Today we will see if what's left of the Labour Left has the Courage to Defy Starmer and Support the SNP Call for an Immediate Ceasefire
For over a month Brighton and Hove Labour
Group, which controls the Council and was hand selected by a special National
Executive panel, (Labour members could not be trusted to select their own
candidates) kept its silence whilst Israel perpetrated a horrific massacre of Palestinians
in Gaza.
Nearly two weeks ago I wrote to
them asking why, when over 600 Labour Councillors nationally had
written to Starmer calling on him to call for an immediate ceasefire, many
of them resigning because of Labour’s support for genocide in Palestine, not
one member of the Labour group had felt able to add their name. In contrast 7
Labour councillors in nearby Worthing had added their names to a petition.
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Brighton & Hove Trades Council Demonstration at The Level
The statement
that the Labour Group issued is, as my Open Letter states, pathetically weak in
every respect. It recognises the ‘right’ of Israel to bomb and maim Palestinians
in Gaza but asks it to take care it doesn’t overdo it. It recognises Israel’s ‘right
to self defence’ but accords no similar right to the Palestinians. Thus it
condemns the October 7 breakout from the world’s largest open air prison but
has nothing to say about 17 year
suffocating siege.
During Israel's attack on Gaza, Israeli Palestinians are being subjected to Police attacks and racist attacks on them as a fifth column
This is why Brighton and Hove Trades
Council is calling the demonstration. The Labour Group includes a number of
openly racist Zionist supporters including Julie Cattell, a member of Sussex Friends
of Israel and Emma Daniel, who managed Starmer’s leadership campaign in Brighton.
Labour Councillors Pretend that the Conflict Began on October 7th
There was a time, though it now
seems in the distant past, when councillors like Francis Tonks, who is now in
his 90s, could be relied on to support all manner of anti-imperialist and
progressive causes. No longer. The
Labour Group is consistently reactionary in every respect. It is made in the image of Labour’s robotic
leader Starmer.
Devastation in Gaza
The Labour Group statement calls
for the moribund and defunct apartheid two state solution. The same formula
that has acted as a cover for the continual expansion of settlements on the West
Bank. There is not a cat in hell’s chance of such a solution being adopted by
an Israeli cabinet dominated by those who want to transfer the Palestinians out
of Palestine altogether.
Perhaps Hamas was operating from the world's third oldest church too?
But even if Israel’s politicians
were to adopt the two state solution then I would oppose it. A Jewish state is
an anachronism. It is a Jewish racial state, granting supremacy to Jews over
non-Jews.
There was a time in Europe when
there were also Christian ethno-religious states – Hungary, Romania, Slovakia and
Croatia. They were without exception the most anti-Semitic states which eagerly
participated in the Jewish holocaust.
Israel has done its best to distort what happened on October 7 when the majority of civilians were killed by the Israeli military
Croatia was the only state to have
its own extermination camp, Jasenovac, which was mainly for Serbs but still
murdered thousands of Jews. Slovakia was the first state to deport its Jews.
Romania’s treatment of its 600,000 Jews, half of whom it murdered, was so bad that Hans Frank,
the Nazi governor of Poland remarked that the Nazis practiced surgery not
butchery. Hungary saw, thanks to Zionist collaboration in the form of the
Labour Zionist leader Rudolf Kasztner, the extermination of 400, 000 of its Jews
at the wars end.
Israeli doctors play the same role as the Nazis' SS Doctors played - advocating the bombing of Gaza's hospitals
When Zionists proclaim that there
is only one Jewish state in the world my reply is that this is one too many.
Religious ethnic states are a throwback to medieval Europe. It was one of the
achievements of the French Revolution in 1789, that it granted emancipation and
equality to its Jewish citizens. Zionism was founded on a rejection of Jewish Emancipation.
Rabbi Dov Lior, Police Minister Ben Gvir's spiritual mentor, one said that a Jewish fingernail was worth more than a thousand non-Jewish lives -
Ignoring Jewish genocidal racism in
Israel is essential if one is going to support a ‘Jewish’ state. The fact is,
as I point out in the letter, that half of Israel’s Jewish population want to
expel the Arab minority. 93% of Israeli land is off-limits to Israel’s Palestinian
citizens but this and much else is simply ignored as is the fact that the
favourite chant of the Israeli Right today is ‘Death to the Arabs’ a variation on the old Polish/Nazi chant of ‘Death to the Jews’.
Tomorrow Labour MPs have the chance
to defy Starmer and vote for the SNP
amendment calling for an immediate ceasefire. I suspect that most of what
is called the Socialist Campaign Group will meekly troop into the lobbies behind
Starmer’s amendment calling for humanitarian pauses. Unfortunately most of the
SCG lack what most normal people have – a backbone.
Blood on the ambulance from Israeli bombing
What Israel’s
genocidal attack on Gaza has highlighted is how Starmer is signed up to the imperialist
agenda. International law has gone out of the window. Yesterday 23 International
Law academics wrote
to Starmer pointing out that Labour policy tramples over international law
concerning collective punishment. That Starmer is supposedly a human rights
lawyer merely compounds this.
Tomorrow at 6 pm we will gather
outside Hove Town Hall in protest at the Labour group’s support for Israel’s
genocidal attack on the Palestinians.
Tony
Greenstein
