It's Not Gun Control but a Violent, Racist society that Killed 20 Children in Newtown Connecticut

 

Flags are flying at half-staff across Connecticut in remembrance of the victims of the Newtown elementary school shooting.  Unfortunately the Stars and Stripes are themselves dripping with blood.

No one can doubt for a moment the trauma and pain of the parents of the children in Connecticut at the act of savagery that took the lives of their children away.  However this is not the ‘one-off’ act of a madman. 


Sandy Hook Elementary School on morning of shooting.Newtown Bee/ZUMA Press

The response of much of the Left, people like Michael Moore, is to blame what happens in the USA on a lack of gun control, arising from the constitutional right to bear arms.  
There have been repeated acts of killings in schools and shopping malls in the United States. As the following history shows,  mass killings at schools and other public places are almost the norm in America.On May 20, 1999, Heritage High School, Conyers, Georgia, six students were injured by a 15-year-old shooter. On November 19, 1999, in Deming, New Mexico, Victor Cordova, Jr., 12, shot and killed 13-year-old Araceli Tena in the lobby of the Deming Middle School. And on December 6, 1999, at Fort Gibson, Oklahoma, four students were wounded when Seth Trickey, 13, opened fire with a 9mm semiautomatic handgun at the Fort Gibson Middle School.

On February 29, 2000, at the Mount Morris Township, Michigan, six-year-old Kayla Rolland was shot dead at Buell Elementary School by six-year-old Dedric Owens with a .32-caliber handgun, which he had found in his uncle’s home.

On March 10, 2000, in Savannah, Georgia, two teenagers were killed by a 19-year-old, while leaving a dance sponsored by Beach High School. On May 26, 2000, English teacher Barry Grunow was shot and killed at Lake Worth Middle School by Nathaniel Brazill, 13, with a .25-caliber semiautomatic pistol on the last day of classes. On January 17, 2001, a student was shot and killed in front of Lake Clifton Eastern High School in Baltimore, Maryland. On March 5, 2001, two students were killed and 13 wounded by Charles Andrew Williams, 15, firing from a bathroom at Santana High School in Santee, California. On March 7, 2001, 14-year-old Elizabeth Catherine Bush wounded student Kimberly Marchese in the cafeteria of Bishop Neumann High School in Williamsport, Pa.

On March 22, 2001, Jason Hoffman, 18, wounded a teacher and three students at Granite Hills High School, Granite Hills, California. On March 30, 2001, a student at Lew Wallace High School in Gary, Indiana, was killed by Donald R. Burt, Jr., a 17-year-old student who had been expelled from the school. On November 12, 2001, Chris Buschbacher, 17, took two hostages at the Caro Learning Center in Caro, Michigan, before killing himself.

On April 24, 2003, James Sheets, 14, killed Principal Eugene Segro of Red Lion Junior High School, Red Lion, Pa., before killing himself. On September 24, 2003, at Rocori High School in Cold Spring, Minnesota, two students were killed by John Jason McLaughlin, 15.

On March 21, 2005, at the Red Lake reservation in Red Lake, Minnesota, 16-year-old Jeffrey Weise killed his police sergeant grandfather and his grandfather’s girlfriend, then later drove his grandfather’s police vehicle to Red Lake Senior High School where, at 2:45 p.m. he began shooting, killed seven people on the school campus, including five students, one teacher, and an unarmed security guard, and wounded five others.

On November 8, 2005, in Jacksboro, Tennessee, a 15-year-old shot and killed an assistant principal at Campbell County High School, and seriously wounded two other administrators. On August 24, 2006, Christopher Williams, 27, shot two teachers and wounded another. Before going to the school, he had killed his ex-girlfriend’s mother.

On September 27, 2006, an adult male held six students hostage at Platte Canyon High School, Bailey, Colorado, then shot and killed Emily Keyes, 16, and himself. Two days later, on September 29, in Cazenovia, Wisconsin, a 15-year-old student shot and killed Weston School principal, John Klang.

On October 3, 2006, in Nickel Mines, Pa., a 32-year-old milk-truck driver, Carl Charles Roberts, entered the one-room West Nickel Mines Amish School and shot 10 schoolgirls, ranging in age from six to 13 years old, and then himself. Five of the girls and Roberts died. A movie has already been made of this chilling tragedy.

On January 3, 2007, Douglas Chanthabouly, 18, shot fellow student Samnang Kok, 17, in Henry Foss High School, Tacoma, Washington. On April 16, 2007, in Blacksburg, Virginia, a 23-year-old Virginia Tech Student, Cho Seung-Hui, killed two in a dorm, then killed 30 more two hours later in a classroom building. His suicide brought the death toll to 33, making that shooting rampage the most deadly in U.S. history. Fifteen others were wounded.

On September 21, 2007, at Delaware State University, Dover, freshman Loyer D. Brandon shot and wounded two other freshmen students on the university campus. On October 10, 2007, 14-year-old Asa H. Coon shot and injured two students and two teachers before killing himself at Cleveland High School, Cleveland, Ohio.

On February 8, 2008, a nursing student at Louisiana Technical College, in Baton Rouge, shot and killed two women and then herself in a classroom. Three days later, in Memphis, Tennessee, a 17-year-old student at Mitchell High School shot and wounded a classmate in gym class. A day later, on February 12, 2008, in Oxnard, California, a 14-year-old boy shot a student at E. O. Green Junior High School causing the 15-year-old victim to become brain dead. Two days later, on February 14, a gunman killed five students, wounded 17 others, and then killed himself when he opened fire on a classroom at Northern Illinois University.

On November 12, 2008, a 15-year-old female student was shot and killed by a classmate at Dillard High School in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

On February 5, 2010, at the Discovery Middle School in Madison, Alabama, a ninth grader was shot by another student during a class change. The boy pulled out a gun and shot Todd Brown in the head while walking in the hallway. On February 12, at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, Amy Bishop, a biology professor, shot her colleagues, killing three and wounding three others.

On January 5, 2011, in Omaha, Nebraska, two people were killed and two more injured in a shooting at Millard South High School. Shortly after being suspended from school, the shooter returned and shot the assistant principal, principal, and the school nurse. The shooter then left campus and took his own life. On that same day, in Houston, Texas, two gunmen opened fire during a Worthing High School powder-puff football game. One former student died, and five others were wounded.

On May 10, 2011, in San Jose, California, three people were killed at San Jose State University. Two former students were found dead on the fifth floor of the garage. A third, the suspected shooter, died later at the hospital. On December 8, 2011, at Blacksburg, Virginia, a Virginia Tech police officer was shot and killed by a 22-year-old student from Radford University on Virginia Tech’s campus.

On February 10, 2012, in Walpole, New Hampshire, a 14-year-old student shot himself in front of seventy fellow students. Seven days later, at Chardon High School, in Chardon, Ohio, a former student opened fire, killing three students.
 Yet Norway has a higher ownership of guns per head of population. Switzerland is similar, in that it has always had a citizens’ army. Yet in these countries you don’t have these repeated outbreaks of mass murder. Certainly in Norway there was the murderous rampage of Andres Breivik, the Norwegian fascist and Zionist. But his motives were clear, to kill as many young, left-wing people as possible. And what Breivik did was all but approved by people like ex-Fox News mouthpiece, Glenn Beck, who called those who died ‘Hitler Youth’ for supporting the Palestinians.
 The fact is that the 20 children who died in Connecticut are no different from the hundreds of Afghan children, Palestinian children and others who die, daily, because of US drones and missiles and other weapons of murder and mayhem. A violent society begets violence and the children of Newtown are the price that the United States pays for its approval, support and use of violence beyond its border.

Tony Greenstein

Say NO to Pinkwashing

 

The video speaks for itself!

Jesus at Israel's Checkpoint



Israel's Irish Embassy's Racist Cartoon

 As any half-wit with a couple of brain cells to spare would know, Christianity developed out of a struggle amongst the Jewish community in Palestine. The poor Jews and farmers gradually became Christianised and today their descendants are the Christian Palestinians. The better off either emigrated and became traders or moved to the Hellenised cities of the Middle East like Alexandria or Damascus.

None of this stopped the Israeli embassy in Dublin issuing a post on the Israel in Ireland Facebook page which showed a picture of Mary and Jesus, accompanied by the comment: "A thought for Christmas . . . If Jesus and mother Mary were alive today, they would, as Jews without security, probably end up being lynched in Bethlehem by hostile Palestinians. Just a thought . . ."

The Israeli Embassy has apologised and taken down the post. Among the posts it attracted was one saying: "Have you no regard for honesty whatsoever? If Jesus Mary were alive today, they would be protesting against the Israeli occupation of Palestine, along with all the Palestinian Christians currently living in Bethlehem."

Crosspost from Jewssansfrontieres

Edited by an Idiot - But was it worth hacking?

Warning that the Jewish Chronicle site is dangerous for one's computer and mental health

I was sorry to hear that the Jewish Chronicle web site has apparently been hacked!  I say apparently, because the following message appeared ‘Warning - visiting this web site may harm your computer!’

Stephen Pollard - without doubt the worst ever editor of the Jewish Chronicle - presiding over a precipitous circulation decline

The thing is, it’s not the computer I’m worried about.  Visiting the JC's site is far likelier to damage your mind, especially now that its editor, Stephen Pollard, is in charge, having been fired by Britain’s largest porn operator, Richard Desmond, from editing that quality paper, the Daily Express.

On Question Time Pollard demonstrated the quality of his intellect, when he said of Rupert Murdoch that ‘he has done more to enrich our lives than any other single human being of the past generation and should be a hero for his commitment to freedom’.  Try telling that to the relatives of the Hillsborough dead, or the Miners battered in the Great Strike or any other workers involved in disputes, or the family of Milly Dowler.  It just shows the warped and distorted logic of the fool who edits the JC.

Rupert Murdoch - the Boss of a Criminal Empire who Stephen Pollard believes has made the greatest contribution towards freedom of any human being alive!

And when questioned by David Dimbleby about whether he really stood by this extraordinary statement, Pollard responded ‘absolutely, absolutely’. 

Tally-Ho as the Toffs and Tory Press Wage a Campaign of Hate Against the Disabled & Unemployed

This blog has taken a break for a few weeks for a number of reasons, not least the need for me to do some writing unencumbered by the demands of a blog.


Here is an excellent cartoon showing our  hunting and horsey Prime Minister, fresh from his outings with Rebecca Brooks and riding a Metropolitan Police nag, indulging in a sport favoured among the ruling class – demonisation of the poor to protect their class.  It is taken from that excellent site Outrage 

It is unfortunate that politically the unemployed and working class in Britain to day are so politically backwards that many of them fall for this divide and rule nonsense.  Instead of the politics of class solidarity they fall for the campaigns of the Express and Mail in seeking a fresh scapegoat when the real reason  for poverty stares them in the face.

But if one wants to find a real parasite, then who better than Prince Charles, the Royal Family and those who caused the economic crisis?  Why he even employs someone to squeeze this tube of toothpaste - he is by all accounts known as the 'silver stick'!

His Royal Highness the Chief Parasite

Apart from receiving extra state support, despite his multi-million income from the Duchy of Cornwall, Prince Charles also receives massive funding from the State directly.  as well as having received millions of pounds in ‘set-aside’ grants from the Europe – i.e. you are paid not to grow anything.

Another recipient is the Duke of Westminster, the third richest person in Britain with a fortune estimated at £6.5 billion, who collected £486,534 for his farm.

Top Ten Anti-Semites Controversy Wiesenthal Center Refuses Debate with Accused Author

Jakob Augstein - the world's '9 worst anti-Semite'

Well can you believe it?   The US based Simon Wiesenthall Centre, not to be confused with its Austrian counterpart, publishes a ‘top-10’ of the world’s worst anti-Semites!  And of course Arabs head the lists – the Egyptian Brotherhood number one and the Iranian regime number two.  The fact that Iran has 25,000 Jews living in it, the largest in the Middle East bar Israel, is discounted.

Of course genuine anti-Semites barely get a look in.  Only anti-Semitic European fascist groups which oppose purportedly oppose Israel like Greece's Golden Dawn and Hungaruy's Jobbik are included in the list.  Not so those far more numerous fascist and neo-fascist groups like the French Front Nationale, or Polands Law and Justice Party or Latvia’s Freedom & Fatherland Party, which marches each year with veterans of the Latvian SS.  But strangely enough a writer for the German Spiegel magazine and a critic of Israel, Jakob Augstein was also included at number 9. 

Rabbi Meyer - well-paid head of the Wiesenthall Propaganda Centre

Note that Germany's National Democratic Party, which is a neo-Nazi party with elected representatives in at least one state parliament, is not included.  Nor is Gert Wilder’s Freedom Party.  Nor is the BNP or EDL.  After all they are nearly all pro-Zionist.

And what has this virulent anti-Semite, Augstein, done to be included on a list of the world’s anti-Semites?  Well here is a flavour of the ‘evidence’ cited against him:

“Israel’s nuclear power is a danger to the already fragile peace of the world. This statement has triggered an outcry.Because it’s true. And because it was made by a German, Guenter Grass, author and Nobel Prize winner. That is the key point. One must, therefore, thank him for taking it upon himself to speak for us all.”

“Israel is threatened by Islamic fundamentalists in its neighborhood. But the Jews also have their fundamentalists, the ultra-orthodox Hareidim. They are not a small splinter group. They make up 10% of the Israeli population. They are cut from the same cloth as their Islamic fundamentalist opponents. They follow the law of revenge.”

Apparently criticism of Israel’s nuclear weapons and pointing out the fact that the most virulent racism today in the Middle East comes from the Orthodox within Israel, is a taboo – it must not be mentioned.  And when it is then it must be swiftly dealt with as ‘anti-Semitic’.

Spiegel Magazine naturally wished to deal with the matter, but not by way of a ritual defence of its writer.  So it asked the Wiesenthall Centre to have a debate between the person who made the allegations, Rabbi Abraham Cooper and Augstein concerning the allegations made.  After considering the matter for a day, Cooper agreed, but on one condition.  First Augstein had to apologise for his statements!  So the only debate that Cooper and the Wiesenthall Centre will enter is one where their opponent concedes his case in advance!  What they are not willing to do is to public debate any challenge to their accusations.

And the morale of this story?  That Zionist accusations of ‘anti-Semitism’ melt like snow in the desert when subject to scrutiny.

Tony Greenstein

Simon Wiesenthall Centre Includes Critic of Israel as the World’s 9th worst anti-Semite

By Clemens Höges

The Simon Wiesenthal Center has triggered a major debate by listing a prominent German publisher and SPIEGEL ONLINE columnist among the world's top 10 anti-Semites. The evidence is debatable, but now the center refuses to speak to the publisher unless he apologizes first.

The Simon Wisenthall's Los Angeles HQ

It seemed like a completely unexpected stab in the back -- a startling assault from someone who is generally considered to be harmless.
ANZEIGE
On December 27, the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center published its current "Top 10" list (PDF) of the world's worst anti-Semites, a list the center has published near the end of each year since 2010. The Jewish organization has a good reputation, certainly due in part to the fact that it was named after the legendary Nazi hunter when it was founded in 1977.

The usual suspects can be found in the top spots of the 2012 list of "anti-Semitic/anti-Israel slurs": Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood is in first place, followed by the Iranian regime, which aims to destroy the state of Israel. Not the kind of list one wants to be a part of.

But prominent German journalist Jakob Augstein, publisher of the weekly newspaper Der Freitag and author of a regular column on SPIEGEL ONLINE (which is occasionally translated into English for publication), appears in 9th place on the list.

It's a scandal. SPIEGEL immediately sought to find out what had happened and why Augstein had appeared on the list -- but failed. It is a failure that speaks volumes about the methods and position of the Wiesenthal Center. At issue are absurd demands and emails that seem to stem from a different world.

After the list was published, a passionate debate erupted in German newspapers over what constitutes justifiable criticism of Israeli policies and what exactly defines anti-Semitism. Most journalists felt that the accusation against Augstein was absurd, with the exception of Henryk Broder, a former SPIEGEL writer and well-known polemicist. Broder, in an effort to illustrate Augstein's lack of self reflection, even went so far as to liken him to a pedophile who views himself as a friend of children.

Salomon Korn, vice president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, seemed to put an end to the debate when he said that he had never had the impression that Augstein's writings were anti-Semitic, and suggested that the Americans hadn't done their homework. Korn said on the radio station Deutschlandradio Kultur, that the Americans were "pretty far removed, in a manner of speaking, from German reality."

No Evidence

It's a tricky issue for SPIEGEL. Augstein isn't a member of the editorial staff, nor does he have any influence over the content of the magazine. Augstein doesn't even write for the magazine per se, since SPIEGEL ONLINE, its Web-based sister publication, has its own editorial staff.

Nevertheless, he is the adopted son of SPIEGEL founder Rudolf Augstein. As heirs, he and his siblings own 24 percent of the SPIEGEL publishing house. We didn't want to attack him, because we believe that the accusation against him is wrong. But we could hardly defend him, because every reader would expect us to defend him. Doing so would devalue every sentence.

But there was a possible solution: We believed that readers could form their own opinions about the accusations if we presented both positions. So we tried to organize a debate between Augstein and the person at the Wiesenthal Center in charge of the list so as to allow the opponents to argue their sides in detail. We contacted Augstein by telephone, and he agreed.

But who are the people in Los Angeles? Rabbi Abraham Cooper, born in 1950 and one of the founders of the center, is responsible for the list. We called him in Los Angeles, which is nine hours behind Central European Time, late at night on Jan. 2. We asked him if he would tell Augstein directly what his accusations were and engage in a debate with him, which would then be published in SPIEGEL. Rabbi Cooper asked for 24 hours to consider the proposal.

The proof of Augstein's anti-Semitism the center used when compiling the list is weak; one would have to have malicious intent or be looking for a fight to see an anti-Semite behind the quotes used. The center cited five lines from two columns Augstein wrote for SPIEGEL ONLINE in which he criticized Israeli policy and the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

In one case, Augstein quoted German author Günter Grass, who had said that Israel, a nuclear power, posed a threat to an already fragile world peace. In another column, Augstein likened the Gaza Strip to a camp in which Israel was incubating its own enemies. A number of journalists, including some in Israel, have published similar remarks.

Quotes by Broder are the worst of the supposed evidence cited by the Wiesenthal Center. Broder refers to Augstein as a "pure anti-Semite" and a "little Streicher," a reference to Hitler propagandist Julius Streicher. Broder was out to provoke -- but he offered no evidence to support his arguments.

Absurd Conditions

It took Cooper less than 24 hours to respond by email. He wrote that he appreciated the "kind offer" and that he was willing to participate, but only under certain conditions. "If you wish to interview me together with him," Cooper wrote, "Mr. Augstein must publicly apologize in advance for the statements that earned him his designation on the Wiesenthal Center's Top Ten anti-Semitism List." Otherwise, he added, he would refuse to "sit in the same room with him."

Such a request is nothing less than a snub, yet Augstein reacted matter-of-factly when told about Cooper's response. Of course he wouldn't apologize for criticizing Israel, he said, noting that he is, after all, a journalist.

Since Cooper apparently finds Augstein's physical presence intolerable, we thought the debate could also be held via Skype. The two men could sit in two different rooms, as Cooper wanted, and conducting the debate online wouldn't diminish its quality.

Augstein doesn't really like Skype conversations owing to the sometimes poor technical quality, but there was no getting around it. The editorial office sent Cooper the proposal, along with a plan covering its technical aspects.

In his email response to the proposal, Cooper was even more adamantly opposed to the idea: "I will not participate in any face-to-face, simultaneous 'discussion' live, in the same room or digitally with Mr. Augstein unless he has apologized," Cooper wrote (italics in original). Instead, he added, he would prefer to have a page for himself in SPIEGEL, apparently so that he could tell its readers about his accusations without having to entertain any opposing arguments.

SPIEGEL editors sent him another message on Friday afternoon asking whether he would be willing to participate in an ordinary interview, without Augstein sitting in the next room. He would, in principle, Cooper later replied. But by then it was too late, because the magazine was approaching its copy deadline. Besides, Cooper reiterated, he would prefer to have his own page in SPIEGEL.

He also pointed out that he would be in Germany during the last week of January, and that he might be willing to talk then. We shall see.

Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan

Lerman's book - an example of the Zionist fear of genuine debate

Just before Yuletide I wrote the following review for Weekly Worker.  What is remarkable, as I pointed out already in another post, how the Zionist and Jewish Establishment in this country runs a mile rather than trying to debate the issues that Tony Lerman raises.  Lerman was a part of the Zionist establishment and that makes his sin doubly unforgiveable. 
Prominent Zionist capitalists like Stanley Kalms, the owner of Dixons made it clear that they would withdraw funds from the Institute of Jewish Policy Research if Lerman remained a Director.  True to form the Jewish Council, under its abysman editor Stephen Pollard, conspired in this determination to avoid debating the issues Lerman had raised such as the differing interests of Jewish communities and Israel.  The result in the Jewish Chronicle was a hack ‘review’ by a Prof. Hochauser, w hose specialism lies in the world of medicine not history or politics or the social sciences.  But  Hochhauser wrote what was expected of him, which was an unbridled atttack on Lerman of the form ‘if he insisted on disagreeing with us why did he complain of the consequences’.

It illustrates a wider point, namely that Zionists attempt to suppress free speech are bound up with their fear of debating the issue of Zionism, racism and its record even with respect to Jewish people.  Like Dracula, it prefers to operate in the dark!

Tony Greenstein

Review:  The Making & Unmaking of a Zionist

A Personal and Political Journey

Antony Lerman, Pluto Press 2012

Baron Stanley Kalms - British Jewish capitalist and Euro-sceptic who used money and influence to prevent debate

Tony Lerman is someone who for some 25 years was at the heart of the Jewish establishment in Britain.  A former Director of Anglo-Jewry’s foremost research body the Institute of Jewish Affairs and subsequently the Institute of Jewish Policy Research, as well as a former columnist on the Jewish Chronicle and Editor of the Jewish Quarterly, Tony Lerman’s experiences should be compulsory reading for students at Jewish schools who want to understand something about the structure and power of their own community.

I can identify with Lerman’s experiences on a number of levels.  Like him I was brought up as a Zionist, albeit in the religious orthodox rather than the socialist Zionist tradition.  Like him I can fully understand the McCarthyite attitude of those petty shakers and movers in the Jewish community who brook no dissent.  Academics are expected to toe the line and to produce research carefully tailored to the prevailing and accepted norms, prime amongst which are the idea that the Israeli state must, on no account be criticised beyond the odd disagreement over policy.  In particular the founding ideology of Israel, Zionism, must not be criticised and those of Jewish extraction who do venture across these red lines must accept that they will be branded as traitors and ‘self-haters’.  Although it died a death in Germany, the ‘stab-in-the-back legend is alive and well amongst the Board of Deputies of British Jews and its sycophants.

Lerman was a member of the socialist Zionist youth group Habonim whereas I was a member of the religious Zionist Bnei Akiva, which later morphed into Gush Emunim (Bloc of the Faithful) the original Greater Israel movement.  Lerman took his politics seriously, spending two years in Israel working on two kibbutzim and taking out Israeli citizenship.

In many ways these are the most interesting aspects of the book and yet the most frustrating.  I was brought up to believe, at a time when much of the Left saw Israel as a socialist paradise, that the kibbutzim heralded the new future.  Property was owned in common, private possessions were frowned upon, income and child rearing shared.  Yet as Lerman points out the Kibbutzim were seen, both by themselves and others, as the elite of Israeli society, not least the left-wing Palmach shock troops, staffed primarily by the ‘Marxist’ Hashomer Hatzair and the militaristic left Ahdut Ha'avodah.  They were, in the words of another ‘self-hater’ Gerald Kaufmann, the Israeli equivalent of Eton.

Through manual labour the Jewish nation, which Zionism, in common with the anti-Semites, saw as a degenerate and deformed people, would be renewed through a mystical attachment to its land. As Jacob Klatzkin, editor of Die Welt (1909-1911) of the official Zionist newspaper explained, Jews outside Palestine were ‘an alien nation in your midst and we want to remain one. An unbridgeable chasm yawns between you and us. A loyal Jew can never be other than a Jewish patriot. [Krisis und Entscheidung im Judentum: Probleme des modernen Judentums, 2d ed., Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag, 1921, p.118]  Palestine, according to Pinchas Rosen, Israel’s first Minister of Justice, Palestine was an ‘Institute for the Fumigation of Jewish Vermin.’ [Joachim Doron, ‘Classic Zionism and Modern Anti-Semitism: Parallels and Influences (1883-1914), Studies in Zionism, No. 8 Autumn 1983).

