If There’s One Thing that Apologists for Israel's Genocide Can’t Stand Its Free
Speech
Susan Abuhalwa’s Speech to the Oxford Union – Unedited
On 28 November a debate at the Oxford
Union passed the motion “This house
believes Israel is an apartheid state responsible for genocide” by 278-59
votes. This set up a howl in the ruling class.
Their genocidal narrative about how Zionism
made the desert bloom and how Palestine was an empty land before the Zionists
colonised it was rejected by a vote of 4-1. They got just 21% of the vote at
the world’s mostprestigious debating
society.
today, the @OxfordUnion set the original version of my speech to private (see screenshot) and uploaded an edited version, one minute shorter, seemingly following zionist pressure. see their statement on the matter.
— susan abulhawa | سوزان ابو الهوى (@susanabulhawa) December 14, 2024
Oxford Union’s President when the
debate occurred, Ebrahim Osman-Mowafy, resisted all attempts of the Zionists to
stop or disrupt the debate. Not so his successor Israr Khan who like all
collaborators knows his place in the racial hierarchy and bowed to the demands
of the racists and Zionists to censor the recording of the debate. Instead Oxford
Union deleted their original recording on Youtube and they uploaded an ‘edited’ i.e. censored
version. The original can be found here.
No doubt the Zionists, led by the
far-right UK Liars, sorry Lawyers for Israel,
had various objections such as praise for the ‘terrorist’ Hamas. Hamas is
always singled out as the bogeyman just like all anti-colonial resistance
movements have been in the past. The only difference is that now proscription
makes speech in support of such groups a criminal offence. Israel’s murder of
17,000+ Palestinian children, its mass rape and torture is according to the
monsters who govern us the behaviour of a civilised society.
Susan Abulhawa on the rape and pillage of the Middle East by imperialism
Almost as soon
as the result of the debate was announced the British press went into overdrive
to discredit it. None other than Zionist hack Jonathan Sacerdoti, who himself
participated in the debate and lost, was writing
in the Spectator that
‘The chamber of the Oxford Union, that
once-proud institution, has been breached by the forces of bigotry, hatred, and
mob rule.’
Sacerdoti
continued in the same vein:
The motion for debate was itself a grotesque
provocation: “This House Believes Israel is an Apartheid State
Responsible for Genocide.” Apartheid and genocide are not just loaded
terms; they are distortions when applied to Israel, as I planned to explain in
my speech. That the Union had decided to frame this debate around them was bad
enough.
The fact that the debate around Zionism
and Israel is continually framed around Israel’s ‘right to self defence’ and ‘terrorism’
doesn’t bother Sacerdoti a jot. It is the fact that the debate on Zionism and Israel
has gone beyond these establishment talking points to the real question of
racial discrimination and apartheid that worries the Zionists.
The openly genocidal statements of Israel’s
Prime Minister Netanyahu who invoked
Amalek or the Labour Zionist President Yisrael Herzog who says
all of the civilians in Gaza are a military target doesn’t bother Sacerdoti. To
say nothing of numerous cabinet ministerswho openly embrace talk of wiping out the Palestinians.
Israel’s professional propagandists
like Sacerdoti are used to portraying themselves as the victim. What they don’t
like is being seen in their true colours.
The Zionists chose as their
supporting speakers a disgusting collaborator Yoseph Haddad who was kicked out of the
debate for his aggression towards other members.
The other speaker for the Zionists, Mosab
Hassan Yousef, was, as the Jewish Chronicle described him ‘a son of a Hamas leader who became an
IDF informant’. It’s as if we had a debate on the Nazi holocaust and
invited a Jewish informant who had betrayed Jews in hiding to the Gestapo to
take part in the debate. The Zionists have no shame.
Reactions to Yoseph Haddad defacing Palestine murals
in London
The Jewish Chronicle argued
that the debate ‘descends into chaos as
students shout down Israeli speakers’ but we can hear during Susan Abuhalwa’s
brilliant speech constant Zionist attempts at interruption. It seems that the Zionists
didn’t like a taste of their own medicine and so they have tried to alter what
actually happened by getting their tame puppet Israr Khan, in whose hands the
Oxford Union now is, to censor the parts they liked least of Susan’s
speech.That is how Zionists work.
Of course when Tommy
Robinson and genocide supporter Tzipi
Hotoveli came to speak the Zionists had no objection. Racists are no
problem, its Palestinians and anti-Zionists who are their enemies.
For the Jerusalem Post the debate was
marred by heckling
and shouting. These Zionists are very sensitive souls. Only they are allowed to
shoot and heckle!
For the Telegraph the debate was no
less than ‘sinister’.
I imagine that anything that challenges the power of the genocidaires and war criminals
who rule us is sinister. Only the bombing of hospitals and the starvation
ofcivilians is civilised according to
the warped values of the Telegraph. The Torygraph spoke of how Zionist dons
And what
did the Open Letter say? That there was a ‘failure
on all counts’ to protect Jewish students from ‘antisemitism’ for ‘apartheid
state’ motion.’ Notice the sly way that these dons of mischief conflate anti-Semitism
and Jewish students? Calling Israel an apartheid state is itself anti-Semitic.
Since every
human rights organisation in the world holds that Israel is an apartheid state then
what these dons are doing is to deliberately endanger Jewish students by
associating them with the Nazi-like behaviour of the Israeli state.
It doesn’t
take the brain of a don to work out that an ethno-religious state must be racist
by definition. A Jewish state wherein Jews have greater privileges than non-Jews
cannot help but be racist. That is why neo-Nazis today love
Israel.
Jewish Supremacism,
discrimination and police violence are the lot of Israel’s Palestinian citizens.
Bringing over a quisling like Haddad won’t change that fact. Even as I write the
Knesset is debating legislation to debar
Arab political parties altogether. Unless of course they consist of
collaborators such as we saw at Oxford.
One wonders
whether calling the Nazi state anti-Semitic 90 years ago would also have been
considered ‘inflammatory’ against German students studying at Oxford. Perhaps an
anti-Apartheid motion would have been inflammatory against White South African students
too. The Telegraph singled
out
Ebrahim Osman Mowafy, the president of the Union,
who is an Egyptian Arab, of being “openly
biased from the outset”, and “fostering
an environment of unchecked hostility”.
What has
Ebrahim’s nationality or ethnicity got to do with it? If someone had mentioned
the Jewish background of a debate chair the air would be thick with cries of ‘anti-Semitism’.
What however is interesting is that
even in the portals of a ruling class, the Oxford Union no less, the Zionists
can’t win anything more than derisory support. What Israel has ‘won’ on the
battlefield against Gaza’s population is being lost in the hall of public
opinion.
You Cannot Call BDS a ‘Cult’, Support the Existence of an Apartheid State
& Attack the Slogan of the Movement ‘Palestine
Must be Free’ & Expect To be Worshipped
Like An Ancient God
Norman Finkelstein has been a
remarkable analyst and critic but he has also acted like a bull in a china shop.
Finkelstein’s demolition of the
fraudulent Joan Peter’s From Time Immemorial,
which claimed that it was the Zionist settlement which attracted the
Palestinians to Palestine and that there were therefore no refugees, was a classic
example of how to deconstruct an opponent’s argument. To say that Finkelstein demolished Peters and her wretched book, whilst swimming against
the tide of favourable reviews in all the mainstream press, the NYT included,
is an understatement.
When Daniel Goldhagen wrote the
execrable ‘The
Germans: Hitler’s Willing Executioners’ which said that the Germans
killed Jews because they were a particularly sadistic and cruel nation, Finkelstein
tore him to pieces. So devastating was his criticism
that Goldhagen threatened him with libel initially, rather than reply to the
substance of the criticism.
Holocaust Industry
Finkelstein’s Holocaust
Industry, helped change the debate over the weaponisation of the memory
of the holocaust but it nonetheless refrained from drawing any conclusions
about the relations between the Zionists and the Nazis which are surely
relevant to the Zionists’ exploitation of the holocaust?
The pre-eminent holocaust scholar
Raul Hilberg, author of the Destruction
of European Jews was a ‘strong
supporter’ of Finkelstein. Finkelstein savaged the Zionist Jewish Claims Conference which has
embezzled millions of dollars, intended for the holocaust survivors, for the
Zionists’ pet projects (as well as engaging in more mundane corruption).
This was all too much for the Socialist Workers’ Party
resident guru, Professor Alex Callinicos [Finkelstein
and the holocaust] who declared, in a review which, more than anything,
demonstrated that the SWP is incapable of a serious analysis of anti-Semitism today
or how the holocaust has been used to undermine Palestine solidarity.
How different is his assertion that “the field of
Holocaust studies is replete with nonsense, if not plain fraud” from the
Holocaust revisionist David Irving’s rantings during his recent libel case?... so
exaggerated is his polemic that at times he comes, quite contrary to his own
intentions, dangerously close to giving comfort to those who dream of new
holocausts.
Perhaps this is one reason why the
SWP front organisation, Stand Up to
Racism, continues
to march with genocidal Zionist organisations like Glasgow Friends of Israel.
The misnamed Zionist group Honest Reporting was more than happy to take advantage of Finkelstein's attack on BDS as were other Zionists
Finkelstein is not an anti-Zionist
I say all this because Finkelstein
has one major flaw. And it’s not just an overweening ego. Finkelstein is not an
anti-Zionist nor is he a socialist, despite once having been a Maoist. His
support for a 2 State Solution, which he has never disavowed, is based on the
myth of the ‘International Community’ which is nothing more than an attempt to
cloak the interests of US imperialism in a democratic garb. His faith in
International Law as the arbiter of relations between states and nations has
been shown to be hollow with the genocide in Gaza.
Gaza has demonstrated that international
law is unable to prevent Israel from committing genocide in Gaza because it has no enforcement mechanism. As long as Israel is
backed by the United States it can and does act with impunity. International law can’t
even prevent states like Germany and Britain supplying arms
for the genocide.
Finkelstein is erratic in that he
took a correct position on the 7th October attack by the Palestinian
Resistance, namely that it was akin to a slave revolt against their masters,
but he refused to draw the necessary conclusion that the slaves destroyed the
institution of slavery where they could (Haiti) because it was incompatible
with their own freedom and liberty.
Norman has consistently supported the
continued existence of the Israeli state and played down its supremacist and
apartheid nature. That's what support for 2 States means.
Finkelstein's Opposition to
the slogan 'From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free'echoes
what the Zionists say
In his interview with the Guardian,
Finkelstein made plain his disagreement with the slogan ‘Palestine will be free, from the river to the sea’ when he said:
“What do you mean by Palestine will be free? Do you
mean there is no room for Israel?”
But then he went on to say something
even more interesting.
“Palestine
will be free” can also mean something else. It can fit into what’s called the
settler colonial framework, which basically says, “Settlers do not have
legitimate rights to the land. The land belongs to those who are ‘Indigenous’
to it. And everybody else, at most, can live there on the sufferance of the
Indigenous majority, or they have to pack up and leave.” And the reason that
slogan is ambiguous is because the movement is ambiguous about what its goal
is. And if you try to remove the ambiguity, you risk breaking up the movement.
Finkelstein
did not say this to the encampment at Columbia University. At Columbia he beat about the
bush and was vague and waffled on about strategic
goals. He didn’t say ‘what about Israel’ there because he knows the reception
that would have got. As soon as he had he finished speaking the students
broke into the very slogan that he was trying to get them to disavow! Clearly
his argument was not very convincing.
What Finkelstein said in his Guardian
interview is that he doesn’t agree with the settler-colonial framing that apparently sees
Israel as a product of western colonialism and imperialism and in which the
settlers have no rights. What Finkelstein is doing is deliberately distorting and caricaturing the settler-colonial
paradigm. It does not say that the
settlers don’t have legitimate rights to the land. That was never said in South
Africa, quite the contrary. What it said was that the settlers were entitled to live as equals with
the indigenous and that is what Palestinians say today.Although to be blunt I wouldn’t blame Palestinians
for saying for example that the neo-Nazi settlers on the West Bank should fuck
off back home.
What the settler colonial framework does
say is that the settlers’ rights are no greater than those who are indigenous
to the land and they have to jettison their belief that they are superior. All
of this Finkelstein disparages and distorts.
In
essence Finkelstein is a liberal democrat. That is why he is so fond of the
reactionary Mahatma Ghandi whose acceptance of communal electorates helped pave
the way for Partition and the present day Hindu Supremacist state of India and
the permanent military dictatorship of Pakistan.
Finkelstein isn’t prepared to say
that Israel is a settler colonial state that has got to go. On the contrary he
admires the early Zionists, the kibbutzim, their ‘idealism’, the ‘austere life’
and the ‘rugged individualism’ of the early Labour Zionist settlers. This isn’t
a matter of speculation. It is what he wrote in correspondence to me.
It is unfortunate that Finkelstein,
who is very close politically to Noam Chomsky, who himself has never disavowed Zionism,
hasn’t made his position clear on Zionism and the continued existence of a Jewish
State. When Finkelstein calls Israel a ‘lunatic’ or ‘satanic’ state what he is
doing is saying that the genocide it is carrying out today and the expansion
now in Syria isn’t on account of Zionism but relates to the ‘thuggish’
messianic vision of Netanyahu as an individual.
— susan abulhawa | سوزان ابو الهوى (@susanabulhawa) November 30, 2024
Susan Abulhawa & the Oxford Union Debate
Susan Abulhawa,
who made that brilliant
speech at the Oxford Union debate on November 28, which was won by
278-59, was highly critical of Finkelstein’s behaviour for many of the same reasons as I've given. Susan wrote:
Finkelstein decided to back
out ostensibly because Morris wasn't coming, but in reality, I think he didn't
want to be overshadowed by actual Palestinians who can speak more cogently and
eloquently than him on the matters pertaining to our own lives, on which he
claims expertise, almost exclusively. Norman is a star and shall be treated as
a star. Therefore, he demanded to have his own Oxford Union session, undiluted
with the voices of pesky Palestinians. That left a gaping hole in the
opposition's side, which could not be filled on such short notice. That's why
the president of the union, Ebrahim Osman-Mowafy stepped in....
Norman Finkelstein had his own event the following
day and everyone fawned over our white American savior. Yes, I'm angry. Norman
came to be invited because I suggested he be there to have an academic
counterweight to Morris. Rather than supporting Palestinians, he withdrew,
apparently because he's too special and important.
The Spires of Oxford
However it wasn’t Finkelstein’s event
the next day which made a political impact but the Oxford Union Debate which
the pro-Palestinian side won by 4-1. Given that he had been invited at Susan’s
suggestion his failure to co-ordinate tactics with her is indicative of
his individualistic and egotistical approach when it comes to being part of a collective movement.
Finkelstein's Infantile E-mail
It was because of my recent blog
in which I called on Finkelstein to ‘Stop Undermining the Global Movement in
Support of the Palestinians’
and then a subsequent challenge by me to debate his objections to the Palestine Must be Free slogan (which he
declined) that he sent me an infantile email. I guess I should be amused at finding
out how thin Norman’s skin is!
Norman’s email was notionally in response to a
circular I sent to people advertising a webinar on December 3, How
Anti-Semitism has Complemented Zionismin which Tony Lerman, Barnaby
Raine, Michael Richmond and myself spoke. Norman wrote:
I’m tempted to ask readers of my
book to email Finkelstein (normfinkelstein@gmail.com/norm6344@gmail.com) to disabuse him of his
belief! However that would be to respond in kind.
All I can say is that
it’s clear that Finkelstein was stung by my criticisms and instead of debating it out as we have done before, our usually
loquacious academic pundit responded with a temper tantrum. Clearly Finkelstein finds it difficult to defend his opposition to the slogan without having to defend his other views such as the two state solution.
On
December 20 2023 my home was raided
at 7 a.m. in the morning by South-East Counter-Terrorist Police who informed me
that I was being arrested on suspicion of committing an offence under s.12(1)A
of the Terrorism Act 2000.
This is what Starmer and Lammy Support By Approving Arms Sales
What
you may ask was my offence? Planting or conspiracy to plant a bomb? Assassinating
war criminals Starmer and Lammy? Not a bit of it. The Police referred to a tweet
I had posted a month before which expressed support for Palestinian Resistance in
its fight against Israel’s genocidal occupation of Gaza.
I understand that the charge that has now been laid
relates to a blog which I posted on October 7, Full
Support for the Gaza Ghetto Uprising. Its subtitle referred to
the hypocrisy of Biden & those who support Ukrainian resistance but condemn
Palestinian resistance.
I referred to the Commander of the Warsaw ghetto resistance, Marek Edelman, who comparedtheir resistance with that of the
Palestinians. This is not of course a message that is welcome to the British
state.
Despite the BBC and British press commenting favourably on the Syrian Jihadists of the HTS, who are still proscribed, there have been no arrests!
There can be no doubt
about the intention of s.12(1A) of the Terrorism Act. It states quite
clearly:
A person commits an offence if the person (a)
expresses an opinion or belief that is supportive of a proscribed organisation,
and (b) in doing so is reckless as to whether a person to whom the expression
is directed will be encouraged to support a proscribed organisation.
The word ‘supportive’
is a weasel
word. It is intentionally
ambiguous or misleading. If what you say about a proscribed organisation is
at all positive, that can be held to be supportive, regardless of whether it is
true or not. This legislation deliberately embeds lies into British law.
The result is that when
writing an article you must look over your shoulder in case what you write might
offend the Zionist lobby which may report you to the Thought Police. This is
the stuff of 1984. We are sleep walking into an Orwellian Dystopia. It cannot
help but chill freedom of speech and is clearly contrary to Article
10 of the European Convention of Human Rights which guarantees the right of
freedom of speech and expression.
William Tyndale died at the stake because the state disapproved of what he said
The second part of
s.12(1A) criminalises the expression of an opinion or belief if the person is
reckless as to its effect on someone who reads it. This is the stuff of police
states. Recklessness forms part of the mens
rea in criminal cases such asgross
negligence manslaughter. Where the defendant was aware of the risks involved
but nonetheless pursued a particular course of conduct and someone died they may
be held liable. It is known as Cunningham recklessness.
Such a test is completely inappropriate when it
comes to someone’s opinion or belief. We are not dealing with any fatal
consequences. What is really intended is that you should keep your mouth shut
when talking about a group that the government doesn’t like, which it defines
as ‘terrorist’ or else face the consequences.
In the case of the expression of one’s opinion
nothing need happen but you are held to be reckless as to whether someone might support the said organisation.
Only a liar
and a bully
like Priti Patel could introduce such a clause into law.
I must confess that when I write an article, I hope
that this is not used in evidence against me (!), I don’t think of consequences
in terms of what my readers might do. I wonder if people understand the points
I’m making, I wonder how many hits it may get and what readers think of the
article but as regards what they might do? Nothing. Only a police state could
think of introducing such a subjective law.
There is the question of what is or is not
terrorism. Section 1 of the Terrorism Act defines terrorism as the use or
threat of violence designed to influence a government. This is completely
inappropriate when applied to a resistance or anti-colonial movement. Israel is
not the government of Gaza. It is an occupying power whose occupation has just
been ruled
illegal by the highest court in the world, the International Court of Justice.
Since the occupation is illegal how can resistance to it anything other than legal?
Subsection 2 of Section 1 states that the action
must involve serious violence to a person, serious damage to property, endanger
a person’s life, create a serious danger to health and safety and be designed
to interfere with or seriously disrupt an electronic system. These provisions
are not what most people call terrorism.
The irony is that the Israeli state itself played a key role in the formation of Hamas
Damage to property, health and safety or the
disruption of electronic systems have their own criminal offences. There is no
need to invoke the use of terrorism unless there are hidden motives and specific
political objectives in mind. It is, after all, highly unlikely that a company
which puts its workers at risk will be charged with terrorism, though it would be
nice if they were!
Thatcher
and Reagan
both described the African National Congress as a terrorist organisation. If
this law had been in operation back in the 1970s and 80s then support for the
overthrow of Apartheid in South Africa would have been a criminal offence.
Indeed support for any anti-colonial movement that used violence against the
occupier would have been ‘terrorism’. This is the law of the occupier, the
racist, the imperialist. It is no wonder that Starmer and Attorney General Hermer
and his Zionist
Deputy Sarah Sackman are so happy to use it.
Today the law is being used by the institutionally
racist Metropolitan Police to attack the Kurdish community in London who
largely support the PKK (Kurdish Workers Party) who are conducting a struggle
against the semi-fascist Turkish state of Recep Erdogan. Erdogan is trying
to ban and has severely harassed the HDP, which obtained 6 million votes at
the last election.
The ban on the PKK in effect means supporting
Erdogan, who has been waging his own genocidal war in Kurdistan, which Turkey
occupies. It is another example of how this so-called anti-terrorist law is
being used to support colonial oppression and fascism. See Banning
the pro-Kurdish HDP in Turkey is a move towards fascism.
Terrorism is quite simple to define. It is the use
of violence against civilian populations by groups which have no mass base, the
intention of which is to coerce or frighten them. The Israeli state is the
classic example of a terrorist organisation. ISIS and Al Qaeda similarly.
Neither ISIS or Al Qaeda have any mass base and have never been elected by
anyone.That is why they send people to
Europe to commit random acts of mass murder such as at the attack on the Bataclan
in Paris when 130
people died and hundreds were injured.
Hamas, Hezbollah and the PKK are entirely different
organisations from ISIS. They operate within the territory of their own
countries. They have never planted bombs in this country. Hamas was elected
in 2006 by the majority of Palestinians. However the US and Israel didn’t like
the result so they ignored it and in 2007 Gaza was subject to a suffocating
siege and repeated attacks on it which Israel’s military called ‘mowing
the lawn’. Thousands died in these attacks but to reptiles like Starmer and
Lammy Palestinian deaths are of no consequence. Assassinated Israeli Prime
Minister Yitzhak Rabin stated
in 1992that “I
would like Gaza to sink into the sea, but that won’t happen, and a solution
must be found”.
John McDonnell MP speaking truth to power -
Its time to act now. All arms licences need to be closed down. When will this government stop selling weapons to Israel who seem to be using their right to defend themselves as an excuse to kill children? pic.twitter.com/YjrLO5jJGf
Anti-colonial resistance struggles are lawful under
international law. The AdditionalProtocol
I of the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949 include the protection of
peoples fighting against colonial domination and occupation and against racist
régimes in the exercise of their right of self-determination. Likewise UN General Assembly
Resolution 3314 (XXIX)confirms thatthose living under
colonial domination have the right to struggle to remove that occupation.
Nothing
in this Definition, and in particular article 3, could in any way prejudice the
right to self-determination, freedom and independence, as derived from the
Charter, of peoples forcibly deprived of that right and referred to in the
Declaration on Principles of International Law concerning Friendly Relations
and Cooperation among States in accordance with the Charter of the United
Nations, particularly peoples under colonial and racist regimes or other forms
of alien domination: nor the right of these peoples to struggle to that end and
to seek and receive support, in accordance with the principles of the Charter
and in conformity with the above-mentioned Declaration.
Furthermore, the Additional Protocol 1 to the Geneva
Conventions (1977), to which Palestine acceded in 2014 (joining over 160
countries), in its Article 1(4), classifies conflicts in which peoples are
fighting against alien occupation and racist regimes as armed conflicts.
Individuals engaging in such “fighting,” if captured, should be afforded the
status of prisoners of war, meaning their fighting is legitimate.
To those who argue that Hamas, Hezbollah
and the PKK have no right to resist Israel militarily, I point them to Stanley
Cohen’s Palestinians
have a legal right to armed struggle Al Jazeera 27.7.16. Cohen points out that
the Israeli state was born in blood and fire. Its terrorism makes Hamas seem
like amateurs:
On April 12, 1938, the Irgun murdered two British police officers in a
train bombing in Haifa. On August 26, 1939, two
British officers were killed by an Irgun landmine in Jerusalem. On February 14, 1944, two British constables were shot dead when they
attempted to arrest people for pasting up wall posters in Haifa. On September 27,
1944, more than 100 members of the Irgun
attacked four British police stations, injuring hundreds of officers. Two days later a senior British police officer of the Criminal
Intelligence Department was assassinated in Jerusalem.
On November 1, 1945, another police officer was killed as five trains were
bombed. On December 27, 1945, seven British
officers lost their lives in a bombing on police headquarters in Jerusalem. Between
November
9 and 13, 1946, Jewish “underground” members
launched a series of landmine and suitcase bomb attacks in railway stations,
trains, and streetcars, killing 11 British soldiers and policemen and eight
Arab constables.
Four more officers were murdered in
another attack on a police headquarters on January 12, 1947. Nine months later, four British
police were murdered in an Irgun bank robbery and, but three days later, on September 26,
1947, an additional 13 officers werekilled in yet another terrorist attack on a
British police station.
Throughout this period, Jewish
terrorists also undertook countless attacks that spared no part of the British
and Palestinian infrastructure. Numerous attacks were carried out against the
oil industry including one, in March 1947, on a Shell oil refinery in Haifa
which destroyed some 16,000 tonnes of petroleum.
Zionist terrorists killed British
soldiers throughout Palestine, using booby traps, ambushes, snipers, and
vehicle blasts.
In 1947, the
Irgun kidnapped two British Army
Intelligence Corps non-commissioned officers and threathened to hang them if death
sentences of three of their own members were carried out. When these three
Irgun members were executed by hanging, the two British sergeants were hanged
in retaliation and their booby-trapped bodies were
left in an eucalyptus grove.
In announcing their execution, the
Irgun said that the two British soldiers were hanged following their conviction
for “criminal anti-Hebrew activities” which included: illegal entry into the
Hebrew homeland and membership in a British criminal terrorist organisation –
known as the Army of Occupation – which was “responsible for the torture,
murder, deportation, and denying the Hebrew people the right to live”. The
soldiers were also charged with illegal possession of arms, anti-Jewish spying
in civilian clothes, and premeditated hostile designs against the underground (pdf).
Well beyond the territorial
confines of Palestine, in late 1946-47 a continuing campaign of terrorism was
directed at the British. Acts of sabotage were carried out on British military
transportation routes in Germany.The Lehi also tried, unsuccessfully, to drop a bomb on the House of
Commons from a chartered plane flown from France and, in October 1946, bombed the
British Embassy in Rome. A number of
other explosive devices were detonated in and around strategic targets in
London. Some 21 letter bombs were addressed, at various times, to senior
British political figures. Many were intercepted, while others reached their
targets but were discovered before they could go off.
There are some who will say that it was the
Palestinian resistance that breached international law when they seized Israeli
captives and took them back to Gaza in order to exchange them for Palestinian
captives. If this is unlawful under international law then so is the holding
of 10,000+ Palestinians in Israeli captivity. A third of them have had no trial
at all and the remainder are ‘convicted’ in Israeli Military Courts which have
a 99.74%
conviction rate.
We should also bear
in mind, although our pitiful press won’t inform people of this, that Israel
has regularly captured hostages to exchange for its own prisoners. The
‘liberal’ President of the Israeli High Court Aharon Barak held in 1997 that
a detention is legal if it is designed to
promote State security, even if the danger to State Security does not emanate
from the detainees themselves.
and that “detention ... for the purpose of release of
... captured and missing soldiers is a vital interest to the State.”
In Starmer’s Brave New World It is a Crime to Hold or Express Opinions
that Oppose Genocide or War Crimes – War really is Peace
Tony Greenstein speech outside Westminster magistrates court
Last Thursday 19th December
2024 I was formally charged with inviting support for a proscribed organisation
and expressing an opinion or belief that was ‘supportive’ of them.
Needless to say I have done neither
and I pled not guilty to offences carrying a 14 year prison sentence. As I
explained to the 100 or so demonstrators outside, in a wonderful expression of solidarity,
if I had downloaded hard core child pornography and my name was Hugh Edwards, I
could expect a 6 months suspended sentence.
