anti-Zionist sources.

For example Shabtai Teveth, the official biographer of David Ben-Gurion, the first Prime Minister of Israel and the Chair of the Jewish  Agency before that, was extremely honest about Ben-Gurion’s attitudes during the holocaust in the final chapter ‘Disaster Means Strength’of his book Ben-Gurion: The Burning Ground 1886-1948 he explained Ben-Gurion’s attitude to the holocaust..

The very title of the chapter was indicative. The disaster he referred to was the holocaust itself and for Ben-Gurion its meaning was the strengthening of the Zionist movement. Teveth concluded that:

If there was a line in Ben-Gurion’s mind between the beneficial disaster and an all-destroying catastrophe, it must have been a very fine one. (p.851)

Freedland however is not a historian, he is a propagandist.  He fronted, via his Guardian columns, the dishonest attacks against Corbyn. Freedland never failed to invent a pretext for alleging that Corbyn was anti-Semitic or, at the very least, tolerated anti-Semites.

Freedland decried those who alleged that ‘anti-Semitism’ was being weaponised. He argued that questioning Jews about allegations of anti-Semitism was like doubting women or Black people of if they alleged rape or racism.

Freedland asked whether any other minority would have had their allegations called into question, thus avoiding the substance of the doubts themselves. Being a minority is one thing but being an oppressed minority is quite another but for Freedland Zionist Jews had the ‘right to define their own oppression’ even if it meant justifying the oppression of the Palestinians.

The fact that a substantial minority of Jews were not Zionists and did not agree with the way anti-Semitism was being weaponised on behalf of Israeli apartheid did not bother him.

Not once did Freedland ever spell out what this ‘anti-Semitism’ meant practically. We know that Black people in this country experience economic discrimination, police violence and imprisonment, racist attacks etc. but what was it that Jews, almost entirely White and middle class, experienced?  Freedland never said because he dealt in abstractions and false analogies.

Likewise with Israel. For Freedland this was a Jewish state. Jews in Britain identified with it (but not all) therefore it was anti-Semitic to challenge that identity. It is an argument that has no intellectual or moral basis. Is a challenge to someone’s identity racist? What about reactionary, sexist or racist identities? 

Netanyahu & Viktor Orban have a bromance - Orban believes that Admiral Horthy who presided over the deportation of nearly half a million Jews was an 'exceptional statesman'

Hindu men used to identify with Sati, the practice of burning widows on the funeral pyre of their husbands. One wonders whether Freedland would consider an attack on this custom as racist per se? There are those whose identity is bound up with female genital mutilation? Should criticism of that also be considered racist since it is practised still in many African countries? Why should the identification of some Jews with Apartheid in Israel be any different?

Of course all historians approach their subject with preconceived ideas and prejudices. Neutrality is a rare commodity. However honesty dictates that people should be open about where they are coming from rather than adopt a stance of Olympian neutrality.

Freedland did not merely criticise Vrba for the views he held, he distorted them, lied about them and then, to cap it all, he justified the attempts to silence them.

When I wrote Zionism During the Holocaust I had already concluded that Zionism was a reaction to anti-Semitism that accepted the conceptual framework of anti-Semitism. I made no pretence to neutrality but nor did I seek to distort or manipulate what advocates of Zionism who I quote say. I wanted them to condemn themselves out of their own mouths.

Freedland is different. Ostensibly he was writing a biography about someone who everyone accepts was an incredibly brave hero. Freedland accumulated the evidence, mainly papers from his family and was set to write the story. But instead of honestly setting out his stall he constantly ran up against the fact that politically he disagreed with Vrba on Zionism. So instead of calling out the censorship that Zionism’s holocaust historians had practised and at which Zionism is so good he ended up justifying it.

A Liberal Zionist is simply a Right-wing Zionist on a Journey of Self-Discovery

Freedland is nothing if not a ‘liberal’ Zionist and is a good example of the hypocrisy of this breed.  In Israel liberal Zionists are a rare breed. Ethnic Cleansing and Extermination are all the fashion. In Britain they are more numerous because Britain’s political climate is different. So what is their role? 

The function of ‘liberal’ Zionists in the West is to beautify what Ben Gvir, Smotrich and the Kahanists seek to achieve, even whilst they attack them personally. Their job today is to rationalise and justify the genocide and ethnic cleansing. October 7, when the Palestinian resistance fought back, is their rationale.

The ‘liberal’ Zionists go along 100% with the false narrative about a slaughter of the innocents and the equally false rape narrative.

The most left-wing and liberal Zionist group in Britain today is Yachad. They have issued a statement Why the war must end and what comes next.’ Members of Yachad include Mike Katz, Chair of the Jewish Labour Movement  which led the ‘anti-Semitism’ attack against Corbyn in the Labour Party.

Nowhere in the statement is there any call for an arms embargo. Quite the contrary they supported Israel’s attack on Gaza saying that

The atrocities committed by Hamas on October 7th precipitated a response by Israel, with the stated aim of removing Hamas from power, in order to prevent a repeat atrocity against Israelis.

Nowhere do they acknowledge the right of the Palestinians to resist the occupation. It calls for the removal of Hamas from power in Gaza because ‘no long-term ceasefire can hold whilst Hamas remains in power.’ They go on to say that

‘the tens of thousands of Israelis displaced from the Gaza border won’t be able to return home without a cast iron assurance that they will be safe.’

I may have missed it but there is no call for the removal of Ben Gvir, Smotrich, Gallant, Netanyahu et al. from Israel’s government because otherwise Palestinians won’t feel safe. There is no call to disarm the Israeli army because Palestinians aren’t safe.

It is an entirely chauvinist document from a coloniser’s perspective that presumes that Israel has the right to dictate who is allowed to rule in Gaza.

They go on to say that ‘The reality is that too many Palestinians are paying the price for Hamas’ crimes.’ thus ignoring 57 years of occupation in Gaza. Are Palestinians in the West Bank also paying the price of Hamas’ crimes one wonders?

How about reversing this and saying that the Israelis who died on October 7 paid the price of a suffocating siege for 17 years, an occupation for 57 years and the regular slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza as in Operation Protective Edge when twice as many Palestinians died as Israelis on October 7.

The statement was issued on December 12 last year and has not been updated since. It is as if the chain of torture camps such as Sde Teiman didn’t exist. The destruction of Gaza’s health sector, its universities, bombing of schools was just a figment of our imagination. There is no call for Israel to be sanctioned for genocide. All that matters is the safety of Israeli colonists and settlers.

This is quintessential ‘liberal’ Zionism. The only difference between ‘right-wing’ and ‘liberal’ Zionists is that at least the former are not hypocritical. They don’t pretend that they support equality and harmony. They are unabashed Jewish Supremacists. They don’t pretend that there is such a thing as a Jewish Democratic State.

The reality is that at the end of the day all Zionists agree on the necessity of a Jewish Supremacist ethno-nationalist state. They may disagree on tactics and questions like the judicial reforms but on the necessity of ethnic cleansing they are as one. Not even the most left-wing Zionist calls for the return of the Palestinian refugees who were expelled in 1948. Quite the contrary the JLM is absolutely opposed to this because you can’t have a Jewish state if the majority of inhabitants are not Jewish.

Whereas the JLM and Yachad support a two-state solution i.e. a Palestinian Bantustan, the Right in Israel has a simpler solution – expel the Palestinians. When you establish a state based on Jewish racial purity then the simpler, more violent solutions will win out.

The job of liberal Zionists is to kosher the Kahanists, fascists and open racists in the Israeli government. No liberal Zionist says that the racists must be removed from Israel’s government because there would be no one left. Palestinian safety is not their concern.

The fact that Jewish neo-Nazis like Ben Gvir, Smotrich, Chikli and all the others are in Israel’s government is simply a consequence of Israeli ‘democracy’ to them. The fact that Hamas was also democratically elected by Palestinians is irrelevant. Democracy only belongs to the coloniser never the colonised. This is the logic of settler-colonialism and it is this that Freedland signed up to with his weaponisation of ‘anti-Semitism’.

Yachad and Freedland don’t support the issuing of arrest warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant because there is a broad consensus that Israeli war crimes against Palestinians are not crimes. Some two-thirds of Israelis are opposed to the prosecution of the soldiers who sodomised Palestinian prisoners.

Instead Yachad talked about Hamas atrocities on October 7. Now I’m sure there were some atrocities such as shooting civilians in cold blood but they pale in comparison with Israel’s mass slaughter. For Yachad and Freedland Jewish blood is all that matters.

Hamas did not bomb schools with the express intention of killing children. It did not snipe children in the head. It did not bomb and attack hospitals. Any organisation that has any pretence at being ‘liberal’ would call for the overthrow of a state that allows these atrocities to be passed off as normal.

 ‘Liberal Zionist’ is an oxymoron. It is not possible to be a liberal and a Zionist. Which is why, at the end of the day, given the choice, Yachad will always line up with the Ben Gvirs and Smotriches than Jewish anti-Zionists. Even Jewish Nazis are preferable to anti-Zionists as long as they are Zionists.

Yachad has gone along, as has Freedland and other ‘liberal’ Zionists, with the narrative that came out of Netanyahu’s government that Hamas engaged in mass rape on October 7. This was after the 40 Beheaded Babies lies were discredited. I mention this because on October 8, before Israel’s propaganda narrative had got off the ground, the Times of Israel posted an article by a mother, Reut Karp, about

an alarming testimony from her children about the murder of their father, Dvir Karp, and his partner Stav in Kibbutz Re’im.’


Both the father and his partner were killed when a Hamas gunman broke into a house in the Kibbutz. There were also two children there by themselves. If the ‘beheaded babies’ and all the other atrocity propaganda was correct then one would assume that the gunman would have done what Israel’s soldiers have done in Gaza and that is murder the children too.  Not a bit of it. The Times of Israel describes how:

The terrorist calmed down my Daria and Lavi, covered them in a blanket, took lipstick and wrote on the wall: ‘The al-Qassam [Brigades] people don’t murder children.’

This is somewhat at odds with the Zionist narrative that The Times, the Guardian, Independent  and the rest of the British press were happy to run with of terrorists seeking to kill Israeli children. But when it comes to Palestinian children then the yellow press are silent.

There have been no front page headlines about Palestinian children being killed. Virtually every newspaper, including The Times and Independent splashed the ’40 Beheaded Babies’ on their front pages. Even now the Independent has a story‘Kfar Aza smells of death’ which alleges that ‘babies were slaughtered’ in Hamas attack'. No babies were slaughtered that day. Just two died, accidentally. But of course if you engage in colonial tropes about savages then you must fit the facts to the perception and liberal Zionists are adept at this.

At the end of the day Yachad, the Union of Jewish Students, JLM and the other ‘liberal’ Zionists organisations all agree with the Ben Gvirs and Smotriches in a Jewish State. That is why they will never ally with anti-Zionists against right-wing Zionists. Zionism Uber Alles.

That is a lesson that the Palestinians have painfully learnt after the demise of the Oslo Accords. It is also something that the Palestine solidarity movement has to learn. The two-state solution is not only not desirable it is not going to happen and those who plug it are in reality pushing for the one-state solution that already exists – the State of Apartheid Greater Israel.

Tony Greenstein

Below I post correspondence from the Jewish Chronicle in 1943 about the successful attempt by the Zionist President of the Board of Deputies to sabotage the attempts of Rabbi Schonfeld to rescue Jewish refugees from Nazi occupied Europe - the Zionists wanted Jews to go to Palestine or nowhere - that meant they went to their deaths.

50 years later Marcus Retter, an Assistant to Rabbi Schonfeld, the Chair of the Chief Rabbi's Rescue Committee Wrote Explaining How the Zionists Preferred Jews to Go to the Gas Chambers than Seek Refuge in any Country Bar Palestine




THE WAR ON JENIN - In the name of Fighting ‘terrorism’ Israel’s Military have Occupied the Al Tafawk Children’s Centre & Forced the Children onto the Streets

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 Israel’s attack on the West Bank is a Continuation of the Genocidal War in Gaza – Ethnic Cleansing and Expulsion is the Zionist Project

If you would like to support the children of Jenin please go to our Crowdfunder

Israeli Occupation Forces Attack Jenin

For over 4 years the Brighton Trust, has raised funds for the Al Tafawk Children’s Centre in Jenin and for over 4 years Israel’s military has done its best to destroy the Centre.

Twice, in May 2021 and July 2023, the Israeli military have wrecked the interior of the Centre. During the course of these attacks they have destroyed water pipes, toilets, doors and in a demonstration of their savagery, even torn up children’s books. The excuse for the last being that since the children will grow up to be ‘terrorists’ there is no need for them to learn to read.

The Children of Jenin

In July 2023 Israel’s finest went one step further punching holes in the exterior walls. Naturally no compensation is offered for the damage. Even British troops paid compensation during their occupation of the North of Ireland for damage caused in the course of searches.

Israel’s military are immune from the law when it comes to their treatment of Palestinians. It’s only Israeli settlers who are entitled to the benefit of their ‘independent’ judicial system.

The money we raised went towards paying for the teachers’ salaries, food and water – yes water. Unlike the settlers who get free piped water, Palestinians have to buy back the water that Israel has stolen from them.

In July of this year the Israeli military once again wrecked the interior of the Centre. The only thing they didn’t destroy was a picture of me!  I can only assume that their racist logic dictated that they should not damage the picture of a white person.

Al Shifa Hospital Reopens

What makes this worse is that every night the military occupy the homes of the children and force them onto the streets. By occupying the Children’s Centre Israel’s army prevent the children from having anywhere safe to sleep. This is the 'Zionist dream’.

Israeli Military Deliberately Wrecks the Interior of the Al-Tafawk Centre

Next time one of those sensitive Jewish students tells you how upset they are that you have attacked their ‘identity’ by criticising Zionism you might want to ask whether that identity includes killing Palestinian children or perhaps that too would be considered ‘anti-Semitic’ as it would threaten their sensitive and precious feelings.

Israeli Military Deliberately Wrecks the Interior of the Al-Tafawk Centre

The Palestinian Resistance Fights Back


I have had messages from the staff at the Centre throughout the current attack and I copy some of them below. I have not included names, to protect them and I have not changed the English.

I should add that we have had major difficulties even getting money to the Centre. We used to send money via Western Union but the Israeli military attacked and wrecked the offices of their agents stopping them from doing business anymore.

Israeli Military Deliberately Wrecks the Interior of the Al-Tafawk Centre

In February I tried to send money via my own bank Nationwide. However they blocked it without giving a reason. When I asked them if they would have treated an Israeli children’s centre that way and I accused them institutional racism, I was debanked.

Unlike Nigel Farage my debanking didn’t attract any attention from the popular press. I can only assume that they are only interested when racists are penalised.

When I sent a message saying I’d faxed money via the bank of our charity, The Brighton Trust, I received the following message from a teacher on Wednesday 14 August

Thank you so much. I will let u know when I get it. And will share with you update pictures. Thanks God that we can use the bank cause any transfer through WU solders come and take the money ! Do u think this war would end soon?

We are in our worst of times.

Thank you to all the donors..

All my love 

An injured boy

On Sunday 18 August I got another message

Dear Tony, I visited the bank today, the money didnt arrive yet. I hope they didnt block us again.

On Friday 23 August another volunteer messaged me saying:

Thanks for making me feel better and not forgotten . Yeah i am waiting the time the money arrives. Our situation everyday is getting worse and worse in Jenin and Tulkarm. Me and the children and the most families in the camp leave each night to any safe place . Then in the morning we go home but lots are homeless now. 