It doesn’t take much imagination to see the parallels between Zionism, a volkish Jewish political movement and anti-Semitism, which is why the Zionist charge today that anti-Zionist is a form of ‘new anti-Semitism’ is so ludicrous.   The kibbutzim were at the forefront of this creation of the new Jew.  It is no accident that one of the main proponents of the Kibbutzim was Arthur Ruppin, justly known as the father of land settlement in pre-state Israel.  Ruppin was a devoted believer in the racial sciences and a fierce protagonist of the idea that Palestine should not accept just any Jew for immigration.  It was no surprise when, in 1933 Ruppin made what was a pilgrimage to see his hero, Hans Gunther who had been installed as Professor of Racial Anthropology at Jena University, at the insistence of Wilhelm Frick, the first National Socialist state minister and later Nazi Minister of the Interior, who was hanged at Nuremberg in 1946.  Gunther who was Himmler’s ideological mentor, welcomed Zionism as ‘a positive development, praising it for recognising the genuine racial consciousness (Volkstum) of the Jews at Jenna University in Germany.  [Amos Morris-Reich Arthur Ruppin’s Concept of Race’, Israel Studies, Vol. 11, No. 3, Fall 2006, pp. 8-9 and Arthur Ruppin and the Production of the Modern Hebrew Culture, Ph. D. thesis, Etan Bloom, Tel Aviv]

However Lerman by his own admission found his stay on the Kibbutzim less than fulfilling.  Without challenging its ideology he found ‘nothing intrinsically valuable’ in manual labour. [p.23] but put this down to a personal failing on his part.  In fact this is one of the by-products of the divorce between the kibbutzim, a collective form of colonial settlement, and socialism, because there is nothing intrinsically valuable in manual labour for its own sake.  The capitalist abolition of drudgery in the kitchen, the use of a mangler by mother to dry the clothes or the use of a broom rather than a vacuum to clean the floor, is a progressive development. 

If I have a criticism of Lerman’s account of his stay on kibbutzim Yifat and Amiad, it is his description of the caretaker or his passing reference to the nearby ruins of Jubb Yosef, an Arab village, though to be fair he later attempts to establish the origins of the kibbutzim.  Another example was the reference to Mahmood, the Arab caretaker, ‘a local Arab who lived on the plantation in a hut with his wife and children.’ [21]  It doesn’t seem to have occurred to Lerman to ask why Mahmood wasn’t a fully fledge member of the Kibbutz.  Of course the answer was that he was not Jewish, and the Kibbutz was a wholly Jewish affair.  Zionist socialism excluded the indigenous population whilst dismissing their hostility as nothing more than feudal resentment.

Lerman was typical of a whole generation of young Zionists who accepted socialist Zionism without ever questioning its socialist bona fides.  Of course Lerman was unaware of how the ‘socialist’ Zionist leaders David Ben-Gurion and Berl Katznelson had worked hand-in-glove with the British military rulers of Palestine to expel and imprison the Jewish Communists who did take joint work with the Arab working class seriously.  Nor would he have been aware of the fierce battles in the 1920’s between the Zionist ‘trade union’ Histadrut and the Gdud Avodah (Work Brigades) based in the northern kibbutzim, some of whom moved to an anti-Zionist position, who were starved out.  [Ze’ev Sternhall, The Founding Myths of Zionism]

Much of Lerman’s book is taken up with the trials and tribulations of a free-thinker confronting a Jewish and Zionist establishment which already knew the answers and required academics to find the proof.  It was a kind of reverse academic engineering but Lerman was too naïve to realise that applying for a research post with the IJA into anti-Semitism might mean exactly that!  His first job mistake was to become Editor of an ailing magazine the Jewish Quarterly, a cultural/political which had staggered on for 30 years from one crisis to another and now that its editor Jacob Sontag had died was facing imminent demise.

Lerman’s second mistake was his second editorial in early 1985 coupled with his commissioning of an article, with which he disagreed, from David Rosenberg of the Jewish Socialists Group.  The JSG had been anathema to the Jewish establishment from the moment it had set up stall.  The Jewish Board of Deputies and the various misleaders of the Jewish community did not take kindly to Jewish radicalism, especially when it came in the clothes of the Bund, an anti-Zionist Jewish group that was predominant in pre-war Poland.  Lerman’s editorial managed to press all the right (or wrong!) buttons.  It not only questioned the misuse of anti-Semitism as a weapon against Zionism’s adversaries but he also questioned the role of the Jewish diaspora vs Israel (the ‘Jewish’ State). 
In the eyes of Zionism there is no role for a Jewish diaspora other than as a support mechanism for Israel, cheerleading from the side.  It is axiomatic that Jews outside Israel don’t question or criticise those on the front line of the war against the Arabs.  In the words of Lord Tennyson, theirs is not to reason why, theirs is but to do or die!  In suggesting that Jews outside Israel might have interests that are not the same as those of Israel, and even worse, to suggest as he did in later articles and symposia, that it was the actions of Israel, which claims to speak on behalf of all Jews, that is creating the very ‘anti-Semitism’ that it deprecates, was enough to create a tsunami of hatred directed at Lerman.  Even worse he started suggesting that maybe the life of Palestinians inside Israel itself was not everything it was cracked up to be.

Despite or maybe because of his work for the IJA and then as Director of the IJPR and in between that for the Rothschild’s Foundation Yad Hadaniv, in which he consciously sought to strengthen the internal life and institutions of European Jewry, he brought down on his head the wrath of people like Stanley Kalms, former Treasurer of the Conservative Party and Sir Alfred Sherman.  Kalms simply walked out of the IJPR, taking with him a number of other trustees and making the life of his establishment supporters more and more difficult.

I think it is fair to say that Tony Lerman was an innocent abroad who had an annoying habit of saying what he thought.  If the Emperor had no clothes then he felt it his duty to point to this fact when his job was to maintain the pretence that all was normal.  He clung to the belief that what mattered was logic and argument rather than the fact that he wouldn’t toe the line.  So in his editorial in Jewish Quarterly he disagreed, rightly in my opinion, with David Rosenberg’s argument that anti-Semitism was on the increase.  But to the powers that be that was irrelevant.  After all what they termed ‘anti-Semitism’ was a different creature anyway.

In his battles with the petty minded petit-bourgeois of the Board of Deputies, Lerman attracted the support of the cream of the British Jewish intelligentsia – people like Professor George Steiner and Rabbi Julia Neuberger.  But it was to no avail because the Zionist leadership of the Jewish community in Britain doesn’t do debate.  Anti-Semitism is and always has been an excuse.   When the battles against Oswald Moseley were at their height, the Board ran for cover, as it did against the National Front in the 1930’s.  ‘Anti-Semitism’ is a wholly artificial construct as far as they are concerned and Israeli organisations sought to gain a monopoly on the collection of statistics of anti-Semitism for one purpose – to show how dangerous Europe was for Jews and how much better off they would be in Israel.  In this the Community Security Trust a group set up by the Board of Deputies, allegedly to monitor anti-Semitism in Britain but which also collates intelligence on left-wing Jews and this year supplied false information to the Home Office in their failed bid to deport Sheikh Raed Salah, the Islamic Leagues leader in Israel, ‘played a role both in vilifying me personally for my views and undermining the work JPR was doing.’ [187]

So when Lerman says things like ‘Zionism failed to eliminate anti-Semitism and now Israel provoked it’ he was putting a match to gunpowder. [132] When he was appointed in January 2006 to the post of Director of JPR it was greeted by one of the Jewish Chronicle’s hack columnists, Dr Geoffrey Alderman thus:  ‘JPR loses mind in choice of new head’.  Round robin e-mails which all misspelt the same word, secret meetings and other examples of skulduggery resulted in Lerman’s position being personally and politically untenable.  Lerman became paranoid but with good reason.

The book is replete with various symposia and conferences but Lerman was an innocent abroad.  Polite academic debate in Israel and elsewhere was one thing, but the Zionist propaganda machine required compliant and tame academics like Robert Wistrich, a Professor of History at Tel Aviv University, who could use their credentials to further a Zionist agenda.  Lerman himself had by now drawn the conclusion that Zionism was outmoded and outdated, a vehicle for the interests of the Israeli state via institutions such as the Jewish Agency.  In one particular paper, in January 2007 at a conference at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem he put outlined four particular aspects of what was termed as ‘Jewish Peoplehood’: the particular vs universal, diversity of identity and opinion,, the threat to an Israel-centric definition of peoplehood and Jews as the subject not object of history. 

All of these are subjects in their own right.  For example Jews as subjects directly challenges the Zionist notion of eternal anti-Semitism (itself a reflection of the Nazi idea of the ‘eternal Jew’) that anti-Semitism is one unbending constant of some 2,000 years origin.  As if Jews have been passive victims rather than players in history.  As he summed it up, ‘What is peoplehood anyway?  Just another con-trick on the part of the Jewish Agency and Zionist bodies.’ [160] To people like Stanley Kalms, the enemy was Islam and Muslims and the purpose of the JPR was to support Blair and Bush, the only people who had stood up to it. [167]

The book cleared up one minor mystery for me.  In 2007 an organisation Independent Jewish Voices was launched but missing from its list of prominent signatories like Mike Light, Miriam Margolyes and Brian Klug was that of Tony Lerman.  In fact it was almost a condition of his continued employment that he wasn’t seen to associate with them, although in practice he attended their committee meetings.  IJV was an attempt to create a space for Jewish people to debate issues free from the narrow confines of Zionist orthodoxy.  Naturally it attracted the venom of people like Melanie Phillips, who notoriously described it as ‘Jews for Genocide’!

Like so many of us Lerman was accused of ‘self-hatred’ which, as he rightly says, is a way of   ‘strengthening a narrow, ethnocentric view of the Jewish people.’ [178] In fact it is worse.  It is a racist calumny which assumes that to be Jewish you have to be a chauvinist.  It is the same charge that the Nazis levelled against anti-fascist Germans.

On January 22 2008 Lerman decided that he had had enough and handed in his resignation.  Almost immediately the fake leftist David Hirsh from Engage, which fought a losing battle against the academic boycott in the Universities & Colleges Union (and which is now known to have been financed by the Board of Deputies) had applied to be Lerman’s replacement!

As Lerman recognises, having worked at the heart of the Jewish establishment for more than 25 years, ‘to hold views usually associated with the marginalised, dissenting groups was an unprecedented danger, a traitorous act that simply could not be tolerated.’ [197]

Tony Lerman is not an anti-Zionist, he has not formulated a critique of Zionism as a movement which was, by its very nature, bound to end up as a right-wing, racist movement among Jews.  No doubt even today he holds that it had progressive origins rather than seeing Zionism as having been formed in the crucible of the fight against anti-Semitism, but as a counter-revolutionary movement which accepted the essential argument of the anti-Semites that Jews did not belong in the societies in which they were born.  That it was a movement forever condemned by its alliance with imperialism and its nationalism had no progressive content but owed much to the nationalism of the volkish groups in central Europe of the 1930’s.

Another disagreement I would have with Lerman is that he never asks what might be the basis of a secular Jewish identity freed from the poisonous grasp of Zionist nationalism?  In times gone past Jews played particular social, economic and political roles and their identity was formed as a result.  The Bund for example was formed as a result of a distinctive Jewish proletariat.  The Jews of the Middle Ages reflected the Jewish role as money lenders and agents of money in an economy based on use value.   The Jewish role as traders helped define and mould the oral tradition of Judaism.  What today is left other than another variant of the white middle classes?  I suspect that minus Israel a separate and distinctive Jewish presence would rapidly fade away, leaving the remnants of Orthodoxy.  It is a subject that Lerman barely mentions but which is crucial to many of his endeavours.  However Zionist itself is proving a massive turn-off for young Jews in particular and apart from a nationalist Jewish minority is insufficient to provide the basis for a separate Jewish identity.

Tony Lerman’s book is though a valuable depiction of how Zionist McCarthyism claims even its own if they stray from the accepted.  What happened to Norman Finkelstein at De Paul’s University, the attacks on Ilan Pappe, the exiled University of Haifa historian, the attacks on academic freedom on American campuses where groups such as Camera, Campus Watch (any group with ‘watch’ in their name is almost certainly an organisation set up to curb the freedom it watches) is what happened to Tony Lerman.

Perhaps the most pathetic gesture of all was the decision of Stephen Pollard, editor of the declining Jewish Council and ex-editor of the Daily Express, owned by Britains largest porn operator, Richard Desmond, to commission a ‘review’ by a Daniel Hochhauser which instead of criticising the message attacks the messenger.  Lerman is a ‘career bureaucrat’.  Hochhauser finds it surprising that Lerman used various conferences to put his own views across and yet he resented ‘being held accountable’ for them.  It’s difficult to know whether to laugh or cry at the ignorance of this hired gun.  The whole point of things like academic tenure is that people can express their views without being subject to dismissal or revenge.  Working for Jewish policy institutes, Lerman was in a particularly exposed position, something which was taken full advantage of.  Hochhauser, like the petty McCarthyite he is, sees nothing wrong in waging vendettas against those whose views he disagrees with. 

In many ways Antony Lerman should consider it to his credit that even now, the Jewish Chronicle, until recently a paper with a reputation, dare not take up the challenge that Lerman in his book has thrown down.

Tony Greenstein

Today I learnt something knew. I have often asked those who oppose a boycott of Israel’s ‘cultural’ activities whether they would have boycotted Wilhelm Furtwanger and the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra in the 1930’s on the grounds that culture and politics don’t mix, despite the evidence we now have that their trips abroad were sponsored by the Nazi state. The Israeli state makes no secret of its sponsorship of ‘Brand Israel’ artists. I have never received a satisfactory answer, since the only honest one would be ‘yes’ – just as we Zionists opposed the boycott of Nazi Germany so we oppose the boycott of Apartheid Israel.
But in fact 11 leading world musicians, led by Toscanini and Fritz Reiner did in fact do exactly that when they announced a boycott of all German cultural events. So it is extremely welcome that, after some hesitation, Stanley Jordan, a famous jazz musician, has decided to boycott Israel’s Jazz Festival held in Eilat.

It is also no surprise that it is Black American artists who are prominent amongst supporters of boycott. Although there are some white musicians, like Roger Waters who support the Boycott and groups like Santana have also cancalled gigs, there is a predominance of Black musicians like Stevie Wonder and now Stanley Jordan. There is no doubt that this is because of a shared experience of racism that most whist musicians like Paul Simon, Dylan or Elton John don’t understand or care about.

Below is a list of some of the most recent successes of the BDS Cultural Boycott movement and beneath that an article from Electronic Intifada.

Tony Greenstein

SOME 2012 CULTURAL BOYCOTT OF ISRAEL SUCCESSES

January 2012: The acclaimed French writer, Jacques Ranciére, cancels plans to give public readings at Israel's Tel Aviv University.

February 2012: Grammy-winning jazz singer, Cassandra Wilson and singer-songwriter Cat Power (Chan Marshall) both publicly cancel their Israeli gigs. Wilson said in a statement: "As a human rights activist I identify with the cultural boycott of Israel."

March 2012: Thirty seven artists and actors, including Academy Award, Emmy and and Golden Globe winner Emma Thompson, write to the Shakespeare Globe Theater in London requesting it to withdraw its invitation to Israel's Habima theater. Locally, Durban based hip hop artist, Iain "Ewok" Robinson, releases a music track, "Freedom for us All", for the international "BDS Day of Action".

April 2012: Two Irish bands, Fullset and the Dervish respect the cultural boycott of Israel and cancel a series of their planned shows in Israel. The Dervish explained their position in a public statement: "At the time [that] we agreed to these performances we were unaware that there was a cultural boycott [against Israel] in place. We now feel that we do not wish to break this boycott".

May 2012: South African Nobel Prize Laureate, J.M. Coetzee, and Slumdog Millionaire author, Vikas Swarup, both turn down invites to Israel's International Writers Festival, Coetzee makes it clear that he will only participate "when the peace process goes forward."

June 2012: Pulitzer Prize winning author, Alice Walker, refuses the Israeli company, Yediot Books, from publishing her award-winning novel, The Color Purple (in the 1980s, when the ANC had called for a boycott against South Africa, Walker also refused Apartheid South Africa permission to screen the movie adaptation of her book).

July 2012: Reggae artist, Sizzla Kalonji, cancels his Israeli gig. Then, later in July, the Canadian-based band, the Three Little Birds, perform their music single "Apartheid" on Canadian national television.

August 2012: In violation of the Palestinian boycott-of-Israel-picket-line, the Edinburgh International Festival invites Israel's Batsheva dance company. Activists and protesters subsequently --and successfully-- disrupted several Batsheva performances. The protests against Israel's Batsheva remind us of the sports boycott protests and disruptions of the 1980s against Apartheid South Africa's rugby and cricket teams that attempted world tours in violation of the ANC's boycott.

September 2012: British theater director Peter Brook and the Bouffes du Nord theatre troop of France honor the call to boycott Israel, cancelling their planned performances for December at the Cameri Theater in Tel Aviv.

October 2012: Hip hop duo Rebel Diaz and Narcenio Hall boycott the two-day 2012 Creative Time Summit in Manhattan because of the summit’s partnership with an Israeli organization funded by the Israeli government.

November 2012: The Cape Town World Music Festival lands in deep water due to collaboration with and sponsorship from the Israeli Government. The Festival has to do without its headline main stage act when Pops Mohamed pulls out. Also in November, South African musicians Simphiwe Dana and Tumi Molekane (from Tumi and the Volume) tweet using their official Twitter accounts supporting the boycott of Israel.

December 2012: Music legend, Stevie Wonder, cancels his scheduled performance at a benefit gala for the Israeli military. Finally, also in December, Roger Waters, front-man and founder of Pink Floyd, addresses the United Nations on the issue of Palestine and the international boycott of Israel. Waters said: "[The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against Israel campaign] aims to bring non-violent economic pressure to bear on Israel to force an end to its violations, an end to [Israel's] occupation and apartheid...and an end to Palestinian citizens of Israel being required to live as second class citizens, discriminated against on racial grounds, and subject to different laws than their Jewish compatriots."

Thanks, Stanley Jordan, for pulling out of Israeli jazz fest

Stanley Jordan announces his withdrawal from Israeli Jazz Festival

Submitted by Alexander Billet on Fri, 01/11/2013 - 13:25

It appears that the movement for a cultural boycott of Israel can claim another victory. On Saturday (5 January) guitarist Stanley Jordan announced he will not be performing at the winter installment of Israel’s Red Sea Jazz Festival. In a brief statement on his Facebook page, Jordan said: "My performance at the Red Sea Jazz Festival has been cancelled. I apologize for any inconvenience to anyone." Jordan, an acclaimed and innovative guitarist, had been billed as a headliner at the festival.

The outpouring of gratitude has been substantial. A lengthy stream of comments thanked Jordan for standing with human rights and against occupation, recognizing that for a working artist to pull out of a show is not an easy decision. Anyone who has had the displeasure of wading through the cesspool of racism and abuse that hardcore Zionists are wont to leave on even vaguely pro-Palestinian Facebook pages can surely appreciate the love and positivity that’s been shown to Jordan.

The Red Sea Jazz Festival — which takes place twice a year — has previously been one of the cultural events that the Israeli state could rely on to go off without a hitch (and yes, it is the actual state we’re talking about here; RSJF is backed by several government ministries). Held in the resort town of Eilat on the coast of the Red Sea, the jazz festival has normally been adequate in filling its role in distracting from the realities of Israeli apartheid. Jazz, after all, is a multi-racial art form, and any state that hosts jazz festivals can’t possibly be racist, right?

That changed after the New Orleans street jazz troupe Tuba Skinny cancelled in 2011. The cancellation was last minute, and drummed up a good amount of publicity for the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement, particularly when the group released a statement explaining its actions. This past summer, as hundreds of Sudanese refugees were rounded up and deported, they were held at a detention center not too far from Eilat itself, which surely poked a few more holes in the city’s idyllic veneer.

Tipping point

More broadly, Israel is obviously facing a serious political fallout from Operation Pillar of Cloud — its eight-day offensive against Gaza in November. Though its international backers continue to support Israel’s occupation and apartheid regime, its continual slide into racist barbarity surely puts the tipping point in its credibility not too far off. Indeed, some think that it’s already arrived. Either way, it’s getting harder and harder to pull off the kinds of cultural events that have always been used to paint Israeli society as the beacon of cultural tolerance amid a sea of savagery.

Credit is also due to the sustained and patient campaigning on the part of boycott activists attempting to convince Jordan to cancel. And that is what makes this case rather unique. The use of Facebook to campaign for an artist, speaker or a musician to cancel a performance or appearance in Israel is nothing new in our age. What stands out is the way that Stanley Jordan himself used it to come to the decision to cancel.

Several messages and pleas had already been sent to Jordan requesting he cancel, but on 24 December, he made a rather unexpected move, posting the following statement on his Facebook page:I’ve received several messages from people requesting that I cancel my performance at the Red Sea Jazz Festival in Israel. I promised a detailed response, so here it is. I would like to start a dialog right here to discuss this topic. Next to global warming, the Middle East conflict is the biggest issue of our time, and it’s too important for black-and-white responses that ignore the nuances. And we truly need an open dialog with a spirit of mutual compassion for everyone involved. For my part, I want to use my talents and energies in the best possible way for the cause of peace. This purpose is deeply ingrained in my soul’s code, and I’ve known it since childhood. So the only remaining question is: how can I best accomplish this goal? I invite you all to weigh in. I’d like to start the discussion by recommending a wonderful book called Embracing Israel/Palestine: A Strategy to Heal and Transform the Middle East by Rabbi Michael Lerner. I’ve been reading a lot on this topic but this book stands out for me because it resonates with my own feelings. I encourage everyone to read it as background for our discussion. And please keep your comments clean and respectful. Let’s model the type of dialog that will eventually lead to a solution.

As an aside, Michael Lerner isn’t exactly a steadfast ally of the Palestinian cause. The former Berkeley radical has spoken out against Israel’s occupation of Gaza and the West Bank and the treatment of the Palestinians, but like many liberals he has also equivocated greatly, defending the basic tenets of Zionism and refusing to support boycotts, divestment and sanctions (BDS).

Refreshing

Nonetheless, Jordan’s move — opening it up for a frank discussion on why artists should support cultural boycott movements — was refreshing. It provided an opportunity for activists to make a clear case for BDS and even perhaps expose the arguments to a sliver of people who had never heard them before. It also worked, evidently.


A week after posting the initial invitation for a debate, Jordan commented again:

Our discussion revealed a crisis whose depth was even far greater than I had known, and I felt compelled to help. Like many others, I am deeply dedicated to the cause of world peace, and this situation goes against everything anyone with a heart could ever condone. However, after much consideration I concluded that the best way I could serve the cause would be to do my performance as scheduled, but separately organize an event in a major city in the United States to raise funds and awareness of the plight of the Palestinian people.

Another several hundred comments followed, in a thread that went on for the next week at least. Notably absent was the deluge of hard Zionist trolling that one might expect in such threads. Instead, Jordan revealed days later that such anti-boycott campaigners had actually been messaging him directly — an odd move.

Again, the conversation was remarkably and uncharacteristically civil, which likely had much to do with the notable absence of those trolling for hasbara (Israeli state propaganda). One can only speculate as to why the abusers weren’t out in such full force; perhaps the political climate is starting to demoralize a segment of them. One can hope. In any event, it made for a fruitful discussion. As was written at The Palestine Chronicle:

The absence of (overt) trolling allowed for an exemplary demonstration of what well-informed, dedicated BDS advocates can do with a thread if they are not constantly fending off accounts spouting Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs talking points. The result was passionate, well-reasoned and forceful advocacy for the Palestinian cause from a diverse group of people on several continents, many of whom were unconnected with one another or had just become Facebook friends as a result of the virtual encounter.

The Palestine Chronicle also joined in the debate, publishing an open letter by Rima Merriman where she took to task several of Jordan’s arguments. Jordan’s basic stance is one that we’ve all heard before: that art and music have the power to transform consciousness, and therefore cultural boycotts are counterproductive because they shut down that potential. His concession that he would organize some kind of fundraiser for the Palestinian people was essentially a red herring. Indeed, all of Jordan’s responses after his post at the beginning of January proceeded from this contradictory starting point that because artists can maybe "change consciousness" and affect people on a spiritual level, they have no political role to play.

