‘This is not a political trial it
is a criminal trial’ – so sing Judge
and Prosecution in harmony
I promised
in my last blog to provide an update on the trial at Wolverhampton Crown Court
in which I’m charged, together with 5 others, with having in my possession ‘articles withintent to destroy or damage’ property belonging to Elbit.
Overwhelmed as I am by messages of support (see comments) the supporters of Ben Gvir, Smotrich and Israel's genocidalists are crossing their fingers in the hope I will be locked up!
I was
informed by my barrister, Danielle Manson from Garden Court Chambers that the
reason why I am the lead defendant is because of my blog
of two years ago! A rare honour indeed. No
doubt I shall be cross-examined on every word and past participle.
There is
one theme that Judge Chambers and Prosecutor Deborah Gould are agreed on and
that is that this trial has nothing to do with politics. It’s only about criminal conduct and criminal
damage in particular.
If Chambers
and Gould are to be believed, then 6 people, most of whom did not even know
each other beforehand, conspired to engage in a spot of vandalism on the
morning of March 9th for no other reason than that they felt in a
destructive mood. Quite why we didn’t focus on breaking a few windows nearer
home or vandalizing a phone box is one of life’s mysteries.
Six members of the German Jewish Resistance Group in Nazi Germany Who in May 1942 set fire to Goebbel's Soviet Paradise Exhibition in Berlin's Lustgarten. They had broken the law and were beheaded. According to Judge and Prosecutor in the trial, adherence to the law is a supreme value
There is
therefore a deliberate attempt to exclude or play down the real reasons for
what happened, i.e. the role of Elbit in manufacturing drones such as Hermes
450 which has been responsible for the death of thousands of Palestinian civilians,
to say nothing of its supply of drones to the Indian army for use in Kashmir
and its supply of weaponry to the genocidal junta in Burma.
Herbert Baum - executed leader of the German Jewish anti-Nazi Baum Group - died under torture
Jo
Wadsworth, the Blairite co-editor of the Brighton & Hove News published
an article on the case today. No doubt she and the Editor of the Jewish
Chronicle are salivating at the prospect of me being convicted!
Today the
jury was whittled down from 18 to 12. It was thus only on the afternoon of the
fourth day of trial that the Prosecution opened its case with lurid tales of
conspiracies and plots. Factually she was all at sea despite copious amounts of
information supplied by mobile phone companies on our whereabouts on the night
of March 8/morning of March 9.
Thus I was supposed to have left Brighton
at 5.30 when I picked up the van and arrived by 9.30. In fact I didn’t leave Brighton
until about 7.30 and didn’t arrive until after midnight. Just a small point but
it shows the sloppiness of the Prosecution despite the massive powers of search
they have under the Regulation of
Investigatory Powers Act 2000.
Demonstration March 29th outside Shenstone's factory in Walsall
Thus
tomorrow (Friday) the trial begins proper as the Prosecution opens its case.
However as Judge Chambers has other business, sentencing a rapist and murderer
in the afternoon, there will only be a short session from 10.00-12.00.
Thus ends
the first week. The second week will consist of only 3 days because of Easter
and the third week will be four days because of Easter Monday so this trial is
likely to continue into the third week of April.
However
this also gives people time to mobilize around the issues in the case, which is
the right to take action against those who deliberately flout international
human rights law in search of profit. Britain is signed up to the UN and European
Human Rights Conventions but they are observed in the breach and a blind eye is
turned to arms exports by Britain.
In June
2019 the Court of Appeal held
that the government’s export of arms to Saudia Arabia to be unlawful. Foreign
Secretary Liz Truss blithely ignored
the ruling and proceeded regardless. It was all a ‘mistake’ she said. Not a defence I suspect we will be able to
use.
Tony
Greenstein
This blog
has been legally vetted and there are a number of things I have been forced to
omit for legal reasons which will become clear later
GMB 3 Pickets
Acquitted in Brighton Magistrates Court
What is the
Meaning of the Massive Opposition in Israel to Netanyahu’s Judicial Reform
Plans?
John Ware Accuses Me of Being Disagreeable!
Those of you with long memories may
recall that in the early hours of Tuesday 9 March I was arrested with 5
supporters of Palestine Action whilst driving a van to Elbit Systems
Shenstone factory.
The trial, in Wolverhampton Crown
Court, is due to start on Monday before Judge Chambers. I shall, of course, be
pleading not guilty to the charge of intending to destroy or damage
property, contrary to section 3 of the Criminal Damage Act 1971. My intent was
notto cause criminal damage but to
prevent war crimes being committed.
Elbit's Hermes Drone
British
justice places a premium, as it has always done, on the protection of property over
people, even when that property’s sole reason for existence is to kill and maim
the innocent.
