Labour Changes Manifesto as a result of Zionist Pressure – No Condemnation of Israeli Settlements or Violence

The article below by Asa Winstanley makes it clear that the draft Labour manifesto was altered as a result of  pressure from the Labour Friends of Israel, which is nothing more than a front for the Israeli Labour Party, and the Jewish Labour Movement, an extension of the Israeli Labour Party inside our Labour Party.  

A statement that the expansion of settlements on the West Bank was ‘wrong and illegal’ was taken out at the last minute.  Likewise a statement that ‘that Labour “cannot accept the continued humanitarian crisis in the Occupied Palestinian Territories” was also removed.

The humanitarian crisis in Gaza includes hunger, people dying for lack of medicines, water that is 90% unfit to be drunk and an  inability to rebuild after Israel's last attack because Israel refuses to allow building materials in (in conjunction with the Egypian police state under Sisis with whom Israel works).  Couple this with electricity for 3-4 hours a day, 80% unemployment, Israel regularly shooting and killing Gaza fishermen because Israel doesn't like Palestinians in Gaza having independent access to food resources, and you have a humanitarian catastrophe.  Corbyn's gutlessness in not facing that snake Tom Watson down and insisting that Israel is at fault is despicable.

The idea that 'rockets' from Gaza, which are little more than car exhausts and which haven't in any case been fired now for some 2 years, equates to the FI-5 fighter planes of Israel and the one ton bombs they drop on civilian areas is to equate the violence of the Yugoslav resistance with that of the Nazis.

The reason why the initial policy statements were dropped?  These statements were unbalanced.  Presumably a condemnation of Apartheid in South Africa would also have been ‘unbalanced’ as far as the White Supremacists were concerned.  How can you be neutral between an occupier and the occupied?  The idea of 'equivalence' between an occupier and an occupied people, who are subject to the full force of military repression is obscene.

Israel maintains a military and settler colonial occupation of the West Bank.  3 million Palestinians have no civil or political rights.  They are governed by an entirely different set of laws and regulations to Jewish settlers, Military Law as opposed to Israel’s civil law, is usually known as Apartheid.  When one takes into account that Israel’s Palestinians are also treated as a guest population, segregated and the subject of violence and discrimination, in Israel on sufferance, then the removal of even the reference to the continued humanitarian crisis, especially in Gaza is a disgrace.

Corbyn spent 30+ years in the Palestine solidarity movement.  His capitulation to the Zionist lobby is sad.  The same lobby which, in the case of the Jewish Labour Movement voted 92-4% to support Owen Smith last summer.  The Chair of the JLM Jeremy Newmark has made it clear that in the event of him being elected, fortunately very unlikely, he would not support Jeremy Corbyn alongside a number of right-wingers such as Hove’s Peter Kyle and John Woodcock.

The Israeli state isn't the cuddly and warm Jewish state that its propagandists over here put over.  Israel is the state that forged the closest alliance with Apartheid South Africa.  It is the state that supplied, armed and trained the Guatemalan military who murdered up to 200,000 Mayan Indians.  In other words Israel is a pariah state led by war criminals.

Unfortunately there is no Palestine solidarity group inside the Labour Party to counter the Israeli Embassy’s groups – Labour Friends of Israel and Jewish Labour Movement.

Tony Greenstein

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Asa WinstanleyLobby Watch 17 May 2017

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn launching the party’s 2017 manifesto. (Labour Party)

A section about Palestine in the UK Labour Party’s new manifesto was significantly altered after intervention from the Israel lobby.

The main opposition party published a list of pledges this week ahead of a general election on 8 June.

A draft of the manifesto was leaked to the press last week.

Reference in the draft to “expansion of Israeli settlements on the Palestinian West Bank” being “wrong and illegal” was removed from the final document.

A second line stating that Labour “cannot accept the continued humanitarian crisis in the Occupied Palestinian Territories” was also removed.

According to London newspaper The Times, the changes were made after Jeremy Newmark, chair of pro-Israel group the Jewish Labour Movement, complained about the draft being an “unbalanced, partisan” text.

The final document demanded both “an end to the [Israeli] blockade” of Gaza, its “occupation and settlements” and an “end to [Palestinian] rocket and terror attacks.” By doing so, it created a false equation between the violence of Israel, a highly militarized state, and the resistance tactics used by some Palestinian groups in response to Israeli oppression.

But Labour’s commitment to recognizing a Palestinian state was also made more explicit in the final version.

The draft had only said a Labour government would “support Palestinian recognition at the UN.” The final version commits the party to “immediately recognize the state of Palestine” if it wins the election.

Labour Friends of Israel, a pressure group within the party, has described the changes as a “difficult win,” according to The Jewish Chronicle.

Jeremy Newmark did not reply to request for comment.

Newmark is a long-standing leader in the UK’s Israel lobby, and has a history of working closely with the Israeli government against the Palestine solidarity movement.

He is standing as Labour’s candidate for a north London seat in Parliament.

The final version of the manifesto’s section on Palestine seems to have been essentially reverted to the pledges Labour made before the 2015 general election. The two wordings are almost identical, apart from the references to Palestinian “terror attacks” and the “state of Palestine.”

The manifesto now says that “there can be no military solution to this conflict and all sides must avoid taking action that would make peace harder to achieve.”

The 2017 Labour manifesto has been hailed as radical and is proving to be popular with voters.

Although Labour is still trailing the ruling Conservative Party in opinion polls, its ratings have been surging after unvealing a series of policy proposals.

Supposedly “radical” Labour policies such as building 100,000 social-rent homes a year and slightly increasing tax for those with an annual salary exceeding £80,000 ($104,000) were once polical consensus, carried out by Labour and Conservative governments alike.

It is only because politics in the UK swung so far right under Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives in the 1980s, and later under Tony Blair’s New Labour, that current leader Jeremy Corbyn’s modest social democratic program can be portrayed by a hostile media as a dangerous and “radical” document which would take the UK “back to the 1970s.”

But when it comes to Palestine, the manifesto seems to reflect long-failed conventional “wisdom.”

And it proposes no sanction that would hold Israel to account for its human rights violations against Palestinians. Even the draft version contained no such proposal.

When it comes to foreign policy, Corbyn’s “radicalism” remains very much constrained by the Labour Party’s right-wing, pro-Israel remnants.