My real ‘offence’ was opposing
Israel’s 57 year old occupation of Gaza and its ethnic cleansing of Gaza. If
the proscription of anti-colonial resistance groups had been in place 40 years
ago then I could have been charged with supporting another ‘terrorist’
organisation – the ANC.Because that is
what Thatcher and Reagan called
the ANC.
Thatcher told
a press conference at the Commonwealth summit in Vancouver, in 1987:
A considerable number of the ANC leaders are Communists… When the ANC
says that they will target British companies, this shows what a typical
terrorist organisation it is. I fought terrorism all my life… I will have
nothing to do with any organisation that practises violence. I have never seen
anyone from ANC or the PLO or the IRA and would not do so.
Presumably Thatcher kept her distance
from the British army too! This is the hypocrisy that labels Hamas, Hezbollah
and the PKK as ‘terrorist’. The massively greater violence of the Israeli and
Turkish states simply does not exist for creatures like Thatcher or Starmer.
State violence is fine, but violence against the state is ‘terrorism’ unless, as
with Assad and Gaddafi, we oppose the state too.
Tony Greenstein speech outside Westminster magistrates court
Using the same ‘logic’ Thatcher should have condemned violence
by the Yugoslav resistance under Tito against the Nazi occupation. Because the
Special Operations Executive, which became the SAS, was aiding them, she would
have made an exception for them. This demonstrates that those who define resistance
organisations as ‘terrorist’ don’t have a single principle between them.
Outside Tony Greenstein's court hearing, end segment
If I’d been alive 80 years ago according
to the same logic people could have been charged with supporting the French and
Polish Resistance. The Nazis certainly called them ‘terrorists’.
The system of proscribing
organisations in force today enables any
support for any national
liberation or resistance organisation to be classified as ‘terrorist’ thus
making support for people seeking to overthrow colonialism or imperialism a
criminal offence.
International law supports the right of resistance of those
opposing colonialism and this includes the Palestinians but British law
deems this irrelevant. Except in the case of Ukraine of course!
Tony Greenstein speech outside Westminster magistrates court
Suffice to say those who profess
their support for freedom of speech also seek to outlaw anything that strays
outside the overton window of what is and is not allowed to be
discussed. It is a window that has been closing for the past half century.
Freedom of speech has limits and
those limits are not confined to incitement to racial hatred or violence
against another person but to support of organisations that the Establishment
deem to be ‘extreme’ i.e. anti-colonial or anti-capitalist.
‘Extremism’ is the new buzzword. When I was remanded in
custody I was asked at reception whether or not I was an extremist! When I
asked the young Black woman if she knew what an extremist was she confessed she
didn’t. I then explained that all those who fought for the freedoms we take for
granted (and which we are losing) like the Suffragettes, were also called extremists in
their time. The Jewish Chronicle then said that I compared myself to the
Suffragettes!
It is no surprise that Attorney
General Richard Hermer and his Zionist side-kick Sarah Sackman from the Jewish Labour Movement want to criminalise those who oppose British imperialism.
They have lost the battle to tar us with the ‘anti-Semitism’ brush and have
therefore sought the help of the Police to keep us silent.
Live: Outside Tony Greenstein's court hearing
It is untrue that I support Hamas as
a political organisation. What I do is to recognise that it was elected by the Palestinians in 2006 in
preference to Fateh. Instead of respecting the outcome of the elections, the Israeli
state together with the US and Britain supported a coup attempt by Palestinian
Quisling Mahmoud Abbas to overthrow the elected government of the Palestinians.
There are terrorist organisations
such as ISIS and Al Qaeda, both of which are the creations of US imperialism.
We see today how Al Qaeda offshoot Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) which was proscribed in May 2017 has quickly been taken
to the bosom of the imperialists. At the time the justification for their
proscription was that they:
‘should be treated as alternative names for
the organisation which is already proscribed under the name Al Qa’ida.’
All sorts
of people like MI6 former chief Sir John Sawers have called for the UK to deproscribe HTS. Sawers
argued that the organisation has changed significantly in the last several
years.
Sawers told Sky News that Jolani, the head of
HTS "has made great efforts over the
last 10 years to distance himself from those terrorist groups.
"Certainly, the actions we've seen of Tahrir al-Sham over the last
two weeks have been those of a liberation movement, not of a terrorist organisation,"
"It would be rather ridiculous, actually, if
we're unable to engage with the new leadership in Syria because of a
proscription dating back 12 years."
For once the Telegraph got it right when Nina Shea wrote
That commander Al-Jolani has now changed into a
Western suit and talks of moderation, they undoubtedly see,
is purely tactical. When before has a holy warrior, at the very moment of
triumph, pulled down his keffiyeh to reveal underneath a champion of religious
pluralism and freedom? These militants are no more credible than the Taliban,
who promised to respect women’s rights but who, three years after taking
control of Afghanistan, have “erased” women from public life, as
the UN reports.
Sawyer’s statements seem very
supportive of an organisation that is still proscribed yet the anti-terrorist
police have not conducted a dawn raid on his home in the early hours of the
morning because he is in breach of s.12(1A) of the Terrorism Act. Clearly the
Police are making political decisions as to who is breaching the said Act.
If Sawers had said the same about a proscribed
Palestinian organisation his feet wouldn’t have touched the floor before he was
arrested by the Thought Police.
Proscription has nothing to do with terrorism.
It is about preventing people supporting organisations that are fighting for
the rights of their own people against regimes imposed by the West.
Terrorism contrary to the definition in
the Terrorism Act 2000 has nothing to do with ‘serious damage against property’,‘serious violence against a person’, the disruption of electronic
systems or health and safety. All of the above are covered by other
legislation.
Terrorism is the deliberate
infliction of violence and terror on civilian populations. ISIS, with its
attempted genocide of the Yazidis clearly fits into this as does Al Qaeda. ISIS
violence in Paris, the Bataclan attack and the London Bridge knife attacks or the Manchester Arena bombing of Ariana
Grande’s concert were
for the sake of spreading terror without any discernible political motive.
It is usually because an organisation
lacks a mass base that they resort to terrorism. Hamas (& Hezbollah) have
both been elected and carry large popular support. Hezbollah’s attacks on Israel
in support of Gaza was carefully calibrated and unlike Israel’s response did
not target civilians but military infrastructure primarily.
The worst terrorist attack in
Britain, the bombing of Ariana Grande’s concert in the Manchester Arena in May 2017
came about because of the collusion of MI5 with the bomber, Salman Abedi, who
had been sent to Libya to fight in jihadist organisations trying to overthrow
Col. Gaddafi.
The head of
MI5 said he was
"profoundly sorry" the
security service did not prevent the Manchester Arena attack but not so sorry
that he was prepared to reveal the truth about the bomber’s links with MI5.
An articleManchester Arena bombing inquiry delivers cover-up “in
the national interest”on the World Socialist Web Site explains:
The final report by Sir John
Saunders from the inquiry he led into the Manchester Arena terrorist bombing is
a state cover-up. It conceals the role of MI5, MI6, the Ministry of Defence and
successive British governments in the grooming and protection of far-right
Islamists who were deployed to achieve imperialist foreign policy objectives in
Libya and throughout the Middle East.
The
22-year-old Salman Abedi worked with Islamist fighters who were trained, armed,
and financed by the British state and NATO to topple Libyan leader Muammar and
install a puppet regime.
Abedi had
been sent to fight in Libya with Jihadi groups by MI5 as part of a plot to
overthrow Muammar Gaddafi. British imperialism aligned itself with the very
forces that they would later classify as terrorist. Again there was blowback
and 22 people died as a result.
The duplicity and dishonesty
of our war criminal leaders and the press means that Terrorism legislation is
being deployed to suppress political debate and discussion not terrorism.
The next stage in my trial will
be the Old Bailey on Friday 31 January at 10.00 am and there will be a demonstration
outside the court because my prosecution is aimed at the Palestine solidarity
movement as a whole, not just me as an individual.
The turnout
last Thursday was impressive but it could have been better still. London PSC
groups were not in evidence unlike groups such as Jewish Voice for Labour,
Jewish Network for Palestine and the Jewish Anti-Zionist Network. It is about
time that PSC took the attacks on the solidarity movement seriously.
It is not
enough to issue a statement condemning the
repression of Palestine Action
and then do nothing further. A statement on its own is useless. PSC has to
realise that the British state is attacking the Palestine solidarity movement and
that means it must defend those who are targeted by them. The problem with PSC
is that it has no anti-Zionist or anti-imperialist politics. It has become just
another NGO.
The attacks by the Police on the Palestine
solidarity movement are only part of the picture. The Met have also been acting
on behalf Recep
Erdogan and Turkey’s genocidal repression of the Kurds. The PKK, which is fighting
the Turkish army has a mass base amongst the Kurds. It is anything but a
terrorist group.
Through proscription the British state is
clamping down on support for the PKK in Britain. This has nothing to do with
terrorism. Palestine solidarity and Kurdish supporters have to start working
together.
Finally please also
contribute to my Crowdfunder: It is not
just for me but for activists caught up in the ‘terrorist’ trap.
As the Starmer Dalek Tells Us‘To care for one another’ he and Lammy Send More
Weapons to Israel to Kill Palestinian Kids
Starmer’s Xmas Message
goes from the mundane ‘This Christmas,
people will be travelling up and down the country.’ to the boring opposite of what
his government has been doing, ‘to
care for one another’ . What Starmer excells at though is lying, for example:
‘This Christmas, I will
be hoping for peace, particularly in the Middle East as the birthplace of
the Christmas story.’
This is the man who is sending Israel more weapons in order that
it can complete the extermination and ethnic cleaning of Palestinians in Gaza.
Was there ever such a combination in public life? A man without a personality
or principles, combined with compulsive lying and an overdose dose of hypocrisy?True Boris Johnson was a man to whom the
truth was a stranger but at least he had a personality.
Starmer
tells us that
I’ll be looking towards a
better, brighter future for every person and celebrating the joy and
wonder that Christmas brings.
You wouldn't think that Starmer has stripped pensioners of the winter fuel allowance, kept the
two-child benefit cap and has now betrayed the Waspi women. Is it any wonder that
Starmer Labour has plumbed unprecedented depths of
unpopularity?
Since
October 7th we have seen a collapse in the international legal architecture
that was put in place after the Nazi holocaust. The United States has made it
plain that the International Court of Justice is there solely to be used
against the West's perceived enemies. It ignores anything that does not go
along with its support for Israel, Hitler's
Bastard Offspring.
Starmer on Srebrenica an ‘Inhumane Genocide’
The United
States and Britain have tried to justify genocide in Gaza by denying it is
genocide. Israel’s atrocities are simply invisible even though every
doctor coming back from Gaza says they have never seen anything like Israel’s
attack on hospitals and the health sector. Torture and rape of prisoners, even
though admitted, is simply ignored. Israel’s deliberate sniping of children hasn’t
happened. Western imperialism justifies itself only through the naked
use of force and making its atrocities invisible.
Lammy says that not enough Palestinians have been killed but
hasn't told us how many would satisfy the definition of genocide even though
his boss was more than happy to call the massacre
of 8,000 people in Srebrenica a genocide when he was a young barrister.
Despite
the attempts of the BBC and Britain’s prostitute media to hide the reality of
the genocide and ethnic cleansing in Gaza, what has been happening has been obvious to all
those with eyes to see, despite the attempt of Facebook and the
BBC to outlaw the word ‘genocide’. No one can proclaim ignorance as they
did during the Nazi holocaust.
Our own
Church of England, led by child abuse defender Justin Welby, has said and done
absolutely nothing to oppose Israel’sGaza holocaust. It is to the credit of Pope Francis that he has repeatedly spoken out
about Israel’s atrocities, not least against Christians in Gaza.
To the CoE’s
Evangelicals, Palestinian Christians are invisible. These 'Christians' are
more interested in Rapture and the Second Coming, all on the back of the Jews who
will be slaughtered in the battles of Armageddon.
Perhaps we
should remember that in Germany it was the Protestant Church that was the most ardently pro-Nazi
with a Reich Church being established that barred Christian Jews from its
portals.
In Israel
those who use the Holocaust as their pretext for Apartheid and massacre openly
call for the extermination of the Palestinians. Israeli President, Labour Zionist
Isaac Herzog declared that
It’s an entire nation out
there that is responsible. This rhetoric about civilians not aware, not
involved, it’s absolutely not true. They could’ve risen up, they could have fought
against that evil regime.
Defence
Minister Yoav Gallant initiated the genocide by calling
Palestinians 'human animals' the very
phrase Himmler used when
justifying the extermination of the Jews. “We are fighting human animals, and we are acting
accordingly,” Gallant, said as he promised
to starve the Palestinians into submission.
“We’re fighting
Nazis,”declared Naftali Bennett, a former prime
minister, even though he had included them in his government.
“You must remember
what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible — we do remember,”said Benjamin
Netanyahu, referring to the ancient enemy of the Israelites, who were wiped out
to every man, woman, child and infant.
The
parallels between the Nazis and the Zionists are obvious but that didn't stop
the institutionally Metropolitan Police arresting me on
October 4th this year for making such a comparison at the demonstration against
Israel's racist Ambassador Tzipi Hotoveli.
Let us renew
our strength and vigour this Xmas to oppose Israel's genocide and the West's enablement
of that genocide. Hopefully we can get rid of the red Tory Starmer regime this coming year
Tony
Greenstein
MUST WATCH! @HRW explains how Israel has used water as a tool of genocide:
- Turned off water supply - Then Israel cut electricity & fuel to desalination plants etc - Then, it bulldozed solar panels for these plants - Prevented any repair
On 19 December 2024, Human Rights Watch
issued a 179-page report detailing Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
On 5 December 2024, Amnesty International
issued a 296-page report detailing Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
On 21 November 2024, the International Criminal
Court issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
and former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for crimes against humanity
and war crimes.
On 26 January 2024, the International Court of
Justice found that a plausible case can be made that Israel is committing genocide
in Gaza.
Given the West’s presumed commitment to human
rights and especially to preventing genocide, one would have expected countries
like the United States, Britain, and Germany, to have stopped the Israeli
genocide in its tracks.
Instead, the governments in those three countries,
especially the United States, have supported Israel’s unimaginable behavior in
Gaza at every turn. Indeed, those three countries are complicit in this
genocide.
Moreover, almost all of the many human
rights advocates in those countries, and in the West more generally, have
stayed silent while Israel executed its genocide. The mainstream media has made
hardly any effort to expose and challenge what Israel is doing to the
Palestinians. Indeed some key outlets have staunchly supported Israel’s
actions.
One wonders what people in the West who have either
supported Israel’s genocide or remained silent tell themselves to justify their
behavior and sleep at night.
History will not treat them kindly.
Below is an article from Ha’aretz about the war crimes and other deeds
of Israel’s ‘most moral army in the world’.
"I have no problem with
women. One threw a slipper at me, so I gave her a kick here (pointing to the
groin), broke all this here. She can't have children today."
"X shot an Arab four
times in the back and got away with a self-defense claim. Four bullets in the
back from a distance of ten meters ... cold-blooded murder. We did things like
that every day."
"An Arab just walked
down the street, about 25 years old, didn't throw a stone, nothing. Bang, a
bullet in the stomach. Shot him in the stomach, and he was dying on the
sidewalk, and we drove away indifferently."
"A new commander came to us. We went out with him
on the first patrol at six in the morning. He stops. There's not a soul in the
streets, just a little 4-year-old boy playing in the sand in his yard. The
commander suddenly starts running, grabs the boy, and breaks his arm at the
elbow and his leg here. Stepped on his stomach three times and left. We all
stood there with our mouths open. Looking at him in shock ... I asked the
commander: "What's your story?"He told me: “These kids need to be
killed from the day they are born. When a commander does that, it becomes
legit."
The eulogies at Shuvael Ben-Natan's funeral,
a reservist who was killed in Lebanon, illustrate this shift. One speaker
referred to Ben-Natan's killing of a 40-year-old Palestinian who was harvesting
olives with his children in the West Bank. Members of his military unit
recounted how he boosted morale in Gaza by setting a home on fire without
approval. They professed their commitment to continue with arson and revenge in
Gaza, Lebanon and Samaria (the West Bank).
Sde Teiman, a detention facility, is like a microcosm
of brutalization in the current war. It became notorious when an Incorruptible
veteran physician reported signs of severe sexual abuse in a detainee. Nine IDF
reserve soldiers were subsequently detained on suspicion of aggravated sodomy
and other forms of abuse.
According to media reports, there are
36 investigations regarding deaths of detainees who were held in Sde Teiman since October 7. Testimonies of released
Palestinians gathered by the Israeli human rights NGO B'Tselem indicate harsh,
arbitrary violence on a frequent basis, humiliation and degradation, deliberate
starvation and other abusive practices. Soldiers expressed anonymously how a
discourse of hatred and revenge normalized the abuse of detainees.
A Restrained student in the reserves
described brutalization and its effect on the Followers.
"I saw sadistic people there. People who enjoy
causing suffering to others. … What was most disturbing was to see how easily
and quickly ordinary people can detach themselves and not see the reality right
in front of their eyes when they are in a difficult and shocking human situation."
Similarly, a reservist doctor
stated:
"There is total dehumanization here. You don't
really treat them as if they are human beings ... in retrospect, the hardest
thing for me is what I felt, or actually what I didn't feel when I was there.
It bothers me that it didn't bother me. There is normalization of the process,
and at some point, it just stops bothering."
A Restrained female reservist
kept her standards by escaping the facility:
"The dehumanization scared me. The encounter
with such dangerous attitudes, which has become more normal in our society, was
traumatic for me ... I discharged myself from reserve duty with a
psychiatrist's help."
When the Hungarian Arrow Cross
fascists murdered, in January 1945, 92 medical staff and patients at two Jewish hospitals in
Maros Street and Vasosmajor Street in Budapest, Eugene Levai described it as ‘one of the blackest deeds of the Nyilasterrorism.’ (Black Book on the Martyrdom of
Hungarian Jewry p.419).
Two Nice Jewish Boys Join the Hitler Youth
Those who committed these
atrocities were later hanged by the Peoples Courts. Those Israeli government ministers
who were responsible for these atrocities, together with their military
commanders, deserve a similar fate.
The destruction of the Czech
village of Lidice in June
1942 in reprisal for the assassination of Reinhardt Heydrich and the murder of
its children and 173 men above the age of 15 stands out among the most infamous
of Nazi deeds. As does the wiping out of the French village of Oradour-sur-Glane.
Israel’s attack and
storming of Kamal Adwan hospital and other hospitals in Gaza is no different from what the
Nazis and their Hungarian accomplices did. Israel’s military burned to the
ground the Indonesia hospital and utterly destroyed the main Al Shifa hospital.
All in order that Northern Gaza can be ‘cleansed’ (another Nazi term for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians) whilst not only did the West look on but
supplied the weaponry to do it.
Kamal Adwan Al Jazeera
The destruction of Gaza’s
hospitals takes place under the pretext that they are Hamas bases.
Not one single photograph has been
produced of a Palestinian fighter inside a hospital. Anyone who pretends
otherwise is nothing other than a holocaust enabler.
Under International Humanitarian Law the principle is clear: Hospitals are protected, because of their life-saving function for wounded & sick.
Yes, they can lose their protection, but this is not a free license to attack. @CDroegeICRC, ICRC Chief Legal Officer, explains 👇 pic.twitter.com/ZbhHkvmd0y
The International Committee of the Red Cross states that
According to international
humanitarian law (IHL), health establishments and units, including hospitals,
should not be attacked. This protection extends to the wounded and sick as well
as to medical staff and means of transport.
The Death of Palestinian Babies
Attacks on hospitals are
particularly heinous yet not one of our war criminal leaders has protested
it. One would not expect Starmer to say anything. Nothing that the Palestinians
have suffered merits any sympathy from this cardboard cut out of a politician.
The only thing that stirs this dessicated politician is October 7and Israeli deaths.
Just 2 babies died according to
official Israeli statistics – both accidentally. Only one baby was killed in Kibbutz Beeri, 10-month-old
Mila Cohen, whose mother survived. The death was accidental as was another death.
Compare this to the deliberate massacre by Israel of babies and children of all
ages.
·The Kamal Adwan Hospital’s director said about 50
people have been killed, including five medical staff, in
an Israeli air strike on a building near the hospital in northern Gaza. Israel
ordered the evacuation of the hospital, endangering the remaining nearly 75
patients there.
·A fourth Palestinian baby has died due to extreme cold in Gaza over the
past 72 hours, as hundreds of thousands of people displaced by Israel’s war
struggle to keep warm in flimsy tents.
·Israel’s war on Gaza has killed at least
45,436 Palestinians and wounded 108,038 since October 7, 2023.
Explosive Robots at the Gates of the Kamal Adwan Hospital
For 75
days, doctors in this north Gaza hospital have withstood the Israeli army's
attempts to forcibly evacuate them and their patients. In the face of death,
the doctors are still refusing to leave, even as the army steps up its attacks.
Patients are trying to sleep inside the Kamal Adwan
Hospital in the northern Gaza Strip. But just outside, they can see a
remote-controlled robot carrying explosives sent by the Israeli army. It’s only
a matter of time before the bomb is detonated. Tanks and bulldozers move around
the hospital and in front of its entrances all day long. The sounds of
explosions and bullets do not stop.
Inside the hospital, there is a constant state of
panic. With each new explosion or round of fire, patients flee from one wing of
the hospital to another, crowding in the narrow hospital corridors to sleep
like sardines, hoping that they will be safe.
This is the current reality at the Kamal Adwan
Hospital in Beit Lahia, one of the last semi-functioning hospitals in northern
Gaza. For 75 days, the hospital has been under siege by the Israeli army, which
has banned the entry of food, medicine, and water, while periodically cutting
off communications inside the hospital, preventing doctors and patients from
communicating with the outside world. Not to mention the constant
bombings.
In recent days, the army has stepped up its attacks on
the hospital. According to witnesses, the Israeli army has deployed the use of
remote-controlled robots, which approach the hospital gates, the surrounding
areas, and its courtyard, dropping boxes filled with explosives that are later
detonated remotely. The Israeli army has attacked the
hospital dozens of times over the past 10 days, and in addition to the
remote-controlled explosives, the army has been firing live bullets and
artillery fire at the hospital, and has also been using drones and
quadcopters in its attacks.
“Yesterday
we went through a difficult night that no one can imagine. At dawn, there was
violent and direct targeting of the intensive care unit’,
Dr. Muhammad Barid told Mondoweiss
from inside the ICU at the hospital on Tuesday, December 24.
“Some of the effects are still present. Shells fell and set fires
inside the department. The department is crowded with cases because the
intensive care unit in Kamal Adwan Hospital is the only department operating in
the northern Gaza Strip,” he said.
Dr. Barid highlights the grim reality facing patients
in the intensive care unit, emphasizing that most patients are heavily
dependent on ventilators, and require constant care from medical
staff.
The intensive care unit, which is designed to
accommodate only 16 patients, is now treating 47 individuals. Due to lack of
supplies and a staff who are stretched thin, patients receive treatment only
once a day instead of the usual three times, while patients with wounds
struggle are given just one dressing change without further evaluation. Those
inside, including both patients and medical staff, rely on limited supplies
that have managed to enter the hospital via humanitarian organizations and
medical delegations amidst the prolonged siege.
Ahmed Al-Barawi, a wounded man lying in the hospital
recounts the horrific experiences that have made it impossible for him to
recover. He expresses that the dire circumstances he faces—due to treatment
shortcomings and a lack of essential medical supplies—has transformed the
hospital into something unrecognizable.
“It’s a hospital
in name only. The [Israeli] occupation has stripped even the most basic levels
of care from us,” he said. “We
suffer daily due to inadequate medical supplies, receiving only what amounts to
first aid. Meanwhile, the shelling and continuous gunfire at the hospital add
to our despair,” Al-Barawi explains.
He details the events from the previous day, December
23, when the hospital and its vicinity were targeted over ten times. According
to him, electric generators were set ablaze, buildings were damaged, and
patients were harmed by shattered doors and glass.
“Yesterday, they placed a robot next to the hospital and detonated it.
We had to flee from our beds and spent the whole night in the corridors.
Shelling and shooting were everywhere.”
Al-Barawi continues: “The hospital has become a place where people die rather than receive
care,” adding that not only is medicine in short supply, but so are food
and water.
“We urge the world to pay attention, to stand with us even just once,
and help us against this enemy and this siege—the pain we experience is
unbearable for any human being. We are humans, if you know what humanity means,
not the animals the Israeli occupation claims we are.”
Dr. Barid expresses profound frustration at the lack
of international response to months-long calls from
doctors at the hospital to stop the army’s attacks.
“There is no justification that gives anyone the right to target such
places. We have repeatedly appealed to the world to provide protection for
hospitals, but unfortunately, no one responded. There are no messages left to
send.hank you to the world,” he finishes sarcastically.
‘We will fulfill our oath as doctors’
The current situation at the Kamal Adwan Hospital
underscores the dire situation facing healthcare providers and patients across
Gaza. What were once places of healing have been turned into war zones by
Israel.
Since October 5, the Israeli army has been carrying
out an ethnic cleansing campaign in north Gaza, as part of ‘The General’s
Plan’. Starting in Jabalia, the army imposed a crippling siege aimed at starving
residents out, while also intensifying its military attacks. Since then, the
army has extended the siege and attacks to all areas in the north, such as Beit
Lahia and Beit Hanoun, forcing people to go south, towards Gaza City. It is
estimated that of the more than 200,000 inhabitants of northern Gaza that were
present as of October this year, some thousands remain.
Part of the army’s strategy to force people out of the
north, residents say, is by further crippling the already devastated healthcare
system. Throughout the siege, the army has stepped up its attacks on civil
defense teams and first responders, bombing their outposts and attacking their
crews, essentially making it impossible for the wounded to be rescued or
treated.
As the last functioning hospital in north Gaza, the
Kamal Adwan Hospital has become one of the primary
targets of the Israeli military operations. According to doctors at
the hospital, over the course of 75 days, the Israeli army has killed 17
medical personnel from the hospital, injured over 50 others, and arrested 46
individuals from the hospital grounds.
Skwawkbox Video Dr Hussam Abu Safiya
Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, the hospital director, who
himself has been targeted by
Israeli army bullets, says the attacks on the hospital are unfounded. He noted
that the Israeli army had previously raided the hospital’s ICU in November
2023, at which time no evidence was found to justify Israel’s claims that
hospitals were being used by Hamas or other armed groups. The Israeli army is “aware of its [the hospital’s] purpose, as
there are no other facilities providing such care in the northern Gaza Strip,”
Dr. Abu Safiya states,describing the targeting of the hospital as violent and
terrifying, likening it to a war zone.
“I don’t know why we are being bombed in this way. It is clear that the
bombing was done with the aim of killing, based on the level of fire on the
walls,” Abu Safiya says. “This is a dangerous matter, and we have asked the
world, and are still asking, for international protection.”
“What we seek is to neutralize the hospital from bombing and targeting.
This facility provides humanitarian services and is filled only with patients,
companions, the injured, and medical staff. Why we are being bombed in this
way, I don’t know,” he says.
Since the onset of the Israeli army’s invasion of the
northern Gaza Strip in early October, Dr. Abu Safiya has been actively urging
for measures to be taken to safeguard the lives of patients and assist the
wounded. However, in the wake of no international response, the Israeli army
has continued to enforce a suffocating siege on the facility in an effort to
drive the patients and doctors out, along with all residents who refuse to
leave northern Gaza.
“For 75 days, we have been calling on the world for international
protection for the health system. These are laws established by the Geneva
Conventions, which stipulate the protection of the health system,” Dr. Abu
Safiya says. “Where are these laws? What sin did we commit in this hospital to
be bombed and killed in this way?”
As Dr. Abu Safiya speaks, two massive explosions can
be heard in the background.