The latter refers to the fact that the Israeli army is busy destroying whole streets in the refugee camp and the houses in them. Over 70% of the roads in Jenin Refugee Camp have been destroyed as have many houses. Parts of the camp resemble Gaza City.

We have no words to explain our life and nothing can come to the camp even food water and meds. People cant have the water because all the water supplies are damaged and we cant bring from villages cause it too much expensive. Please send huge thank to the all donors to keep thinking of us even the war is lasting long. We were scared that the world will use to see what we face each day but they dont.


It beggars belief that a religious leader complains that Israel doesn't have enough weapons with which to kill Palestinians? 

On Tuesday 27 August 24

Dear Tony 

I am writing you while we are widen inside the UN school. The shooting is everywhere and we lost my brother child a week ago. I didn't want to bother you but I can’t say i am ok any more. Every day i lose about 2 children. 

Tony we are feeling so bad, please please all of u dont leave us . We cant talk the most of the time but we are falling apart.

Keep your pressure on the government please.

About 23 of the centre’s children passed away. 

My correspondent refers to her own brother who died as a result of injuries sustained when he was shot.

Messages from the Al Tafawk Centre, Jenin

Thursday 29 August 07.59

Dear Tony 

Good morning, Our situation still the same, but more and more distracted. They force the familes to leave her houses and now we cant stay in schools or hospitals they get us out. I wanted to ask you if the bank reject again your money do we have a problem again?

Keep us in your prayers

 

Saturday 31 August 07.24

This is where live right now ! Even the ambulances couldnt reach us for any help ! 

A lot of our families disappeared and we dont know where they are! Please raise our voice

Saturday 31 August 14.48

The center children while they were inside and forced to leave after they destroy their homes

31 August 15.37

Leaving their homes as they dont have homes anymore. Sadly i heard from people who around the center that the solders use the center to arrest and question people. Me and my family changed from home to other 

Saturday 31 August 17.38

We are using it [the Al-Tafawk Centre] of-course ,but during this four days while we under this horrible attack  the military using it hope they dont ruin it again .We didnt close the center before we were going to feed the children and save them as possible as we can when there is some peaceful time ! Yeah please dont stop helping huge number of children and families without food or water even the hospital without water. Please tell all people now we are the second Gaza. To be honest all of us get rid of the clean water to drink

Monday 2nd September 2024 17.19

I couldn't answer you yesterday sadly my uncle was shot while he was going to have food. So we had to  move to other homes. I had no news about the center but they are still inside it. We are suffring too much about thousand of children and families are homeless. Tony i swear we face days harder than the days we had in 2002 … As we heard from the women who were running with their children that alot of dead bodies inside the camp and no one know about them.. Here the video of my uncle who was shot in front us

The reference to 2002 is to the Second Intifada when Israel invaded Jenin, massacring many people and fighting gun battles with the resistance. It has gone down in history. What is happening now is even worse.

Monday 2nd September 2024 20.03

Thank you so much ! Do they block us as before ? I hope not as they did to us before . 

Here the first video is the way to get to the center. The second video for a child cant believe what we are facing now ! The third video for the solders chasing 3 children were coming to give us bread these children are 14 , 15 and 9 years i sent a picture for one of them

Jenin has been called the Little Gaza and for good reason.

Israel’s pretext for invading the cities of the West Bank and bombing them is that it is fighting ‘terrorism’, i.e. Palestinian resistance. Over the past months there have been a wave of settler attacks on Palestinian farmers

In April Amnesty International wrote that:

Between 12 and 16 April hundreds of Israeli settlers went on a deadly rampage launching violent raids on Palestinian villages in the West Bank including in al-Mughayyir, Duma, Deir Dibwan, Beitin and Aqraba. In these attacks, in which settlers set fire to homes, trees and vehicles, at least four Palestinians were killed by either settlers or Israeli forces, including 17-year-old boy Omar Hamed near Ramallah, and two men shot dead near Nablus– Abdulrahman Bani Fadel and Mohammed Bani Jami’. In the latest violence, a Palestinian paramedic was shot dead in the village of al-Sawiya south of Nablus on 20 April. 


Attack on the village of Jit by Settlers, with Israeli Army Support

On August 16 the Guardian reported on an attack on the village of Jit:

Dozens of Israeli settlers have attacked a Palestinian village near Nablus in the occupied West Bank, killing at least one person, in the latest deadly incident of settler violence amid surging tensions in the Palestinian territory.

What was the Israeli army response?  Did it bomb the settlement that these thugs came from?  Did it round up the settlers for questioning?  Not a bit of it. They stood around and let it proceed.

Palestinians regularly accuse Israeli security forces of standing by and allowing groups of settlers to attack their houses and villages in assaults that have attracted increasing concern internationally.


BBC - settler attack on village nr Qalqiya - 1 person killed - Army does nothing

The BBC had a similar report on an attack on a village near Qalqilya. Again a Palestinian was killed. The Israeli military did nothing for an hour before eventually intervening after the damage was done.

Of course Netanyahu and Israeli leaders went through the motions of criticising what happened but strangely enough they didn’t seal of the settlement where the murderers came from. They didn’t demolish the settlement and shoot randomly because of course the settlers are Jewish and the Palestinians are the regular target of the Police and army too.  As a Palestinian spokesperson said:

“These condemnations [by Israeli leaders] are viewed as performative by the Palestinian public, because the track record is [that] the investigations go nowhere, nobody is prosecuted, nobody is held to account, and these settlers can count on the full support of members of the government to protect them.”

The UN said on Wednesday that it had recorded around 1,250 attacks by Israeli settlers against Palestinians in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, since 7 October, external. About 120 of those attacks led to people being killed or injured, and 1,000 led to property damage.

Strangely enough the West and Biden have done absolutely nothing apart from token ‘sanctions’ on a few settlers. There hasn’t been condemnation at the UN or the cutting of aid or a demand that the settler terrorists be brought to book. Because the settlers and the Israeli government are on the same side.

However, as we saw today, Palestinians in the West Bank are resisting. Three Israeli police were killed in a well-planned ambush. No-one should mourn the loss of those who enable Israel’s pogroms.

Tony Greenstein

If you would like to support the children of Jenin please go to our Crowdfunder

See Palestinian children in the West Bank are also under attack on the first attack on the Al Tafawk Centre in 2021 and

Palestinian children in the West Bank are also under attackon the 2023 attack and Israel Lays Siege to Jenin Hospitals: On-the-Ground Report From the West Bank 

The Zionists are Trying to Cancel Unite4Palestine’s Meeting at TUC Conference

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 Instead of Implementing UNITE Policy on Palestine & Trying to Stop the Transfer of Weapons for Israel's Genocide, Sharon Graham attacked Activists Protesting Against the Arms Factories


Jim Kelly – Chair of London & Eastern Region Criticises Sharon Graham’s Obstruction of Palestine solidarity 

Fiona Sharpe of Sussex Friends of Israel and Labour Against Anti-Semitism,[LAA]is trying to get our meeting cancelled on the grounds of ‘anti-Semitism’. This has not prevented SFI members in the past from demonstrating alongside the EDL. In 2014 SFI invited Israeli academic Mordechai Kedar to speak at a meeting they held. Kedar advocates raping Palestinian women in war.

LAA was involved in the anti-Semitism smear campaign against Corbyn. Its principal spokesperson is Euan Philips, a non-Jew who, as Al Jazeera exposed, uses a Jewish name ‘David Gordstein’ to pretend that he is Jewish when making complaints of ‘anti-Semitism’.

The reason why Unite4Palestine are holding a fringe meeting at TUC Conference is the refusal of General Secretary Sharon Graham to implement Unite policy on Palestine or support any solidarity action with the Palestinians. Graham has even refused to condemn Israel’s genocide in Gaza.


Unite policy on Palestine is good – it supports BDS, opposes the settlements and Israeli Apartheid and calls on Unite to ‘support the Palestinian population in Gaza living under siege.’ It describes Israeli Palestinians as ‘second class citizens (and) subject to racist laws.’

There is only one problem. It is nowhere to be found on Unite’s own website. As far as Graham is concerned it doesn’t exist.

The first inkling that Graham was a Zionist and a supporter of Israeli Apartheid came on 8 June when she banned Jeremy Corbyn – The Big Liefrom Unite premises and Asa Winstanley from speaking about his book,  The Weaponisation of Anti-Semitism at Unite’s Tony Benn house in Bristol.

SE Regional Secretary Sarah Carpenter, who has now been appointed as Graham’s bag carrier, informed Unite branch SE 6246, that she had asked for screenings of the film to be cancelled ‘whilst I seek further guidance.’

The reasons for the bans were explained in an email of 27.10.23. from Graham’s spokesperson, Gail Cartmail:

The General Secretary... is also clear that the Unite position must be that we do not stoke division through anti-semitism and anti-Muslim racism

What Cartmail was saying was that British Jews would offended by suggestions that supporters of Israel automatically cry ‘anti-Semitism’ whenever Israel is criticised. Except of course that they do!

 When the International Court of Justice called Israel’s war on Gaza ‘plausible genocide’ Israeli officials and ministers immediately described them as ‘anti-Semitic’. There are many, many other examples too numerous to count.

‘Anti-Semitism’ is the all-purpose smear of those who support Zionism and its ethnic cleansing settler colonial project in Palestine. What Graham was effectively saying was that all Jews support Israel’s war crimes. This is in itself anti-Semitic. It is the Suella Braverman/Sunak/Starmer line.

The far-right Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, an Israeli government cut out, campaigned strenuously to cancel Corbyn – The Big lie. They wrote asking Graham to ban the film from Unite premises and she was happy to oblige. Yet on 30 August 23 Cartmail sent me an email saying that:

Yourdisagreeableattackisbasedonafalsehood. No one in Unite took advice from the Campaign Against Antisemitism, on‘Jeremy Corbyn – The Big Lie’, nor indeed any other matter.

Yet on 23 July, the CAA posted an article claiming that:

Following correspondence with Campaign Against Antisemitism, the Unite union has cancelled the screening of a propaganda film about the antisemitic former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn that was due to be shown alongside a book signing and talk from Asa Winstanley....

following contact from Campaign Against Antisemitism in which we pointed out that the scheduling of the event appeared to be contradictory to the reports that the film has been banned in all of Unite’s buildings, it was cancelled....

Campaign Against Antisemitism commends Unite for its swift and decisive action to cancel the screening as soon as we brought it to its attention.

I replied asking Cartmail if Unite had put out a statement denying the claims of the CAA. I received no response. Cartmail also wrote that:

Unite as a union is outstanding in both our commitment to anti-racism and solidarity with the Palestinian cause, actions speak louder than words.'

For once she was right. Actions do speak louder than words. Graham’s actions or rather inaction speak volumes.

Graham’s behaviour has been warmly welcomed by the Zionists. Writing in the Zionist Jewish News‘Liar’ Lee Harpin described how,

In a further put down on far-left foreign policy dogma Graham also wrote “Similarly, we cannot be expected to affiliate to organisations that actively work against our members and their jobs.

Examples include groups that look to build networks inside trade unions to undermine the defence industry or demand the disbandment of NATO and AUKUS.

Under Graham’s leadership Unite has also taken great strides in attempting to combat antisemitism within the movement. Despite early claims that the left-wing leader would seek to move the union away from Labour and disaffiliate, Unite now appears to be opting to become a “critical friend” of the Starmer led Labour Party.

Similarly Labour Against Anti-Semitism, in the wake of Graham’s election issued a statement welcoming her election. Euan Philipps (Gordstein) wrote:

“LAAS congratulates Sharon Graham on her election as General Secretary of Unite the Union.

During her campaign Ms Graham was clear that as General Secretary of one of the UK’’s largest unions she would avoid interfering in the running of the Labour Party. We trust Ms Graham will be true to her word and allow Keir Starmer and the Labour Party leadership a free hand to undertake the large reforms required to effectively tackle antisemitism.

We also hope Ms Graham will look to the concerning evidence of widespread antisemitism in her own organisation and begin reforms to tackle anti-Jewish racism there.”

Despite her claims at the time of her election as General Secretary to be ‘non-political’ Zionist groups seem to have been well aware of Graham’s support for Israel and hostility to the Palestinians.

Graham has refused to take part in a single national Palestine demonstration. She has even refused to allow the national banner on the marches and has tried to prevent others giving solidarity.

According to Jim Kelly, Chair of London and Eastern Region, Graham’s representatives ‘advised’ Peter Kavanagh, the Regional Secretary, not to speak at a Palestine solidarity demonstration. Kelly described how activists on Palestine had had to work in ‘an environment of silence and obstruction’ by union officials, in particular Graham.

Graham attempted to prevent attempts to mobilise solidarity in support of the Palestinians. Kelly described an ‘expectation that employees will not speak alongside other General Secretaries’ at demonstrations.

Carpenter even threatened Peter Kavanagh, the union’s London regional secretary, with the loss of a discretionary pension bonus if he did not pull back from his support for Palestinians in Gaza.

Carpenter was appointed by Graham without the position being advertised and without the approval of Unite’s elected executive.


On October 16 2023 Unite put out a statement which said it

 ‘unreservedly condemns and expresses its revulsion at the recent appalling acts of violence by Hamas against innocent civilians in Israel. We further deplore the subsequent suffering and loss of life being endured by civilians in Gaza’.

Although Graham ‘unreservedly condemned’ and expressed her ‘revulsion’ at the killing of ‘innocent’ Israeli civilians, she merely ‘deplored’ the suffering and murder of Palestinian civilians, who were presumably not innocent. This is BBC language.

By October 16 2,750 Palestinians had died and 9,700 were wounded. Israel’s Defence Minister Yoav Gallant had made clear Israel’s genocidal intent when he said, on October 9 that

I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.


Israeli spokesman Daniel Hagari had said that “right now we’re focused on what causes maximum damage”. President Herzog said on October 14 that ‘There are no innocent civilians in Gaza".

Graham and Unite’s Executive refused, like Starmer, to call for an immediate ceasefire.

On 17 October Peter Kavanagh, the Regional Secretary of London and Eastern Region Unite, wrote a letter to Graham asking why there had been no Unite banner or speaker at the previous Palestine demonstration in London on October 7 and why Unite had done nothing to advertise the demonstration on its web site.

Kavanagh asked that Graham write to all branches urging members to attend the demonstration. No reply was ever received.

On November 1 I sent an Open Letter signed by 135 members of Unite to Graham demanding that the Union call for an immediate ceasefire and take part in and publicise the national demonstrations.

On November 3, having resisted calls for an immediate ceasefire up till then, Graham finally issued a statement calling for a ceasefire although it was pitifully weak, failing to mention still less condemn Israel’s genocide. The only good thing about the statement was its headline ‘Unite calls for an immediate ceasefire’.

On March 7 Israel bombed the headquarters of the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions in Gaza City. The Federation’s five-story building had attached to it a kindergarten that served 380 children, as well as a large automatic bakery.

On March 25, over two weeks later, Graham penned a letter to the PGFTU General Secretary Shaher Saeed, in which she expressed her solidarity and boasted of Unite's record including a donation of £50,000 to Medicin Sans Frontiere. This is in the context of £500 million reserves and a report that Graham and Unite’s legal bill for defending itself against Brendan Ogle, their former Ireland Regional Secretary, is over £1m.

Between the November 3 statement and that letter she had done absolutely nothing. This letter was all that she had done. She had clearly written it in order to justify her previous inactivity.

