Anti-Semitism - Moral Panics

September 29, 2017, 6:26 pm

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The Anti-Semitic Attack that wasn’t

I'm happy to run this story about a serious assault on a Jewish man, but the question is whether it was anti-semitic or not.  It would appear that what was a drug related attack has been elevated, for entirely cynical reasons into being an anti-Semitic attack.  We should remember that whilst all anti-Semitic attacks are made on Jews, not all attacks on Jews are anti-Semitic.

tony greenstein

Guest Post:  Gavin Lewis

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

Coverage of the Moshe Fuerste assault reveals deep-seated media prejudice.

In the aftermath of global condemnation of Israel’s 2014 bombing of Gaza’s civilians, including hundreds of children, the UK media and that of the broader Western world became swept up in a moral panic suggesting that the world’s ‘real’ victims were in fact affluent, middle-class, white ethnic Western Jews. Apparently anti-Semitism was to be the ‘real’ prioritised problem, and it was claimed to be rife. However, in the UK, even in the face of media under-reporting, the extent of racism experienced by Black Britons and Muslims is evident, because we know the names of those who experience crippling attack, and who die at the hands of racists and disproportionately at the hands of the police: Dr Sarandev Bhambra, Mohammad Saleem Chaudry, Mark Duggan and Jermaine Baker have been some of the many victims of these various experiences. We even know the places of Muslim worship subjected to arson, such as the Finsbury Park and Bishopbriggs mosques. By comparison, where were the equivalent white ethnic Jewish victims of anti-Semitism? Even in the case of the much-trumpeted fist fight that occurred at Stamford Hill synagogue—which got considerable, disproportionate media coverage—the local rabbi, Maurice Davis, excluded anti-Semitism as a cause. Finally, filling a gap in the dominant ideological narrative, there was one incident that the media could invoke by reference to a real name, which therefore was privileged with elevated coverage, despite obvious undermining contradictions in the reportage.

‘This was not an anti-Semitic attack’, a family friend of Fuerst’s was reported as saying. ‘They might have said something about him being Jewish—but it all started because of drugs. He smokes a lot of weed.’

Reporting the incident

While out in a group of four teenage Jewish friends, Moshe Fuerst was involved in an incident during which he suffered a ‘bleed on the brain’ (media accounts of his injury vary from ‘serious head injury’ to ‘fractured skull’). The Guardian chose to headline the story ‘suspected antisemitic attack’. However, the Jewish Chronicle (JC), which was the Guardian’s cited source, initially reported Fuerst’s father’s assertions that this had actually been drug-related violence; it later took down its original online report entirely, and instead ran with an anti-Semitism claim. Israel’s Haaretz, though, ran the original JC story, which is still available: ‘This was not an anti-Semitic attack’, a family friend of Fuerst’s was reported as saying. ‘They might have said something about him being Jewish—but it all started because of drugs. He smokes a lot of weed.’ Fuerst’s father, Rabbi Michael Fuerst, told the JC in an exclusive interview that he would not be surprised if the attack on Saturday night came after a disagreement over cannabis. ‘He is on the fringes of society and that is what kids on the fringe do’, Rabbi Fuerst said. ‘He was not involved in hard drugs—he’s not any different to any other middle classes’.

At trial, ‘Judge Prowse said that “throwaway remarks that were anti-Semitic were made”, but ruled the victims weren’t attacked because they were Jewish, saying they were simply “in the wrong place at the wrong time”’. Ian Rushton, deputy chief crown prosecutor at the Crown Prosecution Service for the North West, said:

We considered very carefully what each of the victims reported the two attackers saying during the incident, and we have studied the available CCTV. None of the victims reported that racist or religiously abusive language was used by the offenders and there is no clear evidence from the statement or CCTV to prove to the court that they demonstrated or were motivated by racial or religious hostility.

This material was never used to update the Guardian’s original story page, which to this day continues to label the attack as anti-Semitic violence

Despite the fact that anti-Semitism as a motivation for the attack was unsubstantiated by any official source, the paper referred to the two accused as ‘the hate attackers’.

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In a broader context, the evolving coverage that occurred during the course of this story was considerably worse. The Manchester Evening News (MEN) is the newspaper of the city where the incident took place. The MEN has a practice of covering criticism of Israel pejoratively, as anti-Semitism—there is a very small hard core of wealthy Zionist activism in Manchester, apparently with significant advertising budgets to spend or withhold. The paper has previously smeared Muslims protesting Israel’s bombing of Gaza by likening them to Nazis (as if people of colour weren’t also persecuted by the Nazis). The credibility of these smears unashamedly rested entirely on the utterings of local councillor Richard Leese, who in 2010 spent twenty hours in a cell and received a police caution for assaulting his sixteen-year-old stepdaughter. The paper ran more than eight variants of the Moshe Fuerst story, of which some, perhaps reflecting the sensationalist tone of its coverage, it subsequently felt obliged to either take down or update. In its coverage the paper explicitly labelled the attack anti-Semitic or emphasised the Jewish identity of the teenagers, so as to give that impression. This overt and definitive media reporting tends to be rarer in the cases of Black Britons who have suffered a racist attack, where the label ‘racism’ is often withheld until it has been ‘legitimised’ by the police or a court. In almost all coverage, and heightening the sensationalist tone, a substantially blown-up photo of Moshe Fuerst’s shaved, stitched and operated-on head was used. The Guardianemployed a similar tactic of ‘splashing’ the photo.

Moshe Fuerst

One report, which later disappeared from the news site but is still available via the website of one of the MEN’s local sister papers, The Bury Times, claimed that it was a case of young teenagers ‘set upon by a gang of men’—by inference many fully grown adults victimising a smaller number of teenagers. Like several other news outlets, Israel’s National News revised the figure down to a ‘gang of three men’. The MEN conceded that it was actually a ‘gang of three youths’—so, not adults. By the time the case went to trial, it turned out—as the MEN had to further concede—to be two youths in a confrontation with, er, a ‘gang?’ of four Jewish youths. Despite the fact that anti-Semitism as a motivation for the attack was unsubstantiated by any official source, the paper referred to the two accused youths as ‘the hate attackers’. The extent of some of these hyped claims is still evident, and they have been repeated in the Israeli media, for example in The Times of Israel: ‘Fuerst’s father Michael said the attack was carried out by a gang of “non-Jewish boys who were drunk” and who took “great joy, I’m sure, from the fact that they were beating up a Jewish kid”’. However, it’s not just that the numbers and ages of the people involved in this confrontation were manipulated, or even that loaded assumptions about the assailants’ motivations coloured the story, but also that in this coverage the media use of the word ‘gang’ is coming though a particular class- and race-based ideological prism, and therefore it has been unevenly applied. North Manchester has some affluent sections, home in part to the city’s historic Jewish communities. When middle-class Jewish teenagers congregate in these areas they are referred to as a ‘group’. By contrast, working-class kids from poorer and former blue-collar neighbourhoods that border these areas, such as Middleton and Salford, are described as gathering in ‘gangs’, as are, in particular, Black teenagers from the poorer parts of South Manchester, known as Moss Side. None of the media coverage that prioritised an anti-Semitic motivation in its reporting investigated or even considered the option that this was perhaps simply lower-middle-class youths fighting with rich kids.

None of the media coverage that prioritised an anti-Semitic motivation in its reporting investigated or even considered the option that this was perhaps simply lower-middle-class youths fighting with rich kids.

Much of the MEN’s coverage not only gave the impression that this was without question an anti-Semitic attack but also that it was attempted murder. ‘I believe these men killed my son and the NHS brought him back to life’ (Michael Fuerst). ‘(W)hy…come up to him while he is lying on the ground unconscious, kick him in the head, and potentially kill him?’ The impression is also given by the MEN that the extent of Moshe Fuerst’s vulnerabilities and potentially critical health status was instantly evident to those involved in the violent confrontation, thereby justifying the attempted-murder inferences. Here the MEN writes, suggesting an immediate consequence, ‘He suffered a bleed to the brain. He was intubated at North Manchester General Hospital and then put in an ambulance and taken to the neurosurgery specialist centre at Salford Royal. As soon as he arrived there he was operated on. At Crumpsall (North Manchester General) he was already slipping into a coma’. Actually, as the JC reported—perhaps unaware of the MEN narratives—it was apparently a day or so later that Moshe Fuerst’s health crashed and his condition became apparent: ‘The 17-year-old was taken to hospital and initially discharged. He returned to Salford Royal Hospital on Sunday after he complained of headaches, and vomited and collapsed’. But the MEN reporting reinforced national tabloid coverage in papers like the Daily Mail and Daily Mirror, which consequently followed a similar tone: using the language ‘anti-semitic attack’ and the inference of attempted murder, and, like the Guardian, splashing the post-operative photo of the teenage victim. It’s worth reiterating that the youths were convicted of assault: no attempted-murder or hate-crime charge was made. By the time the case came to trial, in reference to the assailants and in contradiction of the implied media narrative that they’d kicked the victim into a coma and casually sauntered off, Judge Prowse said, ‘They genuinely had no idea of the severity of the incident that they had been involved in’.

The other issue in the reporting is the manner in which the potential gangs, class, drugs and/or alcohol-related aspects of this case were underexplored and under-represented in favour of an anti-Semitism narrative. Significantly, the JC initially wrote that ‘the two groups clashed after shouting at each other’ (accounts suggest that this took place from opposite platforms at a tram stop). The JC’s subsequent reports were revised, apparently so as not to give the impression that the Jewish teenagers had been doing any of the baiting and ‘shouting’. But the pictures of the two youths who were eventually convicted of the assault are quite telling in that, in contradiction of the anti-Semitism narrative, both young men appear to be performing gang signs with their hands, perhaps indicative of a more basic, tribal youth conflict?

Moshe Fuerste’s assailants, Joseph Kelly, left, and Zach Birch, right. Source: Manchester Evening News.

None of this—even the legal decision—categorically rules out any anti-Semitic motive in this attack, but a number of questions arise. Why, given the weight of evidence and testimony, did the coverage veer off in the direction of an anti-Semitism narrative when so many other factors were worthy of consideration? Why did the corporate media manipulate material in this way, particularly as the coverage occurred just after the first anniversary of Israel’s bombing of the children of Gaza? If there is a homogenous ‘anti-Semitic’ narrative being encouraged, it does not appear to be a genuine expression of the diverse grassroots reality of Jewish-British experience, sentiments or communal allegiances. In May 2016 the Daily Mirror (also part of the MEN’s Trinity Mirror news stable) splashed the headline ‘Jewish cemetery vandalised by yobs in “sickening” anti-Semitic attack’. Yet buried at the very bottom of the page was the following statement: ‘Stephen Wilson, administrator of the North Manchester Jewish Cemetaries Trust, said he reported the vandalism to the police after being alerted by the cemetery’s ground staff. He said he was “dismayed” by the attacks but was not convinced the motive was antisemitism. “It’s my guess—locals come over the wall, you always find drink cans (beer) over here, they’ve been in that frame of mind and they’ve done it for the sheer hell and fun of it”’. Mr Wilson’s dismissal of an anti-Semitic motive to the vandalism in Manchester replicates Rabbi Maurice Davis’s position—‘everybody gets on and we haven’t had any experience of anti-Semitism’—on the fight that occurred at the entrance to Stamford Hill synagogue hundreds of miles away in London. Both incidents, though, were headlined as anti-Semitic.

Four consecutive Al Jazeera investigations plus ongoing commentaries have revealed that the Israeli embassy has been attempting to provoke its sympathisers to intervene in and manipulate British political and media culture. Could this current moral panic, its tone and potential misrepresentation of Jewish-British experience, be a reflection of this?

It appears that at one point, apparently in support of an interpretation of the Moshe Fuerst incident as an anti-Semitic attack, claims were made that ‘a Jewish Kippah skullcap worn by one of the boys appeared to have been spat at after it fell to the ground during the incident. However, police said the victim “couldn’t be sure” about this happening in a formal statement which was presented to the Crown Prosecution Service to make a charging decision’. Greater Manchester Police ‘said the allegation surrounding the Kippah cap was fully investigated, but the victim was “unsure” as to whether it was spat on’. The police later said:

On September 21, two weeks after the attack, one of the victims attended a police station to report that he believed his Kippah may have been spat upon on the floor during the attack. Further enquiries were carried out by officers to investigate and the circumstances were discussed with the victim. On September 30, the victim made a formal statement to the police regarding this matter, in which he was unsure if the offender spat towards his Kippah.

To summarise: in support of an anti-Semitism narrative, and as an apparent afterthought two weeks after the incident, these claims were made, then withdrawn, then made again, unsubstantiated, at trial. No DNA evidence was ever produced in support of the claims.

As noted above, this coverage and its continuous self-contradictory, flip-flopping claims, occurred just a few months after the first anniversary of Israel’s bombing of Gaza’s children, which in many quarters received much less coverage than the assault on Moshe Fuerste. To put this incident in broader socio-historical context, at almost any time in postwar Britain, regardless of the injuries he sustained, if Moshe Fuerst had been Black, he may well have been treated as a suspect, even prosecuted—unjustifiably or not—for an offence such as ‘affray’. One infamous historical example illustrating this institutional prejudice is the 1993 racist murder of Black teenager Stephen Lawrence, where not only did the authorities initially refuse to prosecute the killers but also the police put the dead victim’s parents, Neville and Doreen Lawrence, under surveillance after they publicly complained to the media about continuing police inaction.

More recent incidents echo Britain’s ‘all darkies look and are the same’ racist past. Bristol police tasered an elderly Black Briton, Judah Adunbi, directly in the face because the officers involved couldn’t tell the difference between him and another Afro-Caribbean man who was the genuine suspect. This generic ‘Black labelling’ resulting in a ‘police stop’ was something Adunbi had suffered before. He had merely been attempting to enter his own home, and the police were apparently oblivious to or unable to recognise the fact that he had been their own race-relations adviser to the local Independent Advisory Group. An innocent, unarmed Brazilian, Jean Charles de Menezes, was publicly shot dead because he was presumed to be Middle Eastern—as if that would have made it all right. Retired top-flight professional footballer Dalian Atkinson was killed by repeated police taser assaults. Complaints of racism—on an incident-by-incident and thematic basis—are given far less column space, and often the term ‘racism’ may not even be used. These inconsistent degrees of coverage have certainly never reached equivalent anti-Semitism moral-panic reportage levels, even—as in case of the killing of Mark Duggan—when the original incident provoked rioting. In contrast to the relatively free use of the term anti-Semitism, the word racism was hard to find in news coverage of the original de Menezes killing or in commentary on the extraordinarily surprising subsequent promotion of Police Commander Cressida Dick, the officer in charge of the operation in which he was killed, to police commissioner.

Given how heavily the anti-Semitism narrative was pushed in reporting the Moshe Fuerst assault, it’s worth going back to original coverage, including family testimony, that featured in the JC: ‘The rabbi [the boy’s father, Michael Fuerst] questioned whether antisemitism had been the key driving force behind the attack. “They were not neo-Nazis out looking for Jewish boys to beat up. They were drunk kids. I imagine they knew they were all Jewish—one of the boys was wearing a yarmulke”’.

One of the defining characteristics of ongoing racial oppression is that it is underpinned by a history of slavery, colonial genocide, institutional power, the leverage of the cultural-media apparatus, and white racial, economic and class privilege. This is what differentiates it from simple prejudice that individuals such as redheads experience. By comparison to the Black experience of racism, rather than being oppressed by institutional practices, the mobilisations of current anti-Semitism moral panics—particularly as and where they support the Israel lobby and aspects of white privilege—appear to be benefiting from these entrenched power dynamics. Even now there are numerous easily accessible webpages on news sites—including that of the Guardian—where the constructed narrative of the Moshe Fuerst incident includes the headlines and descriptions ‘anti-semitic attack’, and this plays into a broader, largely incident-free moral panic about anti-Semitism. By comparison, racist incidents against Black and Muslim Britons require a far greater degree of substantiation. The death toll experienced by the Palestinians is downplayed and/or—in the tradition of nineteenth-century racist, ‘civilising-the-savage’ narratives—is treated as a justifiable developmental inevitability of white Western progress. Similarly, the oppression of Black and indigenous Jews in Israel is made invisible by the corporate media. And, disgracefully, the reported reality of Israel practising apartheid and ethnic cleansing is treated as debatable, even when it is supported by the testimony of Nobel Peace Prize winners Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu. But perhaps, given the racist double standards on the comparative value of human life upon which the current moral panic is structured, the hypocrites in the corporate media regard Mandela and Tutu as only Black Noble Prize winners.

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Open Letter to the Lying Leader of Brighton and Hove City Council, Warren Morgan

September 30, 2017, 6:55 pm

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It’s Time to Make Way for an Honest and Truthful Politician

Lies come easily to Warren Morgan

30 September 2017

Cllr. Warren Morgan,

Leader Brighton and Hove City Council,

Town Hall
Bartholomew Square
BRIGHTON
BN1 1JA

To:       warren.morgan@brighton-hove.gov.uk          @warrenmorgan 

Dear Cllr. Morgan,

Sir Henry Wotton is famous for his observation that ‘an ambassador is an honest gentleman sent to lie abroad for the good of his country.’  Given that you are not a diplomat what is it that makes you feel the need to lie so often?

You have been widely quotedas saying that Labour’s conference will not be welcome in the city in the future because of ‘anti-Semitism’.  You are reportedin Brighton and Hove News as having ‘singled out a local campaigner Tony Greenstein’.  You are quoted on Facebookas saying that:

 ‘We have the prominent activist and suspended Labour Party member Tony Greenstein here, who indeed was present at the fringe meeting where it was suggested that Holocaust denial should be allowed. His expulsion, in my view, is long overdue.’

The only possible interpretation of your remarks is that I am responsible for what a speaker at the meeting I attended allegedly said. Otherwise why call for my expulsion? What you are engaged in is the McCarthyist tactic of guilt-by-association. Unsurprisingly Joe McCarthy was also anti-Semitic.

The speaker, Miko Peled said that ‘‘Israel, Zionism, even the holocaust  - can these subjects not be discussed, yes or no?’  Nothing Mr Peled said disputed the holocaust. He was merely saying that all subjects, ‘even the Holocaust’should be open for discussion. That is in fact the current legal position in the UK.  Of course we could bring in legislation to make Holocaust denial illegal, as in Germany and Austria.  However given the electoral success of far-Right, neo-Nazi parties, Alternative for Germany and the Freedom Party in both countries, this doesn’t seem a particular wise route to go down. 

All that Miko Peled was doing was to say discussion about the Holocaust is legitimate free speech.  To twist this into support for Holocaust denial is a prime example of how anti-Semitism has been weaponised by supporters of Zionism and the Israeli state.  It demonstrates your contempt for those who died at the hands of Hitler’s regime – Jewish and non-Jewish.

Unlike you I am Jewish. Unlike you half my father’s family was murdered in the gas chambers of Treblinka. For you to use the Holocaust, of both Jews and non-Jews, up to 5 million of whom also died in the Nazi concentration camps, as a cheap political device in order to gain a political advantage over your opponents in the Labour Party is despicable.  If anyone in Brighton Labour Party is anti-Semitic it is you and your followers. 

It is noticeable that you and your political soul mates have nothing to say about racism against the Roma, yet proportionately just as many Roma died in the camps as Jews. Racism against the Roma today is far higher than that against Jews today but it isn’t so politically advantageous.

As you well know I have often been the recipient of this vile Holocaust denial propaganda, as evidenced by the Argus article of 16th October 1993 as well as physical attacks by fascist groups such as the National Front. A cursory search of the Argus archive would turn up numerous articles e.g. Adam Trimmingham’s reviewof my book ‘Fighting Fascism in Brighton’  I confess that in 40 years of opposing fascism and racism in Brighton and Hove your name has never once come up.

My reasons for opposing Zionism and the Israeli state are the same as my opposition to fascism and racism in Britain and Apartheid in South Africa. Your use of the Jewish Holocaust for transparently cheap political purposes is contemptible.

Mega Momentum rally before last year's Brighton Labour Party AGM

Last year you lied about spitting at the local Labour Party AGM, because the candidates you supported lost a democratic election.  This year your friends had no traction at Labour Party conference and once again you have resorted to dishonest political gamesmanship, even if it is at the expense of stirring up and exploiting anti-Semitism.

The sophisticated wit of former Brighton councillor Craig Turton endorsed by Cllr Morgan

I realise that you may find this difficult to understand but even the worst political foes try to maintain a certain level of political decorum.  That however seems to elude you.  On your Facebook page there is a comment from former Brighton councillor Craig Turton:

‘Well said Warren Morgan! Greenstein is a poisonous piece of shit - the sooner he's kicked out of the Party the better! - Thursday at 10:09

Instead of admonishing Turton you respond ‘Thanks Craig, appreciate that. Hope you are well.’

It is clear that you are unfit for any public office, both because of your display of arrogant ignorance and your inability to conduct an appropriate public discourse.  You are clearly unfit to be the leader of Brighton and Hove City Council.  Singling out and defaming one Brighton Jewish resident by name is inciting hate crime. If you have an ounce of decency you will resign of your own accord.

It would also be interesting to know with what authority you wrote your letter and on behalf of whom.

Yours truly,

 Tony Greenstein 

Background

Councillor Warren Morgan is a supporter of Progress.  In 2015 he supported Liz Kendall, the most right-wing candidate for leader of the Labour Party.  Last year he supported Owen Smith.

In the wake of Jeremy Corbyn’s victory in the leadership elections Warren Morgan, Peter Kyle MP and the Labour councillors have felt ever more beleaguered.  The 3 Brighton & Hove parties contain a massive 8,000+ members.  Last July 2^nd 600 people came out to vote at the AGM of the local District Labour Party.  When  Momentum supported candidates won with majorities of 2-1, Warren Morgan promptly invented an alleged spitting incident, backed up by another councillor Emma Daniels, which led to the national Labour Party and the Chair of the Disputes Committee, Anne Black, suspendingthe party.  Morgan thought nothing of lying through his teeth if it gave him a political advantage.  Last week he did so again.

Morgan even makes light of suggestions of a conspiracy - you don't need to be a conspiracy theorist to know that sometimes there are conspiracies - when the CCTV footage was examined and the staff member interviewed it was clear that Warren Morgan was a liar

Morgan was confident that City College would never release CCTV footage but when it did he remained silent

 The right-wing officials in the party did their best to uphold Morgan’s allegations and hatchet woman Katherine Buckingam was sent down by Iain McNicol from Labour nationally to ‘investigate’ the allegations.  Despite her best efforts, Buckingham found it impossible to find any evidence to back up Warren Morgan’s lies and when the video tape of the alleged incident was produced, courtesy of City College, where the AGM was held, Buckingham refused to view it!  [see Warren Morgan, Emma Daniels & The Spitting Incident That Never Was, My response to Katherine Buckingham, the Labour Party’s head of disputes and discipline]

At last week’s Labour Party Conference the Left was in a large numerical majority.  It is clear from the reception given to anti-Zionist Jewish speakers at the Conference, Naomi Wimborne-Iddrissi and Leah Levane, that Conference was unwilling to put up with more fake allegations of anti-Semitism.  Both received standing ovations.   The loudest cheer of Corbyn’s speech was reserved for his references to Palestine.  The Labour Friends of Israel and Jewish Labour Movement were not best pleased.

Both the Free Speech on Israel and Jewish Voices for Labour meetings were packed to the rafters.  So an allegation was invented and I have no doubt that Zionist activists pored over the footage they took secretly of the former meeting to find anything that could possibly discredit the speech of Miko Peled, an American-Israeli and son of an Israeli General Mattiyahu Peled.  When at one point Peled said that everything, including the Holocaust, should be discussed, this was transformed by the spin merchants and cynical manipulators of the Apartheid lobby into a call for Holocaust denial!

Warren Morgan, to whom lying comes as easily as his expenses claims, agreed to write a letter to Iain McNicol threatening the Labour Party with not being allowed to hold a conference in Brighton.  In other words for the sake of his Zionist and Progress friends he was willing to sacrifice millions of pounds in tourism money in Brighton.

Once again the fake anti-Semitism allegations have been used as the last throw of a desperate and discredited group of cynical and dishonest politicians.  And because I happened to be in the same room as 150-200 other people and even worse I spoke at the meeting, I am therefore guilty of Holocaust denial too and should be expelled immediately if not sooner.  I have no doubt that people will clearly see what has happened as the actions of desperate right-wingers trying to use the issue of anti-Semitism in order to halt the advance of the Left. 

I have therefore penned an Open Letter to Warren Morgan calling on him to do the only decent thing in his life so far and that is to resign as Leader of the Labour Group and better still as a councillor altogether.  To paraphrase Shakespeare’s Macbeth, nothing in his life would become him like the leaving of his office.

Tony Greenstein

Saying the unsayable about Zionist Support for the 1935 Nuremberg Laws & Nazi favouritism of German Zionism

October 2, 2017, 6:18 pm

≫ Next: Professor Moshe Machover Israeli Anti-Zionist Expelled from Labour today for ‘anti-Semitism’

≪ Previous: Open Letter to the Lying Leader of Brighton and Hove City Council, Warren Morgan

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It might be true but it’s anti-Semitic to say it!

Hitler in his famous 'Prophecy' speech promising the annihilation of the Jewish people, spoke about the Jews having the last laugh

The relationship between the Zionist movement and the Nazis is something I’ve always taken a keen interest in.  Not because I wish to dwell on the more unsavoury aspects of Zionist history for its own sake or even because of the hypocrisy of those who attack anti-Zionists today as anti-Semites. The reasons for my interest is that if Zionism collaborated with and indeed welcomed the Nazi regime in the 1930’s, then it is likely to adopt the same attitude to anti-Semitism in the future.

Of course I mean genuine anti-Semitism, not the fake anti-Semitism that the Jewish Labour Movement and Zionists wield against the Left and supporters of the Palestinians.  Today we see that Zionism has not changed its spots.  Its attitude to anti-Semitism is still the same.  Anti-Semitism rejects the idea that Jews have any place outside Palestine.  That was why in the 1930’s the favourite slogan of anti-Semites was ‘Jews to Palestine’.  Unfortunately it could also be the slogan of Zionism.

Zionism never had any problem with this because they too believed that the Jewish diaspora was unnatural and should be wound up.  Indeed if you didn’t know who the speaker was when they talked about Jews you might assume that they were died-in-the-wool anti-Semites not Zionists.  For example Israel’s first Justice Minister, Pinhas Rosenbluth described Palestine as ‘an institute for the     fumigation of Jewish vermin’.[1] 

Neo-Nazi Richard Spencer and founder of the Alt-Right movement describes himself as a White Zionist

Zionism has always seen its interests as being the same as anti-Semitism.  Today we see Benjamin Netanyahu intervening to prevent Hungary’s Israeli Ambassador criticising the nakedly anti-Semitic campaign by its racist Prime Minister, Viktor Orban of George Soros.  Israel backs Hungary, says financier Soros is a threat

We have the obscene spectacle of Benjamin’s son, Yair Netanyahu producing a cartoon attacking Soros which contains all the traditional anti-Semitic features.  It was welcomedby David Duke of the KKK and Andrew Anglin of the openly neo-Nazi The Stormer.  The guest of honour at the forthcoming Gala Dinner of the Zionist Organisation of America in November is none other than Donald Trump’s anti-Semitic former advisor, Steve Bannon.