This is the case all day and night; we are bombarded with these bombs.
The shrapnel is flying as we speak in front of the world. We are bombed all day
and night like this, either around the hospital or inside it.
Despite the horrific conditions at the hospital,
doctors inside Kamal Adwan insist that they are dedicated to the humanitarian
oath they took when they began their medical careers, vowing to provide care to
those in need. They are resolute about remaining in the hospital, refusing to
leave under any circumstances.
“We will leave when the last Palestinian leaves the northern Gaza
Strip,” Dr. Abu Safiya declared defiantly. “We will stay and serve those who
are here. This is a humanitarian mission, and our message to the world is that
we deliver humanitarian care and should not be obstructed. We committed
ourselves to providing for those in need, and we will fulfill our oath as
doctors here at Kamal Adwan Hospital.”
Mohammed Al-Sharif contributed to this report from inside
the Kamal Adwan Hospital in Beit Lahia, northern
Gaza.
Doctors have been forced out of the last real medical facility in
northern Gaza, the Kamal Adwan hospital, after occupation forces invaded the
hospital, arrested some staff and forced out others at gunpoint with only ten
minutes to move, after they refused to leave their patients. One of its
doctors, Dr Waleed Alboudi, managed to transmit a last desperate, moving
message to the world – asking for prayers and forgiveness if they ‘fell short in anyone’s rights’:
Israeli attack on Kamal Adwan Hospital puts ICU out of
service
Yesterday, Israel murdered at least five of
the hospital’s staff and numerous other civilians around the hospital, through
airstrikes and robotic bombs, some of the doctors targeted along with their
families as they brought them food, as a message from the hospital’s director,
Dr Hussam Abu Saffiya, explained last night:
Staff at Kamal Adwan Hospital describe night of ‘horror’ amid
Israel’s attack
Gaza doctors and other staff have
frequently been detained and tortured, in some cases to death, raising fears
for the fate of those detained now.
Al Jazeera broadcast the first
news of the forced evacuation – yet another war crime by the occupation regime:
Israel is a rogue state and a
terror state, supported shamefully by UK PM Keir Starmer and his cronies, who
will not even mention its crimes let alone condemn them.
For 75 days, doctors in this north Gaza hospital have withstood the Israeli army's attempts to forcibly evacuate them and their patients. In the face of death, the doctors are still refusing to leave, even as the army steps up its attacks. https://t.co/6OmFTzA8mP
New testimony
claims to reveal the moments that led to death of Dr Adnan al Bursh
Five journalists killed in Israeli strike near Gaza
hospital
Popular Israeli podcasters call to ‘erase every living being’ in Gaza and
West Bank– Middle East Eye
Half of Gaza’s children are so traumatised by Israel’s war on them that
they wish for death as a release – and 96% believe death is
imminent, according to a new study by the War Child Alliance.
Tens of thousands of Palestinian children have been murdered
by Israel since October last year – some by bombs, missiles and hunger, others by sniper bullets– and many more have been maimed – Gaza has the largest population of child
amputees in history, according to the United Nations in October this year, with
many more severely burned or otherwise wounded.
Below are just a few examples of Israel’s atrocities against
Gaza’s children in the last week. Don’t look away – and if you have not
realised yet that Israel is committing genocide and this does not convince you,
get help:
Shattering testimony from Gaza surgeon ignored by media and
politicians
Surgeon breaks down in
parliament explaining how IDF drones target children
Imagine an
experienced British surgeon, recently returned from Ukraine, breaking down in
front of a committee of British MPs as he related how Russian forces had been
deliberately targeting Ukrainian children.
Imagine the
surgeon had had to operate in desperate conditions on young children who had
been lying injured after a Russian bombing attack and who were then ‘picked
off’ by Russian drones. The atrocity claims would be headline news all across
Western media.
Here, in
the real world, the horrific testimony
of a British surgeon who had operated on children in Gaza targeted by Israeli
drones after Israeli bombing attacks– something that happened ‘day after day
after day’ – has been largely blanked.
Professor
Nizam Mamode, a retired NHS surgeon who recently returned after working at
Nasser Hospital in southern Gaza, said he had ‘never seen anything on this
scale, ever’. He has worked in a number of conflicts around the world,
including the genocide in Rwanda. Prof Mamode worked for a month between August
and September as a volunteer for the charity, Medical Aid for Palestinians. In
a hearing on the
humanitarian situation in Gaza, he told members of the UK parliamentary International Development
Committee:
Israel's murder of Palestinian children
Drones
would come down and pick off civilians, children. This is not an occasional
thing. This was day after day after day operating on children who would say, “I
was lying on the ground after a bomb dropped and this quadcopter [a small,
remotely-piloted helicopter drone] came down and hovered over me and shot me”.
Prof Mamode
told MPs he saw children with sniper injuries to the head. He also noted that
the pellets fired by most drones were more destructive than bullets which would
go straight through a victim’s body. Instead, the pellets would bounce around
inside bodies, creating much more extensive damage.
A
seven-year-old boy, who had been caught up in an Israeli bombing and then
deliberately hit by an Israeli drone, came into the hospital with his stomach
hanging out of his chest. He had further injuries to his liver, spleen, bowel
and arteries.
He survived
that and went out a week later. Whether he is still alive, I don’t know.
The surgeon
broke down three times during his testimony. He described one case of an
8-year-old girl who was bleeding to death during surgery:
I asked for
a swab and they said, “No more swabs”.
As he spoke
to the MPs, he was momentarily overcome with emotion. Simple medical
items, such as sterile gloves and painkillers, are in short supply because of
Israel’s blocking of aid into Gaza, said Prof Mamode. This also applies to
basic items like soap and shampoo, leading to unhygienic conditions. He added:
I saw I
don’t know how many wounds with maggots in [them]. One of my colleagues took
maggots out of a child’s throat in intensive care. There were flies in
operating theatre landing in wounds.
He told MPs
that he had spent the entire month in the hospital, partly because it was not
safe to travel around. But also because, in January 2024, Israel had bombed the
guest house used by Medical Aid for Palestinians. The surgeon believes that
this was done deliberately by Israeli forces:
All of
those guest houses are in the Israeli army’s computers and are designated safe
houses, so my assumption is that it was a deliberate attack and the aim behind
it is to discourage aid workers from coming.
He said the
same applied to five Israeli attacks on UN convoys, including one while he was
in Gaza.
Labour MP
and committee chair Sarah Champion asked Prof Mamode if he meant that rogue
snipers were shooting at the armoured vehicles.
No, no.
This is the Israeli army coming up as a unit and deliberately shooting.
Prof
Mamode’s Palestinian colleagues told him that when Israeli forces attacked the
hospital in February, they killed members of staff and deposited them in a mass
grave with dead patients. Many other colleagues were taken away. The surgeon
related one such case:
They
[Israeli soldiers] just took him away and killed him. That’s what’s going on.
As far as I can see, it doesn’t matter who you are in Gaza. If you are a
Palestinian in Gaza, you are a target.
The
Committee will do all we can to act on Professor Mamode’s extraordinary
testimony and ensure his experiences are heard loud and clear. If leaders are
not yet listening, they should be by now.
This should
have generated massive coverage across national news media, with the Prime
Minister Keir Starmer and Foreign Minister David Lammy being bombarded by
questions from journalists on what action the UK government would now take.
Instead, there has been virtual silence.
As far as
we can tell, there was no broadcast coverage on BBC News, Sky News or ITV,
although Channel 4 News did include an item on Prof Mamode’s testimony, at
least on its X feed (we
could not find a broadcast item, however, on the Channel 4 News programme catch-up page). We do not have the
resources to monitor all television and radio programmes, so we cannot rule out
that there was a passing mention on the BBC World Service or elsewhere.
Nor were
there any editorials or significant coverage in major news reports in UK
national newspapers. Prof Mamode’s appearance before the parliamentary
committee was reported in a live Guardian blog
about Gaza on 12 November, but his most compelling and harrowing evidence was
omitted or glossed over. To his credit, Owen Jones mentioned
the surgeon’s account in a Guardian opinion piece.
The
appalling lack of serious coverage is actually highlighted by the fact that
there wasone article on the
BBC News website about Prof Mamode’s testimony to the committee (we were
alerted to it by a post on X by one of our followers). The article was titled,
‘Gaza surgeon describes drones targeting
children’. As is often the case, the word ‘Israel’ or ‘Israeli’ – as in
‘Israeli drones’ – was missing from the headline. In other words, the
perpetrator of violence was missing. Moreover, rather than refer to Prof Mamode
as a British surgeon, he was labelled as a ‘Gaza surgeon’, perhaps implying
that he was employed by the ‘Hamas-run health ministry’, the phrase that is
routinely deployed in BBC News reports.
But here
was the most glaring feature of the piece: rather than being placed on the
front page or even somewhere in the section marked, ‘Israel-Gaza war’, a
glaring misnomer for an ongoing genocide, it appeared deep inside the BBC’s
‘Local News’ category on the page for ‘Hampshire & Isle of Wight’. (As far
as we know, it never appeared in a more prominent place on the BBC News
website. But the fact that the bottom of the article contains the line, ‘Get in
touch: Do you have a story BBC Hampshire & Isle of Wight should cover?’,
suggests that it was immediately placed in that section). The same treatment
was afforded to an earlier BBC News article in October, shortly after the surgeon had
returned from Gaza, but with the most disturbing details about the deliberate
targeting of children omitted.
Why place
such an important story in the ‘Hampshire & Isle Of Wight’ local news
section of the BBC website? The ostensible reason is that Prof Mamode comes
from Brockenhurst, a New Forest village in Hampshire. But surely the real
reason was to minimise public attention and thus evade pressure from the
powerful Israel lobby. After all, as we have mentioned before, senior BBC News
staff have admitted to
‘waiting in fear for the phone call from the Israelis’.
The Israel
lobby’s weaponising of antisemitism, which was deployed to prevent Jeremy
Corbyn becoming Prime Minister, is being used to suppress or silence criticism
of Israel. This has had a crippling effect on journalism and
free speech.
Regular
readers will recall the dearth of media coverage
given to the harrowing testimony provided by Professor Nick Maynard, a UK
surgeon who works as a consultant gastrointestinal surgeon at Oxford University
Hospital, when he returned from Gaza earlier this year. He had described the
clear, deliberate targeting of hospital and healthcare facilities; but also the
actual execution of Palestinian surgeons and other medical staff.
In April,
Prof Maynard said that Israeli forces are:
systematically targeting healthcare facilities, healthcare personnel and really dismantling
the whole healthcare system.
He
described what had happened to Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza where he had
previously worked, and where around 400 Palestinians had reportedly been
killed in a brutal two-week attack by Israeli forces:
Every
single part of the hospital has been destroyed. The whole infrastructure of the
hospital has been destroyed. When I spoke to Marwan [a Palestinian colleague]
yesterday, he told me there were 107 patients, 60 medical staff. God only knows
what has happened to them. I think we’ve seen some of the pictures. Surgeons
I know have been executed in the last 48 hours there. Bodies have been
discovered in the last 12-24 hours who had been handcuffed, with their hands
behind their back. [Our added emphasis].
He added:
And so,
there is no doubt at all, that multiple healthcare workers have been executed
there in the last few days.
All of the
above, taken together with the media’s recent gaslighting about
a supposed ‘pogrom’ against rampaging Israeli football fans chanting genocidal,
anti-Arab slogans in Amsterdam last week – disinformation expertly dissected by Richard Sanders
for Double Down News – reveals like never before the monstrous, genocide-enabling
reality of ‘mainstream’ news media.
Meanwhile,
Israel appears able to continue unimpeded in its brutal drive towards a ‘Greater Israel’, openly espoused by
Netanyahu and other Israeli politicians, which would require the ethnic
cleansing of Palestinians ‘from the Jordan to the sea’.
Two documents outline the scale of
destruction upon Gaza’s health system and medical workers, threatening the very
possibility of sustaining life in the Strip.
Whenever the Israeli public is called upon to discuss the
fate of the Gaza Strip, the debate tends to focus on the question of who will
control the territory after the war. In recent weeks, this debate, too, seems
to have been sidelined by the escalating war on Lebanon and the Iranian
threat.
Gaza’s fate, however, is not limited to questions of
sovereignty or control, but to the very existence of life. Indeed, two recent
publications that focused on Gaza’s health system sharply illustrate how much
the current catastrophe challenges the very possibility of sustaining life in
the territory.
At the end of September, the Palestinian Ministry of Health
in Gaza issued a document that,
for the first time, comprehensively details the damage to hospitals in the
Strip over a year of war. The novelty of the report is not in the new information
it brings, but rather in the aggregation of over 100 incidents that were
reported in real time in the international and Arab media, as well as in
periodic reports by international humanitarian organizations, into one
document. It thus pieces together the gradual disintegration of Gaza’s health
system, the direct and indirect causes of which are the responsibility of
Israel and its army.
Meanwhile, on Oct. 2, 99 American medical professionals who
volunteered in Gaza during the war for a cumulative 254 weeks issued a public letter to
U.S. President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, presenting a stark
picture of the health of the civilian population in the Strip. These professionals
— some with extensive experience providing medical relief in war zones and
after natural disasters — said that the situation in Gaza was much worse than
anything they had encountered before, including in Afghanistan or Ukraine.
A few days after the letter’s publication, we spoke
separately with three of the signatories to get more detailed, first-hand
accounts of the state of Gaza’s health system. Their insights are shared here
alongside those of the documents above.
Doctors and patients begin to flee from the European Hospital
as the Israeli army requested an evacuation to begin a new military operation
east of the city of Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip, July 2, 2024.
(Abed Rahim Khatib/Flash90)
Easing suffering before death
The picture that emerges from the two documents and our
conversations with doctors shows the fatal blow dealt to Gaza’s entire health
system and infrastructure.
Only a few echoes of this disintegration reach the Israeli
media; in fact, the absence of these reports from the Israeli public discourse
creates the impression inside Israel that the early warnings of famine and
epidemics in Gaza have not materialized. Moreover, the only number that is
discussed is that of fatalities of Israeli attacks (over 43,061 Palestinians as of writing) —
a number that excludes deaths from disease, starvation, and the poor health of
the population after a year of war.
An examination of the data and testimonies, however, reveals
the scope of the harm to the general Palestinian population, and particularly
the lives of the most vulnerable — infants and toddlers, pregnant women, the
elderly, and the chronically ill.
For example, the medical professionals who signed the letter
to Biden and Harris estimate that it is likely that the death toll in
Gaza since the beginning of the war exceeds 118,908. The letter explicitly
states that, with marginal exceptions, the entire population of Gaza is sick
and/or injured, and almost all children under the age of 5 whom the doctors
encountered suffered from coughing and diarrhea.
In a survey
conducted by Dr. Feroze Sidhwa, an American surgeon who returned from Gaza, in
conjunction with The New York Times, 63 of 65 American health care workers who
volunteered in Gaza described severe malnutrition among patients, Palestinian
health workers, and the general population. In addition, 52 medical
professionals described near-universal mental distress among young children,
noting that they had seen some who were suicidal or hoping to die. One of the
nurses said that the children did not respond to pain, even while they were
being stitched up after being wounded.
Palestinians injured in an Israeli airstirke at the Buraij
refugee camp brought to Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah, in the Gaza
Strip, September 7, 2024. (Ali Hassan/Flash90)
The doctors’ letter states that all medical personnel who
worked in Gaza’s emergency rooms, intensive care units (ICU), or surgical wards
said that they regularly treated small children who were shot in the head or
chest. Dr. Mimi Syed, an emergency physician from Seattle who returned from
Gaza in September, told us that while working in the ICU of Nasser Hospital in
Khan Younis such injuries were very common, and that in some cases, all she and
the staff could do was to ease their patients’ suffering and let them die. In
her words:
The majority of my patients were anywhere from six months old
to early 20s. Most of them were on the lower end of that spectrum. There was a
day where we had nothing but gunshot wounds to the head reported to be
quadcopters by witnesses. And there was nothing to do for most of them. They
were in palliative care because their injuries were so devastating that we had
to just let them die. There must’ve been about eight patients that day in our
Trauma Bay.
In Dr. Sidhwa’s survey, 44
medical professionals reported that they had seen multiple such cases during
their stay in Gaza.
An
intentional pattern
The medical professionals’ letter places the blame for the
systematic and deliberate destruction of Gaza’s health system on Israel.
Indeed, considering all the information regarding the state of the Strip’s
hospitals, one clearly sees an intentional pattern. Hospitals and clinics were
repeatedly hit by aerial bombardment; have suffered from a shortage of
electricity and diesel fuel for generators; have been encircled by tanks; saw
their medical staff and patients expelled as part of the evacuation of an
entire area; and in some cases, were turned into military bases.
As of late October,
20 of the 36 hospitals in Gaza were out of service, while 16 were only
partially functional. Of the 11 field hospitals, half are only partially
functional. The number of hospital beds across the Strip dropped by 75 percent
(from approximately 3,400 at the beginning of the war to around 1,200 in late
September), just as the need for them increased due to the large number of
wounded, the severe shortage of medicines and medical equipment, and the
near-universal spread of infectious diseases.
The sequence of data and dates provided by the Gaza Health
Ministry’s report indicates a series of bombings in the first two weeks of the
war that shut down several hospitals, mainly in the northern Strip; it also
notes the takeover of hospital compounds in November, followed by the de facto
shutdown of all hospitals in northern Gaza and most hospitals in Gaza City.
Doctors and patients begin to flee from the European Hospital
as the Israeli army requested an evacuation to begin a new military operation
east of the city of Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip, July 2, 2024.
(Abed Rahim Khatib/Flash90)
Al-Ahli Arab Hospital made headlines in
mid-October 2023 following an explosion that killed hundreds of men, women, and
children who found shelter there. Although the question of responsibility for
the blast remains disputed, the incident and the ensuing debates set a precedent
by normalizing attacks on hospitals in an unprecedented manner.
During November 2023 alone, 12 of Gaza’s 36 hospitals were
put out of service temporarily or permanently. Al-Shifa Hospital was raided
twice by the army, in November 2023 and March 2024. While Israeli media chose
to focus on a Hamas tunnel and a number of militants in Al-Shifa compound,
international media reported on the massive destruction to the hospital and the
severe damage to its ability to function, resulting in its complete destruction
in the second raid. The second raid also led to the discovery of mass graves, some of which
had been dug by Gazans during an earlier siege of the hospital, and some of
which were dug while the military took over the compound.
Another wave of attacks on hospitals in the southern Gaza
Strip followed the takeover of the city of Rafah in May 2024. In some cases,
staff and patients were forced to leave hospital compounds, while others were
shelled or bombed. Some hospitals were completely destroyed or converted for
use as military outposts.
In early October 2024, the military ordered three hospitals in northern Gaza to
evacuate once more as part of a broader move to expel the entire civilian
population from the north (the so-called “Generals’ Plan”). This raised the alarm
among at least 38 humanitarian
organizations, which highlighted the harm caused to the medical system,
and the UN Human Rights Office,
which called the situation “desperate.” Israeli commentators havesimilarlyexpressed alarm
toward what appears to be ethnic cleansing.
‘Either the baby dies because of no
ventilator, or because of infection’
A series of monthly publications by the Palestinian Health
Ministry, as well as periodic reports by the World Health Organization (WHO)
and the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), further
present the long-term consequences of the destruction of medical services in the
Strip.
Palestinians mourn the death of people killed in an Israeli
airstrike outside Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip,
September 21, 2024. (Abed Rahim Khatib/Flash90)
According to the UN,
1,047 Palestinian medical personnel have been killed and 310 have been arrested
during the war — a reality that places an even greater strain on local medical
teams. The medical professionals’ letter states that their local Palestinian
colleagues were aware that their work as healthcare providers had marked them
as targets, and that many of them were arrested, abused, and taken to detention
facilities in Israel before being returned to Gaza by the military. Many told
their American colleagues that they were simply waiting to die.
Many medical staff have not received their salaries for
months. A great number of them have lost family members, yet continue to come
to work. Many live in tents near the hospitals, or walk daily — sometimes for
hours — from the family tent to the hospitals.
Thousands of the over 100,000 wounded have had their limbs
amputated, at a time in which the Gaza Strip does not have crutches or
wheelchairs, let alone prosthetic limbs, to serve amputees. Meanwhile, children
who are injured require a series of surgeries that they cannot receive in the
current state of Gaza’s health system. All of these findings were backed up by
the medical professionals’ letter and by eyewitness accounts we collected.
The destruction of Gaza’s civilian infrastructure has drastic
implications for its ability to maintain a functioning health system. Of the 16
operating hospitals, only four have a full supply of water and sewage services,
while only two have regular electricity.
The consequences are obvious: without electricity, it is
impossible to operate oxygen machines or keep medicines refrigerated. Without
basic sanitation, the danger lies in contracting deadly diseases even inside
the hospital. The medical professionals’ letter states that they have found
cases of jaundice in almost all the hospital rooms where they volunteered, and
among the Gaza medical staff.
Due to severe shortages of soap and detergents throughout the
Strip — in Dr. Sidhwa’s survey, 64 out of 65 respondents said that even the
most basic medical equipment, such as soap and gloves, were usually unavailable
— the surgical environment could not be disinfected, leading to high death
rates from infections.
Members of the Jordanian field hospital install prosthetic
limbs for Palestinian amputees injured during the war, in Khan Younis, in the
southern Gaza Strip, September 17, 2024. (Abed Rahim Khatib/Flash90)
In a conversation with us, pediatrician Dr. Aman Odeh, who
worked in Rafah during March, before the Rafah crossing to Egypt was closed,
testified that soap bottles in the operating room contained only a small amount
of liquid soap that had been diluted with water. In the absence of detergents,
the ventilator tube in the neonatal ward was not disinfected between uses,
leading to the spread of infections and mortality among premature babies. Dr.
Odeh describes the scenes she saw:
There was a newborn in the neonatal ICU who was deteriorating
very quickly no matter what we tried. We tried the strongest antibiotics, but
we were not able to control the infection. That was a day when we were able to
get a blood culture bottle from another place at the hospital. After the baby
passed away, they were able to identify what type of bacteria it was. It was a
multidrug resistant bacteria. But then the next day, other babies were showing
similar patterns. We didn’t have hand sanitizer. The soap bottle was a tiny bit
of soap and old water. We didn’t have gloves. The infections were spreading so
quickly.
A baby who was very, very sick, needed to be on a ventilator.
After the baby passed away, what are we going to do with that ventilator? There
is no way to sanitize the ventilator and get rid of that multidrug-resistant
bacteria. We also didn’t have tubing to change when we used the ventilator for
another baby. So there is a very big chance that you’re going to spread the
infection to other babies: so either the baby dies because there is no
ventilator or the baby dies because of the bacterial infection. Your options
were tragically limited.
Dr. Syed told us that while she was in Gaza, a shipment of
soap arrived, but the price of a small bottle rose to $40. One nurse said
she saw more maggots in wounds in one day in Gaza than she had seen in her
entire career as a wound specialist.
Lethal combinations
The medical professionals’ letter notes that a high
percentage of the incisions in their surgeries were contaminated. Dr. Thalia
Pachiyannakis, an obstetrician-gynecologist from Indiana, told us that
hospitals cut down on their air conditioning to save fuel, resulting in her
performing operations at Nasser Hospital at 40° Celsius (104°Fahrenheit), so
that sweat from her forehead and the foreheads of the other medical personnel
dripped into the wounds of the patients they were operating on.
The letter indicates that the surgeries, including cesarean
sections, were performed without anesthesia or pain relief. Afterward, women
were given only paracetamol to treat their pain.
Dr. Pachiyannakis also spoke about the lack of clean water
for herself as an international volunteer, which caused her and the rest of the
medical staff to become ill. “We were also very sick. You get sick with
diarrhea, then you get better, then you get it again, and you’re vomiting. Once
I was vomiting and had diarrhea at the same time,” she told us.
Palestinians donate blood at the Kuwait Field Hospital in
cooperation with the European Gaza Hospital, west of Rafah, in the southern
Gaza Strip, September 5, 2024. (Abed Rahim Khatib/Flash90)
For young children born malnourished and who are fed formula
made with contaminated water, this condition becomes life-threatening;
according to the medical professionals’ letter, many have died as a result.
Twenty-five medical professionals interviewed for the survey said they saw
babies who had been born healthy return to hospitals and die of dehydration,
malnutrition, or infections.
Dr. Odeh testified that other babies, whose mothers were
unable to breastfeed them due to malnutrition and did not receive adequate
nutrition due to a lack of formula and lack of clean water, received an
infusion at the hospital but were returned home with the same condition that
led to their hospitalization.
The numerous testimonies emphasize the chronic lack of
equipment inside Gaza. The three doctors we spoke with testified that the
Israeli military forbade them from bringing medical equipment they had
purchased themselves into Gaza. In the delivery rooms where Dr. Odeh worked
there was only one ventilator, while in the delivery rooms where Dr.
Pachiyannakis worked, there was no refrigerator, which left the food
contaminated.
There’s no clean water, no pain medicine for women in labor,
the labor beds are broken. There’s only one warmer for the newborns, so when
they’re born they’re all put together in one warmer. And there’s only one
machine for monitoring a baby, so if a baby is having bad heart tones, you
cannot pick it up because there’s only one working machine. So there would be
fetal deaths.
One of the nurses reported that
nearly all of the new children admitted during her time in Gaza died, and that
these deaths could have been prevented with proper nutrition, basic
disinfectants, and adequate supplies.
As of the end of September, only 17 of the 113 dialysis units
that were present in the northern Gaza Strip on the eve of the war remained
operational, compared to 72 out of 178 in the south.
In their letter, the medical professionals worried that
thousands have already died from the lethal combination of malnutrition,
disease, and the inability to receive proper treatment, and that tens of
thousands more could die in the coming months due to winter conditions in Gaza.
Most of the dead, they warn, will be small children whose immune systems are
weaker than those of adults.
View of Al-Aqsa Hospital premature babies section after it
was evacuated, in Deir al-Balah, Gaza Strip, August 27, 2024. (Abed Rahim
Khatib/Flash90)
Unconvincing legal claims
In a recent policy paper
for the Institute for Palestine Studies, the scholars Nicola Perugini and Neve
Gordon argued that Israel very broadly interprets the reservation in
international law regarding the protection of hospitals. According to
international law, hospitals can be attacked only if combat activity is carried
out from within the hospital itself, and provided that the attack is
proportionate and done out of genuine military necessity, and provided that the
combat force protects the lives of non-combatants.
Testimonies describing Israel’s attacks on hospitals, the
expulsion of all their inhabitants, and the exposure of mass graves clearly
indicate non-compliance with these legal conditions. These, in turn, connect to
the larger picture of the nature of the military operation in the Gaza Strip
and the dire humanitarian situation arising from it, many details of which have
been published on +972.
Perugini and Gordon propose an amendment to international law
that would prohibit attacks on hospitals under any circumstances. The
widespread impact on all hospitals in Gaza, however, cannot wait for such a
change to unfold. And in light of the abundant evidence accumulated over the
past year, Israel’s arguments for meeting the reservations set forth in
international legal conventions are not convincing.
An independent UN commission of
inquiry on damage to the Strip’s health infrastructure published in
September found that Israel’s actions are part of a deliberate policy that
constitutes a crime against humanity, including in the form of extermination
and torture. The
report’s authors found no support for most of Israel’s claims about Hamas’
military use of hospitals, noting that Israel did not pass on information to
the report’s authors, despite requesting such information nine times.
The
destruction of the health system presents a bleak picture of Gaza’s present,
let alone its future. A war that destroys hospitals and does not allow for the
establishment of a suitable alternative is a war against a civilian population,
one that is now plagued by disease and starvation. Any discussion of the war in
the present or the “day after” must therefore take an honest and direct look at
the immediate consequences of Israel’s policies for its victims.