The trial
is scheduled to last between 2 and 3 weeks and I shall try to keep people
informed as to its progress from time to time though my blog will not be
appearing as regularly as before.
Yesterday
the case against the “GMB three”, who were accused of wilful obstruction of the
highway collapsed. Three GMB officers were arrested in May last year during an
industrial dispute with waste management company Biffa in Wealden, East Sussex.
They were found not guilty at Brighton Law Courts after the Crown put forward
no evidence. Gary Palmer, one of those involved, was quoted
as saying:
Picket of Brighton Magistrates Court
“This was always a political
case about the rights of people during a cost-of-living crisis to win enough
money to look after their families.
“Our members were taking
part in lawful industrial action to win a decent pay rise.
“This was an
attempt by the company and the police to restrict the right to protest,”
The 3 were arrested under the 1980
Highways Act on suspicion of “obstructing
the highway” in the course of asking strike-breakers not to cross their
picket line. Among the scabs was “a
manager driving a vehicle who GMB and the strikers believe does not have the
correct paperwork to drive the vehicle he was in.” But the Police weren’t
concerned with such trifles as health and safety.
Picket of Brighton Magistrates Court
GMB senior organiser for Southern
England Charles Harrity said,
“This is a serious health
and safety risk for GMB members on the picket line he was crossing and the
general public. The licence violation was reported to the police.”
A statement by Sussex Police read,
“Pickets or assemblies in
trade disputes are not immune from criminal law and police have powers at their
disposal to respond to any issues or breaches of the peace, including any
offences of blocking the highway.
The Highways Act was introduced by
the Thatcher government in 1980—one of its first major pieces of legislation
aimed at suppressing the right to strike. It has been routinely used against
pickets and protests. Under “Obstruction of highways and streets”, section 137
of the Act reads,
“Penalty
for wilful obstruction (1) If a person, without lawful authority or excuse, in
any way wilfully obstructs the free passage along a highway he is guilty of an
offence and liable to a fine not exceeding £50.
“(2) A constable may arrest without warrant any
person whom he sees committing an offence against this section.”
“‘Obstruction’ includes
anything that prevents passing and re-passing along the highway. To be
committing this offence, you don’t have to be blocking the whole width of the
highway. This is because the offence is obstructing the highway itself
(and not other users of the highway). The prosecution, therefore, do not have
to prove that anyone was actually obstructed, but instead that you obstructed
the highway itself.”
The
police attack on the refuse workers’ pickets came after the police consulted
with senior Tory Party politicians. In a statement following the police
operation Wealden District Council said,
“following intervention by
the Police today to enforce lawful access to and from the depot, which had
until now been blocked by the picket line, Biffa have been able to operate two
rubbish collection rounds in the southern half of the District today.”
Simon
Hester, chair of Hastings and District trades union council, told Socialist
Worker,
“A number of GMB full-time
workers and I were blocking vans from leaving the depot. We knew Friday would
be a stand-off because the council had recalled all the vans to the Amberstone
depot on Thursday.
“Vehicles were in line
waiting to leave the depot, and I was in front of the trucks. They sent
officers to deal with pickets. When the chief inspector arrived, he said we
would be arrested for blocking a highway.
Being attacked for being disagreeable by John Ware is like being accused
of sexual harassment by a rapist
Readers of this blog will be shocked
to hear that Islamaphobe-in-chief John Ware, has accused me of being ‘one of the most disagreeable individuals
I’ve ever set eyes on.’ Leaving aside the minor point that he has never set
eyes on me, you will understand why I have to consult m’learned friends about
this attack on my good character and reputation.
Coming from the man who was quoted
in the Guardian as having ‘a track record
for displaying unfairness and twisting the truth’ this is a case of pots
and kettles.
Ware's
2005 programme "A
Question of Leadership" was described
by a senior ex-Panorama journalist as "the
most disgusting Panorama that I have ever seen. The presenter was acting like a
prosecuting attorney, not a journalist." The Guardian's Madeleine
Bunting called the documentary "McCarthyite".
Ware is also on
record, in the Jewish
Chronicle (where else?) as saying that Islamaphobia is rational and the
fault of Muslims themselves.
‘Yet there are several
differences between antisemitism and (authentic) Islamophobia. The former is
entirely irrational, the latter reactive.
It is surely Muslim radicals
who have brought it [Islamaphobia] on their fellow Muslims — by their promotion
of Islam as a political ideology, and by invoking Islamophobia to close down
criticism of this ideology, pouring fat on the fire of those predisposed to
blind bigotry in the first place.
Islamophobia — however it is
defined — will abate when terrorism carried out in God’s name ceases.