The very next day Graham penned an undated letter to Unite Officers, Organisers and Staff. It was written, it said

to alert and inform you about a number of extremely troubling actions being undertaken by a tiny minority of individuals, inside and outside of our Union.

Some of these individuals are linked to the past leadership and a small number are linked to groups who want us to make decisions detrimental to our membership and their jobs.

It was written in the language of Joe McCarthy and its purpose was to witch-hunt Palestine solidarity and anti-war activists who Graham saw as a threat to jobs in the arms industry. What happens in wider society, with growing militarisation and the danger of nuclear war was irrelevant. The consequences of increased military expenditure, reduced spending on the NHS and the welfare state was irrelevant. According to Graham Unite must tie its fortunes to the military-industrial complex.

Graham could have told Unite workers that she would support them refusing to handle arms destined for Israel’s genocide in Gaza just as happened with Rolls Royce workers in East Kilbride in 1973 when they refused to service engines for Pinochet’s airforce.

According to Graham’s logic the right of workers at IG Farben to produce Zyklon B for the gas chambers trumped the rights of Jews not to be murdered.

Graham made a number of false claims in her letter such as that ‘Unite was the first major union to publicly ... call for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza’. This was a silly lie. UNISON called for an immediate ceasefire on October 26. UNISON also condemned Israel for its attacks on civilians unlike Unite’s statement.

Rather than supporting the diversification of production and enabling arms factories to produce useful equipment like solar panels and wind turbines, on the lines of the Lucas Aerospace plan, Graham adopted the mentality of the most backward section of workers who believed that opposition to the British Empire spelt doom for British workers.

The USA today is seeking a confrontation with China. Graham’s support for NATO and AUKUS demonstrates that she supports the United States in its war plans. How will a nuclear war benefit Unite workers? International solidarity is not something Graham can even spell. She is an imperialist shill.

Unite should have been trying to persuade Unite workers and dockers not to handle arms shipments to Israel. When it came to Ukraine Graham gave her full support to dockers at Dungeness and Ellesmere Port refusing to unload Russian oil. Graham didn’t mince her words:

“There is overwhelming support being expressed throughout Unite to support the people of Ukraine.

But on Palestine there has only been silence.

Graham was happy to be seen with the Ukrainian flag backing NATO’s proxy war in Ukraine, which has armed various neo-Nazi militias, but she has not been seen anywhere near a Palestinian flag.

Getting Graham to condemn what Israel does is like drawing teeth. In her letter condemning the bombing of the PGFTU headquarters in Gaza City Graham failed to even to mention the word ‘Israel’. It is as if the bombing of the Trade union HQ happened by itself.

On March 11 we organised a demonstration outside Unite HQ to coincide with an Executive Committee meeting. About 50 Unite members attended from 3 regions.

Graham justified not discussing Gaza’s genocide because ‘Palestine is not a service we offer members.’ This one phrase sums up everything about Graham’s narrow minded, blinkered chauvinism.

Graham is wedded to capitalism. She simply wants workers to have a larger share of the imperialist cake. At previous TUC Conferences she has supported an increase in arms expenditure despite more military expenditure meaning less expenditure on the NHS, housing etc.

On December 19 166 Unite members sent another letter to Graham pointing out that in the statement of November 3

There was no mention of genocide or ethnic cleansing or war crimes ... the bombing of hospitals, the targeting and murder of journalists, academics and doctors...  or the murder of 8000 children....

You have done nothing to publicise all the previous national demonstrations.  Are you going to ignore the one on January 13 too? There has been no national Unite presence on the marches to date. 

The letter demanded that Graham

publicise all future demonstration, that you provide the resources necessary for Unite members to attend, that Unite nationally is present on the march together with its banner and that Unite has a speaker at the rally.

We quoted a report from Vatican News of 16 December as an example of Israel’s war crimes:

‘Israelis have opened fire on Gaza’s Christians ... around Holy Family Latin parish in Gaza City, dozens are reported dead… and reports continue to arrive that shooting by Israeli snipers continues during these hours.... A statement released by the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem confirmed that an Israeli sniper murdered two Christian women inside the Holy Family Parish where the majority of Christian families have taken refuge since the start of the war.’

The letter referred to ‘an even more horrifying massacre’ on 17 December when Al Jazeera reported that Israeli bulldozers had crushed Palestinians who were taking shelter in tents outside Kamal Adwan Hospital.

Dozens of Palestinians are reported to have been buried alive. These are Nazi-style massacres and yet you have said nothing and done nothing since issuing your statement You were happy to wave the Ukrainian flag but you haven’t waved the Palestinian flag or expressed any sympathy with the thousands of murdered Palestinian civilians, not least children.

Resistance Street

In April of this year Sharon Graham bannedOn Resistance Street an anti-fascist/anti-racist film that looks at the role music has played in the fight against fascism and racism. The reasons for the ban were explained by Sarah Carpenter who said that it didn’t conform with Graham’s ‘industrial strategy’ or ‘existing Unite policies’.

One can only marvel at the tunnel vision of Graham. Her ‘industrial agenda’ poses no threat to British capitalism. Existing Unite policy is anti-racist. Graham is politically illiterate if she does not understand how racism has been used to divide and weaken, if not destroy the trade union and labour movements elsewhere. Carpenter wrote that:

In this context the Union should be especially careful to avoid appearing to endorse any material which causes unnecessary offence to members.’

In other words we should not give offence to racists.

On Resistance Street revisits the ‘Rock Against Racism’ movement of the late 70s, noting its influence on future waves of radical artists and political activists. The film also highlights the role played by punk rock in uniting young people in 1970s’ sectarian Belfast.

On Resistance Street tracks contemporary drifts to the right in the West, right wing musical cultural appropriation and the role of anti-racist social media groups today.  It looks at grime music and the historic role played by Black musicians in British music.

The decision to ban the film is shocking. For a trade union leader to ban an anti-fascist and anti-racist film is a sign of how politically degenerate the Sharon Graham leadership is.

Why Does the Sectarian Left Still Support Graham

To this day the SWP and the Socialist Party have given their full support to Graham and refused to critice her. Why? Because she has supported workers strikes in this country that means that her support for the murder of workers in Palestine is ok.

It is time for those on the left who placed their faith in Graham to realise they have backed the wrong horse. Graham is a narrow minded British nationalist, an imperialist, racist war monger and a Zionist who has nothing to offer the working class.

Industrial strikes do not by themselves challenge capitalism unless they are generalised and politicised. It is quite possible to combine industrial militancy with racist, imperialist attitudes. The White South African working class was militant as was the Protestant working class of Northern Ireland. Israel’s Jewish working class was militant but it fought like its South Africa counterparts for a color bar.

It is unfortunate that much of the left in Britain is unable to understand that racism and imperialism mean the working class allying with its bosses. Both Marx and Lenin understood these things unlike the SWP, SP and Counterfire.

This is why Unite4Palestine, a pressure group set up to campaign for Unite to implement its policy on Palestine is holding a meeting on Sunday night at 6 pm in Community Base, Queens Road Brighton, about 5 minutes from the railway station.

It is also why the Zionists want to prevent the meeting.

Tony Greenstein

Open Letter to Kathrin Meyer, Secretary-General of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance

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The Only Lesson You Have Drawn From the Holocaust is that Genocide is Fine When Israel Does It

Why is it Anti-Semitic to Compare Israel to Nazi Germany?

Sent to:        info@holocaustremembrance.com

Dear Ms Meyer,

I’ve lost count of the number of genocidal statements by Israeli leaders. Statements worthy of Hitler and Himmler themselves.



Netanyahu began Gaza’s genocide by invoking the memory of Amalek

“You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible. And we do remember.”

That memory being Samuel’s instruction to Saul to

“attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.”


Or Finance Minister Smotrich lamenting that he could not starve all 2 million Gazans, even though it was the most ‘moral’ thing to do.

No-one can seriously doubt that the above sentiments are those of Nazis yet according to the intellectually bankrupt definition that you foster, to say so is ‘anti-Semitic’.

The IHRA definition of anti-Semitism has been used the world over by racists and anti-Semites (Trump, Bannon, Braverman etc) to brand criticism of Zionism and Israel as anti-Semitic.

Today, in the midst of Gaza’s Genocide, the IHRA is being used in order to shield and justify Israel’s war crimes. Your silence about what is happening in Gaza is no surprise given that the IHRA was drawn up specifically to render Israel immune from criticism.


The IHRA Anti-Semitism Definition states that

criticism of Israel similar to that levelled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic

but Israel is not like any other country. What other country has occupied another people’s land for over half a century? What other country has instituted a system of Apartheid and ethnic cleansing? What other country continues to destroy the villages and homes of the people it rules over in order to make way for settlers?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MX27DnEek5o

American Surgeon volunteers in Khan Younis hospital, Gaza

Your role in legitimising genocide, Kathrin Meyer, is not surprising given that you are part of the German State Academic Establishment. From Heidegger onwards, German   academics have always been willing to lend a helping hand to the cause of genocide and colonial barbarities. You follow in the footsteps of those who justified eugenics and racial supremacy in the first half of the last century.


I refer not just to Heidegger, the Nazi Rector of Freiburg University but to people like Eugen Fischer, a professor of medicine, eugenics  and anthropology as well as director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology and Rector of the Frederick William University.

Fischer served as a doctor in the extermination camp of Shark Island, also known as Death Island, in South-West Africa from 1906-7. He conducted medical experiments on African prisoners. These included sterilisation, injection of smallpox, typhus as well as tuberculosis.

“The numerous cases of mixed offspring upset the German colonial administration and the obsession with racial purity. Eugen Fischer studied 310 mixed-race children, calling them “Rehoboth bastards” of “lesser racial quality”. Fischer also subjected them to numerous racial tests such as head and body measurements, eye and hair examinations.


The links between Germany’s African Holocaust and the Nazi Holocaust are clear and obvious yet they are nowhere to be found on the IHRA’s website. A search for the Namaqua and Herero peoples turns up nothing. This is not accidental. As a German state functionary your job is not to help us understand the causes of the Nazi holocaust but to normalise it for imperial purposes.

The antecedents of the Nazi holocaust are not difficult to locate. In November 2017 Elizabeth Baer published a book “The Genocidal Gaze: From German Southwest Africa to the Third Reich,” about the connections between Germany’s first holocaust and the Nazi holocaust. As an article in the Times of Israel  explained Genocide of African tribes was Germany’s Holocaust dress rehearsal’. Baer argued that a connection could be made between the two genocides by analysing literary texts such as

a diary by Nama revolutionary Henrik Witbooi, who kept a record while battling colonization, to works by German author Uwe Timm, which include a novel about the genocide in Southwest Africa and a memoir about his brother’s death fighting for Hitler in World War II.

What Baer defined as the “genocidal gaze” was

“the attitude of German imperialists toward the indigenous people of German Southwest Africa that is then perpetuated by the Nazis.”


Germany’s colonial era lasted for 30 years and ending with its defeat in World War I. Genocide in South-West Africa killed 80 percent of the Herero and 50% of the Nama. Thousands of Hereros and Namas were imprisoned in concentration camps, where the majority died. [In] many respects, it seemed a precursor to the Holocaust” Baer said. “I could see the parallels.

The Nazi concept of lebensraum or living space was developed in 1897 by Freidrich Ratzel while the Germans were fighting native resistance in what is now Namibia. The Times of Israel described how

Infamous German Lothar von Trothadefeated the Herero ... in 1904 and the Germans campaigned mercilessly toward an endlosung — or final solution — “a way to eradicate indigenous people,” according to Baer.

Memorial on Shark Island to the Victims of German Imperialism

Final Solution was of course the term used by the Nazis to indicate the methods necessary for a solution of the ‘Jewish Question’.

Von Trotha’s army forced the survivors of Waterberg — tens of thousands of men, women and children — into the Omaheke Desert, dooming them to death from thirst and starvation. They also created konzentrationslager, or concentration camps... They also founded what Baer calls “the first death camp, a prototype for Auschwitz” — Shark Island, where “people were subject to rape, medical experimentation, no shelter, no food, in cages on the beach.”



The colony’s imperial administrator, Heinrich Goring, was the father of Hermann Goring, Hitler’s Deputy. Dr. Eugen Fischer performed experiments on indigenous people, sending their severed heads back to Germany. Fischer went on to train the Nazi SS doctors including Josef Mengele who performed similar experiments at Auschwitz.

Baer was quoted as saying that:

“the genocide in Africa was a kind of dress rehearsal. So much of what the Germans did there, the Nazis did subsequently in the methods, the ideology, of the Holocaust.

As you say in your Linked In bioI am passionate about empowering governments and civil society to reflect on their history to inform policy.’ That certainly is one way of putting it, but when it comes to German history you are remarkably reticent.

This can hardly be an oversight. It is clearly relevant given that Germany is supplying 30% of the weapons that Israel is using to commit genocide in Gaza. Last year, the German government authorized arms exports worth a total of €326.5 ($355.3 million) to Israel.

The truth is that there hasn’t been a holocaust that the German state... hasn’t smiled upon

Yet you seem to have missed this in your ‘educational’ efforts. The truth is that there hasn’t been a holocaust that the German state and its academic functionaries, of which you are one, haven’t smiled upon.

Germany was also involved in the Armenian holocaust. In Armenia German military advisors signed some of the orders that led to Ottoman deportations of Armenians, a major component of the genocide. In World War I over 25,000 soldiers and 800 officers of the Imperial German Army were sent to the Middle East to fight alongside the Ottoman Army, with German commanders serving in the Ottoman high command and general staff.



According to Vahakn Dadrian’s German Responsibility in the Armenian Genocidethe Turkish denial of Armenian genocide served as a shield for Nazi Germany. Two German generals Bronsart and Boettrich served as members of the military mission in Turkey.

Bronsart, in particular, knew in advance about the real purpose of the mass Armenian deportation and did nothing to prevent the mass execution. He even scolded the German Vice consul for wanting to help the Armenians.

A German document of May 4, 1916, which the German state did its best to disappear, indicated that the annihilation of the Armenians was ordered by the Germans (p.160-163)

Three prominent officials served in both the Turkish Army and then in Nazi Germany. They included Franz von Papen, who was the Chief of General Staff of the IV Turkish Army in World War I, and served as Hitler’s Vice Chancellor and President of Prussia and Konstantin von Neurath, who served as Hitler’s first Foreign Minister and who was convicted of war crimes at Nuremberg. Dadrian wrote that:

"what stands out in that evidence is a central feature of German complicity, namely, the willingness of a number of German officials, civilian and military, to aid and abet the Turks in their drive to liquidate the Armenians" (p.186).

Dadrian argued that full disclosure and knowledge of the Armenian genocide could perhaps have prevented the Jewish holocaust of World War II. Yet there is no mention of the Armenian holocaust on the IHRA’s website. A strange omission is it not?

I am writing this letter because of the open support in Israel for the annihilation of the Palestinians. As you know that was also the policy of the Hitler government in respect of Gypsies, Jews and others. Yet despite you wanting people to learn from history you are actively supporting and justifying Israel’s holocaust in Gaza.

There are many examples of Israel’s exterminationist mindset. The most popular car bumper sticker in Israel today is ‘finish them’.  The host of the most popular English language podcast in Israel ‘Two nice Jewish boys’, Eytan Weinstein, is quoted as saying:

“If you gave me a button to just erase Gaza, every single living being in Gaza would no longer be living tomorrow. I would press it in a second.”

Weinstein claimed that “most Israelis” would do the same. His co-host Naor Meningher added that they would also want to wipe out Palestinians in “the territories”.