This is, of course, a fallacy. If for no other reason than it makes the tacit admission that Israelis are deserving of the spiritual nutrition brought by art but Palestinians (who are prevented from attending almost all Israeli cultural events) aren’t. And, as many BDS supporters have pointed out, also flagrantly contradicts Jordan’s own support for those who refused to play Sun City in the fight against South African apartheid.

Victory

After four more days of sustained pressure on Facebook and other online avenues, though, something must have convinced Jordan. His statement of cancellation may have been terse, and it obviously would be much more preferable for him to release something longer, allowing for more in-depth reasoning to come out, but it still represents a big victory. One of Israel’s most surefire means of cultural propaganda has had a headlining act pull out, and only a couple weeks before the actual event to boot.

What’s more, the actual process of convincing Jordan to cancel is profoundly informative — if for no other reason than it was an example of people using Facebook for something other than sniping at each other. It was, if one might excuse a slightly pretentious term, an example of real cultural democracy. An artist — flawed though he may be — actually takes the time to ask what his fans think. And this is where it gets really novel: he listens to them. In a world where we’re taught to put the artist on a pedestal (an ethos that Jordan has admittedly absorbed), there was finally a sign that perhaps there’s a bit more innate parity between artist and audience than might initially meet the eye.

I’m reminded of the words of the late jazz great Max Roach, a tireless campaigner for racial justice in the US and South Africa, as well as one of the most thrilling composers and drummers to sit behind a kit: "Jazz is a very democratic musical form. It comes out of a communal experience. We take our respective instruments and collectively create a thing of beauty."

It may have taken some prodding, and may require still more, but in the meantime we can say that Jordan did Roach’s words justice.

In attempting to make a case for a specifically Jewish critique of Israeli state violence, Berkeley professor Judith Butler argues that even at its most liberal, Zionism is profoundly un-Jewish

By Carlo Strenger 18 10.12.

'The Butler Did It: Academic superstar Judith Butler has aligned herself with some of the most outspoken critics of Israel' Jewish Daily Review

Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism, by Judith Butler. Columbia University Press, 256 pages, $28

Judith Butler has rightly been described as an academic superstar. She is one of the most quoted scholars in the humanities, and has also acquired fame − or notoriety, depending on one’s viewpoint− as a political activist. She has been highly critical of Israel’s occupation policy, describes herself as an anti-Zionist, and endorses the BDS movement, which advocates boycotting and divesting from Israel and imposing sanctions against it.

"Parting Ways"is Butler’s latest book, and she states its goal right at the outset: She wants to make a case for a specifically Jewish critique of Israeli state violence. Furthermore, she wants to make a case for "Jewish values of cohabitation with the non-Jew that are part of the very ethical substance of diasporic Jewishness."

"Parting Ways" must be read as an integral part of Butler’s larger oeuvre. Her most famous book is"Gender Trouble," in which she argues that gender is socially constructed rather than a natural given, a project that she has continued to pursue in, among other works, "Bodies that Matter" ‏(1993‏). Butler’s lifelong agenda has been to loosen the straitjackets by which society forms and enforces conceptions of gender that lock all too many into categories that limit their lives unbearably.

This is a radical form of a widely held political and ethical position. Reflective individualism’s starting point is that every individual human being belongs to many groups; a French-born straight Catholic man who loves Italian cuisine and Bob Dylan belongs to the category of Catholics as well as those of heterosexuals, natives of France, Bob Dylan lovers, etc.

The ethical claim of this position is that every individual has the right to determine the weight of each of these groupings in his or her life. Furthermore, reflective individualism denies the right of any collective to monopolize any of these categories, whether it be gender, nationality, religion or sexual orientation. For example, it argues that no conception of femininity should force a woman to put motherhood at the center of her life, if she chooses otherwise.

In "Parting Ways," Butler applies this ethical demand for individual autonomy to Jewish identity. She joins a large number of contemporary Jewish intellectuals who refuse to accept the notion that one’s relation to Israel determines one’s Jewishness and that being critical of Israel turns one into a self-hating Jew − or worse, an anti-Semite.

But she goes one step further: She argues that Zionism itself is profoundly un-Jewish. Defending liberal versions of Zionism cannot salvage Jewish values as she understands them. Nothing less than a radical decoupling of Jewishness and Zionism will do for Butler, starting with the binary opposition between Israel and the Diaspora posited by classical Zionism, which valorizes the former and disparages the latter.

Contemporary political Zionism, in Butler’s view, has constructed a very slanted narrative of Jewish history − one that glorifies the kingdom of David, the Maccabees, Masada and Bar Kochba, all equated with the type of bellicose masculinity embraced by some early Zionist activists like Max Nordau, Arthur Ruppin and Vladimir ‏(Ze’ev‏) Jabotinsky and pursued by Israeli leaders like Ariel Sharon and Benjamin Netanyahu. It depicts the identity of the downtrodden, servile, frightened and humiliated Diaspora Jew as one to be repressed and forgotten, so as to allow for the revival of the proud Zionist/Israeli Jew who participates in history. Butler does not accept this narrative, and claims that it pushed Israel into the indefensible policies of the last 45 years.

Her own pantheon
"Parting Ways" is Butler’s version of a non-Zionist counter-narrative, with her own pantheon of Jewish voices: French-Lithuanian philosopher Emmanuel Levinas; Berlin-born Walter Benjamin, proponent of a non-violent form of historical messianism; German-American political thinker Hannah Arendt; and Italian writer Primo Levi. She harnesses them for the project of a Nietzschean reevaluation of all Jewish values. Diasporic existence is not second-rate, she argues; it is an ethically more developed position than one contingent upon territorial and political sovereignty, because sovereignty almost inevitably impairs one’s ability to recognize the needs and rights of the other − a central concept of Levinas’ philosophy.

Butler mobilizes Arendt for a powerful critique of the ethnically unitary state: Plurality, Arendt argued, is a fundamental given of human existence. Constructing a nation-state, however, invariably means that the dominant group reserves the option of saying that it does not want to live with certain others: Gypsies, gays, Jews − or, in Israel’s case, Arabs. The rejection of plurality in favor of homogeneity, at worst, leads to the Nazi project of exterminating those you do not want, or to the project of ethnic cleansing that the late Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic revived for a greater Serbia. Butler expressly rejects making a direct comparison of Israel to Nazi Germany, but concludes that Zionism’s core value of Israel as a Jewish state invariably leads to injustice toward minorities, particularly, of course, Palestinians.

This, of course, leaves Butler open to the objection that Jewish history is unique in that the perpetrators of the Holocaust tried to annihilate the Jews, making Israel, the Jewish state in which Jews finally have the capacity to defend themselves, an existential imperative. To counter this argument Butler musters the moral authority of Primo Levi, who survived Auschwitz and made it his life’s project to restore humanist values after the hell of the Holocaust. Levi was an outspoken critic of Israel’s occupation policy and the first Lebanon war, and opposed invoking the memory of the Holocaust to justify such abuse of power.

While accessible, compared to most of Butler’s work,"Parting Ways" suffers from one crucial flaw: Butler engages lovingly with the minutiae of the thought of her beloved thinkers, primarily Benjamin, Arendt, Levinas and Levi, but she does not engage with the second topic of her book − Zionism − at all. Judging from"Parting Ways," you might think that Zionism was a unitary ideology run by some politburo. At no point would you recognize how complex the history of Zionism is, and how different its various shades can be. You would not guess that there are committed liberal Zionists who argue for a secular constitution for Israel that would give full equality to Arabs and lead to a complete separation of religion and state. Quite remarkably, Butler, whose life’s work is about nuances, unquestioningly accepts simplistic premises about Zionism dictated, on the one hand, by Arab rejectionists who define Zionism as racism, and, on the other, by Israel’s right-wing ideologues. [JPLO Note: On the contrary, Zionism is defined as a Nation-State concept - those who called themselves Zionists failed to recognize to where they were being led.]

‘New Jewish identities?’
Does "Parting Ways" succeed in delineating a tradition of Jewish criticism of Israel’s policies? I think that a case for a specifically Jewish critique can be made, but that Butler’s attempt to construct such a critique primarily by way of an intense debate with just four Jewish thinkers is not convincing, even if I personally happen to cherish the ideas of Arendt, Benjamin, Levi and Levinas. Butler’s argument requires a fleshed-out portrayal of Jewish tradition that offers greater historical depth than she provides.

Such a portrayal could, for example, describe a tradition that historian of Marxism Isaac Deutscher called non-Jewish Jews. He claimed that there is a tradition of Jewish thinkers who did not adhere to Judaism in any way, and yet were distinctly Jewish in their contrarian, critical cast of mind. Such a history could cover Spinoza, Heine and Freud ‏(who figures in"Parting Ways" obliquely via Edward Said‏); Arthur Schnitzler and Albert Einstein; Philip Roth, Steven Spielberg, Danny Cohn-Bendit and Tony Kushner, in addition to Arendt, Benjamin and Levi‏(Levinas would not fit into this category‏). Such an account would have to give a convincing argument for a specifically Jewish form of modern contrarian thought and cultural production.

Daniel Boyarin, a historian of religion at the University of California, Berkeley, where Butler heads the critical theory program, has done exactly this for a different tradition: Talmudic thought. He has presented a conception of Jewishness with explicit reference to Butler’s approach to gender by portraying the "soft," "feminine" Jewish man as a cultural ideal. He has also argued against seeing Judaism and Christianity as two mutually exclusive sides of a dichotomy. Boyarin makes rich use of Jewish sources, ranging from the Bible to rabbinical tradition from the Talmud onwards, and connects them to Jewish modernists and postmodernists. He presents a strong case for a viable counter-narrative that could claim deeper ownership of Jewish history than the Zionist conception, which largely represses, or at least devalues, millennia of diasporic Jewish past. Boyarin asserts and demarcates his own Yiddishkeit, a softhearted Jewish identity, in opposition to Zionism − or at least in opposition to the form it has taken in Israel’s policies since 1967.

Finally, a word about the timeliness of Butler’s "Parting Ways":While her argument will appeal primarily to readers steeped in contemporary humanities, her book is symptomatic of a crucial juncture in Jewish history. Many Jews in the Diaspora, including liberals less left-leaning than Butler, feel that, rather than strengthening their Jewish identity, Israel forces them to define their Jewish identity in terms of opposition to the country’s policy of occupation.

These Diaspora Jews are afraid that the liberal Zionism of Theodor Herzl and Ahad Ha’am is dying, because Israel’s elected governments have led it to the point where the gradual de facto annexation of the West Bank is bound to end the dream of Israel as the democratic homeland of the Jews. Bereft of a politically viable strategy, many Jewish liberals are left with the rueful argument that the Zionist experiment could have led to a different result.

This sort of despair is beginning to spread into Israel, where many progressives− politically marginalized, powerless and under growing pressure by the anti-liberal measures promoted in the Knesset − are beginning to feel as if they are in exile in their own country. Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman’s ethnocratic attempts to define Israeliness by totalitarian demands for unquestioned loyalty put a growing strain on the progressives’ Israeli core identity.

As a consequence Israeli liberals might want to return to some form of Jewishness as a core identity. This would require defining a Jewish cultural identity radically different from that imposed by the stranglehold of Israel’s Orthodox establishment on state-defined Judaism. Most of them will require accounts of Jewishness richer than Butler’s, and they might look for possible models in Boyarin’s work, or in Udi Aloni’s 2011 exploration of non-Zionist Jewish identity in his whimsical and wide-ranging book"What Does a Jew Want?" to which Butler contributed.

These Israeli progressives who feel politically disenfranchised might come to agree with Butler, Boyarin and Aloni that such new, non-Zionist conceptions of Jewishness must indeed move beyond the dichotomy between Zion and Diaspora. They might argue that Jewishness as they understand it sees Diaspora as a source of ethical inspiration rather than of shame. A new Jewish identity might emerge that connects Tel Aviv with New York’s Upper West Side, Berlin, Paris, London and Buenos Aires − and all of them on an equal footing. This old/new type of Jew could well come to the conclusion that Jewishness is inherently diasporic, by virtue of preferring humaneness over power, and recognition of the other over sovereignty no matter where one lives.

Carlo Strenger, a philosopher and psychoanalyst, is a professor in the School of Psychological Sciences of Tel Aviv University, and is on the scientific board of the Sigmund Freud Foundation, Vienna.

Arthur James Balfour - author of the Declaration which promised Palestine to the Zionist settlers regardless of the wishes of its indigenous population.  He also authored the Aliens Act 1905 which barred entry to Jewish refugees from Russia

There is nothing that is new in the analysis below but it brings together all the essentials in understanding the inner dynamics of Israel and the Zionist movement today, and for that reason alone is well worth reading.

Tony Greenstein
By Yisrael Puterman
Date Sat, 05 Jan 2013 19:57:11 +0200

Zionism as in inevitably turned out - Israeli soldiers involved in repressing demonstrations in Bi'ilin

It is becoming increasingly evident that governance of the Occupied Territories is assuming permanent form. Israel’s regime is becoming established as apartheid: one legal system for Israeli citizens, based on the ‘Jewish and democratic’ version of Knesset legislation (incorporating discriminatory laws applied to Arab citizens, land expropriation, dispossession, restrictive measures such as delays in approving construction plans, deprivation in resource allocation, etc.); and another legal system –military rule – for the Palestinian population in the OTs, without any pretence of democratic rule. -------- For a little while after the occupation of 1967 it could have been thought that the Israeli occupation was indeed temporary, and the settlements were a sort of whim, an impulse of groups of the old ‘pioneering’ Zionist left and the new nationalist-religious right, trying to fulfil an outdated dream. But the subsequent intensive construction in the OTs, building of roads and other infrastructure, transfer of large Israeli-Jewish population into these territories, which required enormous multi-billion government expenditure – all this indicates clearly that Israel aims at permanent colonization of the OTs and creating there an irreversible state of affairs that will prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state and will preclude any solution other than continued Israeli rule.

The establishment of Ma‘ale Adumim, the disengagement from the Gaza Strip instigated by Sharon, as well as the construction of the Separation Barrier – all these are clues to the solution that Sharon and others have intended for the Palestinian population: concentration in autonomous Bantustan-style pockets. This setup has actually been implemented in Gaza, with well-known results.

Israel is not the only player in the arena. Resistance of the Palestinians to any solution that would not satisfy their minimal demands cannot be ignored. However, the Palestinians are divided between Fatah and Hamas regarding conditions for ending the conflict. Fatah, a movement representing the Palestinian bourgeoisie, seeks to resolve the conflict by establishing an independent Palestinian national state supported by the US and integrated in its regional order. A pre-condition for this is recognition of Israel, which Fatah (the leading movement of the PLO) has therefore accepted.

Chaim Weizman  - President of the Zionist Organisation and 1st President of Israel - in his early Manchester days where he struck up a friendship with the anti-Semitic Arthur James Balfour

By contrast, Hamas, whose supporters are among the Palestinian proletariat and mainly the refugees, opposes a solution that would not resolve their problem. For them the problem is Zionist dispossession. Hence their demand is the restoration of their rights in the whole of Palestine, to be achieved by struggle.

But even the minimal moderate demands of Fatah – a state based on the pre-1967 borders including east Jerusalem and some kind of solution the problem of refugees (sufficient to mitigate their resistance) – are inacceptable to Israel, which shows its real intention by persisting with its policy of dispossession and construction in the OTs. The rhetoric of the ‘peace process’ can deceive no one, not even Abu-Mazen.

The US supports in general terms this solution (which, as mentioned above, implies integration of the Palestinian state in the regional imperialist order), but dare not impose it on Israel, so as not to antagonize and destabilize its main protégé. On the other hand, the Netanyahu government not only rejects this minimum solution but keeps raising the ante by demanding fresh conditions that make it impossible even to start negotiations. It must be said that should a left-Zionist led government be formed – which is in any case an unrealistic prospect in the foreseeable future – it would be unable, and most probably unwilling, to implement such a solution because of the reality that has been created on the ground, and mainly because of the massive opposition of the settlers, whose political muscle is greater than their electoral weight.

The resulting political deadlock, and the adherence to it of the Netanyahu government, appears to be leading to a bi-national state or an apartheid state. According to warnings issued by persons belonging to various shades within the left-Zionist camp, that would be the end of the Zionist dream. On the face of it, they seem to have a valid point: the Zionist right is leading Israel to an impasse. But this view – as though all Israeli governments have for years been investing billions in a pointless project and, with eyes wide open, leading Israel into a dead end – is one of denial and refusal to face the facts. Whoever is prepared to examine the system thoroughly will discover that there is method in this madness.

The colonial essence of Zionism

The terms ‘colonialism’ and ‘ethnic cleansing’ are not deemed to be politically correct in the Israeli-Zionist discourse. There is a weighty reason for this: the need to repress and ignore the fact that the Israeli–Palestinian conflict is essentially one between colonizing settlers and an indigenous people, that the Zionist project is fundamentally colonial, implemented via dispossession and ethnic cleansing. One of the thinkers who spoke about this openly and bluntly was Israel Zangwill, a Zionist leader admired by Benzion Netanyahu, the prime minister’s father, who quotes him approvingly in his Hebrew book The Road to Independence. This is how Zangwill put it:

"There is, however, a difficulty from which the Zionist dares not avert his eyes, though he rarely likes to face it. Palestine proper has already its inhabitants.... So we must be prepared either to drive out by the sword the tribes in possession as our forefathers did, or to grapple with the problem of a large alien population, mostly Mohammedan and accustomed for centuries to despise us."(ii)

Zangwill was by no means the only Zionist leader to see that the implementation of Zionism must involve ethnic cleansing. Most of the Zionist leadership, from Herzl to Ben-Gurion, supported population transfer; but for the most part they understood that openly advocating it would be politically harmful to the Zionist project and tarnish its image, so they took care to speak and write about it off the public record. Quotations from their speeches and writings on the subject, as well as a wealth of information about the implementation of transfer in various places and the war crimes that it involved, can be found in the literature.(iii)

It should be pointed out that the aim of Zionist colonization was not to exploit the cheap labour power of the natives but to displace them, as was done by the settlers in North America and Australia, and replace them by Jewish immigrants.

Most of the leading circles of Palestine’s Arabs had no illusions about what the Zionist project meant for them. As far as they were concerned the danger became especially real following the Balfour Declaration, which meant that the British empire – the country’s new ruling power – supported the Zionist plan. As was to be expected, the Arabs’ reaction was implacable opposition.

As in the aforementioned colonies, the settlers in this country formed a new, Israeli-Jewish, nation. But unlike what happened in those countries, where the indigenous people were exterminated or overpowered and marginalized, the indigenous population here, part of the Arab nation, became a people possessing Palestinian national consciousness, whose specific identity was formed in the struggle against the Israeli-Jewish settler nation. This is why the Israeli–Palestinian conflict has the appearance of a national conflict over a piece of territory, to be resolved by territorial compromise.

The following two excerpts, taken from a Matzpen editorial of 10 December 1966, describe the essence of Israel’s regime; they are as topical today as they were then:

"The policy of Israel’s regime is a consistent extension of that of the Zionist movement since its beginnings: it consists in creating new facts and entrenching them by all available means, while planning and seeking to create new facts."

"Since the existing Zionist regime of Israel cannot impose itself on the Arab World by persuasion, it needs to resort to violence. But as its own force falls short of subjugating the Arab World, it must seek the support of the power or powers that it regards as dominating this region."

The ultimate solution: ethnic cleansing

The dispossession of Arab tenant fellaheen started right from the early days of Zionist activity in Palestine: land was bought from absentee landowners residing in Beirut or Damascus, and the tenants, whose families had worked the land for generations, were evicted by the British police. This is what happened in the Valley of Jezreel (Marj Ibn ‘Amer), in Hefer Valley (Wadi Hawarith), and wherever land inhabited by tenant fellaheen was purchased. The accumulated Arab indignation, caused by British-supported Zionist activity, resulted in the 1936–39 Arab uprising against the British authorities and the Jewish immigrants. The uprising was suppressed by the British forces, using tanks and aircraft. As a result, the Palestinians’ military, organizational and political backbone was broken and demoralization spread in their ranks. The leader of the Palestinian uprising, Hajj Amin al-Huseini, fled the country. (As is well known, he later collaborated with the Nazis against the British and the Jews.)

The momentous ethnic cleansing, the Palestinian nakba, took place during the 1948 war. Sporadic terrorist actions by both sides turned into a war following the November 1947 UN partition resolution, and subsequently escalated. It must be emphasised that for the most part the Palestinian population had little interest or involvement in the clash, and wished only to be left alone. Nevertheless, although the Zionist leadership was aware of the Palestinians’ powerlessness, it spread fear in the Jewish yishuv, as though it was in danger of extermination. This made it possible to expel the Palestinians from villages and mixed-population towns, which were conquered more or less rapidly, without the slightest protest even on the part of those Zionists who had supported a bi-national solution and were supposedly against ethnic cleansing.

The Zionist leadership was indeed surprised by the feebleness of Palestinian resistance and the hasty escape of the population, but it knew how to exploit the situation in two ways. On the one hand it claimed that the the flight was ordered by the Palestinian leadership, wishing to prepare a clear operational arena for the Arab armies; on the other hand it intensified expulsions, especially from the areas conquered in the south following the Egyptian invasion. About 400,000 Arabs were expelled before the invasion of the Arab states’ armies, and about another 350,000 after it.

It is important to understand that process of flight and expulsion in order to infer what may happen in future. Spokespersons of the Israeli authorities and establishment historians claim, first, that the Arabs fled and were not expelled; and, second (in support of the first claim), that there had not existed a plan for expulsion, so that the flight of the Arabs must have been spontaneous or a response to an instruction/recommendation of the Arab leadership.

As for the first point: indeed the Arabs generally fled, because they realized right from the start of the hostilities that Palestinian resistance was weak and unable to withstand the Zionist military organizations and their attacks on centres of defenceless civilian population. In those few places where there was resistance, or where the Zionist forces wished to accelerate the flight, massacres were perpetrated.

The second point is of special importance for our present consideration: a detailed and comprehensive plan for expelling the Arabs and destroying their villages did not exist, nor was it needed. Transfer was an integral part inherent in Zionist ideology and practice. Every commander understood what was required of him; and if he was not sure, a small gesture of the hand was sufficient to make matters clear to him.

The same pattern was repeated in the 1967 war: immediately following the conquest of the West Bank and the Golan Heights, a ‘spontaneous’ process of transfer and destruction of villages was put in motion. By the time this move was stopped under American pressure, about 250,000 inhabitants had been expelled (‘fled’) from the West Bank and about 100,000 from the Golan Heights.

The facts that have been established on the ground and the political deadlock designed to allow continued settlement construction in the OTs have created a void into which may be drawn the classical ultimate Zionist solution – ethnic cleansing. Groups of settlers, motivated by an open ideology of transfer, are already creating provocations in the OTs, designed to ignite a major flare-up that would allow transfer to take place. The fact that the ‘security forces’ refrain from stopping them is a pointer to where this is leading. The Netanyahu government is aware that a confrontation, however great, confined to the OTs might attract international and internal opposition capable of preventing the implementation of the scheme. For this purpose what is needed is a regional large-scale conflagration lasting sufficiently long.

The scenario of the nakba may be repeated: a rocket attack may panic the Israeli public into supporting, or at least accepting, any action justified by ‘security needs’. It must be noted that the Zionist left and right do not differ regarding the Zionist aim: a ‘Jewish and democratic’ state over the largest possible territory with as few Palestinians as possible. The Zionist left supports territorial compromise when conditions do not allow this aim to be implemented in the entire area; but if that would become possible, some of them would give it their blessing, and others would perhaps accept it with regretful ‘understanding’, shedding crocodile tears. Of course, this scenario depends on the occurrence of a suitable international conjuncture, and on the acquiescence of the ‘international community’ (the states obedient to the US). In such circumstances the Palestinians would not stand a chance.

Israel’s role in the service of imperialism, and the international situation

The idea of establishing a state for Jews in Palestine was mooted in the British government as early as the mid-19th century,(iv) in the heyday of British colonialism, decades before Herzl and the Zionist movement. At that time Britain had no foothold in the Arab east. The idea was that a Jewish state, alien to the Arab peoples, would be totally dependent on it British sponsor and serve its interests. This idea, proposed to Moses Montefiore, found little support among Jews at that time.