All you
have to do is substitute ‘Jew’ for ‘Muslim’ and John Ware would be the first to
protest. Given the extent of Israeli terrorism the possibilities are endless.
Clearly anti-Semitism is rational.
It is no surprise that Panorama has
employed Ware so frequently, all in the name of that famous ‘balance’ between
the right and far-right.
What is the
Meaning of Israel’s Jewish Protests?
It is important to understand the
nature of the massive Israeli demonstrations against the judicial reforms that
Netanyahu is proposing. As Gideon Levy wrote
in Ha’aretz:
To most Israelis, real
democracy is tantamount to “the destruction of Israel.” They’re right. True
democracy will bring an end to the Jewish supremacism they call Zionism, and an
end to the state they call Jewish and democratic. Therefore the threat of
democracy is the existential threat, against which all Jewish Israelis unite:
Should democracy be instituted for all the state’s residents, it will bring an
end to the pretend democracy.
Therefore, the leaders of
the protest make sure to steer clear of any true contact with democracy, lest
the entire thing collapse like a house of cards. It is not due to racism or
hatred of Arabs that they don’t want Palestinian flags or protesters – they are
good people, after all – but only due to the understanding that raising the
question of apartheid will render their struggle ludicrous.
That is why most Israeli Palestinians
have avoided the demonstrations which are about Jewish democracy only. Both
Netanyahu and his opponents agree on the place of Israeli Arabs and they also
agree with the repression that Palestinians face.
One of the most vociferous opponents
of the ‘judical coup’ is former Defence Minister and Chief of Staff, Benny
Gantz, who promised
to bomb Gaza ‘back to the stone ages’.
It was Gantz who outlawed 6 Palestinian Human Rights organisations and it was
under Gantz that Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh was assassinated.
In the eyes of these Jewish
demonstrators the Supreme Court represents all that is good about Israel. As
the Jerusalem Post reported:
Around a hundred activists
from the civil society movement Darkenu argued that the High Court of Justice
protected IDF soldiers from international lawfare campaigns.
The High Court
is the flak jacket of IDF soldiers, it is protection for our sons and daughters
that serve in the army, from attempts to petition against IDF soldiers at the
International Criminal Court in The Hague," warned Darkenu CEO and former
Kulanu MK Rachel Azaria. "The Override clause and Levin's moves to weaken
the justice system would hurt IDF soldiers, and hurting our soldiers is a red
line.
The military fears that the war
crimes that the Israeli army perpetrates would be open to the jurisdiction of
the International Criminal Court at the
Hague if the judicial reforms go through.
The demonstrations in Israel reach
into the innermost parts of the secret state. Thousands of reserve soldiers,
some from the elite forces, have said they would refuse to serve.
Ex-Generals, heads of Shin Bet and a
raft of Judges have condemned the override clause that would enable 61 votes in
the Knesset to overturn any decision of the Supreme Court. Coupled with
proposals that would allow the government to choose who sits on the court this
has provoked panic at the heart of the Israeli establishment.
Israeli Palestinians however have
been conspicuous by their absence from the protests. Why? Because the Supreme
Court has an unparalleled record of approving legal discrimination against
Arabs. Not one piece of anti-Arab legislation has been disallowed.
Even the Jewish Nation State Law
of 2018 which officially made Israel an Apartheid State was approved
by a vote of 10-1, the sole dissent coming from the sole Arab member of the
court.
Eg the Central District Court reduced
the time spent on Administrative Detention for two settler suspects in the
Huwara pogrom from 4 to less than 2 months and from 4 to 3 months.
Administrative Detention is almost never used against Jews. It is a form of
internment without trial and Palestinians are routinely given 6 months
detention renewable every 6 months. In the case of these settlers they were
given less than 6 months in the first place. The Supreme Court has an
unparalleled record forapproving
Administrative Detention for Arabs.
Khalil Awawdeh - Hunger Striker - Imprisoned Without Trial - Supreme Court Refused to Release Him
Yet in
the case of Khalil Awawdeh, who had been on hunger strike for 170 days and was at death’s door the
Supreme Court refused
to intervene. As a matter of course they refused to challenge the assertions of
Israel’s Shin Bet secret police. As Diana Buttu, a Palestinian lawyer
and former negotiator said
“The Supreme
Court rubber stamps everything that the Israeli security services put forward.
It is only in very rare circumstances that we actually see that they are
pushing back against what the security services are saying.”
On Wednesday afternoon, Palestinian
administrative detainee Khalil Awawdeh announced
that he was ending his hunger strike, which had lasted over 170 days, after the
Shin Bet agreed not to renew his detention beyond October 2. Until then, he
will remain at Shamir Medical Center in central Israel, where he is currently
hospitalized, in order to recover….