Nor is it just a couple of fruitcakes.  When the Argentinian Junta in 1976-83 took power their ideology included quite weird and strange versions of the traditional anti-Semitic conspiracy theory.  Jews such as  Jacobo Timerman were savagely tortured, because they were Jews and of the 30,000 murdered by the Junta, some 10-12% were young leftist Jews.  What was Israel doing at the time?  Supplying these monsters with weapons and engaging  in an arms trade over the dead bodies of young Jews.

Translation on Yad Vashem's site of  the welcome given by the official Zionist paper Judische Rundschau to the Nuremberg Laws

The welcome by the Zionist establishment for Donald Trump and the openly White Supremacist and anti-Semitic alt-Right should open peoples’ eyes.  A welcome, not only by Netanyahu but by Israeli Labour Party leader Isaac Herzog who sent a message of congratulation to Trump as ‘“an American leader who showed the commentators and the sceptics that we are in a new era of change”.  A welcome for Trump and Bannon

What particularly irked the Jewish Labour Movement and its Vice-Chair Mike Katz at the recent Labour Party conference was the Labour Party Marxists leaflet with an article by Moshe Machover.  Katz called Machover, a founder of Matzpen, the Israeli Socialist Organisation an ‘immoral historian.’ 

Machover’s ‘immorality’ consists of pointing out certain inconvenient episodes in Zionist history.  The pivotal turning point in Nazi Germany was the introduction of the Nuremburg Laws which stripped German Jews of their citizenship (much like Israel is beginning to strip its Bedouin inhabitants of citizenship).  Instead Jews became a separate national minority with their own flag, the Zionist Star of David. 

Steve Bannon of the anti-Semitic Alt-Right is a guest of honour at the next Zionist Organisation of America gala dinner

On 15^thSeptember at the mass Nuremburg rally, Hitler announced the introduction of the Nuremburg laws which forbade Jewish marriage or sexual relations with Aryans.  Gerald Reitlinger described the laws as ‘the most murderous legislative instrument known to European history’ [2]. 

Two days later, on 17th September 1935 an editorial in the Zionist paper Judische Rundschau welcomed the Nuremburg Laws.

The speakers at the Zionist Congress (which had just been held in Lucerne) stated that the Jews are a separate people and once again put on record the national claims of Jewry. 

Germany has merely drawn the practical consequences from this and is meeting the demands of the International Zionist Congress when it declares the Jews now living in Germany to be a national minority. Once the Jews have been stamped a national minority it is again possible to establish normal relations between the German Nation and Jewry. …. from now on and for the futurethere can be no interference in questions connected with the Government of the German people, that there can be no interference in the national affairs of the German Nation.
… Germany has given the Jewish minority the opportunity to live for itself and is offering State protection for this separate life of the Jewish minority:[3]

Whilst the liberal Zionist Jewish Forward in America is worried about the alliance between Zionists and anti-semites the Labour Zionist Jewish Labour Movement complains if we talk about it!

Zionism was so taken up with its own racial idiocy, the idea that races and nations cannot live together that it justified the Nuremburg Laws as fulfilling its own demands. Of course the Zionist movement couldn’t know that the Nazis would adopt the Final Solution in 1941.  Very few people, apart from Trotsky predicted that.  However it wasn’t only the German Zionist movement which welcomed the Nuremburg laws.  The Zionist movement in Palestine did too.  It had seen the rise of the Nazis, in the words of Berl Katznelson, Ben Gurion’s deputy, as “an opportunity to build and flourish like none we have ever had or ever will have”.[4]

On 26^thSeptember Reinhardt Heydrich, Himmler’s Deputy and in charge of the RHSA (Police and SS) declared that he was‘‘in agreement with the great spiritual movement within Jewry itself, Zionism, whose position is based on the recognition of the unity of Jewry throughout the world and the rejection of all ideas of mixing in.’  [5]

Nicosia describes how the ‘fiercely anti-Zionist and deutschnational Association of National German Jews (VnJ) in December, while the Jewish war veterans organization (RjF) was completely neutralised.  Additional bans on meetings and activities of other Jewish organisations, were enacted at the end of 1936 until the middle of 1937.  Again ‘these too were directed primarily at the assimilationist organizations.’  [6]

But even before the introduction of the Nuremburg Laws the policy of the Nazi state was to support the Zionists against the non and anti-Zionist German Jewish organisations.  On 28 January 1935 Heydrich issued a directive to all police officers that ‘The activity of the Zionist-oriented youth organizations that are engaged in the occupational restructuring to Palestine lies in the interest of the National Socialist state’s leadership.’ [7]

Try as they might the Zionist movement is finding it impossible to suppress the truth about their own record.  Cry as they might that everyone bar them is anti-Semitic, the reality of who really has most in common with anti-Semitism is catching up with them.  And no, we should not accept the idea that to speak the truth is anti-Semitic!

Tony Greenstein

In defence of history: Reinhard Heydrich, Zionism & saying the ‘unsayable’

Labour Party Marxists attracted hysterical attacks from the right wing at the Labour Party conference. Many of these centred around an article in the LPMno 17, by veteran Israeli-Jewish Marxist, Moshé Machover. This explored an area of “basic agreement” between the Nazi regime and the Zionist movement. The Labour right used their natural allies to attack this – the Daily Mail, The Times, The Sun, etc. We thought we should let the author himself reply

LPM: Frankly, I enjoyed your article but I didn’t anticipate it would cause so much fuss! How do you explain the vehemence of the attacks on your contribution? Why is this happening?

MM: It’s the result of a conjunction of two things. I follow the Israeli press very closely and the wider political discussions in Israel in general. Quite some time ago – and I’m talking about before anyone imagined that Corbyn would be Labour Party leader (least of all himself!) – there was a feeling in Israeli establishment circles that they were losing the propaganda war. They responded with the Hasbara campaign.¹⁾

This was part of a decision was made to go onto the offensive: in a sense, it’s the last ditch attempt to rescue the international reputation of this state. They are losing credibility on the arena of what could be called international opinion, but – more importantly – they are losing the Jewish public outside Israel, especially those under 30. There is a clear generational shift in opinion. These people are becoming very critical of Israel and its colonisation project.

You could see a sign of this at the Labour conference on September 27, in Corbyn’s leader speech to close the event. His call for Israel to stop the oppression of the Palestinians and to end the savage oppression of these people won loud applause.²⁾) This was a sign of the times. It’s an indicator of what the general public has come to feel – including a large percentage of Jewish people, especially the youth.

Remember, the Israeli establishment identified this quite some time before Corbyn’s breakthrough was on the agenda. They had already decided to go on the attack internationally, using this ‘dirty bomb’ tactic of labelling any criticism of Zionism and its colonisation project as anti-Semitic.

In the UK, they found useful fools in the form of the Labour right wing. The Israeli state’s propaganda tactic of smearing all criticism of itself as anti-Jewish coincided with the Labour’s right’s need to discredit Corbyn and the left of the party.

Now Corbyn has plenty of enemies – both inside and outside the party! So this smear tactic was eagerly seized upon – including by people who care absolutely nothing about the issues of Israel-Palestine, the Jews, Zionism and all these important questions. They are totally cynical in their use of these issues. As Chris Williamson’s phrase goes, the Labour right “weaponised” the sensitive and complex issue of anti-Semitism for the sake of narrow, factional advantage against a left in the Labour Party that was growing and threatening to overwhelm them.

It’s a dirty war.

LPM: Mike Katz of the Jewish Labour Movement ³⁾ dubbed you an “amoral historian” in conversation with one of our supporters at the Brighton Labour conference. He couldn’t really elaborate on this category when challenged to do so. He didn’t directly contest the veracity of anything you said: he simply seemed to be implying that bringing up the issue of the limited collaboration between Zionist organisations as the Nazi regime at all is outside the boundaries of social/political acceptability. But, as I say, that’s a guess! What do you think he’s talking about?

MM: Well, I’m not quite sure. I have made my views about history and morality quite clear in the past. They can be found in a book I published in 2012 and in public lectures I gave in London in 2006.⁴⁾

In these, I make it crystal clear that moral judgements of historical events are very important. But first, you need the facts. You mustn’t start with a moral, value-laden attitude to past events. In the first instance, establish what happened. The moral judgements must come later.

Everyone is entitled to their own moral assessments of the historical actions of individuals, groups, parties or social classes. We can disagree. But people are not entitled to ‘alternative facts’. The factual record I refer to in my article is there, it is available to access, the basic record of the events I write about is uncontested. (As you say, Mike Katz didn’t contest them either!) So, accept that these events took place, they are part of history and must be explained. Then let’s talk about morality!

LPM: The JLM seem to approach historical truth and investigation with parameters that set by what is sayable– what is permitted to be spoken of, regardless of whether it is an actual historical fact.

MM: Here are some historical facts, then. We are closing in on the century of the Balfour declaration.⁵⁾ It’s interesting to read what the Board of Deputies of British Jews said about it at the time. During the discussions around the declaration, spokespeople of the BDBJ expressed consistent and fundamental objections to the general plan for the Zionist colonisation of Palestine and specifically to the idea that the Jews in Britain were a separate race or nationality.

They insisted that Jewishness is a religion. Take Lucien Wolf,⁶⁾ a leading light in the BDBJ. In a famous letter to Lord Rothschild while the negotiations that resulted in the Balfour Declaration were taking place, he took great exception to the Zionist idea that it was “self-delusional for any Jew to believe him or herself to be English by nationality and Jewish by faith”. This is how Wolf responded:

I have spent most of my life in combating these very doctrines when presented to me in the form of anti-Semitism and I can only regard them as the more dangerous when they come to me in the guise of Zionism. They constitute a capitulation to our enemies which have absolutely no justification in history, ethnology or the facts of everyday life…

In fact, the Zionists of that time – who, it must be remembered, were a minority amongst British Jews and minorities in all western European countries – would have regarded Wolf’s stance as abominable.

Later, we have the Montefiore brothers – Alexander and Claude, who were, respectively, the presidents of the Board of Deputies of British Jews and of the Anglo-Jewish Association. These two penned a letter to The Times, published on May 24, 1917. In it, they express a similar sentiment:

“Establishment of a Jewish nationality in Palestine founded on the theory of Jewish homelessness would have the effect throughout the world of stamping the Jews as strangers in their native lands, undermining their hard-won position as citizens and nationals of those lands.”

So, what they are saying is that our nationality is British; we are Jewish by religion. In fact, they go on to reject the idea of:

a secular Jewish nationality recruited on some loose and obscure principle of race and of ethnographic peculiarity.

LPM: And isn’t this the specific feature that you point to when you reference the limited ‘commonality’ of one aspect Zionism and the Nazis. The notion of the Jews as a race; the idea that they could not live amongst gentiles without constant conflict and friction; that assimilation was an illusion and, therefore, there was the need for the Jews to separate themselves from the Gentiles and vice versa?

MM: Yes, but let’s remember something about that Heydrich⁷⁾ quotation in my original article – the one that caused LPMers so much trouble from JLM activists outside the Labour conference!⁸⁾ In this, Heydrich is responding to a reciprocal overture on the part of German Zionists. Let me put this in its historical context.

This context was the publication of the notorious, abominable Nuremberg Laws against German Jews – probably the foulest racist laws enacted.⁹⁾These were published in September 1935. Of course, most German Jews felt the same as Lucien Wolf and the Montefiores in Britain: they regarded themselves as Germans by nationality and Jews by religion or religious background.

But a minority amongst the community – the Zionists – welcomedthe Nuremburg laws! Here is a quote from the official organ of the Zionist movement in Germany – it is available in Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust Memorial Museum in Jerusalem. The name of this journal was Jüdische Rundschau. Specifically, it was an editorial, signed by the editor, a certain Mr Brendt, which welcome the fact that Germany had recognised the Jews not as part of the German people, but as separate nationality/race. (In Germany – and in many other places at that time – the words ‘nation’ and ‘race’ tended to be treated as synonyms). Brendt refers to the resolution recently passed by the 19^th World Zionist Congress (1935), held in Lucerne in Switzerland. He says that this resolution put an end to any talk of Judaism being simply a religion. And now, he says, speaking of the Nuremberg laws:

Germany has merely drawn the practical consequences from this and is meeting the demand of the International Zionist Congress when it declares the Jews now living in Germany to be a national minority.

So, according to this leading Zionist, by enacting the Nuremburg laws, the German Reich is implicitly accepting the position of the international Zionist Congress.

Of course, we look back at this history with the 20/20 vision of hindsight. We know the end of the story as it were; where the Jews of Europe actually ended up – facing physical extermination. And, of course, you cannot be sure that Heydrich himself was guilty of dissimulation when he responded positively to this overture. He may have been lying; or, as some historians argue, that at the point in history the ‘Final Solution’ was not yet the fixed policy of the Nazi state.

In some ways, this question of intention is a secondary matter. Heydrich, writing in the SS paper Das Schwarze Korps, is responding within days of that editorial in that official Zionist organ, and he explicitly states that “the government [ie, the Nazis in power] finds itself in complete agreement with the great spiritual movement within Jewry itself, the so-called Zionism, with its recognition of the solidarity of Jewry throughout the world and the rejection of all assimilationist ideas.”

It was very important for the Nazis state to insist that Jews were not simply a religion because it was not the policy – in general – of their state to persecute and discriminate in such an extreme way against religious minorities. Thus, they insisted that the Jews were a separate nation/race. In thisrespect, their view clearly coincided with that of the Zionist movement – which, remember, was a minority viewpoint amongst German Jews. In that sense, Heydrich was using the Zionists against the majority of the German Jews. He was using Zionism as a polemical stick against the majority viewpoint of German Jews – for assimilation and full civil rights in Germany, the country of their birth.

LPM: What’s your estimation of the Labour conference and what does the controversy around this sensitive question tell us about the current balance of forces between the left and right?

There are contradictions. One the one hand, Corbyn wins enthusiastic applause when he calls for an end of the oppressions of the Palestinians. On the other hand, we have an ongoing guerrilla war in the lower levels of the party – at the level of council votes, for example – where bad positions are being adopted, very dangerous votes taken.

So, the “weaponisation” of anti-Semitism continues, but can move into different arenas of struggle. We can make progress in the Labour Party itself, but then in local councils the rightwing Labour councillors can stop education on the issue of Israel-Palestine, they can close down actions and meetings in solidarity with the Palestinians, etc.

The fight isn’t over! This dirty war against us will continue and probably intensify as the pro-Israel apologists and rightist in the party lose ground.

1.	↑	Hasbara is a Hebrew word for the public relations efforts of the Israeli state to disseminate abroad positive propaganda about itself and its actions.
2.	↑	“…let’s give real support to end the oppression of the Palestinian people, the 50-year occupation and illegal settlement expansion and move to a genuine two-state solution of the Israel-Palestine conflict” (https://www.totalpolitics.com/articles/news/jeremy-corbyn%E2%80%99s-2017-labour-conference-speech-full-transcript
3.	↑	Mike Katz is a leading member of the Jewish Labour Movement. A fuller biography of the man can be read here – http://www.mikekatz.org/about-me/
4.	↑	Israelis and Palestinians: Conflict and resolution, Haymarket Books, Chicago 2012. Also see lecture http://www.israeli-occupation.org/2006-11-30/moshe-machover-israelis-and-palestinians-conflict-and-resolution/
5.	↑	The Balfour Declaration was a public statement in the form of a letter to Lord Rothschild, issued by the British government during WWI announcing support for the establishment of a Jewish “national home” in Palestine. The area was then an Ottoman region with an Arab population and a tiny Jewish minority.
6.	↑	Lucien Wolf was a British-Jewish journalist and historian of Anglo-Jewry. He was a campaigner for Jewish civil rights and an outspoken opponent of political Zionism.
7.	↑	Reinhard Tristan Eugen Heydrich was a high-ranking Nazi SS commander during World War II, and a main architect of the Holocaust.
8.	↑	http://labourpartymarxists.org.uk/john-mann-mp-expel-labour-party-marxists/
9.	↑	The Nuremberg laws (1935) institutionalised many of the racial theories of Nazi ideology. The laws excluded German Jews from Reich citizenship and prohibited them from marrying or having sexual relations with persons of “German or related blood.”

---

[1]              Joachim Doron, p.169.

[2]         G. Reitlinger, p.7, The Final Solution Valentines Mitchell. London, 1998.

[3]        Juedische Rundschau, No. 75, September 17, 1935. http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/german-news-agency-on-the-nuremberg-laws

[4]          Nicosia, ZANG, p.91. Segev, p.28 attributes this to a report by Moshe Beilinson, a cofounder of  Davar, to Katznelson.

[5]        Francis Nicosia, Zionism and anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany’ p.119, 2008, CUP.

[6]        Nicosia p. 121.

[7]        Lucy Dawidowicz, War Against the Jews, p. 119, Penguin, 1987.

Professor Moshe Machover Israeli Anti-Zionist Expelled from Labour today for ‘anti-Semitism’

October 3, 2017, 5:51 pm

≫ Next: Open Letter to Iain McNicol – What gives you the right to expel a Jewish anti-Zionist for ‘anti-Semitism’?

≪ Previous: Saying the unsayable about Zionist Support for the 1935 Nuremberg Laws & Nazi favouritism of German Zionism

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Imagine if Labour had expelled White anti-racist South Africans at the behest of the Apartheid regime

Moshe Machover

Moshe's expulsion letter

Imagine if, during the Apartheid era, White South Africa exiles opposed to the Apartheid regime had been expelled from the Labour Party for ‘racism’ against Whites.  Crazy?  Imagine there had been a Labour Friends of (White) South Africa which had demanded the expulsion of these ‘anti-White’ racists.  Even more ludicrous.  Well that is exactly the situation in the Labour Party today.

Israel has two organisations working inside or alongside the Labour Party seeking to subvert its democracy.  As we saw from the Al Jazeera programme The Lobby the Israeli Embassy, headed by its war criminal Ambassador Mark Regev, has deliberately sought to interfere in and destabilise the party alongside creatures such as Jeremy Newmark of the Jewish Labour Movement.  The South Africans tried this kind of thing but with less success.

Labour's witch hunting General Secretary Iain McNicol who Corbyn has failed to move against yet

The aim of the Jewish Labour Movement and Labour Friends of Israel is to help in the overthrow of Jeremy Corbyn who, despite his appeasement of the Israel Lobby, is seen as a dire and mortal threat.  His speech to Conference in which he spoke of support of the Palestinians and opposition to the settlements and the siege of Gaza will have won him no plaudits amongst the Zionists.

The Right in the Labour Party, love Israel’s ethnic cleansing state because it is an essential part of the alliance with the United States.  Tom Watson and Luke Akehurst are prepared to turn a blind eye to any war crime, any human rights violation, any act of racism however vile because Israel is the United State’s watchdog in the area. 

Not once, ever, has Watson, Wes Streeting, John Mann or any of the cacophony of Zionists who bleat about ‘anti-Semitism’ in the Labour Party once expressed any indignation about Israel’s gaoling and shackling of Palestinian children as young as 12.  The beating and torture of children (Jewish children of course operate under a similar regime to this country).  Not one protest about the demolition of Palestinian homes, villages or the endemic discrimination in the ‘Jewish’ state.  The real racism in the Labour Party is that of the Right and in that I include Labour Friends of Israel supporter, Emily Thornberry.

That is what the whole contrived ‘anti-Semitism’ nonsense is about.  In much the same way as Tom Watson et al. are happy to support Israel’s ally in the region, Saudi Arabia in its genocidal war against Yemen.

The  Zionist paper which welcomed the Nuremberg Laws

This article is a translation from the Zionist Federation of Germany's paper, Judische Rundschau of 17.9.35., two days after the Nuremberg Laws were announced.  This article comes from the site of the Israeli holocaust propaganda museum, Yad Vashem but mentioning it is anti-semitic!

Thornberry tried to mollify Labour Friends of Israel at its fringe meeting by explaining Corbyn’s absence as they shouted ‘where is he’ as if beckoning a naughty school boy.  Unfortunately her explanation, that he was working on his big speech, was somewhat contradicted by pictures of him having a jolly time at the Daily Mirror reception!

The last base of the Right in the Labour Party is amongst its civil service and staff. In particular its General Secretary Iain McNicol and the Compliance Unit under John Stolliday.  Iain McNicol, the General Secretary of the Labour Party and the Witch-finder General is something of a hero to Labour Friends of Israel and quite rightly so.  He was greeted with a rapturous reception by the LFI meeting.  [see Ian McNicol Receives the Warmest Welcome of Anyone at Labour Friends of Apartheid Israel Meeting]

I have been suspended for 18 months and now my comrade and friend Moshe Machover, the founder of Matzpen, the Socialist Organisation in Israel has been expelled.  Just like that, without even a hearing or the opportunity to answer the charges levelled against him. Expelled at the whim of a petty Blairite apparatchik, someone who would have been at home rooting out communists in the McCarthy era or fingering the enemies of Stalin.  A cipher who goes by the title of Head of Disputes, one Sam Matthews.  Matthews department even has an Orwellian title since its main role is to cause disputes!

Moshe at the lectern

Now that the Left and Corbyn have a majority on the National Executive Committee there is no excuse not to demand that this expulsion is reversed and Moshe and all other people expelled reinstated.  This is a matter of principle.  If Corbyn has any bottle he will finally put an end to this nonsense.  

The other accusation levelled against Moshe is that he writes for and ‘associates with’the Communist Party of Great Britain.  Well so do I.  I have written for Weekly Worker for over a decade but neither Moshe nor I are members of the CPGB.  Since when is it an expulsion offence to write articles for or speak at the conferences of other organisations?

What we are seeing is a rerun by the descendants of McCarthyism of the old question that the House of UnAmerican Activities used to ask ‘are you or have you ever been associated with ...’. 

Moshe, who is over 80 years old, is a veteran Israeli anti-Zionist.  He has inspired a generation of Jewish and non-Jewish anti-Zionists.  I first became an anti-Zionist as a consequence of reading his joint article with Haim Hanegbi and Akiva Orr back in 1970, The Class Nature of Israeli Society.  The idea that Machover, a Marxist, is ‘anti-Semitic’ is for the birds.  Unlike his Zionist detractors he doesn’t have a racist bone in his body.

By coincidence it was only last night that I posted on my blog the article that led to Moshe’s expulsion.  Saying the unsayable about Zionist Support for the 1935 Nuremberg Laws & Nazi favouritism of German Zionism.  Today we learnt that Moshe Machover has been expelled.  The reason, as ludicrous as it can be in the Orwellian world of Labour’s witch hunters, is ‘anti-Semitism’.  As the subtitle of my blog post said ‘It might be true but it’s anti-Semitic to say it!’

Over the summer Moshe and me gave a joint talk at the CPGB's Communist University - grounds for our expulsions

Moshe explained in his article for Labour Party Marxists that far from opposing anti-Semitism, Zionism has always accepted if not welcomed it as a means of separating out Jews from non-Jews.  Zionism begins from an acceptance of the anti-Semitic idea that Jews cannot live in non-Jewish society.  That is why Israel was established.  In the Nazi era the Zionist movement far from opposing the Nazis sought to cut deals with them.  They actually welcomed the Nuremberg Laws, which stripped German Jews of citizenship and Machover’s article quoted directly from the translation of an article in the German Zionist paper Judische Rundschau which can be found on the site of the Zionist Holocaust Museum Yad Vashem.  Of course the Zionists didn’t know at the time (1935) that Nazism would change from expulsion and separation to genocide, though many Jews had premonitions of this, as did Trotsky.  Today we know better.  Genocide is the accompaniment of any movement for expulsion as Burma is showing us at the moment.

Moshe Machover has been expelled for telling the truth.  The truth is, apparently anti-Semitic and no one must draw any attention to what the Zionist actual role was when anti-Semitism was not some contrived fantasy.  Today when there is virtually no anti-Semitism the Zionists create fake anti-Semitism in order to attack their opponents.

Moshe’s article was classified as ‘anti-Semitic’ under the Zionists' International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of anti-Semitism that  Corbyn adopted in yet another attempt to appease the Right.  Despite being told that Labour had only adopted the introduction to it and not the examples, it is clear that Labour's witch hunting bureaucracy has adopted the definition wholesale.  

We can see how the IHRA is being used, not to combat anti-Semitism but to combat anti-Zionist.  Indeed the main victim of the IHRA are Jews! 

The IHRA is almost the same as the discredited Working Definition on Anti-Semitism that was abandoned by the EU’s Fundamental Rights Agency in 2013.  The Working Definition was drawn up by the Zionist American Jewish Committee.  It consists of a vague and open ended definition 

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

This was followed by 11 examples of ‘anti-Semitism’, 7 of which are concerned with Israel. Thus it is clear that the purpose of the definition is not to clarify what antisemitism means but to conflate antiZionism with anti-Semitism.  As Sir Stephen Sedley, a former Court of Appeal Judge wrote in his article Defining Anti-Semitism in May's edition of London Review of Books, the IHRA

'fails the first test of any definition: it is indefinite. ‘A certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred’ invites a string of questions. Is anti-Semitism solely a matter of perception? What about discriminatory practices and policies? What about perceptions of Jews that are expressed otherwise than as hatred? 

These gaps are unlikely to be accidental. Their effect, whether or not it is their purpose, is to permit perceptions of Jews which fall short of expressions of racial hostility to be stigmatised as anti-Semitic.

The example that Moshe seems to have fallen foul of is the one that says ‘Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.’ might be anti-Semitic.  In fact Moshe was writing about the historic position and policy of the Zionist movement vs the Nazis, but anything that mentions the Nazis in connection with Israel is good enough.  

The example that Moshe seems to have fallen foul of is the one that says ‘Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.’ might be anti-Semitic.  In fact Moshe was writing about the historic position and policy of the Zionist movement vs the Nazis, but anything that mentions the Nazis in connection with Israel is good enough.  

Another example of ‘anti-Semitism’ is ‘Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination (e.g. by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavour).’  In other words it accepts that Jews are a nation, a postulate that previously only anti-Semites used to believe in.  There follows a sentence which bears no logical relationship to it, claiming that Israel is a racist endeavour.  Quite why refusing to accept the right of Jews to self-determination has any bearing on anti-Semitism is bizarre.  What connection that has with the fact, because it is a fact, that Israel is a racist state is incomprehensible.  These are two sentences strung together in a non sequitur.

But anything is good for an alliance of states, including the anti-Semitic governments of Poland and Hungary, which are also avidly pro-Zionist and pro-Israel.

The purpose of the IHRA definition self-evidently has nothing to do with anti-Semitism and everything to do with preventing criticism of Zionism.

PSC and Free Speech on Israel obtained a a coruscating Opinion of the IHRA by Hugh Tomlinson QC which is worth reading as is the article Defining Anti-Semitism in London Review of Books by Sedley, who is himself Jewish.  Both Tomlinson and Sedley criticise the definition as a whole but the more liberal and defeatist elements in the Palestine solidarity movement such as Palestine Solidarity Campaign and Jewish Voice for Labour believe that you can accept the first part of the definition without the second part.  This is fundamentally mistaken.  A fish is rotten from the head down.

Moshe’s reaction to the latest outrage from the witch hunters was:  ‘I have just been expelled from the Labour Party – for telling the truth, which is falsely and maliciously described as “antisemitic”.’

We should not be disheartened by what has happened.  On the contrary it is a sign of the weakness of the Labour Right.  After a conference where their political weaknesses became all too apparent, with the successful Free Speech on Israel and Jewish Voices for Labour meetings, coupled with the rapturous reception for two Jewish anti-Zionist speakers and then the applause for Jeremy Corbyn’s mention of Palestine, which was the loudest of any part of his speech, it is clear that the Zionists have not won any friends in the Labour Party.  Their only friends of McNicol and people like the witch hunting liar who is leader of Brighton and Hove Labour Council, Warren Morgan.