When favourable conditions materialized and the idea started to be implemented in Palestine, it didn’t quite work out as planned: support for Zionism created difficulties for relations between the British empire (and later the US) and the Palestinians, as well as the Arab states that coveted the territory and wished to annex it. (These states themselves were created through the division of the region according to the imperialist interests of Britain and France, following their conquest of the Ottoman empire.) Also, the prospective creation of an alien Zionist state and the dispossession of the indigenous Arabs caused internal unrest within the Arab countries, which destabilized their regimes and unsettled their relations with the British empire.

This ambiguous situation continued after the British domination of the region was replaced by that of the US and lasted until the June 1967 war. Since that war, the clear preference of the US was to support Israel as the principal and most stable mainstay of American hegemony in the region. The turning point was Israel’s decisive victory over Nasser’s Egypt, Syria and Jordan. This crushing victory also led to the downfall of Nasserism, which had posed the most significant threat to US domination of the region, and eventually to the collapse of Soviet influence in the Arab east. Thus the US achieved almost effortlessly an unprecedented gain during the cold war. Since then, the alliance with Israel has been a firm and unassailable feature of US policy in the region, granting the Israeli regime virtually absolute military, economic and political support. For its part, dependence on the US has become for Israel an existential necessity, so that continued US domination of the region is a vital Israeli interest.

At the same time it must be noted that, notwithstanding all the fine talk of shared values, democracy etc., and the influence of the Jewish lobby, US support for Israel is conditional on the latter’s role as watchdog of the imperialist order as well as on its meshing with US regional policy. This premise is now being put to the test, which threatens Israel’s strategic regional position.

The global crisis of capitalism has created shock waves around the world. Among the first to be hit were the corrupt regimes of the Arab world. The Arab Spring, the popular uprising that has spread almost everywhere in the region is undermining ‘stability’, that is to say the regional imperialist order and US hegemony.

We cannot go here into an analysis of the various events in the countries in which the Arab Spring manifested itself, so far with diverse outcomes. What is clear is that the opposition, generally led by the parties of political Islam, that has managed to achieve power, has no solution for the social problems of the masses, which had mainly caused the unrest in the first place. Therefore the insurgency has not had its last say, and stability has not been restored. It is also clear that the US has no intention of endangering the huge profits of the oil corporations, which depend on its strategic domination of the region.

Obama’s re-election, the ebbing of internal American support for the strong-arm policy initiated by G W Bush in Afghanistan and Iran, as well as the capitalist crisis and the Arab spring, have created a new situation, inviting reassessment of US policy in the region. Unlike his predecessor, Obama is reluctant to apply American military force directly (although he has not hesitated to do so by proxy: using NATO in Libya, Saudi Arabia in Yemen and Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Qatar in Syria). He is attempting to apply softer force and more conciliatory policy wherever possible, so long as this does not threaten basic US interests, particularly in relation to the biggest and most important countries of the region, Egypt and Iran. In Egypt the change in the style of US policy was illustrated by its acquiescence in the overthrow of Mubarak and acceptance of the Muslim Brethren opposition. Regarding Iran, it is illustrated by readiness to negotiate with the regime and accept some accommodation with the latter’s interests.

These changes in the policy of the Obama administration’s policy may reduce to some extent Israel’s strategic importance, and increase the importance of Palestinian demands, as part of the new stability that Obama is attempting to promote in the region.

The Netanyahu government, alarmed by these prospects, took unprecedented steps in an attempt to reshuffle the cards and lead back to the old strong-arm policy: it announced its intention to attack Iran without a US green light (an idea that was blocked at the eleventh hour), and made a hare-brained attempt at intervening in the US presidential election campaign, based on the assumption that a Republican administration would oppose Obama’s conciliatory policy and revert to the old policy that secures the position of Israel.

Obama’s policy has no better than even chance of working out. He has been revealed as a weak president, whose hesitancy may lead him to draw back from his plan. On the other hand, the uprising in the Arab world may continue, because the peoples’ hardship cannot be truly resolved by this or that imperialist settlement. In this situation, the entire region may be plunged into chaos and war. In such a scenario, in which Israel is supposed to play a major role, it could be rewarded by its pound of flesh: a large-scale expulsion of Palestinians from the West Bank and possibly also from Israel. This would spell calamity for both peoples.

Conclusions

The realization of Zionism depends on three main elements, which have been addressed in the present article: first, colonialism; second, ethnic cleansing; third, association with a foreign power that dominates the region. Without any one of these, Zionism is but an insubstantial idea. Therefore, irrespective of which ideological current is leading a Zionist Israel, these three elements will perennially determine the reality created by Zionism and its consequences. This is the essence of the problem; but Israeli politics, the Zionist parties and the media, do not address it but are engaged in debates about sorting out its symptoms.

This forecast of the outcome of the process just described is not a prophecy; it is inferred from the whole history of Zionist practice in Palestine. The fact that Israel prefers political deadlock and continued colonization to any solution, albeit partial, that would dampen the flames of the conflict; the extremely asymmetric balance of power between Israel and the Palestinians as well as between imperialism and the ‘international community’ and the peoples of the Arab east – all these suggest a process that may lead to an apocalypse. True, this is not the only possible outcome, and unforeseen circumstances may well arise, forcing all forecasts to be altered. But it would be wrong to bury one’s head in the sand and ignore the dangers.

In any case, it is clear that the Israeli–Palestinian conflict will not be resolved within the narrow framework of Israel-Palestine: it is inseparably bound up with the geopolitical situation in the entire region. Neither the existing imperialist order, nor nationalist or theocratic regimes, can genuinely solve the problems of the peoples of the region, which are basically social.

The Arab Spring – a popular uprising that will re-emerge so long as the problems that engendered it have not been resolved – is a struggle against all the ills of imperialism and its partners, the reactionary Arab regimes and Zionism; it renews the relevance of internationalist socialism as the solution to the region’s social problems and conflicts. Far off as it may seem to be, it has no real substitute.

Socialism (not modelled on the discredited Soviet regime) can also attract the impoverished Israeli working class, as well as the white-collar workers who are forced down into the ranks of the proletariat together with other disadvantaged strata, all those who came out in the social protest of 2011, to renounce Zionism, capitalism and dependence on imperialism, which shackle the Israeli people to endless wars, isolate it from the peoples of the region, and endanger its existence in confrontation with the Arab world.

I. Hebrew text posted 27 December 2012 on Hagada Hasmalit This translation by Moshé Machover

II. "Zionism and England’s Offer", The Maccabaean (American Jewish journal), December 1904. Quoted in http://chaimsimons.net/transfer07.html

III. See, for example, Nur Masalha, Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of ‘Transfer’ in Zionist Political Thought, 1882–1948 (Washington, DC: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992); Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (London: Oneworld, 2006).

IV. See British Support for Jewish Restoration, http://www.mideastweb.org/britzion.htm

Questions surround the treatment of Holocaust survivors in Israel, yet plenty is invested every day into displacing the Palestinian population. This image from an Israeli newspaper is titled, Leopold Rosen, "I don't have enough money for food"

Holocaust survivors protest budget shortage Photo: Marc Israel Sellem/ The Jerusalem Post

Below is an article from YNet, on-line edition of Israel's largest circulation daily,  Yediot Aharanot, on a demonstration by holocaust survivors in Jerusalem in December.

The Israeli State and the Zionist Movement has never lost a chance to utilise the survivors - to establish and gain recognition for the Israeli state and today as a justification for the oppression of the Palestinians.  In the warped logic of Zionism, Nazi genocide of Jews justifies Israeli murder and expulsion of Palestinians.

But the holocaust survivors themselves?  Many live in dire poverty as the Israeli State and Zionist groups like the Jewish Claim Conference have pocketed reparations meant for them.  That is documented further in Norman Finkelstein's 'The Holocaust Industry'.

EDMUND SANDERS / MCT At 67, Shoshana Roza-Levy is the youngest resident at Helping Hands shelter in Haifa, Israel.

I also include links to a number of other articles on the subject, including another report of the demonstration from the Jerusalem Post.

Tony Greenstein
Omri Efraim,12.16.12, 16:38 / Israel News

Dozens of Holocaust survivors demonstrated in Jerusalem on Sunday as the cabinet convened for its weekly meeting. The protesters demanded NIS 16 million in reimbursements for medical bills.
They carried signs reading "Steinitz, I hope you're warm at night because I'm cold."

According to data published by the Foundation for the Benefit of Holocaust Victims, the past year has seen 35 Holocaust survivors die while waiting for the compensation.

The Finance Ministry said in response that it has increased budgets for Shoah survivors. The ministers did not respond to the claims during the cabinet meeting.

EDMUND SANDERS / MCT At 67, Shoshana Roza-Levy is the youngest resident at Helping Hands shelter in Haifa, Israel.

Last month it was revealed that the Foundation for the Benefit of Holocaust Victims suspended the transfer of funds to over 8,000 survivors eligible for benefits.

The frozen funds were meant to reimburse survivors for medical bills of up to NIS 4,000 (roughly $1,000), which they have already paid out of their own pocket. To be eligible for the benefits, the survivors' monthly income must not exceed NIS 8,158 ($2,100). Some of the services and equipment covered include dental, hearing aides and prescription glasses.

Among the protesters was also Avram Grant, the former manager of the Israel national soccer team and the son of a Holocaust survivor. "I am here on the name of my father and his slain family members," Grant told Ynet. "They're not asking for luxury items, but for medical aids, the most basic things."

Karol Godelfeder, 82, said he is waiting for reimbursements for his hearing aid. "It cost me thousands of shekels. I filed a request several months ago and the money never came," he said. "I need that money. I want to pay my children back but medications are expensive."

Another survivor said, "I underwent eye surgery and need medications and a hearing aid . We suffer as the state looks on with indifference."

The Finance Ministry said in response that together with the foundation it has significantly increased the survivors' budget. "For instance in 2009 the foundation was allocated NIS 159 million and in 2010 it received NIS 170 million. Several days ago the foundation approved the allocation of an extra NIS 9 million," a statement said.

"While the foundation is independent, we expect the money to be directly transferred to the survivors and not be used for management costs." The ministry said that an independent check by an accounting firm showed that the foundation needs to improve its finances.

see also Holocaust survivors protest budget shortage  and Israel Facts, Figures and Statistics About Poverty Stricken Holocaust SurvivorsHolocaust survivors' poverty is Israel's dirty little secret

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Martin Smith, former National Secretary of SWP - at the centre of serious allegations of sexual violence

Can the SWP survive its own failures of internal democracy?

UPDATE
Although I didn't realise it until reading the transcript, the second woman who made a complaint of sexual harassment against Comrade 'Delta' has been barred from working at the SWP HQ.  In her own words 'Within days of the hearing I asked to be allowed to return to work, but in many meetings and appeals to the central committee I was repeatedly told that I’d disrupt the harmony of the office. The worst part and the most stressful part of this is the motivations that have been ascribed to people coming forward.' 

If I were acting as her employment lawyer I would do, as I have done on many similar occasions with capitalist employers, tell her to resign and claim constructive dismissal and detriment on the grounds of having made a complaint of sexual harassment as well as the dismissal itself.  That would be my strong advice to Comrade X now.  The SWP has to know that it is not above the most basic laws that even capitalist society has conceded in respect of discrimination and sexual and other harassment. 

I have also received the following from a recent member of the SWP:

'By the way, don't quote me as the source of this, but are you aware that not only are SWP members being expelled from the party but members of SWP staff in their office in Vauxhall are being sacked too? There seems to be a full-scale purge going on.  Hannah Dee is now off the CC as part of the purge ...

Another thing: Judith Orr may have leapt to the defence of the party position over Atzmon, but my sources tell me that she was on the right side of the current split i.e. she supported the alleged victims. Again don't quote me on this please.  Not sure whether she will also be purged, will resign or  whatever ... watch this space.'

The debate at the SWP Conference was stacked.  Most of the speakers were supportive of the Central Committee.  The debate was curtailed instead of being extended.  The victim of the alleged rape was barred from listening to the debate itself.  The behaviour of the SWP is so bad one wonders where they have been for the last 30 years.  Have they learn nothing?  Do they not understand that asking the victim about her past/present sexual relationships, her drinking habits etc. is part of the process whereby rape is made acceptable?

The Socialist Workers Party is the largest group on Britain’s far-left, with an estimated membership of around 2,500 although the statistical manoeuvres, which are part of the greater problem facing the SWP, has led to these figures being inflated to around 7,000.

The present unprecedented crisis within the SWP, leading to the expulsion of four members before even holding their annual conference, just after the New Year, the near defeat of the Central Committee at the conference, a split in the CC itself, with four members standing on a separate slate and the resignation of a long-standing journalist Socialist Worker journalist, Tom Walker, whose statement is beneath, signify that the long-standing problems of lack of democracy, declining membership, auto-activism without political coherence, the legacy of Respect and now an inability to take on board serious allegations of rape and sexual harassment by a senior Party member, have come to a head.  The question is whether the SWP itself can survive.

The catalyst for the crisis in the SWP were the allegations of rape by one member of the SWP and the sexual harassment of another member by Martin Smith, former SWP National Secretary.  It is of course impossible to know whether there is any foundation to the rumours, although it is unlikely that there is no smoke without fire, but how they were dealt with by the SWP leadership speaks volumes about the mentality of the leadership clique led by Alex Callinicos and Charlie Kimber and their attitude to ordinary members.  It also speaks volumes about their commitment to socialism since it is difficult to imagine a more serious and vile act than rape by a senior member of the leadership of a political group against a young comrade.

Martin Smith is, regardless of the truth of these allegations, a particularly unpleasant individual, both politically and personally. Weekly Worker of 12 July 2007 Stop thuggery in workers` movement  described how Simon Wells, who was expelled from the SWP, was attacked without provocation by Smith, at Marxism 2007, when he refused to hand over the ticket he had paid for when queuing to go into a session:  “The SWP`s national organiser angrily demanded comrade Simon`s ticket to the Marxism event and, when he refused, Smith instantly attacked him. Wrestled to the floor, comrade Simon sustained bruising, abrasions and back strain.”

It was also Smith who was primarily responsible for the SWP hosting and politically defending Gilad Atzmon against accusations of anti-Semitism.  From 2005 to 2009 the SWP was content to make use of Atzmon’s status as a leading jazz musician, regardless of his racist views.  Martin Smith, a devotee of John Coltrane and jazz, was content to ignore Atzmon’s views as taking secondary priority to his musical affections. 

Otto Weininger - Hitler's favourite Jew and the subject of Atzmon's talk to the SWP in 2005

On 17th June 2005 Jews Against Zionism picketed the Bookmarx bookshop in London, owned by the SWP, after it refused to cancel a talk by Atzmon.   In an e- mail to me of 16.6.05, Judith Orr of Bookmarks urged that we call off our planned picket because ‘Bookmarks has a reputation as a socialist bookshop going back over 30 years, we have faced up to Nazi attacks both physical and legal and have been proud to have been part of the struggle against racism, fascism and anti-Semitism throughout that time.’  This and an SWP statement issued at the time (which has long disappeared from the web) traded on the past legacy of the SWP in fighting fascism as a pretext for hosting someone who was openly anti-Semitic. 

Although the reason Judith gave for Atzmon’s hosting an event, was to  read from his book ‘My One and Only One’ in fact Atzmon gave a talk on Otto Weininger, a German Jewish philosopher and author of the anti-feminist Sex and Character, of whom Hitler once remarked that ‘Dietrich Eckart once told me that in all his life he had known just one good Jew: Otto Weininger, who killed himself on the day when he realized that the Jew lives upon the decay of peoples".   In charge of stewarding and grimacing at the demonstrators was Martin Smith, who hovered at the entrance to Bookmarks.  Even SWP members who had fraternised with the demonstrators were barred from the meeting.

I should confess my own experience of the SWP.  In 1970, after having participated in my first demonstration, in Newport, South Wales against the tour of the South African rugby team, the Springboks, I came across and soon joined the International Socialists Group, forerunner of the SWP, at the age of 16 whilst still at school.  By the age of 18, with less than 3 years membership, I was expelled from the group for breach of discipline, namely openly dissenting from the IS line, which was to wind up the Anti-Internment League.  [see The Left: There’s no success like failure - Tony Greenstein bemoans the continuing self-marginalisation of Britain’s far left 

Martin Smith outlining the finer points of theory to the UAF

There is no doubt that the recent furore in the SWP is unprecedented.  Normally decisions of the Disputes Committee are passed on the nod.  However the decision on Martin Smith’s guilt was only ratified by 231 votes to 209 with 18 abstentions.  Those who opposed the Disputes Committee and the Central Committee’s expulsion of 4 SWP members for secret factionalising (which was endorsed by two-thirds of the conference) were labelled ‘feminists’, harking back to old debates in the 1980’s over radical feminism, with the implication that to take rape or sexual violence seriously is somehow to be some kind of reactionary radical feminism. The transcript of the debate the SWP Conference has been published and is here.

What is remarkable is that an allegation as serious as rape even came before the Disputes Committee of eight, which is packed with 5 current or former members of the Central Committee.  The DC found that the allegations against Smith were ‘not proven’, though one member dissented from this (also unprecedented).  Just what expertise the DC has to pronounce on whether rape has occurred is not clear.  The existence of an SWP forensic and detective department hasn’t previously been highlighted as a part of the SWP’s structures.  They were unable to take sworn evidence, clearly there was no cross examination of Smith and it had of course no capacity to investigate the allegations.
Nonetheless, when it came to supporting a senior member of the Central Committee, the DC voted to support their mate Martin.  By all accounts the women concerned were subject to the kind of hostile and obtrusive questioning that women have often complained about in the courts and treated with the kind of hostility that the Police were and still are famous for.  We don’t know whether or not the women concerned decided not to complain to the Police but a DC was not the forum in which these allegations could be investigated and a verdict pronounced upon.  The obvious question would be why a member of the SWP would make up such an allegation.  Of course there may indeed be a reason, but she should have been strongly advised to go to the Police.  But faced with allegations from 2 women comrades the verdict of ‘Not proven’ (which only applies under the Scottish legal system) was absurd.  How could it have been proven?  In a criminal court there is forensic evidence and cross examination.  In the case of Martin Smith it came down to the simple question ‘Who to  believe’ and Smith’s comrades preferred to take his word above the women members of the SWP.  But having chosen to believe the alleged perpetrator, the SWP Central Committee’s glaring lack of democratic accountability was brought into the open.

Lack of Democracy

The SWP’s Central Committee is in effect a self-perpetuating clique whose ‘elections’ are transparently undemocratic.  Instead of individuals being elected or rejected by the SWP National Conference, a Central Committee slate is presented to the conference.  Only once has there been an alternative slate.  It is a take it or leave it situation which the SWP proposed in 2001 at the Socialist Alliance AGM and which destroyed the democracy of that body.

The SWP also has a quaint rule which forbids the existence of factions until a 3 month period before the national conference.  When I joined in 1970 the SWP was still a more libertarian body and Workers Fight (now the AWL which was then a healthy socialist group) not only had the right to exist as a faction but had representatives on the Central Committee.  In 1972 the rules were changed to ban factions. 

Despite claiming to be a revolutionary socialist organisation, the SWP, unlike the Bolsheviks, refuses to allow permanent factions with the result that the only permanent faction is the Central Committee itself.  The formation of ‘secret factions’ is outlawed and this was used as the basis for the expulsion of 4 members before Christmas.  What it boils down to is that the very act of trying to form a faction within the 3 months period before conference can lay one open to the charge of secret factionalising!  This is what is normally known as a Catch-22 situation after the author Joseph Heller.  When the facebook conversations of 4 members of the Democratic Opposition, who in fact argued against forming a faction in discussions, were discovered they were expelled by e-mail by the Central Committee.  Even the idea of a disciplinary hearing, which even the bourgeoisie concede in the case of a dismissal of a worker, is too democratic for the SWP. 

The SWP isn’t the first organisation to face such a crisis.  The Workers Revolutionary Party under Gerry Healy splintered as a result of rape and sexual harassment allegations against Healy.  In both cases the root of the problem is the lack of democracy in the organisation that allowed powerful male leaders to emerge in a position to suborn and molest young and inexperienced female members.  The SWP’s Central Committee is virtually impossible to remove.  Its members aren’t individually elected or therefore accountable and there is a natural tendency amongst organisations and institutions, to protect those in authority.  That is exactly what has happened over Martin Smith.   And the alleged victims of his sexual violence were expected to shut their mouths for the greater good.

As I said above, the allegations of rape, which will undoubtedly be made use of by the Right, were the catalyst not the cause of the present furore and possible implosion of the SWP.  When the SWP’s dalliance with Respect and George Galloway came to an abrupt end in September 2007, John Rees, then National Secretary was made the fall guy.  He had accepted a donation of £10,000 from an anti-union Arab capitalist in order to fund a trade union fight-back conference!  Rees formed a faction which was heavily defeated at the annual conference in January 2008 and shortly after  both he and his partner, Lindsay German, left the SWP for Counterfire.  Chris Nineham of Global Resistance and former National Secretary Chris Bamber also left the organisation.  Ironically at the time, Rees and German protested furiously at the lack of democracy involved in his removal and scapegoating, even though he had never hesitated to preside over the apparatus of ‘democratic centralism’ itself.

Therein lies the problem.  Democratic centralism.  In the Bolshevik Party’s early years, democratic centralism meant free debate, factions and the ability of party leaders to dissent from each other.  In the hands of the SWP and other British far-left groups it has become a mechanism of control of the party by the leadership.  It isn’t democratic but bureaucratic centralism.  It ensures that the debates of party leaders are never reflected back to the membership of the party, who as in the Respect Affair, were kept ignorant of what had been happening until almost the end.  By definition it lacks all accountability and transparency and for what?  Has the SWP advanced under the chains of its bureaucratic centralist means of control?  All it does is allow the leadership to claim credit for the most insignificant of achievements, such as the Unite the Resistance conference last year (did you notice the difference that was made?) or in the case of the defeat of the EDL demonstration in Waltham Forest, to outrightly lie to the membership about what actually did happen.
Another feature of democratic centralism, as I highlighted in my article, is that democratic centralism enables the leadership to pretend that there has been a steady advance towards the goal of socialism.  It prevents mistakes being examined or analysed, unless that analysis is itself prescribed by the Central Committee.

Democratic Centralism might make makes sense when combating a capitalist class that is itself resorting to military and authoritarian rule.  One can hardly open and above board and democratically overthrow capitalism by being transparent in everything one does.  Revolutionary groups in a revolutionary situation would also have to keep secrets and organise secretly if they wish to be successful.  Not to do so means nothing less than permanent capitalism.  But democratic centralism belongs to the age of revolution.  We are not in a revolutionary situation or anything like it.  In the current climate, democratic centralism means dictatorship by the leadership.

The running in this affair has been made by a small group, the Communist Party of Great Britain and its paper, the Weekly Worker.  Despite the small size of the CPGB itself, it runs an open paper of the far-left and has managed to achieve the largest readership of a far-left paper via the Internet.  In its current issue there are articles by the group itself SWP conference: Comrades in the SWP, rebel!  and Tom Walker, Why I am resigning  Tom Walker takes the opposite view from the CPGB, viz. that dissidents should now leave the SWP and organise to do so rather than being picked off separately.  I agree with Tom Walker. 

The SWP has had a mixed record being responsible for the creation of a mass anti-fascist organisation, the Anti-Nazi League before taking it over and closing it down.  It was also responsible for launching the Stop the War Coalition and organising the monster demonstration in February 2003 against war in Iraq.  But it has also operated as a revolving door as recruits came in one door and the disillusioned or expelled went out the other door.  Permanent activity was counterposed to debating politics and strategy.  That was the responsibility of the Central Committee.  Indeed probably the largest political party in Britain today is ex-members of the SWP.  But of course this problem has been addressed by fiddling the figures.

Below I reprint an article by Richard Seymour on his Leninology blog.  Despite previous differences with Richard, the article is brave and well worth reading and it is likely to end up in his own expulsion.  However up till now Richard has teetered on the edge as a loyal critic and refused to publicly criticise the SWP over Atzmon, preferring to see it as an isolated incident.