In recent days, photos of an emaciated
Awawdeh on the brink of death flooded social media, energizing the global
campaign to release the prisoner. If the Shin Bet’s policy of extending the
detention and agreeing to release the hunger-striking detainee as his life
hangs in the balance were not grotesque enough, it is worth remembering that
only on Tuesday, Israel’s Supreme Court rejected
another urgent petition for Awawdeh’s release.
So on Tuesday the Supreme Court were
satisfied by Shin Bet’s evidence that Awawdeh was a dangerous terrorist and the
day after Shin Bet itself agreed to end the Administrative Detention making a
fool of the Supreme Court. This speaks volumes about the racism of the Court.
But if the Supreme Court is racist
towards Palestinians it is liberal towards Jews and that is what has earned it
the ire of the Jewish Supremacist Religious Zionism and the Orthodox Jewish
parties. It has repeatedly recognised non-Orthodox conversions for the purpose
of being a Jew entitled to the law of return.
It has always made clear that its
version of ‘who is a Jew’ is an all encompassing one, rejecting the narrow
racial purity definitions of the Israeli right. It does indeed have a liberal
attitude to gay Israelis and others. But when it gets an Arab in its sight it is
as racist as Ben Gvir.
So what is likely to happen? In the
short-term we should not be surprised if the judicial reform plans do not go
ahead, at least unreformed.
Israeli Defence Minister
‘Yova
Gallant has reportedly threatened to resign his post recently over concerns for
the brewing crisis in the military and fears that it could be beset by mass
desertions and refusals to serve’.
The Jerusalem Post asked ‘Could senior Likud MKs
force compromise on judicial reform? – analysis’. It reported that possible
defectors include MKs Danny Danon, Yuli Edelstein as well as MK David Bitan and
Avi Dichter, a former head of Shin Bet. The Coalition’s majority of 64-56 could
easily disappear as it would only take four Likud MKs to vote against or
abstain to prevent the passage of the legislation.
If this were to happen then it is
almost certain that the ruling coalition would break up and Religious Zionism would
defect, thus causing fresh elections. So in the short term the judicial reforms
could be nixed.
ButiIn the longer term the
beneficiary is likely to be Religious Zionism which already has 14 seats.
Israeli Jewish society is undergoing profound changes. Until 1977 the Israeli
Labor Party, which has just 4 seats in the Knesset today, formed the government
in partnership with the National Religious Party.
The effect of the 1967 war and the
conquest of the West Bank was to cause the NRP, which no longer exists today,
to move to the right as the settler movement began, with ILP encouragement, colonising
the West Bank. What was a handful of settlers in 1967 is 700,000 today.
Today Israeli politics are driven by
the Jewish settlers with their messianic dreams of a Third Temple, the Return
of the Messiah and eternal salvation. ‘Left’ Zionism is dead. How did this
happen?I would argue that it was
inherent in Zionism itself.
Labor Zionism created the Israeli
state. Most of their leaders were atheists who based their claim to Palestine
on the god they denied! In order to provide their movement with legitimacy, at
a time when most Orthodox Jews saw Zionism as a secular heresy, they formed a faustian
pact with the minority of Orthodox Jews led by Rabbi Abraham Kook who supported
Zionism. Why? Because without their backing there could be no definition of a
Jew that would be accepted by religious Jews. The NRP were given control over personal
affairs – birth, death and marriage. They defined who was a Jew (although the
definition was different for the purposes of the Law of Return).
As Jewish nationalism and religious
Zionism became intertwined, both feeding off each other, so Israel has moved
further and further to the settler right. Today much of the army has been taken
over. Recently we saw the activecomplicity of the army in the Huwara pogrom.
The settler lobby will continue to grow,
politically and numerically, until it exerts a stranglehold over Israeli
politics. It knows what it wants unlike secular Israeli Jews. Although the racism
of secular Jews is not fundamentally different from that of religious Zionists
they do not want Israel to become a halachic state, a state ruled by Jewish law.
There is a very real prospect of
Israel having the attributes of a theocratic state based on the principles of
racial purity and with an open dictatorship and apartheid. The rabbis, corrupt
as they are, will then rely on their own interpretation of the bible to rule.
Already segregated classes in universities are accepted. The present coalition
is proposing to prevent chametz, forbidden food at Passover, entering
hospitals.
The old wars
between the two Jewish states of Judah and Israel is more than likely to be
repeated. What has held Israeli Jewish society together over the past 75 years
has been a common antagonism towards the Palestinians. Today religious Zionists
see no need to compromise with their secular opponents. That is what we are
seeing played out today.
So although it is more than possible
that the judicial reforms will be watered down in the long-terms they and more
will be introduced.