Suspended members of the Labour Party are therefore planning a fightback and the first meeting of a new Labour Against the Witchhunt meeting is planned for October 21^st, 12.00 pm at the Calthorpe Arms in Kings Cross Road.

Tony Greenstein 

'Evidence' that Moshe is a socialist and therefore ineligible for membership of the Labour Party

More evidence against Moshe - an article he wrote for Labour Party Marxists

One of the articles that got Moshe expelled

Open Letter to Iain McNicol – What gives you the right to expel a Jewish anti-Zionist for ‘anti-Semitism’?

October 5, 2017, 11:10 pm

≫ Next: Moshe Machover – Explosion of Anger At McNicol’s Expulsion of Israeli Anti-Zionist

≪ Previous: Professor Moshe Machover Israeli Anti-Zionist Expelled from Labour today for ‘anti-Semitism’

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Defend Moshe Machover – the Victim of the Zionists’ Invented Anti-Semitism Campaign

Iain McNicoll, the devious trickster at the heart of Labour's machine

Dear Iain McNicol,

Professor Moshe Machover, an Israeli anti-Zionist, was expelled from the Labour Party this week, the victim of a malicious allegation of anti-Semitism. Such basic concepts as natural justice and the right to a hearing were denied under the police state regime that you preside over.  Although the letter was signed by Sam Matthews, Labour’s Head of Disputes, I prefer to address the organ grinder rather than the monkey.

You have spent the past two years trying to overthrow Jeremy Corbyn. Last year, after trying to keep Jeremy off the ballot paper you were responsible for the suspension of thousands of Labour Party members in a failed attempt to rig the vote. 

The reaction by the German Zionist Federation newspaper, Judische Rundschau, to the Nuremberg Laws was favorable

This year you ensured that socialist candidates in Tory marginals were denied any help or resources.  Without you we may have had a Labour government today.

As solicitor Martin Howe wroteto you last year, ‘Who is it who is instructing you to carry out the actions you intend?  Who has suggested to you that the legal advice that the Labour Party has received is to be kept hidden or ignored.’ 

The Jewish Chronicle revealed that Iain McNicol had been given a warm reception by the Zionists for the way the 'antisemitism' issue had been handled

The answer to that question was provided by the Jewish Chronicle when it reported from the Labour Friends of Israel rally that ‘The warmest welcome at the event was reserved for Iain McNicol, Labour’s general secretary’.  The Zionist lobby have much to be grateful to you for.  In pursuing false allegations of anti-Semitism against Labour Party members, you deliberately handed the Tory tabloids a stick to beat the Labour Party with. 

Despite a non-stop barrage of invective against anti-Semitism, Labour conference was overwhelmingly in favour of the Palestinians

Isn’t it strange that the same Tory press that never ceases to demonise asylum seekers or migrants is up in arms about ‘anti-Semitism’ in the Labour Party?  Just look at the past week’s headlines:

The Daily Express led with Labour's anti-Semitism SHAME: Activists call for expulsion of Jewish groups from party.  Richard Littlejohn, who vies with Katy Hopkins as the most racist journalist, wrote in the Mail, the paper that used to support Hitler Once in the shadows, anti-Semitism is now entrenched at the poisoned heart of the Labour Party and even the Sun, that well known anti-racist paper, informed us that Theresa May slams Jeremy Corbyn for letting ‘anti-Semitism, misogyny and hatred run free’ in Labour . 

If  irony is lost on the Sun it is not alone.  Have you or your minions ever pondered the absurdity of non-Jews expelling Jewish anti-racists for ‘anti-Semitism’?  Matthews stated in the expulsion letter that ‘direct attacks or pejorative language which may cause offence to Jewish people is not acceptable.’  The question is which Jewish people?  Zionist or anti-Zionist?

Free speech means nothing if you don’t have the right to give offence.  Wasn’t that the lesson of Charlie Hebdo or do you find that too difficult for you to comprehend?  If Zionists take offence at anti-racism or anti-Zionism then that is tough.

Expulsion Letter

You are also reinstating the very clauses that were excised from the Jewish Labour Movement rule change.  The JLM wanted the ‘victim’ to decide whether or not a racial incident had occurred.

The JLM also took offence at Moshe quoting Himmler’s Deputy, Reinhardt Heydrich, that he was ‘in agreement with the great spiritual movement within Jewry itself, Zionism.’  Moshe was quoting from a book by Francis Nicosia, Professor of Holocaust Studies at Vermont University, in his book Zionism and Anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany.  They also took offence at the quote from  the German Zionist newspaper Judische Rundschau, which alone amongst German Jews welcomed the Nuremberg Laws.  Since when is telling the truth anti-Semitic?

In expelling Moshe Machover, a renowned intellectual and academic, for questioning the trite and arid clichés of Labour’s Zionist Right, you are no different from the book burners of yesterday. You and your apparatchiks are waging a war on freedom of expression and criticism of Zionism and Israel using McCarthyite tactics of guilt by association. 

Moshe’s crime was to speak at the Communist University 2016 and to write for Weekly Worker. If your minion Matthews had done his homework then he would have known that I too am guilty of this crime having spoken with Moshe both last year and this year. Only this week I have written an article in WW opposing your McCarthyist witchhunt. 

Before you upgrade my 18 months suspension to an expulsion you might break the habit of a lifetime, sit down and think about the implications of this.  If writing or speaking for another party is an offence, then you will be able to achieve your ambition by expelling Jeremy Corbyn, since he was a columnist of the Morning Star for 10 years!

It is part of the socialist and labour movement tradition that people speak on all sorts of platforms, debate and write for all manner of papers.  The real crime is when Labour MPs write for the Mail and the Sun, our political enemies. 

The real reason for the expulsion of Machover and your suspension of Jackie Walker and myself is that we are Jewish anti-Zionists. For non-Jews to expel Jews for anti-Semitism is in itself anti-Semitic. It is as if, during the Apartheid era the Labour Party had expelled White anti-Apartheid South Africans because they caused offence to White supporters of Apartheid.  As Archbishop Desmond the Tutu Nobel Peace Prize winner saidin the Jerusalem Post:

I have witnessed the systemic humiliation of Palestinian men, women and children by members of the Israeli security forces. Their humiliation is familiar to all black South Africans who were corralled and harassed and insulted and assaulted by the security forces of the apartheid government. Those who turn a blind eye to injustice actually perpetuate injustice.

If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.’  Your reception at the LFI fringe meeting demonstrates which side you are on.

Israel is a state where racism is embedded into its DNA.  Israel’s Education Ministry recently banned a book on the high school English syllabus because it was seen as encouraging relationships between Arabs and Jews.  As in Nazi Germany, mixed marriages are illegal in Israel. Novel about Jewish-Palestinian love affair is barred from Israeli curriculum

Your attempt to renew the witch hunt has only one purpose. To undermine Labour at the very time when it is ahead in the opinion polls.  You have outlived your purpose and it is time to seek your reward from your Zionist friends and Britain’s secret state. 

Yours truly,

Tony Greenstein

I also recommend the following articles:

Israeli anti-Zionist expelled from Labour amid anti-Semitism smear

https://www.facebook.com/kevin.ovenden/posts/10159312845615468

Guilt by Association is now Labour Party Practice

As battle rages in UK Labour Party, Moshe Machover expelled after asserting ‘Anti-Zionism does not equal anti-Semitism’ Jonathan Cook

Expelled for saying the unsayable

Israeli anti-Zionist expelled from Labour amid anti-Semitism smear

Moshe Machover – Explosion of Anger At McNicol’s Expulsion of Israeli Anti-Zionist

October 9, 2017, 12:13 pm

≫ Next: Zionism is and always has been a Jewish form of Anti-Semitism

≪ Previous: Open Letter to Iain McNicol – What gives you the right to expel a Jewish anti-Zionist for ‘anti-Semitism’?

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Keep the  Pressure Up as Witch-hunters back off from accusation of anti-Semitism

Labour's witch hunters are using a speech at the Communist University 2016 with Tony Greenstein as a pretext for expulsion - the Zionists are attacking the basic right to free speech

 The motions at the bottom of this article from different Labour Party branches are just the tip of the iceberg.  Anger has been mounting among Labour activists at the expulsion of Israeli anti-Zionist and Marxist Moshe Machover.  When news broke many branches, including Moshe’s own, passed resolutions condemning what had happened.  This weekend the Labour Representation Committee added their voice to the outrage as did the Jewish Socialists Group, which had been more hesitant in taking up the case of Jackie Walker and Ken Livingstone.

McNicol’s witchhunters resorted to ‘auto-exclusion’ which conveniently avoids such niceties as a hearing and having to produce evidence.  Instead, on the say so of Sam Matthews, a bureaucratic pipsqueak, you are deemed guilty and expelled.  Guilty until proven innocent, except there is normally no procedure to prove yourself innocent.  It is quite Kafkaesque.  In 5 years time Moshe can apply to rejoin.

Anyone who knows Moshe, as has been my privilege over the past quarter of a century, knows that he doesn’t have a racist bone in his body.  He is a Marxist and opposes all forms of racism and chauvinism, so it was natural that he should oppose Zionism, an ideology and practice of Jewish supremacy.  The idea that Moshe is an anti-Semite is laughable but it is also dangerous.  If someone who is an anti-racist can be declared an anti-Semite on the basis of a definition of anti-Semitism drawn up by Zionists, then it renders the term ‘anti-Semitism’ meaningless.  Anyone can be an anti-Semite, it is entirely subjective.  The only people who benefit from this are genuine anti-Semites who turn round and say that this is the ritual accusation levelled at critics of Israel.

The only people who benefit from conflation of anti-Zionism & anti-Semitism are anti-semites like the ex-Israeli Gilad Atzmon

It is the ‘boy cried wolf’ syndrome.  Cry ‘anti-Semite’ for long enough and people will become immune to genuine anti-Semitism.  This happened not so long ago when Gilad Atzmon, a famous jazz player and ex-Israeli began engaging in conspiracy theories about Jews and flirted with Holocaust denial.  Many people warmed to him despite what people like myself said precisely because they assumed that such accusations of anti-Semitism were false.  It took a joint letter by over 20 Palestinians and Arabs, led by Ali Abunimah of Electronic Intifada, Professor Joseph Massad of Columbia University and Omar Barghouti of the BDS Boycott National Committee before Atzmon was finally excluded from the Palestine solidarity movement.  See Granting No Quarter: A Call for the Disavowal of the Racism and Antisemitism of Gilad Atzmon and A Guide to the Sayings of Gilad Atzmon, the anti-Semitic jazzman

The fact that conflating anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism is helpful to genuine anti-Semites doesn’t bother Zionists one iota.  Zionism has never fought anti-Semitism, which is hatred of Jews as Jews.  Zionism is concerned with one thing and one thing only – defending Israel.

Historically Zionists and anti-Semites got on like a house on fire.  The anti-Semites wanted Jews out of ‘their’ countries and Zionism was only too happy to oblige.  The Zionists were very understanding of anti-Semitism because they too wanted to create a racially based state. 

Noone will be happier at Moshe Machover's expulsion than Gilad Atzmon, whose anti-semitism is a variant of Zionism

That is why, when the Nazis came to power in Germany, the only Jews who welcomed them to power were the Zionists.  Berl Katznelson, David Ben Gurion’s deputy in the Palestine Jewish Agency, saw the rise of Hitler as “an opportunity to build and flourish like none we have ever had or ever will have”. [Nicosia, Zionism and Anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany, p.91. Tom Segev, The Seventh Million p.18 attributes this quote to a report by Moshe Beilinson, a cofounder of  Davar, to Katznelson.  When an article by Moshe was reprinted by Labour Party Marxists, the Zionists thought that they could use the newly adopted International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of anti-Semitism to secure his expulsion

Moshe Machover and myself on BBC1's Big Questions

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 Background

The Labour Party conference just gone was a dismal affair for the Zionists.  Not only did the new Jewish Voice for Labour get going with a bang on the Monday of conference and not only was Free Speech on Israel meeting earlier in the day packed out but Conference this year was a very left-wing affair.  Up to 80% of constituency delegates were from the left.

Conference reserved their loudest cheers for when Jeremy Corbyn mentioned the Palestinians. When two Jewish anti-Zionists – Naomi Wimborne-Iddrissi and Leah Levane - came to the rostrum they were cheered to the rafters and given standing ovations.  When they declared that they weren’t anti-Semites everyone, knew exactly what they meant.  People were not prepared to buy into false anti-Semitism nonsense of the past two years.

To cap it all Corbyn himself decided he preferred the company of Daily Mirror hacks to that of the Labour Friends of Israel and war criminal Mark Regev.  When the anti-Corbyn Joan Ryan MP and Chair of LFI read out a message from Jeremy she was greeted with cries of ‘where is he’  ‘why isn’t he here’.  The obvious answer, that he has no reason to meet with his political enemies hadn’t sunk in. The Zionists think they have the right to summon Corbyn as if he was some naughty boy.

It was in this gloom that Newmark and the JLM deputy Mike Katz hatched an idea.  Katz had already been mightily annoyed with a Labour Party Marxist article, written by Moshe, which was distributed to conference entitled ‘Anti-Zionism does not equal Anti-Semitism’.  

Iain McNicol - having done his best to prevent a Labour government he is now desperately trying to revive the Tory tabloid's 'anti-semitism' campaign

What’s worse Moshe’s article made reference to a speech of Reinhardt Heydrich.

Heydrich was one of the coldest and bloody of the Nazis. Haunted by rumours he was half-Jewish he went out of his way to disprove them.  Assassinated by Czech partisans in 1942, he was justly described by Gerald Reitlinger in ‘The Final Solution’ (p.13) as the ‘engineer’ of the Final Solution. Heydrich convened the Wannsee Conference in Berlin in January 1942 to organise the Final Solution.  In fact the Final Solution was been underway for over 6 months with the invasion of Russia.  Arguably the main purpose of the conference was to extend the Holocaust to Western Europe.  Heydrich was quoted as saying:

‘National socialism has no intention of attacking the Jewish people in any way. On the contrary, the recognition of Jewry as a racial community based on blood, and not as a religious one, leads the German government to guarantee the racial separateness of this community without any limitations. The government finds itself in complete agreement with the great spiritual movement within Jewry itself, so-called Zionism, with its recognition of the solidarity of Jewry throughout the world and the rejection of all assimilationist ideas. On this basis, Germany undertakes measures that will surely play a significant role in the future in the handling of the Jewish problem around the world.

Second Letter in 3 days from Witchhunter Sam Matthews

Of course it was a lie to say that the Nazis had no intention of attacking the Jews, but his comments about being in agreement with the Zionists were true.  There is ample proof from directives that Heydrich issued to the Gestapo that the anti-Zionist and ‘assimilationist’  

Jewish groups were to be persecuted.  On 28^th January 1935 Heydrich had issued a directive stating that 

‘the activity of the Zionist-oriented youth organizations that are engaged in the occupational restructuring of the Jews for agriculture and manual trades prior to their emigration to Palestine lies in the interest of the National Socialist state’s leadership.’ These organisations therefore ‘are not to be treated with that strictness that it is necessary to apply to the members of the so-called German-Jewish organizations (assimilationists)’.

BBC Big Questions with Moshe Machover and Daphne Baram

This  quote can be found in War Against the Jews by the right-wing Zionist historian Lucy Dawidowicz, on page 118, and also in Francis Nicosia’s book  Zionism and Anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany. p.119.  Moshe also quoted from the Introduction to the Nuremburg Laws of September 1935 which said that:

If the Jews had a state of their own, in which the bulk of their people were at home, the Jewish question could already be considered solved today … The ardent Zionists of all people have objected least of all to the basic ideas of the Nuremberg laws, because they know that these laws are the only correct solution for the Jewish people too 

This quote can be found in Nicosia’s ZANG on p.108.  Katz’s reaction to this article was predictable.  Moshe was an ‘amoral historian’.  Why?  Because he insisted on telling inconvenient truths.  He didn’t challenge the accuracy of what Moshe said, what he challenged was Moshe’s right to say it. 

Thus a decision was made by the leadership of the JLM to report Moshe under the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism to the Labour Party apparatchiks of the Compliance Unit.  Sure enough last week, Sam Matthews, Chair of the Disputes Committee (their job is to go around stirring up disputes!) sent a letter to Moshe telling him he was ‘auto excluded’.  

Professor Moshe Machover Israeli Anti-Zionist Expelled from Labour today for ‘anti-Semitism’

Matthews explained in the letter that Moshe’s article for LPM ‘was apparently anti-Semitic’ because it ‘appears to meet the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of anti-Semitism’.  And what was Moshe’s offence?  Well Matthews explained that:

‘perjorative language which may cause offence to Jewish people is not acceptable... Language that may be perceived as provocative, insensitive or offensive...’

This seems a clear attempt to reinstate the rule change that the Jewish Labour Movement had failed to introduce this year.  The JLM had originally proposed that where someone perceived that they were a ‘victim’ of a racial incident, that view triumphed over everything.  Any common and garden Zionist or racist could say that criticism of their politics was racist and that would be that.  A subjective definition of racism triumphed over evidence.  

Attacking the Israeli state as a racist state would be deemed racist in itself, even though it might be true.  In adopting this interpretation of the rules, Sam Matthews was putting himself above the Labour Party conference.

The irony is that Moshe, who is himself Jewish, is being expelled for anti-Semitism.  Clearly Moshe’s language offends certain Jews i.e. racist supporters of Israeli Apartheid.  To Matthews, McNicol and their ilk they are the real Jews.  To believe, as these people do, that only racist Jews are representative of Jews is in itself anti-Semitic.  To believe that all Jews support Israel and would therefore be offended by what is uncontested history, is also anti-Semitic.

The Zionist had tried after our success at conference to firstly suggest that the Free Speech on Israel meeting had been anti-Semitic by trying to pretend that the main speaker Miko Peled had advocated for Holocaust denial.  This however fell flat on its face.  See Open Letter to the Lying Leader of Brighton and Hove City Council, Warren Morgan

Things are not going well for the Zionists.  Allied as they are to Luke Akehurst and the right-wing of the Labour Party they are now politically isolated.  Their main base of support lies in the Tory tabloid press, which is racist to the core but always concerned about ‘anti-Semitism’ and the fast diminishing ranks of the Labour Right.

Overwhelmed by the outpouring of support for Moshe, McNicol’s catspaw Sam Matthews sent an unprecedented second letter to Machover 3 days after the first letter.  It stated in its opening paragraph ‘representations have been made to the Labour Party on your behalf to clarify its position on your membership.’ Well that was one way of putting it!

The letter not only disavows anti-Semitism as a reason for the expulsion but offers Moshe the opportunity to ‘challenge the validity of the evidence attached to the letter sent to you on October 3^rd’

This is unprecedented.  When you are auto-excluded that is that.  There is no right of appeal.  Correspondence is ignored yet here were the Compliance Unit and Matthews voluntarily offering Moshe a means of overturning their own decision.  Why?  Because there has been such a massive upsurge in anger at this nakedly unjust and unfair expulsion, that McNicol and co. have been forced to backtrack.  It is understood that Corbyn’s office have also been involved in this decision.

Katz and Newmark are nothing if they are not stupid.  When my friends Mel Melvin, the Women’s Officer in Brighton Kemptown was expelled for ‘anti-Semitism’ and Riad, an Executive Member of Hove CLP was expelled for having served a prison sentence for sanctions busting in Iraq, no right of appeal or review was offered.  It is only because of the uproar over Moshe that McNicol has been forced into granting at least the semblance of fair process.

Of course Moshe is well known.  He is a distinguished academic in his own right, being an Emeritus Professor at King’s College London.  Not unnaturally the bureaucrats of Southside, the Labour Party HQ, not being the brightest specimens of humanity, have been overwhelmed.  Matthew and McNicol probably genuinely don’t realise that the right to give offence or heaven forbid, be controversial, is the essence of free speech and indeed socialism.  The idea that you can’t offend racists would seem, at least to most people, absurd.

Of course it is still possible that Moshe’s representations will be turned down and that is why we must ensure that the pressure is kept on, not least on Corbyn to come out openly in favour of free speech for anti-Zionists and supporters of the Palestinians.

Below are just some of the resolutions passed by Labour Party branches and there is also an excellent article by Bob Pitt

Tony Greenstein

Solidarity with Moshé Machover! The Labour movement speaks out

The disgraceful expulsion of Moshé Machover from the Labour Party

Bob Pitt

Moshé Machover writes:

In fact I never had any “organisational involvement” with the CPGB. I am not and have never been a member. I use their paper and meetings as a forum to express my own ideas.

My “involvement” with Labour Party Marxists (LPM) is zero. My article they printed was in fact a reprint of an article published months ago in the Weekly Worker. I allowed them to reprint it – as I would allow any paper and anyone to reprint my articles.

Resolutions

This resolution was passed on 5 October 2017 by the Queen's Park branch of the Labour Party (part of Hampstead & Kilburn CLP). This is the branch to which Moshe belonged until he was summarily and arbitrarily expelled by the party HQ.

This branch calls upon the Labour Party's Head of Disputes to do the following:

1) Rescind immediately the expulsion of Professor Moshe Machover;

2) Rescind immediately the letter informing Professor Machover of his expulsion.

These 2 actions should be taken because:

First, the allegations against Mr. Machover are unsubstantiated; and, second, the process through which the decision to expel him was taken seems to have him guilty until proved innocent, rather than presumed innocent until proved guilty. The letter to Professor Machover and the apparent lack of process seem both unworthy of the Labour Party and unjust.

We further call on the Labour party to protect the right of members to contribute to the political debate across numerous platforms, without expressing support for other political parties or views contrary to the values of the Labour party.

All in agreement, and two abstentions.

Defend Moshe Machover – rescind his expulsion!

Campaign news

7th October 2017

Labour Representation Committee Statement

Professor Emeritus Moshe Machover has been expelled from the Labour Party. Machover is Jewish and Israeli, the co-founder of Matzpen, the socialist organisation which from the ‘60s to the ‘80s brought together Arab and Jewish opposition to the illegal occupation of Palestine.

The Head of Disputes has accused Machover of writing an “apparently anti-Semitic article” according to the - extremely contentious -  International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition (which conflates all criticism of Israeli policies with antisemitism); he further accused him of “membership or support for another political party, or a political organisation with incompatible aims to the Labour Party”, because he has, on occasion, written for the Weekly Worker.

His principal ‘crime’ is the accusation of antisemitism. Anyone who looks objectively at the evidence will see that what he is ‘guilty’ of is putting the record straight on historical links between some German Zionists and the Nazis. Clearly uncomfortable historical facts should be banned. One report on the issue said it was outrageous that he had quoted “the author of the holocaust”, and went on to quote the same Nazi!

It is significant that the Compliance Unit has cited the IHRA definition of antisemitism, confirming the fears expressed by many, including the new organisation Jewish Voice for Labour, that the new rule on antisemitism passed at Labour Party conference could be used in this way.

By throwing in that Machover has written articles for the newspaper Weekly Worker and spoken at events organised by them, the Compliance Unit claims this automatically makes him ineligible for membership of the Labour Party under the rule which states “A member of the party who joins and/or supports a political organisation other than an official Labour Group or unit of the Party or supports any candidate who stands against an official Labour candidate, or publicly declares their intent to stand against a Labour candidate, shall automatically be ineligible to be or remain a party member,  subject to the provisions of part 6.I.2 of the disciplinary rules”. 

Thus is the catch-all which has also been used to exclude supporters of Socialist Appeal and the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty. In theory, it could be used to exclude supporters of this organisation, the Labour Representation Committee, Momentum or even Progress, and has to go. Members should have the right to organise within the Party (though obviously not to support candidates against it).

The expulsion of Machover comes after calls for action against alleged antisemitism by leaders of the Jewish Labour Movement. This follows support given by delegates at Party conference to speakers who argued that many allegations of antisemitism are spurious. This, together with Jeremy Corbyn’s call in his speech for justice for the Palestinians, clearly spurred the Compliance Unit to lash out in response.. Leaders of the JLM are encouraging the use of disciplinary methods rather than engage in political debate. Association with the Weekly Worker is the least of their concerns.

The Chakrabarti Inquiry found that the Party’s “ complaints and disciplinary procedures . . . lacked sufficient transparency, uniformity and expertise . . .” and called for “the vital legal principles of due process (or natural justice) and proportionality”. Machover, who denies the accusations, has not been given the opportunity to challenge either the accusation of antisemitism nor his alleged support for another party or organisation.

The Labour Representation Committee supports all calls for Machover’s expulsion to be immediately rescinded and for due process to take place so that he is given the opportunity to challenge the claims of the Head of Disputes. Labour Party and union organisations should pass resolutions along these lines and submit them to the NEC for urgent response.

Resolution passed unanimously by West Branch Hastings and Rye Labour Party

On Tuesday 3rd October, Labour Party member Professor Emeritus Dr. Moshe Machover was summarily expelled from the Labour Party, based on allegations which he denies. Dr. Machover is Jewish and Israeli, the distinguished co-founder of Matzpen, the socialist organisation which from the early 1960s to the 1980s brought together Arab and Jewish opposition to the illegal occupation of Palestine. Dr Machover has been an activist for decades and is an asset to the Labour Party. It is an act of self-harm to expel such a valuable member.

However, we would be demanding reinstatement for any member, regardless of their political perspective who has been treated like this because we are equally concerned that this action was taken without a clear and transparent process ‘in accordance with the principles of natural justice and proportionality”. These were within the recommendations of the Chakrabarti Review, which seem to have been largely ignored. These included looking at other penalties short of suspension and expulsion .

We demand the immediate reinstatement of Moshe Machover and a public apology. In addition we demand a clear and public assurance that no member of this Party will again be treated in such an appalling manner and that in future, any actions will be taken only following such a clear process, as outlined in the Chakrabarti Report.  We are also very concerned at the apparent misuse of the IHRA definition of antisemitism to stifle free expression, including the right to non abusive criticism of the State of Israel as we had outlined in our own Rule change. We insist that the Party firmly commits to uphold the right to non abusive free speech in all its political discourse.

____________________

Emergency Motion. Herne Hill Branch,  5.9.17
Passed nem con

This Branch notes the NEC policy that auto-exclusions ceased following the party’s adoption of the recommendations of the Chkrabarti Report, that the Party’s policy is now to follow due process, based on natural justice, in relation to disciplinary procedures.

The proper application of this policy is pertinent to a very recent case where a long standing member of Hampstead and Kilburn Branch, MM, has been expelled without due process, having not been informed in advance of the action, not having been suspended pending investigation, and where the grounds for expulsion are not even that he is, or ever has been, a member of a proscribed organisation (he has, in fact, never been a member of the organisations cited).

The grounds are that he has attended their public meetings and has had articles published in their journals. In none of the articles cited as evidence did MM in any way advocate support for these organisations nor advocate opposition in any way whatsoever to the Labour Party.

The Chakrabarti Report, found the Labour Party’s  “complaints and disciplinary procedures . . . lacked sufficient transparency, uniformity and expertise . . .” and “failed to observe the vital legal principles of due process (or natural justice) and proportionality”.

The summary expulsion this week of MM is a deeply disturbing repetition of this bad practice and heralds a serious curtailment of free speech within the Party. It sets a frightening precedent and flies in the face of a party which is working to be more democratic and accountable and to adopt procedures based on natural justice.

This Branch therefore calls for the Labour Party’s Head of Disputes immediately to rescind the expulsion of MM, a member of Hampstead and Kilburn CLP, so that due process can take place, and MM can be given the opportunity to challenge the allegations made against him in proper hearings.