Likewise the article from Laurie Penny is also interesting but it also has a right-wing slant in its use of what has happened to bolster the merits of ‘identity politics.  The alleged rape and sexual harassment of two SWP members has nothing to do with how they defined themselves and everything to do with the abuse of power by men who were powerful in the SWP.  Identity politics is often used by the strong against the weak as Ms Penny should know from the use of ‘anti-Semitism’ by Zionists.

I also reprint an article by Mike Marqusee, a libertarian socialist and journalist.  Mike’s contribution though is somewhat disingenuous as his account of SWP misdemeanours begins with the affair of the cheques forged by the SWP in the name of his partner, Liz Davies, who was at that time Chair of the Socialist Alliance.

What Mike omits to mention is that in the autumn of 2001, the SWP proposed a change to the SA’s constitution which led to the Socialist Party walking out (in error) and a new National Committee being proposed which was elected by, wait for it, the same undemocratic slate system that Mike is now taking exception to.  A slate of individuals was to be put up en bloc to the SA Conference and could be accepted or rejected accordingly.  Of course the SWP said it would include ‘independents’ but the problem was that they were not genuinely independent, but chosen by the SWP.   For reasons that are still unclear, since Mike and Liz refuse to discuss the matter, Mike himself and Liz Davies agreed to become SWP independents.  It was only after supporting this attack on SA democracy that Mike Marqusee and Liz Davies realised just who it was that they had got into bed with.

I said I agree with Tom Walker.  The question of what to do is a tactical matter but within the SWP it is impossible to organise any sort of oppositional group.  It would be far better if a large section of the SWP left to form, in conjunction with the others on the far-left without a home, a new revolutionary socialist grouping which had democracy at its heart.  The SWP politically should be left to wither on the vine, a testament to where the methods of Stalinist democracy lead.

Tony Greenstein

Crisis in the SWP

Laurie Penny writes an article about the crisis in the SWP, following up on Tom Walker's very finely written resignation statement. It quotes my long-time friend and comrade China Mieville making some, to my mind, extremely well put observations about the catastrophic nature of this crisis and the roots of it in the party's deformed democratic structures and lack of accountability. It is an excellent piece. And it stands in stark contrast to the shameful whitewash in this week's Socialist Worker, and ironically does more service to the party.

The image of itself that the SWP likes to portray

So, let us recapitulate. A serious allegation is referred to the Disputes Committee of the Socialist Workers Party, my party, to investigate. The Disputes Committee is composed largely of individuals who know the accused. The Disputes Committee asks the person making the allegations a series of completely inappropriate questions that, had they been asked of someone making such allegations in a police station, we would rightly denounce them as sexist. Another comrade makes a related allegation against the same accused, and submits a statement. The committee subjects this comrade to similar treatment. The committee reaches a verdict of 'not proven'. The conference of the party is then lied to about the nature of the allegations. The Central Committee and the Disputes Committee collude in a cover-up. They suppress it. This is already a disgrace.

But word does get around. People begin to hear what has happened, and are outraged. They begin to hear of senior party members spreading the most disgusting rumours about the two women involved. Many members, especially young members, begin to kick off about it. It becomes clear that this will be an issue in the party conference of 2013. So, there is a preemptive strike against four members for participating in a Facebook thread discussing the case, which is alleged - on the basis of selective excerpts - to be evidence of 'secret factionalising', which is prohibited. The expulsion is enacted immediately, with no due process, no disciplinary hearing. The four comrades are expelled by email. This is totally at odds with the party's usual procedures. It is a clear bureaucratic manoeuvre to stymy the upsurge. But it produces a revolt. A group of comrades form a faction to contest the expulsions, campaign for the rejection of the Dispute Committee's report on the allegations, and challenge the party's democracy deficit. (Naturally I join this faction.)

We organise. But the members who raise this issue, many of them students, are yelled at in meetings, denounced for 'creeping feminism', or for carrying the germ of autonomism into the party. Old polemics against 'feminism' from the 1980s, always somewhat dogmatic, are dusted off and used as a stick to beat dissenters with. People who try to raise the issue at district aggregates are shouted down. Wised up hacks turn up at meetings, with their best 'what, us?' innocent expression, claiming to be shocked and horrified at the lack of trust in the party, and astonished that some people use terms like 'hacks'. They express befuddlement about why the faction even exists. They accuse dissenters of being 'inward-looking'. Nonetheless, the faction grows quickly. Soon, there are two factions, both opposing the expulsions and criticising the findings of the Disputes Committee. They have different emphases and different tactics, but similar objectives. They go to conference, expecting to be in a minority - after all, most comrades still haven't got the slightest clue what is happening, or have only heard the rumours and lies. In the history of party conferences, dissenting motions generally haven't fared well. But we find, suddenly, that there is a groundswell. The more members hear, the more they're throwing up. And we get to conference, and our delegates face down the most appallingly bureaucratic arguments. And we are surprised, and disappointed. The party ratifies the expulsions by two thirds to one third. The party ratifies the Dispute Committee findings by a slender margin. But the reality is that despite formal wins for the leadership, this amounts to a serious crisis for them.
How do they respond? A sane response would be to say, 'much of the party is still not convinced, we need to debate this further and work out a solution'. At the very least. More generally, a sane leadership might think about opening up year round communications so that party members can communicate with one another outside of conference season. They might think about creating more pluralistic party structures, ending the ban on factions outside of conference season and rethinking the way elections take place. Instead, they tell everyone in Party Notes that there will be no further discussion of the matter. CC members tell full-time party employees that the accused was 'exonerated' by conference (no such thing), insist that conference voted for an 'interventionist' party, rather than a 'federalist' party, and begin a purge. Report backs from conference either don't discuss the Disputes Committee session in any detail or discuss it in an arrogant, dismissive manner. A CC member gives a report back that instructs members, "if you can't argue the line, you should consider your position in the party" - as if the party was the possession of the bureaucracy. They tell members to get on with focusing on 'the real world'. In the real world, this is a scandal. And we, those who fought on this, told them it would be. We warned them that it would not just be a few sectarian blogs attacking us. We warned them that after we had rightly criticised George Galloway over his absurd remarks about rape, and after a year of stories about sexual abuse, and after more than a year of feminist revival, this was a suicidal posture, not just a disgusting, sickening one. They continued, obliviously, convinced that this was the correct, hard-headed Bolshevik position. Now members are caught between the choice of having to expend energy on a fight to save the party and its traditions, or burying their heads in the sand, or swallowing the Kool Aid and joining the headbangers.

There isn't enough bile to conjure up the shame and disgrace of all of this, nor the palpable physical revulsion, nor the visceral contempt building, nor the sense of betrayal and rage, nor the literal physical and emotional shattering of people exposed to the growing madness day in and day out.
This is the thing that all party members need to understand. Even on cynical grounds, the Central Committee has no strategy for how to deal with this. A scandal has been concealed, lied about, then dumped on the members in the most arrogant and stupid manner possible. The leadership is expecting you to cope with this. This isn't the first time that such unaccountable practices have left you in the lurch. You will recall your pleasure on waking up to find out that Respect was collapsing and that it was over fights that had been going on for ages which no one informed you about. But this is much worse. They expect you to go to your activist circles, your union, your workplaces, and argue something that is indefensible. Not only this, but in acting in this way, they have - for their own bureaucratic reasons - broken with a crucial component of the politics of the International Socialist tradition that undergirds the SWP. The future of the party is at stake, and they are on the wrong side of that fight. You, as members, have to fight for your political existence. Don't simply drift away, don't simply bury your face in your palms, and don't simply cling to the delusional belief that the argument was settled at conference. You must fight now.

***

One last thing. There is an article in The Independent about this case. It uses the phrase "socialist sharia court". It is miles away, in tone and spirit, from Laurie Penny's piece. I would urge people to think carefully about who wants to use the sort of language deployed in the Independent article. I think the answer is, "racists". I would also point out that, as far as I know, the Independent did not speak to any party members. My advice is to disregard that piece.

What does the SWP's way of dealing with sex assault allegations tell us about the left?

When it comes to sexual violence, why should progressive organisations be held to different standards?

Laurie Penny, New Statesman, 11 January 2013

How do we deal with sexual violence on the left? Here's a case study.

The Socialist Workers' Party, for those who aren't familiar with it already, is a political organisation of several thousand members which has been a prominent force on the British left for more than 30 years. They are at the forefront of the fight against street fascism in Britain, were a large organising presence in the student and trade union movement over the past several years, and are affiliated with large, active parties in other countries, like Germany's Die Linke. Many of the UK's most important thinkers and writers are members, or former members.

Like many others on the left in Britain, I've had my disagreements with the SWP, but I've also spoken at their conferences, drunk their tea, and have a lot of respect for the work they do. They are not a fringe group: they matter. And it matters that right now, the party is exploding in messy shards because of a debate about sexism, sexual violence and wider issues of accountability.

This week, it came to light that when allegations of rape and sexual assault were made against a senior party member, the matter was not reported to the police, but dealt with 'internally' before being dismissed. According to a transcript from the party's annual conference earlier this month, not only were friends of the alleged rapist allowed to investigate the complaint, the alleged victims were subject to further harassment. Their drinking habits and former relationships were called into question, and those who stood by them were subject to expulsion and exclusion.

Tom Walker - a party member who walked out this week in disgust - explained that feminism "is used effectively as a swear word by the leadership’s supporters.... it is deployed against anyone who seems ‘too concerned’ about issues of gender."

In a brave and principled resignation statement published yesterday, Walker said that:

". . . there is clearly a question mark over the sexual politics of many men in powerful positions on the left. I believe the root of this is that, whether through reputation, lack of internal democracy or both, these are often positions that are effectively unchallengeable. Not for nothing have recent sex abuse allegations in the wider world focused on the idea of a ‘culture of impunity’. Socialist Worker has pointed to the way that institutions close up to protect powerful people within them. What is not acknowledged is that the SWP is itself an institution in this sense, with its instinct for self-protection to survive. As previously mentioned, its belief in its own world-historic importance gives a motive for an attempted cover-up, making abusers feel protected."
Members are now leaving the organisation, or being expelled, in large numbers after the case came to light at the party's conference and transcripts of the discussions were leaked online.
The writer China Mieville, a longstanding member of the SWP, told me that, like many members, he is "aghast":

"The way such allegations were dealt with - complete with questions about accusers' past relationships and drinking habits that we would instantly, rightly denounce as sexist in any other context - was appalling. It's a terrible problem of democracy, accountability and internal culture that such a situation can occur, as is the fact that those arguing against the official line in a fashion deemed unacceptable to those in charge could be expelled for 'secret factionalism."
Mieville explained that in his party, as in so many other organisations, the power hierarchies which have facilitated problems such as this have been controversial for a long time.

"Many of us have for years been openly fighting for a change in the culture and structures of the organisation to address exactly this kind of democratic deficit, the disproportionate power of the Central Committee and their loyalists, their heavy-handed policing of so-called 'dissent', and their refusal to admit mistakes ," he told me.  "Like the current situation, a disaster catastrophically mishandled by the leadership. All of us in the party should have the humility to admit such issues. It's up to members of the SWP to fight for the best of our tradition, not put up with the worst, and to make our organisation what it could be, and unfortunately is not yet."
The British Socialist Worker's Party is hardly atypical among political parties, among left-wing groups, among organisations of committed people or, indeed, among groups of friends and colleagues in having structures in place that might allow sexual abuse and misogyny by men in positions of power to continue unchecked. One could point, in the past 12 months alone, to the BBC's handling of the Jimmy Savile case, or to those Wikileaks supporters who believe that Julian Assange should not be compelled to answer allegations of rape and sexual assault in Sweden.

I could point, personally, to at least two instances involving respected men that have sundered painfully and forever friendship groups which lacked the courage to acknowledge the incidents. The only difference is that the SWP actually talk openly about the unspoken rules by which this sort of intimidation usually goes on. Other groups are not so brazen as to say that their moral struggles are simply more important than piffling issues of feminism, even if that's what they really mean, nor to claim that as right-thinking people they and their leaders are above the law. The SWP's leadership seem to have written it into their rules.

To say that the left has a problem with handling sexual violence is not to imply that everyone else doesn't. There is, however, a stubborn refusal to accept and deal with rape culture that is unique to the left and to progressives more broadly. It is precisely to do with the idea that, by virtue of being progressive, by virtue of fighting for equality and social justice, by virtue of, well, virtue, we are somehow above being held personally accountable when it comes to issues of race, gender and sexual violence.

That unwillingness to analyse our own behaviour can quickly become dogma. The image is one of petty, nitpicking women attempting to derail the good work of decent men on the left by insisting in their whiny little women's way that progressive spaces should also be spaces where we don't expect to get raped and assaulted and slut-shamed and victimised for speaking out, and the emotions are rage and resentment: why should our pure and perfect struggle for class war, for transparency, for freedom from censorship be polluted by - it's pronounced with a curl of the upper lip over the teeth, as if the very word is distasteful - 'identity politics'? Why should we be held more accountable than common-or-garden bigots? Why should we be held to higher standards?

Because if we're not, then we have no business calling ourselves progressive. Because if we don't acknowledge issues of assault, abuse and gender hierarchy within our own institutions we have no business speaking of justice, much less fighting for it.

"The issues of democracy and sexism are not separate, but inextricably linked," writes Walker. "Lack of the first creates space for the second to grow, and makes it all the more difficult to root it out when it does."  He's talking about the SWP, but he could be talking about any part of the left right now, in its struggle to divest itself of generations of misogynist baggage.

Equality isn't an optional add-on, a side-issue to be dealt with after the revolution's over. There can be no true democracy, no worthwhile class struggle, without women's rights. The sooner the left accepts that and starts working the enormous stick of priggishness and prejudice out of its collective backside, the sooner we can get on with the job at hand.

Ten years on: a comment on the British SWP

Mike Marqusee

Mike Marqusee - socialist iconoclast

The recent conflict within the Socialist Workers Party over allegations of serious personal misconduct by a leading member has brought back sharply my own rupture with the (then) SWP leadership, ten years ago, and how this was handled by the party (of which I’ve never been a member).

To explain. After twenty years hard graft in the Labour Party I resigned in 2000 and became active in the Socialist Alliance campaign for the London Assembly. A year later, I was joined in the SA by my partner, Liz Davies, who had been a Labour councillor and an elected member of Labour’s National Executive. Liz was elected chair of the SA national executive in late 2001. As such she was made one of the signatories for the Socialist Alliance’s (meagre) bank account.

In autumn of 2002, we discovered that Liz’s signature was being forged on Socialist Alliance cheques. The forging was being done by people in the SA office, members of the SWP whom we knew to be in daily contact with the SWP leadership. When Liz raised the discovery with the SWP leadership, she was met with hostility. None of this was to be discussed by anybody. That was not acceptable to her. She brought the matter to the SA Executive. In the course of the discussion there it became apparent to Liz that there was a comprehensive refusal to grasp the seriousness of the offence or to take any meaningful measures in response. That was articulated by one SWPer at the meeting who said it would have been wrong not to forge the signature since the money was needed to get placards on a demo. Liz resigned in disgust and I followed soon after.

It shouldn’t be necessary to say but for those with doubts: by forging the signatures, these people were making unauthorised use of the dues paid to the SA by its members. They did it not once but repeatedly, and were only found out by accident. This was a sustained, furtive, and calculated violation of democracy and basic standards of probity, a high handed abuse of power, displaying contempt for the SA and its members.

Sadly not only the SWP but also most of the other groups involved in the SA could not grasp this. It suited them all for various reasons to downplay the whole thing. For some it served as an excuse to marginalise strong unaffiliated voices within the SA.

People on both sides of the current SWP conflict have understandably taken offence at the way they have been labelled by opponents. But this has been the modus operandi of the SWP towards critics outside its ranks for ages. Time and again, crude categorisations, given a spurious Marxist veneer, have taken the place of real engagement with the issues in question.

In the wake of our departure from the SA, we were dismissed as “Labourists” or “reformists” preoccupied with “formalistic bourgeois morality”. SWP leaders put it about that we were going to go to the police about the matter – an allegation that said more about their own petty mentality than it did about us.

In fact, because of the political situation in the run up to the invasion of Iraq, we kept our counsel: it was obvious that this incident could be used to attack the Stop the War Coalition. Nonetheless we were treated by the SWP as persona non-grata at meetings of various kinds, our every intervention met with suspicion.

Some months after the invasion had turned into a long-term occupation, and the anti-war movement was taking stock, I wrote a piece critical of the SWP’s methods – it mentioned no names, made no personal references of any kind, and referred once only in passing to the cheque forgery incident, without giving details. In response, an article penned by the leaders of the Stop the War Coalition appeared in both the Morning Star and Socialist Review attacking me by name, lumping me in with Nick Cohen and David Aronovitch as an enemy of the Coalition, stating that I had played no role in the movement for the past year – which the authors of the piece knew to be untrue – and dismissing my concerns as the result of “personal bitterness”. There was no attempt at all to respond to what I’d actually said in the original article.

So I have to say that many features of the SWP’s current internal dispute seem bitterly familiar to me: treatment of whistle-blowers, smearing of critics, blaming victims, the unaccountability of leading cadre. When I see SWP members valiantly insisting that the recent dispute is nobody’s business but their own, I have to demur.

Some years later, when John Rees at al departed the SWP, SWP members approached me to say that we must be pleased with this development and suggesting that all could be forgotten now. But I saw and see no evidence of the SWP examining itself with the seriousness required. The question was and is: how was it that a socialist organisation that claims to be democratic could allow people with a coarse disregard for accountability in all spheres run their organisation unchecked for years? How was it that the SWP leadership’s obviously contrived and incomplete account of their rupture with us (described by them as a dispute over “administrative procedures”) went unquestioned by the vast majority of members, including the scores with whom we had worked amicably and constructively? Only three individuals (two of them now long gone from the party) were even willing to talk about the matter with us.

Shortly after I first learned about the forgeries, I made an effort to talk about it confidentially with three long standing SWP activists with whom I felt I had a personal relationship. Not one of them was prepared to accept that there could be any truth in what they referred to as “these allegations”. It spoke to me of a party culture of denial and solipsism.

Coming from a left Labour and trade union background, I was from the first taken aback by the SWP’s lax approach to what it regarded as the finer points of accountability and organisational integrity. For us in the Labour left, the whole battle had been about accountability, about members’ rights and power; we had no interest in joining an alternative that did not meaningfully enfranchise us – for which things like accurate and detailed minutes, reports from officers, etc. are a sine qua non. The cheque forgery was one example of the kind of misbehaviour that people with serious experience in the labour movement would never countenance. But the aura of “revolutionary” superiority in which the SWP wraps itself enables it to skate past all kinds of questions that are the daily diet of people in the broader movement. Perhaps that’s now coming back to haunt the SWP as they wrestle with the issues revolving around the current dispute.

Is theJewish state becoming Klan country?

African counter-demonstration in Tel Aviv

Anti-African mob

Michael Ben Ari - Knesset member for National Union - Jewish Home - rousing the mob

Netanyahu - warmonger Prime Minister casts his vote

Old Wine in New Zionist Bottles

In the article I wrote 4 years ago, after the 2009 Israeli elections, I said that the 2 State solution was dead as a door mouse.  Today membership of the Flat Earth society is a more rational choice than support for 2 States.

Anyone who thinks that the latest Israeli elections will give a boost to the ‘Peace Process’ has substituted hope for reality.  In fact what was remarkable about the election was the absence of any discussion about the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.  Shelly Yachimovitch, leader of Israel’s Labour Party, steadfastly refused to discuss the issue, preferring instead to concentrate on  bread and butter issues.  Yair Lapid, leader of Yesh Atid, the new Centre Party, was equally reluctant to discuss the Occupied Territories.  The Right of course didn’t need to discuss the Occupation (though they did) and the new far-right party Jewish Home, led by Naftali Bennett, appears to have gained 12 seats.

At the time of writing, the election results are still changing, but the trends are clear.

1. In the Arab sector, the 3 Arab parties – United Arab List, Balad and Hadash (Communist) are set to gain 10 seats again.  Although there are reports of a last minute increase, Israeli Arabs were expected to abstain in record numbers.
2. The Zionist ‘left’, which plumbed the depths of unpopularity in the 2009 elections, gaining just 16 seats (compared to 65 in 1949 and 56 as late as 1992) has recovered to a minor extent.  Meretz (formerly Mapam and Ratz) and the Labour Alignment, according to exit polls, are expected to gain 22 seats, two less than they held in 2006.  Meretz in particular, which no longer links with a kibbutz federation, has doubled its seats from 3 to 6, the same number as a decade ago but still half the number of seats they gained in 1992.

3. The ‘big talking point’ is however the rise from nowhere of Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid, a ‘centrist’ secular party, which is estimated to have gained 18 seats.  Unfortunately people have short memories.  When Menachem Begin was elected to government in 1977, he formed a coalition with Yigal Yadin’s Democratic Movement for Change which gained 15 seats.  In 2003 Shinui, a secular free market party, which later merged into Meretz, also gained 15 seats.  By the 2006 elections it had disappeared.  It was even lead by Yair’s father Tommy Lapid!  In case people have forgotten there was another ‘centrist’ party, Kadimah, formed in November 2005 by Ariel Sharon and former members of Likud, though former Labour leader and  the current President, Shimon Peres, also joined it, winning 26 seats in 2006.  In 2009 under Tsipi Livni, the former Foreign Minister, it became the largest party in the 2009 elections with 28 seats.  Described by Wikipedia as a ‘a centrist and liberal’ party http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kadima Kadimah, under Shaul Mofaz, on the latest projections won’t gain any seats! 
Israel’s many ‘centrist’ parties were and are, in any normal western democracy, election lists led by a personality, in this case a prominent former journalist Lapid.  They have no real membership or internal life except at elections.  They represent the hope of Israeli electors who, wish to enjoy the spoils of colonisation without paying the price.  They hope to square the circle between a Jewish state and a Democratic state.  In reality, as Kadimah demonstrated, they consistently choose the former.  Livni, as the Palestine Papers (Clayton Swisher) proved (part of the series of leaks of State department files), consistently advocated in the negotiations with Saeb Erekat of the Palestine Authority, the transfer of Israel’s Palestinian  population into a Palestinian state. 

Almost without exception these ‘centrist’ parties, whose only distinguishing feature was a watered down secularism, but who consistently lost out to the Orthodox parties over questions such as civil marriage and the role of the rabbis in personal affairs, have split into fragments which have disappeared by the next election.  If there is one prediction that I can confidently make, it is that Yesh Atid will fragment and barely exist (if at all) in the next elections in 2017.

Naftali Bennett of the hard-line settler party, Jewish Home

Netanyahu’s Likud-Beteinu, a merger with Avigdor Lieberman’s party, (Lieberman himself is currently expected to be charged with corruption by the Police) will be on current projections gain 33 seats, a loss of 10 seats.  But the elections have also seen the rise of Jewish Home, an increase of 5 seats for the old Jewish Home and National Union.  Shas, the Sephardic/Misrahi religious party, is also expected to gain one seat, so the ‘right’ in the Israeli elections have suffered at most a loss of about 5 seats.

But the terms’ ‘left’ and ‘right’ are almost meaningless.  Kadima supported most of the racist legislation of the current Netanyahu government – Boycott, Loyalty oaths, outlawing of Nakba commemoration, legalisation of the JNF practice of only leasing housing to Jewish citizens.  The fact that Tsipi Livni’s new Hatnuah party, with 7 seats, is termed part of the Israeli ‘left’ shows just how far Israeli politics have moved to the right.

Shelly Yachimovich, Labour’s leader, was once seen as a radical.  Today however she goes out of her way to emphasise that the settlers are not her enemy.  In 2011 she argued that the tent protests against the high cost of housing and the decline of Israel’s welfare state, even for Jews, should not take a position on the settlements or the position of Arabs in Israeli society or campaign around ending money for new settlements and using it to build housing in pre-1967 Israel.  But Yachimovich is only living up to the tradition of the Israeli Labour Party, which first pioneered the settlements and historically was the party that expelled the Palestinians in 1948.  The Israeli Labour Party was the party of Jewish Labour (i.e. no Arab Labour – pre-1948 Israel’s equivalent of the colour bar).  It merged the apartheid structures of pre-48 Zionism, the Jewish National Fund and the Jewish Agency, into the operations of the government, in order to provide the cover for state discrimination.  Even Meretz, the left-Zionist party, is based on Mapam, which historically talked left whilst being part of the Kibbutz Artzi Federation that was established on confiscated and razed Arab villages.  Its members took part eagerly in the activities of Palmach, the Zionist shock troops, who carried out many of the expulsions and massacres.