The SWP Decision to Welcome Zionist Groups to its ‘anti-racist’ march in
Glasgow last weekend proves that the SWP's support for the Palestinians is hot air
UPDATE
On
16 February, in response to an email on behalf of Brighton and Hove Trades Council, Scottish SUTR i.e. the SWP, reassured
me that:
SUTR
Scotland … has no formal relationship with Confederation of Friends of Israel
Scotland or any of its local groups. Claims it "works closely" with
or "invites" these groups are false. Neither is true that this
group has been "welcome" to marches. We have no knowledge of their
intention to attend the march in 2023.
Today Glasgow Friends of Israel posted this
message on Facebook:
‘a letter of
thanks from GFI chair Sammy Stein to Kier McKechnie and Mohammed Asif,
organisers of the SUTR march that took place on Saturday, who made sure that
GFI and COFIS members were kept safe during the march.
Hi Keir and Mohammad
It was good to see you both at the SUTR march in
George Square on Saturday and many thanks for the welcome you gave us.
The Letter of
Thanks ends:
‘I will of course
post this message on social media so that all the good folk in Scotland will
know about your kind and on-going support.’
Many thanks and I
look forward to meeting you again in 2024.
Keep safe
Sammy Stein
chair Glasgow
Friends of Israel.
I
don’t mind being lied to by the SWP/SUTR. Indeed I expect it. What I do object
to is being lied to on behalf of a racist Zionist group by those who dare to call
themselves socialists. Especially since they were lying to me in my role as an
Executive Member of Brighton & Hove Trades Council.
GFI is a 100% racist outfit. It had room on its Facebook page for a story about ‘A violent Palestinian mob attack on 2 German tourists’ who were
attacked when entering Nablus in a vehicle with Israeli license plates and an Israeli
flag. The tourists escaped with light injuries thank to the help of other Palestinians.
There
has been no mention on GFI’s Facebook page of the reign of terror by settlers
and the Israeli army on the West Bank. No condemnation of the call by Bezalel
Smotrich, the West Bank’s head of civil administration, to ‘wipe-out’ the town of Huwara. No mention of the pogrom in Huwara in which Israeli
soldiers accompanied and defended the settlers whilst attacking their victims, 1 of whom was killed and nearly 100 injured, some seriously.
No mention of the Jewish Nazi Ben Gvir who is now Israel’s
Police Minister. No mention of the ethnic cleansing of Masafer Yata.
Glasgow
Friends of Israel are 100% racist scum
yet the SWP welcome them onto its ‘anti-racist’ demonstration. The SWP have
demonstrated that there is no principle that they are not prepared to sacrifice,
no promise that they are not prepared to break, no ethic that they won’t undermine
for the sake of building their party.
Whenever there is a Palestine
solidarity march you can be sure that there will be an SWP stall with posters
and placards. The impression given is that the SWP is in the forefront of Palestine
solidarity.
The reality is somewhat different.
The way the SWP works in practice marks it out as an organisation that combines
verbal support for the Palestinians with the most shameful appeasement of
Zionism and its British supporters.
But we are now fighting back against the SWP’s capitulation to Zionism’s
far-right supporters. Dundee Trades Council’s refusal to support the SWP’s
march was joined this year by Brighton & Hove Trades Council. At Lewisham
Trades Council a similar motion of non-support was narrowly defeated. It is to
be hoped that next year more trade union branches and Trades Councils will join
in saying no to SWP/SUTR’s collaboration with far-Right Zionists.
Glasgow Friends of Israel Contingent 2023
It is no surprise that the ‘right’
of these Zionist groups to march was vociferously supported by that friend
of anti-racism, the Scottish Daily
Express! The SWP’s real reason for allowing Zionists to march each year is a
fear of being accused of ‘anti-Semitism’, in other words a surrender to the
campaign that brought down Corbyn.
In other words GFI will be marching against anti-Zionism i.e. the Palestinians, courtesy of the SWP
On 16 February Scottish SUTR wrote to me saying ‘SUTR has no policy on the Middle East’.However most anti-racist groups do oppose apartheid,
today in Israel yesterday in South Africa. Even the SWP used to oppose
apartheid.
If an anti-racist Zionist actually
exists then no one objects to them marching as an individual. Hopefully they will come to
recognise their own cognitive dissonance. The objection is to organised supporters
of Israeli Apartheid marching with flags and placards. To Palestinians
the Israeli flag is the equivalent of the Confederate flag for Black people or the Swastika to Jews.
The Lies that Justify Ethnic Cleansing from COFIS
As Mick Napier of Scottish PSC
said:
"SUTR
pretend to be neutral on the issue of of Israeli ethnic cleansing of the
Palestinian people. Bad enough to try to be neutral but in fact they are very
partisan. Their absurd claim that "we
cannot build a united anti-racist movement if the politics of the Middle East
are imported into the movement" is belied by their insisting on the
right of Friends of Israel to march with them, ie precisely to import the
Politics of the Middle East onto their demonstrations, thereby making them
no-go areas for Palestinians".