Nor are these ‘2 nice Jewish boys’ alone Defence Minister Yoav Gallant began the attack on Gaza by describing the Palestinians as ‘human animals’ the very phrase Himmler used about the Jews on October 4 in a talk to SS Generals when justifying the Final Solution.

There is no doubt that the Israeli state has now entered its genocidal phase and that the Palestinians are in danger of extermination. Most people have no difficulty in making a comparison between what the Nazis did and what Israel is doing today.

Yet none of the above appears on the IHRA website. You state in your ‘Founding Principles’ that your mission, is

to remember the Holocaust, educate future generations on the tragic events of the past and strengthen governmental cooperation to work towards a world without genocide.

How can you do this if you erase from memory the German involvement in the Armenian holocaust and Germany’s holocaust in SW Africa?

It would seem that your mission is altogether more sinister. It is to provide the ideological underpinning for Germany’s support for Israel’s exterminationist policies today. Even worse you are legitimising false accusations of ‘anti-Semitism’ directed against anyone who dares questions those policies.

Eugen Fischer - the Link Between German Colonialism and Nazism

The IHRA is built on fraud. As Jamie Stern-Weiner explained in his report‘THE POLITICS OF A DEFINITION - How the IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism Is Being Misrepresented.

In the foreword Avi Shlaim, Emeritus Professor of International Relations at Oxford University, wrote that

What is touted as the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) Working Definition of Antisemitism is not a definition, has little to do with antisemitism, and was neither written nor endorsed by IHRA....

Scholars and legal experts have convincingly argued that IHRA’s definition is incoherent, vague, vulnerable to political abuse, and not fit for purpose. It fails even to meet the most elementary requirement of a definition, which is to define. The decisive role of pro-Israel advocacy groups in drafting and promoting the definition has also been established.

This remarkable report... also breaks important new ground. Expert criticism and political controversy have focused on a list of 11 highly problematic examples of purportedly antisemitic statements and behaviours. Seven of these 11 examples relate to Israel. ...

The report shows that IHRA’s decision-making body, the Plenary, in fact decided to exclude all of these examples from its definition. The IHRA definition includes no examples. If there is widespread confusion about this, it is because champions of the examples... have systematically and methodically misrepresented the Plenary’s decision.

The examples, falsely represented as part of the IHRA definition, have been used to delegitimise and censor legitimate criticism of Israel and, more broadly, to curtail free speech on Israel. This shields Israel from accountability for its serious human rights abuses...

... The sad truth is that these [IHRA] officials have been complicit in a deliberate effort to conflate criticism of Israeli policies with antisemitism. IHRA’s core mandate...

Jamie Stern-Weiner’s report demonstrates in irrefutable detail how a definition intended to protect Jews against antisemitism was twisted to protect the State of Israel against valid criticisms that have nothing to do with anti-Jewish racism

The 10th illustration of the definition that your organisation propagates states that ‘contemporary examples of antisemitism’ include

ØDrawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.

Naturally, not wanting to be accused of ‘anti-Semitism’ I thought I should seek your advice as to why calling for the extermination of Palestinians is any different from calling for the extermination of Jews? I would be grateful for your advice in this respect and look forward to hearing from you.

Yours sincerely,

Tony Greenstein

Jews4Genocide & Christians4Armageddon Combined to Protest that 20,000 Dead Children is not Enough

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With their Union Jacks & Israeli Flags the Zionists Resembled the Nazi National Front & English Defence League

Anti-Genocide Supporters Outnumber Jews4Genocide and their Christian supporters

Brighton Clocktower Protest Attracts a Few Zionist Christian Nutters

On Saturday Brighton & Hove PSC and other Palestine solidarity organisations held a demonstration at Brighton’s clocktower in support of the Palestinians. Sure enough ‘Christian’ Zionists and Jews4Genocide also turned.

Another Jewish Fascist Uses the term 'self hater' to describe anti-racist Jews

One of the few Jewish women there was chanting ‘god save king Charles’ though from what she did not say. She seemed perturbed at my presence, calling me a ‘self-hater’, the Nazi term for German anti-fascists (who by ‘hating’ their ‘race’ thereby hated themselves).  I informed said harridan that it was not myself who I hated (I am usually accused of narcissism not self-hate!) but her and all she represented. She looked offended.

Christians Rapturing to Heaven on the Backs of the Palestinians

As is always the case in Brighton & Hove the number of Palestine solidarity supporters far outweighed the bunch of misfits and loony tunes who turned up to support genocide. The Christian Zionists were there because they see the present war as part of god’s plan to return the Jews to Palestine and thus hasten the battles of Armageddon. In that way they will be able to rapture to heaven, as most Jews are consigned to the flames.

Christian Zionists are really Christian imperialists and fascist outriders. The same ‘Christian’ justifications, the supremacy of the ‘civilised’ White races, were used to justify the extermination of the native peoples in the Americas.

Patrick and fellow Christian Zionist

Patrick, a Brighton Christian Zionist, is not the brightest spark that the Zionists possess

A special mention should be made for Patrick from Northern Ireland, who has freely confessed on camera to being a racist. Not the brightest of the Zionists but when you have such little support you can’t afford to be choosy.

A Brainwashed Christian Who Shouted Out that Hamas was Killing Christians When that is Israel's Work

One chump told us that Hamas was killing Christians despite the fact that Christians have lived peaceably in Gaza until Israel decided to bomb their churches and kill their worshippers.

Jerusalem Deputy Mayor, Fleur Hassan-Nahoum, insisted to Nick Ferrari on LBC that there were no Christians or Churches in Gaza

Pope Francis has repeatedly condemned Israel for killing those whose only offence is to pray and shelter inside the churches. Palestine Chroniclereported that in the Pope’s communication with members of a Catholic parish in Gaza.

“They tell me ugly things, difficult things,” Francis stated that there are 600 Christians and Muslims in the parish and in the college. “They live as brothers”.

National Front March  - Like the Zionists They Marched With Union Jacks

These attacks on Christians are part of the visceral hatred for Christianity amongst the fundamentalist messianic Zionists in Israel, who have a charming habit of spitting at the sight of Christian priests. Their justification for this is past European Christian anti-Semitism as if Palestinian Christians bear any responsibility for what happened in Europe or as if racism is a biological/religious inheritance.

Brighton EDL being protected by the Police

Like the Fascists, the Zionists love their Union Jacks and Israeli Flags

In fact, compared to the Zionists who consciously obstructed attempts to rescue Jews during the Holocaust, Christians in Nazi  occupied Europe were responsible for saving hundreds of thousands of Jews as my book Zionism  During the Holocaust explained.

Christian Zionist Looking for Trouble

On December 17 of last year the Pope said that “unarmed civilians are the targets of bombings and gunfire.” Pope Francis condemned an attack on the compound of the Catholic parish, “where there are no terrorists, but families, children, people who are sick and have disabilities, and nuns.”

“A mother, Mrs. Nahida Khalil Anton, and her daughter, Samar Kamal Anton, were killed, and others were wounded by the shooters while they were going to the bathroom,”

Brighton Zionists -  similar flags and similar message to the fascist EDL below

Nonetheless the Zionists have a script to stick to which is that Hamas and the Palestinians are genocidal terrorists who have killed all the Christians because Islamists can’t tolerate any other religion. Zionists have a habit of deliberately confusing Hamas with ISIS, which Israel was reliably reported to be supporting in its heyday. ISIS really was a murderous, sectarian organisation. 

The aftermath of the bombing of St Porphyrius

In fact Gaza has, or rather had, a number of churches. Israel has bombed them all including the world’s third oldest church St Porphyrius. But of course to the average Christian Zionist the fate of Christians in Palestine is of no consequence because for these racists they don’t fit into their genocidal and Manichean narrative.

The EDL attacking Birmingham Palestine Solidarity stall with an Israeli flag in one hand whilst giving the Hitler Salute - These are the  Zionists' Friends

Christian Zionism is a genocidal imperialist cult which uses the Bible and End Times in order to justify the worst depredations. Christian Zionism is a racist Western religious ideology that rests on a selected plundering the Old Testament in order to justify the conquest of what they consider heathen non-White populations. 

Jill - A Fanatical Christian Zionist

In essence Christian Zionism doesn’t consider Palestinian Christians to be Christian because their very definition of Christianity is teleological. Their goal is the second coming and Palestinian Christians are an obstacle to their narrative. Their warped interpretation of Revelations and the ‘Return of the Jews’ means that they are the religious spearhead of imperialism and see this as the way of achieving their millenarian objectives.

James (with the Hamas poster) A Christian Fascist and Daniel (on the right)

In this they are at one with the equally insane Jewish Fundamentalists who wish to restore the third temple on the ruins of the Golden Dome and Al Aqsa Mosque. We had the hilarious interview by Jerusalem’s Deputy Mayor, Fleur Hassan-Nahoum, with Nick Ferrari on LBC, who insisted that there were no Christians in Gaza because they had all been driven out by Hamas. The fact that this is patently untrue made no difference. You stick to the Zionist script regardless of the truth.

An Israeli who is convinced that Israeli Palestinians have equal rights to Jews - despite over 60 discriminatory laws and 93% of land being barred to non-Jews

So it was another weekend with a bunch of lunatic Christian Zionists and a few sad and sick Jewish Zionists who paraded with the pictures of Israeli captives held by the Palestinians forgetting that over 10,000 Palestinians are also held hostage, in far worse conditions of torture, starvation and rape.

Whilst hundreds of thousands of Israelis are demonstrating in Tel Aviv calling for an end to the war in order to save the hostages, from Israel’s bombs, Jews4Genocide want to see more bombs, more deaths and more destruction even if it means the deaths of the hostages whose pictures they flaunt.

What makes this particularly disgusting is that the main danger to the Israeli hostages is the war and Israel’s bombing. If they were really concerned about the lives of Israeli hostages they would be doing what half a million Israeli Jews in Tel Aviv did and demand an immediate ceasefire. But of course that is not what they or their ‘Christian’ counterparts want.

Almog Goldstein, who was released in the November hostage swap, said that she was

more worried at times that she and her daughter, Agam, 17, and sons Gal, 11, and Tal, nine, would be killed by the Israeli offensive than by their captors, who once shielded the family with their bodies as shrapnel rained around them.

When the EDL turned up to oppose the Boycott of the Israeli Ahava  Shop in Covent Garden - holding hands with Jonathan Hoffman

Hastening Armaggedon and rapturing up to heaven does not sit easily with a ceasefire. Genocide in Gaza is seen as the fulfilment of the holy covenant in the eyes of these swivelled eyed Zionists, Christian or Jewish.

Tony Greenstein


The Jewish Chronicle has been on Life-Support for Years – Will They Now Turn It Off & Allow it to Die?

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Like Rats Deserting a Sinking Ship, Freedland, Aaronovitch, Baddiel & Freeman Took Their 30 Pieces of Silver Whilst the JC Celebrated the Slaughter of Gaza’s Children– But when Scandal Broke They Fled


Skwawkbox – The JC’s Libel Victims

The Jewish Chronicle has reached the end of the road. The kindest thing to do with it would be to put the financial equivalent of a Do Not Resuscitate notice on it. Whatever happens to this apology for a newspaper, its reputation is blown for good.

Jonathan Freedland's Self-Serving Statement

It is no surprise that Jonathan Freedland, David Aaronovitch, David Baddiel and Hadley Freeman have, at last, said goodbye to the JC. Like rats deserting a sinking ship they left the captain Jake Wallis-Simons to drown in his own disgrace.

Wallis-Simons has faithfully defended the murder of Palestinian civilians, children included, in Gaza whilst denying that what was happening was genocide. This is the Zionist version of holocaust denial.


Simons posted and then deleted an Islamaphobic tweet accusing Muslim Palestinians of staging a ‘Ramadan’ attack on the Church of Annunciation in Gaza.


Not only was this untrue, but it is Israeli soldiers who have attacked, not only the Church of Annunciation but worshippers at the Church of Holy Sepulchre. The church even closed its doors indefinitely because of Israel’s attacks on it.

Jerusalem’s far-right Council have repeatedly attacked Christian institutions through methods such as taxation.  Settlers and Orthodox Jews have regularly spat at Christians and priests in Jerusalem something defended by Israel’s Police Minister, Ben Gvir.

This has not prevented Wallis-Simons being a regular guest on Sky News Press Review as well as appearing on BBC Question Time on October 12, 2023 as part of an all-Zionist panel.

The scandal over the JC’s financing has been brewing for some time. They were the consequence, not so much of Wallis-Simons, but his vituperative Islamaphobic predecessor Stephen Pollard, a founding member of the Islamaphobic Henry Jackson Society.


At one point the JC’s circulation hit 63,000.  In the 1970s it averaged 50,000. As I wrote at the time, the JC’s circulation declined when Pollard took over. It went from from over 32,000 in 2008 to 20,000 in 2018. Wallis Simons gave it the kiss of death as it plummeted to 6,000 paid copies with another 6,000 given away, figures that provincial papers have.

Historically the JC was the paper of the Jewish Establishment. Its main problem used to be how to keep its readers awake long enough to read it. (see British Jewry’s Family Newspaper:A Century of the “Jewish Chronicle”)

When the Zionist movement appeared in the late 19th Century, the JC reflected the views of the Jewish Establishment which was hostile to any attempt to suggest that, having won the battle for Emancipation, British Jews didn’t belong in Britain. It described Zionism ‘as ill-considered, retrogressive, impracticable, even dangerous.”

In December 1906, L.J. Greenberg, an English Zionist leader, bought the paper from Dutch banker Jacobus Kann with the object of promoting Zionism. However at that time the JC was not the extreme and partisan paper it became. In the 30s it was vociferously opposed to the Zionist trade agreement, Ha'avara, with the Nazis, describing it as an ‘unclean thing’.

Fast forward today and the JC has become a supporter of the far-right. Under Trump the Jewish Chronicle refrained from criticising the anti-Semites and racists that made up his Administration whereas America’s Forward had a series of articles such as How Steve Bannon and Breitbart News Can Be Pro-Israel and Anti-Semitic at the Same Time.

The Forward realised that you can be both anti-Semitic and pro-Zionist at one and the same time. In fact the whole history of Zionism has been its friendly relations with anti-Semites, both of whom agree that Jews are a nation separate from those they live amongst.

Pollard went as far as defending anti-Semites as long as they supported Zionism and Israel. Pollard defended one fascist in particular, the Chair of the European Conservatives & Reform, Michal Kaminski MEP defended villagers in Jedwabne who had herded up to 1,600 Jews into a barn which was then set alight in July 1941. Kaminski when an MP opposed a national Polish apology for what had happened in Jedwabne during the war.  

After books by Jan Tomasz Gross. [Neighbours: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland,] and Anna Bikont’s ‘The Crime and the Silence’, a movement grew up to re-examine what had happened 60 years previously.  Kaminski was in the forefront of those opposing an apology. 

Pollard’s other hero, another MEP Roberts Zile from Latvia’s LNNK distinguished himself each March by marching in Riga, the scene of the first executions of German Jews in October 1941, when 5,000 were machine gunned as they descended from the deportation trains from Germany, by the veterans of the Latvian SS.  See Jedwabne – The Polish Village Where Up to 900 Jews Were Burnt Alive by Fellow Poles

None of this stopped Pollard writing that Kaminski was ‘one of the greatest friends to the Jews” Kaminski, even if he didn’t like Jews very much loved the State of Israel. Poland's Kaminski is not an antisemite: he's a friend to Jews. Pollard also wrote in response to criticism from Jonathan Freedland that

Robert Ziles - Latvian MEP who marched with the Latvian veterans of the Waffen SS - Stephen Pollard was foremost in defending him

“Jonathan Freedland attacked Michal Kaminski, the Polish MEP; Roberts Zile, the Latvian MEP; and me. Freedland seems to have decided that Kaminski is an antisemite; but, far from this, Kaminski is – as his record in Brussels shows clearly – one of the greatest friends to the Jews in a town where antisemitism and a visceral loathing of Israel are rife.” (Once no self-respecting politician would have gone near such people, 7 October)

 

A Palestinian Woman Comforts Emily, the Victim of the 'Jewish' State's Violence

Emily Henochowicz.