____________________

The following resolution was adopted nem con on 4 October 2017 by the West Hampstead and Fortune Green branch of the Labour Party, which is part of the Hampstead and Kilburn Constituency LP

This West Hampstead and Fortune Green branch / Hampstead and Kilburn CLP is outraged that:

• Professor Emeritus Moshe Machover has been expelled from the Party. Professor Machover is Jewish and Israeli, the distinguished co-founder of Matzpen, the socialist organisation which from the 60s to the 80s brought together Arab and Jewish opposition to the illegal occupation of Palestine.
• The Head of Disputes has accused Professor Machover of writing an “apparently anti-Semiitic article” according to the new IHRA definition, and further accused him of “membership or support for another political party, or a political organisation with incompatible aims to the Labour Party.”

This West Hampstead and Fortune Green branch / Hampstead and Kilburn CLP notes that:

• The Chakrabarti inequiry found that the party’s “… complaints and disciplinary procedures … lacked sufficient transparency, uniformity and expertise…” and called for “the vital legal principles of due process (or natural justice) and proportionality”
• The IHRA definition is being monitored by Camden Council to ensure that it is not used to stifle free expression and criticism of Israeli policies.
• Professor Machover who denies the accusations, has not been given the opportunity to challenge either the accusation of anti-Semitism nor his alleged support for another party or organisation.
• This expulsion is a frightening precedent in a party which is working to be more democratic and called for, in the words of its leader Jeremy Corbyn, ‘support to end the oppression of the Palestinian people, the 50-year occupation and the illegal settlement expansion’.

This West Hampstead and Fortune Green branch / Hampstead and Kilburn CLP therefore calls for:

• Professor Machover’s expulsion to be immediately rescinded and for any allegations against him to be investigated in accordance with due process so that he is given the opportunity to challenge the claims of the Head of Disputes.
• This Branch Labour Party condemns the expulsion of Professor Moshe Machover, before any hearing of evidence against him, from the Labour Party.This branch notes the expulsion has been justified though a process of guilt by association and was sparked by a totally unfounded allegation that Professor Machover, who is Israeli and Jewish by origin, wrote an antisemitic article. This allegation is based highly selective quoting from a long and closely argued article and by an extreme interpretation of the International Holocaust Remembrance Association working definition of antisemitism that “pejorative language which may cause offence to Jewish people” is antisemitic.  This branch therefore demands from the Party: his immediate reinstatement; an apology for such tarnishing of his reputation; and an urgent review of Party disciplinary procedures so such an injustice is not repeated.

____________________
Motion passed on October 4 by Highams Park Labour Party Branch (Chingford and Woodford Green CLP)

This branch calls upon the Labour Party’s Head of Disputes immediately to rescind the expulsion of Professor Moshe Machover, a member of Hampstead and Kilburn CLP, so that due process can take place and Prof. Machover can be given the opportunity to challenge the allegations made against him.

Supporting argument

As outlined in a statement from the Jewish Socialists’ Group, Moshe Machover – a lifelong Israeli socialist, anti-racist and anti-imperialist, who has lived in Britain since 1968 – has been expelled from the Labour Party accused of writing “an apparently antisemitic article” and accused of “involvement and support for” two organisations, the Labour Party Marxists and the Communist Party of Great Britain.

The accusation regarding the “antisemitic” article references the controversial, flawed definition of antisemitism, which the JSG and many others on the left have challenged. The article by Moshe Machover, that has been cited, is a critique of the political ideology of Zionism, not of Jews. Indeed the article exposes antisemitic ideas.

As the JSG further notes, the action against Professor Machover represents a McCarthyite-style attempt to expel members for alleged “involvement and support for” other left groups on the basis of writing articles and attending and participating in meetings. It is common practice for Labour members of all levels to speak and participate in events of other groups, and have articles published, representing their individual viewpoints, in a range of publications.

According to the Chakrabarti Report, the Labour Party’s “complaints and disciplinary procedures . . . lacked sufficient transparency, uniformity and expertise . . .” and failed to observe “the vital legal principles of due process (or natural justice) and proportionality”. Members deserve to see these principles applied in all disciplinary cases, including Moshe Machover’s.

The expulsion letter sent to Prof Machover by Sam Matthews is attached. Evidence presented appears in the form of articles written for the CPGB paper and a report of a discussion in which Prof. Machover participated.
____________________

Suggested Branch/CLP model motions:

1.

This Branch Labour Party condemns the expulsion of Professor Moshe Machover, before any hearing of evidence against him, from the Labour Party.

This branch notes the expulsion has been justified though a process of guilt by association and was sparked by a totally unfounded allegation that Professor Machover, who is Israeli and Jewish by origin, wrote an antisemitic article. This allegation is based highly selective quoting from a long and closely argued article and by an extreme interpretation of the International Holocaust Remembrance Association working definition of antisemitism that “pejorative language which may cause offence to Jewish people” is antisemitic.

This branch therefore demands from the Party: his immediate reinstatement; an apology for such tarnishing of his reputation; and an urgent review of Party disciplinary procedures so such an injustice is not repeated.

2.

This Branch/CLP is shocked that:

Professor Emeritus Moshe Machover has been summarily expelled from the Party.

Prof Machover is Jewish and Israeli, the distinguished co-founder of Matzpen, the socialist organisation which from the 60s to the 80s brought together Arab and Jewish opposition to the illegal occupation of Palestine.

Professor Machover has been found guilty – by the Head of Disputes Sam Mathews, with no due process whatsoever – “of involvement and support for both Labour Party Marxists and the Communist Party of Great Britain (through your participation in CPGB events and regular contributions to the CPGB’s newspaper)”.

Prof. Machover has never been a member of either organisation.

Prof Machover denies the accusations, but has not been given the opportunity to challenge the accusations.

This Branch/CLP notes that:

The Chakrabarti Report, found the Labour Party’s “complaints and disciplinary procedures . . . lacked sufficient transparency, uniformity and expertise” and “failed to observe the vital legal principles of due process (or natural justice) and proportionality”.

Members deserve to see these principles applied in all disciplinary cases, including that of Moshe Machover.

In addition, the Head of Disputes has accused Prof Machover of writing an “apparently antisemitic article” according to the new IHRA definition. This accusation is being held on file in the event that after 5 years Prof. Machover were to reapply for membership.

The article in question is a scholarly criticism of Zionism as a political ideology. Nowhere does it use the word zionist as an epithet for Jews, but Prof.Machover has been given no opportunity to respond.

This expulsion is a frightening precedent in a party which is working to be more democratic, accountable and to adopt procedures based on natural justice.

This Branch/CLP therefore calls for the Labour Party’s Head of Disputes immediately to rescind the expulsion of Professor Moshe Machover, a member of Hampstead and Kilburn CLP, so that due process can take place and Prof. Machover can be given the opportunity to challenge the allegations made against him.

The final version of Labour Party, Kilburn (Brent) branch’s resolution passed overwhelmingly, 5 October (I abstention, I against) in support of our friend & colleague Moshe Machover:

This Branch/CLP is outraged that:

·       Professor Emeritus Moshe Machover has been expelled from the Party. Prof Machover is Jewish and Israeli, the distinguished co-founder of Matzpen, the socialist organisation which from the 60s to the 80s brought together Arab and Jewish opposition to the illegal occupation of Palestine; 

·       the Head of Disputes has accused Prof Machover of writing an “apparently antisemitic article” according to the new IHRA definition, and further accused him of “membership or support for another political party, or a political organisation with incompatible aims to the Labour Party” on the basis of “participation in CPGB events and regular contributions to the CPGB’s newspaper, the Weekly Worker”.

This Branch/CLP notes that:

·       The Chakrabarti Inquiry found that the party’s “. . . complaints and disciplinary procedures . . . lacked sufficient transparency, uniformity and expertise . . .” and called for “the vital legal principles of due process (or natural justice) and proportionality”.

·       The IHRA definition is being monitored by Camden Council to ensure that it is not used to stifle free expression and criticism of Israeli policies.

·       Prof Machover who denies the accusations, has not been given the opportunity to challenge either the accusation of antisemitism nor his alleged support for another party or organisation with incompatible aims to the Labour Party.

·       This expulsion is a frightening precedent in a party which is working to be more democratic and called for, in the words of its leader Jeremy Corbyn, ‘support to end the oppression of the Palestinian people, the 50-year occupation and the illegal settlement expansion’.

This Branch/CLP therefore calls for:

·       Prof Machover’s expulsion to be immediately rescinded and for due process to take place so Prof Machover is given the opportunity to challenge the claims of the Head of Disputes.

Emergency Resolution Passed by the Bethnal Green Ward

Labour Party, 5 October 2017

Reinstate Moshe Machover

The Israeli socialist and long-time campaigner for Palestinian rights, Moshe Machover, has been expelled from the Labour Party for writing an article entitled “Anti Zionism does not equal anti-Semitism”.

We note with great concern:

The expulsion letter from the head of disputes, Sam Matthews, describes the article as “apparentlyantisemitic” and that it “appears to meet” the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism which has just been adopted by the Labour Party.

 The letter does not quote the definition but instead says: “Antisemitism in of any form – whether direct attacks or pejorative language which may cause offence to jewish people – is not acceptable and will not be tolerated in the Labour Party. Language that may be perceived as provocative, insensitive or offensive falls short of the standards expected of us as party members and has no place in the party.” It appears to be referencing the parts of the IHRA definition that were not adopted at the conference.

Moshe has been expelled, not suspended, without the right to defend himself, on the grounds that the publication concerned, Labour Party Marxist, is regarded as a front publication for another political organization, even though there are many examples of Labour members and politicians writing for comparable journals.

We believe:

This action is arbitrary, lacking in basic justice and is bringing the Labour Party into disrepute.

Therefore we resolve:

1.         We fully support Moshe Machover and call for his expulsion to be rescinded and for his immediate reinstatement as a member of the Labour Party.

2.         We reject any McCarthyite-style move to expel members for alleged “involvement and support for” other left groups on the basis of writing articles and attending and participating in meetings. It is common practice for Labour members of all levels to speak and participate in events of other groups, and have articles published, representing their individual viewpoints, in a range of publications.

3.         We call on the NEC to investigate the procedures followed to ensure that principles of natural justice are upheld.

On Thursday 5th September 2017 East Dulwich branch in Dulwich and West Norwood CLP passed the following resolution condemning the expulsion of Moshe Machover by 20 to 0 with one abstention.

This branch/CLP calls upon the Labour Party's Head of Disputes immediately to rescind the expulsion of Professor Moshe Machover, a member of Hampstead and Kilburn CLP, so that due process can take place and Prof. Machover can be given the opportunity to challenge the allegations made against him.

Branch motions and resolutions on the expulsion of Moshé Machover

Zionism is and always has been a Jewish form of Anti-Semitism

October 10, 2017, 5:22 pm

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Steve Bannon to Speak at Annual Zionist Organization of America Gala: 'He's So pro-Israel'

Steve Bannon is Donald Trump’s former Strategic Advisor, once the most powerful man in the White House after Trump himself.  Having been fired he has gone back to edit the far-right Breitbart News, house magazine of America’s White Supremacist Alt-Right.  Bannon perhaps more than any other figure represented all that is toxic in Trump’s Administration – the racism, the misogyny and bigotry.

It is also clear that Trump was loathe to dismiss Bannon and he only did so only because his new Chief of Staff, General John Kelly, insisted on it as the ‘globalists’ (for which read military hawks and  imperialists) isolated the ‘economic nationalists’.

The disputes between one set of warmongers and another are unimportant.  Both  factions are equally despicable.  What is of note however is how Bannon has been adopted by the Zionists, in particular the Zionist Organisation of America headed by Mort Klein.

Last year the ZOA also invited Bannon but a large Jewish demonstration, led by Jewish Voices for Peace and IfNotNow, two left-wing anti-Zionist Jewish organisations, led him to stay away. Despite this ZOA have renewed their invitation to Bannon for thisyear's gala dinner.

What one wonders are the attractions of Bannon and the movement he represents to the Zionists. It is barely in dispute that Breitbart is a sewer of racism, misogyny and bigotry with articles such as that by Milo Yiannopoulos, a former Associate Editor, Does Feminism Make Women Ugly?

Yiannopoulous, before he was forced to resign as a result of his advocacy of paedophilia was, despite his half-Jewish parentage, a died in the wool anti-Semite.  In an interviewwith David Rubin he explained how “Like the Jews run everything. Well we do. The Jews run all the banks. Well we do. The Jews run the media. Well we do. You know they’re right about all that stuff.” Yiannopoulos insisted that Jewish control over finance and the media is “not in debate,” explaining that “Jews completely dominate the media. Vastly disproportionately represented in all of these professions. That’s just a fact, it’s not anti-Semitic to point out statistics.”

Milo Yiannopoulous

It is quite understandable that Yiannopoulous was looked on favourably at Breitbart given the views of his Bannon himself.  Bannon’s former wife, Mary Louise Piccard, testified during her 2007 divorce proceedings that Bannon didn’t want his children going to school with ‘whiny Jews’ and complained that there were too many Jewish students at the elite Archer School for Girls.

“The biggest problem he had with Archer is the number of Jews that attend,” Bannon’s ex-wife said.   The  comments were first reported by the New York Daily News.

“He said that he doesn’t like the way they raise their kids to be ‘whiny brats’ and that he didn’t want the girls going to school with Jews,” Piccard wrote.

Bannon complained that another elite school had too “many Hanukkah books” in its library. [Steve Bannon Didn’t Want Children Going to School With ‘Whiny’ Jews, Forward 14.11.16.]  See also Will Steve Bannon Be the Anti-Semitic Firebrand in Donald Trump’s Inner Circle?, Forward Staff November 14, 2016

But if Bannon and Breitbart are anti-Semitic and supporters of White Supremacism they are also ardently pro-Zionist and pro-Israel.

Liberal Zionist papers like Forward found this hard to understand and there were articles, subsequent to Trump’s election asking how this could be.  Zionists who had spent the best part of their lives equating ‘anti-Semitism’ and anti-Zionism found it a shock that you could be ardently pro-Israel and Zionist  and still dislike Jews.    

Naomi Zeveloff  almost seemed to be in shock as she explained that ‘though it would seem impossible to hate Jews but love the Jewish state, these two viewpoints are not as contradictory as they appear.’  She interviewed Steven M. Cohen, a sociologist at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, who explained to her that ‘There is actually “little correlation” between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, according To be sure, anti-Semitism is found among the anti-Zionist left. But it is also found among the Zionist right’  

You could almost see the scales falling from Zeveloff's eyes as Cohen told her that ‘many people who dislike Jews like Israel and many people who are critical toward Israel are affectionate toward Jews,”  This was clearly not what she had been brought up to believe.  [How Steve Bannon and Breitbart News Can Be Pro-Israel — and Anti-Semitic at the Same Time, Forward 15.11.16.]

Steve Bannon - racist, anti-Semitic but ardently pro-Zionist

To those of us who are longstanding anti-Zionists this is nothing new.  Historically Zionists and anti-Semites have got on like a house on fire, even if it was Jews who did the burning.  From Theodor Herzl, with his trip to see von-Plehve, the author of the Kishinev pogroms in Russia to Ze’ev  Jabotinsky, who allied with the White Russian leader, Petlyura who had up to ¼ million Jewish deaths on his hands, Zionists have always found a strategic ally in anti-Semites.  The collaboration between Zionism and Nazism was not an aberration.  On the contrary it was simply a continuation of this historic relationship.

Why is this the case?  Primarily because Zionism began as a separatist reaction to anti-Semitism which accepted the terms of debate that the anti-Semites set.  Zionis began from the premise that anti-Semitism couldn't be fought, the non-Jews were inherently anti-Semitic and therefore you had to come to terms with them.  The anti-Semites said that the Jews didn’t belong and the Zionists agreed.  

Mort Klein of the Zionist Organisation of America - has no problem working with neo-Nazis and anti-Semites as long as they are Zionists

The anti-Semites were more than happy to support Zionism.  Indeed they were often passionate about the fact that Jews should go to Palestine.  In Poland and elsewhere in Europe anti-Semites demonstrated with the chant 'Jews to Palestine' just as today Israeli Jews chant 'Death to the Arabs.' The belief that Jews belonged in Palestine, not the countries of their birth, was the fundamental basis of their agreement and sometimes, if you didn’t know who was speaking, it could either be a Zionist or an anti-Semite. 

To take but 3 examples Israel’s first Justice Minister, Pinhas Rosenbluth described Palestine as ‘an institute for the fumigation of Jewish vermin’.[1]Chaim Weizmann, the longstanding President of the World Zionist Organisation and 1^st President of Israel  described German Jewish refugees as ‘the germ-carriers of a new outbreak of anti-Semitism.’[2]Jacob Klatzkin, editor of Die Weltand co-founder of the Encyclopedia Judaica, held that Jews were ‘a people disfigured in both body and soul - in a word, of a horror… some sort of outlandish creature… in any case, not a pure national type.... some sort of oddity among the peoples going by the name of Jew.' [3]

When Bannon was appointed, the Anti-Defamation League, a thoroughly Zionist group initially spoke out against the appointment but the major pro-Israel lobby group, AIPAC, kept quiet and refused to say anything.  The Zionist Organisation of America, which boasted Alan Dershowitz as a guest at its last dinner, has welcomed Bannon, despite (or maybe because of?) his anti-Semitism.

Sebastian Gorka

Their PR adviser, Arthur Schwartz, wrote"we're honored to have him as a guest."  His tweet was quoted by Sebastian Gorka, another former Trump adviser who was dismissed from the White House and like Bannon, is close to the American far right. "Can't wait," Gorka wrote. "Thank you to Mort Klein and all his team. Patriots, all."  

Gorka has been a life lmember and adviser to far-Right anti-Semitic and neo-Nazi Hungarian groups.  Other speakers at the ZOA dinner alongside Bannon will be American ambassador to Israel David Friedman and former Democratic Senator Joe Lieberman.

“Steve is one of the best friends that Israel has had in any administration,” claimedSchwartz.  Also on the guest list is Gorka.  Vanity Fair describedhow Gorka was a member of Vitézi Rend, a far-right Hungarian military organization that supported the Nazis during World War II and how he wore a medal honoring the group to an inauguration party.  Gorka defended the group as historically anti-Communist, which of course could be said for any neo-Nazi group. “First I am an Islamophobe, then I’m an anti-Semite, then I am a fascist. Next I am going to be a Martian, you know, subversive,” he said to The Telegraph, calling himself a political victim.

Although Bannon and Gorka are welcomed by Zionist organisations in the United States Jewish anti-Zionist and socialist groups can be expected to demonstrate outside the ZOA’s annual gala dinner come November.

Tony Greenstein

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[1]           1. Joachim Doron, p.169, ‘Classic Zionism and modern anti-Semitism: parallels and influences’ (1883-1914), Studies in Zionism 8, Autumn 1983.

[2]           2.  Edwin Black, p.259, The Transfer Agreement, citing Palestine Post 5.7.33.

[3]           3.  Arthur Herzberg, The Zionist Idea, p. 322/323, Temple, Atheneum, New York 1981.

The Time has Come to get rid of Brighton Council Leader Warren Morgan

October 11, 2017, 4:16 pm

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Warren Morgan Provided Theresa May with ammunition at Question Time today

It was less than two weeks ago that I wrote an open letter to Warren Morgan, a bitter enemy of Jeremy Corbyn and a paid up supporter of Progress, the Blairite group in the Labour Party.  Open Letter to the Lying Leader of Brighton and Hove City Council, Warren Morgan

Letter in Brighton's Argus responding to Warren Morgan

‘Anti-Semitism’ has been the favourite weapon of the Right in the Labour Party for the past two years, not because there is any genuine anti-Semitism in the Labour Party but because it is a useful means of attacking the Left and supporters of the Palestinians and anti-Zionists.  Ironically, the main victims of the ‘anti-Semitism’ purge have been Jews like Professor Moshe Machover, Jackie Walker and myself.  Jews have always been the foremost opponents of Zionism, even before the Palestinians, because anti-Semitism was seen as a form of Jewish anti-Semitism.  The anti-Semites told Jews they didn’t belong in non-Jewish society and the Zionists agreed to get out.

Warren Morgan is happy to provide the Tories, the tabloids and Theresa May with weapons to attack Labour with

Isaac Deutscher, the biographer of Leon Trotsky, in his Non-Jewish Jew and Other Essays (pp. 66/7) explained how:

‘the great majority of East European Jews were, up to the outbreak of the second world war, opposed to Zionism... The most fanatical enemies of Zionism were precisely the workers, those who spoke Yiddish... they were the most determined opponents of the idea of an emigration from Eastern Europe to Palestine... in the idea of an exodus, from the countries in which they had their home and in which their ancestors had lived for centuries, the anti-Zionists saw an abdication of their rights, a surrender to anti-Semitism. To them anti-Semitism seemed to triumph in Zionism which recognised the legitimacy and the validity of the old cry ‘Jews get out’. The Zionists were agreeing to get out.’

The anti-Semitic far-Right today is enthusiastically pro-Israel and pro-Zionist - what is there not to like about this racist anti-Arab society?

What is abundantly clear from the expulsion of Moshe Machover is that Zionists don’t like to be reminded of the times when they praised the Nazis and the Nazis praised them.  To tell the truth about that period of history is now, in itself, anti-Semitic!

This false and fake use of ‘anti-Semitism’ is not only dishonest but can only result in an increase in anti-Semitism, which the Zionists are quite happy about.  If you tell people that if they oppose Zionism and what Israel does to the Palestinians is anti-Semitic, then some people will say ok, I’m an anti-Semite.  If you tell people that they have a choice between supporting Israel and supporting the Palestinians but that the latter means supporting anti-Semitism and hating Jews then some people will make this false choice

In my open letter I showed not only how Morgan lied about there being anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial at the Labour Party conference but he also lied last year about spitting at the Labour Party AGM.  He was prepared to drag through the mud an entirely innocent member of the Labour Party in order to have elections to a new Brighton and Hove Executive cancelled because his faction were as unpopular as he is.

The level of anti-Jewish racism in West European society is minimal compared to Roma or Muslims yet the Labour Right is uninterested in this form of racism

In every single country, Eastern and Western Europe, anti-Roma racism is above 37%, similarly for anti-Muslim racism it is 29% and above.  In only two countries, Greece and Hungary, anti-Semitism as high.

The hypocrisy about fake anti-Semitism with the redefinition of anti-Semitism, not as hatred or hostility to Jews but as hostility and hatred of Israel as a racist state is best evidenced by the Global Attitudes Survey of Racism in Europe.

In Britain some 7% of people harbour anti-Semitic attitudes of one kind or another.  By way of contrast 45% have negative opinions of Roma and 28% about Muslims.  In other words anti-Muslim racism is 400% higher and hatred of Gypsies is 650% higher, yet we don’t hear an inkling about other forms of racism.  Why?  Because Zionism is an integral part of the British alliance with the United States and the United States pays Israel over $4 billion a year as part of its defence, i.e. war budget.  To oppose Israel is to oppose the alliance with US imperialism.

The same is true throughout Western Europe.  In the Netherlands just 4% have negative opinions about Jews compared to 37% about Roma and 35% about Muslims.  Nor is it merely a question of statistics.  Synagogues in Britain are never attacked and have never been attacked since the 1960’s when fascists associated with John Tyndall’s Spearhead engaged in arson attacks.  Mosques in Britain are regularly attacked, including being firebombed.  Roma are the subject of being banned in pubs, discriminated against in schools and of course subject to police harassment and eviction.  Yet we never hear one word from hypocrites racists such as Warren Morgan because they too are complicit in the eviction of anti-Roma racism.

Warren Morgan had no authority whatsoever to threaten to stop the Labour Party conference meeting in Brighton.  He alleged anti-Semitism but of course he didn’t attend the Free Speech on Israel meeting which he labelled anti-Semitic.  He was happy to take at face value the propaganda attacks of his Israel supporting friends, like Jeremy Newmark of the Jewish Labour Movement, a man who was all but accused of perjury in the Employment Tribunal case of Fraser v University College Union.

It was good enough that his Zionist friends had attacked it, as they do all manifestations of opposition to Zionism as anti-Semitic.

In reality of course it is the Donald Trumps, the Viktor Orbans and alt-Right White Supremacists like Richard Spencer who combine anti-Semitism and support for Zionism.  It is no surprise that Spencer, an open neo-Nazi, who became famous for his ‘Heil Trump’ rally, defined himself, in an interview with Israel’s Channel 2 as a White Zionist.

Morgan was in effect attacking the whole Labour Party conference as anti-Semitic.  Why else would he propose to ban it?  He deliberately provided  Theresa May, who is on the political ropes with ammunition at today’s Question Time, the first after the Party conferences.  The time has come for Warren Morgan to be deselected, deposed as leader of the Labour group and invited to rejoin the Lib-Dems from whence he came.

Tony Greenstein 

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A Glimpse at the Banality of Israelis Everyday Genocidal Racism

October 12, 2017, 7:55 pm

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A Random Group of Israelis Talk Openly to Abby Martin About Their Racism

Pew Research Centre survey of the attitude of Israel's Jews to Israel's Arabs

This is a fascinating video of an interview by Abby Martin of a random group of Israelis in Jerusalem’s Zion Square.  ‘Who is the enemy’ she asks them, what do they think of the situation.  Sometimes they hide behind euphemisms.  

It gives the lie to the idea that Israel is just another western democracy stuck onto Asia minor.  The level of racism demonstrated in this random sample of young Israelis would not have been out of place in Nazi Germany.  It is clear that Israel is a deeply sick and racist society and those in Britain and the USA who try to pretend otherwise are parties to Israel's war crimes.

One American girl says it’s not any specific nation but people who are interested in being ‘politically correct.’  An Israeli who follows her is more precise:  ‘Islam is a very bad disease’  He says ‘We have to kick them away, it will be much better’ though not for those who are kicked away!  He clarifies ‘not to kill them, just to go back to Arab countries.’  Which was in fact the programme of the Nazi party – expulsion not extermination.

I think we have the right to hate them

Islam is a very bad disease

Another boy from the fascist Lehava group says that ‘Jews must not marry Arabs’ because Jews are a ‘special nation’.  Now where have we heard that before?  Umm circa 1935?  A certain central European country?

An Orthodox young Jew doesn’t beat around the bush:  ‘May their name and memory be obliterated’a traditional curse which means, let’s kill them all like the Amalekites.  Two girls laugh and giggle about killing Arabs and a more serious, intellectual type talks about Jews having ‘the right to hate them.  I wouldn’t trust any of them.’ 

Jews shouldn't marry Arabs

It might be worth casting our minds back to a Report brought out last year by the Pew Research Centre entitled Israel’s Religiously Divided Society.  In this Report we learnt that a plurality of Israelis, some 48% supported the physical expulsion of Israel’s own Arab citizens as compared to 46% who were opposed.  We aren’t even talking of Palestinians in the West Bank or Gaza but the supposedly equal citizens of Israel that the Labour Right and Jonathan Freedland of the Guardian lie about.

struggling to find the right word for expelling the Arabs

It was said by Daniel Goldhagen, a junk Zionist historian, that the Germans were an 'eliminationist' people - what would he want to say about ordinary Israeli Jews?

what is so shocking about these 2 girls is how normal they actually are - just ordinary teenagers who find the idea of 'killing Arabs' something that is funny and amusing

One religious gentleman summed up the Zionist lesson – god punished the Jews by first sending the Nazis and now he sends the Palestinians.  In other words the Palestinians are simply the new Nazis.   Another girl who is convinced that history provides the title deeds to the land to the Jews is convinced that the land was barren before the Jews came here, despite eye witness testimony at the time to the contrary.  We see here how history is written backwards, from present day racist assumptions.  Another boy tells us that it wasn’t the Romans or Persians who kicked the Jews out, in fact they were Hebrew tribes not Jews, but the Arabs.  Which sits uneasily with the fact that the Arab invasion of Palestine was in the 7^thcentury whereas the expulsion of Jews was supposed to be 2000 years ago (which it wasn’t!).

there's no answer but 2 carpet bomb them

This is the real Israel, not the pretend Israel that Israel’s apologists would have people believe.  The racism you see here is a product of a Jewish settler colonial society.