When I was a teenager I was a
member of the International Socialist group, which pre-dated the SWP. I
remember that they took a fierce anti-Zionist position. The first anti-Zionist pamphlet
I read was The Class Nature of Israeli Societyby Moshe Machover and others.
Today the SWP is proud of the fact that
they have the support of the right-wing TUC and trade union bureaucracy. The
same people who are calling off the biggest wave of strikes we have seen in 40 years.It doesn’t seem to have occurred to them that
this ‘support’ is a way that they can parade their anti-racist credentials without
them doing anything.
If the TUC were serious about
fighting racism then they would have condemned the statement of Rachel
Reeves criticising the Tories for not having deported enough refugees.
It is more than ironic that on an
allegedly anti-racist march you have organisations marching whose sole purpose
in being there is to support racism.
The leader of GFI, Sammy
Stein, was caught fraternising
with Max Dunbar, an ex-BNP Treasurer. Stein was pictured on the
latest march with an SWP banner! GFI’s main support is from anti-Semitic Christian
Fundamentalists.
Stevie Harrison is Sutherland and together with Matthew Berlow (below) they faked an antisemitic attack which was intended to be blamed on Scottish PSC
Although GFI later dissociated
themselves from Dunbar, the statement confirming this was from Edward
Sutherland,who was reprimanded by the
General Teaching Council for sharing an anti-Semitic post online.
In a recent post on Facebook Sammy Stein demonstrates how far to the right he is, even for Zionists, when he cast doubt on the Deir Yassin massacre in April 1948 which he
calls ‘disputed’. Zionist militias
Irgun and Lehi carried out a savage massacre in the village. Over 100 women,
children and elderly died. David Ben
Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister condemned
it and the Jewish Agency sent Jordan's King Abdullah an apology.Holocaust deniers dispute the Nazi Holocaust so shall we have doubts about that too?
Stein also
repeated the myth of Palestinian refugees having voluntarily left of their own
accord whereas this lie was designed to cover up the ethnic cleansing in
1947-8. Stein even made out that he supported refugees in this country. But not
Israel of course where non-Jewish refugees are refused asylum automatically.
But since Stein supports the rights of refugees in Britain so much perhaps he
will support the Right of Return of the Palestinian refugees to Israel too? I somehow doubt it because he’s wedded to the
Jewish supremacist nature of the Israeli state.
Has the SWP ever asked GFI if they support
the Right of Return of Palestinian refugees and if not why not?
That the SWP choose to
align themselves with the likes of Sammy Stein demonstrates that they have
learnt nothing from the rape
scandal that nearly destroyed them in 2012/3. They have also learnt nothing
from their association
with the anti-Semitic Gilad Atzmon
from 2005-2011.
The problem in Scotland is part of
a wider problem with the politics of the SWP on Zionism, racism and imperialism.
Instead of treating racism as flowing from imperialism and Britain’s role in
the world the SWP treats racism and imperialism as separate entities.
On the one hand the SWP will
proclaim that Zionism is racist and Israel is an apartheid state, but when it
comes to anti-racist work, the issue of Palestine disappears as the SWP allies
with these very same racists! The fact that Israel and Zionism is to the fore
of Islamaphobia is simply ignored.
On the GFI Facebook page a
supporter wrote, after the murder of 50 Muslims in New Zealand that:
‘it’s payback for the attacks that muslims have
perpetrated across the globe. perhaps this will curb their appetite for
bloodshed.’
It is difficult to think of a more vile
racist comment yet the SWP is unconcerned. Imagine that someone had celebrated
the murder
of 11 Jews at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018 because of
the Palestinians murdered by the ‘Jewish’ state. The air would be thick with cries
of anti-Semitism, prime amongst them the SWP.
Also on the GFI FB group was a post
which talked about Israel ‘euthanasing’
3 Palestinians. This is language which one would normally expect from neo-Nazis.
The SWP supports refugees coming to Britain but it refuses to ask why they come
and to integrate this understanding into broader anti-racist struggles.
The SWP confines itself to broad
statements of support for Palestine solidarity but rarely discusses the causes
of their dispossession and the role of Zionism except once a year at Marxism when anti-Zionism is brought out
on display.
At the 2021 Palestine Solidarity
Campaign conference, the Executive proposed a new constitution eliminating
anti-Zionism. The two SWP members present, Tom Hickey and Rob Ferguson, spoke
in support of the Executive’s proposals and against those who wanted PSC to
remain an anti-Zionist organisation.