It was a story that many papers had covered, including Israeli newspapers.  It was about an American Jewish teenager Emily Henochowicz who had lost an eye at the Qualandiyah checkpoint in Jerusalem, where Palestinians cross to the West Bank and back again. Emily had participated in a demonstration against forcing Palestinians to wait for hours in the hot sun for the ‘privilege’ of being able to cross over to work or return to their home again. 

A soldier of the Israeli army, that beacon of moral righteousness fired a tear gas shell directly at her face, blinding her in one eye. And just to show just how wonderful the ‘Jewish’ state is, the government insisted that her family should pay the bill for her hospital treatment.

I emailed Pollard suggesting that this story should appear in the Jewish Chronicle so that Jewish readers in Britain might understand just what Palestinians faced in their normal life and how criticism is not motivated by anti-Semitism. Pollard emailed back that

Dear Mr Greenstein,

Thank you for your email, which will make a fine addition to my 'delete' folder.

Stephen Pollard

From that day on I had nothing but contempt for this vile lump of lard.

Elon Perry

During today’s genocide in Gaza the JC has been nothing more than the propaganda arm of the Israeli military and Netanyahu. It is no wonder that it employed Elon Perry without bothering to check his credentials. Perry claimed to have been a professor at Tel Aviv University for 15 years amongst other lies.

Why should the JC have checked what Perry told them? The JC has never checked its facts when it came to writing scandalous stories about its anti-Zionist opponents and Palestinians. Why change the habits of a lifetime? It has a history of making things up. Why shouldn’t those it employs?

The JC was forced to apologise to Nada al-Sanjari, alleging she was one of a number of Momentum activists who had engaged in anti-Semitic activities when she had never even been a member of Momentum. It had to apologise to the charity Interpal, to whom they also paid £50,000 damages. These were the tip of the iceberg. Most people can’t afford to litigate in the libel courts.

Skwawkbox listed 15 victims of the JC yet the Regulator IPSOS, which found some 33 breaches of its own Code of Conduct in 3 years, refused to conduct an inquiry. Now this scandal has broken out. IPSOS’s Chair, Lord Faulks gave as his explanation `

the newspaper’s 2020 change of ownership and recent changes in editorial leadership.  Stephen Pollard stepped down as editor after 13 years last month, and was succeeded by his deputy Jake Wallis Simons.

Well we know how this turned out!  One crook gave way to another crook and now the JC’s past is beginning to catch up with it. The disregard for facts was such that completely fictitious articles were making it into the paper as ‘Exclusives’.  Which in a sense they were!

What is worse is that although there was indeed a change of ownership, we don’t know who the new owners are!!

Alan Rusbridger, former Editor of the Guardian asked in April 2024 Who really funds the Jewish Chronicle? It is a question yet to be answered. Rusbridger’s article was the stone that started a landslide.


What we do know is that in April 2020 the paper was rescued from liquidation by a consortium that was headed by Sir Robbie Gibb, who is a government-appointed BBC director. In his declaration of interest Gibb states that he has a 100% holding of Jewish Chronicle Media.

The problem is that Gibb doesn’t have that money. He was a front-man for person or persons unknown who gifted £3.5 million to the JC. Other members of this consortium included the ex-Labour MP John Woodcock (Lord Walney) who was suspended by Labour for sexual harassment of an 18 year old assistant. Others included Zionist operative Jonathan Sacerdoti and John Ware who produced the anti-Corbyn Is Labour Anti-Semiticprogramme which has been assailed ever since it was broadcast in July 2019 for its dishonesty and downright lies.

A newspaper which refuses to come clean about who owns it is not a newspaper. It is a propaganda sheet. What is outrageous is that a BBC Director, who is supposed to be responsible for impartiality at the BBC is himself party to hiding the ownership of this pro-Israeli propaganda sheet.

The Case of  Geoffrey Alderman

One reason I have contempt for the 4 ‘journalists’ who have resigned from the JC is because of their acquiescence in the sacking of Geoffrey Alderman. Zionists’ have a totalitarian attitude to criticism.  Pollard was determined to shut down any dissent at the JC and Freedland went along with this. The rot did not begin with the pathetic bigot Wallis-Simons. It began under Pollard.

My association with the JC goes back over 40 years.  I say ‘association’ but only in so far as I have long been a target of theirs!

Geoffrey D Paul was the editor between 1977 and 1990 when I became involved with the Palestine solidarity movement. He was a Zionist but he was critical of the invasion and occupation of  Lebanon. Although he was a Zionist he at least allowed the targets of his criticism to respond to the attacks on them and I had many letters in the Jewish Chronicle. In the one instance he refused to print my letter I went to the Press Council and obtained, for the first time, ever an adverse judgement against the JC. 

Nonetheless Paul stood by his columnist Chaim Bermant who earlier than most argued for recognition of the PLO and talking to the Palestinians.  Contrast this with the miserable Pollard.

Following my role speaking at UNISON Conference in support

 of BDS the JC's Letter Writers were not Happy!

 My Response to the JC's Readers

Long and loud was the clamour of the JC’s readership for Bermant’s head but to his credit, the Geoffrey Paul stood up for him and freedom of speech. That was why the JC was a lively publication even if it made you chew your hair at times. It also had interesting contributors such as its Literary Editor, T.R. Fyvel, who succeeded George Orwell as literary editor of Tribune.

Despite being a columnist for 14 years Pollard sent an email to Emeritus Professor Geoffrey Alderman, the historian of the British Jewish community out of the blue one day. It was blunt and to the point: “as editor I no longer wish to have you in the paper.” A decision confirmed by Pollard in a phone conversation.

What was Alderman’s offence?  In an interview with the Times Higher Ed. of July 13 2017 he said that ‘In the Oxford empirical tradition, I shall go wherever the evidence takes me.’ For Zionists, for whom defence of Israel right or wrong is everything, this is the wrong approach. The truth is secondary to the hasbarah (propaganda).

In an Interview with the THES (13.7.17.) Alderman outlined his philosophy in the statement that ‘Folks don’t like the truth, do they? Even academic folks. Very sad.’ It would make a good epitaph for Pollard when the grim reaper comes a calling.

Alderman though is not your average progressive, still less a socialist.  He is religious and right-wing, as one would expect of someone who was Professor of Politics at the Britain’s only private university, Buckingham.

Alderman was a man of contradiction, a ‘communal gadfly’ as a JC article described him when he left the Board of Deputies to the sound of boos. On the one hand he, of all people, in an article A man who deserves banning called, in November 2015, for the banning of another Jewish dissident, Gerald Kaufmann MP.

Kaufmann was targeted by groups such as the misnamed Campaign Against Anti-Semitism for having used the phrase ‘Jewish money’ in regard to the contributions of the Conservative Friends of Israel to Tory Party funds. As I wrote in Geoffrey Alderman and Gerald Kaufman –Jewish Chronicle Columnist’s Exercise in Hypocrisy

surely this wasn't the same Geoffrey Alderman who wrote, in an article Obama’s false Iran Alternative (14.8.15) of ‘the fact that Jewish money, albeit American-Jewish money – is being used to this end has led the president to adopt an unfortunate and worrying rhetoric.  Israel and its supporters are warmongers and American-Jewish money is being used to drag America into war.’ 

Alderman’s main sin in Pollard’s eyes had been to contradict the JC’s propaganda barrage that Corbyn was the worst anti-Semite since Adolf Hitler. Having worked with Corbyn Alderman knew that this was not true and he wrote an article in The Spectator Is Jeremy Corbyn really anti-Semitic? in which he stated that:

The fact of the matter is that Corbyn has an impressive record of supporting Jewish communal initiatives. For instance he was recently supportive of Jewish efforts to facilitate the speedy issue of death certificates by the north London coroner. In 2015 he took part in a ceremony in his Islington constituency to commemorate the founding of the North London Synagogue. In 2010 he put his name to an Early Day Motion (tabled by Diane Abbott) calling on the UK government to facilitate the settlement of Yemeni Jews in Britain. Indeed I could fill this entire article with a list of philo-Semitic EDMs that Corbyn has signed since he was first elected as Labour MP for Islington North in 1983.

As if this was not blasphemy enough, Alderman went on to declare that ‘in my view context is, again, paramount.’ Alderman wrote:

‘I will agree that from time to time, as backbench MP and party leader, Corbyn has acted unwisely. But the grounds for labelling him an anti-Semite simply do not exist.’

In the eyes of Pollard and the Board of Deputies Alderman had committed a Chillul Hashem, which is about as great a sin as man is capable of viz. telling the truth.

Of course to most normal people it is obvious that Corbyn was not anti-Semitic. But Zionists are not normal. Their values are, above all, those of state worship and veneration of the land over the people who live on it. To that end lying is just a means to an end.

Alderman wasn’t the first journalist to suffer at the hands of the Zionist press for expressing a dissenting opinion. Stephen Oryszczuk the foreign editor of Jewish News dared to criticise his own paper’s attack on Corbyn. He told The Canary:

It’s repulsive. This is a dedicated anti-racist we’re trashing. I just don’t buy into it at all.

Neither did the Jewish News editor as Oryszczuk was immediately put on gardening leave and soon after parted company.

Statement by Professor Geoffrey Alderman

Jewish academic Professor Geoffrey Alderman has been no-platformed by the UK’s oldest Jewish newspaper, the Jewish Chronicle.

Announcing this, Professor Alderman has made public the contents of an email sent to him by the Jewish Chronicle’s editor, Stephen Pollard.

In that email, Pollard told Alderman that “as editor I no longer wish to have you in the paper.”

This decision was confirmed by Pollard in a phone conversation with Alderman on 31 January 2020.

Such was Pollard’s dishonesty that he wouldn’t even give a reason for his decision.  However Alderman's crimes were not hard to fathom. Amongst which were an article in The Independent headedThis Labour Party row will not be settled by relying on a flawed and faulty definition of antisemitism’.

Attacking the IHRA misdefinition of ‘anti-Semitism’, which has the status amongst Zionists of Moses’ tablets of stone, Alderman wrote that the 11 examples of anti-Semitism in the IHRA

‘embed numerous internal contradictions. One example affects to condemn as antisemitic “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.” But the preamble that introduces all 11 examples explains that manifestations of antisemitism “might include the targeting of the state of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity. However, criticism of Israel similar to that levelled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic.”

Well, a number of political regimes around the world have been criticised because they are alleged to be pursuing policies reminiscent of the Nazis. So how in principle can it be antisemitic to draw a comparison between “contemporary” Israeli policy and that of the Nazis? 

Alderman compounded his ‘crimes’ by making a submission to the EHRC  slating the IHRA definition. One of the wondrous things about the IHRA is that virtually no academics or legal scholars defend it and yet it continues to dominate the narrative.  An example of Marx’s dictum that the ruling ideas in society are the ideas of the ruling class.

Although Alderman was banned from writing for the JC  Pollard’s pages were left open for arch Islamaphobe Melanie Phillips one of whose pieces was ‘Don’t fall for bogus claims of ‘Islamophobia

I first came across Alderman’s name in 1978 when the Board of Deputies was launching ‘kamikaze attacks’ (Maurice Ludman, Editor Searchlight No. 41) against the Anti-Nazi League because of its anti-Zionist founders. The ANL bothered the Board far more than the National Front. Alderman along with others like Miriam Karlin criticised their approach.

Previous Blogs & Articles on the Jewish Chronicle include:

Former Columnist and Historian of the Jewish Community, Professor Geoffrey Alderman, is Banned by Jewish Chronicle Editor Stephen Pollard.

Jewish academic no-platformed by Jewish Chronicle (JVL)

The Jewish Chronicle is Heavily Criticised by the Independent Press Standards Organisation for Lying about Audrey White and Refusing to either Retract the lies or Co-operate with an Investigation 2 December 2019

The Sad and Steady Decline of the World’s Oldest Jewish Newspaper 22.9.18.

Meet the Jewish Chronicle’s New Blogger – Carlos Contiglia of the BNP!  20.4.12.

Jewish Chronicle Publishes Uncut and with Teeth Clenched Letter Rebutting Jonathan Freedland’s Lies & Distortions 3.10.15.

Ex-Daily Express Editor Stephen Pollard Turns the Jewish Chronicle into a Propaganda Sheet 5.9.14.

The Nauseating Hypocrisy of Stephen Pollard, Editor of the Jewish Chronicle 10.12.16.

Emergency Appeal – Jewish Chronicle is Facing A Financial Crisis - Please Dig Deep for the Sake of Genocide Jake’s Salary 20 November 23

The Lies & Distortions of the Jewish Chronicle 27.9.08.

With Its Funding Sources Hidden and Half its Copies Given Away, the Jewish Chronicle is a Propaganda Sheet not a Newspaper15 may 24

Why the Editor of the Jewish Chronicle Is No Different To A Holocaust Denier18 January 21

The Jewish Chronicle's Contempt for its readership knows no limits - they treat them as idiots (probably because they are)13 January 20

The Hypocritical War by the Jewish Chronicle and the Jewish Establishment on Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party9 November 2019

Rachel Cooke: Never Underestimate the Stupidity of a Guardian Journalist – Jewish Chronicle Letter of the Week24 June 2019

The Prostitute of the Press - the Jewish Chronicle and Glynn Secker22 May 2019

Jewish Chronicle survey finds that 85% of British Jews are stupid and gullible  18 September 2018

Two White Racists Discuss Their Anti-Semitism and Contemplate their Navels as the Jewish Chronicle Declares War22 July 2018

Meet Jessica Elgot - the Guardian & former Jewish Chronicle 'Journalist' Whose Articles are Regurgitated Press Releases17 July 2018

Jewish Chronicle Editor Stephen Pollard Compares Jeremy Corbyn to Adolf Hitler and the Nazis8 July 2018

A Comedy of Errors from the Jewish Chronicle – Marcus Dysch in Another Fine Mess14 Jan 18

Jewish Chronicle Hits a New Low - A Vile Article Attacking 16 year old Ahed Tamimi12 January 2018

Full Support for the Lebanese Resistance in its Fight Against Israeli State Terrorism - The War Against Zionism Can Only Be Won with the Overthrow of the US's Client Arab Regimes

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 The Iranian Regime Has Demonstrated That It Is A Paper Tiger – Its Rhetoric in Inverse Proportion to its Actions


Last week’s pager attack on Lebanon signalled the beginning of the Lebanon war. It exposed the hypocrisy behind Western denunciations of terrorism. The triggering of explosives in 5,000 pagers, irrespective of whether the target is Hezbollah, fits every definition of terrorism. It killed dozens of civilians, including children.

As Michael Walzer, author of “Just and Unjust Wars” and co-editor of “The Jewish Political Tradition” wrote in the New York Times,

the explosions on Tuesday and Wednesday were also very likely war crimes — terrorist attacks by a state that has consistently condemned terrorist attacks on its own citizens....

the attacks, which killed at least 37 people and wounded thousands of others, came when the operatives were not operating; they had not been mobilized and they were not militarily engaged. Rather, they were at home with their families, sitting in cafes, shopping in food markets — among civilians who were randomly killed and injured.