Tony Greenstein

How Manchester University Prostitutes Itself in the Service of Imperial War Criminal Arthur James Balfour

October 13, 2017, 7:27 pm

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Manchester University censored Holocaust survivor Marika Sherwood but allows the celebration of ethnic cleansing

Manchester University censored the title of the talk by Holocaust survivor Marika Sherwood and limited access to students only

I’ve just written to Nancy Rothwell, the Vice-Chancellor and President of Manchester University to complain of an Israeli government and Zionist event being hosted to commemorate the Balfour Declaration.  Arthur James Balfour, on November 2^nd1917 wrote a letter to Lord Walter Rothschild, promising his best endeavours in setting up a Zionist settler colony in Palestine as a precursor to the Apartheid state that exists there today.

Of course Balfour didn’t quite word it like that.  He spoke of a ‘Jewish national home’ and not prejudicing the ‘civil and religious rights of the existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.’  Which was a curious way to describe over 90% of the population of Palestine.  The Declaration also tried to allay the fears of Jews by promising that it wouldn’t prejudice the rights and political status of Jews in other countries.  Note that it didn’t promise not to prejudice the political rights of the Palestinians.

The Balfour Declaration promised the land of the Palestinians to the Zionists

We can see what Balfour really intended from a letter to his successor as Foreign Secretary Lord Curzon in 1919.

‘in Palestine we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country…. Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long traditions, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land………. In short, so far as Palestine is concerned, the Powers have made no statement of fact which is not admittedly wrong, and no declaration of policy which, at least in the letter, they have not always intended to violate.

Not for nothing was Britain known as Perfidious Albion.

Manchester University distinguished itself earlier in the year, during Israeli Apartheid week by censoring the title of a talk given by Marika Sherwood, a survivor of the Budapest Ghetto set up in November 1944 during the reign of the pro-Nazi Nyilas/Iron Cross.  Housing some 60,000 Jews its inhabitants were lucky not to have been massacred by the fascists before being rescued by the Soviet invasion of Hungary.

Because the University of Manchester was forced, against its will, by the Information Commissioner to disclose the correspondence it had, we now know that this craven act was carried out at the behest of the Israeli Embassy.  The same Israeli Embassy that is now hosting this event.  What is it about academic institutions that they can’t, when approached by the representatives of Israel’s Apartheid regime, simply say ‘fuck off’ to them.  It is as if Nancy Rothwell and her colleagues lack anything so much resembling a backbone.  The Corporate University of today is nothing more than the transmitter of the dictates of the government of the day. 

Manchester University explains why it is commemorating a war criminal - we're only in it for the money

The title of Marika Sherwood’s talk was forbidden because it infringed the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of anti-Semitism.  This definition, which is not legally binding but is the policy of Theresa May’s Tory government, has one aim only – to conflate criticism of Israel and Zionism with anti-Semitism.  It has no other purpose.  Anti-Semitism is extremely easy to define.  It is hostility to or hatred of Jews.  It doesn’t need the 420+ words of the IHRA definition. 

Below is my open letter to Ms Rothwell.

Tony Greenstein

Marika Sherwood - survivor of the Budapest Ghetto

Letter to Vice-Chancellor of Manchester University

PO Box 173

Brighton

BN51 9EZ

Friday 13^th October 2017 

Nancy Rothwell,

University of Manchester

Office of the President and Vice-Chancellor
University of Manchester
Oxford Rd
Manchester M13 9PL

Dear Ms Rothwell,

I understand that Manchester University is proposing to host an event on October 31^st celebrating the Balfour Declaration of 2^nd November 1917.  This event is organised by the Israeli Embassy and the Zionist Federation.  In response to other complainants you wrote:

‘As you may be aware, the University allows some of its premises to be hired by third parties for external events, provided that the events in question comply with the University’s Code of Practice on Freedom of Speech.’

This is disingenuous.  You are responsible for events held on your premises.  What you are celebrating is the decision, by the British Empire to donate the land of the Palestinians to a third party, the Zionist settler colonial movement.  The British Empire has committed enough crimes without you being host to those who glory in them for the sake of petty profit.

You recently censored a talk by Marika Sherwood, a Holocaust survivor.  You refused to allow the meeting to go ahead until the title of the meeting: ‘You’re doing to the Palestinians what the Nazis did to me’ was changed.  You also insisted that attendance was limited to university students and staff only.  Your decision to change the title of this talk, especially since the speaker was a Holocaust survivor, was outrageous by any measure.

This was only revealed when you were forced to disclose what you did by the Information Commissioner. As the Guardian reported, the Israeli Embassy pressured Manchester University into taking these steps. Your assertion of free speech when it comes to an event celebrating a 100 years of ethnic cleansing is therefore both hypocritical and untrue.  It would seem that Manchester University has a sweet heart relationship with the Israeli Embassy.

If a German university were to celebrate the anniversary of Kristallnacht or an Australian university were to celebrate the extermination of the Aboriginal peoples it would be no different morally to what you are doing.  If you allow this event to go ahead you will be seen to be identified with the Apartheid regime in Tel Aviv and a century of Zionist crimes.

Far from allowing a celebration of the Balfour Declaration Manchester University should be hanging its head in shame.  It was at your institution that Chaim Weizmann, the real author of the Balfour Declaration and President of the Zionist Organisation, taught.  What you and similar academic institutions should be examining is your complicity in the crimes of British imperialism from the slave trade to the free market induced famines in Bengal.

Arthur James Balfour, as Chief Secretary to Ireland, was known as Bloody Balfour on account of the Police murder in 1882 of three demonstrators in the Mitchelstown Massacre in Ireland.  Your refusal to cancel this event, because you will make money from the hire of a hall, demonstrates the lack of any ethics behind the academic ethos of Manchester University. 

Two years after the Declaration, Balfour wrote to Lord Curzon, his successor explaining that:

‘in Palestine we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country…. Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long traditions, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land………. In short, so far as Palestine is concerned, the Powers have made no statement of fact which is not admittedly wrong, and no declaration of policy which, at least in the letter, they have not always intended to violate.

It is noteworthy that the only member of the Lloyd George Cabinet who opposed the Balfour Declaration was its only Jewish member, Sir Edwin Mongtagu, who wrote a paper criticising his fellow Cabinet members for anti-Semitism.

As Prime Minister Balfour also introduced the 1905 Aliens Act aimed at preventing the immigration of Jewish refugees fleeing from the pogroms in Czarist Russia.  He was not only a reactionary Tory politician but like many anti-Semites, he disliked Jews but loved Zionism. 

As someone who is a Jewish I would urge you, even at this late hour, to put principle before profit and cancel this glorification of the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians.

Yours sincerely,

Tony Greenstein 

Burma - Once Again Israel Extends the Hand of Friendship to a Genocidal Regime

October 14, 2017, 12:22 pm

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Israel's lessons from the Holocaust - Never miss an opportunity to sell arms - the nastier the regime the more profitable it is!

Once again Israel is up to its neck in supplying weaponry to a state engaged in genocide.  One might have thought that Israel, since it claims its legitimacy from the Holocaust might conclude that it is wrong to supply a barbaric and genocidal regime with weaponry.  However that would be to have illusions in the ‘Jewish’ state.  The only lesson Israel draws from the Holocaust is that Jews too should have the right to engage in genocide.

If Israel could trade arms with the Argentinian Junta from 1976-1983, which was busily murdering and torturing Argentinian Jews, then it is unlikely that the murder of the Rohinga people, who are after all Muslims, is going to weight on Netanyahu’s conscience.

Israeli President Reuven Rivlin greets the Head of Burma's genocidal junta

Activists in Israel took the issue of Israel's arm sales to the High Court.  Not only did the court rule in favour of Israel's right to sell arms to any Nazi-like regime it wanted to but it tried to keep its verdict secret by issuing what is called a 'gag order'.  Israel, despite being  the 'only democracy in the Middle East' has comprehensive censorship.

Below is an article from Haaretz.

Tony Greenstein

Israel, Partner in Genocides

Sending weapons to a government that’s guilty of genocide is very similar to sending weapons to Germany during the Holocaust

Yair Auron Oct 02, 2017 11:10 AM

Israeli President Reuven Rivlin and Myanmar's Commander-in-Chief Senior General Min Aung Hlaing meeting in Jerusalem, September 10, 2017. Senior General Min Aung Hlaing's Facebook

This is the independent Israeli High Court in action

 The State of Israel is sending weapons to a country that’s carrying out ethnic cleansing. Once one couldn’t even imagine such a thing, but then it turned out that during the 1990s the Rabin-Peres-Meretz government was selling weapons to the genocidal governments of Rwanda and Serbia.

To send weapons to a government that’s guilty of genocide is very similar to (excuse the comparison) sending weapons to Nazi Germany during the Holocaust. Our leaders nevertheless did this knowingly and desecrated the memory of the Holocaust in the process. It’s important to stress that they turned both you and me into criminals, into accessories to a crime and to abettors of genocide.

In Myanmar there is now a “textbook example of ethnic cleansing” going on, as per the United Nations. Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman can equivocate and lie, but the bitter reality is sad. Israel is the only democratic country, at least according to press reports, that is still sending weapons to Myanmar. European and North American countries have stopped doing so, even though there is no official embargo.

Eitay Mack, who has for years been leading the struggle against the criminal weapons exports by Israel – not private weapons merchants, but the State of Israel – to dubious regimes, petitioned the High Court of Justice to stop the defense exports to Myanmar. His petition was rejected and in an unprecedented move there was a gag order imposed on the full ruling, even though the case was handled in open court.

I had the privilege of submitting petitions with Mack against the sales of weapons by Israel to the murderous regime in Serbia, which conducted ethnic cleansing campaigns in the early 1990s, and at least one massacre in Srebrenica in Bosnia, and another petition against the weapons deliveries to the Hutu government in Rwanda, which conducted the fastest genocide in human history.

There’s a connection between the rejection of our petitions back then and the current reality. The petitions then were submitted after the fact, regarding crimes that had already been committed. The current petition and struggle is about the present. Today there are children and elderly people being murdered and women raped in Myanmar. There will almost certainly be more tomorrow.

We told the “leftist” High Court that exposing documents under the Freedom of Information Law could signal to the Israeli government that there are limits and restrictions on the sale of weapons to murderous regimes. The petition was rejected on grounds that it would undermine state security and the state’s security exports. But the success of the current struggle can save lives.

I’ve learned one thing from dealing with the Holocaust and genocide, and that’s the sacred value of human life and the equal value of human life, because we are all human beings created in God’s image. When we remember this basic fact, a lot of things become simple.

Prof. Auron is a genocide researcher who works to get the genocides of other peoples recognized.

Yair Auron

How the Guardian became the flagship for the false ‘anti-Semitism’ Smear Campaign of Labour’s Zionist Right

October 15, 2017, 5:17 pm

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≪ Previous: Burma - Once Again Israel Extends the Hand of Friendship to a Genocidal Regime

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Jonathan Freedland’s contemptible attack on Ken Loach and his refusal of a right of reply 

Corbyn criticises the 'subliminally nasty' Jonathan Freedland

Dear Jonathan,

For over 2 years, the Guardian has run a campaign whose aim has been to paint the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn as anti-Semitic. You have personally insinuated that Corbyn worked with a holocaust denier, as have other contributors.

Some of us would say that Labour has a Zionist problem

The Guardian’s hostility to Corbyn has surpassed even that of the tabloids. It is little wonder that in the past 8 years the Guardian’s sales have declined from over 400,000 to just over 150,000 today. It is no longer seen as a paper of the Left.

The Guardian used to be the only British paper to have an informed coverage of the Middle East. Correspondents such as Michael Adams and David Hirst were renowned the world over. Today their role has been filled by Robert Fisk and Patrick Cockburn at The Independent.

Ken Loach and Jeremy Corbyn - Even when Corbyn tries to appease the Zionists he has the problem of all those people on the Left that he worked with for forty years.

When Comment is Free was established 10 years ago under the late Georgina Henry, I was one of a number of contributors.  My first article for CIF was The seamy side of solidarity, a coruscating attack on the anti-Semitic Jazzman Gilad Atzmon.  It was a call for the Palestine solidarity movement to dissociate themselves from Atzmon and his supporters. 

My article began with the observation: ‘Like the boy who cried wolf, the charge of "anti-semitism" has been made so often against critics of Zionism and the Israeli state that people now have difficulty recognising the genuine article.’  That observation is particularly relevant since you have repeatedly made false allegations of anti-Semitism against people like Ken Loach. 

The Zionist lobby was not happy with Jewish anti-Zionists writing under the banner of The Guardian.  They therefore formed ‘CIF Watch’ In January 2002 in ‘A new anti-Semitism?’ the Guardian quotedLord Greville Janner, a leading Zionist and a notorious child abuser, as saying that the Guardian was ‘viciously and notoriously anti-Israel’.

The Guardian succumbed to the pressure and I and others were banned from contributing. CIF Watch even changed its name to UK Media Watch because, as they boasted, their work was complete.

As a senior editor at the Guardian you led the anti-Corbyn campaign with your article Labour and the left have an antisemitism problem.  The strap line was:  ‘Under Jeremy Corbyn the party has attracted many activists with views hostile to Jews.’  You provided not an iota of evidence to substantiate this. 

Alex Chalmers, Chair of Oxford University Labour Club, resigned because of the Club's support of Israel Apartheid Week.  It had nothing to do with 'anti-Semitism'

You cited Vicki Kirby’s quote that Jews have ‘big noses’ but failed to correct this when David Baddiel, the Jewish author of Infidels, pointed out that this was a direct quote from his play.  

You also cited the bogus allegations of anti-Semitism at Oxford University Labour Club by its Chair Alex Chalmers who resignedwhen the Labour Club decided to give its backing to Oxford’s Israel Apartheid Week.  It was later revealedthat Chalmers had been a paid intern at Bicom, an Israeli propaganda organisation.

There have been numerous articles in The Guardian’s Comment or Opinion sections, on the false anti-Semitism theme.  Nothing contradicting this narrative has appeared.  Submissions from Professor Avi Shlaim, myself and others were rejected. Far from Comment being Free, when it comes to Zionism it has been tied down and silenced as surely as Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver.

The furore around Vicky Kirby's reference to Jews''big noses' was in fact based on a quote from a play by a Jewish author, David Baddiel

As you are well aware it is Zionism and anti-Semitism which go hand in hand. Have you forgotten the time when David Miliband attacked the Tories for their alliance with anti-Semites such as Michal Kaminski and Robert Zile in the European Parliament?  You even wrote an article Once no self-respecting politician would have gone near people such as Kaminski.  This of course was before the election of Jeremy Corbyn.

Kaminski fronted the Committee to Defend the Good Name of Jedwabne, a village in Poland that burnt alive up to 1,600 of its Jewish inhabitants in 1941.  Robert Zile distinguished himself by marching every March with veterans of Latvia’s Waffen SS in Riga.  

Prominent Zionists were ‘incandescent’when the Board's Vivian Wineman raised the issue with David Cameron?  Stephen Pollard, editor of the Jewish Chronicle wrote about how Poland's Kaminski is not an antisemite: he's a friend to Jews.

Trump's former anti-Semitic adviser, Steve Bannon, is invited as the guest of honour to Zionist Organisation of America's gala dinner  - he might be an anti-Semite but 'He's so pro-Israel!'

The alliance of Zionists with the anti-Semitic Right is a world wide phenomenon, with the Israeli government supportingthe anti-Semitic attacks of Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban on George Soros. Soros’s offence being to help fund Israeli human rights groups. And there is the little matter of the invitationby the Zionist Organisation of America to Steve Bannon of Breitbart and the Alt-Right to speak to its annual gala dinner.

Despite this your most recent article Labour’s Denial of Antisemitism in its Ranks Leaves The Party in a Dark Placerepeats the lie that there were ‘loud calls for the expulsion of Jewish groups’ at Labour Party Conference.  What there were was calls for the disaffiliation of the Jewish Labour Movement, a Zionist not Jewish group.  The JLM is the ‘sister party’ of the Israeli Labour Party, a party of segregation and ethnic cleansing.

Freedland's attack on Ken Loach - a right of reply was refused.

Your suggestion that Ken Loach was ‘echoing ... the language of Holocaust denial’ is contemptible.  Unlike you, Loach has spent a lifetime confronting and opposing racism and supporting the poor and dispossessed.  You have spent your career defending Apartheid when it comes in Jewish clothes.

You argued that Ken Loach, Len McCluskey and Ken Livingstone, not being Jewish, are unqualified to comment on anti-Semitism.  Racism is not subjective.  Non-Jews are perfectly capable of expressing an opinion. Many Jews in the Labour Party also deny your claims so it depends on which Jews you speak to or for.  You also compared Jews to Black, Women's and other oppressed groups.  Jews in Britain are not oppressed as Jews. 

Ironically it is anti-Zionist Jews who are the primary victims of the fake anti-Semitism witch hunt. Moshe Machover, Jackie Walker and myself have been suspended or expelled.  It is as if the Labour Party during the era of South African Apartheid had ostracised White South Africans opposed to Apartheid at the behest of Labour Friends of South Africa!

Jews have been the loudest critics of the attempt to equate anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. To pretend that all Jews have one opinion, that they are homogenous, is not only fundamentally dishonest but also anti-Semitic.  I expect better of you Jonathan.  

People like Archbishop Desmond Tutu have described Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians as similar to what happened in South Africa.  Ha’aretz quotes him as saying that:

‘"I have witnessed the systemic humiliation of Palestinian men, women and children by members of the Israeli security forces... Their humiliation is familiar to all black South Africans who were corralled and harassed and insulted and assaulted by the security forces of the apartheid government."

You seem to find it difficult to accept that a Jewish settler colonial state can be anything other than inherently racist.  You have made turning a blind eye to Israel’s crimes into an art form. How can a state which demolishedin January a Bedouin village, Umm al-Hiran, in Israel’s Negev, in order to make way for an exclusively Jewish town be considered a normal democratic state?  Or why is it that a plurality, 48% of Israeli Jews want to see the expulsion of Israeli Arabs?

Your suggestion that anti-Zionism equals anti-Semitism is based on your argument that 93% of British Jews identify with Israel.  In fact just 59% identifyas Zionists.  But even were you correct so what?  If a majority of Hindus supported Suttee would it be racist to oppose it?  Jews who support Israel are identifying with the world’s only apartheid state.  That is wrong whoever they are.

Ken Loach is forced to reply to Freedland on the site of Jewish Voice for Labour as Freedland and the Guardian refuse a right of reply

What I really find remarkable is that having launched an abusive and dishonest attack on Ken Loach you didn’t even have the courage to print his reply, Comment is Free - Guardian’s One-Eyed View of Labour Politics Ignores the Palestinians.  That really is cowardly. 

Ken Loach is a living legend.  His films have borne eloquent testimony to the evils of racism and imperialism, as well as being a devastating indictment of the way the poor and dispossessed are treated – from Cathy Come Home to I Daniel Blake.  What will you leave to the world other than a few instantly forgettable tirades against anti-Zionists plus a few thrillers?

You are living proof Jonathan that even the most ‘liberal’ of Zionists ends up in Netanyahu’s choir singing the same songs of ‘anti-Semitism’.  As Israeli society moves further and further to the racist Right you find it impossible to change the tune.

Of one thing I am certain. If Jews in Britain experienced even a tenth of what Palestinians in Israel had to put up with then your references to anti-Semitism would carry some weight.

There is only one thing I don't understand.  When Jeremy Corbyn accused you of “utterly disgusting subliminal nastiness” why he thought it was subliminal?  It seems all too clear.

Yours sincerely,

Tony Greenstein

Ken Loach’s Reply to Jonathan Freedland that the Guardian refused to print

Comment is free – Guardian’s One-Eyed View of Labour Politics Ignores the Palestinians

Ken Loach, 5 October 2017

On 27th September 2017 the Guardian published an article by Jonathan Freedland called Labour’s denial of antisemitism in its ranks leaves the party in a dark place. Ken Loach wrote a response for Comment is Free beginning “The taint of antisemitism is toxic. Yet, with hints and innuendos, your columnist, Jonathan Freedland, tries to link me, Len McCluskey and Ken Livingstone to Labour’s ‘dark place’, for which it seems we are in part responsible. This is cynical journalism.”

The Guardian has refused to carry Loach’s article. We are pleased to do so here.

---

The taint of antisemitism is toxic. Yet, with hints and innuendos, your columnist, Jonathan Freedland, tries to link me, Len McCluskey and Ken Livingstone to Labour’s ‘dark place’, for which it seems we are in part responsible. This is cynical journalism.

What is his evidence? Len and I were welcomed at the packed first meeting of ‘Jewish Voice for Labour’. Strangely, Freedland ignored this progressive new group, which has published its own response to his attacks on us. The founding document says: ‘we stand for rights and justice for Jewish people everywhere and against wrongs and injustices to Palestinians and other oppressed people anywhere’. We support that.

But Freedland disputes our right to contribute. We are ‘not Jewish – a fact that might limit their authority to speak on the matter’. The matter in question is antisemitism in the Labour Party.

Many Jewish comrades say that they know the Labour Party to be a welcoming environment and have not experienced hostility as Jews. This chimes with my fifty years of involvement with the labour movement. But, for Freedland, this is a discussion to which only one group – Jews who share his political perspective – can contribute. It is exclusive – no place for solidarity or collective support. This goes against all traditions of the left where we stand alongside each other to oppose injustice.

People join left organisations to fight racism and fascism, intolerance and colonial oppression. Throughout history, it is the left that has led this fight. Racism including antisemitism is real enough and will emerge in all political parties. The Jewish Socialists’ Group (JSG) acknowledges this in relation to allegations about the Labour Party: ‘a very small number of cases seem to be real instances of antisemitism’. I trust their judgement.

This present campaign about antisemitism surfaced when Jeremy Corbyn became leader and drew on a number of cases that pre-dated his leadership. It has been led by his political opponents inside and outside the Labour Party, seeming in part to be aimed at undermining Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters and therefore his leadership. JSG wrote ‘accusations of antisemitism are being weaponised to attack the Jeremy Corbyn-led Labour Party’.

Corbyn has always opposed racism and defended human rights wherever they have been attacked, which includes the plight of the Palestinians. This will alarm apologists for Israeli occupation and expansion. Further, he stands on a socialist programme which has disturbed the right of the party.

There is a further, more serious allegation, that I gave ‘spurious legitimacy’ to Holocaust denial. In a BBC interview I was asked about a speech I had not heard and of which I knew nothing. My reply has been twisted to suggest that I think it is acceptable to question the reality of the Holocaust. I do not. The Holocaust is as real a historical event as the World War itself and not to be challenged. In Primo Levi’s words: ‘Those who deny Auschwitz would be ready to remake it.’ The first terrible pictures I saw as a nine-year old are ingrained on my memory as they are for all my generation.

Like readers of this paper, I know the history of Holocaust denial, its place in far right politics and the role of people like David Irving. To imply that I would have anything in common with them is contemptible. The consequences of such a smear are obvious to all: let the poison escape and it will be picked up on social media and reputations may be tarnished for ever. A brief phone call would have clarified my position.

One thing Freedland has got right – the ages of Len McCluskey, Ken Livingstone and me (he wittily makes a rhyme of our names). Freedland is happy to embrace one prejudice – ageism.

Exaggerated or false claims of antisemitism can create a climate of fear in which legitimate discussion about the state of Israel and its actions are stifled. Antisemitism and debate about Israel should be separate issues. Once again it is the Palestinians who are marginalised or ignored. Freedland writes frequently about Israel, yet his concern for the Palestinians takes second place. So while we are clarifying our position, could he make clear whether, for example, he accepts:

• that land stolen from the Palestinians should be returned to them and all illegal settlements removed, as UN Resolutions demand.
• that Israel is breaking the Fourth Geneva Convention by transporting Palestinian children to Israeli prisons without access to lawyers or their families.
• and that the deliberate destruction of civilian life, hospitals and medical facilities in Gaza during Operation Protective Edge were war crimes.

And will he endorse the distinguished Israeli historian Ilan Pappe when he writes about the founding of Israel: ‘The ethnic cleansing of Palestine (is) a crime against humanity that Israel has wanted to deny and cause the world to forget’?

So many questions, so many injustices. Labour has much to do in developing an ethical foreign policy and social and economic justice at home. It now has principled leaders and a growing, enthusiastic membership. Let the party not throw away this great opportunity. We have a world to win.

The time has come to Organise to Stop the Witch-hunt - Meeting Saturday October 21st 12.00-3.00 p.m - Calthorpe Arms, Gray's Inn Rd, London

October 17, 2017, 5:09 pm

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We should turn the witch hunt onto Labour's real racists - the Right and the Zionists

After their defeat and demoralisation at Labour Party Conference, it is clear that the Jewish Labour Movement, the Blairite right-wing together with Labour’s civil service under Iain McNicol and his familiar, Sam Matthews, are determined to once again use the stick of ‘anti-Semitism’ as a means of attacking the Left in the Party.

Labour’s Conference was not a happy affair for the JLM and their Chair Jeremy Newmark, as it was clear that the sympathies of most conference delegates weren’t with Israel’s military police state and the apartheid regime.  The wearing of Palestinian lanyards by so many delegates must have seemed like rubbing salt into their wounds.  If you believe that Palestinians (or Arabs) are inherently anti-Semitic then you cannot but interpret this as anti-Semitism.

Freedland has led the Guardian's repetitive campaign about Labour Party 'anti-semitism'

However the Right are also stupid.  Their targeting of Moshe Machover, who is both a distinguished academic as well as a well-known Israeli Marxist and dissident was stupid and has backfired.  It has made it very clear to people that it is anti-Zionism that is under attack, not anti-Semitism.  Yet again one of the main targets of the anti-Semitism witch hunt is Jewish!

Moshe has submitted a most excellent defence against the charges against him, which you can see here

Even the most stupid right-winger (Luke Akehurst) should understand that an ‘anti-Semitism’ that sees Jewish anti-racists as the main enemy isn’t anti-Semitism.  It is using the label of ‘anti-Semitism’ for opportunistic purposes.  It is anti-Zionism in disguise.

The article which led to Moshe's expulsion

We now have a situation where left-wing groups like Labour Party Marxists and Socialist Appeal are effectively being proscribed  whereas Progress and Labour First are untouched.  That is why demands have to be made on Jeremy Corbyn and McDonnell.  Both in previous years opposed the witch hunt of Militant and other left groups.  It is incumbent upon both of them to come out against McNicol’s McCarthyist regime.

If Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell fail to oppose the witch hunt of the Left in the Labour Party today they will buckle at the first hint of pressure from the City tomorrow.  That is why it is long overdue for Corbyn, McDonnell and Dianne Abbot to condemn what is happening in no uncertain terms.