Sammy Stein reveals himself as a far-right Zionist bigot behind all the talk of mutual recognition etc.
The arguments of Hickey and
Ferguson were that we should concentrate on activismand not get
distracted by Zionism. Except that Zionism, as an ideology
and movement, was responsible for the dispossession of the Palestinians. How can you
support the Palestinian struggle and have nothing to say about Zionism? This, more than
anything, reveals the bankruptcy of SWP politics.
The question of Zionism was a
central feature of debates inside the Labour Party. Yet to the SWP what matters
is activity for its own sake despite the
fact that Israel, unlike South Africa, depends on maintaining political support
in the West. Anti-Zionism is not a theoretical luxury but a necessity. We
constantly have to win the argument on campuses and in trade unions.
The reluctance of the SWP to argue
for anti-Zionist politics is a product of their opportunistic politics. Tony Cliff, their founder
did understand Zionism being born in Mandate Palestine but SWP theoreticians
today – John Rose and Rob Ferguson – do not have that background.
… the anti-Zionist,
pro-Palestinian case must be argued effectively and sensitively. Traps must be
avoided which favour our opponents. On Thursday Ken Livingstone created then
walked into precisely such a trap. The argument about Zionist collaboration
with the Nazis has been around for a long time. It is rightly ignored by
solidarity activists with Palestine….
It’s true that when
Hitler came to power some Zionist leaders stupidly thought that they could do a
deal with him that would enable some German Jews to go to Palestine. But Ken
should have known that this disgraceful manoeuvre bitterly divided the Zionist
movement.
Rose went on to say that ‘there
was no coherent, united Zionist leadership in the 1930’s. It was deeply
split.’ This is simply untrue, indeed it is a lie. As I show in Zionism
During the Holocaustit is also ahistorical nonsense. There was almost
complete agreement about the need to create a Jewish State and ‘transfer’ the
Palestinians out of it in the 30s and 40s. The differences amongst the Zionist
leadership between Weizmann and Ben Gurion were about which imperialist partner
they preferred – Britain or the United States. Even the differences between
Labour and Revisionist Zionism were tactical.
Nor was there anything ‘stupid’ about negotiating with Nazis from
the Zionist perspective. Ha'avara,
the Nazi-Zionist trade agreement was not about saving German
Jews. What it sought to do was rescue their wealth.
David Ben Gurion was the most
important pre-state Zionist figure. A cursory reading of the final chapter, Disaster Means Strength, of his biography
by Shabtai Teveth makes it abundantly clear that the Zionist leadership welcomed
the rise of the Nazis and Hitler. The very title of the chapter gives us a
clue.
On the eve of Hitler becoming
Chancellor, in January 1933, Ben-Gurion explained his thinking to the Central
Committee of Mapai (Israeli Labour Party) when he warned that
‘Zionism…
is not primarily engaged in saving individuals’ and that if there was ‘a
conflict of interest between saving individual Jews and the good of the Zionist
enterprise, we shall say the enterprise comes first.’
In November 1935,
after the passage of the Nuremberg Laws he said:
To the disaster of
German Jewry we must offer a Zionist response, namely, we must convert the
disaster into a source for the upbuilding of Palestine.
On 15 October 1942, by which time the Zionist leadership was aware
of the holocaust, Ben Gurion remarked to the Zionist Executive:
Disaster is strength
if channelled to a productive course. The whole trick of Zionism is that it
knows how to channel our disaster, not into despondency or degradation, as is
the case in the Diaspora, but into a source of creativity and exploitation.
Berl
Katznelson, a founder of Mapai and editor of Davar, saw the rise of Hitler as ‘an opportunity to build and flourish like none we have ever had or
ever will have.’Ben-Gurion predicted that ‘The Nazis’
victory would become “a fertile force
for Zionism.”
It is to
the critical Zionist historian Noah Lucas, not John Rose, that we must turn if
we want to understand Zionism’s approach:
‘As the European holocaust erupted, Ben-Gurion saw it
as a decisive opportunity for Zionism... In conditions of peace,… Zionism could
not move the masses of world Jewry. The forces unleashed by Hitler in all their
horror must be harnessed to the advantage of Zionism. ... By the end of 1942…
the struggle for a Jewish state became the primary concern of the movement.’[A
Modern History of Israel, pp. 187/8].
Rose was
also wrong when he said that ‘this disgraceful manoeuvre bitterly
divided the Zionist movement’ The Labour Zionists were united in support of Ha'avara. The General Zionists and
Religious Zionists of Mizrahi supported it too. Only the Revisionists under
Jabotinsky opposed Ha'avara.
Ordinary Zionists bitterly opposed Ha'avara and didn’t
understand what was happening but the Zionist movement was not a democratic
movement and their voices counted for nothing.