Terrorism is

the calculated use of violence to create a general climate of fear in a population and thereby to bring about a particular political objective.

The definition in Britain’s Terrorism Act 2000 is all but useless.

1.    serious violence against a person;

2.    serious damage to property;

3.    endangering a person's life (other than that of the person committing the action);

4.    creating a serious risk to the health or safety of the public or a section of the public; and

5.    action designed to seriously interfere with or seriously to disrupt an electronic system.

No. 1 could be applied to the Metropolitan Police whose violence is a matter of record.   No. 4 could be applied to the ‘reforms’ to the NHS proposed by Keir Starmer and equally to the privatisation of the NHS by previous Tory governments for the sake of profit.  But of course western governments never think of their actions as ‘terrorist’. If endangering a person’s life is the definition then we should have no standing army!  Not in itself a bad idea.

I would define ‘terrorism’ as the use of violence and terror against a population, for political reasons. The classic non-state terrorist groups are ISIS and Al Qaeda. Groups which have a substantial political base such as the IRA, the ANC and PLO were not terrorist though all of them were called that at the time. Terrorists don’t win elections and don’t have a mass base.

Amnesty International posted this report of Israel’s pager attack:

Another witness who was shopping in the southern Beirut suburb of Borj al-Barajne when she saw women and children screaming and running, described the scenes as apocalyptic. “People were running all around me, but my legs couldn’t move,” she said. She later saw young men lying on the ground and dozens of ambulances arriving.

People were running all around me, but my legs couldn’t move

A witness to a pager explosion in Beirut

Amnesty International’s Evidence Lab analyzed 12 videos showing the pagers exploding in crowded civilian areas, such as residential streets and grocery stores, as well as in people’s homes. A verified video of the skyline of Beirut show large smoke plums over at least 10 locations in residential areas.

Lebanon’s Minister of Health, Dr. Firas Abiad, described the attacks as “the epitome of indiscriminate attacks” adding many caused “life-changing injuries”.

Israel's Bombing of Lebanon - same old story

One witness confirmed to Amnesty International media reports stating the pagers beeped before detonating causing some people to bring them up to their faces to check the screens. A mechanic in Sour described how a friend’s pager started beeping:

He took it in his hands, I was looking at it, and it said ERROR. I turned around to get my cigarettes, and I was still right next to him, and then the pager exploded. He lost his hand and both his eyes.

It is not only Hezbollah fighters who were killed and injured but civilian employees of Hezbollah including health workers. Not that there is any justification for targeting Hezbollah members in this indiscriminate way.

The silence of the world’s leaders – Biden, Starmer, Scholtz etc, is deafening. International law only applies to the enemies of the West, never its friends.  Because there is no doubt that the planting of booby traps is explicitly outlawed.

The use against civilians of booby traps is prohibited by the Protocol on Mines, Booby-Traps and Other Devices. Article 2 of the 1980 Protocol II to the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons provides that a “Booby-trap” means

any device or material which is designed, constructed or adapted to kill or injure, and which functions unexpectedly when a person disturbs or approaches an apparently harmless object or performs an apparently safe act”

It is understandable therefore that Lebanese Resistance, taken by surprise with many of its members injured and killed, has not yet been able to co-ordinate its response to Israel’s savage bombing.

As is normally the case, Israel’s bombing has primarily focused on and killed civilians. Only today the United States announced a further $8.7 aid to Israel. There is no war, no act of aggression, no war crime or atrocity by Israel that the United States will not support.


US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken simply lied to Congress about reports from the U.S. government’s two foremost authorities on humanitarian assistance, which concluded that Israel had deliberately blocked deliveries of food and medicine into Gaza.

The U.S. Agency for International Development delivered its assessment and the State Department’s refugees bureau made its stance known in late April. Because U.S. law requires the government to cut off weapons shipments to countries that prevent the delivery of U.S.-backed humanitarian aid, the U.S should have cut off military aid. In fact it expanded it.

Blinken and Biden did not accept either finding. On May 10 Blinken stated to Congress that:

“We do not currently assess that the Israeli government is prohibiting or otherwise restricting the transport or delivery of U.S. humanitarian assistance.”

USAID had sent Blinken a detailed 17-page memo which described instances of Israeli interference with aid efforts, including killing aid workers, razing agricultural structures, bombing ambulances and hospitals, sitting on supply depots and routinely turning away trucks full of food and medicine.

Despite the ruling of the International Court of Justice that Israel was ‘plausibly’ committing genocide and its later order to Israel to halt its offensive in Rafah and the ICJ’s later ruling that Israel’s occupation of Gaza and the West Bank were illegal Israel has ignored the rulings of the world’s highest court. International Law has been shown to be completely useless when it comes to preventing genocide because it has no effective mechanism to implement its decisions.

In Lebanon we can also assume that whatever war crimes Israel is planning will also be ignored. Israel’s launching of an aggressive war against Lebanon is a war crime. This issue was considered by The International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg to be the ‘supreme international crime’. It led the Court to issue 12 death sentences against the major Nazi war criminals in 1947.

To date the Lebanese Resistance, which opened a second front on the border with Israel in solidarity with the Palestinian resistance in Gaza, has been careful to limit its attacks to Northern Israel and military targets whereas Israel has deliberately targeted civilians in South Lebanon as a way of creating a buffer zone.

To date the response of the Lebanese Resistance has been cautious and hesitant given its reported stockpile of 200,000 missiles. Of course it is difficult to know what effect the pager attack has had but it is likely that the resistance is calibrating its response to Israel’s attacks. If this is true it may prove a costly mistake. The longer Israel carries out its bombing campaign the likelier it will be that it destroys the missiles and their launchers.

What is more likely to bring Israel’s military to heel will be the launching of 1,000 or 2,000 missiles a day. The Iron Dome missile defence system would be overwhelmed. Targets need to be widened to cover economic infrastructure such as oil refineries, energy and airports.

The Lebanese Resistance also needs to make it clear that if Israel continues to target civilians then it will not consider itself bound by the Geneva Convention on war. In Gaza Israel has attacked hospitals, schools, churches, mosques – indeed every facet of civilised life. The Resistance cannot afford to show restraint when the word doesn’t even appear in the Zionist dictionary.

Thousands of mosques, churches, homes, restaurants, colleges and other buildings have been turned to rubble across the Gaza Strip as the Israel-Hamas war continues.

What will be crucial also will be the assistance of other Arab groups. With the exception of the Houthis, all Arab states to one degree or another wish to please or come to terms with U.S. imperialism. This includes Iran and Syria. Although Iran’s’ support for Hezbollah in terms of weapons supply has been crucial to their ability to continue to fight Israel, this has been done, not because of solidarity with Lebanon and the Palestinian people but because Iran wishes to extend its influence in the Middle East. Iran has attempted on numerous occasions to try and reach an agreement with the United States, most notably the Nuclear Agreement with President Obama that Trump tore up. It has already made its peace with Saudi Arabia.

Iran’s problem has always been that Israel wants to be the unchallenged hegemon in the region. Because Israel is the United States’ attack dog, whose purpose is to intimidate any radical Arab group or movement, there will never be a chance that the US will agree to its peace feelers. The US harbours a desire to return to the days of the Shah of Iran, who was the US’s favourite dictator.

The Iranian regime is not therefore interested in solidarity for its own sake. It is not a revolutionary or even a progressive regime.  On the contrary it has waged a campaign of terror and oppression against its own people: women, workers, national and religious minorities (Jews are the only exception to this, thus proving the accusations of ‘anti-Semitism’ against it are nonsense).

Ayatollah Khomeini came to power in Iran in 1979 with the US’s blessing because the alternative was a revolutionary workers regime. The CIA actually enabled Khomeini at the time although later they fell out. Under Reagan Iran became embroiled in the Iran Contra Scandal when Iran paid for arms the US supplied it with knowing full well that some of the money would fund the Contras, the US-backed terrorists who were then fighting the Sandanistas in Nicargua. Israel too supplied captured PLO weapons to the US in order that the Contras could be armed. 

It is therefore no surprise that the Iranian regime has made it clear that it will not be taking part in any attacks on Israel. It has not responded to the assassination of Ismail Haniyeh, the Hamas chief in Tehran despite its threats at the time.

The one thing that the US does not want is a region wide war because in such a war the complicity of its own Arab client states will become all too clear. Jordan and Saudi Arabia have been supplying Israel with goods bypassing the Houthis blockade on the Red Sea. The involvement of Iraqi Hezbollah, who would almost certainly find themselves in confrontation with King Hussein’s forces might pose a threat to an already unpopular regime. At the same time it will bring into even sharper focus US bases in Jordan and Northern Syria.

The Middle East is dotted with unpopular, repressive dictators and regimes that are in alliance with Israel. A war that sucks in forces across the region cannot but help destabilise those regimes.

In order to defeat Hezbollah Israel needs to wage a ground war as Israeli generals are already threatening. The problem with this is that the Israeli army has already proved wanting in the war against Hamas. Hezbollah fighters are vastly more experienced than Hamas fighters having fought in Syria’s civil war in aid of Syrian dictator, Assad.

In 2006 Israel troops were forced to withdraw from Lebanon when they launched a ground offensive. There is no reason to believe they will fare any better this time around.

Before the war on the Palestinians in Gaza Israel’s military had an undeservedly high reputation as an effective fighting force. But its main role in the past two decades has not been in armed combat but in maintaining a repressive military dictatorship in the West Bank.

Israel is very good at killing civilians but it finds armed opponents a much more difficult proposition. In Gaza the claim that it has lost some 370 soldiers and a few thousand injured are ludicrous. On December 2023 Israel’s claim that 1593 soldiers had been injured was shown to be a lie when Ha’aretzdiscovered that at the Barzilai Medical Center in Ashkelon alone 1,949 soldiers had been treated for injuries. Given that most of its tanks and armoured personnel carriers have been put out of action the figures for Israeli military deaths, 346 are ludicrous. It is likely that the Israeli military has lost at least 3,000 and probably more dead and up to 10,000 injured.

Israel’s army is already battle worn. Its reservists are now refusing further call-ups, hence the attempt to draft the Ultra-Orthodox who prefer studying the Talmud to taking part in military adventures to secure the Promised Land.

Others, like Michael Ofer Ziv have refused to fight at the horror of what he has seen.  He described to CNN how

One minute, he was looking at soundless footage of airstrikes he ordered; the next, he was on his phone watching unfiltered videos of Palestinians shrieking, carrying their loved ones who had been killed because of the Israeli military.

“This is happening in real life and has an actual effect on those people… at some point, your brain kind of cannot disconnect those two things anymore,” he said.

Once he connected those dots, there was no going back.

Asked for comment, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) told CNN that Ofer Ziv’s claims around targeting were “baseless, unfounded, and misrepresent the sensitivity, precaution, and strict obligation to international law with which the IDF selects and pursues its targets.”

If the Lebanese war does turn into a fully fledged war it could bring the very existence of Israel, as the United States’ settler colonial watchdog, into question. The genocide in Gaza, conducted in the full glare of the international media has destroyed the moral argument for Israel’s existence as a Jewish supremacist state. Our leaders may repeat clichés about ‘Israel’s right to defend itself’ but when pictures of murdered children enter peoples’ living rooms only the brain dead still accept that Gaza’s children pose a threat to a nuclear armed state.

Tony Greenstein

For a Democratic State not a Jewish State

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Israel was created, not as a rejection but a reflection of Nazism – that's why there cannot be a 2 State Solution – Lebensraum Drives Israel Every Bit As Much as Nazi Germany

Please Register Here

https://tinyurl.com/yrtxa5nf


Debate: What is the solution? One state, two states or something altogether different?

People may have difficulty accepting the headline. The IHRA ‘definition’ of anti-Semitism calls it anti-Semitic. Today even the simplest of truths, such as calling Israel’s attack on Gaza ‘genocide’, are deemed ‘anti-Semitic’.

In 1993 the Oslo Accords were signed. The wolf and the sheep were going to lie down without the Palestinian sheep being eaten by the Israeli wolf. Not only did most Palestinians support it but so did the vast majority of the Palestine solidarity movement,

In Britain PSC held an Emergency General Meeting to debate the Accords. About one-third of the meeting opposed the Executive motion arguing that support for the Oslo Accords represented a capitulation to Israel and that there would never be a Palestinian state. That the Oslo Accords represented a neo-colonial solution. Moving the Executive motion Israeli anti-Zionist Uri Davies, who is now embedded in the Quisling Palestinian Authority, assured the meeting that all would now be hunky dory,

As a result of our defeat I resigned from PSC, the group that I had been one of the co founders of, along with Roland Rance, another Jewish anti-Zionist and co-founder of PSC. I did not rejoin Brighton and Hove PSC until 2000 and national PSC until 2005 when the BDS campaign began. In 2022 I resigned once again from national PSC when, with the support of the SWP, it abandoned opposition to Zionism.

We were told that we could not go against the will of the Palestinians, even though most Palestinians only supported Oslo because they believed that a fraction of a loaf was better than no loaf. If given a free choice most Palestinians would have supported a unitary Palestinian state and the Right of Return of the refugees.

Oslo gave the Palestinians virtually nothing. Autonomy in a fraction of the West Bank (Area C) a city state to run (Jericho) and control of that part of Gaza where there were no settlers with Yassir Arafat arriving in triumph.

Every prediction I made about the Oslo Accords came true whereas Julia Bard of the JSG could only witter on about 'a new politics'

As I predicted in a debate in Labour Briefing with Julia Bard of the non-Zionist Jewish Socialists Group, Oslo represented the worst defeat since the Nakba for the Palestinians. It didn’t even mention a Palestinian state. I used a biblical metaphor. The Accords were a message of potage. The soup that Jacob gave Esau in order to deprive him of his birthright.

The JSG and other soft supporters of the Palestinians were all in favour of the Accords. For them Zionism was not a reality, it was just a word. Israel was not a settler colonial state but just a Jewish state gone wrong. Zionism wasn’t part of their language. All that mattered was that Palestinians and Israelis had become reconciled. Their differences hadn’t really been political but inter-personal. All that was needed was reconciliation. It was part of the western personal politics of identity and the feminist zeitgeist. The PLO had been legalised, the Palestinian flag could now be flown and in return the PLO recognised the Israeli state and the UN repealed Resolution 3379 which said that Zionism was a form of racism.

Zionism was irrelevant to anyone except us leftists. All that mattered was that Israelis got to know Palestinians better. The differences had not been structural. The Nakba was the past, Israel was here to stay.

Netanyahu and Obama

I dropped out of Palestine solidarity work for the best part of a decade. After all if the Palestinians had decided to fly the White Flag what role was left for people like me?  However disillusion with the Accords was quick to materialise. On 4 November 1995 Yitzhak Rabin, the war criminal turned peacemaker, was assassinated. Netanyahu played a major part in creating the atmosphere that led to Rabin’s murder. He had spoken at rallies where Rabin’s effigy had been dressed up in Nazi uniform.

Netanyahu won the May 1996 elections for Prime Minister against Labour’s Shimon Peres (the first and only time the Prime Minister was chosen by the electorate). In 2000 there began the second Intifada.

The question however is why did the Oslo Accords fail? Large sections of the left supported it, including even the Fourth International’s Michel Warshawsky, of Jerusalem’s Alternative Information Centre.

To understand what is happening today and yesterday one has to go back to basics and understand Zionism. This is one of the reasons why I am a Marxist because it gives me the tools of analysis to understand historical developments by reference to the material and economic conditions that lead to capitalism and imperialism.