Liat Kozma
is a professor in the Department of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies, and is
in charge of the Harry Friedenwald Chair in the History of Medicine at the
Hebrew University.
Lee
Mordechai is a senior lecturer in the Department of History at the Hebrew
University.
Injured Palestinians receive
treatment inside Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital after being targeted by Israeli
occupation forces, April 22, 2024. (Photo: Ali Hamad/APA Images)
Since the
beginning of the war, I have volunteered as an emergency doctor in Gaza to help
my people. Over more than a year, I have witnessed countless horrors and been
repeatedly displaced by Israeli bombardments and invasion. I have lost loved
ones, seen patients die in horrific ways, and feared for my own life — and yet,
even in the darkest moments, I have found glimpses of light.
Awaiting
death in Al-Shifa
From the
very beginning, the situation at al-Shifa hospital
in Gaza City was catastrophic. There weren’t enough beds for the wounded, who
were scattered everywhere. Dead bodies piled up in a “martyrs tent” in the
hospital courtyard.
On November 9,
2023, I found among the martyrs my cousin, his wife, and their two little
daughters. Their bodies were torn into unrecognizable pieces, victims of the
indiscriminate Israeli shelling that ravaged their neighborhood. I didn’t
realize it was them until I saw their ID cards, which had fallen from the
remnants of their tattered clothes.
It was a
scene drenched in heartbreak — a cruel mosaic of innocence and tragedy.
Unable to
distinguish one from the other, we laid them to rest together, wrapped in a
single shroud, as if even death could not separate their bond. The silence that
followed was deafening, but their loss echoed in every corner of my soul.
In November
2023, Israel barred entry of fuel, food, and water into Gaza, as Israeli forces
besieged Al-Shifa. In the hospital, some of us drank saline solution we found
in the storage room to survive.
Hospital
officials pleaded with the Israeli military to allow patients to evacuate. As
soon as this happened, the electricity was cut off, leaving medical staff trapped
for two days, surrounded by the enemy, awaiting death.
We were
gathered in a dark reception in total silence, surrounded only by the sounds of
gunfire, tanks, and shelling. I remember missing my family, who had already
evacuated to southern Gaza at the time. I had no way of contacting them, and I
didn’t know if I would ever see them again.
Suddenly,
one of the doctors started singing Sawfa Nabqa Huna
(We will stay here), a song about life and its beauty. I think he wanted to
distract us, and himself, from the fear. His voice was beautiful as he sang the
words: “We will stay here until the pain disappears, we will live here, and the
melody will become beautiful, my homeland, my homeland.”
We
eventually evacuated the hospital, taken away in ambulances. Before we cleared
the area, we were searched by Israeli soldiers, who detained several senior
doctors.
New places,
same horror
When I
reached the south, I immediately went to find my family. While I felt happiness
and safety finally being reunited with them, I could feel a familiar sadness,
almost like it was lodged in my throat. After the time I spent in al-Shifa,
after witnessing what was happening to my homeland, I was filled with a painful
sense of loss. I spent that day hiding so no one would see me cry. I wondered:
what is left of martyrs after death? Bones and memories, are those all that
remains of a person? Who inherits their fear, anxiety, and sadness?
As soon as I
got to Khan Younis, I began to work at Nasser hospital.
It was a different place, but there I witnessed the same horror.
One
heartbreaking scene remains etched in my mind. A pregnant woman lay on the
floor, her abdomen open, her intestines and liver exposed. A doctor fought to
save her, but both she and her unborn child were lost. The blood, the screams,
and the tragedy froze me in place.
How could a
child who had yet to see life die alongside his mother? How could a mother
leave the world without holding her baby?
That baby
became just another number in an unimaginable toll. All we can hope is that
they rest together in peace.
Eventually,
the Israeli military also reached Nasser hospital. In March, we were evacuated
again and I went to work at al-Kuwaiti hospital in Rafah.
On March 25,
2024, while I was on duty at al-Kuwaiti, the reality of war hit me in the
cruelest way. At around 1:00 am, bodies of martyrs were brought to the
hospital, victims of the relentless bombardment. Among them was Razan Mohammed
Barhoum — a 24-year-old medical graduate, my friend, my classmate, my sister in
spirit. Razan Barhoum (left) and Dr. Shurooq Ahmed (right). (Photo courtesy of
Dr. Shurooq Ahmed).
Razan, who
had memorized the Qur’an and was in the first few months of her pregnancy after
a long struggle to conceive, had been killed in her sleep, alongside others in
her family, when their home was bombed.
I will never
forget the moment I wrapped her body in a shroud with my own hands, tears
streaming down my face. She was not just a friend; she was an example of grace
and resilience, someone who balanced her duties as a wife, student, and
soon-to-be mother with extraordinary strength.
The morgue
was filled with dozens of martyrs, placed in a special tent awaiting burial. As
I said my final goodbye to Razan, I couldn’t reconcile with the fact that this
was the last time I would see her.
Light in
the midst of darkness
I wish this
had been the final displacement.
In April,
after Israeli forces invaded Rafah, I fled to Deir al-Balah, where I joined the
Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital. Since then, I have been a volunteer doctor in its
emergency department.
One
unforgettable moment happened in October 2024 while I was leaving work and
heading back to the tent where I stay with my family near the hospital. I heard
someone shouting, “Doctor Shurooq! The head is coming out!” A photo of baby
Shurooq, born in a tent in Deir al-Balah, and named after Dr. Shurooq Ahmed,
the doctor who delivered her/ (Photo courtesy of Dr. Shurooq Ahmed)
Grabbing my
emergency kit, I rushed to the woman’s tent and delivered a healthy baby girl
with only the tools I had on hand. Thankfully, both mother and baby were safe,
and everything went smoothly. It was a proud and grateful moment, a bright
light in the midst of darkness.
Her mother
named her Shurooq, like me.
This moment
illuminated the darkness within me and filled my heart with a glimmer of hope.
It made me feel that my existence holds meaning, that we are more than just
numbers on a screen. In my hands, I felt the miracle of new life being born — a
profound reminder that even amidst the shadows of despair, there is still
light, purpose, and the beauty of renewal.
Doctors,
babies, oxygen stores already attacked by Israel, now most desperately sick and
wounded are targeted
The
intensive care unit (ICU) at Kamal Adwan hospital in northern Gaza is in flames
and completely out of service after what hospital staff describe as a ‘night of
horror’ under Israeli bombs and shells. The hospital has been a frequent target
for occupation forces, killing babies
and medical staff– including the hospital’s ICU
head– and destroying vital medicine and oxygen stores. More than
sixty patients are said to be still trapped inside the unit; the precise number
of casualties is unknown, but dozens are said to have been killed and more than
fifty wounded.
Dr Hussam
Abu Safiyeh, Kamal Adwan director, on the attack.
While UK
media have remained silent on the attack, Qatari broadcaster Al Jazeera has
covered it:
Staff
described last night as a ‘night of horror’:
Medical
staff in the UK and Ireland have called on their governments to take urgent
action against Israel’s war crimes against their colleagues and their patients
in Palestine. Neither UK PM Keir Starmer nor Foreign Secretary David Lammy have
mentioned, let alone condemned, Israel’s war on Gaza’s hospitals, doctors and
sick.
The hospital
has been under intense Israeli military bombardment for days, with its
intensive care unit coming under direct fire.
The
Palestinian Resistance Movement Hamas has condemned the Israeli military’s
ongoing assault on Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza, describing it as an “unprecedented crime against humanity.”
“The occupation army
continues its relentless bombing and systematic destruction of northern Gaza,
focusing particularly on the Jabalia refugee camp and Beit Lahia,”
Hamas said
on Sunday, according to the Anadolu news agency.
“The strikes are targeting
residential areas, shelters, schools and especially Kamal Adwan Hospital,” it
added.
The hospital
has been under intense Israeli military bombardment for days, with its
intensive care unit coming under direct fire. On Sunday, the hospital, which is
caring for critically ill patients, was ordered to evacuate.
Hamas called
this “a crime of ethnic cleansing and forced displacement under the shadow of
international silence and inaction.”
The movement
appealed to Arab and Islamic nations as well as governments and global entities
to take immediate action using all means to support the Palestinian people,
protect holy sites and liberate their land from occupation, Anadolu reported.
‘Without
Warning’
On Monday,
the hospital’s director, Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, shared footage
documenting the Israel army placing explosive-laden robots at the gates of the
facility.
This follows
an earlier urgent video message in which Dr. Abu Safiya said that the hospital
had come under heavy shelling and direct sniper fire.
He said that
“without warning” the hospital’s intensive care unit, the neonatal unit, the
maternity ward, and all other hospital departments were being “bombarded by the
occupation forces.”
The army was
using “all kinds of weapons, snipers, tanks and quadcopter drones,” he stated.
‘Critically Ill Patients’
“This is a disaster, we are
currently the only hospital still providing humanitarian services in northern
Gaza,” he warned, adding that evacuating meant “displacing 66 patients,
removing all hospital equipment, and evacuating all medical staff.”
Video
footage captured
critically ill patients in the ICU and neonatal ward, as well as patients seen sheltering in
the hospital corridors amid heavy bombardment.
“We hold the world
responsible for what is happening, we hold the world accountable for ignoring
our pleas as we have been calling on them for more than 70 days to protect this
healthcare system but unfortunately, no one is responding,” he stated.
‘A Big
Crime’
In an interview with
the Al-Jazeera Arabic channel, Dr. Muneer Alboursh, Director-General of Gaza’s
Ministry of Health, said the hospital “now
has no lighting except from solar power in the morning.”
He described
Israel’s demand for the hospital to be evacuated as “a big crime.”
Alboursh shared a photo on
his X page of a person lying amidst rubble and destruction of buildings. The
caption stated that a “citizen was targeted and burned in front of the gate of
Kamal Adwan Hospital,” according to a Google translation.
Ongoing
Genocide
Meanwhile,
the Israeli genocide in the Gaza Strip continued with the death toll among
starved and besieged Palestinian civilians rising daily.
Currently on
trial before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) for genocide against
Palestinians, Israel has been waging a devastating war on Gaza since October 7,
2023.
According to
Gaza’s Ministry of Health, 45,259 Palestinians have, to date, been killed, and 107,627
wounded. Moreover, at least 11,000 people are unaccounted for, presumed dead
under the rubble of their homes throughout the Strip.
Israel says
that 1,200 soldiers and civilians were killed during the Al-Aqsa Flood
Operation on October 7. However, Israeli media published reports suggesting
that many Israelis were killed on that day by ‘friendly fire’.
Millions Displaced
Palestinian
and international organizations say that the majority of those killed and
wounded are women and children.
The Israeli
war has resulted in an acute famine resulting in the death of many
Palestinians, mostly children.
The Israeli military is targeting Gaza’s
Kamal Adwan Hospital, Indonesian Hospital and al-Awda Hospital.
Al Jazeera English
The Israeli
military is targeting three major hospitals in the northern Gaza Strip as
doctors and authorities in the enclave request immediate intervention by the
international community.
On Tuesday,
weeklong Israeli attacks intensified on the besieged Kamal Adwan Hospital and
Indonesian Hospital in Beit Lahiya, and the al-Awda Hospital located east of
the Jabalia refugee camp.
Two explosive-laden unmanned robotic vehicles planted earlier by
the Israeli military blew up in the vicinity of Kamal Adwan in the early hours
of Tuesday, wounding approximately 20 patients and medical staff, hospital
director Hussam Abu Safia told Al Jazeera.
The death toll from the bombing carried out by Israeli drones on the tents of the displaced in the Al-Mawasi area (west of Khan Yunis, south of the Gaza Strip) has risen to seven. pic.twitter.com/GsgTfibyxW
This was the first time Israeli forces used the
explosives outside Kamal Adwan, but there have been similar reports of them
being used to detonate buildings in northern Gaza.
Reporting
from Deir el-Balah in central Gaza, Al Jazeera’s Hani Mahmoud said,
“An eyewitness told us that much of the area around
the hospital has been cleared from buildings, the infrastructure destroyed and
severely damaged, impeding movement in and out of the hospital.”
The hospital
has been repeatedly bombed by the Israeli military, rendering various
departments, including the intensive care unit, inoperable.
Repeated Attacks (Al Jazeera)
Al-Awda, a
charitable facility providing free healthcare in the northern part of the
enclave, was hit on its third floor by the Israeli military on Tuesday. Parts
of the building caught fire, which also spread to nearby residential buildings.
The
Indonesian Hospital, a larger health facility that also been experiencing
increased attacks, was threatened by the Israeli forces to evacuate the entire
facility.
Munir
Al-Bursh, director of Gaza’s Ministry of Health, said the Israeli army had
ordered hospital officials to evacuate it on Monday, before storming it in the
early hours of Tuesday and forcing those inside to leave.
Al Jazeera’s
Mahmoud said the two hospitals have been providing medical supplies to besieged
Kamal Adwan and also transferring patients out of there when possible.
“The Indonesian Hospital has been crippled by the
attacks in the past few months. Much of the facility has been damaged, forcing
many to evacuate it. As of midnight, the Israeli military issued a warning to
everyone inside the hospital, including the patients, to leave the building and
be in the streets in the cold weather amid the intimidation by the tanks and
quadcopters,” he said.
Hospital
directors, health authorities and rights organisations inside and outside Gaza
have been condemning the attacks and calling for international help, but the
situation in the north has only deteriorated.
Gaza’s
Health Ministry said in a statement on Tuesday that the Israeli military is
trying to put all three hospitals in the north out of service, and appealed for
intervention.
The
Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) said more than 20 attacks on Kamal
Adwan Hospital in recent days using drones, shelling and gunfire show that
“genocide persists” in Gaza.
Aid
delivery ‘almost impossible’
The Israeli
military continues to launch numerous deadly air raids on Gaza each day, with
medical sources confirming on Tuesday there were at least 32 deaths in the past
24 hours.
Some of the
latest Israeli attacks included the bombing of a house in central Gaza that
killed four, including a child and two women.
The Israeli
military has kept blocking humanitarian aid bound for the enclave, with the
chaos created by its ground offensive presenting myriad challenges for safely
getting the meagre trucks coming in to designated locations, aid groups say.
On Monday
night, an Israeli drone attack hit an area approximately 1km away from Al-Aqsa
Martyrs Hospital in Deir el-Balah, targeting a humanitarian aid convoy.
Al Jazeera’s
Mahmoud, reporting from the hospital, said the Israeli military first allowed
gangs to attack the convoy with the aim of looting it, to later launch a drone
attack against security guards trying to protect the cargo.
“These seem to be deliberate attacks to cause more
mayhem. Israel has killed 30 of these security guards so far.”
Tom
Fletcher, the head of the United Nations humanitarian agency (OCHA), said in a year
when more humanitarians have been killed than any on record, Gaza is currently
dealing with its most dangerous situation yet.
“As a result, despite the massive humanitarian needs,
it has become almost impossible to deliver even a fraction of the aid that is
so urgently required. The Israeli authorities continue to deny us meaningful
access – over 100 requests to access North Gaza were denied since 6 October. We
are also now seeing the breakdown of law and order and the systematic armed
looting of our supplies by local gangs.”
Please Join Me in Protesting Against Israel’s Racist Ambassador Tzipi Hotoveli this Friday 5.30 pm, Swiss Cottage
Hin & Ajam on their treatment as captives in Gaza – compare this to Israel’s torture of Palestinian captives
This Friday I will again be speaking at the weekly picket outside Hotoveli’s residence in Swiss Cottage. I intend to elaborate on my comparisons between Israel and Nazi Germany in the light of the destruction of Kamal Adwan hospital and the torture and murder of its doctors including its Director, Dr Hussam Abu-Safiya, who refused to abandon his patients or fellow doctors.
On Friday October 4th I was one of four Jewish speakers at the protest outside the Israeli Ambassador’s residence at Swiss Cottage. At the end of the protest I was arrested by the institutionally racist Metropolitan Police for a ‘racially aggravated’ offence.
What they were effectively accusing me, as a Jewish person? Anti-Semitism! You couldn’t make it up. Being racists, the Met Police think in strictly racist terms. Jews are therefore expected to support the ‘Jewish state’ and if they don’t they must be anti-Semitic! Such is the way that simple minds work.
This mentality found its absurd culmination in the decision of the Met to ‘protect’ the Jewish Bloc on the 9 December Palestine demonstration in London. The Police have a colonial attitude to policing society. They divide people into racial categories. So the Palestine demonstrations must be inherently anti-Jewish. They can’t get their heads around the fact that many Jews are anti-Zionist.
On October 4 the police objected to my comparing the Zionists to the Nazis and in particular my reference to a Jewish Chronicle article some 5 years ago in which I was reported as saying that Israel is ‘Hitler’s bastard offspring’ .
What the Met were doing was turning the ‘non-legally binding’ IHRA definition of anti-Semitism into a criminal offence. One of the illustrations of ‘anti-Semitism’ in the IHRA is:
Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.
Today it is more obvious than ever that Israel and Nazi Germany share the same racial supremacist ideology and practice.
On 13 November I was informed, after having been held for several hours in a cell, that I was not going to be charged. I have instructed solicitors to bring a claim for wrongful arrest and unlawful imprisonment.
October
4th was, although the Police were not aware of it, the 88th
anniversary of the Battle of
Cable Street when
up to 200,000 people, including Jewish and non-Jewish workers, prevented the
Metropolitan Police from allowing the British Union of Fascists and National
Socialists marching through the Jewish East End of London.
The Board of Deputies, Zionists and Jewish Chronicle urged Jews to allow the anti-Semites and fascists to march - and the police did their best to help them
East End Jews ignored the call from the Jewish Chronicle, the Board of Deputies and the Zionists for Jews to stay at home and let the fascists and British Nazis march. The Zionists, who today run the Jewish Supremacist State of Israel, have never fought genuine anti-Semitism, which is hatred or hostility to Jews as Jews. Instead they have redefined anti-Semitism as hostility to the State of Israel.
It is no surprise that the Metropolitan Police, which is as racist as their predecessors, therefore arrested me. Whereas the Met in the 1930s was riddled with supporters of the British Union of Fascists and in the 70s and 80s had large numbers of supporters of the National Front, today they fall over themselves to support Jewish racial supremacists, i.e. the Zionists.
Two weeks after I was arrested Professor Haim Bresheeth, an Israeli anti-Zionist was also arrested and held overnight in Holborn Police Station. Haim is suffering from cancer but despite this was kept in a cold cell all night, not given access to his medication and abused by police officers. The police are not proceeding with charges again him either.
Whilst I was awaiting to hear whether I would be charged I had restrictive bail conditions imposed on me preventing me attending the weekly picket outside Hotoveli’s residence and also taking part in any Palestine solidarity demonstration in London.
After successfully appealing against my bail conditions
I appealed against these bail conditions and on 1 November at Highbury Corner Magistrates Court I succeeded in having the ban on me attending Palestine solidarity demonstrations in London lifted.
Dr Abu-Safiya has according to accounts from fellow prisoners been whipped with an electric cable before being taken to Israel’s main torture camp, Sde Teiman.
Israel’s bombing and destruction of Kamal Adwan Hospital, its murder of doctors, its torture of doctors and its forcible evacuation of patients is a war crime. YET THAT PITIFUL, PATHETIC WAR CRIMINAL, KEIR STARMER, HAS SAID ABSOLUTELY NOTHING.
We should
perhaps remind ourselves that when Israel’s hostages were released in October
23 as part of an exchange for Palestinian prisoners, many of them testified
about how humane their Hamas captors had been. Yocheved Lifshitz 85 gave a
press conference at Ichilov Hospital, where she was taken to, explaining why
she shook hands with her captors. Other
prisoners also testified as to their
humane treatment.
Avi Shoshan, the hospital employee who facilitated
the press conference was immediately suspended and forced to resign, because as
Ha’aretz explained:
Her statements caused an uproar in Israel, with some
government and diplomatic figures accusing the conference organizers of
damaging the country's advocacy efforts by portraying a positive image of
Hamas.
In other
words telling the truth about what actually happened when Israel’s hostages
were in captivity, that Hamas were not monsters like most Israelis, was ‘damaging’ Israel’s propaganda, sorry ‘advocacy efforts’.
And there you have it. Everything
about October 7 is a propaganda narrative.
Truth doesn’t come into it as was show by the false story of beheaded
babies. The fact that Hamas treated its captives well compared to Israel’s torture
of prisoners, is simply disregarded.
Another hostage, Danielle Aloni, said her 5 year
old daughter Emilia, “felt like a queen.” Not one Palestinian prisoner has said the
same about their treatment. On the contrary about 70 prisoners have died
under torture including Dr Adnan al-Bursh who was literally raped to death by
the beasts who ran the facility.
These monsters even went on Israeli TV to boast of their deeds and 65% of Israelis said that they opposed their prosecution. When there were attempts at arresting them, the Military Police were attacked by hundreds of far-right demonstrators, including members of the Knesset. Meir Ben-Shitrit, the chief rapist even became a media star.
Israel is a depraved society run by corrupt monsters like Netanyahu. Yet Biden and Starmer are happy to turn a blind eye and repeat ad nauseum that Israel is the Middle East’s ‘only democracy’
It is because most ordinary people see through these lies that the Metropolitan Police see it as their duty to try and prevent free speech by arresting those who call the war criminals out.
This Friday I will explain to the demonstration and any police who happen to attend, just why comparisons between Israel, Zionism and the Nazis is valid. That after all is what my book was about. And the police, above all, need educating!
Berlin's Jewish Hospital after liberation from the Nazis
I will end with this thought. Whereas Israel has attacked every single hospital in Gaza and destroyed most of them, even the Nazis left untouched the Jewish hospital in Berlin to the end of the war. What does that say about Zionism?
Below is the Speech I Would Have Made When Challenging the Police to
Arrest Me Again
Last night I posted a blog
advertising a speech I was going to give at the picket of Tzipi Hotoveli on
Friday evening. Tonight I received an email from Sam Weinstein of the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network
(IJAN) withdrawing that invitation. You can judge for yourselves whether the
reasons given were the real reasons and whether IJAN
feared that events were getting out of their control. I have saved both emails here.
In the last few days, our researchers at Fake Reporter alongside @HablocOrg have been monitoring far-right groups on Whatsapp and Telegram.
We saw how civilians are organizing and arming themselves, in order to violently attacks Arab businesses and civilians.
— פייק ריפורטר | FakeReporter (@FakeReporter) May 13, 2021
The alleged reason for the cancellation
concerns my refusal to get involved, despite considerable pressure, in the case
of alleged harassment of an Israeli activist which dates back many years. I was
accused of taking the side of the alleged harasser, which I reject, but
nonetheless I confess that I have wrestled with the issue. I have taken the
advice of others not to make any further comment on it.
What is important though is the issue
of the Metropolitan Police implementing the ‘illustration’ of anti-Semitism in
the Zionists’ IHRA definition of anti-Semitism, which states that ‘Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli
policy to that of the Nazis’ is anti-Semitic. At a time of genocide this
and only this, is what matters, not an arcane personal dispute.
Below is what would have been my
speech to the picket/ demonstration next Friday.
I am only going to provide a few links,
not only because of the time it takes but because, if I had made the speech, I
would not have given any links!
Why comparisons between Israel’s
holocaust in Gaza and the Nazi holocaust are valid and relevant
Comrades,
Three months ago, on October 4 2023,
I was arrested at this demonstration by the institutionally racist Metropolitan
Police for a ‘racially aggravated’ public order offence. In essence I was being
accused of anti-Semitism for having compared the Zionist holocaust in Gaza to the
Nazi holocaust. Comparing the Nazi treatment of Jews to Israel’s treatment of
the Palestinians is now deemed by the Met to be ‘anti-Semitic’.
Despite being arrested, held for 7
hours in a cell and subject to restrictive bail conditions, I was informed 7
weeks later that the Crown Prosecution Service were not going to charge me. No
doubt even the CPS could see the absurdity of charging someone who is Jewish with
‘anti-Semitism’!
People often say to me that even if
allegations of Zionist collaboration with the Nazis is true it is better not to
mention them for fear of giving unnecessary offence to Jewish people. My response
is simple. We will never understand why Israel behaves the way it does unless
we understand Zionism, the ideology that governs the actions of the Israeli state
– its ethnic cleansing, its desire to ‘cleanse’ Gaza of the Palestinians and
now its deliberate and targeted extermination of Palestinian civilians.
Bear in mind that even the
terminology of the Israeli state today when it talks of ‘cleansing’ Gaza is
identical to Nazi descriptions of ‘cleansing’
areas of Jews.
The Nazi holocaust against the Jews is
being used today to justify Israel’s holocaust of the Palestinians. In the words of Gideon Levy, a Ha’aretz columnist:
I have yet to hear a single teenager come back from Auschwitz and
say that we mustn’t abuse others the way we were abused. There has yet to be a
school whose pupils came back from Birkenau straight to the Gaza border, saw the barbed-wire fence and said,
Never again. The message is always the opposite. Gaza is permitted because of
Auschwitz.
People often say that Israelis are
suffering from an ‘inter-generational holocaust trauma’. My response is no. What they are suffering
from is a settler-colonial trauma. The fear that the indigenous population that
they have oppressed so long will rise up against them.
The slave owners in the Caribbean and
the American colonies suffered from a similar trauma and their reaction to
slave uprisings was not dissimilar to that of Israel’s reaction to October 7.
The Zionists have magnified October 7
out of all proportion. They have said that this was the largest slaughter of Jews
since the holocaust. In fact the largest death of Jews since the holocaust was
under the Argentinian Junta (1976-83) which tortured to death 3,000 Jews, up to
12.5% of those who disappeared.
Israel doesn’t mention what happened
in Argentina however because at the time it was arming and training the Argentine
military. It even refused visas to Argentine Jews because they were ‘the wrong sort of Jew’, a phrase you may
have heard recently.
This is however a particularly
noxious and racist comparison. Jews in Nazi Germany were killed because they were Jews. Israelis were killed on October 7 because
they were occupiers not because they were Jews.
Israeli deaths on October 7 pale in
comparison with Israel’s repeated attacks on Gaza.
In Operation Protective Edge in the summer of 2014 some 2,200 Palestinians,
including 515 children, were killed.
Death of Israelis on October 7 were 1139, half of this. It is estimated that since the Nakba some 134,000 Palestinians
and Arabs have been killed.
On 7 October 400 of the dead were
soldiers and police and therefore legitimate targets. Because of Israel’s
Hannibal Directive, which mandates that it’s better to kill your own people if
they are taken hostage rather than allow them to be swapped for prisoners, that
it’s highly likely that the majority of the remaining 739 Israeli deaths were
at the hands of their own trigger happy military.
The New York Times Fraudulent Article that Alleged that Hamas had Planned October 7 as a Mass Rape Expedition
That is why we have had a non-stop
barrage of atrocity propaganda from Israel.
First it was 40 beheaded babies, baked babies and babies hung from
clothes lines. Then it the mass rape story despite there being no victims and
no forensic evidence.
October 7 was the catalyst not the
reason for the genocide taking place in Gaza today. Chants of ‘Death to the Arabs’ didn’t begin on
October 7. Ben-Gvir, who had a picture of Baruch Goldstein on his wall (the man
who murdered 29 worshippers in the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron in 1994) became Israel’s
Minister of Police at the beginning of 2023. Gvir is a fully-fledged Jewish Nazi. A Jewish Nazi list became the third
largest in the Knesset in the November 2022 elections, not October 2023.
The reasons for making comparisons between
Israel today and the Nazi period is quite simple. Any group of people, given
the right set of conditions and circumstances, can become genocidal maniacs and
Nazis. Racism is not a biological property.
There was nothing German about the Nazis’
extermination of the Jews. The Romanians were even more enthusiastic about
killing Jews when the Germans seemed to
be winning the war. Slovakia asked the Nazis to take the Jews off their hands.