Those who believe that the current Israeli elections herald any sort of change will be sadly disappointed.  It is a rule of Zionist politics that no government coalition should depend on the votes of the Arab parties.  In reality this means that the Zionist ‘right’ will continue to dominate the Knesset and it is likely, despite their promises to the contrary, that both Labour and Yesh Atid will be attracted by the possibility of being in government, given that the United States will want the fig-leaf of ‘2 States’ to continue for another four years.


Below is an updated table showing the decline of the Zionist 'left' since the first election in 1949.

Tony Greenstein

Gilad Atzmon Rides to the ‘Rescue’ of Martin Smith and the SWP leadership

Tony Greenstein

Comrade Delta aka Martin Smith at the centre of allegations of rape and sexual harassment

I have already posted on the crisis in the SWP, Britain’s largest far-left group. SWP Crisis Over Cover-up of Rape & Sexual Harassment Allegations against former National Secretary Martin Smith  The SWP’s Central Committee is a self-perpetuating, all-knowing oligarchy, which has resisted all calls for democracy from a membership which is treated with contempt as footsoldiers for their latest ideas. 

When the Respect debacle unfolded, John Rees, its National Secretary was thrown to the wolves and together with Lindsey German, an old-time hack, resigned from the Party to set up Counter-fire.  Rees and German, who formed the ‘Left-Faction’ suddenly discovered the virtues of democracy when they were at the wrong end of the CC’s machinations.  In reality Counterfire represented a right-ward split from the SWP, but it took a section of the leadership and those involved in anti-war work in Stop the War Coalition.  Despite their belief that popular fronts are united fronts, and their alliance with sections of the Communist Party of Britain in the StWC included adopting the same Stalinist methods in relation to political opponents in that organisation, they were at least grounded in protest and and anti-war work and were prepared to challenge some of the shibboleths that the SWP Central Committee clung on to.  The SWP has an attachment to the working class as the sole agent of change in society without ever once analysing the implications of de-industrialisation and atomisation, the disappearance of the most militant forces of the working class in the Thatcher counter-revolution.

When the latest crisis blew up who could blame the CC for thinking that a few decisive expulsions, the fixing of delegate elections and the use of the Party’s district organisers to keep discipline, would work.  So 4 members of the SWP, whose only crime had been to hold a conversation on Facebook about how they would not be forming a faction, found themselves expelled for forming a ‘secret faction’.  You are allowed to form a faction, but the fact of so doing, i.e. talking to fellow sympathisers, is in itself an offence.

But one of the problems of shielding yourself from the real world (a phrase the CC uses a lot) is that you begin to lose your political judgement.  Whatever could be said about the International Socialists/SWP in the 1960s to 1980’s, it contained people who had first hand experience of fighting the class struggle.  For all his sins, Tony Cliff had been a building worker in Palestine who was physically thrown out of the Zionist apartheid ‘union’ Histadrut for raising the question of Jewish-Arab collaboration.  He also had a finger broken in one such incident.  Duncan Hallas, Jim Higgins were in the same mould.  Paul Foot added to the reputation of the SWP as a brilliant investigative journalist and with Cliff was one of the two best speakers the British left had produced.  Economist Mike Kidron and a layer of industrial militants like John Deason, were part of a leadership which took its tasks seriously.

Today you have no serious heavy weights on the SWP CC.  Prof. Alex Callinicos is about the best on offer and he has no experience of the class struggle or much of an academic reputation either.  The rest of them, people like Charlie Kimber, are unknown and have no record of involvement in struggles.  It is little wonder that the opportunism which was always a hall-mark of Cliff’s leadership, should be the sole card that Kimber and co. have left. 

I mentioned in my previous article that the SWP had forged a tie up, between 2005 and 2009-10 with Gilad Atzmon.  This was someone who openly spoke about Jewish conspiracies, kept company with holocaust deniers and made it clear where his sympathies really lay – and they were not with the Left.

SWP Statement Defending Atzmon and a Statement from Atzmon

When Jews Against Zionism announced its decision to picket an SWP meeting at Bookmarks at which Atzmon was the speaker, they issued a statementGilad Atzmon and Marxism 
2005 which used the credentials of Cliff and the past record of the SWP in opposing fascism and racism, to justify the fact that they were consorting with an anti-Semite. 

The statement itself has been moved to the SWP archive and I only found it with difficulty.

Our founding member, Tony Cliff, was Jewish and, like many of his generation, lost many members of his family in the Holocaust. Nazis in the British National Party and National Front have targeted our members for attack….  We have a record of opposing fascism, anti-Semitism and all forms of racism, that is second to none. The SWP does not believe that Gilad Atzmon is a Holocaust denier or racist.

The revolt of the SWP membership, over an issue of rape and sexual harassment, needed to be handled with care and delicacy in any event.  But the CC, believing that it was immune from criticism, coupled with a pliant membership which was prevented, by the ban on factions and a slate system  of elections from holding them to account, proceeded regardless.  The slate system effectively prevents anyone who isn't a buddy or hack, certainly not critics, even friendly critics like John Molyneaux, from being elected.  The 3 weeks since the SWP Conference have shown them that behaviour that they would have denounced if it had been committed by others, does not render them immune from the outside world.


The bourgeois press, such as yesterday's Times are having a field day.  SWP members have been left to face the music and the criticism for the Central Committee's failures.  Above we see, banker and columnist Oliver Kamm, writing for the criminal Murdoch Press and happy to take advantage of the SWP's stupidity over Atzmon.

The SWP fiercely denounced its one-time friend from Respect days, George Galloway and his comments re Julian Assange over sexual etiquette.  But from what I’ve read, Galloway’s infantile comments pale into comparison compared with the behaviour of the SWP CC. 

The Disputes Committee should have told the woman who alleged rape against Martin Smith (‘Comrade Delta’) that she should either go to the Police or speak to other women from, for example a Rape Crisis Project.  Possibly they themselves should have taken the initiative to seek counseling themselves.  Since she didn’t want to go to the Police, and that is a decision that should be respected, given the record of the Police in increasing the trauma of victims, comrades should have gone out of their way to ensure that she was provided with as much support as possible.  Instead she was subject to questioning by the Disputes Committee, effectively about her sex life, which the SWP condemns without question when it is perpetrated by the police or the courts. 

What could possibly have possessed them to find that the allegations against Smith were ‘not proven’ apart from a feeling of immunity from the principles that the CC/DC urge on others, remains a mystery.  And to compound this by effectively suspending the second woman who alleged sexual harassment from Martin Smith is, by any standards, outrageous.  The only member of the 7 strong DC, who upheld the allegation of sexual harassment, Pat Stack, has himself been subject to criticism from the CC and its friends, testifies to a culture of abuse and bureaucratic power and privilege.  Pat Stack, who I knew from NUS, is a long-time hack who has previously upheld without question all expulsions, as Chair of their Appeals Committee.  Yet Cde. Stack described, at the SWP Conference, how 'At the end of the hearing I ended up in a minority of one. As a result I've been the subject of lots of gossip and speculation.'  Which is a polite way of saying he too was subject to invective. 

Keith Watermelon describes what he calls a cult-like atmosphere in an article Crisis in the SWP: What Do Socialists Say? on the International Socialism website that SWP dissidents have set up.

‘At its most extreme, the sycophancy appears cult-like.  A number of CC members are big fans of jazz music.  Under their leadership over the past few years, the party has organised a number of (mostly loss-making) jazz gigs as fundraising events.  Regardless of their own musical tastes, comrades were told they were disloyal if they didn't purchase tickets.  This elevates the cultural tastes of the official leadership to a point of political principle; and clearly is not in any way a healthy state of affairs.'

What is gratifying is that this attempt to cover up alleged rape and sexual harassment by a Central Committee member, Martin Smith, this has provoked open rebellion in the ranks of the SWP.  So much so that the CC now takes on the appearance of rabbits, transfixed in the headlights, not knowing what to do or where to go.  For all their proclamations of leadership, they have taken on the appearance of Trappist monks.  They have nothing to say, other than the fact that the vote of the SWP Conference should be respected.  But the election of delegates to it was rigged to begin with, the Democratic Faction was effectively prevented from putting its case, conference was fed with false information and of course in the debate itself, there was no attempt to balance speakers in the crucial debate.


SWP Students Revolt

One of the more welcome features of what has happened is the resolutions passed by, it would seem, nearly all Socialist Worker Student Societies.  A constant theme is that they have had no response or explanation for what has happened.  In the words of the Sussex and Brighton SWSS Open Letter to the CC, there is

‘a complete disconnect with the political and personal burden your membership has come to bear as result of this fiasco, but more crucially displays an apparent obliviousness to the political reality that comrades are facing in their local unions, campuses and campaigns as a result of this.

What happens in the SWP is 'none of your business' - the suspicion is that Richard is looking for an exit from the SWP with his credentials intact for the left-luvvies

They work with people who are appalled at the behaviour of the SWP CC, who do not wish to work with them any longer.  They resort in some cases, as with the meeting at the University of East Anglia at which Judith Orr of the CC (& Martin Smith's partner) spoke, to outright lying.  What kind of CC is it that feels the need to lie to its own membership?’

Richard Seymour & the Critics - A Need for Open Self-Criticism

It is important that the current SWP critics engage in honest and open self-criticism too.  For too long they were also complicit in what has happened.  Richard Seymour of the Leninology blog has led the way with his publicising of articles and letters and resolutions.  That is all to the good and he should be commended for that.  I know that Richard was personally opposed to Atzmon from the very start, because those of us on the picket in 2005 of the Bookmarks had a drink with him afterwards!

However Richard was silent since then, preferring to forget the Atzmon episode rather than seeing that it was a product of the lack of democracy and the opportunist method of the SWP.  When I raised this with him, after he and fellow authors at Zero Books had issued a statement condemning their publisher for having issued Atzmon’s Wandering Who? book in 2011, he reacted in precisely the way that the CC expected members of the SWP to react when facing criticism of their internal affairs.  It was none of my business.

In my article Zero Books Authors Distance Themselves from the Decision to Publish Gilad Atzmon’s New Book ‘The Wandering Who?’  I wrote that  ‘Martin Smith should be expelled. Instead he is or was your National Secretary and is still a Central Committee member.’  Rather prescient now.  The sub-title was ‘Richard ‘Lenin’ Seymour makes it clear that the SWP owes no-one an apology for its previous relationship with Atzmon [or indeed for anything!]’. 

Therein lies the problem.  Just as the CC didn’t owe the membership any explanation, so the members didn’t owe other socialists outside the SWP any explanation.  The problem this time round is that the periphery of the SWP and those they work with are now demanding answers, as the price of continuing co-operation.  I sent Richard an e-mail which included the following, concerning the Zero Book authors' statement:

‘Yes but it's not before time. This has been known for 3 months. [in fact 2 months]  It seems to have taken Andy Newman's Guardian CIF piece to stir them into action.’

Richard’s bad tempered response was that ‘The completion and timing of this statement has nothing to do with Andy Newman's piece. It has been in the works for some time, pending further information from Zero. Get your facts right, Tony. Or, as I would prefer, keep it shut.’

My response was:  

‘Yes I'm sure you would prefer that I get my mouth shut. That way you can avoid being tempted into providing explanations as to what happened to the statement from Atzmon on the SWP website and why, to this day, you have not explained why the SWP maintained a relationship with Atzmon for some 3-4 years. It is a serious matter when an organisation that calls itself Marxist and revolutionary socialist deliberately promotes someone who is nakedly anti-Semitic. … Martin Smith should be expelled. Instead he is or was your National Secretary and is still a Central Committee member.’  

 To which Richard responded that:

‘The SWP's long-since aborted relationship with Atzmon has nothing to do with this, and nor do I owe you any explanation for it.  Nor, while I'm at it, do I owe you an explanation for why Zero authors released our statement when we did. We do not answer to you. No one answers to you, unless you happen to own a pet dog. You may wish to reflect on the fact that it is this sort of self-important bluster on your part that has been responsible for such calamities as the humiliation of Jews Against Zionism at the PSC annual conference and its subsequent disintegration.’  

For someone keen on the facts, Richard Seymour managed to get a lot wrong.  Only a few months later Atzmon and his supporters were dealt a decisive blow when an open holocaust denier, Frances Clarke-Lowes, was expelled from PSC.  Those who had been involved in JAZ, far from disintegrating, had in fact grown into Jews for Boycotting Israeli Goods and had worked closely with members of PSC Executive to secure this victory.

It is, of course, ironic that Martin Smith is now at the centre of the present crisis, but that is what political immunity and a lack of accountability can do.  Richard’s response spoke volumes about the SWP culture.

But Richard’s response was symptomatic of the SWP’s political malaise.  It owed no-one, not just me, any explanation.  School-boy invective was a substitute for political accountability to the working class they sought to represent.


More pertinent is the fact that Richard Seymour, despite being the leader of the unofficial opposition, has suggested nothing concrete to resolve the situation.  There has been no call for a meeting of those concerned, no organisation, no perspective.  The suspicion is that as a budding author trying to make a name for himself with the Guardianistas, he is cultivating a reputation for opposition to what went on in the SWP whilst preparing for a hasty exist.  Certainly he and China Mieville, have not outlined what they propose to cut out the cancer of the SWP's leadership.

Atzmon

It is somehow fitting that the only person outside the SWP (or it would appear inside it too!) to defend Martin Smith and the CC is, Gilad Atzmon!  And what a defence.  Martin Smith is the one who has been raped.  It’s all the fault of the Jews who have been out to get him.  Why Laura Penney even has Jewish ancestry.  One suspects that Atzmon’s support is, to paraphrase Lenin, like a rope supporting a hanging man.  In an article ‘Sax Offender Vs. Progressive Rapists’ Atzmon writes that:

‘The exact same Judeocentric tribal coalition that, a year and a half ago, was formed to wreck my career (and failed) is now pursuing Martin Smith AKA Comrade Delta, former secretary of the UK SWP (Socialist Workers Party) who, they insist, is a ‘sex offender’.  

Atzmon describes how

‘Between 2005-10 I worked closely with Martin and the SWP…. I toured with Martin, performed and spoke in quite a few of those Red gatherings. [NB:  the reference to ‘Red gatherings’ is interesting in itself, it is how fascists describe the opposition – the Reds]I met some very nice people in the SWP, but I also came across their many Jewish gate-keepers and tribal operators.’  

So you see.  It’s not a question of allegations of rape and harassment that is what is at stake.  It is a Jewish cabal who 

‘chase Smith because he is a Jazz lover and an enthusiastic fan of my music. They harass him because he gave me a platform in spite of the Jewish demand to ban me. They want to bring Martin Smith down simply because he didn’t obey his tribal masters. So If anything, it is Martin who is the rape victim in this saga – he is punished because he refused to bow down to the tribal junta.’ 

I neither know nor care whether either of the women involved is Jewish.  It isn’t in the slightest bit relevant other than to Atzmon’s poisoned mind.  Sexual violence and harassment are not ‘Jewish’ issues, but issues that affect every woman.  But to Atzmon it was all about:

Otto Weininger

 ‘progressive’ but oh-so vindictive Jews [who] were mighty quick to celebrate their symptoms. Notorious AZZ Mark Elf today asked to see the SWP’s accounts - he really wants to know how much it cost ‘for the SWP to listen to Atzmon’. Isn’t it this just what you’d expect from this ‘Jew Sans Frontiers’? And Elf’s ideological twin, [me!] also made it clear that Secretary Smith is being chased for his affiliation with Atzmon  who dared to use the platform given to him by the SWP to spread the thoughts of Otto Weininger.[the only Jew that Hitler had a good word to say about – because he committed suicide]

But here is something that may help our ‘progressive’ non-friendly comrade to better understand their situation.  One of the SWP’s most popular videos ever, is a clip of myself, with the OHE,  being a sax offender playing ‘Liberating The American People’ at one of the SWP’s Cultural Festivals

….Update: correction, i was just informed that Laurie Penny is not a Sabbath Goy, she is apparently  "a woman of Jewish descent with many family members living in Israel" .. in other word she is just an ordinary tribal campaigner as well as AZZ.

Mea Culpa

For many of us, Atzmon’s intervention provides some light entertainment, as some of Martin Smith and the CC’s chickens come home to roost.  However there are more important issues at stake, namely the future of Britain’s largest revolutionary organisation and what happens next.  In my previous article I wrote that because of the grip of the CC, SWP members should leave and call a conference to set up a genuinely democratic, socialist organisation.  I was wrong.  It is clear that the reaction to the CC is now so strong that the CC is unable to expel for example Richard Seymour and China Mieville, whose article is below.

In one sense the CC has begun to understand one of the lessons of what happens to an ancien regime.  There comes a time when a ruling class realises that repression alone will not stem the revolt.  That happened to Mubarak and in its own small way is now happening to the CC.  Expulsions will merely inflame the situation.  The CC is retreating into itself and it is probably beginning to dawn on them that only a recall SWP Conference, at which they are likely to  be heavily defeated, is an option.  Either they let go and put forward concessions on the question of democracy and their own lack of accountability or there is another leadership.  In fact the SWP probably cannot survive if its present leadership is allowed to stay. 

The current leadership is simply too tainted by having tolerated an abuse of power by Martin Smith, including ignoring credible allegations of sexual harassment and rape and allowing a Disputes Committee made up of 2 CC members and 3 previous CC members to exonerate him.

My own expulsion letter no. 1

My own expulsion letter no.2

My own expulsion letter no. 3

Below is an important article by China Mieville, an author in the SWP, which is well worth reading and below that is the statement issued by Brighton & Sussex University SWSS groups, links to other SWSS statements and a letter from Linda Rodgers of the SWP’s Edinburgh Branch and a Unite shop steward at Scottish Women's Aid.

My Own Expulsion

By way of enlightenment to readers, I am publishing for the first time my own expulsion papers, dated December 1972, from the SWP’s forerunner, the International Socialists Group.  I was expelled for having voted, in public, against a decision of the Branch Committee of Liverpool IS, to close down the Anti-Internment League.  Internment had been introduced in Ireland and IS was, having supported the civil rights protests and the nationalists in Northern Ireland, going back to an economism that denounced the IRA for defending the Catholic community.  IS’s decision had nothing to do with supporting work over Ireland but naked sectarianism – it had got what it wanted out of the struggle in Ireland and it was time to move on to fresh pastures.  Rather than simply abandoning the AIL it decided to destroy it.  I could see no reason for this and voted accordingly.  I have described the mechanics of my expulsion elsewhere.   At the time I was about 18 and because I wasn't prepared to buckle under and accept 'the line' without question I was, like hundreds of other members, swiftly despatched.  Until the present crisis, China Mieville and Richard Seymour has made no protests about this kind of democracy in the SWP.  They too have to accept some of the blame but, if they are not looking to their careers, then they are duty bound to take an active part in organising the opposition rather than courting expulsion and becoming heroes.

What I didn’t recall until reading the correspondence again was that the basis of my expulsion had been changed from the above to being ‘hostile to both the leading and local committees of the group and the IS politics that inform them.’   The ‘background information’ that Jim Higgins [who later resigned and became a dissident - see his More Years For the Locust] mentions is forming an ‘unauthorised’ Rebel (Youth) group.  Self-organisation of young people was frowned upon, to put it mildly, building a Schools Action Group and the resulting publicity (a Daily Mail article on our activities) a criminal (not malicious) damage conviction were all thrown into the pot.  In short a catch-all charge, beloved of  McCarthyites and the dragging up of matters that had no relevance, formed no part of the original charge, but were all thrown into the melting pot.  Unsurprisingly I couldn’t see the point of attending a meeting whose conclusions had already been reached.  Certainly not unless they paid my fares!









The Stakes
China Mieville:

Members of the SWP must understand what is at stake in the crisis rocking our organization. Not only is there already a steady outflow of members resigning in disgust at this farrago and its handling by the leadership, but now other organizations of the left are becoming hesitant about working with us, and in some cases are openly boycotting and censuring us.

This is a call to members to stay and fight. It is also to urge that we do so without illusions about the nature of the fight that we face.

 Many of us have argued strongly that catastrophic errors of principle and process on the part of the leadership have taken us to this. But even those who – I firmly believe wrongly – disagree about this must recognise the situation we are in. This has rapidly also become a catastrophe for us strategically. Our name is becoming toxic. Our credibility as a collective and as individual activists is being grossly compromised, and is on the verge of being permanently tainted. We all know the allegations that any future potential recruit who takes two minutes to research us online will read. The hoary accusations of the loyalists that those of us expressing concerns are looking ‘inward’ to ‘blogland’ and are not in the ‘real world’ have never looked so pitiful as they do now. This is a real world, acute crisis, of the leadership’s making.

As we ‘dissidents’ have repeatedly stressed, the fact that we are on the verge of permanently losing our credibility is irrespective of the truth or otherwise of the allegations of rape and sexual harassment. (These, of course, deserve sensitive and appropriate examination in their own right.) This fact inheres in the grotesque and sexist nature of the questions posed to the accusers; in the ‘wagon-circling’ attitude of the leadership and its loyalists; in the failures and evasions of accountability that meant the processes involved could ever have been thought appropriate; and now in the belief-beggaringly inadequate and arrogant response of the CC to the greatest crisis we have ever faced. These are all political failings of astonishing proportions.

We must not only deal with this but be seen publicly to be dealing with it. A ‘quiet revolution’ will be no revolution at all. There is one chance to save the SWP, and to do so means reclaiming it. We must be the party whose membership saw that there was a catastrophe unfolding, refused to heed our own failed leadership’s injunctions to fall into line, and reclaimed the party and the best elements of our IS tradition. If we fail in this, the SWP is finished as a serious force.

We must understand that these are extraordinary times and require extraordinary measures. Members’ usual – and usually understandable and honourable – instincts to show discretion and to trust their leadership are not only inadequate, they are counterproductive. This leadership does not deserve our trust, and our discretion now only serves them.

We must consolidate our efforts. We need to communicate with each other. It is invaluable to pass motions in branches censuring our CC and above all – this is critical – calling for an extraordinary conference. However, these motions must be publicized to the wider membership. This is not the time for private letters to the CC, for appeals to their wisdom, for concerned words to our district organizers. Such methods are part of the system that got us here. Comrades must go public, and link up with others attempting to salvage the honour of the tradition in which we fight.

 Of course taking matters to the branches and discussing them there is vital. However, the allegation often made by loyalists that to also discuss them with the wider membership is somehow inappropriate or disloyal is wrong at any time, and utterly absurd now. The CC itself, in its shameful document ‘For an Interventionist Party’, defending the recent expulsion of four comrades for ‘secret factionalism’, claims that ‘[m]embers of the SWP are of course free to discuss face-to-face or online’. (This, incidentally, is a lie: as recently as the 2009 conference, those arguing for democratic renewal were denounced from the podium by a CC member for discussing our concerns on email.) Even according to the CC’s own ad-hoc positions, in other words, members are free to discuss with all others, including by email, Facebook or whatever, the nature of the crisis facing us, and how we fix it. And discuss we must.

By far the lion’s share of blame for our parlous situation lies squarely with the CC and its loyalists. However, none of us can avoid hard questions. What got us here was not merely the failures of this particular CC, but of our structures. These structures concealed from the members perfectly legitimate debate within the party; pathologised dissent on the CC and among the membership; and at worst legitimated whispering campaigns and bullying against members considered ‘troublemakers’. We could have stopped this train wreck at an earlier stage if the membership had been able and ready to call bullshit on the CC’s bullshit.

To overthrow these problems requires, among other things, a huge shift in internal culture. This, of course, is not possible in isolation from the structures that we have worked under. These have enabled the CC’s top-down and dissent/discussion-phobic style and mistrust of the membership; and among the membership itself have encouraged a damaging culture of deferral to the leadership.

This vicious cycle must be broken. To renew our party, in other words, must mean to trust in the membership, to encourage independent thought and comradely discussion. This in turn will enable the members not only to select the leadership we deserve, but to hold them to account in a way both we and they deserve.

 Accordingly, not only is this fight one for the SWP’s survival as an interventionist force, but it is one that can only be won by a root-and-branch rethinking of how we operate. The scale of this catastrophe of their own making is slowly dawning on the leadership. It is inevitable that they will start to offer some kind of carrot-and-stick response, likely designed to minimize changes to the structures to which they have shown themselves wedded. We must be clear on the scale of what is needed. The removal of one or two people from positions of prominence would clearly be inadequate.