Nationalism and religion deal in heroic tales, myths of the past and the metaphysical. It substitutes wishful thinking and a deity for what was and what is.

Why is it that Israel has come to be a Reflection of Nazi Germany?

The one question that has bedevilled Israel since its creation in 1948 has been ‘Who is a Jew’. It is the same question that perplexed the Nazi race scientists too. Defined as a race, the Nuremberg definition of Jews was based on religious practice. If your grandparents, going back to 1870, were practising Jews then you too were Jewish.

The Nazis found that even this definition had its difficulty, so they created a ‘mixed race’, the Mishlinge. If one of your grandparents was Jewish you were a quarter Jew and if two of them were Jewish then you were a half-Jew. So too in Israel. There are many Jews who conform to the definition of a Jew in the 1970 Amendment to the Law of Return, also based on who your grandparents, relatives and partners are but they still fall foul of the religious halachic definition, which is based on whether your mother is Jewish.

The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute

That is the problem with ‘race’. Despite the best efforts of the racial scientists of the Nazis' Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics, (which was partly funded by the Rockefeller Foundation) with their measurements of the cranium and other physical attributes, ‘race’ defies any scientific definition.

The ‘Jewish’ State was created as an ethno-nationalist state so defining who is a Jew was supremely important. It was inevitable that purity of race and the predominance of Jews was essential. That is why the Zionist formulation of a ‘Jewish Democratic State’ was an oxymoron. Israel could be either Jewish or Democratic but not both.

Moshe Sharrett - Israel's second Prime Minister and its only dove

Anyone wishing to understand the engine behind Israel’s ethnic cleansing and genocide should read Livia Rokach’s Israel’s Sacred Terrorism, which is based on the diaries of Moshe Sharrett, Israel’s second prime minister. Sharrett was a dove amongst wolves and he lasted less than two years as Prime Minister, from December 1953 to November 1955, when Ben Gurion ‘retired’ and then returned as first Defence Minister then Prime Minister.

Sharrett however left what became 8 volumes of a diary. Over 40 years later it was translated into English and expanded to include declassified archival material, released as My Struggle for Peace: The Diary of Moshe Sharett, 1953–1956. It pulled no punches. Sharrett described Ben-Gurion’s ‘diabolic plans’ to "Christianize"Lebanon, i.e., to foment and take advantage of the sectarian divisions in Lebanese society that French colonialism had bequeathed to them. Ben-Gurion had a ‘detailed blueprint for the partition and subordination of that country to Israel’. Sharrett described how:

"I have been meditating on the long chain of false incidents and hostilities we have invented, and on the many clashes we have provoked which cost us so much blood, and on the violations of the law by our men-all of which brought grave disasters and determined the whole course of events and contributed to the security crisis".

Sound familiar? It should.

Moshe Dayan, lsrael's then chief of staff (later Defence Minister), explained why Israel needed to reject any border security arrangements offered by the neighbouring Arab States or the UN, as well as formal security guarantees suggested by the United States.

Such guarantees, he predicted, might "tie Israel's hands" and prevent the attacks and incursions across the armistice lines which went on throughout the mid- 1950s, under the ‘euphemistic name of reprisal actions.’ Dayan described these actions as being

" our vital lymph. They . . . . help us maintain a high tension among our population and in the army. . . in order to have young men go to the Negev we have to cry out that it is in danger". (26 May 1955)

Rokach described how

the creation of a siege mentality in Israeli society was necessary to complement the prefabricated myth of the Arab threat. The two elements were intended to feed each other.

Rokach quoted the testimony of a soldier who participated in the occupation of the Palestinian village of Duelma in 1948:

Killed between 80 to 100 Arabs, women and children. To kill the children they fractured their heads with sticks. There was not one house without corpses. The men and women of the villages were pushed into houses without food or water.

Then the saboteurs came to dynamite the houses. One commander ordered a soldier to bring two women into a house he was about to blow up. . . . Another soldier prided himself upon having raped an Arab woman before shooting her to death. Another Arab woman with her newborn baby was made to clean the place for a couple of days, and then they shot her and the baby. Educated and well-mannered commanders who were considered "good guys". . . became base murderers, and this not in the storm of battle, but as a method of expulsion and extermination. The fewer the Arabs who remain, the better. (quoted in Davar, 9 June 1979)

Let no-one believe that Israel’s atrocities in Lebanon and Gaza are new or the product of ‘right-wing’ Zionism. Rokach described how

‘War with Egypt was to remain a major ambition of Israel's security establishment, but the time was not yet ripe. On February 25, Ben Gurion, himself put the brakes on his collaborators' impatience when he rejected Lavon's proposal "to go ahead immediately with the plan for the separation of the Gaza Strip from Egypt." The Old Man was determined to stick to his timetable. Now, Sharett noted later, "Ben Gurion suggested to concentrate on action against Syria." (27 February 1954)

Rokach described a ‘historic opportunity to occupy Southern Syria’. On January 31, 1954 Moshe Dayan went on to outline his war plans.

The second plan-action against the interference of the Syrians with our fishing in the Lake of Tiberias. . . .The third-if, due to internal problems in Syria, Iraq invades that country we should advance [into Syria] and realize a series of "faits accomplis." . . . The interesting conclusion to be drawn from all this regards the direction in which the new Chief of Staff is thinking. I am extremely worried. (31 January 1954)

On February 25, 1954, Syrian troops stationed in Aleppo revolted against Adib Shishakly's regime. After lunch Lavon took me aside and started trying to persuade me: This is the right moment to act. This is the time to move forward and occupy the Syrian border positions beyond the Demilitarized Zone. Syria is disintegrating. A State with whom we signed an armistice agreement exists no more. Its government is about to fall and there is no other power in view. ... This is an historical opportunity, we shouldn't miss it. I was reluctant to approve such a blitz-plan and saw ourselves on the verge of an abyss of disastrous adventure. I asked if he suggests to act immediately and I was shocked when I realized that he does. I said that if indeed Iraq will move into Syria with its army it will be a revolutionary turn which will ... justify far reaching conclusions, but for the time being this is only a danger, not a fact. It is not even clear if Shishakly will fall: he may survive. ... He repeated that time was precious and we must act so as not to miss an opportunity which otherwise might be lost forever. Again I answered that under the circumstances right now I cannot approve any such action. ... I saw that he was extremely displeased by the delay. However, he had no choice but to agree. (25 February 1954)

President Eisenhower and Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser

Lavon was Defence Minister. He left the Israeli government owing to the scandal of the Lavon Affair when an Israeli terror cell, comprising Egyptian Jews who Israel had recruited, were arrested in the summer of 1954. They had planned to plant bombs in movie houses, a post office, and U.S. institutions in Cairo and Alexandria. The purpose was to create the impression that Egypt under the nationalist Gamal Abdel-Nasser was unstable and thus undermine Cairo’s relations with the United States and Britain.

Unfortunately for Israel its agents were caught red-handed planting bombs and two members of the Zionist terror cell, Moshe Marzouk and Shmuel Azar, were executed in Egypt. Six others were sentenced to long prison sentences and only released in 1968.

In the 1950’s Israel was not a super-power. It could not bomb its neighbours with impunity. At that time the United States was more interested in preventing the Arab countries aligning with the Soviet Union than Arab nationalism and relying on Israel to intimidate the Arabs and protect the oil. Thus Eisenhower told Israel to withdraw its army from the Sinai Desert and the Gaza  Strip saying that territorial aggrandisement could not be rewarded. He even threatened to withhold $100m in aid.

From the start Israel was an aggressive, militaristic state seeking to expand its borders. Israel has permanently engaged in a search for  lebensraum. Whereas the US did not rely on Israel in its early stages, today Israel is the main pillar on which western imperialism relies in the Middle East.

Theodor Herzl - founder of Political Zionism

Why Zionism is the ideological and political reflection of Nazi ideology

That Zionism is a political ideology based on race not religion is not open to dispute. From Moses Hess, the first political Zionist, who wrote in Rome & Jerusalem that ‘race is primary, class is secondary’ to Herzl’s Deputy, Max Nordau who was a strong believer in eugenics, Zionism as a settler colonial movement based its right to displace the indigeous Palestinians on racial supremacy.

Early Zionist felt a particular attraction to the same ideas that motivated the most virulent anti-Semites. Nordau’s theories on art and illness ‘ripple through the writings of Nazi race ideology, including Mein Kampf...’ [Jason Farrago] In an interview with La Libre Parole [21.12.1903] Nordau explained that Zionism

is not a question of religion but exclusively of race, and there is no-one with whom I am in greater agreement on this position than M. Drumont.

Eduard Drumont was the leader of the anti-Drefussards in France. Zionism was a ‘blood and soil’ form of nationalism (blut und boden). None more so than Zionist Federation of Germany [ZVfD] which on June 21 1933 wrote to Hitler explaining their kinship:

Zionism has no illusions about the difficulty of the Jewish condition, which consists above all in an abnormal occupational pattern and in the fault of an intellectual and moral posture not rooted in one’s own tradition… an answer to the Jewish question truly satisfying to the national state can be brought about only with the collaboration of the Jewish movement that aims at a social, cultural and moral renewal of Jewry… On the foundation of the new state, which has established the principle of race... fruitful activity for the Fatherland is possible…. Our acknowledgement of Jewish nationality provides for a clear and sincere relationship to the German people and its national and racial realities. Precisely because we don’t wish to falsify these fundamentals, because we, too, are against mixed marriage and are for maintaining the purity of the Jewish group… The realization of Zionism could only be hurt by resentment of Jews abroad against the German development. Boycott propaganda… is in essence unZionist, because Zionism wants not to do battle but to convince and to build.

This letter was sent in an attempt to curry favour with the Nazi leadership. No one forced the ZVfD to send it. Germany’s Zionists wanted the Nazis to know that there was a group, a tiny group of German Jews (approximately 2%) which was friendly to the Nazi racial experiments. It was never replied to. It can be found in Lucy Dawidowicz’s Holocaust Reader pp. 151-153.

Once it is accepted that the same principles of racial purity that underlay the Nazi experiment also motivated Zionism, then it is clear that Israel can never live in peace with either the Palestinians nor its Arab neighbours. In its eyes they are racially inferior.

The driving force behind Hitler’s war on neighbouring European states was lebensraum, the search for ‘living space’, as Hitler outlined in the Hossbach memorandum. During the war Germany engaged in vast resettlement schemes that led to thousands of German colonists settling in places like the Warthegau, the annexed part of Poland from which the Poles and Jews were expelled.

This of course is exactly what is and has happened in the West Bank. Jews have been resettled from pre-1967 Israel to the Territories on the pretext that god gave it to them! It is the settler right which has risen to power in Israel.

Similarly the motive behind Israel’s war against Lebanon, its house demolitions and destruction in Jerusalem, is simply a Zionist version of lebensraum. As former Israeli Minister Yossi Saridwrote in 2011:

Suddenly we are short of space here in Israel, which has become full to capacity and needs lebensraum. Every cultured person knows that this is a despicable German concept, banned from use because of the associations it brings up. Still, people are starting to use it, if not outright then with a clear implication: We are short of land, we are short of air, let us breathe in this country.

When we embarked on the Six-Day War did we want to remove a threat or did we want to gain control in order to spread out? That's what happens after 44 years of mire and moral corruption, which distort things and make us forget the original objective and replace it with an entirely different one. We were fortunate when we occupied the West Bank because had we not done so, where would we have come to live? And who knows how high housing prices would have risen? The divine promise is now being revealed in all its ability to prophesy about real estate.

The original Zionist aim was to conquer Eretz Yisrael (the Biblical Land of Israel) which god apparently promised to Abraham in a fit of madness. This promise stretched from the Litani river in South Lebanon down to the Brook of the Nile in Egypt and across to the Euphrates in Iraq. So there is lots of room to grow in future years!

Of course even Netanyahu is not so crude as to admit that he is aiming to conquer all of this territory. Instead Israel’s steady expansion is dressed up as ‘the right to self-defence’ or ‘security’ but the aim is clear. Gaza is to be cleared of its indigenous population in order to allow Israelis to settle it once again. The far-right is even talking seriously in terms of settling South Lebanon.

Always you understand it is ‘security’ never lebensraum that is their concern. Israel conquers a territory, as it did in 1967, which unsurprisingly provokes resistance. This is immediately termed ‘terrorism’ and that in turn results in Israel’s ‘right to self-defence’. In the course of ‘defending’ itself Israel expands a little bit further.

One sometimes has to feel sorry for Hitler and Goebbels. If only they had ‘genocide’ Joe and his partner, serial liar Anthony Blinken, then history might have looked on them in a more favourable light.

It is true that Hitler’s Final Solution meant gassing and shooting the Jews and Roma (who the Zionist historians insist did not suffer a holocaust). However the Nazis also experimented with blowing up Jews with explosives. Unfortunately their explosives weren’t powerful enough which was why they opted for gas, first Carbon Monoxide and then Zyklon B, hydrogen-cyanide.

However if Biden and Kamala Harris had been around to provide them with 2,000 bombs of high explosives who knows? Perhaps they would have settled on blowing the Jews up. In self-defence of course. But to those who find killing people by gas as opposed to explosives especially abhorrent ask yourself this – which is more cruel? Killing someone with poison gas, which is relatively quick or burying people alive under rubble to die a lingering, painful death. I just ask of course because we know that Biden and Netanyahu are civilised people.

Next Tuesday Jewish Network for Palestine and the Socialist Labour Network are holding a webinar on why, after the genocide in Gaza, there is only one goal that the Palestine solidarity should set and that is the de-Zionisation of the Israeli state. The two-state solution is an apartheid, neo-colonial solution which envisages a tamed, civilised State of Israel co-existing side by side with a Palestinian state.

Just as it is impossible to tame the appetite of a fox for chickens and lions for lambs, so Israel becoming a peace-loving, non-racist state is equally impossible. A rabid dog cannot be cured. Israel was flawed from the start. As a settler colonial, ethno-religious Jewish state, it could not be other than an inherently racist state.

Romanian Roma children deported to Transnistria and murdered

Any state which defines its national collectivity in terms of religion will automatically discriminate against those who aren’t of that religion. Israel is not a theocracy, although it is heading that way, but it is a state no different to the Christian ethno-nationalist states of Eastern Europe – Romania, Slovakia, Croatia in the 1930s and 1940s. 

Without exception they were the most enthusiastic participants in the Nazi holocaust. Slovakia was the first to deport its Jews – it asked the Nazis to take them off their hands. Romania didn’t ask the Nazis to exterminate its Jews, it managed that task all on its own as did Croatia, the only Nazi occupied state to set up its own extermination camp, Jasenovac.

Of Romania’s 600,000 Jews, it butchered 300,000 without any need for Nazi help. Even Hans Frank, the Nazi Governor of Poland, who was hanged at Nuremberg, remarked of Romania’s Jassi pogrom, that ‘we practice surgery, they practice butchery’.

Israel’s Jewish Nation State Law, passed in 2018 is quite clear:

The right to exercise national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish people.

The other 20% of Israel’s population, its Arab/Palestinian citizens can go to hell. In the words of Netanyahu, Israel is a state, not of all its citizens, but its Jewish citizens.

They have individual, not national rights. What does that mean? That the 93% of Israeli land which is owned by the State and the Zionist institutions like the Jewish National Fund belong only to the metaphysical Jewish people.