Croatia even set up its own extermination camp, Jasenovac.
When Israeli ‘Defence’ Minister Yoav
Gallant began the genocide, he described the Palestinians as ‘human animals’ the very phrase that Himmler
had used about the Jews, when justifying the
Holocaust on October 4 1943 to senior SS Generals. Gallant also promised
to starve them and deny water and fuel. Also Nazi tactics.
Netanyahu invoked the example of
Amalek, the tribe that god had commanded the Israelites to wipe out – every man,
woman, child and infant was to be murdered.
The number of calls to genocide by Israeli
politicians is limitless. Israeli Heritage Minister Amihai Eliyahu suggested
that dropping a nuclear bomb on the Gaza Strip was “one of the possibilities”. Law for Palestine released a database of over
500 genocidal statements by influential Israelis, including the President and
Cabinet members.
Wiping out the Palestinians is a very
popular idea in Israel. The most popular car bumper sticker in Israel is ‘finish them off’. Indeed if the
comparison with Nazi Germany is wrong it is because the level of anti-Semitism amongst
ordinary Germans was far less than that in Israel.
When the presenters of Israel’s
oldest podcast ‘two nice Jewish boys’ said
‘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’
there was
no condemnation in Israel, let alone a prosecution as would happen if an Israeli
Arab were to say the same about Jews. Incitement to murder Palestinians is not
an offence in Israel.
There are
some who go even further. Rabbi Eliyahu Mali, of the pre-military Yeshivah Shirat
Moshe, said:
‘“Whoever comes to kill you... does not only include the young man aged
16, 18, 20, or 30 who is now pointing a weapon at you, but also the future
generation (the children of Gaza), and those who produce the future generation
(women of Gaza), because there is really no difference,”
In other
words one should kill children as well as their mothers because they may become
the fighters of the future. Compare this with what Himmler said about killing Jewish
children in a speech on October 6th 1943.
‘I did not assume to have the
right to exterminate the men… and have the avengers personified in the children
to become adults for our children and grandchildren.’
When pogroms against Arabs broke out
in Israeli towns in 2021one user wrote
“We are no longer Jews today. People from Holon, Bat
Yam and Rishon Lezion go out to bring war. Today we are Nazis.”
Today in Gaza, with the destruction
of hospitals and the murder of patients and doctors and the detention of people
like Dr. Hussam Abu
Safiya,the
Director of Kamal Adwan hospital, in the Sdei Teiman torture centre, we can see
the degeneration of Israeli society before our eyes. A society where 65% of the
population is opposed to criminal prosecutions of those who rape prisoners.
Indeed in some respects Israel is
going beyond what the Nazis did. In Budapest it was the Nazis’ protégés in the Arrow
Cross, a Hungarian Nazi party, that murdered doctors and patients at two Jewish hospitals (Maros Street
and Varosmajor Street). The Gestapo did not touch the hospitals. In Berlin the Jewish
hospital survived untouched until the end of the war. It is Israel which has a peculiar attraction
for destroying Palestinian hospitals.
We should
also ask ourselves whether the Nazi destruction of Jewish synagogues during
Kristallnacht is any different to the Zionist destruction of virtually every
mosque in Gaza?
Ever
since its creation Israel has laid claim to inherit the memory of the Jews who
died in the holocaust. The reality, as Gaza shows, is that Israel inherits the
memory of those who killed Europe’s Jews.
In the
words of an
article in the Jewish Chronicle quoting
what I said at Palestine Expo in 2019, ‘Israel
is Hitler’s Bastard Offspring’.
I
leave you with just one thought. If the level of racism in Israel today had
been present in Europe during the Holocaust it wouldn’t have been 6 million Jews
who died but 7 or even 8 million.
I Responded by Asking
Them Why They Wanted to Commemorate the Holocaust and what ‘Truth’ was it That
They Wanted to Preserve?
I didn’t know that I was on Yad Vashem’s mailing
list of donors. Clearly I now walk in exalted company! Perhaps that’s because
Yad Vashem now has a copy of my book, given to them in memory of Yehuda
Schwarzbaum (1930-2011) and his relatives who were murdered in the Holocaust.
Yad Vashem
Clearly Zohar Neumann, who sent me the begging
letter, hadn’t read my book because if he had he would have come across more
criticism of Yad Vashem than I expect he is used to.Founded in 1953 as an Israeli State propaganda
institution, Yad Vashem is the main institution charged with developing a
Zionist holocaust narrative, distorting holocaust history and creating what is
called ‘holocaust awareness’ or consciousness.
Despite its commitment to learning the lessons of
the holocaust, Yad Vashem does not include Israel’s numerous racist laws against its own Arab
citizens in that lesson. Nor does it consider the vicious anti-Arab discrimination in Israel, the pogroms against
Arabs and calls to expel refugees as forming any part of those lessons. The ‘lessons of the
Holocaust’ are Zionist not anti-racist ones.
Lenni Brenner - the author of Zionism in the Age of the Dictators and 51 Documents on Zionist-Nazi Collaboration
In Yad Vashem’s sanitised world we learn nothing
about Zionist collaboration with the Nazis. Nor do we learn about how the
Zionist leaders made every effort to sabotage rescue schemes where the
destination was not Palestine. Or how the Zionists undermined the Jewish
Boycott of Nazi German and instead did their best to ensure that the Nazi
regime was not destabilised.
the police authorities were entirely satisfied by 1938 that Zionism had
become the dominant political force among those Jews who remained in Germany (p.123)
Yad Vashem doesn’t ask why no Zionist Congress
before 1939 condemned the Nazi attacks on Jews or why the Nazi
state viewed the Zionists in Germany as the good, ‘racial’ Jews and why the
Zionist Federation of Germany consciously used their favoured status to try and
displace the existing non-Zionist leadership.
Still less do we find out why the heads of the Jewish Desks in the Gestapo were allowed to attend their conferences and use the German Jewish delegation as their proxies?
Eichmann attended the
1937 Zionist Congress in Zurich and his predecessor, Baron von Mildenstein attended the 1935 Congress in Lucerne. Nor do they ask why Eichmann visited the Zionists
in Palestine alongside Haganah and Gestapo double-agent Feivel Polkes before the British expelled them.
What we do know is that there is no more ardent
supporters of the traditional Jewish leadership in the ghettos, the Judenrate, than Yad Vashem, even though they were despised by the very Resistance that they purport to support.
Yad Vashem is involved in constructing an utterly
false version of Zionism’s role in the holocaust. It doesn’t mention the letter
that the Zionist Federation of Germany wrote to Hitler on June 21, (which is published
in Lucy Dawidowicz’s Holocaust Reader).
The letter spoke about how
On the foundation of the new state, which has
established the principle of race... fruitful activity for the Fatherland is
possible’
In Yad Vashem’s version of history Zionists aren’t
collaborators but resistance fighters. The fact that two out of every three
members of the Judenrate (Jewish Councils) which rounded up Jews for the death camps were Zionists passes them by. Yad
Vashem has a very important role.Rewriting the history of the holocaust in order that the Israeli state
can justify its apartheid and genocidal policies.
It is no small task and I know that readers of my
blog will be sensitive as to how enormous this undertaking is. Because of Yad Vashem's determination to ensure that Holocaust history fits their preconceived ideological framing, Yad Vashem has had to reject a number of books that they might have published which any holocaust institute worthy of the name would have grasped with 2 hands.
The first such was Raul Hilberg's The Destruction of the European Jews. First published in 1961 and updated since it remains the most comprehensive history of the holocaust. Even Yad Vashem's academic advisor, Professor Yehuda Bauer was forced to admit it is 'unsurpassed'. It is not for nothing that Yad Vashem is incapable of producing a general and comprehensive history of the Holocaust.
Hilberg, who became the Professor of Holocaust History at Vermont University, saw the Judenrate as an instrument of the Nazis who were essential to the implementation of the Final Solution. Yad Vashem didn't appreciate such an analysis since two-thirds of the Judenrate were Zionists!
Polish fascist Michal Kaminski who justified the murder of Polish Jews in Jedwabne visits Yad Vashem
Likewise Yad Vashem didn't appreciate Hilberg's dismissal of Jewish Resistance during the Holocaust as minor as Zionist history consciously magnifies it and on occasion invents it in order to provide itself with a retrospective justification and back story.
When it came to the escape of Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler from Auschwitz in April 1944 Yad Vashem decided that the best thing to do was to ignore them. Not only were they not Zionists but they came into conflict with Zionist collaborator, Rudolf Kasztner who, in the words of Israeli Judge Benjamin Halevi in 1955, 'sold his soul to Satan'when he agreed a deal with Eichmann for a train out of Hungary for 1684 of the Zionist/Jewish elite in return for silence about where the deportation trains were heading.
Kasztner, who was the plaintiff in a libel trial in Israel in 1954 when accused of collaboration, rapidly turned into the de-facto defendant. When Israel's second government led by Moshe Sharrett decided to appeal the verdict of the first trial, that Kasztner was a collaborator, it promptly fell. Kasztner has nonetheless been rehabilitated by Yad Vashem.
No matter that Kasztner’s deal with Eichmann led to the truth of Auschwitz being kept from Hungary’s 700,000 Jews resulting in nearly 2/3 of them being deported to their deaths. This is a minor matter. What is important is that his deal with Eichmann saved 1600 Zionist and Jewish leaders. The fact that he went to Nuremberg after the war to provide testimony for major Nazi war criminals is erased from history.
Suffice to say YV wouldn't publish Vrba's memoirs 'I cannot forgive'. In fact they were determined to erase Vrba and Wetzler's very names from Yad Vashem. It is with difficulty that one could find any mention of them until, the late 1990's when Ruth Linn, Professor of Education at Haifa University, began a campaign in their favour. At one point Yehuda Bauer called Linn an 'anti-Zionist'. There is no worse insult in the Zionist dictionary than that!!
Suffice to say Yad Vashem weren't interested in the history of the Warsaw Ghetto Revolt by its last Commander, Marek Edelman. Edelman's misfortune was being a member of the anti-Zionist Bund and a supporter of the Palestinian resistance.
In
the words of Daniel
Blatman, an Israeli
holocaust scholar, Yad Vashem is a 'diplomatic laundromat for every fascist and
anti-Semite who darkens its doors.' And there have been a lot of them –
Trump,Brazil’s Bolsonaro, the
Philipenes Duterte and assorted neo-Nazis from Germany and Austria.
In
1976 South Africa’s Prime Minister, John Vorster, who had been interned during
the war because he was a member of the neo-Nazi Afrikaner Broederbond and
Ossewa Brandwag, visited Israel as a guest of the Israeli Labor Party
government. Naturally he was taken on a tour of Yad Vashem.
Israel
Shahak, a survivor of
the Warsaw Ghettoand Bergen-Belsen wrote
Of the Yad
Vashem…
theatre, I do not wish to speak, at all. It, and its vile exploiting, such as
honouring South Africa collaborators with the Nazis, are truly beneath
contempt.
Zohar Neumann of YV wrote to me just before Xmas begging
for money in order that they could counter those who deny that the Holocaust
occurred. Of course there are a few political flat earthers but they are
nothing as compared with Zionist genocidaires.
Zohar told me that ‘the urgency to act has never been greater’. I agree but it’s not
the few people who deny what happened between 1939 and 1945 who are the problem
but those who deny that there is a holocaust happening barely 20 miles away
from where Yad Vashem is based, which itself is built on stolen Palestinian land in Jerusalem.
The problem is, as I explained to Zohar, Yad
Vashem is on the side of today’s holocaust deniers – the Keir Starmers and Joe
Bidens of this world who not only deny that there is a holocaust happening but
actively support it by sending the Israeli state more weapons to kill more
Palestinians.
When 50 holocaust researchers asked Yad Vashem to condemn the genocidal statements made by Israeli
politicians, military and other public figures, including Israeli government
ministers, Prime Minister Netanyahu and Israeli President Herzog, its Chair
Dani Dayan refused.
Instead
Dayan asserted that the Israeli army was not conducting a genocide but was
acting ‘within the constraints Hamas
imposeson us to comply with the
proper moral standards and the laws of war.’
Dayan himself illustrates everything I have described above. He was Secretary-General of the
fascist anti-Arab Tehiya
party, and a candidate to the Knesset on
its list in the Israeli legislative elections in 1988
and 1992.
Dayan
was also on the Executive of the settler Yesha Council, which is a kind of
government for West Bank settlers. Unsurprisingly in 2015 Brazil rejected him
as Israel’s nomination as its Ambassador because of his fascist credentials.
Clearly Dani Dayan is an excellent choice to run Yad Vashem!
One can
only assume that support for the destruction of Gaza’s hospitals, universities
and extermination of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians are what passes for
high moral standards at Yad Vashem.
Dayan told
those who suggested that Yad Vashem say something about the holocaust in Gaza that:
the outrageous statements you
cited do not express the moral position of the very large majority of the
Israeli public or the IDF and its commanders.
This is
the same Israeli army which is busy torturing to death prisoners, raping to
death doctors and running over hundreds of Palestinians with tanks. Clearly
what Yad Vashem considers a ‘moral position’ is not one shared by most civilised people.
Ironically
Dayan is teaching us a lesson, which is how senior Nazis were also able to
justify to themselves and live with the holocaust.
I
therefore wrote a letter in response to Zohar which is below the one from
Zohar. Despite not contributing a penny farthing to the appeal,Zohar wrote me a gushing thank you
letter!!Clearly these PR merchants
don’t care about anything except the bottom line!
Thanks to compassionate supporters like you, we’ve already reached 25% of our
goal! Every donation helps us commemorate, educate, and preserve the truth of
the Holocaust.
But we can’t stop here. Every day, falsehoods about the Holocaust—claims that
“death camps” were merely “work camps” or that far fewer lives were
lost—continue to spread. Imagine the heartbreak of survivors who see their
stories obliterated by denial and distortion. History is being rewritten, and
the urgency to act has never been greater.
With your support, we can reach more people, counter misinformation, and ensure
the light of truth shines even brighter. Every click strengthens the fight
against those who twist history for their own ends.
Thank you for standing with us and ensuring the lessons of the Holocaust remain
a beacon of truth for generations to come. Together, let’s keep the momentum
going!
Thank you,
Zohar Neumann
Director, Partnerships and Global Campaign Desk, Yad Vashem #TruthShinesBright
Re: We’re Making Progress Together
15:05 23 Dec. 24
Zohar,
Thank you for
your email asking me to make a financial contribution towards your appeal.
There is a
genocide, or a holocaust if you prefer, taking place in Gaza even as I write.
The similarities with the Nazi holocaust of Jews, Roma and the Disabled is all
too obvious. There is an exterminationist mentality in Israel today.
'Finish
them off'is
Israel's most popular car bumper sticker. 'Two nice Jewish boys' Israel's oldest and most
popular podcast broadcast
a program
saying how hosts Naor Meningher and Eytan Weinstein
would press a button and wipe out the Palestinians without a second's thought. In defending their
stance, they claimed that their views reflect mainstream Israeli sentiment.
These
nice Jewish boys would also erase the whole population of the West Bank too.
Yoav Gallant
when opening Israel's war on the civilians of Gaza called
the
Palestinians 'human animals' the very same term that Heinrich Himmler used to
SS Generals on 4 October 1943 at Posen when justifying
the
extermination of the Jews.
Israeli government
ministers, e.g. Netanyahu's comparison
of the
Palestinians with Amalek, have used genocidal language about the Palestinians.
In this case a call to treat the Palestinians as the ancient Hebrew tribes
supposedly treated the tribe of Amalek, when they wiped out every man, woman & child.
Influential
Israelis have even justified the wiping out of Palestinian children using the
same arguments as Himmler on 6 October 1943, also at Posen (Posnan). E.g. Rabbi
Eliyahu Mali, of the Kiryat Moshe Yeshivah, who said on 7 March 2024 that:
"Today's
terrorists are the children of the prior [military] operation that left them
alive. The women are essentially the ones who are producing the
terrorists," he said, adding that when someone comes to kill you, you
should be quick to kill them. "It's not only the 14- or 16-year-old
boy, the 20- or 30-year-old man who takes up a weapon against you but also the
future generation. There's really no difference,"
Compare this
with Himmler's remarks
‘I
did not assume to have the right to exterminate the men… and have the avengers
personified in the children to become adults for our children and
grandchildren.’
Perhaps you
can spot a difference between the two? Naturally the Israeli Police recommended that no charges be brought
against Mali but if he had been an Israeli Palestinian they would have been
arrested, beaten up and charged months ago.
You say in your begging
letter that you want to:
commemorate,
educate, and preserve the truth of the Holocaust (thus)... ensuring the
lessons of the Holocaust remain a beacon of truth for generations to come
Perhaps Yad
Vashem or you can tell me what these lessons of the Holocaust are? Are
they universal or do they only apply to Jews? Is opposition to genocide and the
extermination of whole peoples a principle or does it only relate to
Jews? What are you preserving the truth and commemorating the Holocaust
for? Is it only to preserve Jewish racial supremacy?
Surely one of
the lessons of the Holocaust is that all peoples, be they German, Jewish or
Arab can, if the circumstances are right, become genocidaires. There is nothing
special about which ethnicity/religion one belongs to. Racism is not something that we
inherit biologically. It is a product of the societies we live in and Israel
is, as many of us have argued, an apartheid, Jewish Supremacist State in
exactly the same way that Nazi Germany or South Africa was.
The reality
is that Yad Vashem, throughout its 71 years existence, has set its face against
drawing any universal lessons from the Holocaust. You have remembered the
Holocaust in order that others can repeat it, as is now happening with Israel.
You were even established next to the village of Deir Yassin which Zionist
militias wiped out yet you fired a guide, Itamar Shapira, for pointing out this fact to visitors.
The fact that
an exterminationist and racist mentality pervades in Israel is proof in itself
that you have failed. You commemorate the holocaust, not in order to warn
against the dangers of racism but in order to justify them.
Not once have
you condemned or protested against Israel's many anti-Arab laws. Nor have you protested against the genocide in Gaza that has led to a quarter
of a million Palestinians at least being killed. Genocide is only wrong when Jews are
the victims. This is the Zionist mentality that you propagate.
You remind me
of when Ha'aretz journalist
Nir Gontarz rang Yad Vashem and asked them to publicly condemn Netanyahu’s
attempt to deport 60,000 African refugeesfrom
Israel because they were threatening its
racial identity. The 'crime' of these refugees was being neither White nor
Jewish. Gontarz described what happened next:
One after the other of the senior staff
there, including Mr. Avner Shalev [the director], slammed the phone down
on me when I asked to speak to them... I asked them this morning to remove from
their database the details I gave them in the past about my family. (Ha'aretz 24.1.18)
Yad Vashem serves no useful
purpose. As Professor Yehuda Elkana, himself an Auschwitz survivor, wrote in March 1988 in Ha'aretz,
it is better to forget the Holocaust than allow its memory to be used to
justify further racism and genocide.
You will not
be surprised to learn that I will not be contributing a penny farthing to your
appeal. Whatever spare money I have is going to relief in Gaza.
Yours
sincerely,
Tony
Greenstein
I was
even more surprised to receive an email on New Year’s day from Zohar thanking
me for the donation I didn’t make! I give up!
Dear tony,
We did it—because of you!
Thanks to your incredible generosity, Yad Vashem reached an astounding
$180,000 in our end of year campaign, and we are equipped better than ever to
preserve the truth and honor the memory of the Holocaust.
Your support enables us to:
Safeguard
Holocaust history by preserving irreplaceable testimonies, artifacts, and
documents for future generations.
Combat
the rise of Holocaust distortion by providing accessible, fact-based
resources that make the truth undeniable.
Empower
educators and students worldwide, ensuring the Holocaust’s lessons are
passed down and understood across borders.
Honor
the memory of the six million victims, the survivors, and the courageous
Righteous Among the Nations who stood up against evil.
This victory is as much yours as it is ours. Together, we’re keeping the
light of truth burning bright. We are deeply grateful for your commitment to
Yad Vashem’s mission.
From all of us at Yad Vashem, thank you for standing with us. We look
forward to the important work we will continue to do together in the coming
year!
Thank you!
Zohar Neumann
Director, Partnerships and Global Campaign Desk, Yad Vashem
#truthshinesbright
For those who don’t like to compare Israel & Nazi Germany my message is ‘Compare, Compare, Compare’ – At A Time Of Extermination it's Important to Understand Just What Kind of State Israel Is
Crispin Flintoff & Tony Greenstein
Outside Westminster Magistrates Court
2024 has been a very busy year for me and below are some of
the things that I did.I had a tour of
Scotland and speaking engagements in Ireland and the Netherlands as well as
speaking at demonstrations in Glasgow, Liverpool and my home town Brighton.
I continued to promote my book which came out at the end of
2022. Quite remarkably sales were higher by far in the first half of 2024 than in
the first half of 2023. You don’t get to learn of the sales figures until about
3 months after the end of the half year but I expect they will have increased
again.
I did a wide range of interviews and talks, only some of
which are below with audiences in the United States, South Africa and
Australia. The theme of my book can be summed up in that Jewish Chronicle headline
‘Infamous anti-Israel activist Tony
Greenstein called Jewish state 'Hitler's bastard offspring’. Israel has
demonstrated that the only thing it learnt from Nazi Germany was how to emulate
them.
On 21st December Katie Halper and I finally managed to
arrange an interview. Katie was a stand-up comedian before taking to podcasts
and political commentary. She runs her own Katie
Halper Show and is co-host of the podcast Useful Idiots with Aaron Maté.
Katie was a very challenging interviewer and I was pleased
with the outcome. Recorded separately were interviews with Jenny Manson, the
co-chair of Jewish Voices for Labour and Rabbi Herschel Gluck.
On November 7 I was invited to Cork
in Ireland to speak. The atmosphere in Ireland is totally different from that
in Britain where the State is breathing down our necks and harassing our
marches. Ireland doesn’t have a genocidal supporting government supplying Israel
with more weaponry to murder civilians and destroy hospitals.
I spoke in a hotel on the evening
of the November 7 and the room was packed and I nearly sold out of books. At
the end of the meeting I was taken aback when I was given a standing ovation. It
shows the enthusiasm and solidarity of the Irish with the Palestinians.
On the Friday night I spoke at a
bar in a small town in West Cork, Skibbereen. I’d never heard of the place
before but again the room was packed to the rafters. The following day I took
part in a march in the town and afterwards spoke at the rally.
This was in the middle of the Irish
General Election. There were sarcastic comments about the Social Democrats
taking part in the march having never done previously! The experience of
British colonialism has ensured that the Irish understand what is happening and
it is no surprise that Israel has closed its Embassy in Ireland.
I was therefore pleased to be invited
to an interview with EI on my birthday, 30 December! It was a very useful and
productive interview. Electronic Intifada is the premiere Palestine Solidarity
website. Having written for many papers, journals and sites I have to say that
no one gives you such a hard time as EI! They check virtually every word and quote
to see that you can back it up.Nothing escapes
the scrutiny of their fact checkers. Would that the British tabloids or Elon
Musk had to undergo the same level of scrutiny!
Another interview, in
fact two interviews was with Rania Khalek, a young Lebanese woman who runs Breakthrough News. Rania is a feisty
interviewer who clearly feels the pain of what has happened in Lebanon with
Israel’s savage bombing of its civilian population.
Rania first
interviewed me in Budapest on 10 April, where I had gone for dental implant
surgery.However the Internet connection
was not good and my computer had problems so we completed the interview on 15
April back in Brighton. This is the full
interview and this is the cut down version.
On 14 June Rania interviewed me about
my book and this time it was completed in one session. I found it a fascinating
interview and thanks to Rania for the time she took over this. Subsequently
Rania was invited to speak at a meeting of the Socialist Labour Network and
Jewish Network for Palestine on a Jewish or a Democratic State and on January
27 she will speak at our Holocaust Memorial Day meeting. You can go here for the
full length interview.
I
have never been attracted to the idea of an autobiography or even a biography.
Life is too short to waste time describing what you have done with your life and
its bound to be partial and self-exculpatory. However I was happy to work with
Helen Aksentijevic to produce a short, half hour film summarising some of the
things I’ve tried to do.
Helen
has produced similar films on other Jewish anti-Zionist such as Moshe Machover, Haim Bresheeth and
Sabby Sagall so I was very flattered to be asked.
Tony Greenstein - An Ordinary Rebel
plus Question & Answer Session at the P21
At the end of October I was invited to the wedding of an old
friend, a long standing Palestine solidarity activist, SusanBlackwell.She lives in the Netherlands and so I said that I would be happy to
do a meeting whilst there.
Sue got in touch with students at the main technical
university in the Netherlands, Delft University, and I was invited to speak
to a meeting. The only problem was that the university, which was happy to
invite Admiral Ellis, a representative of US arms company Lockheed Martin to
campus and a ghoul of many US wars, they didn’t want me to speak because I
might hurt the feelings of those students who supported the genocide in Gaza.
Of course when you contrast the hurt feelings of Zionists with
the dead bodies of Palestinian children there is no contest.So I wrote to the Rector His Magnificus
(yes that’s his title) Timothy van der Hagen
suggesting that freedom of speech is worth preserving. After all Hagen had written on the
university website that
‘The most important task of TU Delft is to make a
contribution towards building a better society’.
Yet Magnificus Hagen’s idea of a better society and mine were
not the same. Hagen is just another ruling class hypocrite.
However the students had other ideas. Although I was banned
from campus I turned up anyway
and with just 2 hours notice over 100 students gathered to listen to me on the
steps of the library. Not only had the stupid Magnificus built my meeting for
me but by his own actions he had ensured that my message went out to thousands.
The Rector of Delft University - the Magnificus Timothy van der Hagen
The security, although watching, did not intervene.A magnificus victory! I did write to Magnificus
Hagen afterwards but he seems to be a man of few words and even fewer thoughts!
Tony Greenstein's Speech at Delft
University Which the Administration Tried to Ban
As readers of this blog will know I was arrested a year ago
on ‘terrorism’ charges and my last court appearance was on 19 December at
Westminster magistrates court. There was a demonstration
outside and I will be next appearing at the Old Bailey on 31 January where I
hope people will also demonstrate their opposition to the use of terrorism
legislation to silence Palestine solidarity activists.
Tony Greenstein's
speech outside Westminster Magistrates Court
On the 4 AugustI came
back from my holiday in the Outer Hebrides and stopped off in Liverpool, where
I spent my childhood, to speak to the Palestine demonstration outside the Roman
Catholic Cathedral. I always enjoy going back to Liverpool with its magnificent
waterfront and city buildings.
On 3 December I spoke on behalf of Jewish Network for
Palestine at a seminar organised by the Open University Palestine group. Other
speakers were Tony Lerman, an expert in anti-Semitism and former Director of
the Institute of Jewish Policy Research, Barnaby Raine, a Ph D student and
young firebrand and Michael Richmond who spoke about philosemitism, the other
side of the anti-Semitism coin. The title was ‘How anti-Semitism has
complemented Zionism’.
How antisemitism has complemented
Zionism – Tony Greenstein
The JNP and SLN organised
a seminar on the 12 November in the wake of my review
of Jonathan Freedland’s dishonest biography of Rudolf Vrba, The Escape Artist, about the
anti-Zionist Jewish hero who escaped, with Alfred Wetzler, from Auschwitz in
order to warn Hungarian Jews of preparations being made to exterminate them.
Speakers included
Stephen Kapos, a survivor of the Hungarian holocaust, Haim Bresheeth, an
anti-Zionist Israeli and member of JNP and Tom Suarez, author Palestine HijackedandState of Terror. Below
is my contribution. A comprehensive website
on Vrba has been set up by Alan Twigg, a journalist who knew him.