No one except the most lunatic Zionist pretends that Moshe Machover is anti-Semitic.  Nothing he has said evinces hatred or hostility towards Jews.  What he has been accused of by McNicol’s pet poodle, Sam Matthews, is of having written an ‘apparently anti-Semitic article.’ And what was the offence?  Quoting Reinhard Heydrich, the Deputy Chief of the SS, as saying how much he supported the German Zionist movement.  This is a fact.  The full quote can be found in the book Zionism and Anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany by Francis Nicosia, the Raul Hilberg Professor of Holocaust Studies at Vermont University and himself a Zionist.

Zionism has never had any problems when it came to working with anti-Semites

Telling the truth is anti-Semitic!  The Zionists say that we should not quote a Nazi.  In that case virtually every historian of the Nazi period is guilty!  So is the Israeli state which quoted Adolf Eichmann against himself at the 1961 trial.  The real question is why Heydrich and not just Heydrich is on record as praising Zionism in the period 1933-1939.  The answer is an uncomfortable one for the Zionists.

The Labour Right is being aided in its attacks by the Press, the Guardian in particular.  Jonathan Freedland, who I have already criticised in an Open Letter wrote, even by his abysmal standards, a poisonously dishonest article Labour’s denial of antisemitism in its ranks leaves the party in a dark place. 

Ken Loach was refused a right of reply when the Guardian's Jonathan Freedland suggested he was supportive of holocaust denial

It is time for us to fight back.  The Alliance for Workers Liberty have set up a Stop the Purge group, but this is a group which studiously avoids the small matter of those suspended or expelled because of the anti-Semitism witch hunt.  Indeed the AWL actually support the expulsion of Ken Livingstone and they were responsible for removing Jackie Walker from her position as Vice Chair of Momentum.  This is not surprising since the AWL subscribes to the nonsense notion of ‘left anti-Semitism’.

The proposal is to set up Labour Against the Witchhunt and there is an event page here.

Hope to see you on Saturday.

Tony Greenstein

Brighton & Hove Labour Parties Reject Warren Morgan's Lies that Labour is Not Welcome in Brighton

October 18, 2017, 7:42 am

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Complaint against Warren Morgan as a Labour Council attacks its own workforce

Those of you who watched Question Time in the House of Commons last week will have noticed that Theresa May used allegations of anti-Semitism by Brighton and Hove Council leader, Warren Morgan, in order to attack the Labour Party and Jeremy Corbyn.  That was precisely Warren Morgan's intention when he issued his Facebook statement that Labour's conference was antiSemitic and would no longer be welcome in Brighton.

The Tories loved Warren Morgan's statement attacking the Labour Party and I made a formal complaint last week to Labour's crooked General Secretary, Iain McNicol, demanding that Morgan be suspended for bringing the Party into disrepute.  So far I have had no acknowledgment!

Warren Morgan - Lies & truth are simply a matter of expediency to him

Morgan's attack on Labour's Conference and his suggestion that it was unwelcome in Brighton has produced shockwaves in Brighton and Hove Labour Parties.  I understand that Queens Park Branch in Brighton Kemptown passed a motion calling on Morgan to resign.  At Central Hove Branch, Warren Morgan was so worried about a motion to be discussed that night that he invited himself to the meeting and after being given permission to speak , received almost no support.  A motion was passed calling on him to apologise for his remarks that the Labour Party Conference was antiSemitic and that it should not be invited back to Brighton again.

Pavilion Labour Party has also passed a motion saying that the Labour Conference will always be welcome in Brighton and Hove in a snub to Warren Morgan's declaration that it was not welcome.

I have sent a letter of complaint to Iain McNicol about both this and abusive comments on his Facebook page. 

Given the serious nature of this complaint, aiding the enemy, one would expect that there will soon be a vacancy for the leader of Brighton and Hove Council.

Apart from previous lies over Labour's AGM last year, when he made false allegations of spitting, in order to have the election results annulled, Morgan is also the man who has closed Adult Learning Disability Centres and tried to close Hove library.  The excuse was that the Council had no money.

Letter of Complaint Against Warren Morgan and Craig Turton

Brighton's Labour Council attacks its workforce by employing First Care to harass sick members of staff
How  does Morgan explain the Council’s proposal to employ over the next two years a private company, First Care, whose responsibility it will be to ‘manage’ sickness absence.  At the moment this is done by Managers to whom someone will report if they are sick.  In future they will have to report to a ‘health professional’ at First Care.  Since the Data Protection Act forbids the passing of confidential information on someone's medical record to an external third party, a position that the Council was forced to adopt after UNISON legal pressure, this £1/4m is a total waste of money.  It gives the lie to the argument that the Council has no money.

It is clear that the purpose of employing First Care will be to drive down sickness absence by putting pressure on employees to go to work or face dismissal.  In other words workers who are sick will be expected to go into work.  Given that a majority of sickness is on account of stress caused by pressure at work, the only effect of employing First Care, at a cost of some £260,000, will be to increase staff’s stress levels.  Having sick staff at work is a recipe for dangerous mistakes by for example social workers with vulnerable families and children.

Theresa May attacking Corbyn with the help of Warren Morgan

No socialist Labour council could even contemplate hiring these cowboys from the private sector.  Of course the problem with Brighton & Hove Council is that with one or two exceptions there are no socialists amongst its Labour members. 

Brighton & Hove Council intend to employ private sector cowboys to reduce sickness levels

Tony Greenstein

This is Apartheid - Thousands of Israel’s Bedouin citizens have had their citizenship revoked

October 18, 2017, 9:05 am

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Because Israel is a ‘Jewish’ state – this could not happen to Jews

Israel is engaging on a plan to ‘Judaify’ the Negev desert area in the south.  It is sparsely populated and most of its inhabitants are Bedouin.  Thousands of them were expelled into neighbouring countries from 1948 until the mid 1950’s and those who remain live in ‘unrecognised’ villages.  That means they have no mains water, electricity, state schools, sewerage etc.  It also means that they are liable to be demolished at a moments notice.

Al Araqib has been demolished over a hundred times and in January Umm al-Hiran was demolished.  One protestor, Yakub Abu al-Kiyana, school teacher, was murdered by the Police who also fired rubber bullets directly at the leader of the Joint Jewish-Arab list in the Knesset, Aymen Odeh, injuring him.

The reason to demolish Umm al-Hiran was to build a Jewish town, Hiran, in its place.  In other words naked Apartheid.

That is the context in which thousands of Bedouin are having their Israeli citizenship revoked at a stroke of a bureaucrat’s pen.  The reason given is that they were registered as citizens by mistake.  They have lived in what is now Israel all their lives.  They are the indigenous population, unlike the Jewish settlers who came mostly after them, but that doesn’t count.  It as all a mistake and so they are no longer citizens.  In fact they  never were citizens!

Of course this could never happen to a Jew because if you are Jewish you have the automatic right under the misnamed Law of Return to go to Israel and claim citizenship.  If I were to go to Israel and claim citizenship I would have to be granted it even though I have never lived there.  Arabs who have lived in Israel for hundreds of years can have their citizenship revoked immediately.  This is not accidental.  It is the product of a Jewish state where Arabs live in it by sufferance only.  In Jerusalem thousands of Arabs who had permanent residency cards are now having them revoked too.

What is surprising is that some people in the West still see Israel as a democratic state.

Tony Greenstein

Israel is systematically revoking Arabs' citizenship. Don't act surprised

By Michael Schaeffer Omer-Man   |Published August 26, 2017

Hundreds if not thousands of Bedouin are having their citizenship revoked seemingly for no reason, according to ‘Haaretz.’ Shocking as it may be, it’s not surprising. Citizenship has never provided non-Jewish Israelis with the same security it gives their Jewish compatriots.

Abu Gardud Salem from the village of Bir Hadaj of the Azzamah tribe on August 18 became a man without citizenship after a trip to Israeli immigration offices.

Imagine going to renew your passport or change your official address and after a few minutes of pattering on a keyboard without looking up to see the human being in front of him or her, a government clerk informs you that you are no longer a citizen of the only country you have ever known. The country of your birth.

And no, it’s not that your citizenship is being revoked, the clerk calmly explains. It’s not like that. You were never a citizen in the first place, you see, it was all a mistake — never mind the fact that you were born in Israel to parents who are Israeli citizens, and your siblings are Israeli citizens, and maybe you even served in the Israeli army.

Hundreds if not thousands of Bedouin citizens of Israel have undergone that exact terrifying experience in recent years, according to a report by Jack Khoury in Haaretz Friday.

 

The Kafqesque ordeal, to which Jewish Israelis are exempt, is part of a policy in which one’s citizenship is re-adjudicated, without a judge or judicial process of course, every time one comes into contact with an Interior Ministry clerk for the most routine reasons, according to the Haaretz investigation.

The gut-wrenching practice is shocking on the most basic levels. For those of us lucky enough to be citizens of a country, so much of our security in this world comes bundled up with it. Of course, Palestinians and other non-Jews have never had the same level of security attached to their citizenship in Israel as their Jewish compatriots do. Many of them, like the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from East Jerusalem, don’t even have citizenship to begin with.

As shocking as the Haaretz report is, nobody should be surprised. The Israeli prime minister has openly declared his belief that some, namely Arab, Israeli citizens should be stripped of their citizenship for making political statements not to his liking. A senior government minister recently threatened a “third Nakba,” referencing the largely forced displacement of 700,000 Palestinians in 1948. And then there was the landmark ruling earlier this month actually stripping a Palestinian-Arab man of his Israeli citizenship because of his familial lineage. Let us not forget the more-than 14,000 Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem who have had their permanent residency status stripped of them over the years, sending them into exile.

Again, none of this should be news. Israel is not a state of all its citizens — any minister in the current Israeli government would be happy to tell you as much. Advocating turning Israel into a state with those types of liberal-democratic building blocks is considered nothing short of seditious. It is antithetical to Zionism as it has come to be defined in the contemporary Israeli zeitgeist.

It should also be no surprise that attempts to reduce the number of Arab citizens are taking place in the Negev desert, where every Israeli government has tirelessly worked to establish Jewish hegemony in the sprawling desert that comprises more than half of Israel’s land mass. The latest iteration of those plans, The Prawer Plan, which sought to displace some 40,000 Bedouin citizens living in dozens of “unrecognized” villages, was just one in 70 years of similar efforts. Currently, the Israeli government is finalizing the destruction of the Bedouin village of Umm al-Hiran in order to build a new settlement in its place — for Jews only.

Imagine the feeling of living under a regime which views your very existence as a strategic threat; one out of every five Israeli citizens do.

A state that belongs less to some of its citizens than others, which sees some of its citizens as assets and others as liabilities, which bestows inalienable rights upon some and views others as expendable — is not a just state. After 70 years, the question is no longer whether Israel can balance its Jewish and democratic character. The question is which of them it has chosen.

Even that debate won’t be relevant for much long. The Israeli Knesset is scheduled to advance the “Jewish Nation-State” law in the coming weeks. The government-supported bill, which is the equivalent of a constitutional amendment in Israel’s system, would explicitly favor the country’s Jewish character over its democratic character.

Israel Revokes Citizenship of Hundreds of Negev Bedouin, Leaving Them Stateless

Some were citizens for 40 years, served in the army and paid their taxes, but had their status canceled with a single keystroke and no further explanation

Jack Khoury Aug 25, 2017 8:21 AM

Dozens of people – men and women, young and old – crowd into a big tent in the unrecognized village of Bir Hadaj. Some hold documents in plastic bags while others clutch tattered envelopes. What brought them to this village south of Be’er Sheva in Israel’s Negev desert was that the Population, Immigration and Border Authority had revoked their citizenship, claiming that it had been awarded to them in error.

Judging by the increasing number of complaints piling up in recent months, this appears to be a widespread phenomenon among the Negev’s Bedouin residents. Hundreds if not thousands of them are losing their citizenship due to “erroneous registration.” This is the reason they get from the Interior Ministry, with no further details or explanation.

Fifty-year-old Salim al-Dantiri from Bir Hadaj has been unsuccessfully trying to obtain Israeli citizenship for years. He doesn’t understand why Israel won’t grant it to him; his father served in the Israel Defense Forces. “Sometimes they say there was a mistake in my parents’ registration dozens of years ago. Is that our fault?” asks al-Dantiri. He’s not the only one, but many of those who came to the meeting were reluctant to identify themselves out of concern that it might hurt them in their interactions with the Population Authority. Others have already given up hope.

Salim al-Dantiri from Bir Hadaj Eliyahu Hershkovitz

Mahmoud al-Gharibi from the Al-Azazme tribe in the Be’er Sheva area is a carpenter who has been unemployed for a year following a road accident. He has 12 children from two wives. One is an Israeli citizen and the other comes from the West Bank. Seven of his children have Israeli citizenship but he has been stateless since 2000. “I went to the Interior Ministry to renew my identity card,” he relates. “There, without any warning, they told me they were rescinding my citizenship since there was some mistake. They didn’t tell me what it was or what this meant. Since then I’ve applied 10 times, getting 10 rejections, each time on a different pretext. I have two children who are over 18 and they too have no citizenship. That’s unacceptable. I’ve been living in this area for dozens of years and my father was here before me. If there was a mistake, they should fix it.”

Another person in the tent, who wished to remain anonymous, says that “many of these people, mainly ones who don’t speak Hebrew that well, don’t understand what happened to them. No one explains anything and all of a sudden your status changes. You go in as a citizen and come out deprived of citizenship, and then an endless process of foot-dragging begins.”

For years Yael Agmon from nearby Yeruham has been accompanying Bedouin to the Interior Ministry to help them apply for passports or update their identity cards. On many occasions, she has witnessed their citizenship being revoked. “You can clearly see how a clerk enters their details into a computer and then they instantly lose their citizenship. They then have to contend with an endless bureaucratic process. Sometimes it costs them tens of thousands of shekels in lawyers’ fees, and they don’t always get their citizenship in the end,” she says.

Salman al-Amrat came to the tent gathering because of his wife’s and oldest son’s status. The 56-year-old member of the Al-Azazme tribe is an Israeli citizen. His 62-year-old wife is stateless even though she was born here, he says. “Every time we try to get her citizenship we are met with refusal.” Al-Amrat’s oldest son, now 34, is also without citizenship even though his younger brothers ultimately received theirs. “We’ve been trying for years to obtain citizenship for him but to no avail. Every time they say some documents are missing. Now we’re trying through an attorney. It’s illogical that six of my children and I have citizenship and my oldest son doesn’t,” he says.

Salim al-Dantiri in Bir Hadaj. He too has lost his citizenship due to what Israel claims is a registration error. July 2017 Eliyahu Hershkovitz

Atalla Saghaira, a resident of the unrecognized village of Rahma, fought for 13 years to obtain his citizenship, even though his late father served in the IDF. He started the process in 2002, when he applied for a passport and the Interior Ministry refused to give him one. “They said that my parents had become citizens but weren’t ones to begin with,” he says. He finally obtained Israeli citizenship in 2015. “I insisted on my rights and waged a campaign against the bureaucracy by myself until I obtained citizenship, but I know there are some people who give up,” he says. Saghaira’s father was a tracker in the army for several years, and left after sustaining an injury. At the time, he had seven children (including Attala), but three of them still are still stateless.

Another resident of Bir Hadaj, Abu Garud Salame, works in the Ramat Hovav industrial zone. He says that all five of his children and three of his brothers received their Israeli citizenship but he has been refused each time he requested to have it reinstated. “We’ve been living here for dozens of years. My parents registered in the ‘50s and now I’ve been deprived of my citizenship. Even if there was some mistake in the registration process I don’t know why I have to pay for it,” he says. “Why are we to blame for things that happened decades ago?”

Automatic change in status

Abu Garud Salame from the village of Bir Hadaj also had is citizenship revoked Eliyahu Hershkovitz

Lawmaker Aida Touma-Suliman of the Joint List has received many appeals in recent months from people who have been stripped of their Israeli citizenship. Attorney Sausan Zahar from the Adalah Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel recently appealed to Interior Minister Arye Dery and to Attorney General Avichai Mendelblit, asking them to cancel this policy.

According to her petition, these sweeping citizenship cancellations has been going on at least since 2010. When Bedouin citizens come to Interior Ministry offices in Be’er Sheva to take care of routine matters such as changing their address, obtaining a birth certificate or registering names, the Population Authority examines their status, as well as that of their parents and grandparents, going back to the early days of the state.

In many cases, the clerk tells them that their Israeli citizenship had been granted in error. On the spot, he changes their status from citizen to resident and issues them a new document. People who lose their citizenship are given no explanation and no opportunity to appeal. Instead, the clerk suggests that they submit a request and start the process of obtaining citizenship from scratch, as if they were newcomers to Israel.

Many, caught by surprise and without legal advice, don’t know what to do. Some submit a request for citizenship while others simply give up in despair. Zahar says that many requests are denied due to missing documents, a criminal record (not a valid reason for denying citizenship) or even the applicant’s inability to speak Hebrew. Many Bedouin women who have been stripped of citizenship fall into the latter category. One such woman filed an appeal over the cancellation of her citizenship due to an alleged error. When it turned out that her Hebrew was lacking, her appeal was rejected. She remains stateless.

Adalah’s petition to the interior minister shows that individuals who have been citizens for 20, 30 or even 40 years, some of whom served in the army, who voted and paid their taxes, had clerks cancel their status with a keystroke. As permanent residents, they can vote in local elections but cannot run for office, vote in national elections or run for the Knesset. They receive social benefits such as medical insurance and national insurance payments, but cannot receive Israeli passports. If they are out of the country for prolonged periods of time, they can also lose their permanent residency, and unlike citizens, they cannot automatically transfer their status to their children.

Among those who remain without Israeli citizenship are people born in Israel to parents who are Israeli citizens. There are families in which one child is a citizen while another is a permanent resident. Some of those affected were stripped of their citizenship when they tried to renew their passports to go on the pilgrimage to Mecca, a mandatory tenet of Islam and something they now cannot do.

Registration during British Mandate

The Knesset’s Interior and Environment Committee held a discussion on the issue last year, following an accumulation of requests to reinstate citizenship. During it, Interior Ministry officials confirmed that such a policy exists: When Bedouin citizens come to the ministry’s offices, clerks check the population registry for records of their parents and grandparents between 1948 and 1952.

Perhaps these years were not chosen by chance. Between the founding of the state in 1948 and the passage of the Citizenship Law in 1952, many Arabs could not register with the population authority since their communities were governed by a military administration. This included areas in the Negev which had a high concentration of Bedouin residents after 1948. In many cases, checking the records of an individual's grandparents entails looking at their citizenship during the British Mandate – a time when Israeli citizenship did not even exist.

After last year's Knesset discussion, the Interior Ministry was asked to check the extent of the phenomenon and its legality and to then update the Interior Committee. The head of the ministry's citizenship department, Ronen Yerushalmi, submitted the findings to the committee's chairman, David Amsalem (Likud), in September 2016. Entitled “Erroneous Registration of Negev Residents,” the report said that “the extent of the problem could involve up to 2,600 people with Israeli citizenship, who could lose it due to erroneous registration by the Interior Ministry.” It added that since individual cases had not been examined, the data was not precise and the numbers could even be higher.

During an earlier meeting of the committee in December 2015, the committee's legal counsel, Gilad Keren, expressed doubts regarding the legality of this process: “The citizenship law refers to cases in which citizenship was obtained based on false details, namely under more serious circumstances, not when the state has made a mistake. It refers to people giving false information before obtaining their citizenship. The law allows the interior minister to revoke citizenship only if less than three years have passed since it was granted. After that a court needs to intervene in order to revoke it. I therefore don’t understand how, when a person has been a citizen for 20 years and the state makes a mistake, that person’s status is changed.”

Adalah’s appeal to the interior minister and the attorney general demands an immediate halt to the citizenship cancellation policy. Zahar argued that the people affected by it don’t even have the right to a hearing before their Israeli citizenship is taken away from them. In addition to infringing on their right to citizenship, she wrote, the policy blatantly infringes on their right to equality. It is discriminatory based on nationality, since no Jewish citizen has had his citizenship revoked due to a mistake in his parents' or grandparents' registration under the Law of Return.

 “I’m afraid that what has been exposed is only the tip of the iceberg and what hasn’t been revealed yet is even more serious,” says Touma-Suliman. She says that if Dery and Mendelblit do not resolve the issue soon, it will go to the High Court of Justice. “There is no justification for this policy,” she says. “The ministry is blatantly violating the law. It’s unacceptable that in one family living under one roof, half the children are citizens while the other half are residents or people with indeterminate status.”

Haaretz approached several former senior officials at the Interior Ministry and the Population Authority, including the agency's head until 2010, Yaakov Ganot, and Amnon Ben-Ami, its director until recently. Former Interior Minister Eli Ben-Yishai, who held the post most recently in 2013, said that if a decision had been made to revoke the citizenship of Negev Bedouin, “I don’t know about it and don’t remember holding discussions regarding this issue during my tenure.”

The Population Authority said in response that the cases mentioned above were not instances of revoked citizenship but ones of past registration mistakes, in which people had been registered as citizens but were not. It said now was the time to fix the problem, adding that the ministry held a discussion on the issue, the minister had taken a decision and the Knesset's Interior Committee had been informed. It said that “attempts are being made to address this problem legally in a manner that won’t affect these individuals' status in Israel.” The Population Authority also said the attorney general would be handling the appeal filed by Adalah.

Dery’s office insisted that the cases were absolutely not instances of citizenship being revoked but were instead situations of arranging legal status. “The minister has directed officials at the Population and Immigration Authority to handle the process involving this group of people in the easiest and simplest way possible. Minister Dery asked them to find any way possible to shorten the procedure in an attempt to avoid imposing any hardship on them,” said the office.

The attorney general's office told Adalah that the Population Authority is conducting an examination of thousands of people who have been erroneously registered as citizens instead of permanent residents. Those who are found to have been registered as such by mistake will be allowed to obtain citizenship through an accelerated process, should they meet the legal criteria, the response said.

According to the response, no one has been denied citizenship so far, and residents' rights are being maintained. Therefore the attorney general sees no reason to intervene in the Population Authority's decision, the response said.

Thousands of Arab-Israelis to have citizenship revoked

Hundreds of Arab-Israeli Bedouins in the southern Negev region have their citizenship purportedly revoked by the Interior Ministry, using a law usually reserved for people convicted of 'terrorist activities.'

Dima Abumaria/The Media Line|Published:  02.09.17 , 09:38

The Interior Ministry has purportedly revoked the citizenship of hundreds, if not thousands, of Arab-Israeli Bedouins in the southern Negev region, instead granting them "resident" status.

The ministry’s representatives explained in a parliamentary session that the decision was being taken because in these cases citizenship was granted by mistake or to those that registered "erroneously" between 1948 and 1951.

Bedouin woman confronts Israeli policemen during the demolition of homes in the unrecognized Bedouin village of Umm al-Hiran, Jan. 2017 (Photo: AFP)

Aida Touma-Suleiman, an Arab-Israeli legislator, called for an urgent session last year to raise concern over the move, while giving voice to the residents of Naqab, whose statuses were changed without their knowledge.

"I will not relent, either the Ministry stops the new policy and returns citizenship to the Arabs, or I will file a case with the Supreme Court," Touma-Suleiman told The Media Line.

Adalah, a legal center that supports the rights of Israel’s Arab minority, sent a letter to Interior Minister Aryeh Deri and Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit urging them to cancel the new policy and demanding equal status for the Bedouins in question.

According to the group, the citizenship cancellations have been going on at least since 2010.

"Many Arab citizens, who had survived in their land after Nakba (the 'catastrophe' of Israel’s creation), were unable to register for citizenship due to the military rule imposed on them by the government," Touma-Suleiman explained. "In some other cases, people were not aware of the need to register at all."

"What is happening now," she continued, "is that Arabs in the southern area of Israel are applying to the ministry to renew their IDs or passports, and then, they are being informed of the revocation decision."

The stripping of citizenship, in general, is based on Israel’s 2008 "Nationality Law," which gives the courts the right to revoke citizenship in cases where there is a "doubt in loyalty to the State of Israel;" including, for instance, in the event of terrorist attacks.

Touma-Suleiman confirmed that a few individuals from the northern Arab-Israeli town of Umm al-Fahm have lost their citizenship as a result of "terrorist activities," but that this is not a scenario that applies to the Bedouins in the Negev.

In comments on Monday, an Interior Ministry spokesperson claimed that the number of people affected was inflated and that measures were being taken to rectify the situation. "The group of citizens includes about 150 people, and not 2,600," she said. "No one means to harm them. Now the ministry is asking them to legally re-register so they will remain citizens."

Speaking to The Media Line, Israeli parliamentarian for The Joint List, Dov Khenin, nevertheless slammed the Ministry’s actions and said "it has no right to revoke citizenship, which is totally against the law."

"This can only be done in the event of terror acts, and even then this is done through the courts," he concluded.

Overall, there are some 1.7 million Arabs living in Israel, approximately 20% of the total population.

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It’s time to expel the Zionist ‘Jewish’ Labour Movement from the Labour Party

October 18, 2017, 7:26 pm

≫ Next: The Campaign Against Golders Green Mosque is the tip of the racist iceberg in Britain's Jewish community

≪ Previous: This is Apartheid - Thousands of Israel’s Bedouin citizens have had their citizenship revoked

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An anti-racist party should not tolerate a racist affiliate which  supports Apartheid

In 2004 Poale Zion (the Workers of Zion) changed its name to the Jewish Labour Movement.  Like most things the JLM does, it was an act of deception.  It sought to put a distance between its Zionist origins and the newly renamed group.

 

Israeli Labour Leader Avi Gabbay reiterates  Israeli Labour's traditional hostility to the Palestinians and Israel's Palestinian citizens

To most people the Jewish Labour Movement was exactly that.  The representative of Jewish people in the Labour Party.  In fact the JLM contains a majority of non-Jewish people.  What it doesn’t contain are non-Zionist still less anti-Zionist Jews.  No Jewish person who isn’t a paid up supporter of Israel can join the JLM.  If it was honest it would call itself the Zionist Labour Movement but that would give the game away.

 

If you look at the small print on its site then you find that the JLM is an affiliate of the World Zionist Organisation and the local Zionist Federation.  It is effectively the British branch of the Israeli Labour Party which it calls its ‘sister party.’

The JLM is unique.  No other overseas party has a British branch which has all the privileges that come with being an affiliated socialist society.  If for no other reason than this, the JLM should be disaffiliated.

A poster in the campaign for Jewish Labour i.e. no Arabs

Although the JLM spends most of its time calling for its opponents, most of them Jewish, to be expelled, Jewish anti-Zionists are not proposing that the members of the JLM are expelled.  Simply that they no longer have the privileges that they presently enjoy.   The JLM have secured the expulsion of veteran Israeli anti-Zionist Moshe Machover, a long standing Israeli Jewish anti-Zionist for the crime of writing about relations between the Zionist movement and the Nazis between 1933 and 1939.  It has lobbied for both my own and Jackie Walker’s expulsion as well, of course that of Ken Livingstone, someone who has done more for anti-racism in the Labour Party than any single individual.

A poster in the campaign for Hebrew Labour

It is a disgrace that an organisation affiliated to the WZO, a body which actively funds and supports settlements in the West Bank, which supports the ‘Judaification’ i.e. destruction of Bedouin Arab villages inside Israel should be part of the Labour Party.  However what is most iniquitous is that it considers the Israeli Labour Party its sister party.  The ILP is an out and out racist party of ethnic cleansing.  The Labour Zionist movement founded the Zionist settlement in Palestine by evicting Arabs from the land.  They campaigned for Jewish labour i.e. an expulsion of Arab labour. 