Our starting point must be public and immediate calls for an emergency conference. We must urgently mobilize our branches to pass motions making this call. To emerge from this catastrophe with credibility, at this conference we must demand:

 • The immediate reinstatement of the four recently expelled comrades.

• The removal of this CC and Disputes Committee. By their stunning miscalculations, they have shown themselves to be inadequate to their tasks. They must go.

 • A thoroughgoing reexamination of the structures of party democracy and accountability, to ensure that the culture of mistrust of the membership and closed ranks on the CC that created this situation in the first place cannot happen again.* This must include an expanded CC and one which airs its internal disagreements openly.

• Formal mechanisms for encouraging internal communications among all members, allowing them to air dissent, concern, uncertainty, as well as information, analysis and support.**

 Such renovations will address the terrible situation in which we find ourselves. They should also encourage a spirit of comradely discussion and theoretical open-mindedness, allowing us to act as a pole of attraction for all those fighting for emancipation. This does not mean diluting our Marxism: it should mean invigorating it.*** The fight for the soul of the SWP is on now. The only hope of reclaiming a party on the brink of political annihilation is political audacity.

 ——————
*I have made no secret of my own proposals for this, including, e.g., an at-least temporary end to the slate system. This is argued not on principle, but because that system has in our party become a shibboleth for forces of conservatism and top-down leadership. 

**Many comrades see the end on the ban on permanent factions as indispensable for this. Another invaluable way forward, in my opinion, would be a regular internal bulletin.
 
***As for example when we began to address the lacunae in our approach to homosexuality by learning from the best wings of the gay liberation movement. Currently, we must end a situation where, for example, ‘feminism’ is used by some loyalists as a diss.

Sussex SWSS: Open letter to the Central Committee

Sussex & Brighton University SWSS condemns in the strongest possible terms the Disputes Committee’s (DC) recent handling of serious allegations against a leading member of the organisation, the vote which ratified their report at conference, and the subsequent failure of the central committee to address the current crisis.

We note the failure of the DC in this case to carry out their investigative process in an entirely impartial way due to their composition, and the implications this has for any outcome they could have reached. We also reject aspects of the line of questioning of the two female comrades that came forward with the allegations as sexist, and at odds with the principles of our tradition. We recognize that the DC was faced with a difficult situation, with lack of precedent to enable them to handle this effectively. For this we fault the CC’s conduct with respect to W and the concerns she raised over the past few years. We also fault them for their failure to intervene and correct for failings in the DC’s procedure when they were so glaringly obvious, and for what many will see as their intentional misleading of the membership around the issue in past conferences.

To the CC, we say: not only have you failed W, X and every other comrade that might once have trusted in our disputes procedures. You have failed this entire organization, as well as the tradition in which it stands, by absurdly insisting on the shambolic series of fuckups and blunders that have constituted your “political response.” The list of these includes a process of misinformation in the lead-up to this conference and previous ones; banning the faction that tried to use our democratic processes so that comrades could make an informed decision on the DC report’s process; the removal or reshuffling of those CC members and full-timers that aired critical concerns regarding the matter; the moves to suppress debate in the organisation by asking comrades to “draw a line under it”; the expulsion of four comrades for an alleged “Facebook faction” (in practice a Facebook conversation) that is likely no different in content to those serious debates in which comrades are engaged today, in their branches and through other mediums of communication; the political slurs directed at comrades who have openly aired their views, including the unhelpful brandishing of “feminism” as an apparent insult, as well as the wholly disingenuous implication that the problem at hand is a “generational disconnect”; and the concomitant new CC appointment to the Student Office.

The aforementioned cannot be seen as anything but an attempt to “smash” critical student voices. These issues, coupled with the poor treatment and lack of support offered to the two female comrades that came forward with such grave allegations, has led to a complete breakdown in the trust we have in your leadership. We express our utmost concern for the fate of this organization and the role we hope we can continue to play, as SWP members, in building a revolutionary organization capable and worthy of leading the struggle against all forms of oppression under capitalist society. It is with this in mind that we write to you today, particularly in lieu of a public statement on SocialistWorker.co.uk that shows a complete disconnect with the political and personal burden your membership has come to bear as result of this fiasco, but more crucially displays an apparent obliviousness to the political reality that comrades are facing in their local unions, campuses and campaigns as a result of this. Recent events have forced us all to take a long look at how we found ourselves to be in this position, faults in our democratic procedures, perhaps a narrowing of space for debate, or a developing culture of political regurgitation and acquiescence and the inevitable lack of accountability that results. It is with the long-term view of how the party got here and what is necessary for us to be able to move forward that Sussex & Brighton University Branch came to an almost unanimous vote of no confidence in the leadership. We will be moving for the current CC’s dismissal from their post at the earliest available party decision-making body and/or conference at which we can do so.

Finally, to our comrades in struggle, to our colleagues and our friends, we would like to express our sincerest apologies for the recent failures of our organisation. We understand the distress and distrust that many of you have expressed as a result of this. We had hoped that the few responses circulated by comrades would offer at least some assurance that members of the SWP are fighting tooth and nail for the principles we share, and this letter should come as confirmation that Sussex & Brighton SWSS are no exception to this. We ask you to bear with us, to give us the opportunity to exhaust this line of enquiry, this line of protest, to allow us to fight for the very relevance (if not existence) of the organization that has equipped us to become the principled revolutionaries that you know us to be. And in turn we assure you that we will continue to uphold the proud tradition we stand in, that we will continue to fight oppression in our society in all its forms and variants and that we shall never dismiss or shy away from the criticisms and concerns of those in the movement and in the class as a whole.

We Call for:

1) An emergency conference, so that this organization may resolve this political crisis in a way that holds accountable those responsible and gives the membership the clarity and confidence needed to implement our political strategy moving forward.

2) An immediate public response that can provide clarity around the failures of the DC’s due process.

3) Delta to be removed from any official or public position within our organization, particularly given disagreement on the DC with respect to the question of Delta’s conduct.

4) The DC to resign their posts. Although we acknowledge the difficult situation the DC was faced with, we argue that their ability to carry out their functions as mandated by conference has been undermined by recent events. It remains the case that many members, including Comrade X, will not feel confident in taking their disputes to the current DC in light of recent events.

See also the statements issued by a host of other SWP Student Societies.

East London SWSS
FE Members of SWSS
UEA students and staff
University of Essex
University of Kent
University of Brunel
Portsmouth
Queen Mary
Manchester University

Below is a letter that even the dunderheads of the SWP's Central (Silent)Committee should take note of coming from a female member, a trade union shop steward at Scottish Womens Aid.

For the Attention of the SWP Central Committee

Linda Rodgers, SWP Edinburgh Branch, Shop Steward, Scottish Women's Aid

I am writing to express my condemnation of the process used by the leadership of the SWP to deal with an allegation of rape.  As the shop steward at Scottish Women's Aid I am horrified that the leadership of the SWP - of which I have been a member for 18 years - thought that it was in a position to investigate a serious crime such as rape. Would the DC have investigated a murder? I would guess not, but then what does that say about the level of seriousness with which the CC and DC treat rape?

The series of decisions made by the CC and the DC around the processes for dealing with this allegation of rape and their inability to either pull back from them when they started to go wrong, or to respond reasonably to criticism after the fact (despite access to a very clear analysis of what was wrong with the decisions made) indicate a real lack of understanding of rape, its definition and its consequences.

In addition to my concerns about the sheer inappropriateness of some of the lines of questioning -as raised by many others - I have a more general concern about the lack of specialism in the DC which is required when dealing with rape victims, and the separate set of specialist skills required when investigating rape when there is only one word against another.  This allegation is about rape and sustained abuse within a relationship with a huge power imbalance rather than for example an isolated incident. My point is not that certain types of rape are more or less serious others. My point is that the investigators were not trained in understanding and investigating the different manifestations of violence against women and the various responses required depending on the experience of the woman.

We do reject the bourgeois system of justice but in this case aspects of the bourgeois process were used, and having read the available documents relating to this case it is not convincing that there was a there a clear analysis and understanding of what aspects of an investigatory and quasi-judicial process were accepted and which were rejected. Clear decisions around process needed to be made and then fully explained to the complainant so that she was aware of what exactly she was getting into, its limitations and how effective it could possibly be in terms of her need for a resolution and could make her own choice on that basis.

This shambolic playing at investigator, judge and jury held a real risk of ruining someone's life and it is no thanks to the leadership of the SWP and only testimony to the woman's strength if it hasn't.

The response of the CC following the leaking of documents onto the internet and the subsequent media publicity has been the shamefully offensive "Statement by the Central Committee in response to attacks on the party". This document is only further evidence of the failures of this process.

"Had the Disputes Committee believed that the accused person was guilty, it would have expelled him from the SWP immediately." This statement alone sums up my point. Really? Do you think this could be an adequate response to rape? No responsibility to any other woman who might be at risk?

This document also states:

"If this case had been raised within a trade union or any other organisation there would be no question that the matter should be treated with complete confidentiality. This basic principle should also apply in this case."

Of course confidentiality should apply; however, confidentiality really isn't the issue here. The decisions you made and the way in which you handled the investigation are the issues. Focusing on confidentiality is a poor attempt to obscure the failings of the process and close down the debate.

As anyone who works in an organisation or operates in a trades union knows full well this matter would NOT have been dealt with through internal mechanisms. The procedures for investigating disciplinary matters or disputes between colleagues are not used by organisations or trades unions to investigate serious crimes. How could you not know that? Or are you just assuming that a sheepish membership will accept this untruth?

Even by your own terms you failed to follow the "basic principles" of a standard trade union process.  I would refer you to ACAS good practice guidelines in terms of appointing individuals to panels that don't have a personal connection with the individuals involved in the dispute being heard.

The introductory statement to the document is also untrue:

"A series of attacks on the party have appeared over the last few days - many in newspapers which are the sworn enemies of women's liberation and workers' rights".
Most of the attacks on the actions of the CC and the DC are not in newspapers which are the 'sworn enemies of women's liberation'. Again, why lie to us? It does your position no good at all - most of us do have access to the internet.  The issue at hand for the membership is never what the enemies of women's liberation and workers' rights say about us and to us, but rather how we can hold our head up and explain our actions and decisions with integrity to the world outside of the party with which we come into contact on a day to day basis. Your actions have seriously damaged the party's integrity and members' ability to operate.

Finally, it is false to claim that the party is somehow immune from sexism. There is no theoretical or evidence basis for making this claim.

I have seriously considered my position in the party over the last few days. I know many others who feel the same way that I do.  I have decided I want to stay a member, however I can only remain as a member of the SWP on the basis that action is taken to remedy this:

· Conference must be recalled and the entire CC and DC need to resign.
· There needs to be an immediate and public apology to both of the women who made complaints including an acknowledgment of the mishandling of their complaints, and
· An immediate apology must be made to the membership of the SWP who have been shockingly let down by their leadership.

I would appreciate a sensible and thoughtful response to this letter.


Below is a letter printed by Counterfire from someone who was a leading member of the SWP until recently.  It is unclear, to me at any rate, why s/he doesn't put their name to it rather than hiding behind a pseudonym.



Why I resigned

Donny Mayo (his name has been altered for all the usual reasons) was until recently a leading member of the Socialist Workers Party

I have written this article as an attempt to understand the rapid descent into madness of the party I had been a member of for 11 years. I respect and admire the many comrades who have not yet left the SWP but are fighting as hard as they can to hold the leadership to account (which in this case means overthrowing it) for events of recent weeks. However much I hope they win, it is my belief that they will not succeed and that a substantial realignment on the left is necessary in the near future.

I have chosen to publish on Counterfire despite the fact that the CC will use my article to divert from its failings by suggesting that the crisis was a plot against the party all along. I have done so because I want to make it clear that I do not believe (as some who are critical of the CC do) that beyond the SWP there is just wilderness; because rather than just state the need for dialogue with the rest of the radical left I wanted to actually take part in it; and because, as much as I disagreed with many of their reasons for leaving at the time, I do think those who formed Counterfire made a number of prescient criticisms when leaving the SWP and, moreover, when viewed in the context of a global crisis of old-style Trotskyist Leninism, they seem to me to be on the right side of history and the SWP as-is on the wrong side. I do not think simply joining Counterfire is an answer to all our problems. But I do think those interested in preserving the best bits of the International Socialist tradition should be working with them and I am convinced that they would be an important part of any radical left realignment of the sort the English left so desperately needs.

The Socialist Workers Party is dying. For all the good it has done over many years, it has imploded over allegations of sexual assault and its inability to deal sensibly with them.

It will continue to limp on for at least a few more years but the descent into cultishness will now be rapid. Those who have chosen to 'stay and fight' will be expelled or driven out soon enough (although I do, of course, wish them the best of luck in their fight) and those who see the need to 'defend the line' will find themselves saying and doing things they never dreamt they would say or do; they are in the process of crossing an intellectual 'line in the sand' from which their political minds will probably never recover.

It is not the intention of this article to rehash the allegations, or the grim events of the past few weeks (there are plenty of articles, many very good, that do that already). My aim here is to place recent events in a political context, to try to understand how and why this could happen, the better to build a new left in which this could not happen again.

Much of what has been written about the affair focuses on questions of democracy. Undoubtedly there are questions of democracy at play here. But if this is the case then there must also be deeper questions that need answering. How have thousands of decent people, who consider themselves fighters for liberation, allowed such a sham democracy to persist? What are the ideological justifications that allow good comrades to perform such contortionist arguments?

Many have also focused on the question of patriarchy within the left. This is an important question. Clearly nothing like this would ever have happened with gender roles reversed. Clearly, as much as people can be intellectually aware of the arguments for women's liberation they can still act in the ways socially ingrained in them by a patriarchal capitalist system. In this particular case there is also the question of power. But the question of power again raises deeper ideological questions: how could many thousands of good comrades, who are usually so suspicious of power and the powerful be so in awe of power on this occasion as to let this happen?

Here I want to focus on some of those deeper questions. I want to argue that the SWP, for all its many good points and many good members, has suffered for many years from a structure and an ideology that is, in the final analysis, unable to cope with the myriad ways the world has changed over the past thirty or so years. Despite some major successes, most notably the role played in the anti-war movement, the SWP has suffered a slow build up of problems resulting from this, one which has accelerated in recent years and culminated in the recent implosion.

The question I want to answer boils down to this: how did it come to be that to accuse "comrade delta" of sexual assault was seen, in the eyes of so many, as code for an abandoning of the idea that the working class could transform the world, as an existential attack on the SWP?

Why was the leadership willing to jeopardise the entire organisation, jettison a whole layer of youth, over the supposed infallibility of just one comrade?

Here I think we have to look at the long-term trajectory of the SWP and also the decline of pretty much all the other groups that follow the Trotskyist model of Leninism.

It seems to me that for at least 30 years now any attempt to understand something that had changed about the world has been clamped down on as a revisionist shift away from revolutionary politics.

This wasn't without reason. When the euro-communists said the working class had changed they were shifting to the right. But the problem is the working class had changed. When people talk about financialisation they often are talking about a shift towards a reformist variant of Keynesianism. But the problem is financialisation has happened.

The international socialist tradition was different to other Trotskyisms. It was heterodox. It wasn't theological. It didn't elevate small group politics to the level of principle.

But the SWP of today is not like that at all. It is orthodox. They might let young people write for the paper or the journal but nobody wants or asks them to write anything new or interesting - these articles are marked like a GCSE English comprehension question only with Harman substituted for Shakespeare.

Anything already written down is orthodoxy. Anything else is heresy.

The problem though is that the world has changed. Neoliberalism has made life harder for a generation. Work is different. The unions look different. The battle for women's liberation is in a new place. Imperialism has changed. The third world has been transformed. The information revolution has changed the nature of both capitalism and resistance to it.

These are things we should be talking about. But to even gesture towards them is heresy.

Radical left ideas have flourished since the crisis. But the truth is almost none of the best thinkers on the radical left are from a Trotskyist background. Many are not Lenininst. Some (the horror) are not even Marxist. But the traditional left ignores them at its peril. It is the job of revolutionaries, as Marx did in his time, to synthesise the insights of the best anti-capitalist thinkers with the fundamental principle that it must, and can only be, ordinary people who bring about a society free from the horrors of capitalism. The SWP though ignores and dismisses thinkers just because they are from 'outside the tradition'.

That is why even the SWP's flagship Marxism festival has been played down. In an Internal Bulletin article that massively over inflated the membership figures (the reality is around 2,500, they claimed 7,500) the central committee actually lied about Marxism the other way - they made it 1000 smaller than it really was. They spent one sentence on Marxism but a whole page on SWP 'educationals'. Why? One brings in outsiders, critics, heretics, new ideas; the other is totally safe repetition of things that were written in the '80s.

Listing the successes of the previous year, the central committee listed Walthamstow's anti-fascist demo (it was good, but a big demo against a spent force in multicultural left labour area which we spent six months building) and the Unite the Resistance conference (smaller than Right to Work, which was smaller than Organising for Fighting Unions) but clearly do not see relating to a new wave of ideological radicalization as a success (in fact Marxism disturbed them, they didn't feel at home there).

Once any criticism of the religion - I say religion because that is what it is when an ideology becomes organisationally frozen in the past - once any criticism is labelled heresy - it is only a short step to what we have now. To the Sopranos' model of leadership that the party suffers from. The mafia approach to criticism.

Because anything from beyond the brains of the central committee must have originated in the scary outside world. It must therefore be a Trojan horse for autonomism or reformism or Chris Bambery or whoever the main enemy is today.

Good ideas can only come from dead people or the central committee. A monopoly on ideas means a monopoly on power. And that is not the organisation I wanted to join, that I built, that I fought for, that I defended.

I didn't join a socialist organisation so that I could be told I shouldn't talk about how working life has become more precarious - lest I cede ground to 'autonomism'. Where feminism is a dirty word, used like it describes a disease ('creeping feminism'). Where autonomism is used as a swear word. Where instead of celebrating the rise of Syriza the CC look for reasons to condemn it. Where instead of celebrating the role new technology can play in building mass movements the CC ignore or dismiss it. Where people who read books beyond our tradition are seen as dangerous (some of those who left to form the Scottish ISG were told they read "too much Harvey, not enough Harman"). Where ideology is seen as a deviation from honest workers' struggle. Where real workers' struggle is seen as a deviation from getting a big (or at least bigger than the NSSN) audience in friends meeting house.

That's not the organisation I joined. That's not the tradition of the SWP. That's not a party that will attract and recruit the best anti-capitalists of our generation - and it's certainly not a party that will develop and keep hold of them.

This is not just a problem faced by the SWP, but by all parties that have followed the orthodox Trotskyist version of Leninism. How does the first generation of leaders loosen its grip and let a new generation lead? How, when so much of the organisational life has orbited around defending obscure interpretations of irrelevant theoretical arguments, how to change tack, to change those arguments when the outside world changes? How to deal with a structure so brittle that the tiniest criticism is treated as the greatest heresy?

And, as times move on, as a whole generation now has grown up under neoliberalism and instinctively (even if not theoretically) understands the changes wrought by it, it becomes harder and harder to hold the line. And as the internet disrupts previous models of organisation (it does for the capitalists too by the way), 'democratic centralism' becomes an increasingly cultish mantra.

I believe that the International Socialists were the best organisation on the British left in the 60s and 70s. I believe that the SWP had many things going for it. I think things possibly were salvageable. There was a conscious effort to 'modernise' the SWP after Seattle and the mass anti-war demonstrations. But then, for whatever reason, the leadership (including those who have since split) retreated from these attempts. After the failure of Respect though, the retreat became a full-on rout. Modernisation was consciously reversed. And in the context of the gravest capitalist crisis since at least the 1930s, the Arab Spring and the European Autumn, this was not the time to retreat from the outside world.

And so it became the case that the SWP suffered the same problems that had haunted the rest of the Trotskyist-left. Splits along essentially generational lines, brittleness to the point of absurdity (treating criticism of "comrade delta" as the abandonment of classical Marxism) and sectarian retreat and isolation.

Almost everyone who joined with me around the anti-capitalist and anti-war movements has already left the SWP (in fact it has retained between ten and twenty subs paying members for each year 2000-2005). The generation who joined over Millbank will mostly leave over this. Does any serious comrade, hand-on-heart, believe that the next generation of recruits won't also be driven out? That, before all the older cadre retire, the SWP will be able to renew its leadership?

And with each blow, the sectarian retreat becomes worse. The 'Millwall' attitude (nobody likes us we don't care) has become especially pronounced over Syriza and, on a smaller scale, the SWP's expulsion from the Unite United Left. But it will become far, far, worse over recent events. The fact that some of my former comrades have spoken of the need to 'defend revolutionary democracy from the bourgeois press' in this situation makes me feel profoundly disturbed.

So what can be done? I don't pretend to have the answers but I think that by understanding the context of this implosion we can at least avoid some wrong answers.

This was not just a case of 'one bad apple': there was something fundamentally wrong before that. This case just highlighted the fact that there is no 'reformist' (i.e. slowly and softly within the organisation) solution to those fundamental weaknesses. This was not just a question of structures: the lack of democracy resulted from a lack of ideological openness and a retreat from trying to understand changes in the real world.

Any solution has to take into account the generational shift away from orthodox Trotskyist organisations. It has to understand that the splits in Britain in the past decade have occurred roughly along these lines. That whereas splits on the far left generally lead to small rumps that degenerate and disappear all of these groups have actually improved since their splits - suggesting that they are on the right side of history and their 'parent' organisations the wrong side.

Reform inside the SWP is not an option: they will expel anyone who tries and the brand is now utterly toxic anyway.

Leaving to form a new version of the SWP is not an option: it is an historically outdated model and the last thing the British left needs is another small Trot organisation.

My hope is that something will rise in the SWP's ashes. That enough people will leave, soon enough, and together enough (i.e. not just drifting off) so as to allow for some sort of regroupment of the radical left; a coming together of those who understand some of the problems described here (and many others who never felt any of the existing organisations were what they were looking for) into something much more plural.

I have been a member of the SWP for eleven years. For the first few I believe its hegemonic role on the far left was a very positive thing - look at the response to 9/11. In recent years I think it has been much more ambiguous (indeed if 9/11 had happened again I am not sure it would have been willing to play the same role). I think it would be truly disastrous if, after recent events, the SWP were to continue to to play a hegemonic role on the far left. But I don't think it will be able to do so. The task now is to ensure that whatever does fill that role can learn from its mistakes.
See also
SOCIALIST WORKERS PARTY (SWP): WHAT HAPPENS NEXT? from Socialist Unity
The crisis in the Socialist Workers Party and the future of the Left  from Counterfire

Julie Burchill - the Anti-Transgender Bigot - Participates in the Zionist Counter-Demonstration

In the past 7 weeks, for various reasons, as readers of this blog may have noticed, I haven’t been able to attend the picket of Sodastream on Saturday.  This week was the first time I could get there.
At the beginning of December the shop seems to have told the Zionist counter-demonstrators that they were adding to the impact of what was already an effective demonstration and should go across the road and demonstrate there.  As with Ahava in London, the presence of Zionist counter-demonstrators energised the Palestine Solidarity demonstrators and created such a mayhem outside the shop that even less people were inclined to go inside!  In fact the only people shopping there were Zionist counter-demonstrators!
Last week there were just 7 demonstrators, including the racist anti trans-gender bigot, Julie Burchill whose article attacking transgender people was withdrawn from the Observer’s Internet edition.   It also merited an unprecedented protest at the Observer and Guardian premises.    And the Zionist are getting desperate when they rely on the likes of Burchill.  In fact yesterday it would appear that half the Zionists were Christian Fundamentalists who in past years (and in other countries today) are the most vociferous anti-Semites.  In Britain and the USA their pro-imperialism and belief in the return of Jesus leads them to support Zionism as being part of god’s design.  This week there about 10 counter-demonstrators, as the weather was warmer! 
 If All Else Fails - Play the 'Anti-Semitism Card'
 A couple of weeks ago a new group, Sussex Friends of Israel was formed.  Ronnie Bloom, who chaired the group, was quoted as saying that “With the unparalleled level of antisemitism in the town, we feel our organisation will be able to make people understand the truth about Israel.” Strange that.   Anyone at all familiar with the time when there was indeed a great deal of anti-Semitism, or who has read accounts of that time, will know that Jews were afraid to go out of their homes at night.  There there were certain areas like Ridley Road in the East End of London where Jews would never venture and attacks were frequent.  