Zionism & the Holocaust – Tony
Greenstein
The Complete Seminar – Rewriting the Holocaust
To commemorate the one
year anniversary of October 7, the SLN and JNP organised a seminar to discuss
the Gaza holocaust. Speakers included Ghada Karmi, a refugee from 1948, Rania
Khalek, Haim Bresheeth and myself. Below is my speech but people can go to the
SLN’s Youtube channel to listen to the complete seminar, ‘A Jewish State or a Democratic State’.
Most most people agree that it was an extremely good seminar and I highly
recommend listening to the whole seminar as I do the previous one on Vrba.
For One Democratic State
In the wake of
Starmer’s election, the SLN organised a star studded panel including myself!
Speakers included Ian Hodson, General Secretary of the Bakers Union,Graham Bash – founding editor of National
Labour Briefing, David Miller – who was sacked for his anti-Zionist views by
Bristol University and who later won a landmark employment tribunal, Chris Williamson,
the former Labour MP who was forced out of the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn
and Crispin Flintoff, presenter of the Not
the Andrew Marr show and latterly the Crispin Flintoff show which has a
regular attendance of 500 every Sunday morning. You can hear the full video on
the SLN Youtube channel here.
SLN Tony Greenstein – Where to for
the Left 12 07 24
Every year for the
past 2 years the SLN and the JNP have organised a meeting on Holocaust Memorial
Day, January 27. As the Zionists weaponise the holocaust we have to be prepared
to stand up and say ‘Never Again Means Never Again for Everyone’. For the
Zionists of course, Never Again means never again only for Jews, or the right
kind of Jew.
On January 27 2024 we
had an excellent line up including Professor Ilan Pappe, Ghada Karmi, Ronnie
Kasrills – the former head of Umkonte We Sizwe, the ANC’s military wing as well
as former South African Police Minister , Stephen Kapos – a child holocaust
survivor from Budapest, Suzanne Weiss – a child survivor from France and
myself. Again a remarkable meeting. For the full meeting go here
or here.
When Israel had been a month into the genocide in Gaza the
JNP and SLN organised a webinar on the theme of stopping Israel’s onslaught. Speakers
included Huda Ammori from Palestine Action, Asa Winstanley of Electronic
Intifada, Stephen Kapos, Ronnie Barkan – an Israeli anti-Zionist activist and Tony
Greenstein. You can watch the complete video here.
Stop the Genocide in Gaza 10.11.23
Last January I undertook a tour of Scotland at the invitation
of Scottish PSC. I spoke in Glasgow, Edinburgh and Dundee. I also spoke at a
large demonstration in Glasgow city centre.
Tony Greenstein speaking at Palestine Demonstration
in Glasgow January 6 2024
Two months later I was back in
Glasgow. It was March 16, UN Anti-Racism Day and the SWP’sStand
Up to Racism were also holding a march. On the tiny SUTR march was none other than Glasgow Friends of Israel.
Ever since 2017 the SWP/SUTR have
insisted on marching with Zionists against racism! It’s like campaigning
against rape alongside rapists.
This has been the subject of
heated controversy in Scotland and the Police were always willing to lend a
helping hand to ensure that the Zionists could march. This year, at a time of
genocide in Palestine, the SWP’s decision to march with Zionists was particularly
disgraceful.
Tony Greenstein speaking at the Anti-Racism
Demonstration in Glasgow March 16 2024
On October 4th, the 88th
anniversary of the Battle of Cable Street,
when the Police unsuccessfully tried to batter a way through the East End of
London for the British Union of Fascists. The same Metropolitan Police arrested
me after a picket of racist Israeli Ambassador Tzipi Hotoveli for comparing Israel’s
genocide in Gaza to the Nazi holocaust. Their pretext was that I had committed
a ‘racially aggravated offence’ under the Public Order Act. After being held
for 7 hours I was released fromHolborn
Police Station. A few weeks later I was informed that I would not be charged
with any offence.This is the speech
that so annoyed the Met!
Tony Greenstein Speech Which Led
to his Arrrest at Picket of Tzipi Hotoveli 4 Oct 2024
At 8 a.m. on the 26
November 2024 I gave a talk to listeners in Australia about my book, Zionism During the Holocaust. It was 7
pm there!
In this interview with Crispin
Flintoff I tried to explain why people believe I’m outspoken and what motivates
me
Interview Tony Greenstein on the
Crispin Flintoff Show - Why I'm Outspoken
On 23 November 2023 I
spoke to a meeting of the Labour Left Alliance in the wake of October 7. There
was then an extensive Question & Answer session.
LLA meeting 23 November 2023
On 15 November I spoke
at a demonstration organised by the Trades Council outside Hove Town Hall
And finally the one time
I appeared on Question Time at Sussex University’s Gardener Centre. It was when
Norman Tebbit, the Chingford skinhead was on the panel. I spoke from the
audience attacking him for his racist cricket test directed against immigrants
from the Indian sub-continent. Also on the panel was Clare Short. Peter Sissons
was in the Chair. I don’t think I would have got away with it with today’s
far-right Fiona Bruce!
In Their Desire to
Protect BBC Bias the Met are Once Again Hiding Behind Jews
Owen
Jones Interviews Ben Jamal about Zionist 'fears' about Marches Against Genocide
in Gaza
As we
celebrate the ceasefire in Gaza, a ceasefire that despite his
claims, Genocide Joe Biden has nothing to do with, we see the Metropolitan
Police giving a veto to the Genocidal ‘Chief Rabbi’ Mirvis,
a settler-trained rabbi who is an out and out racist, having participated in
the ‘Death to the Arabs’ flag marches
in Jerusalem.
As
Nina Morris-Evans wrote in the Times of Israel
in May 2017:
I’m
ashamed of activities endorsed by two of the most influential members of the
Orthodox movement: Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks and Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis.
This week they were in Jerusalem to support festivities planned by the
organisation Mizrachi Olami.
One
of these events is the annual Jerusalem Day March of the Flags on 24 May
(yesterday). Thousands of young people from across the country were bussed in
to march through the Jewish Old City, shutting down most of the Muslim quarter
and surrounding areas.
This
march has come to be associated with growing levels of hate speech and racist
violence, including shouts of “Death to
Arabs” and vandalism to Palestinian property. Today (Thursday), some of the
delegates were due to visit Hebron and dance through the streets with IDF
soldiers.
Hebron
is a city in which 200,000 residents live under the control of 600 soldiers,
protecting 850 settlers. This celebration is an unequivocally political act,
blatantly supporting the settlers’ presence there.
That the
Police base their decision to try and reroute the Palestine march on the views of this out and out racist
says everything about their political partisanship.
It is incredibly important that Saturday’s Palestine demonstration is
the largest yet
The Police’s
decision to try to ban Saturday’s march against Genocide in Gaza because the‘proposed
route would have caused serious disruption to a central London synagogue’ is a lie. Lying comes
as easily to the Met as a duck to water.
Laughably the Met also said‘our role is not to take sides’. The fact
that the Met have raised disruption to a synagogue, that is not even on the
route, as a pretext to prevent a demonstration proves that they have taken
sides. The side of the supporters of Genocide
in Gaza.
Our latest position on Saturday's Palestine Solidarity Campaign protest is below.
Their proposed route would have caused serious disruption to a central London synagogue.
We've imposed conditions mandating a new route after we were unable to agree on an acceptable alternative.
Owen Jones Interview with Ben Jamal on Police Obstruction
Implicit in this
decision is the assumption that the march poses a threat to Jews. This has been
the long-standing refrain of Israel’s genocide supporters but there isn’t a
sliver of evidence for it.
The Met have
consistently accepted the racialised narrative that Palestinian demonstrations
pose a threat to Jewish people. Their colonial
mindset is incapable of understanding that the Palestinian fight for liberation
is not an anti-Jewish one but an anti-Zionist one.
According to this
playbook Palestinians reject colonisation and occupation, not because of dispossession
and the theft of land and water but because they are anti-Jewish.
A similar narrative
operated in Apartheid South Africa. According to apologists for White Supremacy
Black people opposed racial discrimination not because they didn’t like being
discriminated against but because they were anti-White. So it is with the Jewish
Supremacist State of Israel.
The
Met have demonstrated this colonial and imperialist mentality repeatedly over
the last 15 months. Julia Bard described how, on the 9 December 2023
demonstration:
a cordon of police officers
materialised in front of us, separating us from the march. They apparently had
the idea that, since we were Jews, we must be counterdemonstrators.
We tried again and again to
explain that we were there in support of the Palestinians, and had been present
on the entire march....
But they simply couldn’t or
wouldn’t compute the idea of Jews supporting Palestinians. This isn’t the first
time. We’re getting used to police seeing the word “Jewish” on banners and
telling us which side we’re on — and if we don’t agree, trying to stop us from
joining the Palestine marches.
A month earlier, at the
protest on November 11, the several-hundred-strong Jewish bloc assembled in
Belgrave Square before joining the main march as it passed a nearby junction.
While we were waiting, two Forward “Intelligence” Team officers — the police in
the baby-blue vests — asked to speak to “the organiser” of what they evidently
thought was a separate protest....
Since they would not accept
that people holding banners with the word “Jewish” on them could support the
Palestinians, we spontaneously started chanting “Free free Palestine,” until,
eventually, one of the police officers got the point.
A more serious incident occurred on 18th May 2024.
UK – On 18
May 2024, as a result of Police actions, a Jewish activist named Jessica L was
assaulted by counter-protesters when she attended the pro-Palestine ‘National
March for Ceasefire’ wearing a Kippah and t-shirt with “Jews Say Ceasefire Now”.
Counter-protesters
had gathered holding Israel flags. When Jessica passed by this area they became
visibly and audibly hostile to her, shouting derogatory, misogynistic,
Islamophobic and antisemitic abuse. Jessica was subjected to slurs such as
“Kapo” and accusations of being a self-hating Jew—terms uniquely weaponized
against Jewish supporters of Palestinian liberation. She also received explicit
threats of violence and sexual assault.
A Met Police
Liaison Officer identified Jessica as Jewish based on her attire, forcibly
removed her from the main protest, and then pushed her towards the
counter-protestors as he shouted at her to “get
back over there”. The counter-protestors proceeded to reach across the
barriers, pulled Jessica towards them by the hair, attempted to remove her
kippah, struck her, spat on her, and they continued to shout misogynistic and
antisemitic abuse at her.
Jessica
shouted for help, but police officers failed to intervene. Eventually, she
freed herself with the help of PSC stewards and rejoined the demonstration. A police
officer then communicated that they wanted Jessica to leave the demonstration
due to the amount of hatred and hostility she was receiving from the
counter-protesters. Jessica sought to report the assault to police officers,
but she was told to report it online. When she then went to make a report at a
station, she was refused an in-person meeting with a supervising officer.
Jessica L – a
member of Na’amod and JVL – has instructed Bindmans LLP to
pursue breaches of her human rights to freedom of expression, assembly and to
enjoy these rights without discrimination. The claim is supported by a letter
confirming that she felt humiliated, shaken, and degraded by the police conduct
and the assault by counter-protesters, facilitated by the police officer’s
discriminatory conduct. The incident forced her to leave the protest early.
The incident
highlights the forms of intimidation and discrimination, including verbal and
physical abuse, that confront anti / non-Zionist Jews who publicly and
privately support justice for Palestinians. Jessica L has requested an apology
and a meeting with senior Metropolitan Police officers in order to discuss the
experiences of Jewish protesters marching in support of Palestine and to
propose changes to policing these demonstrations.
Jessica L commented:
“It
was terrifying enough to be within the grasp of counter protesters spouting
antisemitic hate speech and threats of violence but when a police officer
pushed me into their protest, seemingly because he believed that this was the
protest where Jewish people belonged, I immediately feared I was in serious
danger of harm as the mob grabbed at me, pulling my hair, spitting on me and
hurling vile antisemitic abuse at me. I screamed for help and no police officer
intervened – thankfully the protest stewards helped me. It was insult to injury
to later be told that the police believed I should leave the demonstration
because, essentially, they viewed my Jewishness as a provocation, attracting
obvious hostility and hatred from the counter protesters, when their focus
should have been on protecting my right to protest in safety from violent,
antisemitic and Islamophobic hatred.”
Max Hammer, a
spokesperson from Na’amod, said:
“The incident
on 18 May stands out for the behaviour of the Metropolitan Police officers on
site. By inferring a set of political beliefs from the Jewish activist’s
physical appearance, the officers not only displayed a distressing lack of
awareness of the political diversity within the UK Jewish community, but also
demonstrated their inability to keep non- and anti-Zionist Jews safe from antisemitic
abuse directed at them by far-right ultra-Zionists.
The Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) has announced a new route for its march this Saturday (18 January).
The police’s
role in this violent assault comes amid … repeated labelling of largely
peaceful Palestine solidarity marches as “hate marches”. The incident
illustrates a persistent issue in the Police’s failure to recognise or prevent
the unique forms of antisemitism and right-wing violence directed against non-
and anti-Zionist Jews. Neither the Metropolitan Police nor the CST, a charity
which collects antisemitism data used by the police, have a reporting system
for incidents of antisemitic abuse by Jews against other Jews. …
Given that
the prevailing media narrative surrounding PSC’s marches has been that they are
unsafe for Jewish people, it is unsurprising that our presence at the marches
is not recognized by the police. We urgently call on the police to improve its
understanding of Jewish community dynamics and anti-Semitism…
The fight
against antisemitism can only be successful if it combats all forms of
antisemitism, including those directed against Jewish people who march in
solidarity with the people of Palestine.”
Jeffrey
Newman, Rabbi Emeritus, commented:
“Jewish
campaigners and groups who have campaigned against the Occupation of the West
Bank and the war on Gaza or for recognition of the right of Palestinians to
their own State on the West Bank and Gaza are frequently vociferously opposed,
sometimes with the use of force, by other Jews.
There is a word for the behaviour of Metropolitan Police officers who
refuse to understand or recognise that not all Jews support Genocide in Gaza
and that is anti-Semitism.
That is why the MPS has rejected the route that was already agreed,
citing spurious concerns about the Central Synagogue. The Met’s justification is here. The Jewish Bloc
therefore issued a second statement on
14.1.25.
JEWISH BLOC DEMANDS FREEDOM TO PROTEST AGAINST GENOCIDE The @metpoliceuk decision to block the new route of the National Demonstration for Palestine reveals the real reason for their crackdown: To suppress the right to protest genocide. pic.twitter.com/2ETuUX5zxu
The Metropolitan police intend to ban the 18
January Palestine march from the area around the BBC
headquarters in Portland Place in London. Their excuse is that Jewish
attendees at a synagogue that is well away from the march route will suffer
‘disruption’ of their religious worship.
We are writing as Jewish Holocaust survivors, and
descendants of survivors, to protest against this clear attempt to
dissuade people from opposing the Gaza genocide. Along with
thousands of other openly Jewish protesters, we have attended numerous
Palestine demos in London and have received nothing but support and warmth from
our fellow demonstrators. To suggest that the 18 January march is a threat to
Jews, or is in any way antisemitic, is simply a fabrication in order to
restrict everyone’s right to protest.
Yours sincerely,
Stephen
Kapos (survivor of the Holocaust in Hungary)
Agnes Kory
(survivor of the Holocaust in Hungary)
Haim
Bresheeth (son of two survivors of Auschwitz)
Mark
Etkind (son of a survivor of the Lodz ghetto and Buchenwald)
Aurora
Yaakov (daughter of survivor of Dachau & Kaufering camps)
Yosefa
Loshitzky (daughter of survivors of the Holocaust in Poland)
Miranda
Pinch (daughter of a survivor of the Holocaust in Czechoslovakia)
Ursula
Blumenthal (daughter of a survivor of the Holocaust in Germany)
Peter
Kapos (son of a Holocaust survivor of the Holocaust in Hungary)
Peter Hall
(son of a survivor of the Holocaust in Austria)
Sonja
Linden (daughter of a survivor of the Holocaust in Germany)
Chris
Romberg (son of a survivor of the Holocaust in Austria)
Beatrice
Hoffman (daughter of a survivor of the Holocaust in Germany)
We strongly condemn police attempts to stop an agreed march for
Palestine from protesting at the BBC on 18 January.
The route for the march was confirmed with the police nearly two months
ago and as agreed with them, was publicly announced on 30 November. This route
has only been used twice in the last 15 months of demonstrations and not since
February 2024. With just over a week to go, the Metropolitan Police
is reneging on the agreement and has stated its intention to prevent the protest
from going ahead as planned.
The BBC is a major institution – it is a publicly-funded state
broadcaster and is rightly accountable to the public. The police should not be
misusing public order powers to shield the BBC from democratic scrutiny.
The excuse offered by the police is that the march could cause
disruption to a nearby synagogue which is not even on the march route. As the
Met Police have acknowledged, there has not been a single incident of any
threat to a synagogue attached to any of the marches. Any suggestion that
pro-Palestine marches are somehow hostile to Jewish people ignores the fact
that Jewish people have been joining the marches in their thousands.
The rights to protest and free speech are precious. It is not
acceptable in a democratic society that, in the face of an ongoing genocide in
Gaza, people should be barred from protesting at the BBC. We call on the police
to drop their objections and allow the protest to go ahead as planned.
Palestine Coalition Organisations
Adnan Hmidan,
Acting Chairman, Palestinian Forum in Britain
Ben Jamal,
Director, Palestine Solidarity Campaign
Ismail Patel,
Chairman, Friends of Al-Aqsa
Lindsey German,
Convenor, Stop the War Coalition
Raghad Altikriti,
Chair, Muslim Association of Britain
Sophie Bolt,
General Secretary, Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament
Members of Parliament (42)
Abtisam Mohamed
MP
Adnan Hussain
MP
Andy McDonald
MP
Apsana Begum
MP
Ayoub Khan
MP
Baroness
Christine Blower
Baroness Jenny
Jones
Baroness Pauline
Bryan
Baroness Rosie
Boycott
Bell Riberio Addy
MP
Brendan O’Hara
MP
Brian Leishman
MP
Carla Denyer
MP
Cathal Mallaghan
MP
Chris Hazzard
MP
Chris Law
MP
Dáire Hughes
MP
Dawn Butler
MP
Diane Abbott
MP
Dr Simon Opher MP
Grahame Morris
MP
Ian Byrne
MP
Imran Hussain
MP
Iqbal Mohamed
MP
Jeremy Corbyn
MP
John Finucane
MP
John McDonnell
MP
Jon Trickett
MP
Kim Johnson
MP
Lord Bryn
Davies
Lord John
Hendy
Lord Prem
Sikka
Nadia Whittome
MP
Órfhlaith Begley
MP
Pat Cullen
MP
Paul Maskey
MP
Richard Burgon
MP
Seamus Logan
MP
Shockat Adam
MP
Siân Berry
MP
Steve Witherden
MP
Zarah Sultana
MP
'Genuinely dangerous to be Jewish' near London's pro-Palestinian marches, Michael Gove says https://t.co/9Y9XBCeWqg
Barry Lerer called on
Lammy to Apologise for Suspending 8% of Britain’s Arms Supplies to Israel
& Blamed Palestinian Parents for Israel’s Murder of Their Children
Above is
an interview by Ben Jamal of PSC with Middle East Eyewhere he quotes extracts from sermons made
at the Central Synagogue.
The
synagogue's rabidly far-right Rabbi Barry Lerer and his synagogue have hosted a
never ending series of right-wing figures including Michael Howard, Boris's sister Rachel Johnson and Theresa Villiers MP
- as well as the mad genocidal ‘journalist’ Melanie Phillips and Campaign Against Anti-Semitism’s Gideon Falter.
Fascist Lerer
has as much right to his political views as Nick Griffin and Tommy Robinson but
this helps us understand why he has complained to the Met. He totally
ignores, not just secular left-wing Jews, but religious Jews who attend the
Palestine demos and who are very warmly received.
Since a Novara article this week, the synagogue has taken
down the webpages of its sermons, so I have added some extracts from these
sermons as footnotes to. Google has a record of all these webpages so any
extracts can be confirmed.
Lerer
condemns the UN, the International Court of Justice and ends up quoting the
equally far right Chief Rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis, who was trained in a settler
yeshivah, to the effect that Israel is going to extraordinary lengths to
protect human life.
If after at least 200,000 deaths,
including indirect deaths, the deliberate starvation of the Palestinians of
Gaza, the deliberate bombing of tent encampments burning their inhabitants alive, Lerer
thinks that Israel is taking care to uphold humanitarian law one can only
assume that he is a fantasist, a liar or both. Or just a raving loony fascist
of the type that used to stick out their right arm.
Perhaps accusing Palestinians
of being ‘human animals’ as Israel’s Defence Minister, Yoav
Gallant, did, in an echo of Himmler’s
description of Jews is upholding humanitarian law?On 9th October Gallant declared:
“I have ordered a
complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no
fuel, everything is closed,” Gallant says following an assessment at the IDF
Southern Command in Beersheba.
“We are fighting human
animals and we are acting accordingly,”
Or Netanyahu’s
comparison of Palestinians
with Amalek whom god commanded the Israelites to wipe out to every man, woman
or children.Or Bezalel Smotrich’s saying that it is
morally right to starve 2 million people.
If Netanyahu
and Gallant are really upholders of humanitarian law, despite the warrants out
for their arrest by the International Criminal Court then we must reassess Hitler
and Goebbels. Perhaps they too have been misjudged.
The
Sermons of Rabbi Barry Lerer (before
they were removed this week from Central Synagogue’s website)
The
Rabbi of the synagogue that is closest to the BBC - and who the police have
made clear has been one of the people saying I and my congregants feel unsafe –
says that he’s twice had to put back services, to delay them, to prevent the
service taking place when we're there. He's not provided any evidence that
anyone's tried to go to the Central Synagogue, harass people etc.. But he said
we can hear them chanting genocidal chants inside the synagogue.
What
does he mean by genocidal chants. He's talking about people chanting from “The River To The Sea Palestine Will Be
Free”. So the argument is: we're inside a synagogue, we can hear this in
the background; we know there are people with Palestinian flags etc. - that's
harassing.
It's
worth saying something about this rabbi’s political positions which came to
light yesterday and was covered by Novara media. He has published
sermons on the synagogue's website in which he attacked Starmer, calling him
'two-tier Kier'. He said that the government effectively, and the policing it
enforces, is unfairly hard on the far-right but has another rule for those on
the left.[1]
Barry
Lerer accused the BBC of being horrendously anti-Israel.[2] He's criticized the
UN and says the International Court of Justice and the decisions made by the ICJ
are lies.[3]
Most
notoriously and shamefully, in a sermon he quoted Golda Meir, who notoriously
said ‘We'll have peace with the Arabs
when they love their children more than they hate us’.[4] And he's also
talked about the need to go on the attack against our enemies wherever they
exist.
“It
is time to go to combat our enemies, not only
on the battlefield, but the hostile press, those on social media, the UN and
Governments who have no desire for the truth or peace and seek the destruction
of Israel and the Jewish people.”[5]
What
that demonstrates is the police are taking evidence from this person with
egregious views [as if he’s a] good faith actor who's informing them that they
have to prevent people protesting for the rights of the Palestinian people from
going within any sort distance of his synagogue regardless of whether he's got
a service on or not.
It is clear that Rabbi Barry Lerer is an out and out racist so it’s no
surprise at all that the institutionally racist Metropolitan Police should use
him as an excuse to ban protests at the BBC. But that is all they are –
pretexts and excuses.
For someone to blame Palestinian parents for the deaths of their
children, 20,000+ of whom have been deliberately murdered by Israel in Gaza is
beyond vile.Perhaps he would like to
blame Jewish parents for the death of their parents in Nazi Germany?Israel has deliberately targeted Palestinian children.
Hind Rajab wasn’t killed by her parents but by deliberate Israeli tank fire.
[1] “Elon Musk has accused Kier
Starmer of being two teir Keir-
with the Government and policing policies having one rule for those on the
right and another for those on the left. This was apparent in the heavy handed
policing of the recent demonstrations here in UK …” Rabbi Lerer, Sermon, 7 August 2024. (This
sermon was made just after the far right, anti-immigrant riots of
last summer)
[2] “A major study published this week by Assersons, a British law firm
based in Tel Aviv where my brother works is a sobering read. A dedicated team
used AI to follow four months of war coverage. It identified over 1500 breaches
of the BBC’s own guidelines on impartiality and accuracy. Time and again
after 7th October the BBC’s output soft-soaped Hamas’s atrocities
while depicting Israel as ‘militaristic
and aggressive’.
Israel was 4 times more likely to be associated with war crimes in BBC
reporting than Hamas, whose entire campaign from October 7 onwards has
consisted of war crimes against both Israeli and Gaza civilians. Israel was 14
times more likely to be associated with genocide and six times more likely to
be associated with breaking international law.
We’re also reminded of the BBC’s stubborn refusal to call Hamas
terrorists. Instead insisting on referring to 7 October as a ‘militant attack’- and how they claimed
why they weren’t using the T-word by saying that they ‘don’t take sides’, and won’t use loaded words like “evil” or
“cowardly” and how they don’t talk about “terrorists”.’
But we all know that this isn’t true. The BBC has referred often to
‘far-right terrorism’ and even wondered if incels are adherents to a ‘far-right
terrorist ideology’. And as for impartiality, we all know the BBC takes sides
all the time – on Brexit, climate change, woke etc. As Brendan Oneill wrote–
Faced with a thousand dead Jews, the Beeb finally rediscovered the importance
of impartiality.”Sermon, 14
September, 2024.
[3] “This past year has been an Annis Horibilis for the Jewish
Community and for the State of Israel. It feels like we have been in a boxing
ring with a World Heavyweight Champion. We seem to be knocked down again and
again whether it be the constant Israel bashing in the media, the threats and
missiles of Hamas and Hezbollah. The sham trials in the ICJ. The demonstrations
on University campuses. The constant lies being spread at the UN. Iran’s
missile attack just before Pesach. The cold blooded murder of 6 of the hostages
just a month or so ago. We have been broken and even shattered time and again-
but we are not out.” Sermon, 2 or
3 October 2024.
Earlier in that same sermon, Rabbi Lerer said: “For anyone who has
visited Israel over these 12 months they would have seen Posters and Banners
all over the Holy land read Yachad Ninatzeach- together we will be victorious!
And this was shown by the tens of thousands of Israelis who returned from all
around the world to Israel after October 7th to fight – because we
don’t have another land….”
[4] “And of course we think of the how children have been killed on both
sides of the conflict. How children have been orphaned on both sides of the
conflict. We are reminded of Golda Meir’s famous quote “We will only have peace with the Arabs when they love their children
more than they hate us.”” Sermon 3 or
4 October 2024.
“We must succeed in our mission—standing firm, striving for a better
world, and embracing the truth. As one voice we stand up to antisemitism and we
call on the hostages to be released. The state of Israel is also standing.
Standing up against the Hezbollah bullies who have rained daily rockets since
October 8th, caused many deaths (including civilians and children) and
displaced over 60,000 people in the North from their homes for the past year
who have been living as refugees in their own country. Israel is standing up
against the world and governments and media who chose not to see or not to
comment on any of those events over the past year- their eyes were too focussed
on Rafah….now that Israel is finally responding they have all of a sudden woken
up- condemning Israel of course and calling for a ceasefire.
The United Nations General Assembly last week voted 124 to 14 against
Israel’s right to defend itself, with 43 countries abstaining, including
nations like Germany, England, Australia, and Canada....” (This sermon was made
just after the Israeli attack on Lebanon from 23
September.)
Earlier in another sermon, on 7 September, Rabbi Lerer said:
"In a press conference later that day Prime Minister Netanyahu also
apologised “To the families of the six hostages, I ask for your forgiveness
that we did not succeed in bringing them home alive. We were close, but we did
not make it.”
But where were the other apologies? Where were the apologies of the USA
– Hersh’s country of birth?