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The ILP formed the government of Israel between 1948 and 1977.  It was responsible for the expulsion of over ¾ million Palestinians. It established military rule over Israel’s Arab population until 1966.  It barred Arabs from its trade unions until 1959 and then corralled them in an Arab section.  There is nothing socialist about the ILP nor has it ever claimed to be socialist.  As its former leader Shelly Yacimovich said ‘to call Labor left-wing is a historic wrong.”  I can vouch for that!  It is about as socialist as the National Socialists were. 

As Israeli society moves further and further to the Right so the ILP follows them.  Its last leader Isaac Herzog   declared that his nightmare was waking up to find that Israel had a Palestinian Prime Minister and 61 Palestinian Members of Israel’s Knesset .  Who needs the Right when we have Isaac Herzog?  Herzog also declared that he wanted to dispel the false impression that the ILP were ‘Arab Lovers’ Herzog slammed for remark about ‘Arab lovers’.  Imagine that someone were to say that their nightmare was to wake up and find Britain had a Jewish Prime Minister or that the Labour Party was not a ‘Jew lovers’ party.  The term ‘Jew lover’ and ‘N***** Lover’ used to be part of the language of the National Front and BNP.  The fact that it trips off the tongue of the head of the Israeli Labour should be an indication of what Zionism and the JLM are really about.

Israeli Labour supports the Apartheid Wall and calls for more repression in the West Bank

Herzog has recently been replaced as leader by Avi Gabbay, who served in the Cabinet of Benjamin Netanyahu.  If anything he is to the racist Right of Herzog.  He has just declared that “We will not sit in the same government as the Joint List I don’t see any [connection] between us.”  The Joint List is the 3^rd largest group in the Knesset.  It comprises 3 different parties including nationalist Balad and the Communist Party.  It is group representing the most marginalised and oppressed section of Israeli society, its Palestinian citizens.  To say you will not have Arabs in a government and since Israel was formed there has never been an Arab party in Israel’s government is racist in itself.  But the full measure of this racism is that Gabbay did not rule out sitting in the Knesset with Avigdor Lieberman, someone who wants to strip Israeli Arabs of their citizenship and deport them.  A man who has said he would like to drown the thousands of Palestinian prisoners Israel holds in the Dead Sea.

Ha’aretz quoted Balad MKs Jamal Zahalka and Talab A-Sana and Abdelmalek Dahamsha (United Arab List) ‘"How can you suggest transferring thousands of Palestinian prisoners to the Dead Sea and drowning them there?"   Gabbay hasn’t ruled out governing with Habayit HaYehudi (Jewish Home) an explicitly racist settler party of Naftali Bennett and Ayelet Shaked.  Indeed there is no Jewish or Zionist bigot he will not form a government with.  But to form a government with Arabs is out of the question.  Indeed it was because the Yitzhak Rabin government in 1993 relied on the support of Arab parties to form a governing coalition, though they were never part of it, that Rabin was assassinated by the right.

David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first Labour Prime Minister - organised the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians and turned his back on the Jews who died in the Holocaust

The JLM say they favour 2 states.  In Britain of course this is easy.  What they don’t do however is oppose either the occupation itself, the 50 years of military rule or indeed the settlements.  You won’t find one word of opposition to Israel’s nakedly racist and repressive rule on its website.  You won’t find a word of condemnation for its policy of detention and torture of child prisoners as young as 12. Indeed in the House of Commons when a debate was had on Israel’s child prisoners, Louise Ellman, its Vice President defended Israeli practices.

Two states for JLM and Labour Friends of Israel is a smokescreen for supporting the occupation.  Its ‘sister party’ in Israel however is quite clear.  It is opposed to any withdrawal from the settlements.  Indeed its last Prime Minister, Ehud Barak, has been complaining that the ILP has not been given enough credit for their establishment in the first place!  What the ILP do support however is a separation of Jews from Arabs.  It is a firm supporter of segregation and apartheid.  It is as opposed to equality between Arab and Jew even within Israel.  That is why it is an outrage that the JLM is still an affiliate of the Labour Party.

It is true that Poale Zion/JLM have been affiliated since 1920.  In those days the Labour Party was a supporter of the British Empire though it would cloak its support in the warm and comforting words of ‘trusteeship’ ie. it was looking after the colonies until such time that the Africans and Indians were capable of governing themselves, being backward people.

Today there is no Empire and there is no reason why the affiliation of the JLM, which is a relic of colonialism should be tolerated anymore.

Gabbay with former leader of the ILP Shelly Yacimovich on the left and the darling of the ILP 'left' Stav Shaffir - accused by Balad MK Jamal Zahalka of being more racist than Likud

One should point out that naturally the JLM is on the far-Right of the Labour Party.  Its vile accusations of anti-Semitism against the Left have been taken up with relish by the dinosaurs of the Right such as Tom Watson and John Mann to say nothing of papers like the Daily Mail, which in previous times support the Hitler regime and British Union of Fascist leader Oswald Moseley.  Anti-Semitism has been weaponised against the Left and supporters of Palestine.  It has never had anything to do with genuine hatred of Jews.  That is why they have campaigned in favour of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance which conflates anti-Semitism and opposition to Zionism.

In the leadership elections between Jeremy Corbyn and Owen Smith last year, the JLM voted by 92-4% for  Smith with 4% abstentions.  What is most remarkable about this vote is that even 4% of the JLM supported Corbyn.  One can only assume that they didn’t read the ballot paper clearly enough.

It parliamentary supporters include Ruth Smeeth MP who falsely accused Marc Wadsworth at the Chakrabarti press conference of ‘anti-Semitism’ for pointing out that she was trading information with a Telegraph supporter.  Smeeth is listed in Wiki Leaks as a US intelligence asset.  It was the JLM who set up Jackie Walker at their infamous ‘training session’ in 2016 Labour Party conference.

The JLM often tries to portray itself as a critic of Netanyahu’s right-wing regime in Israel.  However you would look in vain for any criticism of Israel on it web site or in its publications.  It is an apologist for Israel’s military occupation and its apartheid laws.  The JLM even stays silent about the attack on civil liberties and human rights organisations, which affects Jews as well as Arabs, inside Israel.  It was only announced today that Netanyahu is seeking to outlawthe Breaking the Silence Group, a liberal Zionist group which collates testimony from former soldiers about the abuse of Palestinian civilians.  Criticism of the army which could result in appearing before an international court of law is not to be outlawed.  However the JLM is like the 3 wise monkeys – it neither hears, sees or speaks about Israel’s move to becoming a Jewish Police State. 

The idea that a racist organisation like the JLM should be leading a training event on racism is akin to asking the late Dr Harold Shipman to take a course on medical ethics.  Perhaps the Labour Party would care to ask Weinstein if he could help in drawing up policy on Equalities with special reference to rape and sexual harassment.  That is the absurdity of having the JLM ‘training’ people in anti-Semitism.

Below are two articles from Israel’s Ha’aretz paper and one from Ben White in The Independent.  Note that the Guardian no longer covers Israel critically anymore under the Freedland regime.

Tony Greenstein

Israeli Labor Party Leader: The New Likudnik

Labor party members, like their colleagues in the left-wing camp, deserve a leader who will show loyalty to their basic values, not Likud's

Haaretz Editorial

  Oct 18, 2017 2:38 AM

The leader of Israel's main opposition party, Labour chair Avi Gabbay, is currently making headlines for all the wrong reasons.

Yesterday, Gabbay told Israeli television that he opposed discussing the removal of even the most isolated illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank. The remarks came a day after Gabbay told a meeting of party activists that “the Arabs have to be afraid of us”. He added: “They fire one missile – you fire 20. That’s all they understand in the Middle East”.

On Saturday, meanwhile, Gabbay vowed to never enter into a coalition with the Joint List, a Knesset group dominated by parties representing Palestinian citizens.

The Israeli Labor Party is often presented as a “moderate” alternative to Benjamin Netanyahu – so what’s going on here?

In one sense, it is not a big surprise; Gabbay, after all, has already previously served in a Netanyahu cabinet, as I noted when the Labour leader won the leadership election in July. Some predicted Gabbay would seek to attract Likud supporters.

But beyond Gabbay’s immediate goals, his series of blunt interventions is a valuable opportunity to subject the Israeli Labour Party to the kind of critical scrutiny it often avoids, particularly in the West, where some – like the Jewish Labour Movement and Labour Friends of Israel – support the party as “progressive” allies in the search for peace.

The uncomfortable reality is that Gabbay’s racism, as well as his support for settlements and disproportionate military force, is entirely consistent with the Labour Party’s past and present.
Previous leader Isaac Herzog ran for prime minister with an advert boasting how he “understands the Arab mentality”. On another occasion, Herzog declared: “I want to keep a Jewish state with a Jewish majority...I don’t want a Palestinian prime minister in Israel”.

It was the Labour Party, as Israeli news site +972 Magazine put it, whose “glory days included the Nakba [the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948]”, as well as “conquering and settling the West Bank and East Jerusalem”.

Just last month, former Israeli premier Ehud Barak bemoaned the fact that a state ceremony celebrating 50 years of the occupation of the West Bank did not give enough credit to the Labour leaders who “consolidated and led the settlement enterprise for a decade”.

Barak was the Labour prime minister, of course, when the Israeli army fired 1.3 million bullets at Palestinian protesters during the first few days of what became the Second Intifada.
Gabbay’s remarks provide three, vital takeaways. First, mere lip service to a “two-state solution” is meaningless because it can mean so many different things.

The Israeli Labour Party has endorsed a vision of “separation” – to an international audience, a “two-state solution” – where Palestinians are condemned to walled-in cantons. The parameters of this future Palestinian “state” are those of a Bantustan.

 “I believe that the Land of Israel belongs to the Jews," Gabbay said today. “God promised Abraham the entire Land of Israel, but I also believe that since there are 4.5 million Arabs here, we have to compromise in order to create a situation in which we live in our country with a Jewish majority."
Second, more broadly, the Israeli maximum on offer does not meet the Palestinians’ minimum – or the standards of international law.

Netanyahu likes the status quo. His coalition includes those, like Minister Naftali Bennett, who want formal annexation of the majority of the West Bank. But all the Labor Party is offering by way of an alternative is an Israeli-defined “separation” plan that smacks of a “smarter” version of apartheid.
In other words, none of the Israeli political parties who are either part of the current ruling coalition, or who could feasibly lead an alternative one, support a solution based on international law and the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination, sovereignty, and return.

Finally, understanding the nature of the Israeli opposition underlines the importance of tactics like Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS). While some claim boycotts only empower the Right, the Israeli Labour Party offers a sobering reality check about what is on offer from the “moderates”.

 A Left for Jews Only

A Labor Party leader's declaration he wouldn't include Arab parties in a potential government was an attempt to find favor in eyes of right-wing groups and Arab-haters

Haaretz Editorial

  Oct 16, 2017 1:22 AM

Labor Party leader Avi Gabbay speaks before ultra-Orthodox residents of Dimona, October 15, 2017 Eliyahu Hershkovitz

Labor Party Chairman Avi Gabbay said Saturday that his party will not agree to include the Arab parties’ Joint List in any governing coalition he heads. Speaking at a public event in Be’er Sheva, Gabbay was unequivocal: “We won’t sit in the same government with the Joint List. Period. Let that be clear. You see their behavior. I don’t see anything that connects or unites us that would enable us to sit together in the same government.”

These are very serious statements. They’re especially grave since they were uttered by the most senior representative of Israel’s center-left camp, which pretends to be the alternative to the Likud-led government. Yet in his remarks, Gabbay effectively ruled out any possibility of his party forming a future government.

His remarks also emit a strong whiff of nationalism. Gabbay didn’t promise not to sit in the same government with representatives of the far right. So why was it important to him to rule out, in advance and under any circumstances, only the Joint List – the authentic representative of most of the country’s Arab citizens?

The Joint List is a coalition of several parties that together represent the mainstream of the Israeli-Arab community, a community that comprises about one fifth of Israel’s citizens. This coalition includes a variety of opinions, some more extreme and some less so.

But Gabbay didn’t limit himself to merely disqualifying them in advance; he also stressed that his party had absolutely nothing in common with them. He has nothing in common with the Hadash and Ta’al parties’ desire for a two-state solution. He has nothing in common with the entire Joint List’s battle against the outrageous discrimination suffered by Israeli Arabs and for equal rights for all.

We can only conclude that Gabbay’s comments were an attempt to find favor in the eyes of right-wing groups and to try to glean votes from society’s Arab-haters. This is both an unacceptable endeavor and a pointless one.

To espouse vile views like this, we already have Yesh Atid Chairman Yair Lapid – the man who, in a reference to Arab MK Haneen Zoabi, once ruled out any possibility of sitting with “the Zoabis.” Now Gabbay looks like a poor man’s Lapid. And he’ll never gain power this way.

The message he’s conveying to the public is that Zionist Union – the joint Knesset slate of Labor and Hatnuah – is just another right-wing party in disguise, one that excludes Arabs from the political game just like almost all the other parties do. Labor has tried veering rightward countless times over the years, and it’s one of the main reasons for its continuous failure.

The only way to replace the right-wing government is by uniting all the forces on the left and center and presenting a real alternative. In his remarks, Gabbay chose a different path: Imitating the right, disqualifying the Arabs and presenting a false facade of leftism.

The Campaign Against Golders Green Mosque is the tip of the racist iceberg in Britain's Jewish community

October 19, 2017, 8:47 pm

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Golders Green TogetherFacebook page could have been written by the BNP and Britain First

 The Centre for Islamic Enlightening bought up the Golders Green Hipperdrome, a former BBC concert hall, in the heart of Golders Green, in July.  Golders Green contains the highest concentration of Jews in any area of London – some 37% are Jewish compared to 26% Christian and 12% Muslims.

You might think that Jews, with their experience of racism, would welcome another religious minority seeking to establish a centre alongside them.  Think again.  Today’s Jews seem to have learnt nothing from the Jewish experience of racism.

Led by outright racists such as Zionist activist Ambrosine Yolanda Shitrit, who is usually to be found demonstrating alongside Paul Besser of the neo-Nazi Britain First, a group called Golders Green Together was formed to oppose the plans.  A look at their Facebook page gives you an indication of their politics. 

Racism and Islamaphobia - the Elephant in the Room of British Jewry

Golders Green Together [GGT] was formed last year as an anti-racist group to oppose a small demonstration by neo-Nazis led by one Joshua Bonehill-Paine in Golders Green.  The demonstration was later moved by the Police to Central London.  Now a bunch of Zionist racists and Jewish (& non-Jewish) Islamaphobes have taken over the name and subverted.

What is common to these people is that their fervent Zionism.  They take their cue from Israel’s hostility to Muslims and Arabs. Israel is an object of veneration by European and American fascists because it is seen as the ideal anti-Muslim state.  In Israel what is termed the ‘Jewish State’ is openly racist.  Legislation such as the recent Muezzin Law outlaws the Muslim call to prayer.  Last year the Northern Muslim League, a group with a large degree of support amongst Israel’s Palestinian minority, was bannedby the government without even a pretence that it had broken any law.

it seems that there is also some skulduggery concerning addimg peoples' names to the racist petition

In the USA Steve Bannon’s Breitbart magazine, the flagship of the Alt-Right movement, combines White Supremacy, homophobia, hostility to feminism and anti-Semitism with fervent Zionism.  We have the neo-Nazi founder of the alt-Right, which organised the carnival of racism at Charlottesville, Richard Spencer describing himself as a White Zionist.

Campaign Against Antisemitism's Racist Portrait of Muslim Men

Groups like the misnamed Campaign Against Anti-Semitism have campaigned on the idea that Muslims are a reservoir of anti-Semitism stating openly that ‘it has long been suspected that sections of the British Muslim population harboured hatred towards British Jews.’  In 2016 they produced a Report  BRITISH MUSLIMS AND ANTISEMITISM to back up their Islamaphobic assertions.

The Reaction of the Jewish Establishment

With the Affair of the Golders Green Mosque, the Jewish establishment has reacted with something approaching horror to the racist base they are sitting on and have, up to now, encouraged.  Forget the nonsense about anti-Semitism causing only 13% of British Jews to vote Labour.  The real reason, which has been analysed by Jewish academics such as Geoffrey Alderman and William Rubinstein, is that they have climbed the socio-economic ladder.  Couple this with the support of many Jews for Israeli settler colonialism (59% declare they are Zionists according to the Attitudes of British Jews to Israel survey in 2015) and what you see is White racist supremacy in the heartland of British Jewry. 

Jews in Britain are no longer on the Left.  Support for Zionism is a mask for wider racist attitudes such as we are seeing now in Golders Green.

Both the Jewish Chronicle and Jewish News have both come out strongly against the racist campaign against the mosque.  This is to be welcomed but both papers have distinguished themselves by their uncritical support of Israel, its apartheid structures and its demonization of Arabs and Muslims. 

The 'liberal kapos' is a new one!

The Jewish News, to its credit said that they had refused to take a paid advert from the GGT hate mongers.  They also said that they had had to delete many ‘vile’ messages on the Internet including being called ‘kapos’, the Zionist term of abuse for anti-Zionists, which equates them with Jewish concentration camp guards.  The term was poplarised by David Friedman, Donald Trump’s bankruptcy lawyer and now US Ambassador in Israel.  

It is a rich irony that those who have been peddling Zionist race hate for so many years have now become victims of that hate!  The same Zionists who regularly called Jewish anti-Zionists ‘kapos’ ‘self-haters’ ‘traitors’ are now turning their fire on those of their comrades who aren’t willing to walk that extra racist mile in the fight against a Mosque.  After all where did those associations between Muslims and terrorism come from if not Israel and its associates?

The Jewish Chronicle in a remarkable editorial for it The Fig Leaf Objections compared the reaction of Jews in Golders Green to Moslems in Rotherham objecting to a synagogue.  Both would be, in its words, outrageous.  One can only presume that editor Stephen Pollard is on leave.

Local Rabbi Goldsmith made the point that the current reactions to a mosque are similar to the reaction to Jews when, in the 1920’s they moved to Golders Green. Laura Marks of the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust asked whether there would have been a similar reaction to a Christian centre moving to Golders Green and of course the answer is ‘no’ there wouldn’t. 

Zionist Tweeters fail to understand why Moslems are setting foot in a 'Jewish area' - Perhaps they have forgotten that Golders Green isn't a Jewish town in Israel

However Marks, a staunch member of the Zionist Establishment tries to play down the reaction to the Mosque.  She wrotein Why opponents of the Golders Green mosque must mind their language:

“[Some of] the language being used is simply not right.  Language has been misused by other evil regimes in subsequent genocides, and as Jews we always need to be very aware of this.

However she then pulls back and says ‘I wouldn’t for one moment suggest we are using Nazi language, but we must recognise the danger of what we say….”  This is cowardice.  The language being used by GGT is Nazi language and indeed there are neo-Nazis posting on the Facebook page.  Nearly all the FB comments are of a virulently racist nature.

Ambrosina Shitrit, 2nd left, Paul Besser of Britain 1st (left) and Hoffman (right

The reaction to the Mosque is driven by what one might call the activist wing of the Zionist movement – people like Jonathan Hoffman, Ambrosina Shitrit etc.  The horrified reaction of the Jewish Establishment is a product of its own work.  Year after year they have poured out vile propaganda against Arabs and Palestinians.  They have defended every racist action of the Israeli state and proclaimed that Israel’s murderous attacks on Gaza were an act of peace.  Is it any wonder that many Jews have assimilated the message that you can’t trust Muslims or Arabs?  These establishment worthies have gone along with everything Netanyahu has done and defended his demolition of homes, houses and even his call to Israeli Jews to vote because the Arabs are voting in droves.  The values of Zionism have seeped into the subconscious of British Jews and the petition to Barnet Council is the result.

Hoffman is able to see 'both sides of the debate' - for once

Ambrosina Shitrit's alter ego is 'Eyeonantisemitism'

Jonathan Hoffman and Zionist tropes

Jonathan Hoffman, the former Zionist Federation Vice Chair is citedin a report by the JTA as saying that ‘“There is a concern around this very divisive issue….There is concern about Muslim anti-Semitism.”  Hoffman went on to say that his comments don’t mean he personally opposes the new Centre, but merely that he understands both sides of the debate.

No doubt if there was a neo-Nazi campaign against a synagogue he would also ‘understand both sides of the debate’.  This comes from someone who has never understood the Palestinian side of the debate as he shouted down his opponents.

It is remarkably similar language to Donald Trump who instead of condemning the neo-Nazi violence at Charlottesville, instead condemned violence on ‘both sides’.

The JTA Report goes on to saythat a 2008 study by the Community Security Trust attributed a third of all violent anti-Semitic incidents to perpetrators described as having an Arab or South Asian appearance.

Golder’s Green Facebook Page and the Vile Racist Comments of Zionists

The Golders Green Facebook page is a sewer of racist bigotry.  It is a testament to what British Zionists really think when the PR and hasbara is abandoned.

Under a post heading ‘Shocking revelations now come to light re Golders Green development of a mosque at BBC hippadrome’ we have Daniel Vulkan of Jewish Voice for Labour finding his racist neighbours comments most amusing.  

There is Ambrosine Yolanda Shitrit, who is normally happiest in the company of Britain First neo-Nazis, saying that the advent of the Mosque will change peoples’ minds with Rachelle Marks commenting that ‘hope they the Muslims go away and realise they are not wanted as we need a theatre not a MOSQUE.’ Rachelle then suggests that ‘they have a mosque in a side street where it won’t be noticed’.

Comments include:

“Who are they praying to and what are they plotting? … Beware the Islamic takeover.”

“Islamic colonialism – in the heart of what was the only uniquely Jewish area in the UK.”

A Robert Sur believes that unless ‘you welcome your conquerer with open arms you are a racist islamaphobic bigot’

whereas Helen Kissen believes the Jewish Chronicle should be renamed ‘the Muslem chronicle’. 

Robert Moshi informs us that ‘the liberal kapos dominate the media’ with surly Sur telling us he lost all respect for that ‘liberal rag’ when they printed an advert for the Gaza appeal some years ago.  The idea of printing a paid for ad for the victims of Israel’s bombing clearly doesn’t appeal to these kindly souls.  It must be the first time in a long time that the JC has been described as liberal.

Robert Young tells us how he can’t bear to see ‘that little dwarf hopping around in golders green’ a reference to the local Tory MP Mike Freer who has opposed the bigots.

Robert Young, who seems to be all over GGT’s Facebook page publishes an illustration of Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on free speech and posts a link to the White Supremacist Breitbart News!

The Independentsuggests that Young is a member of the neo-Nazi Britain First, the same group that former Zionist Federation Vice Chair Jonathan Hoffman works with.  What is interesting is how he is never criticised or called out for his openly racist and neo-Nazi views by others who post to the FB page. 

Young also informed people that the noise from the call to prayer and Muslim demonstrations would be unbearable.  He informs readers that

‘On Sunday the first they swarmed the whole area with a victory parade of cars with jihadi flags and inbreds with 2 different eye-sizes.’ 

Clearly Mr Young’s talents are underused.  He could have been employed on Der Sturmer had the paper still been going.  But there is still no reaction to these overtly racist comments.  In fact Young attracted 3 'likes' for his comment about 'inbreds'.

Robert Surechoes what the Jewish Chronicle said in its Leader, that parking is a pretext for racist bigotry:

‘I am the only one with the guts to say what everybody else is thinking.  It has nothing to do with parking or traffic.  We don’t want a mosque there and who can blame us?  Those Muslims purposely picked Golders Green because it is a Jewish area.  They want to stamp us out as they have in so many other countries.’  Clearly Sur doesn’t just speak for himself as he has 4 likes – A Francesco replies in what must be a humourous comment that ‘I wouldn't be surprised if the JC was a militant lefty newspaper...’ 

A common theme among the posters is that ‘they’ want to take us over.’  Zionist activist Shitrit is at the heart of them.  Her main theme seems to be that as they have some non-Jewish racists alongside them then it’s alright. 

Other activists such as Herutnik Neal Cohenis convinced that it is all a Muslim plot.  Sur and many others reserve much of their bile for people like Laura Marks:  ‘gutless sheep. She'd hand the hangman the rope.’

Far-Right Islamaphobic Gatestone Institute is posted on GGT FB page

An article from the far-Right Islamaphobic Gatestone Institute in the USA is posted, again without any protest despite its record of publishing fake news about no-go Muslim areas in Europe and its hosting racists such as Geert Wilders.

Robert Surspeaks for many when he recalls the Gaza advert in the Jewish Chronicle.  ‘I remember that Gaza appeal. Those Jews make me wanna vomit’

One would think from reading these comments that the JC was a fully signed up supporter of the Palestinians rather than the Zionist rag that it actually is.  But the overt Zionism of the contributors stands out because that is where their racism comes from – Israel.

Plan to Open Mosque in Iconic London Jewish Community Sparks Outcry

Haaretz 14.10.2017 12:07 Updated: 12:08 PM

Move to turn Golders Green Hippodrome into an Islamic Shia center has seemingly split the local Jewish community, with some reactions being labeled 'Islamophobic'

The Golders Green Hippodrome, which might host the Hussainiyat Al-Rasool Al-Adham mosque and Islamic center. Wikimedia Commons

Plans to open a mosque in one of Britain's best-known Jewish communities has sparked a heated response from some locals, leading to accusations of Islamophobia.

The Jewish Chronicle has been reporting on the increasingly fractious developments in recent weeks after the iconic Golders Green Hippodrome – formerly a BBC concert hall seating some 3,000 people – was bought earlier this year by the Centre for Islamic Enlightening, for £5.25 million ($7 million).

The group's spokesman, Ahmed al-Kazemi, was quoted in the Jewish Chronicle as saying that the building would house the Hussainiyat Al-Rasool Al-Adham mosque and Islamic center, serving northwest London's Shia community.

The JC also reported that a petition complaining about the plan was posted on the local Barnet Council's website and received over 4,000 signatures, compared with 93 comments in favor of the mosque.

While some local residents voiced concerns about traffic jams and noise pollution, others questioned the arrival of Muslim worshippers in an area that is famously noted for its Jewish community.

One local resident wrote on the Barnet website that the move would “force the Jewish population to run away,” while another said placing "a large Muslim institution in the heart of one of London’s only two Jewish communities is a highly dangerous undertaking."

However, a prominent local rabbi, Mark Goldsmith, has criticized the comments coming from some members of the community.

"Things have been said about it being the largest mosque in Europe, and that the Shia community is a threat," Goldsmith told the JC. "That language is threatening and misleading.

“I suspect it’s the same sort of thing said about Jews moving to Golders Green in the 1920s," he added. "Golders Green is not entirely Jewish. It’s a special place to live in and we all get along together. That’s what London is about.”

Golders Green, in northwest London, has been home to a large Jewish community since the 1950s. In the most recent census, some 37 percent of the suburb was Jewish, compared to 26 percent being Christian and 12 percent Muslim. (Britain's largest Jewish population is situated further north, in Borehamwood, on the outskirts of London.)

Writing for the JC, Laura Marks – the chair of the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust – questioned whether there would have been a similar response if a Christian center were being established at the site.

Shitrit faking amazement that GGT has managed to attract some non-Jewish racists as well

 "Reading some of the comments on various chat groups by those opposed sent a shiver down my spine," Marks wrote.

"Comments such as 'We don’t know what they are preaching as it's all in Arabic,''This will result in violence and terrorism' and 'There is a chance of infiltration of bombers' are Islamophobia plain and simple," she observed.