Some of the people we have been abusing!

 I’m not aware of any upsurge in what most people understand as anti-Semitism.  Instead the Zionists deliberately confuse and conflate anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism.  Apparently ‘understanding the truth about Israel’ (i.e. accepting its propaganda) has something to do with ‘the unparalleled level of antisemitism in the town.’  Strange then that the leaders of the fascist EDL, whom Simon Cobb is believed to be close to, deny the holocaustbut march with Israeli flags!  Clearly they understand the linkage.

Even stranger is the fact that none of the Zionists prominent in the campaign to support Sodastream has any record of having ever taken part in anti-fascist demonstrations or actions.  When the National Front held a march against Shechita, (Jewish Ritual Slaughter) in Hove and Brighton nearly 20 years ago, there was no participation from the Jewish community or its leaders.  Some young Jews participated but that was despite being told not to.  When I went to Ralli House, at the height of the Anti-Nazi League, some 30+ years ago, I was told that if I wanted to combat anti-Semitism I should go to Israel!And no, we couldn’t put a poster up.

Empty apart from the odd Zionist demonstrator

Likewise in the magnificent victory that we had over the EDL/March for England last April, there was no visible presence from any section of the Jewish community, still less the Zionists, although many secular Jews of course took part.

Sodastream have a new bouncer - rumoured to be from the Community Security Trust.  It must be the only shop in Brighton with its own doorman!

The real problem the Zionist counter-demonstrators face is that people now know the truth about how Sodastream operates on stolen land from which the Palestinians have been ethnically cleansed.  Most people have ethics and principles and don't like buying stolen goods.  Knowing the weakness of their case, Cobb and co. have resorted to outright lying.

In an article Brighton MP Lucas challenges IDF at pro-Israel lobbyCobb bleated that “Her constituents, the people who get spat at and abused from members of the PSC for supporting EcoStream, should be her priority.”  The suggestion that the Zionists have been spat at is absurd.   Even the Police, who have been pro-Zionist in their sympathies, haven't made that allegation.  Indeed most of the abuse has been from passers-by, incensed at their support for Israel. Yet 'After people told the Green Party MP of the antisemitic abuse they suffered from PSC protestors outside the environmentally-friendly shop, Dr Lucas said she would need “real hard evidence” of the abuse.  “If I get evidence of it, then I am more than delighted to completely oppose it,” she said.
Since the incidents alleged have never happened, it will be impossible to secure any evidence.  Indeed the only anti-Semitism has come from Cobb himself, who thought it a wonderful ‘joke’ to start shouting ‘Jews Out’.  Caroline Lucas was told ‘Dr Lucas rejected claims that if the protests did not move from directly outside EcoStream, the store would close.’  This is, indeed, good news.

The desultory ranks of the Zionist counter-demonstrators.  Most of those shown are Christian fundamentalists who believe that only a massacre of Jews at Armageddon will ensure the return of Jesus!

The mad Christian in the blue jacket has found a new role in life

The Zionists managed to bring along one Roman Fox, ‘a gay Jewish member of SFI’ who told Ms Lucas of the ‘antisemitic and homophobic abuse.’ he had suffered.  Of course even gays can lie about what they experience and Fox is one of those liars.  Indeed there has been homophobic abuse, but it has been of gay PSC members.  Caroline Lucas said that she “would be happy to come and stand with you and see what abuse you face,” She’ll be having a very long wait if that’s the case!


Tony Greenstein

Physical Resistance - - A Hundred Years of Anti-Fascism

Dave Hann - Chief Steward of AFA's Northern Network and a respected anti-fascist worked on the book until his death in September 2009.

Unlike the books you get from journalists (for example Martin Walker’s National Front) and academics (for example Richard Thurlow’s Fascism in Britain – A History 1918-85) this has the merit of being written by an activist who could bring his experience to bear when analysing the past struggles against fascism.  It is also far more comprehensive than anything else I’ve read,

It was standing room only at the book launch

Although I was on the Executive of Anti-fascist Action from 1986-1991, I cannot recall having met Dave before.  As I wrote in a previous articleDave Hann – An Appreciation my first contact was in July 2009 when I was rung up by Dave who wanted to interview me for the book.  I’d heard of Dave, both from AFA and the book he co-wrote with Steve Tilzey (No Retreat).  We met in August 2009 and I spent about an hour at Brighton Unemployed Workers Centre before parting.  Although I didn't realise it at the time, Dave was seriously ill and barely a month later died from cancer at the young age of 48.  I also didn't realise, until I read the book, that I was the last person to be interviewed.

The last part of the book was primarily in the form of notes and tapes at that stage and it must have been a Herculean task for his partner, Louise, to complete the book and find a publisher.  Some (Lawrence Wishart) rejected it because it was ‘too confrontational’ but to their credit Zero Book took it on and at nearly 400 pages it is well worth the £18.99.  Louise has done a magnificent job and it is a fitting tribute to Dave.

This isn’t a review but the breadth of the book’s coverage of anti-fascist activity is quite staggering.  From the days of Mosley through the Spanish Civil War to the Union Movement and then the fight against a resurgent British fascism in the 1960’s-1980’s, the book comprehensively details the successes and difficulties that faced anti-fascists in Britain.

The old Daily 'hate' Mail - campaigning against 'bogus' Jewish asylum seekers

He describes the activities of the ’43 group set up by returning Jewish ex-servicemen after 1945 to deal with the threat from Mosley’s Union Movement and how their squads battered the fascists into submission.  He also deals with the more shadowy ’62 group which emerged to tackle the new beginnings of British fascism in the early and mid 1960’s.

I found it interesting to note that in the ’43 group, discussion of Zionism and anti-Zionism was banned.  There were Zionists who played a key role, but the group took their political lead from the Communist Party primarily, or its activists.  Most British Jews then were not Zionist, although they supported the establishment of the Israeli state, and wanted to defend their right to live in Britain free from fascist terror.  The ’62 group was far less political, had little contact with the Communist Party or the Left and was divided between political activists and Zionists.  It was when the Zionists, who under Gerry Gable had their links with the State and Special Branch, made off with files that had been seized from a raid on the fascists, contrary to an agreement reached amongst those responsible, that the group split.

I also found myself reflecting on the reality that Jews faced in the East End where they could not go down certain roads or into certain areas like Bethnal Green without running the risk of physical attack.  The BUF instigated a reign of terror, backed up to the hilt by the Metropolitan Police (no change there).  Today levels of anti-Semitism are minuscule.  The place of Jews has been taken by Roma, East European workers, Bengalis and Muslims. 

Yet Zionist charlatans like Ronnie Bloom, who has set up a Sussex Friends of Israel group, as a result of the pickets of Sodastream, the Israeli shop in Brighton that sells stolen produce from the stolen land of the Palestinians, declaring that ‘“With the unparalleled level of antisemitism in the town, we feel our organisation will be able to make people understand the truth about Israel.”

Letter from President of British Brother's League - the first proto-fascist organisation.  Founded by Tory MP William Evans Gordon, who was on the best of terms with the Zionist leaders in Britain.

Has anyone in Brighton been attacked physically (apart from the demonstrators by Zionists)?  Are swastikas being daubed on walls and are there ‘no go’ areas in Brighton & Hove where Jews cannot go?  Apparently anti-Semitism and understanding ‘the truth about Israel’ have some connection with each other. Interestingly the anti-Arab bigot and racist, Julie Burchill, who has now attacked trans-gender people too, made an appearance last week on the Israeli counter-demonstration.  What is sad is that Burchill, whose father was a communist, was one of the original founders of Rock Against Racism and a columnist on New Musical Express (NME) for some years.  Maybe she intends to set up a ‘Bigots against anti-Semitism’ group!

The account in the book of the formation of anti-fascist committees nationwide and then the Anti-Nazi League and the changing contours of British fascism is second to none.

The Daily Mail's support for the Blackshirts is well known - what isn't so well known is that the Daily Mirror also supported Moseley and Daily Mail owner Lord Rothermere was spreading his poison in this paper too

If I have any criticism, it is that the book could have covered the origins of Mosley and British fascism back to the first proto-fascist group, the British Brothers League.  The BBL was founded in 1901 by the Tory MP for Stepney, William Evans-Gordon, to campaign against Jewish refugees fleeing the pogroms in Czarist Russia.  Evans-Gordon and much of the BBL leadership were both anti-Semitic and pro-Zionist.  Chaim Weizmann, long-standing Zionist Organisation President and the first President of Israel proposed that in the first issue of Der Jude, a new Zionist paper he wished to set up, there would be an article by Evans Gordon [Letters & Papers Vol. 2 Chaim Weizmann p. 293 (1. 12. 1903)]. “Looking back now, I think our people were rather hard on him.” [Trial and Error, autobiography Chaim Weizmann, pp. 90-1]  But maybe I’m asking too much.  My only other criticism is that there's no index!!

Despite their apparent concern over anti-Semitism, Brighton’s Zionist leaders have no truck with anti-fascist mobilisations or demonstrations.  Anti-fascism is not for them.  Zionism is consistent in this regard!  Only a few days ago, the avidly pro-Zionist, Berlusconi, praised Mussolini to the sky, with the except of his 1938 Race laws (forgetting that Mussolini’s Salo Republic also deported about 7,000 Italian Jews and  Mussolini himself was always willing to go along with the final solution).  Although individual Zionists (used to) take part in anti-fascist activities this was not because of, but despite their Zionism which taught them that anti-Semitism is an inherent and 'natural' part of non-Jewish society.

As BBL President William Stanley Shaw said, in a letter to the Jewish Chronicle of 8.11.1901. ‘The return of the Jews to Palestine is one of the signs of our times.’   In other words, an Evangelical Christian of the type that is making up the bulk of the pro-Apartheid demonstrations outside Sodastream.

It was good to see old comrades like Micky O’Farrell from Hatfield and Nick Mullen, the latter who I knew from the days of the Socialist Students Alliance and Middlesex Polytechnic (at that time a bastion of the far-left).  Nick was framed by the Police and spent time inside for being the ‘quarter-master of the IRA’ in Britain.  Although freed from prison he hasn’t received a penny in damages because someone wrongly imprisoned has effectively to prove that they are innocent, an outrage which the Supreme Court pioneered in 2011.  And of course Attila the Stockbroker took part, under the name John Baines, and he was in fine form.

The meeting itself had been moved to a larger room to accommodate the numbers, but even so people were crowded around the door as there wasn’t a spare seat in the room.  It was a wonderful night and it was a joy to hear from people that I hadn’t met for years and who, like me, have passed on the baton to a younger generation. Relatives of Harry Johnson, Manchester communist and anti-fascist, Betty Davis, granddaughter of Trinidadian International Brigader and Cable Street participant spoke at the meeting and stayed on for the excellent post-launch party.

I finished my own talk by reflecting that nothing we had done in Brighton bettered the wonderful turn out on April 22nd last year, when the EDL’s march was halted by the Police after it had gone less than 1/3 of the way, and forced down the backstreets.  I can remember in particular a young woman, who had attended a meeting that I and others had addressed at Sussex University earlier that week, who listened to what I said about the anti-fascist battles of the ‘70s and ‘80s.  We met up again on the demonstration and she asked ‘Well did we do as well’ to which I responded ‘Yes, better even than us!’.

This is a book that every serious anti-fascist activist should read.  I feel privileged to have been asked to take part, along with others cited in the book, in reading extracts from my interview.

Tony Greenstein

An image from the Shas ad.Photo by Screen shot

African Jews - just above Palestinians on the racial ladder

former Sephardic Chief Rabbi Ovadiah Yosef Calls for the 'annihilation' of the Arabs

The spiritual leader of Israel's ultra-orthodox Shas party, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, has provoked outrage with a sermon calling for the annihilation of Arabs. 


"It is forbidden to be merciful to them. You must send missiles to them and annihilate them. They are evil and damnable," he was quoted as saying in a sermon delivered on Monday to mark the Jewish festival of Passover. 

The Lord shall return the Arabs' deeds on their own heads, waste their seed and exterminate them

Rabbi Ovadia Yosef

Rabbi Yosef is one of the most powerful religious figures in Israel, He is known for his outspoken comments and has in the past referred to the Arabs as "vipers". Through his influence over Shas, Israel's third largest political party, he is also a significant political figure.

 As founder and spiritual leader of the political party Shas, Rabbi Yosef is held in almost saintly regard by hundreds of thousands of Jews of Middle Eastern and North African origin.

The Palestinian Authority has condemned the sermon as racist and is calling on international organisations to treat the rabbi as a war criminal.
 
'Arab terrorists'

Rabbi Yosef said in his sermon that enemies have tried to hurt the Jewish people from the time of the exodus from Egypt to this day.

A person of Rabbi Ovadia Yosef's stature must refrain from acrid remarks such as these

Israeli Justice Minister Meir Sheetrit

"The Lord shall return the Arabs' deeds on their own heads, waste their seed and exterminate them, devastate them and vanish them from this world," he said.
Shas spokesman, Yitzhaq Suderi defended the rabbi, saying his remarks referred only to "Arab murderers and terrorists" and not the Arab people as a whole.

'Stirring up hatred'

Palestinian cabinet minister Hassan Asfur urged international civil institutions and human rights organisations to consider Rabbi Yosef a war criminal in future.
The utterances were "a clear call for murder and a political an intellectual terrorism that will lead to military terrorism", he said in remarks reported on Palestinian radio.

He added that no punishment would come from Israel "because its political culture and action are in line with [the rabbi's] racist statements". 

Israeli Justice Minister Meir Sheetrit also condemned the sermon, saying: "A person of Rabbi Ovadia Yosef's stature must refrain from acrid remarks such as these."

 And he added: "I suggest that we not learn from the ways of the Palestinians and speak in verbal blows like these."

 

The Bab Al Shams protest village before it was forcibly evacuated by Israeli forces. (Issam Rimawi / APA images)

Max Blumenthal The Electronic Intifada Ramallah
14 January 2013

Israel likes to call itself ‘the only democracy in the Middle East’, a country that operates according to the rule of law.  The High Court ordered a halt to the eviction of a Palestinian village.  The army simply ignored them.  In fact there is a history of the Israeli military asserting itself and on occasion, as in 1967, there was talk of the army dictating who would take command of the Defence Ministry when Eshkol seemed reluctant to start a war.
 
Tony Greenstein
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was clearly troubled by the establishment of Bab Al Shams, a Palestinian protest village erected on privately-owned Palestinian land, the planned route of what Israel calls the “E-1” corridor in the occupied West Bank.

The E-1 area was to be capstone of Israel’s settler-colonial enterprise, a long segment of housing units expanding east from the Jews-only mega-settlement of Maale Adumim, permanently severing East Jerusalem from the rest of the West Bank and virtually slicing the West Bank in half. And now, 400 Palestinians and their supporters stood directly in the way of the plan.

“We will not allow anyone to touch the corridor between Jerusalem and Maaleh Adumim,” Netanyahu declared (“Israeli security forces evacuate activists from Palestinian tent outpost in E-1 area,” Haaretz, 13 January).

On 12 January, Netanyahu dispatched a lawyer from the justice ministry to the high court to argue for the immediate eviction of Bab Al Shams. Despite the government’s vehement objections to the presence of the Palestinian village, the high court issued a temporary injunction preventing its eviction for six days pending further deliberations.

As the clock struck midnight on Saturday night, Netanyahu summoned his lawyers to author a statement overriding the high court. Treating the court’s ruling as a mere suggestion, the Israeli justice ministry concocted a justification that was as ludicrous as it was predictable: “There is an urgent security need to evacuate the area of the people and tents,” it claimed, suggesting without evidence that a few hundred unarmed activists presented a grave threat to public safety.
Journalists banned

I arrived at the site of Bab Al Shams about two hours before Netanyahu ordered its eviction. The main entrances to the tent encampment were sealed off by squads of Israeli police. A police commander told me and other journalists that no reporters were allowed inside the area. Though he claimed to hold a formal order from the military, he failed to produce any kind of documentation.
An Israeli journalist told me he had been told earlier in the evening by Israeli army GOC Central Commander Nitzan Alon that he was free to travel anywhere in the West Bank, but that “this [Bab Al Shams] was something different.”

In order to enter Bab Al Shams, me and three colleagues had to first navigate the narrow, pothole-scarred roads of al-Zaim, an impoverished Palestinian town severed from the rest of the Jerusalem municipality by Israel’s separation wall and a checkpoint. Though al-Zaim is already an overcrowded, under-serviced ghetto prevented from expanding to meet the needs of a growing population, the construction of the E-1 corridor would enclose it on all sides, consolidating its isolation and forced immiseration.

At a muddy field strewn with trash at the outskirts of al-Zaim, we climbed out of a small car and hiked towards Bab Al Shams, walking for 3 kilometers along a craggy path in the bone-chilling cold. There were no signs of any army presence on our way, only vehicle caravans heading out of the village to gather more supplies for the next day.

When we arrived at the base of the tent encampment, we found Palestinian National Initiative Chairman Mustafa Barghouti giving an interview to one of many international news outlets embedded in the village. Barghouti had helped provide Bab Al Shams with medical supplies, supplementing a growing infrastructure that included an Internet hotspot and a kitchen.
At the entrance of the village, I found about a dozen residents of Bilin village huddled around a campfire, sipping coffee and smoking cigarettes. “Forget about the food,” Billin popular committee leader Abdallah Abu Rahme joked. “If we don’t have cigarettes and coffee we won’t survive a night here.”

Popular struggle

For almost eight years, the popular struggle had been focused in rural villages near the Green Line, the 1949 armistice line marking the boundary between Israel and the occupied West Bank. Residents in these areas have waged a relentless unarmed struggle against the separation wall.

In the past year, activists began to take their tactics beyond the weekly ritual of village-based protests, organizing creative direct actions like the blocking of settler access roads and a raucous protest in the Rami Levy settlement supermaket. Bab Al Shams was evidence of the new era of protest in Palestine, attracting Palestinian activists from inside Israel and from northern West Bank cities like Nablus and Jenin not normally associated with the popular struggle.

I spoke to Hamde Abu Rahme, a videographer from Bilin, about the progression of protest tactics from the embryonic phase of the popular struggle to the birth of Bab Al Shams.

“The people here have so much practice with resistance over the years, and that explains our success,” Abu Rahme told me. “We have a strong system of organization and of deciding what we all want, how to best handle the army, and how to make sure everyone’s needs are looked after. With all the roads closed, it wasn’t easy to make this village happen, but people still came through the mountains and were willing to stay here for three days without enough food, without shower, in the freezing cold. You can see that people really want to be here, that they are not acting because they have to be here.”

Abir Kopty, a Palestinian feminist and human rights activist serving as spokesperson for the Popular Struggle Coordination Committee, challenged the widely reported notion that Bab Al Shams was simply a Palestinian version of an Israeli “settlement” or “outpost.”

“There is a huge difference here,” she told me. “We are building on our own land unlike the settlers who are occupying and grabbing land that isn’t theirs.”

At the same time, Kopty conceded that organizers of the protest village were reacting directly to Israel’s colonial tactics.

“I do admit that we want to change the rules of the game,” she said. “Israel has been imposing facts on the ground and we are doing exactly the same. We want to impose facts on our land. So, yes, it might seem that we have taken a model from them but the difference is that we are building on our land and we are not taking others’ land and building on it.”

At around 12:30am, I rode out of Bab Al Shams in the back of a pickup truck loaded to the gills with journalists and activists. We had no idea whether the army was set to raid tonight, or if it might wait another day. With the news that the high court had issued a temporary injunction against the eviction, we assumed the government would wait to secure formal permission. We were wrong.

Towards the end of the rocky path leading into Bab Al Shams, and just outside al-Zaim, we barreled by a detachment of Israeli border police officers milling around a group of jeeps. It was clear now that the raid was imminent, and that even if we wanted to re-enter Bab Al Shams, there was no way back inside.

Forced evacuation

Two hours later some 500 border police troops in full riot gear marched into Bab Al Shams and carried its inhabitants away by force. According to reports from some of the 150 or activists inside, the police attacked journalists, pushing them to the periphery of the encampment so they could not record the brutality. Photos of those injured during the raid suggest that the police severely assaulted those who refused to leave quietly. Six Palestinians, including the artist and activist Hafez Omar (a photograph of injured Omar is circulating on Facebook), were so badly wounded they required treatment at the Ramallah Hospital.

Under pressure from right-wing upstarts amidst a heated election contest, Netanyahu ordered the eviction of Bab Al Shams in flagrant contempt of the country’s high court. And not one of the judges issued a word of protest. In a state guided not by the democratic rule of law, but by the colonial imperatives of the occupation, Netanyahu’s roguery was business as usual.

Max Blumenthal is an award-winning journalist and best-selling author.

Violating court order, Israeli occupiers forcibly remove Bab Al Shams village from Palestinian land

Submitted by Ali Abunimah on Sun, 01/13/2013 - 14:50

(Issam Rimawi / APA images)

Israeli border policemen stood near what Palestinians called the new village of Bab Al Shams (Gate of the Sun), on Saturday 11 January 2013. Israeli forces raided and dismantled the encampment early Sunday.


Demonstrating once again the illusory nature of the rule of law in Israel when it comes to the rights of Palestinians, Israeli occupation forces on Sunday morning violently expelled dozens of Palestinians who had on Friday established a village they called Bab Al Shams on privately-owned Palestinian land that has been seized for Jewish settlement in the occupied West Bank.   As Haaretz reported:

Israel’s Supreme Court ruled on Friday that the Palestinian outpost, built in the geographically sensitive area known as E-1, could remain for six days while the issue of the removal of the tents was being discussed. [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu ordered the evacuation immediately, however, despite the court’s ruling.

Netanyahu vowed that Israel’s plans to colonize the land would go ahead.

A release from the Popular Struggle Coordination Committee said that several people had been injured in the violent pre-dawn raid and outlined Israel’s bogus legal maneuvers:

Although established on privately owned Palestinian lands, Israel forcefully expelled residents of the village in a pre-dawn raid this morning. Six required medical attention Shortly before 3 AM, hundreds of Israeli cops and soldiers staged a raid on the newly founded Palestinian village of Bab Al Shams (Gate of the Sun), violently evicting its 150 inhabitants. Use of police brutality is even more objectionable in light of the passive resistance offered by the residents. No arrests were made, and all persons detained were released shortly after.

In light of harsh international criticism over the plan to expand the Maaleh Adumim settlement, and in an attempt to draw away attention from the case, eviction took place early this morning. Following its arrival at the scene, a massive police force began by removing journalists from the residents’ immediate surroundings and proceeded to drag people away, beating some of them. Six Palestinians later required medical care at the Ramallah Hospital.

Following his release, Mohammed Khatib of the Popular Struggle Coordination Committee said,

“We will not remain silent as Israel continues to build Jewish-only colonies on our land. Bab Al Shams is no more, but during its short days it gave new life and energy to all who passed through it. Israel continues to act in violation of every imaginable law and human decency. In establishing Bab Al Shams we declare that we have had enough of demanding our rights from the occupier – from now on we shall seize them ourselves.”

Last night the state appealed to the High Court to withdraw an injunction prohibiting the eviction. The state argued, among other things, that the very existence of the village may occasion rioting, despite its remote and isolated location. The state further argued that the village was established by the Committees to Resist the Wall (a body which does not exist), also behind a blockade of Route 443 in October 2012. This claim, backed only by an affidavit signed by an Israeli police chief, has never been supported by any indictments or arrests for the questioning of individuals.

The village of Bab Al Shams was established last Friday by Palestinian activists, on privately owned Palestinian lands, in an area between East Jerusalem and the settlement of Maaleh Adumim, which Israel refers to as E1. After the acceptance of Palestine as a non-member state to the UN, Israel announced the approval of a plan to expand the Maaleh Adumim settlement by building some 4,000 residential units in this area. Such construction would effectively bisect the West Bank and effectively cutting it off from Jerusalem.

 

Still from Palestinian live TV

“Everyone was evacuated carefully and swiftly, without any injuries to officers or protesters,” an Israeli police spokesman told Haaretz. However photos distributed by the Popular Struggle Coordination Committee (link to download zip file) show several protestors with bruises and injuries to their faces.