That is why to this very day, Bedouin living in the ‘unrecognised’ villages of the Negev are evicted to make way for Jewish  towns. Al Hiram was evicted to make way for the Jewish-only town of Hiram. The Bedouin were considered to be squatting on land that did not belong to them, because state land is Jewish state land.

The idea that a Jewish state could accord its non-Jewish inhabitants equality is pure fantasy. The two-state solution embodies this fantasy. The guiding ideology of Israel is Zionism and the responsibility of the Israeli state is to give effect to Zionism. 

Yair Lapid is the leader of Israel's opposition and in Zionist terms is on the 'left'. Yet  his declared principles are no different from the Zionist right:

My principle says maximum Jews on maximum land with maximum security and with minimum Palestinians.

Palestine Solidarity Campaign has fought bitterly against adopting a one-state solution. If it is to have any political credibility after the current genocide and ethnic cleansing it has to jettison this reluctance. Its pretext has always been that it is up to the Palestinians to decide what they want but Palestinians are in no position to decide anything. It is an abdication of responsibility.

A solidarity movement does not have to adopt the slogans of those they support. Whereas the Palestinians may be forced into all sorts of compromises, the solidarity movement is under no such pressures. Our duty is to exert pressure on Zionism and its backers.

The Vietcong were forced to accept the presence of the South Vietnamese government after the January 1973 Paris Peace Talks. The Vietnam Solidarity movement though called for reunification of Vietnam.

The real reason why PSC has refused to support a one-state solution has nothing to do with the Palestinians. They have not defended Hamas as the choice of the Palestinians. The real reason for their hostility to a single state solution and the abolition of a Jewish state relates to their appeal to reformist politicians and trade union leaders, for whom the two-state solution is sacrosanct.

Even the most left-wing of British politicians, such as Jeremy Corbyn, are pro-Palestinian but not anti-Zionist. They have no analysis or understanding of why Israel behaves as it does. They are therefore intimidated by accusations that opposition to a ‘Jewish’ state is anti-Semitic. They cling to the idea that Israel can be reformed, even though this belief is evidence free. The same politicians would never have dreamed of calling for a two-state solution in Apartheid South Africa to include a White state but they do with Israel.

PSC refuses to challenge these fundamental beliefs of the British Establishment because, in so far as it has any strategy, it believes it can win them over. They call it ‘mainstreaming’. PSC supports the Palestinians but at the same time has nothing to say about the Zionist nature of a state whose very existence guarantees continued genocide and ethnic cleansing.

What this has meant in practice is that trade union leaders and left-reformists, such as Corbyn and McDonnell, have been able to ‘both sides’ the Palestinian struggle. You can support a Jewish state and a Palestinian state. You don’t have to touch the thorny question of Zionism. This is what happened during Corbyn’s years of retreat. He accepted Zionism as a valid expression of Jewish identity resulting in a Jewish state. It meant that he succumbed to the fake ‘anti-Semitism’  smear campaign. The rest is history.

Supporters of the Palestinians must break from both Zionism and the two-state solution. There is only one solution, a democratic, secular state. That is the purpose of this webinar. The terrible ordeal of the Palestinians of Gaza and now Lebanon must be ended once and for all. Just as the Nazi state was destroyed so too must the Israeli state. Its continued existence means continued genocide. The two-state solution is an apartheid solution and those who support it should be asked what price they are willing to see the Palestinians pay.

Tony Greenstein

Arrested for Saying that Israel is Doing What the Nazis Did - It is NOT the Job of the Police to Control Free Speech

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The Irony of the Institutionally Racist Metropolitan Police Telling Anti-Zionist Jews What They Can and Cannot Say is Like Harold Shipman Lecturing on Medical Ethics




Last Friday four Jewish people – Haim Bresheeth, an anti-Zionist Israeli, Jackie Walker, who was expelled as a result of the fake ‘anti-Semitism’ in Corbyn’s Labour Party, Stephen Kapos– a child survivor of the Hungarian holocaust and myself addressed about 100 people demonstrating outside the residence of Israel Ambassador, Tzipi Hotoveli.


Hotoveli Opens Book with Blank Pages

Hotoveli is a notorious racist who described the Nakba as an ‘Arab lie’ despite it being copiously documented. The fact that Israel not only won’t open its archives on the Nakba but is busying trying to hide those documents that have been revealed, demonstrates that it has something to hide.

Hotoveli once presented a book with no pages to the Knesset opening it to declare that this was the sum total of Palestinian history.’You are thieves of history’ which was rich coming from a thieving Zionist colonist. The fact that this racist nutcase was welcomed to the Labour Party conference says everything about the moral vacuum at the heart of Starmer’s so-called Labour Party.

I was the last of the 4 speakers. I made it clear that the genocide and ethnic cleansing, the bombing of hospitals, universities, schools, tent encampments as well as the starvation blockade reminded me of nothing so much as the behaviour of Nazi Germany. I could have added that it bore a distinct resemblance to the behaviour of the British Empire in India, Kenya and many other of our colonies but since Israel claims to inherit the memory of the Jewish holocaust dead it was appropriate to confine my remarks to the holocaust.

I also repeated the phrase that I had used at the Palestine Expo five years ago, which the Jewish Chronicle had highlighted, namely that Today most people with a streak of moral fibre would agree that I was prescient. Not so the Police. They were on the look out for any speech that their political masters considered ‘anti-Semitic’ using the bogus IHRA definition of anti-Semitism which gives as an illustration of ‘anti-Semitism’ ‘Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis’.

In its opening sentence the ‘definition’ describes itself as a ‘non-legally binding working definition of antisemitism’ but in practice the Police and other State bodies, including universities, have adopted it as if it were a legal  code. This is not the place to dissect the IHRA, whose only purpose is to defend a racist genocidal state, as its critics are numerous. Academically and intellectually it is indefensible and even Zionists like Professor Geoffrey Alderman and David Feldman have criticised it as flawed,  faulty and bewilderingly imprecise.

I was arrested under Section 5 of the Public Order Act

The fact is that the IHRA’s basic message is that all except anodyne criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic and that is enough for Sir Mark Rowley’s none too bright thought police.  As Sir Stephen Sedley, a Jewish former Court of Appeal judge wrote in Defining Anti-Semitism (LRB, May 2017)

Endeavours to conflate the two [Zionism and anti-Semitism] by characterising everything other than anodyne criticism of Israel as anti-Semitic are not new.

Sedley also wrote that the IHRA ‘fails the first test of any definition: it is indefinite’. However the Metropolitan Police are better known for their corruption and thuggery than any intellectual achievements.

The irony is that I was arrested on the 88th anniversary of the Battle of Cable Street when the Met did their best to batter their way through the Jewish East End of London in order that Oswald Moseley’s British Union of Fascists and National Socialists (they changed their name to add the last 3 words in 1936) could march and intimidate working class Jews.

When anti-Semitism was a real force to be reckoned with in society, no group was more sympathetic to the fascists than the Metropolitan Police who had many BUF sympathisers in them. Now that anti-Semitism has been redefined as support for the Palestinians and opposition to Zionism, which is the adopted policy of the British government, the Met is now against it!

As Jews have moved to the right and become both more prosperous and an alibi for British support for Israel, the Met has combined philo Semitism with Islamaphobia and anti-Black racism. Their racism hasn’t gone away it has simply been transferred to others.

At the end of my speech I was informed by others that the Met, who were surrounding the demonstration, were pointing at me and sure enough, as the demonstration dispersed I was asked to accompany plod. Now for the sake of fairness I should add that the Police were perfectly polite and I accept that they were doing what the Mark Rowley’s and Keir Starmers of this world were instructing them to do which was to clamp down on pro-Palestinian and anti-Zionist speech.

I was arrested and taken to Holborn Police station where I was held for 7 hours before being released early in the morning. I was interviewed for nearly an hour by two cops who clearly didn’t have a clue what they were talking about. I decided to dispense with a solicitor since there was nothing they could have done and since I don’t agree with blanket ‘no comment’ interviews, which tend to suggest that you have something to hide, I was happy to take them on.

I was bailed with two conditions:

Not to come to Camden and not to attend pro-Palestinian protests in London. As far as I am concerned the latter is unlawful and I will be seeking to have this removed at the first opportunity. Article 10 of the European Convention of Human Rights is quite clear. Even the most stupid politician and policeman should be able to get their heads around it:

During my interview I referenced the 1999 case of Redmond-Bate v DPP where the said LJ Sedley ruled that ‘“Freedom only to speak inoffensively is not worth having.” It’s something that the Zionists and their claque of supporters don’t want to understand. Nor did the police who interview me understand what I was getting at. Policemen rarely do understand such concepts.

“Free speech includes not only the inoffensive but the irritating, the contentious, the eccentric, the heretical, the unwelcome and the provocative provided it does not tend to provoke violence. Freedom only to speak inoffensively is not worth having. What Speakers’ Corner (where the law applies as fully as anywhere else) demonstrates is the tolerance which is both extended by the law to opinion of every kind and expected by the law in the conduct of those who disagree, even strongly, with what they hear. From the condemnation of Socrates to the persecution of modern writers and journalists, our world has seen too many examples of state control of unofficial ideas. A central purpose of the European Convention on Human Rights has been to set close limits to any such assumed power. We in this country continue to owe a debt to the jury which in 1670 refused to convict the Quakers William Penn and William Mead for preaching ideas which offended against state orthodoxy.”

Comparing Israel and its genocidal racism to Nazi Germany is something many Israelis have done. Ze’ev Sternhell, a former professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and a child survivor of the holocaust, wrote an article In Israel, Growing Fascism and a Racism Akin to Early Nazism. One suspects that the idiots who arrested me would have arrested Sternhell too.

Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem p.7

Hannah Arendt, who was a refugee from Nazi Germany and the greatest political scientist of the last century noted in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem that the attacks at the Eichmann trial on the Nuremberg Laws for banning marriage between Jews and non-Jews was somewhat ironic since Israel also banned them!

The fact is that the very racial supremacism that the Nazis promoted is alive and well in Israel. The Police are there to uphold the existing inequalities of society in the name of ‘the rule of law’. They are not paid to think and very few of them do think outside narrow parameters.

That is why the Metropolitan and other police forces are regularly found to be full of narrow minded bigots such as the officers at Charing Cross Station whose WhatsApp messages finally did for the Metropolitan Police Commissioner and Bigot, Cressida Dick.

As far as I’m concerned the bail conditions are unlawful and have nothing to do with repeating an offence that did not occur so I do not feel bound by them. I will be pleading not guilty and seeking to bring a number of witnesses if the Crown Prosecution Service is stupid enough to charge me.

In the event that the CPS does not bring charges then I will sue the police for false and malicious imprisonment since I spent approximately 7 hours in custody besides incurring other expenses. The only way to punish the police for their dictatorial behaviour is to hit them in the pocket although, since they can draw on unlimited public money, one suspects that they will not reform.

What happened is that arch-Zionist agitator and thug Richard Millett, who sued Jeremy Corbyn and then backed off, made a malicious complaint to the Police. The Police as is always the case bend over backwards to appease these racists.

That is why I am setting up a Crowdfunder in order that I can fund both future civil litigation and also take legal advice about the present charges (since I am not entitled to legal aid until charges have been laid).

I would therefore ask those of you who are able to contribute to do so. My Crowdfunder ‘Stopping the Police Persecuting Palestine Solidarity Activists’ is now live.

Tony Greenstein

A Democratic or a Jewish State? Webinar from Jewish Network for Palestine & the Socialist Labour Network

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Sky News conducts an investigation into Israel’s murder of Hind Raja – something the BBC would never dream of

Tonight Jewish Network for Palestine and the Socialist Labour Network held a joint webinar attended by 320 people.  Nearly 500 registered for the meeting. Above is the recording.

Ghada Karmi

Tony Greenstein was the first speaker followed by British Palestinian Ghada Karmi who lived through the Nakba in 1948, then Haim Bresheeth, an Israeli anti-Zionist and JNP Steering Committee member.  Last to speak was Rania Khalek from Breakthrough News. Rania is from Lebanon although she was speaking from the United States. Rania, gave a brilliant description of the situation.

Haim Bresheeth

The quality of all the speakers was very high. Unfortunately Ali Abunimah from Electronic Intifada was not able to be present because he has gone down with food poisoning.  I wish him a speedy recovery.

Israel's Murder of Hind Rajab

Sky News Programme on theMurder of Hind Rajab

Tonight Sky News, unusually for the British media, did what the BBC has never done, which is to conduct an investigation into one of Israel’s worst atrocities, the murder of a 5 year old girl and the paramedics sent to rescue her, after the Israeli military had given the ambulance clearance.

Tony Greenstein

This has been a repeated phenomenon of Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza. So often has it happened, most famously with the murder of the 7 members of the World Food Kitchen, that one can now say with certainty that Israel’s ‘deconfliction’ mechanism is used as a deliberate means of entrapping its victims.

When health workers were asked whether they would prefer to sleep in an area that the Israeli military had been given the co-ordinates for and agreed with, they said ‘no’.


The short video into the murder of Hind Rajab in the Tel al-Hawa district of Gaza City demonstrates that despite the evidence – satellite photos showing the position of the Israeli tanks, a press release on the military’s own website admitting they were in the area, which they then deleted when it incriminated them and the recordings of the Hind and her sister speaking to the Red Crescent, the Israeli military simply denied what was plainly obvious.

This is the press release that Israel issued boasting of its operations in the Tel al-Hawa area

When the press release showed the Israel army to be a liar they simply deleted it - yet the US is happy for Israel to conduct its own investigations

And why shouldn’t the Israeli military lie. It knows that whatever happens, however many it murders, the United States Administration has its back. There is no war crime, no atrocity that the Biden regime won’t turn a blind eye to. And why not?  Did they not persecute Julian Assange for revealing a fraction of their war crimes in Iraq?  Why should the United States not tolerate similar behaviour in its favourite attack dog? That is why when the US says its passed the investigation  to the Israeli authorities we can take it as read that they aren’t in the least concerned.

To those who say that the BBC is more progressive because it is state owned my answer is that this only means it reflects more accurately the genocidal views of our rulers. Although it occasionally has better stuff on its website, none of this leaks into its mainstream news or current affairs broadcasts.

Almost obscenely, for the anniversary of Israel’s genocide in Gaza the BBC commissioned a special tribute film Surviving October 7th: We Will Dance Again. It’s not the story of how Palestinians have survived the genocide of the past year, but the Israeli victims of the breakout from Israel’s open air prison in Gaza.

The idea of conducting a serious investigation into e.g. the bombing of Al Ahli hospital when 500 Palestinians were murdered as Israel began to target hospitals or the story of the destruction of Al Shifa Hospital never occurred to the BBC because Palestinians are less than human.

It is as if, in the wake of a slave revolt in the Caribbean the BBC had made a film about how traumatic it was for the slave holders. If the BBC had existed at the time it probably would have.  The BBC consciously provides the narrative to enable Israel and the United States to continue the genocide. It has the blood of thousands of Palestinians on its hands as surely as those who pulled the trigger.

My Open Letter to the BBC's Complaints Department


The least people can do is to refuse to pay their BBC license. There is nothing the BBC can do. Its investigators have no power of entry. All you need is a minimal amount of courage. You don’t have to announce it to anyone. Just do it and ignore the 3 monthly reminders the BBC sends out. That way you won’t have to contribute to Hugh Edwards £200,000 pay-off. If a million people in Britain were to no longer pay their license fee to the genocide enablers at the BBC they would soon get the message. You don’t have to enter an Elbit arms factory or do anything risky, just stop paying the bastards.

Tony Greenstein

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