Where is the apology from the David Lammy the Foreign Secretary who, on
the day of these funerals and while five British citizens are still being held
hostage in Gaza, decided to announce the suspension of thirty arms licenses to
Israel? Accusing Israel of breaching Humanitarian Law when as the Chief Rabbi
says “it is in fact going to extraordinary lengths to uphold it!” As Brendan
O’Neill wrote… in normal times, such a flagrant moral abandonment of our old
ally of Israel would be geopolitically foolish; in the wake of the 7 October
pogrom and its unleashing of a global wave of Jew hate, it feels nothing short
of sickening."
Violent Attack on Chief Steward Chris Nineham as Police Thugs Attack
A large & vibrant Jewish Bloc on the Palestine Demonstration 25.1.25. We Are The Wrong Sort of Jews
I’ve
attended about half the Palestine demonstrations in London and this was the
most repressive and coercive yet. It was clear that the gloves were off as the institutionally corrupt
and institutionally racist
Metropolitan Police saw it as its duty to prevent opponents of genocide from
exercising their right to protest and demonstrate.
As I said yesterday,
the Metropolitan Police took as their pretext for banning a demonstration to
the BBC the lying plaints of Central Synagogue’s neo-Nazi Rabbi Barry Lerer
for whom no amount of Palestinian blood shed will be enough.
The excuse
of disruption to synagogue goers and the unevidenced fears of racist Zionists
was more than enough for the Metropolitan Police to ban any demonstration
outside the BBC which functions as the propaganda arm of British imperialism in
the Middle East.
Almost as
soon as I arrived I saw people being arrested for nothing other than being in
the wrong place. I departed after a couple of hours but later saw the violent attack
on Chris Nineham, the Chief Steward by 10 police.
Despite the
atmosphere of fear and tension caused by the Met’s hostile and aggressive
tactics there was a steely determination to face the bastards down. There was a
large Jewish bloc present, which is of course invisible to the Met because we
are the ‘wrong sort of Jews’ i.e. anti-racist Jews.
Jews 4 Genocide's Pathetically Small Demonstration
Jew 4 Genocide
counter-demonstration to Palestine Demonstration 18th January 2025
There was a
small, well-protected Jews for Genocide contingent, with their far-right Christian
supporters well protected behind Police barriers. I attach a few mugshots of
these creeps below.
Graham Bash
and I did a joint interview with Crispin Flintoff for Sunday’s show, as did
others. It was good to see comrades, despite the freezing cold.
This was the second unprovoked arrest I witnessed on the Palestine Demonstration 18 January 2025
The
organisers though did not inform people of what they had planned and it
appeared to people that they had no plans. Next time we have to mobilise at the
BBC itself, whatever the Police have in mind and if they blockade the BBC to
prevent us gathering then fine. That is what they should be – blockaded. In
addition we will paralyse Oxford Street and cause commercial disruption and
chaos.
Police Arrest I witnessed
Mobilising
in Whitehall was a bad mistake which should not be repeated since the Police
turned the march into a static demonstration.
Unsurprisingly
the far-right Zionist Campaign Against Anti-Semitism welcomed the police tactics.
If I’d Made My Speech in London Rather Than Liverpool I Would Probably
Have Been Arrested
Tony Greenstein Speech at Liverpool Friends of Palestine Demonstration 12
January 2025
Liverpool
Friends of Palestine invited me to speak to their rally after the demonstration
there last Sunday and I was more than pleased to avail myself of the
opportunity.
The
demonstration set off from the Catholic Cathedral on Mount Pleasant and wound
its way, via a silent march in Bold Street, through the City Centre.
Highlights from Liverpool Palestine Demonstration 12 January 20255
It was
great to be back in the city that I grew up in. The march grew as it continued
and it had a great reception from Liverpudlians. There wasn’t one Zionist counter
demonstrator or heckler.A bus driver
reached out of his window to shake our hands.
People in
Liverpool are renowned for their good humour as well as their solidarity.
If my
speech had been made in London there is little doubt that the institutionally
racist Metropolitan Police would, as they did on October 4th last
year, have arrested me for a ‘racially aggravated crime’.Comparing Israel to Nazi Germany is verboten under Commissioner Mark Rowley.
However
freedom of speech is still preserved in Liverpool and long may it remain so!
Thanks to
Liverpool Friends of Palestine who hosted me and Greg Dropkin in particular.
Below are a
few photographs I took of the demonstration.
Compare This to My Arrest – Sussex Police & the CPS Can
Be Relied on To Do Their Utmost to Avoid Prosecuting Caplin
WARNING –you may find some of the pictures below this post offensive
– they were all posted by Ivor Caplin and illustrates his interests
You might think that the
arrest of a former Defence Minister and government Whip on charges of child
grooming would make the pages of all the national dailies.But if so you would be wrong? Only the Daily Mail did
so.
The BBC had a short reportMan arrested on suspicion of child sex offencebut it did not name him. This
narrowed down the suspects to a mere half of the population. The only clues to
Caplin’s identity were that he was 66 and local to Brighton (in fact he is
local to Hove).
Brighton & Hove News went one further with ‘Tony Greenstein charged with terrorism offence’ from which you might assume that I
had been found with a bomb in my pocket rather than having published a blog
that was not to the Police’s liking.
‘Welcoming the decision to expel Mr Greenstein, Ivor Caplin, south east
chair of the Jewish Labour Movement, said: “His continued membership is at
complete odds with our collective values of solidarity, tolerance and respect.
“Deliberately
harassing, intimidatory and hateful language of the kind Tony Greenstein has
continually used has no place inside the Labour movement.
“Despite the unacceptably long time it has
taken to reach this conclusion, we are heartened that the party has sent out a
clear message on this today.
“We will continue to
press the party to deal firmly and swiftly with antisemitism, including the
high number of cases that are still waiting to be resolved."
The Guardian of course said nothing which is not surprising since
Caplin had been such an integral part of their false ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign
in the Labour Party.
There is an easy
explanation. Caplin is a prominent Zionist.I suspect that great efforts will be made to prove that Caplin was only
trying to contact a 15 year old boy in order that they could play chess
together!
And what of the Police?When I was charged they issued a statement which said:
“A
70-year-old man has been charged with a terrorism offence as part of an
investigation by officers from Counter Terrorism South East (CTPSE).
“Anthony
Greenstein, of XXXX, Brighton, has been charged with one count of inviting support for a proscribed organisation, namely Hamas, contrary to Section 12(1) of the Terrorism Act 2000.
“The charge is in connection with comments made online on Saturday 7 October 2023.
“He has been bailed to appear at Westminster Magistrates’ Court on Thursday 12 December.
🚨Ivor Caplin's qualifications to be on @GBNEWS *Supporter of Israeli aggression✅ *Blames Palestine for Middle East war✅ *Suspended as a member of Labour✅ *Has similar alleged perverted tastes as other current and former GBNews presenters✅ https://t.co/NGCRJDdlZQ
What Ivor Caplin Doesn't Lack Is Influential Friends
Sussex Police also issued a
statement when I was first arrested in 2023. Compare this to what Sussex Police
saidwhen Caplin was arrested:
“We
are aware of footage circulating on social media showing a man in Brighton
being detained on suspicion of engaging in online sexual communications with a
child.
“Officers
can confirm that a local 66-year-old man was arrested on Saturday January 11
and currently remains in custody. They later elaborated
“A 66-year-old man who was arrested on suspicion of
engaging in online sexual communications with a child on 11 January has been
released on bail until 10 April while further enquiries are carried out.”
No name and no address. Why the
disparity?It would seem that there are
forces in society who help and protect powerful paedophiles and equally
powerful forces out to portray me as a ‘terrorist’.
One can only hope that one of his bail conditions is surrendering his passport or Ivor may end up in Israel
It’s one
law for right-wing former Labour Zionist ministers who are caught trying to
make contact with children and quite another law forthose of us who support the Palestinian
resistance against a genocidal army that has killed more than 20,000
Palestinian children.
And of
course there is a logic to this.If the
British government, from Starmer down, can say nothing about the murder of
thousands of Palestinian children, why on earth should they be bothered about
the grooming of one 15 year old boy?
The Hypocrisy of these People Knows No Limits
In the eyes of the Police
and Establishment grooming young children is considered a lesser crime than
supporting an anti-colonial guerrilla struggle. Paedophillia amongst our rulers
has always been treated lightly if at all.
We only have to consider the way four
different Police forces, including Sussex, went out of their way to protect
Jimmy Saville. According to an Inspectorate of Constabulary Report in 2007. The HMIC report said:
“Both officers (from Sussex
and Surrey) appear to have alerted each other to the reluctance of their
respective victims and both decided that neither was able to support the other.
As a result, opportunities for mutual support were lost.”
Sussex Police were also involved in protecting another high society paedophile, the
Bishop of Lewes Peter Ball, friend of Prince now King Charles III. Initially,
in 1993, Ball was merely cautioned for his crimes. Eventually in 2015 he was
gaoled for 32 months for quite horrendous abuse. The Independent Inquiry into Child Abuse found that a victim of Ball, Philip
Johnson, after having learned in September 1996 that his younger brother had
also been sexually abused visited a Sussex Police Station, where he reported
the offences committed by Cotton and Pritchard, two other priests.
Mr Johnson said he was made
to feel uncomfortable by the officers, who appeared to view him “as a threat to
children … I felt that I was being investigated more than Cotton or Pritchard.
Starmer’s CPS protected Saville
and then destroyed the files in 2010 when Starmer was
Director of Public Prosecutions. The historic attitude to the abuse of children
by the rich and powerful was exemplified by Peter Morrison MP, Thatcher’s Personal Private Secretary who was protected by Thatcher and MI5 despite his
proclivities being well known.
Caplin and fellow Zionist and current Hove MP, Peter 'Killer' Kyle
Greg
Hadfield has written an interesting
article that should be required reading for anyone interested in why Sussex
Police have treated Caplin with kid gloves. In essence Caplin was part of a
right-wing Gay Labour Mafia in Brighton & Hove which includes local MP
Peter ‘Killer’ Kyle, his ex-boyfriend, who lives literally a stone throws away.
Chris Ward, the new
Starmerite MP for Brighton Kemptown seems to have been another member of this
clique.
Ward was
the Starmer imposed stooge in Brighton Kemptown at the last election. A
complete nonentity he ran Hanbury
Strategy, a PR/Lobbying group with his Tory election opponent,
Khobi Vallis at the last election.
Chris
Ward’s original CV sent to members mentioned that he once worked for Caplin,
but all reference to working for him has been removed since Caplin was
suspended by the Labour Party last year. As Greg Hadfield observed, this is an
extremely unusual occurrence for someone on the right of the party.
Caplin was
the first Labour MP that Hove had ever had.Caplin was a Defence Minister at the time of the invasion of Iraq.I can remember him scuttling out of the
backdoor of Hove Town Hall when we came to talk with him!And he panicked and called the Police when we
next met up with him at Portslade Town hall.
Caplin has
been addicted to Crystal Meths for the last 18 months and genocide for over 20
years.Last June Caplin was arrested for a
sexual assault on a young man at the YMCA hostel in Brighton’s North Road.
Suffice to say SussexPolice managed to
avoid having to investigate the case too hard and Caplin escaped prosecution.
As Andy Winter, an Argus columnist and former Labour councillor recalled being told: “Whenever
something odd happens in the Labour Party, all roads lead back to Ivor Caplin.”
Guess who helped select the Council candidates for 2023 – including two who
didn’t live in Brighton? Yes that’s right, Ivor Caplin. It was Caplin who was appointed to
the Labour Party’s South East Executive with the explicit task of weeding out
anyone on the left.
No wonder that Labour councillors in
Brighton & Hove have had nothing to say about the Genocide in Gaza given
who they owe their position to.
Caplin’s sudden announcement, in
November 2004, barely five months before Blair called a general election, that
he wouldn’t be a candidate was due to a front-page scoop in the ill-fated News of the World. In the end the
article was confined to the inside pages.
Caplin seems to be addicted to posting, re-posting and
replying to pornographic images and videos on what was his Twitter feed.
No indication was given that this was Ivor Caplin - he got away with it again
Brighton & Hove
News reported on June 11 204 that Caplin had been
suspended by the Labour Party ‘after
serious allegations were made about him.’ Clearly this related to the
sexual assault on the young homeless man, the investigation into which Brighton
Police dropped. Yet we were given no clue as to what these allegations were
about.
Jo Wadsworth, the Brighton
& Hove Editor, who is to journalism what Harold Shipman was to care for
the elderly, commented that
In recent weeks, Mr
Caplin has been tweeting increasingly explicit images of young men, ranging
from semi-naked stills to pornographic videos.
Caplin is reputed to have had sex with any number of
rent boys and male prostitutes. Clearly he has a problem. As Hadfield
commented:
When this conduct is undertaken by a senior figure
in a political party, with a public facade of trusted respectability, it is
positively dangerous. Especially in an organisation with inadequate
safeguarding procedures.
In an opaque, hierarchical, and undemocratic Labour
Party — where whistleblowing is now punished rather than welcomed — it is a
disaster waiting to happen.
Teenage members as young as 14 out on the
#LabourDoorstep, canvassing in tiny groups — often on ill-lit streets and
accompanied by older, more experienced, more trusted, more powerful party
colleagues — must be protected.
Caplin sees young boys as something to be exploited,
used and abused. It is little wonder that he is an avid Zionist.
However nothing Caplin did was sufficient to deter Starmer
who has had problems of his own when it comes to sexual predators. Hadfield
commented that
We do not know if Caplin is a paedophile or not. I
hope he will have his day in court, so we can find out.
And I do not have any evidence at all to
substantiate wild rumours about a Labour “sex ring” or a “rape network” in
Brighton and Hove.
Which is another way of saying that Brighton &
Hove Labour Party may indeed have a ‘sex ring’ or ‘rape network’. Hadfield
asked
Did all his followers on X/Twitter always block him,
have dormant accounts, or mute him, or just not notice the daily waterfall of
extreme pornography? All the photographs? All the videos?
Amongst those who followed him were Tom Watson, Jack
Lubner, chair of Young Labour, Mike Katz, chair of the JLM and Gurinder Singh
Josan, the far-right Labour MP for Smethwick and friend of Luke Akehurst. Even
the Crown Prosecution Service (@CPSUK) followed Caplin as well as former
Chief Superintendent Nick May, Sussex Police’s Divisional Commander for
Brighton and Hove (until his retirement in September 2021) and a friend of Fiona Sharpe. As Hadfield commented:
One thing I do know is that the likes of Ms Sharpe
and Caplin are so embedded in the local criminal justice system, not to mention
the local mainstream media, that they feel they can get away with anything. They
have friends in high places.
No complaint from them is too trivial to be taken
seriously (Sharpe and Sussex Police); no mendacious story is so insubstantial
that a quote from “a senior Labour source” won’t generate a headline.
This is very true. A woman Palestine solidarity member
in Brighton was seriously assaulted at the Clocktower but Sussex Police refused
to prosecute because they claimed her witness wasn’t independent (which is a
job for the courts not them)!
Fiona Sharpe harasses Yasser and then claimed or
rather lied in court that she had been harassed
But when has that ever stopped them using Fiona Sharpe
as a witness despite her proven record of lying in court? [See The Janus Faced Fiona Sharpe of
Sussex Friends of Israel] When she gave evidence at the trial of a Palestinian man, Yasser some
years ago, everything she said was contradicted by the video evidence. Yasser
was acquitted.
Sussex Police are using Fiona Sharpe again though in a
case being brought against a Brighton woman for damaging a paste board in
Palmeira Square, which shouldn’t even be there and which uses Israel’s
‘hostages’ to justify genocide in Gaza. It is grossly offensive to opponents of
genocide but Sussex Police bend over backwards to support Sharpe, Caplin and
her clique of misfits.
Sharpe, besides perjuring herself in court, is thick
as thieves with Sussex Police. In February 2024 she was a recipient of the Chief Constable’s award for
services rendered. The mind boggles as to what those services were! No doubt
she is lobbying hard even as I write for the exoneration of the Honourable Ivor
Caplin.
Indeed it was most unfortunate that Caplin was caught
by a vigilante group while trying to recruit a child for a bit of sex on the
side. His protestations of innocence and his web of lies make for amusing
viewing. But we shall see whether the CPS manages to find a reason not to
prosecute. Perhaps they will say it is ‘not
in the public interest’ to have a high profile Zionist convicted of child
grooming.
Not so many years ago, former President of the Board
of Deputies and a former Labour MP and peer also managed to avoid prosecution
for child abuse despite many horrendous allegations because of favourable treatment
by the Police and the CPS.
Hadfield himself is now subject to a malicious
prosecution by Sussex Police under s.127 of the Malicious Communications Act
for posting a single screenshot in a single post of something Caplin posted,
triggered by a vexatious complaint by Fiona Sharpe. He faces 5 years
imprisonment if convicted whereas knowing Sussex Police they will exert
themselves to the maximum to find reasons not to prosecute Fiona Sharpe’s
friend Ivor Caplin.
As Hadfield notes ‘Just
like in the Labour Party, so in the criminal justice system: the process is the punishment and the punishment is the process.’
The Jewish Labour Movement haven’t had a great deal of luck
with their Chairmen. The first one, Jeremy Newmark defrauded the Jewish Leadership Council of
£100,000 but got away with it because they didn’t want the publicity.
Their second Chair, Ivor Caplin is a suspected
paedophile guilty of an attack on a young homeless man.
One wonders what their third Chair, Lord Mike Katz has
hidden in his ermine.Katz earned his
daily bread by lobbying for private rail companies. Really
the JLM should be sued under the Trades Description Act. They may be Jewish but
there is nothing of the labour movement about these frauds.
Tony Greenstein
Below - A Little of Caplin's Prostigous Twitter Output - No-one in the Labour Party, least of all Starmer, seemed to mind
Israel's 'Friendship' Song of Annihilation Sung by Children
The further away from the Holocaust
we get, the more the Western governments, in particular Britain, the United
States and Germany want to remember it.But it is a very selective memory.
Death by Hunger WAS a Nazi Speciality - the Zionists have learnt their lessons of the Holocaust well
During the Cold War and McCarthy era
mention of the Holocaust would mark you down as a communist sympathiser. In
Israel it was no different. In a 220-page Israeli history textbookpublished in 1948, just one page was devoted
to the Holocaust compared to 10 pages on the Napoleonic wars. In 1960, after an
official Holocaust Remembrance Day was already established, more than a quarter
of the educational institutions still ignored the event.
Fact check on the Genocidal Friendship Song Which Talks of Annihilation of the Palestinians of Gaza
It was only after the 1961 Eichmann trial,
that Israel began to construct a holocaust narrative that portrayed Israel as
the victim. Prior to that Israel saw itself as the heroic start-up nation
unlike the ‘accursed Galut’ (diaspora Jews). The ‘new Jews’ were not like the
sheep who had gone willingly to the slaughter in Europe.
'Exterminate Gaza' is one of the lessons that Israelis have learnt from the Holocaust
In the West and via institutions like
the US Holocaust Memorial Museum we are fed a
particular version of the holocaust. In particular what they don’t want to remember is how the
United States and Britain did everything in their power not to admit Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany. What they also
don’t want to remember is that the Zionist organisations, including the Board of Deputies, set their face against any rescue
schemes for Jewish refugees that did not include Palestine.
Anti-Semitism was endemic in the
war-time British Government and Civil Service. At the Foreign Office Sir Alex
Cadogan was of the opinion in
January 1940 that ‘Jew control of our
propaganda would be [a] major disaster.’
Even the Nazis didn't destroy all traces of civilisation in the countries they attacked
In October 1942 Labour Home Secretary
Herbert Morrisonreceived a delegation of public figures asking
him for visas for 2,000 Jewish childrenand the elderly in VichyFrance. Morrisonrefused. Morrison set his face against
the admission of all but a handful of Jewish refugees. Apparently anti-Semitism
‘was just under the pavement.’ A
month later the Nazis overran Vichy Franceand these Jews were deported to Auschwitz. Morrisonwas said to doubt that the Germans were aiming
at the extermination of the Jews. [Lesley Urbach, The Failure to Amend Britain's Immigration Policy, pp. 52-3].
Israeli Children Sing Of Gaza Annihilation In HUGE Public relations Fail!- Jimmy Dore Show
Anthony Eden - British Foreign Secretary later Prime Minister
On December 17 1942 the Allies declared, that
Hitler was embarked on the extermination of European Jewry. On 8 January 1943,
Foreign Secretary Anthony Edenrejected the request of the Archbishop of
Canterbury, Dr Temple, to provide guarantees to neutral
countries regarding the admission of refugees. Temple also asked that children
in particular be admitted to Britain [Sompolinsky, The British Government and the Holocaust, pp. 88-9]. Despite there being more visas for
children available than children Eden resolutely opposed the request.
Even the Nazis didn't destroy every hospital they encountered
Edenalso opposed issuing a warning by the three
Allied leaders to the Nazis in early 1944 regarding the extermination of the
Jews. Eden’s pretext wasthat such a declaration would be to the Jews’
disadvantage, prompting a furious response from John Pehle of America’s War
Refugee Board that this suggested that the Allies
had no objection to the Final Solution. Edenrelented though he succeeded in watering the
declaration down, excluding Germany’s Jewsas they were Germany’s internal affair.
Neither Biden nor Starmer condemned scenes like this of the humiliation and later torture of civilian populations en masse
Edentold the War Cabinet’s Refugee Committeethat the real reason for his opposition was
that there ‘is likely to be redoubled
pressure upon us for measures of rescue.’ [Sompolinsky p.129]
One
FOofficial was of the opinion that ‘a disproportionate amount of the time of the
office is being wasted in dealing with these wailing Jews.’ [Sompolinsky,
p.209] When 200 Jews, including 70 children, drowned as the Salvadorsank in the Sea of Marmara on 12 December
1940, TM Snow, Head of the FOrefugee section commented that
‘There could have been no more opportune
disaster from the point of view of stopping this traffic.’
[Bernard Wasserstein, Britain and the Jews of
Europe, 1939-1945. p. 69]
Edenwas concerned that if Britain offered to take
in Jewish refugeesthen: ‘Hitlermight well take us up on any such offer.’ [Wasserstein, p.168] The Cabinet Committee on Jewish
Refugees, which included Clement Attlee, sent a memorandum to the US State
Departmenton 20 January 1943 warning that:
there is a possibility that the Germans or
their satellites may change over from the policy of extermination to one of
extrusion, and aim as they did before the war at embarrassing other countries
by flooding them with alien immigrants..
A letter sent by the Ministry of Economic Affairs to US
Ambassador Winant in London, explained how, in respect of a proposal to send
funds to Geneva that:
The Foreign Office are concerned with the difficulties
of disposing of any considerable numbers of Jews should they be
rescued from enemy-occupied territory...’.[Arthur Morse, While Six Million Died, p.
85.]
Fortunately for the Committee Hitlernever wavered in his determination to achieve
a Final Solution. The British Establishment now conveniently forgets what its
record during the Holocaust was like.Much like the Zionists. They all shed tears today about the Holocaust but
their counterparts 80+ years were resolutely opposed to the admission of Jewish
refugees.But today they remember the
holocaust as a justification for the Israeli state, which was created in the
image of Nazi Germany.
As Meier Sompolinsky, a Zionist, admitted in his book The British Government and the Holocaust – The Failure
of Anglo-Jewish leadership,
Zionist policy of that period was to use the spectre
of Jewish annihilation in Europe as pressure to open the gates of Palestine...
The Zionist emphasis was certainly not favourable to the refugee cause.
In fact the Zionists deliberately
undermined and blocked any attempt to rescue Jews that didn’t involve
Palestine. Why? Because their priority was building their ‘Jewish’ State not
saving Jews.
Where the Evian Conference was held
Boaz Evron, a former Israeli
journalist, in his book Jewish State or Israeli
Nation tells us of what happened when President Roosevelt called
the Evian Conference in
July 1938, with delegates from 32 states, in order to decide how to solve the
Jewish refugee question.
The Jewish Agency were extremely
fearful of what might happen if a refuge were found for Jewish refugees from Nazi
Germany that didn’t involve Palestine. According to their anti-Semitic logic,
if a refuge could be found in other countries what was the need for a Jewish
state?They preferred Jews to die at the
hands of the Nazis than live in another country.
This policy did not change when the
Holocaust began in earnest. It remained the same throughout the war. Evron
quotes from the minutes of the Jewish Agency Executive of June 26, 1938 where
it was decided to ‘belittle the
Conferenceas far as possible and to cause it
to decide nothing’.
[Boas Evron, Jewish State or Israeli
Nation, p. 260/1].
In a letter to the American Zionist
leader Stephen Wiseof 13 June 1938, which
was written at the
behest of Chaim Weizmann, the President of the World Zionist Organisation and Israel’s
first President, George Landauer, Director of the Central Bureau for the
Settlement of German Jews, spoke of his concerns.
Even if the conference does not propose immediately after its opening
other countries but Eretz Israel as venues for Jewish emigration, it will
certainly arouse a public response that could put the importance of Eretz
Israel in the shade... We are particularly worried that it would move Jewish organizations to
collect large sums of money for aid to Jewish refugees, and these collections
could interfere with our collection efforts.
Ben-Gurion at a meeting of the JAE of 26
June 1938 was
unremittingly hostile:
‘No rationalizations can turn the conference from a harmful to a useful
one. What can and should be done is to limit the damage as far as possible.'
At
the same meeting another Executive member, Menachem Ussishkinsaid that:
He hoped to hear in Evian that Eretz Israel remains
the main venue for Jewish emigration. All other emigration countries do not
interest him… The greatest danger is
that attempts will be made to find other territories for Jewish emigration.[my emphasis]
Selig Brodetsky
Slovakia was the first country to
deport its Jews to Auschwitz. It was a puppet Nazi state ruled by a Catholic priest,
Father Tiso of the fascist clerical Slovak Peoples Party
and its militia, the Hlinka Guard. When information was received about the
impending mass deportations of Slovakian Jews the Federation of Czechoslovakian
Jews organised a protest demonstration. The rally was held in early June 1942
and invitations were sent to Selig Brodetsky, President of the Board of
Deputies and its Secretary, Abraham Brotman. Both declined to attend. They were
asked to send a declaration but sufficed with a letter to the Chief Rabbi.
As Somplinsky observed (p.69) even Anthony Eden, the
Foreign Secretary and the Catholic Primate Cardinal Hinsley
had sent statements to be read in public. All the President of the BOD would do
was send an indirect letter. Somplinsky wrote that
‘it may be assumed that the heads of the BD believed
that the pain should be concealed and that such issues should not be brought to
the attention of the public.’
The Board of Deputies didn’t believe
in holding a demonstration against the deportation of Jews from Slovakia.In fact its first demonstration
against ‘anti-Semitism’ was against Jeremy Corbyn in March 2018. Clearly Hitler
was a benign figure compared to Corbyn.
In December 1939 the Zionist had
captured the Board of Deputies after nearly 30 years of trying. Brodetsky, a
Leeds University professor was its first Zionist President. For the Zionists it
was the Jewish State uber alles.
The Children of the Kindertransport
Many people will know that after the
Nazi pogrom of Kristallnacht,
the British Government offered 10,000 places for unaccompanied German Jewish
children in Britain, the Kindertransport.
The Zionists were outraged. Those children should go to Palestine or nowhere.
Weizmann demanded that the children
be brought to Palestine. If the Zionists had captured the
Board of Deputiesearlier then the children of the
Kindertransport might have become one more grisly statistic. Malcolm MacDonald, the Colonial Secretary, recalled:
I remember at the time that Weizmann’s attitude shocked me.He insisted on the children going to
Palestine. As far as he was concerned
it was Palestineor nowhere.