Marks added: "I wouldn’t for one moment suggest we are using Nazi language, but we must recognise the danger of what we say and how that fuels mistrust, separation, prejudice and hatred."

Although the online petition closed on Friday, the fight looks set to continue in the months ahead.

The Islamic center hopes to open its doors for an initial Open Day in December, with its spokesman, Kazemi, being quoted in the JC as saying, "We are very pleased and excited to be in Golders Green in such a diverse area. We can’t wait to get to know our neighbors."

Voice of the Jewish News: The shameful agenda of Hippodrome hypocrites

The JC Leader: Fig leaf objections...

Hope Not Hate – Balancing Fear and Racism

Golders Green Together Facebook Page

Below is a section of Screenprints with some of the racist filth 

Israel Moves Another Step Nearer Being a Police State – Even for Jews

October 20, 2017, 4:25 pm

≫ Next: The Demolition of an Israeli Arab village is why Israel is an Apartheid State & why a racist state has no ‘right to exist’

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Plan to Outlaw ‘Breaking the Silence’ the group which reveals Israel's war crimes

The reality of the most benign occupation in the world

Settler colonial societies, be it Israel, Algeria or South Africa, always created a certain democratic space for the settler population.  The indigenous population were always faced with a racist police state but Whites South Africans, French colons or Israeli Jews were always granted freedoms that resemble those that exist in Western bourgeois societies.

However the very nature of a settler colonial society leads to a situation where those members of the settler community who sympathise with and support the oppressed native population find that their democratic space is constantly being encroached upon.  So it was in South Africa that White opponents of Apartheid were also banned, detained, framed and deported.  So too in Israel, anti-Zionist Jews are increasingly coming under pressure, political and physical.  Not just anti-Zionist Jews but even those Zionists who are human rights activists and oppose the war crimes of the settler state.

How the Right see it - revealing human rights violations is a distortion of reality

I have had an argument with a good Israeli comrade, Ronnie Barkan, who tells me that ‘Breaking the Silence’ is no better than the rest of the Zionist population.  I disagree with him.  Although they, like Btselem, are undoubtedly liberal Zionists the fact is that the work they do is seen, rightly, as a threat by the Zionist regime – and not just the regime but most of the Zionist opposition too.  The 'centrist' Yesh Atid led by Yair Lapid has been one of the most hostile parties.

Israeli NGOs have already been the target of hostile legislation.  Last year they were forced to reveal prominently in their literature if they received more than half their funding from abroad.  [Israel passes law to force NGOs to reveal foreign funding]  The reason for this was in order to demonstrate that human rights activists are really traitors, who received their money from foreign governments.  Of course there was no obligation on other mainly right-wing groups or e.g. the most popular news paper Israel Hayomwhich is funded by US billionaire to reveal its funding.

Breaking the Silence speak out in Berlin

The aim of the new law is to ban organisations which seek to harm Israeli soldiers, whatever that means and which seek to put them on trial in international courts.  BTS which collects testimony from soldiers on the human rights violations of Israeli soldiers would be caught by this.

Yair Lapid of the 'centrist' Yesh Atid attacks Breaking the Silence alongside Israeli army officers

Netanyahu pushes for bill to ban Breaking the Silence, BDS NGOs

By Lahav Harkov,  Jerusalem Post, October 17, 2017 13:29

The bill would shut down Israeli groups that try to put IDF soldiers on trial in international courts.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pauses while addressing attendees during the 70th session of the United Nations General Assembly at the U.N. Headquarters in New York, October 1, 2015. . (photo credit:CARLO ALLEGRI/REUTERS)

New legislation supported by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would shut down any organization that seeks to harm IDF soldiers or try IDF soldiers in international courts.
The bill would also ban NGOs that promote a boycott of Israel or any area in its controls, meaning that it would apply to settlement boycotts, Channel 2 reported on Monday night.

The new details followed Sunday’s unanimous decision by the coalition to launch a two-pronged attack on foreign funding of political NGOs, consisting of a parliamentary commission of inquiry into “the involvement of foreign governments in the funding of political organizations and activities to harm IDF soldiers,” and legislation that will be more stringent than the current laws requiring organizations to report foreign funding and announce it publicly if more than half of their budget comes from a foreign political entity.

Israeli soldier poses with detainees

The vast majority of organizations that are mostly funded by foreign governments  – 25 of 27 NGOs listed by the Justice Ministry in 2016 – are left-wing.

Earlier this year, Netanyahu appointed Tourism Minister Yariv Levin to come up with a new bill on the topic, because he thought the existing laws are too permissive.

Closing Breaking the Silence, which collects testimony from former IDF soldiers claiming war crimes and airs them around the world, was reportedly specifically mentioned in discussions of what the legislation should entail.

Breaking the Silence Exhibition - Netanyahu wants to clamp down on such embarrassments

Breaking the Silence’s executive director Avner Gvaryahu said his organization “is here to stay, now and after Netanyahu,” and argued that the “persecution” of his NGO is a distraction from the investigations into alleged corruption by Netanyahu.

“This is yet another pitiful witch-hunt from a right-wing government that knows its days are numbered,” he stated. “Yet again, Netanyahu chooses to use IDF soldiers, who have broken the silence and oppose the occupation, as a human shield, deflecting the consequences of his own criminal entanglements. Neither a commission of inquiry nor legislation will deter us. There is only one way to stop Breaking the Silence: end the occupation."

Opinion The Right-wing Assault on Israeli Democracy

A plan to outlaw Breaking the Silence is part of a campaign that aims to erase the liberal democracy that Israel once aspired to be

Chemi Shalev Haaretz, Oct 17, 2017 5:45 PM

The reported plan to declare the anti-occupation NGO Breaking the Silence illegal is an indication of Israel’s heavy-handed government and of its weakened democracy. It would be considered breaking news were it not for the fact that it is actually more of the same. The blacklisting of Breaking the Silence, which would surely serve as a gateway to banning more dissent, is part of the overall right-wing assault on the liberal democracy that Israel once aspired to be. Like the (apparently false) claim that a frog will tolerate water being heated up until it’s boiled to death, Israeli public opinion, including the part that was supposed to offer resistance, has adapted to the dismantlement in stages of the country’s democracy. If and when the public wakes up, it might very well be too late.

The onslaught is being executed on many fronts. It is a calculated and integrated campaign. To allow the government to enact anti-democratic laws as it sees fit, it must first revoke the authority of the High Court of Justice to nullify Knesset legislation. To diminish the stature of the court, the justice minister tries to clip its wings through legislation while her fellow coalition members delegitimize the High Court’s decisions and makeup. Without the threat of High Court nullification, right-wing lawmakers can start dreaming about remaking Israeli democracy into the Jewish ethnocracy they desire. To justify the required curtailment of equality and civil rights, Israeli Arabs are portrayed as a Fifth Column, opponents of the occupation become terrorist collaborators and demonstrators for the rule of law are dubbed anarchists and harassers. All the while, the government’s education commissar tries to edit academic freedom to make it conform to government policy and its culture czar threatens the livelihood of artists who challenge dogma and buck right-wing convention.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s efforts to save himself from what increasingly look like likely indictments only add fuel to the fire already consuming Israeli democracy. A frantic and haunted prime minister waging a personal vendetta against the media and the legal system for his own survival is a crucial element in the anti-democratic revolution. So the coalition stays silent when Netanyahu attacks the police just as they will look the other way when he will try to intimidate his potential Justice Ministry prosecutors, not to mention the ecstasy that engulfs right wingers whenever Netanyahu tries to torment the media. He launches bitter personal attacks on journalists, like Donald Trump on steroids, opens and closes public broadcasting stations, like Romania’s Nicolae Ceausescu or Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, enforces regulations or relaxes the rules to send a message to reporters – but mainly to those who pay their salaries – that investigative exposés and biting criticism might not be the shortest avenue to fame and fortune.

The breaking and smashing frenzy, which is slated to peak in the Knesset’s upcoming winter session, is shared by cynical politicians and true fanatics. The former are looking for headlines that will grab their incited voters but the latter represent a comprehensive world view that derides Western and liberal values and seeks to replace them with an authoritarian regime in which Jews reign supreme. They want to discriminate between Jews and Arabs without knee-jerk liberals getting in their way, to grab Palestinian land while the High Court cowers in the corner, and to continue managing the occupation in darkness, without the rays of disinfecting sunlight occasionally shed by NGOs such as Breaking the Silence and B’Tselem.

This aggressive campaign is fed by the right wing’s perpetual self-victimization, orchestrated and conducted by Netanyahu himself, and by the arrogance of Likud politicians – and those from the national-religious Habayit Hayehudi (Jewish Home) Party even more so – who show no compunction about undermining the values that made Israel what it is today. Maybe their amok is a function of an urge to erase the last remnants of the Israel in whose creation and consolidation their political movements played only a minor role. After the mission is accomplished, the internal destroyers and demolishers of the Zionist revolution that created the state can continue pretending that they are its children and successors.

The Demolition of an Israeli Arab village is why Israel is an Apartheid State & why a racist state has no ‘right to exist’

October 22, 2017, 4:12 pm

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Raba Abu al-Kiyan, the widow of Yakub, next to the rubble of their home in Umm al-Hiran. Alex Levac

If you want to know why Israel is a racist state, with racism embedded in its DNA, then read the following stories.  It is also why Israel is not a 'normal' Western bourgeois democratic state.  Only a settler colonial state demolishes whole villages belonging to a particular ethnicity in order to build on top of it a town belonging to the colonial elite, in this case Jews.  And of course, unlike the Arab village of Umm al-Hiran, the Jewish town of Hiran will have running water, electricity, be connected to the sewerage etc.  Such things are taken for granted in Jewish towns but not in 'unrecognised' Arab villages.

A Bedouin village, Umm al-Hiran in Israel’s Negev desert (not the Occupied West  Bank or Gaza) which, after over 60 years, was demolished in order to make way for the ‘Jewish’ town of Hiran.

The Negev is largely unoccupied.  Few Jews want to live there.  It would have been easy to  build a Jewish town next to Umm al Hiran but that would have defeated another racist master plan, the Prawer Plan.  It is an article of faith amongst Israel’s planners and demographers that the Negev must be Judified.  In other words Arabs must be confined to their own shanty towns at the disposal of Israeli industry.  The High Court when allowing the demolition was told that the new town of Hiran would include Arabs but now they have been told that only religious Jews will be allowed to join.  The High Court, having willingly been deceived, is not likely to overturn its original judgement.  Today Israel’s High Court, which has always been complicit in Zionist colonisation and ethnic cleansing, is being cleansed of any Judge who is seen as concerned about human rights.  The Court is both being stuffed with right-wing settler justices and it is under attack because it isn’t racist enough.

Tony Greenstein

Gideon Levy: A Southern Israeli Village's Fate: Bedouin Out, Jews In

Eight months ago, Yakub Abu al-Kiyan was killed by police during a protest against the demolition of Bedouin houses to make way for Jewish ones; his widow and 10 kids are living in a tent next to the rubble of their home

Gideon Levy and Alex Levac Sep 08, 2017 8:13 PM

Wearing black, she emerges from her tent, a beautiful, smiling woman whose face is etched with the lines of life’s ordeals. Raba Abu al-Kiyan, the widow of Yakub – the teacher who was shot to death on January 18 by the Israel Police, who in a snap decision concluded that he was trying to run them over – lives in a tent next to the ruins of her home in the Bedouin village of Umm al-Hiran in the Negev.

When we visited here a few days after the incident, Raba repeatedly circled the rubble, mutely. Her nephew Akram, a medical student in Moldova, told us at the time that she was reconstructing her last moments with Yakub. This week she stood at the entrance to the large tent that is her home and that of her 10 children and one grandchild, and, in the late-summer heat, bottle of water in hand, agreed to talk.

For eight months – through winter, spring, summer and now with the onset of autumn – the bereaved family has called this tent home. The heaps of rubble nearby have lain untouched since that fateful, early January morning, the morning of the killing and destruction in Umm al-Hiran. The ruins of the parents’ house, the children’s house, the animal pen – all are just as they were. People don’t clear away the rubble in Umm al-Hiran, because they understand that in any event they’re living on borrowed time here.

On July 18, the bulldozers returned and started to prepare the ground for the religious-Jewish community of Hiran, which is to be built on the ruins of the Bedouin village. The work is going on just steps away from the tent where Raba and her children live. They probably won’t be able to stay here much longer.

Her father called her Raba ("four," because she was the fourth child) and her mother called her Najah, which means “success.” Raba-Najah was born 46 years ago on this now rubble-strewn soil. Her husband Yakub’s second wife, Amal, had gone to visit her parents the day we visited. Amal is the widow of his deceased brother; Yakub married her after his brother died, according to tradition.

A pall of despair seems to have descended on Umm al-Hiran. No one is expanding his house, no one is renovating or fixing anything – neglect is rampant. The mounds of ruins have become street furniture, the meager plantings have wilted, there’s no reason to cultivate anything. The generators, the black water containers, the satellite dishes and the solar panels – all are now signs of transience here, scattered about on the ground, after dozens of years of habitation. Only the access road to the community, formerly scarred and pot-holed, was miraculously repaired and repaved recently. After all, it’s going to serve Jewish residents soon.

An uneasy silence hovered over Umm al-Hiran under a blazing noontime sun, penetrated occasionally by the bleating of a lamb or the crying of an infant. Everyone understands that the fate of the village is sealed: Bedouin out, Jews in. And not just any Jews – according to the charter of the new community that will be built here, its land will be sold exclusively to “observers of the Torah and the precepts according to the values of Orthodox Judaism.” The core settler group is already waiting, living in mobile homes, in the nearby Yattir Forest.

Two weeks ago, the district planning and building committee approved a plan for the evacuees of the Bedouin village to be moved to a provisional site for 15 years, in Hura in the southern Negev. In the entire expanse of this vast desert, only here in Umm al-Hiran was a place found for Jews to settle in, on the site of yet another demolished village.

Residents look at the remains of homes demolished in the Bedouin village of Umm al-Hiran in southern Israel, January 25, 2017.Alex Levac

Strewn about, across from Raba’s tent, the double mattress she shared with her husband lies amid solar panels; their personal effects remain trapped under concrete beams. Iron rods, kitchen cupboards, a basin. Of the small olive grove that Yakub tended, the wreckers left only one ornamental tree, which thrusts up from the ruins.

“They thought that was their tree, a tree that we didn’t plant, so they let it be,” Raba says, “but it’s a tree that Yakub planted.” The sheep Yakub raised as a hobby, which were the apple of his eye, also survived and now lie, reeling from the heat, in a small new pen that was built for them. Two mangy stray dogs have found shelter under the wreckage of a car.

Along the sloping dirt road on which Yakub drove slowly to his death, exactly at the place where he was shot by the police, a modest monument of stones in his memory has been erected, surrounded by used tires. Before leaving his house in his jeep, he told Raba and the children to stay clear. “It’s dangerous here,” Yakub said. His family never saw him again.

Last weekend, on Id al-Adha, the Feast of the Sacrifice, Raba prepared two holiday meals, one “a meal for Yakub,” the other for guests. She took the meal for her late husband to the mosque and donated it to the needy.

The couple’s eldest son, Hussam, 25, completed medical school in Odessa and is now preparing for the Israeli certification examinations. Unable to study in the hot, crowded tent, he travels to Be’er Sheva every day, to the library of Ben-Gurion University; his father had a master’s degree in computer engineering from BGU.

Daughter Maryam, 21, emerges from the tent and joins the conversation. Smiling and exuding charm, she’s a student at Kaye Academic College of Education in Be’er Sheva. At the time of her father’s death, she was doing a trial week as a kindergarten teacher. Three weeks later, she sat for exams. She says she was unhappy with the grades she attained, in the shadow of the trauma.

A memorial for Yakub Abu al-Kiyan in Umm al-Hiran. Alex Levac

When her mother stumbles while speaking Hebrew, Maryam helps her out. Her teacher-training studies haven’t yet resumed for the fall, so she’s helping out in the tent. There are no toilet facilities, and the only electric power they have is generated by a solar device.

Everyone in the village has been living in the shadow of fear since January, Maryam says, especially the children.

“I am in a constant state of worry,” she says. “Maybe they will come back again to demolish. Maybe we will leave home in the morning and won’t be able to come back in the afternoon because everything will be blocked and they will level the rest of the houses. If they destroy my home, they will destroy all the memories that it contains for me.”

In the meantime, other than a widow’s allowance from social security, Raba hasn’t received anything from the state, whose leaders lost no time calling her husband – a revered teacher – a “wicked terrorist,” in the words of Police Commissioner Roni Alsheich. Later they half-retracted what they had said, without apologizing. Nor is the Justice Ministry department that investigates the police in any hurry to help out. Following reports that the department's investigators had found a “grave operational failure” in the conduct of the police on January 18, and that “there was probably no terrorist event”– an oppressive, prolonged silence has prevailed, as though the case has been closed.

At the other end of the village, Yakub’s nephew, Raad Abu al-Kiyan, continues to wage a struggle for the community’s survival. Forty years old, polished and articulate, he’s the chairman of the village committee and he sets forth his views again, tirelessly. His wife, Maryam, who has a master’s in public policy management from BGU, is the chairwoman of a local women’s group.

Raad works in the realm of environmental quality, but won’t say where.

“They killed Yaakov and Musa,” he says, referring to his uncle and to his grandfather, Musa, Yakub’s father, who died 21 days after his son was killed, possibly from heartbreak.

“We’ve lived here for 62 years without getting a thing from state, which settled us here. And now the state rewards us with murder – a state that employs all its force against its citizens,” Raad says. “We asked for a partner who would come and talk with us. Who would bring a real offer. But they don’t want an agreed-upon solution. They want to do things by force. Why is there only an enforcement unit that operates against the Bedouin, the [Israel Police’s] Yoav Unit? Is there a unit against people from the Caucasus? Against the Russians? The Ethiopians? Why is there an enforcement unit only against us?

“We suggested that we live together, one next to the other,” he continues. “But the Hiran charter states that the community will be only for Orthodox Jews. Why did Yakub and Musa have to be killed in order to bring Yaakov and Moshe instead? It’s no small thing, what happened on January 18. The world knows what happened here. Now they want to do things by force again, but without anyone noticing. To remove Umm al-Hiran from the ‘front,’ to soften things, so it’s not felt – and then to expel us. We don’t know what to expect, but we haven’t lost hope. A hope that’s 2,000 years old.”

Adds Raba: “Aren’t we citizens? I tell my friends from Hebron: You live better than us. You have land. We don’t even have that.”

Her daughter, Maryam, points to the concrete ceiling that lies crushed on the ground. “This is where we did our homework, and here’s where we played, so we wouldn’t bother Dad, who liked quiet.”

Every month Raba visits Yakub’s grave, at nearby Tel Shoket. She was there early this week, too, with two of her children. What do you tell her husband in his grave? “That God will help.”

Labour Against the Witchhunt Forms in Response to Expulsion of Moshe Machover – Join Us

October 22, 2017, 7:39 pm

≫ Next: EXCLUSIVE Iain McNicol’s Dirty Tricks Brigade Infiltrates Labour Against the Witchhunt Meeting

≪ Previous: The Demolition of an Israeli Arab village is why Israel is an Apartheid State & why a racist state has no ‘right to exist’

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The Compliance Unit and Iain McNicol Are The Last Bastion of the Right

prescient

See the Labour Against the Witchhunt Facebook Page

The time has come to fight back.  The Left simply cannot allow the Right to continue with expelling those they don’t like.  The Momentum leadership under Lansman, which should have taken on the fight against the witch hunt has, instead, got into bed with the witch hunters.  It was Lansman and his friends who laid the basis for Jackie Walker’s suspension from the Labour Party by removing Jackie from her position as Vice Chair of Momentum.  If people really want to see a radical and socialist government under Jeremy Corbyn we have to stop the witch hunt in its tracks.  Indeed we need to be rooting out the Blairite bureaucracy.

Iain McNicol - received a hero's welcome at Labour Friends of Israel - mastermind of the anti-Corbyn witch hunt

Labour Against the Witch hunt was formed on Saturday and we have a few simple positions;

• 1.      No auto exclusions  Everyone has the right to a hearing.  The Chakrabarti Report found that Labour’s disciplinary and complaints procedures “... lacked sufficient transparency, uniformity and expertise” and failed to observe “the vital legal principles of due process (or natural justice) and proportionality”.
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• 2.      It is unacceptable that there are differing definitions of anti-Semitism.  Anti-Semitism isn’t a difficult thing to define.  It is hostility or hatred of Jews.  You don’t need a 450 word definition unless your purpose is to conflate opposition to Zionism, the ideology that led to the foundation of the Israeli state and genuine anti-Semitism.

Corbyn has adopted the short, two sentence International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition

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

The AWL's 'Stop the Purge' supports the purge of Ken Livingstone

This definition is itself too imprecise, open ended and uncertain.  What makes it unacceptable is that it introduces and lays the basis for 11 ‘examples’ of anti-Semitism, 7 of which relate to Israel.  In other words the whole purpose of the definition is to conflate anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism.  Whilst Corbyn has not adopted these 11 examples the Labour bureaucracy has.  We have therefore adopted the definition first espoused by Professor Brian Klug of Oxford University in his lecture ‘Echoes of Shattering Glass’ delivered in his 2014 lecture in Berlin’s Jewish Museum on the anniversary of Kristallnacht. 

‘antisemitism is a form of hostility to Jews as Jews, where Jews are perceived as something other than what they are.’

The article that triggered the  expulsion of Moshe Machover

 3.      Thirdly our demand is that the Compliance Unit is abolished.  It is completely undemocratic and unaccountable.  Instead all disciplinary action is to be taken by elected bodies in future.

It is important that LAW builds itself quickly in the coming months and engages in a series of activities, such as a picket of the NEC to demand the reinstatement of Moshe Machover to holding meetings and a conference.

A four person Executive Committee was elected – Jackie Walker, Stan Keable, Pete Firmin and Tony Greenstein.

Political Background

The Labour Party Conference just gone was a dismal and dispiriting time for Jeremy Newmark, Mike Katz and the Jewish Labour Movement/Labour Friends of Israel.

When Naomi Wimborne Iddrissi and Leah Levane got up to decry the false anti-Semitism smears of both organisations there was rapturous applause and even standing ovations.  When Jeremy Corbyn mentioned Palestine the audience got to their feet.  Nothing was guaranteed to elicit a cheer more than mention of Palestine.

I realise dear reader that you are unlike to be too sympathetic to Newmark and Katz but I ask you not to be too cold hearted either.  For two years they have campaigned incessantly to conflate anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism.  They have secured the suspension of Jackie Walker (twice) myself and even some non-Jews for ‘anti-Semitism’.  They have lobbied, pressurised, campaigned and of course briefed their friends in the Tory press.  It’s almost as if no one reads the Daily Mail in the Labour Party.

And then what?  None of it has made a blind bit of difference because the Labour Party conference swung to the Left.  What was the point of that £1m slush fund for Joan Ryan MP if nothing has changed?  Why Newmark even overcame his distaste for the Left and befriended and flattered Jon Lansman, the property millionaire owner of Momentum.  Ok he’s not that much to the left for you and me but to Newmark he is a raving communist. 

Newmark even fooled Lansman into thinking he was a socialist-Zionist of the Mapam stripe. (for those who don’t know Mapam, although Zionists, have tended to support certain basic civil liberties for Arabs in Israel – today they are part of Meretz and clinging onto a presence in the Knesset).  In fact Newmark goes along with the Occupation, house demolitions the lot.

To make matters even worse, first Free Speech on Israel held a meeting at Monday lunch time which was packed to the rafters and then Jewish Voices for Labour, despite being wet and woolly, held its inaugural rally on Monday evening, also packed to the rafters.  Even worse still two union bosses including Len McLuskey from Unite, attend pledging support.

LRC meeting in Brighton with Jackie Walker

And as if to make this really the Conference from hell, Jeremy Corbyn became the first Labour leader to snub the Labour Friends of Israel fringe meeting in 20 years.  Emily Thornberry, bless her heart, tried to comfort the assembled big wigs, Mark Regev and assorted Zionist nobodies with a tale of Corbyn being hard at work on his speech.  However he was caught on camera having a good time at the Daily Mirror piss up!  When Joan Ryan, Labour’s Tory MP for Enfield North read out a message from Corbyn there were cries of ‘where is he’‘why is he not here?’.  You see LFI expects Corbyn to attend to demonstrate they are still a force to be reckoned with.

It was reported that Iain McNicol, Labour’s crooked General Secretary, was given a hero’s reception and quite right too. When all is lost McNicol has always been steady as a rock.  He has been so reliable that it is hard to imagine he doesn’t have a formal relationship with the Israeli and US Embassies.  Paid or unpaid is anyone’s guess.

Rhea Wolfson on Labour's NEC, an AWL sympathiser supported Jackie Walker's referral to the National Constitutional Committee - spoke at the Stop the Purge meeting at LP Conference

Sure enough, when all else fails, then you have to fall back on that tried and trusted weapon, ‘Anti-Semitism’. So it was that Naomi was made the subject of a complaint because she had accused the JLM of running to the Telegraph and Mail.  How dare she say such a thing?  She mentioned Jews, well Zionists, in the same sentence as the press.  That is an ‘anti-Semitic trope’.  As Jamie Stern-Weiner points out the old anti-Semitic myth revolved around Jewish ownership and control of the media not briefing the press, but such a distinction really is being pedantic.  That means she is an anti-Semite and should be suspended if not expelled for her disgraceful speech.  Indeed everyone who stood and applauded her should be expelled for giving their approval although I accept that it might be difficult knowing who stood up and who didn’t (this can be solved by expelling all the conference delegates bar Progress supporters).

At the Free Speech on Israel meeting the Israeli speaker, Miko Peled argued in favour of free speech on Israel and all political issues.  He even mentioned ‘Holocaust yes or no’.  This was enough for the press to invent an allegation that Holocaust denial was the main topic of the meeting!  And because Tony Greenstein was present at the meeting Brighton and Hove Council’s Progress Leader Councillor Warren Morgan called for me to be expelled alongside saying that he wouldn’t invite Labour to hold a conference in Brighton again.  Kinda logical that.  Clearly both of us being Jewish we share equal responsibility for what each of us said in the meeting!  Eat your heart out Uncle Joe!

Tory Guido Fawkes is in full support of the JLM Witchhunt

And the coup de grace?  Well the JLM had been particularly annoyed by a paper that Labour Party Marxists had distributed at conference.  It contained an article by Professor Moshe Machover, an Israeli anti-Zionist and founder of Matzpen, a socialist organisation of Israelis and Arabs.  The article had the temerity to quote the Deputy Chief of the SS, Reinhard Heydrich in 1935 saying how much the Nazis favoured the Zionists as opposed to the ‘assimilationists’ in the German Jewish community.  Now it is irrelevant that this quote can be found in the book of Zionist Professor of Holocaust Studies, Francis Nicosia.  The fact that it is true is also irrelevant.  To repeat such things today is clearly anti-Semitic!  Moshe also mentioned the welcome that the Zionists gave to the Nuremburg Laws of 1935.  Again he refused to understand that things look so very different 80 years later.

So Iain McNicol and his monkey, Sam Matthews hit on the bright idea of expelling Moshe.  Because he is a professor he might cause trouble.  So they ‘auto excluded’ him, which saves the trouble of a hearing, evidence etc.  and after having to write him two expulsion letters, because the first was not clear enough they explained that it was his links with LPM and the Communist Party of Great Britain that was the real reason for the expulsion.