When MacDonaldrefused to guarantee
that the children would go on to PalestineWeizmanntold him that: ‘We shall fight you - and when I say fight I
mean fight.’ The Zionist leadership’s greatest fear was that the future and
destiny of Palestineand the plight of
European Jewrywould be considered as
two separate problems. As a result, efforts would be made to solve the problem of
European Jewrywithout using
Palestineas a refuge.
At a meeting of Vaad Leumi, the
Zionist assembly in Palestine on 2 December 1938, Ben-Gurionwas afraid that ‘ideological and territorialist plans would be formulated both among
the Jews and among the Gentiles’.
In a speech to Mapai’s [Israeli Labor
Party] Central Committeeon 9 December1938 he explained why:
If I knew that it would be possible to save all the
children in Germanyby 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.
The Jewish Police in the Warsaw Ghetto
So when Zionists talk about the
Holocaust today we can treat what they say with a hefty pinch of salt. It was
the Zionist movement that provided most of the Judenrat collaborators and Jewish police in
Europe and in Palestine they acted to undermine the Jewish Boycott of Nazi
Germany. That is why, when Israeli state is carrying out a genocide in
Palestine it is more important than ever that we commemorate the Nazi holocaust
and see how its memory has been inverted and distorted to justify the Zionist
holocaust in Gaza.
The Zionists commemorate the Nazi
holocaust only in order that they can use it to legitimise their ongoing
holocaust and genocide. It is no surprise that the German State backs Israel to
the hilt with weaponry. As I wrote in my recent Al Jazeera article Why is Germany supporting
Israel’s genocide in Gaza?there hasn’t barely been a single genocide or holocaust that
the German state hasn’t smiled upon.
On Monday 27 January, Holocaust
Memorial Day, we will be holding a meeting with a difference. We take on board
the words of Yehuda Elkana, a child survivor of Auschwitz,
a profound existential “Angst” fed by a particular interpretation of the lessons of the
holocaust … that we are the eternal victim. In this ancient belief… I see the
tragic and paradoxical victory of Hitler. Two nations, metaphorically speaking,
emerged from the ashes of Auschwitz: a minority who assert, “this must never happen again,” and a frightened and haunted majority
who assert, “this must never happen
to us again.”The
Need to Forget
Elkana went on to say that ‘The very existence of democracy is
endangered when the memory of the dead participates actively in the democratic
process.’ And that is what has happened.The dead Jews of Poland, who when they were alive voted overwhelmingly
against the Zionists, have been conscripted into Netanyahu’s genocidal army.
Zionism has consciously used the
memory of the 6 million dead Jews not to fight racism and fascism but to
justify it.Instead of Auschwitz being a
warning about the dangers of where racism leads, Gaza is permitted because of
Auschwitz.
What the Holocaust does do is provide
the Israeli state with a powerful rationale for its victimhood complex even as
it perpetrates a genocide. All settler states have a victim complex and believe
that it is the settlers who are hard done by. Israel is no different in this
respect but the Holocaust provides a unique moral justification and of course
the West is happy to support this.
Go Fund Me Has Frozen
Donations to the Al Tafawk Children’s Centre in Response to Israel’s Attacks
on Jenin – all Palestine solidarity Activists Should Boycott GFM
For nearly five years, from April 2020 until the
present day, The Brighton Trust
has run a crowdfunder
on the Go Fund Me platform for the Al
Tafawk Children’s Centrein Jenin. In fact we have been raising money
for the Centre since December 2018.
It made sense originally to transfer our haphazard
appeals to a Crowdfunder and GFM seemed as good as any. In that time we have
raised over £65,000 of which GFM took approximately 3%.
In recent years all payments from the crowdfunder
have gone via PayPal’s charitable arm. It was a convenient and simple way of
raising money. For nearly 5 years the appeal ran without a hitch.
Indeed the major problem we had in the past year or
so was transferring money to the Centre. Originally we had done this via
Western Union but since Israel smashed up their offices in Jenin this had not
been possible. We were relying on couriers at one stage.
Go Fund Meis a billion dollar American corporation and I was
under no illusions that one day it might pull the plug. This is exactly what
has happened. Fortunately I made preparations for what might happen by taking
care to collect donors emails.
On
5 January 25, out of the Blue, ‘The GFM team’ sent me an email which couldn’t
even get my name right. It was clearly disingenuous. It began thanking me ‘for your efforts
to help those affected by the conflict in the Middle East.’ Jenin is under occupation by the Israeli state. It is
not part of a ‘conflict’ in the Middle East.
The email then said that ‘Due
to recent developments within the region’ presumably Israel’s Genocide in
Gaza,
we’re
carefully reviewing fundraisers related to this conflict. This is an important
step to help ensure fundraisers are in compliance with all applicable laws and
strictly enforced policies from our payment partners and our Terms of Service.
A totally
meaningless word salad.
‘Because of this, we’ve temporarily placed your fundraiser under
review as we gather more information on your plan to help those abroad.[their
emphasis] During this review, although transfers from your fundraiser are
paused, your fundraiser remains visible to the public and can continue to
receive new donations.
In other words it
would continue to accept money but it wouldn’t pay it out. It gave no reason
for freezing our funds.
The email then
proceeded to ask a series of questions, the answers to most of which they
already had when I set upthe
Crowdfunder and some of which were none of their business. A clue to the real
purpose of the attack on the Crowdfunder was in the additional question which
asked:
‘if the funds raised will be used for
exit/evacuation purposes, please also provide the following:
A detailed
plan on how the funds will be used to ensure a secure departure out of Gaza. If
available, please include the full names of any known coordinators,
organizations, travel agents/agencies, or regions that may be involved in the
passage.
It
finished off by saying that ‘To complete
our review, we need a direct response from you as soon as possible.’The following day I sent an answer to their
questions, with an accompanying message
I have now drawn up my response
to your email. In view of the genocide taking place in Gaza (please don't
play with words) and the settler and military terror that has descended on the
West Bank in the past year, which is entirely to do with settlers wanting to
displace the native Palestinians, I find it difficult to judge your email in a
neutral manner.
Your email has a hidden
agenda and is not simply an information seeking exercise. Nonetheless I have
supplied all the info that you requested.
Back came
a response from ‘Brad’ of GFM Team asking a further set of questions and
completely ignoring my response to the first set of questions. It talked about keeping your account safe when the only
people endangering it were GFM.
‘Brad’
asked for Al Tafawk’s ‘beneficial
ownership structure’ and ‘If any individuals have a 25% stake or
greater in the organization, please also provide their full legal name.’As if
the Al Tafawk Children’s Centre was some piece of real estate in Manhattan
rather than a wobbly building in the middle of a refugee camp. What possible
reason would GFM have for asking this kind of information unless they were
passing it on to the Israelis or their American sponsors?
GFM clearly had a hidden agenda which they were
intent on not revealing. I responded refusing to answer their stupid and illiterate
questions. Instead I made it clear that Jenin is under military occupation. It
is not a sleepy town in America’s mid-West. Normal civil society norms don’t
pertain in such a situation.
By this time I had decided that GFM were highly
unlikely to restore the Crowdfunder and even if they did I wasn’t sure we
wanted to continue with this racist US Corporate Scum.So I set up a new Crowdfunder with Chuffed,
which I encourage people to contribute to. The situation in Jenin is not good.
Whether there will even be a children’s centre to go back to after Israel has
finished what it is doing in the Jenin Refugee Camp is open to question.
Three times in the past three years Israel has
entered the Al Tafawk Centre and wrecked it. The first time was in July 2021, (see
Question
asked about this in the House of Lords). The second
time was in November 2023 and the third time more recently when it also cut
the power cables to the Centre in order to ensure that the children would freeze
in the winter.
It has been very difficult to find out the exact
situation in Jenin and in particular the Al Tafawk Centre. I have had messages
from the headteacher Mona at the Centre, who along with her family has been
evicted from her home.
On Mon, 20 Jan 2025 at 10:45, Mona wrote:
Dear
Tony
Didnt
hear from you since awhile hope u are ok. Here the situation is more and more
strict from both sides ! The Israeli helicopters over us all the time ready to
bomb ! We are still able to be in the center in the mornings
Again
hope you are ok
Wednesday 22 January 2025
The
words couldnt really describe the horrible situation we are facing here….
Hundreds of people cant survive inside the camp
My
father is missed from yesterday … we are here taking people and children who
kicked from the camp
Mater
is Arrested"
Thu
23 Jan, 04:35
Dear Tony
I cant go to the bank right now! People are kicked
from the camp ! They arrested all the men nacked for unknown places and we as
women and children collected and stay in one place ! As now the center is still
standing ! I gave karen my sister number if something bad happen to me ! But be
sure the center is still there ! WE NEED YOUR VOICE TO SHOUT FOR ALL OF US TONY.
WE are facing things we never believed could happen .
Mona
Fri 24 Jan, 11:35
Tony sadly the news is very
bad
We are (the families surround the
camp) kicked from homes but we are not allowed to go farther about 200 people
don't have a place. But there are a lot familes and children inside and use the
center
Thank you very much we cant reach
the bank right now . Things are really horrible. We lost the connection with my
father .
While we were walking outside we
had to be each 5 people together and made picture for each one and then they
arrested randomly or
Send us to a place they decide.
MichaEL
11:38 25 Jan 25
Yesterday Mona informed me via
WhatsApp that her family was forcibly evicted from their home in the Jenin Camp
as part of the current IDF operation in Jenin. Mona's father is now missing.
Her brother has been arrested.
Today Mona informed me that she
and her family are in a 'safer place' near the camp, so presumably outside the
camp itself. Mona said that she herself is "very sick" but she didn't
go into detail. Possibly from all the stress.
So it is uncertain whether Mona
and her family will be able to return to the camp, let alone reopen her
Children's Centre. I hope you can help her in some way to give her some hope of
opening her Centre again, if not in Jenin then somewhere else in Palestine.
Mona
Jalamnh
16:26 25th January
2025
Dear Tony
I got inflammation from the gaze
when we were going out side the camp . The situation is more than awful . There
are too much people couldn't go out with us cause the ways are horrible so we
lost connection with the families who are inside . I am staying near by the
camp and we are not allowed to move farther . We called the ambulance to move
me to hospital but sadly they are not allowed to come to the place me and my
family . I didn't expect this . I will update you. We are here moving
from home to other home with the children and women .who could leave with us
It is clear that with the advent of the Trump
Presidency Netanyahu and his far-right government intend to proceed to not only
the annexation of the West Bank but a policy of subjugation and ethnic
cleansing. Settler terror, aided and abetted by the Israeli army, is the rule
now in the West Bank. Trump has withdrawn even the pathetically puny sanctions
on violent settlers that Biden imposed.
How this plays out with ‘normalisation’ with the
Saudi regime is anyone’s guess but I suspect that in the end we can rely on Saudi
Arabia’s Mohammed Bin Salman to sell the Palestinians out. The Saud’s have no
loyalty except to the American dollar.
Jenin was first softened up by the Quisling
Palestinian Authority forces, which are funded by the West. It is a
disgrace that Britain’s Palestine Solidarity Campaign has refused so far to
call them out for what they are. The Anti-Apartheid Movement in this country
never failed to call out a similar force in South Africa under Apartheid, Mangosuthu
Buthelezi’s Inkatha Freedom
Party which also attacked the liberation movement.
Although we are now in Phase 1 of the ceasefire it
is highly unlikely that it will proceed to Phases 2 and 3. Netanyahu has
already promised the fascist and ‘proud homophobe’ Bezalel Smotrich, the
Finance Minister and Gauleiter of the West Bank, and his Religious Zionism party,
that war in Gaza will be resumed. Zionism is now off the leash and it is clear
that by themselves the Palestinians are not strong enough to throw them back,
despite the magnificent resistance in Gaza to date which has resulted in a
situation whereby the resistance forces and Hamas are now estimated
to be as strong today as they were 15 months ago.
Israel is the only state in the world not to have defined
borders. We saw what that meant with the fall of Assad when Israel promptly invaded
Syria, grabbing more land and bombing Syrian forcesAll of which happened without one word of
criticism from the West’s leaders who only wake up when, as happened on October
7th, the Palestinians strike back.
Vladimir Jabotinsky - founder of the Revisionist Zionist movement
But if it was Syria today then we can be sure that
if Israel succeeds in ethnically cleansing the Palestinians of the West Bank or
subduing them that the Jordanian border will be the next place where Israel will
feel bound to exercise its ‘right to self-defence’. After all the original slogan
of the Revisionist Zionists was ‘the West Bank is ours and the East Bank too.’
It is long overdue for the Arab working class and
the Arab street to wake up and remove the corrupt and repressive leaders of
their countries who have squandered their oil wealth propping up the economy of
the United States and the West.
During the War, Switzerland Turned Away Jewish Refugees from Nazi Germany - It Even Insisted that the Nazis Put ‘J' on the Passports of German
Jews
The
kidnapping of Ali Abunimah on the streets of Zurich by the Swiss Gestapo is no
surprise. Switzerland has a history of authoritarianism. In Europe today
freedom of speech is under attack in a way not seen since before World War II.
Ali
described what happened in an article he wrote on the plane to Istanbul:
I
was abducted off the street around 1:30pm on Saturday while on my way to the
Palestine teach-in by undercover agents, handcuffed, forced into an unmarked
car and sped straight to the prison. My “crime”? Being a journalist who speaks
up for Palestine and against Israel’s genocide and settler-colonial savagery
and those who aid and abet it.
As
Ali says:
Speaking
out for Palestine is not a crime! Standing against racist genocidal Zionism is
not a crime! Say it with me ‘From the River to the Sea Palestine Will Be Free!’
I’m free! I wrote this on the plane and I’m posting it just after landing at Istanbul. On Monday evening I was brought to Zurich airport in handcuffs, in a small metal cage inside a windowless prison van and led all the way to the plane by police. This is after three days and two… pic.twitter.com/S4BF2eEYYQ
It
is a little known fact that even the Nazis hesitated to mark the passports of German
Jews. It was Heinrich Rothmund, the Head of the Swiss Police, who insisted
that the Nazis mark the passports of Jews with a ‘J'. After all how could the
Swiss immigration authorities tell who was a Jew and who wasn’t when it came to
turning back refugees from Germany?What
the good burghers of the Alpine country didn’t want was an influx of German Jewish
refugees.
Switzerland
was an ostensibly neutral country, the only one apart from Sweden that wasn’t
invaded, but in practice it was pro-Nazi and performed many valuable financial
tasks for the Nazi state. Swiss banks were happy to accept the deposits of German
Jewish citizens as well as much of the loot that the Nazis stole from their
victims, but they were less keen to disgorge their ill-gotten gains after the
war.
Switzerland
served as a repository for Jewish capital smuggled out of Nazi Germany and the
states threatened by it, and also for vast quantities of gold and other
valuables plundered from Jews and others all over Europe. Right up until the
end of the war, Switzerland laundered hundreds of millions of dollars in stolen
assets, including gold taken from the central banks of German-occupied Europe.
At the war's end Switzerland successfully resisted Allied calls to restitute
these funds, and in the Washington Agreement of 1946 the Allies contented
themselves with acceptance of a mere 12% of the stolen gold. Holocaust
survivors and the heirs of those who perished met an implacable wall of
bureaucracy and only a handful managed to reclaim their assets.
The Electronic Intifada's executive director @AliAbunimah was deported by Switzerland on Monday after spending two nights in jail. https://t.co/Mg4gJC6wc0
A
report by an independent inquiry into Switzerland's second world war history
concludes that Swiss officials "helped the Nazi regime achieve its
goals" by closing the country's borders to thousands of Jewish refugees,
effectively sending them back to near certain death.
The
findings of the multinational Independent Commission of Experts, led by a Swiss
historian, Jean-François Bergier, and established by the Swiss parliament three
years ago, have shaken Switzerland's prim view of itself as an unsullied,
neutral, safe-haven that resisted Nazi oppression.
The
report concludes that the authorities knew by the summer of 1942 that Jewish
refugees arriving at the country's borders faced almost certain death when they
were turned back.
"Even
after they were informed about the unbelievable and unimaginable events taking
place, the federal authorities - like the governments of most other states -
made few changes in their policies regarding refugees. Most frequently, neutral
states demonstrated indifference and passivity or attempted to accommodate the
Nazi system."
Raul Hilberg's description in Destruction of the European Jews of the Swiss role in German Jews Having Their Passports Stamped with a 'J'
I
wrote in my book about how the International Committee of the Red Cross refused
to provide any protection for Jews since they had accepted the Nazi designation
of them as stateless and common criminals. The official history of the War Refugee Board
noted that;
The Board also
appealed to the International Committee of the Red Cross time and again to take
direct and aggressive action to obtain humanitarian treatment for the helpless
minorities being persecuted so viciously by the Germans. For many months,
however, request after request from the Board met with the answer that the
Germans would not permit the proposed action.
According
to ICRCPresident Max Huberthey could not be seen to be ‘intruding into the domestic policy’ of the
Nazis.’
There were
discussions throughout August 1942 about the murder of Jewish civilians yet at
the ICRCexecutive of 14 October 1942 the pro-Nazi
former foreign minister of Switzerland,
Philip Etter,
‘opposed even the anodyne Huberdraft’ calling for the humane treatment of
civilians, not even Jews, ‘arguing that it could be interpreted as a violation
of neutrality.’ Etter’s view
prevailed.
In the
Netherlands the Dutch Red Crossmade no effort to communicate with deported
Jews ‘although it did send a fully equipped ambulance to the Eastern front ‘to
comfort the Dutch Waffen-SSvolunteers fighting there.’
The
Dutch historian, Louis de Jong,condemned the ICRCfor its ‘almost total lack of concern for the
Jews’ disasters.’
My ‘Crime’ is
Supporting Palestinian Resistance While the British State Aids Israel’s
Genocide
Hillary Clinton: "we created the problem we are fighting today" | How the US created al-Qaeda
On
December 20 2023 I was arrested in a dawn raid at my home by officers of Counter-Terrorism
Police SE. Their logo states that their objective is to counter
terrorism but today it is to criminalise support for liberation
movements and anti-colonial struggles – be they in Palestine or Kurdistan.
My
first reaction on being told I was being arrested for a tweet I had posted a month
previously was ‘this is Orwellian’ .At first I was led to believe
that I was being prosecuted under s.12(1A) of the
Terrorism Act 2000, ‘expressing
an opinion or belief that is supportive of a proscribed organisation’.
Now
I understand the prosecution is under s.12(1) of the Terrorism Act 2000
This
is a blatant attempt to criminalise support for any anti-colonial or resistance
organisation of the oppressed. Israel is in an illegal occupation of Gaza, as
it has been for 58 years but any expression for armed resistance against Israel’s
military and genocidal violence is a criminal offence.
We
only have to remember when Margaret Thatcher called
the ANC a terrorist organisation to know that none of this is new. There has
always been an attempt by governments to brand armed opposition ‘terrorist’.
The Nazis called the French and Czech resistance ‘terrorist’.
As
Professor
John Dugard KC, a distinguished South Africa International Lawyer and ad-hoc
judge of the International Court of Justice said:
Terrorism is
an emotive word that has no place in the assessment of the conduct of either a
government or a resistance movement. One man’s freedom fighter is another man’s
terrorist. Few would today label members of the French resistance in World War
II as “terrorist” and most would have no hesitation in describing the Nazi
forces as “terrorist”. Yet today most western states refrain from describing
the acts of government forces as acts of terror but have no hesitation in so
describing the acts of resistance movements and other non-state actors.
The Central Criminal Court 'The Old Bailey'
The
use of proscription, be it against Hamas or the PKK, the Kurdish Workers Party
is an attempt to shut down free speech on support for groups that the British government
does not approve of for political reasons. It has nothing whatsoever to do with
terrorism.
We
all know what terrorism is. It is the planting of a bomb in July 2017 that killed 22
young people at the Manchester Arena Ariana Grande Concert or the attack by
ISIS on the Bataclan concert in Paris that murdered some 100 people.
But
here’s the rub. Salman Abedi was allowed to
go to fight with Libyan jihadi groups in the fight against Colonel Gaddaffis’s
government by MI5.ISIS which carried out
the Bataclan attacks didn’t even exist before Britain and the United States illegal
attack on Iraq.
The
‘terrorism’ that is used as a pretext to attack domestic support for the
resistance organisations of the oppressed has in most cases been created by
western foreign policy. Hilary Clinton admitted that it was US
policy of supporting Jihadi fighters in Afghanistan which created Al
Qaeda.Every time that the British and
American states have employed far-right Islamist fighters to take out regimes
they don’t like there has been blow back.
And
today we see the blow back in terms of our own rights and civil liberties. It
is not me, Natalie
Strecker, Sarah
Wilkinson or Asa
Winstanley or Richard
Medhurst, all of whom have had their homes raided, computer equipment
stolen and been arrested and/or charged (except for Asa) accused of supporting
terrorism. That accolade belongs to the British government and the intelligence
agencies.
That
is what my trial and the trial of all the other people who have been arrested
is about.And that is why you should
join me on Friday January 31 outside the Central Criminal Court, the Old
Bailey, in London.
The
government has even attempted to roll back the right of jurors, derived
from the 1670 case of Edward
Bushells, to deliver a verdict contrary to a judge’s directions and in
accordance with their conscience with the arrest of
Trudy Warner and others who had the temerity to inform jurors of their right.
The Refusal
of the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust to
Include the Gaza Genocide in their Festivities Demonstrates that our Rulers
Have Learnt Nothing from Auschwitz
693 people registered for the meeting and over 60%
of them attended. Normally attendance is little over 50% of those registered.
The largest number of people watching at any time was 388 but the maximum
number of people who did watch was 428. Many
people contacted us to say that they couldn’t attend but that they wanted to
see a recording. So here it is!
We
are told by the BBC and our rulers that we must learn the lessons of the
Holocaust. Below is a picture of the Official Hypocrites including Chief Rabbi
Mirvis, a rabid settler trained racist and an enthusiastic supporter of Israel’s
genocide in Gaza.
The Holocaust must never be allowed to become a
simple fact of history...the lessons of the Holocaust are relevant today.’ however
this pompous foolrefrained from telling us what these lessons
were.Perhaps because that might
exposethe hypocrisy at the centre of
the official festivities.
Britain’s
Holocaust Memorial Day Trustexcluded
the Gaza Genocide from all mention of the Holocaust. In its FAQs it asked ‘Should I acknowledge the conflict in the Middle
East in my HMD activity? And if so, how?’Its answer was simple: ‘We
do not recommend it.’ Thus is demonstrated the moral bankruptcy of the official
celebrations, because that is really what they are – a celebration of
imperialism.
The
advice of the HMD is no surprise when people like the President of the Genocide
supporting Board of Deputies, Phil Rosenberg, sits
on the HMD board. The Jewish
Chronicleand the right-wing press got all worked up by the Islamic Human Rights
Commission call to boycott
their celebrations.
Chikli, Israel's Diaspora Minister and Thug decided not to risk arrest by travelling abroad
The Israeli government minister Amichai Chikli openly threatened me. This is a blatant act of terrorism and incitement. I will be filing a lawsuit against him. What a hallucinating sense of impunity. pic.twitter.com/zd1TwKoHHm
The
Telegraph had one of its normal moral fits at the suggestion that the HMD might
include all genocides in HMD, including the Palestinian holocaust. It quoted the Zionist
propagandist and CEO of the Holocaust Educational
Trust, the morally bankrupt Karen Pollock, as saying that:
Just days before we mark Holocaust Memorial Day... we are appalled to
see that the Islamic Human Rights Commission continue this tasteless campaign
to undermine such a significant day.
Their cynical attempt to denigrate the memory of the Holocaust by
drawing false parallels between the Holocaust – a unique and unprecedented
episode in history – and unrelated current events, will not succeed.
Hind when she graduated from senior kindergarten - cruelly butchered by Israel
Quite
how the memory of those who died in the holocaust is ‘denigrated’ by comparing
their deaths to those in Gaza is difficult to comprehend. Is the death of a Jewish
child in Auschwitz any different from that of Hind Rajab, who
was murdered because an Israeli tank fired a shell at her and the two paramedics
who came to rescue her?
Ukrainian Police Auxiliaries
The
disgusting racist, Karen Pollok, called the Gaza genocide an ‘unrelated current event.’ If anyone is defiling and denigrating the memory of the largely anti-Zionist
Jews who died in the holocaust it is Pollok. But then she is CEO of a Zionist holocaust
industry organisation whose sole purpose is to harness the holocaust to the Israeli
state’s apartheid existence.
The Genocide of Palestinians is different according to Pollok and whatever
we do we mustn’t compare. Zionists hate comparisons because they know that the
actions of Israel can only be defended by pretending that Israel is unique,
being a ‘Jewish’ state that doesn’t have to operate according to the norms of
civilised society. Once you compare Israel’s behaviour to others then you
cannot help but notice that Israel is a rogue state, barbaric and racist in its
determination to effect ethnic cleansing and not at all bothered by the numbers
it kills.
So what are the lessons that Pollok, Rosenberg, Mirvis et al intend us
to learn?That Israel, Hitler’s posthumous
victory, must be given more bombs and bullets in order that it can perpetrate
more genocides and finish the job. This is Zionist morality.
Israel
has killed
up to 300,000 Palestinian men, women and children, the International Court of
Justice has said
that a genocide is plausibly taking
place yet the imperialist narrative demands that Israel’s genocide be treated
as ‘self defence’.
Our
war criminal ruling class, not least the German State, uses the holocaust to reinforce
their genocidal narrative by claiming that Israel is the inheritor of the
memory of the Jews who died. These are the lessons they draw from the holocaust.
‘Although Israel claims to represent the memory of
the Jews who died in the holocaust the reality is that Israel has inherited the
memory and stepped into the shoes of those who killed them.’
It
is a great pity that the IHRC fell into the trap that was laid for them.
Instead of simply boycotting HMD they should have actively promoted our own
meeting and thus shown that they had something to say about the holocaust.
This
webinar refused to be part of the official festivities because that is what
they really were. They were not a commemoration. Representatives from Israel and
all the imperialist states – the United States, Britain and Germany – who are
supplying Israel with the means to annihilate the Palestinian people were
present.
Yet
strangely enough the very state which bore the brunt of the Nazi war machine
and which liberated Auschwitz, Russia, was not present. Instead Volodymyr Zelensky,
leader of the Ukrainian police state, which celebrates a national holiday each
year on the birthday of Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera was
invited. Bandera was the leader of the Organisation
of Ukrainian Nationalists
(OUN-B) whose members, in their role as the Ukrainian Auxiliary
Police, participated in the massacre of 33,000 Jews at Babi Yar, Kyiv on
September 29-30 1941.
Baby Yar Memorial
Babi
Yar was the largest Nazi massacre of Jews up to that date and one of the
largest of the war.Bandera’s Ukrainian Insurgent
Army was heavily involved in massacres of Jews, Poles and Roma.
Speakers
at the webinar were Stephen Kapos, a Jewish child survivor who was hidden in
Budapest during the Hungarian Holocaust; Suzanne Weiss, a Jewish child survivor
who was hidden in Auvergne in France by the Communist resistance; Ghada Karmi,
a child survivor of the Nakba in Palestine when Zionist militias ethnically
cleansed the native Palestinians to create their Jewish state, Rania Khalek, a
Lebanese journalist who directs Breakthrough News; Ronny Kasrils, the Jewish
former commander of Umkonte we Sizwe, the ANC's military wing and former MP in
Nelson Mandela's first government and Tony Greenstein, the first Jewish member
of the Labour Party to be expelled under Corbyn and author of 'Zionism During the Holocaust'. Tariq
Ali, who was due to speak, was unfortunately ill and couldn't make it.
The
Zionists and their imperialist backers use the Nazi holocaust of the Jews as a
justification for Israel’s holocaust in Gaza.We draw the opposite conclusion which is why we held this webinar. The
official state ceremonies draw no anti-racist or anti-fascist conclusions.
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