On June 21 1933 the German Zionist Federation voluntarily wrote
to Hitler expressing their opposition to the Boycott and their agreement with
Nazi fundamentals. They wrote:
On the foundation of
the new state, which has established the principle of race... fruitful activity
for the fatherland is possible…. Precisely because we don’t wish to falsify
these fundamentals, because we too are against mixed marriages and are for
maintaining the purity of the Jewish group… The realisation of Zionism could
only be hurt by resentment of Jews abroad against the German development.
Boycott propaganda… is in essence fundamentally unZionist, because Zionism
wants not to do battle but to convince and to build.’[Lucy
Dawidowicz, A Holocaust Reader, pp.
150-153].
The Zionist leaders were
not stupid. If anyone can claim credit for the founding of Israel it is Hitler. Between 1933 and 1939, as a result of the rose of the Nazis, the
Jewish population of Palestine more than
doubled from around 215,000 to 449,000, giving the settlers a critical
mass. 60% of capital investment in Palestine between 1933 and 1939 came from Nazi Germany.
John Rose was dazzled by meeting the last Commander of the Warsaw Ghetto Resistance, Marek Edelman in
1989. The anti-Zionist Bund, of which Edelman was a member and members of
left-Zionist groups such as Hashomer Hatzair and Dror, fought together. But the
Zionists fought, not because of their Zionism but despite it.
Mordechai Anielewicz,
the first Commander, expressed his regret over the ‘wasted time’ undergoing
Zionist educational work. I quote in my book the speech of one of these Zionist
fighters, Hayka Klinger, to the Histadrut Executive in March 1944. She described the Judenrate, the Jewish
Councils who collaborated with the Nazis thus:
after they began assisting the Nazis to
collect gold and furniture from Jewish homes, they had no choice but to go on
to help them prepare lists of Jews for labor camps... And precisely because
those who stood at the head of most of the communities were Zionists, the
psychological effects on most of the Jewish masses vis-Ã -vis the Zionist idea
was devastating, and the hatred towards Zionism grew day by day...
Klinger told the
Histadrut Executive that ‘we received an
order not to organize any more defence.’ To the Zionist leadership the
ghetto fighters were more valuable in Palestine. Klinger observed that
Without a
people, a people’s avant-garde is of no value. If rescue it is, then the entire
people must be rescued. If it is to be annihilation, then the avante-garde too
shall be annihilated.
After
the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, a Zionist emissary arrived in Bedzin in July 1943
to persuade Frumka Plotnicka to leave. She replied that ‘I have a responsibility for my brethren... I have lived with them and
I will die with them.’ The Zionist youth in Europe, such as Zivia Lubetkin
and Plotnicka, refused on principle to leave. One can only admire the bravery
and commitment of these young Zionist fighters who, given the choice between
the fight against the Nazis in the Diaspora and the Arabs in Palestine,
committed what in Zionist eyes, was a mortal sin. They chose the Diaspora.
One
of the Zionist emissaries, Yudke Hellman, described how in October and December
1939 he witnessed the return of Plotnicka and Lubetkin to German-occupied
Poland and how he had tried and failed to persuade them to leave for Palestine.
Frumka stood up and announced that her decision to return to Warsaw was final.
Never
was the ethical and moral distinction between the Jewish diaspora and
Palestine’s Zionist leaders clearer. Rose failed to perceive that Zionism was
established on the basis that anti-Semitism could not be fought and that its principal
task lay in the establishment of a Jewish state.
It was the Revisionists
who put up the strongest resistance in the Warsaw ghetto because they were
armed by their fascist friends. They had an abundance of arms unlike the
left-wing Jewish Fighting Organisation (ZOB). So yes, Zionists fought. It was
not because they were Zionists but because they were organised in groups. The
Zionist parties in Warsaw however were opposed to resistance.
Individual Zionists
are not the same as the movement. At times of despair the Jewish masses
supported the Zionists and when the fight against anti-Semitism grew, they
abandoned Zionism. In the last free elections in 1938 in Warsaw out of 20
Jewish Council seats the Zionists obtained precisely one compared to 17 for the anti-Zionist Bund.
As anti-Semitism grew
in Poland Poale Zion split into a right and left in 1919. Left Poale Zion had
effectively abandoned Zionism. But these contradictions entirely escape the SWP
and its theoreticians.
The Israeli state was extremely hostile
to Edelman, who had written an open letter to the Palestinians asking them to
enter into peace negotiations. The letter caused outrage because Edelman did
not mention the word ‘terrorism.’ Israeli leaders were incensed by its title: ‘Letter to Palestinian partisans’.
When Edelman
died on 9 October 2009 he was honoured with a state funeral and a fifteen-gun
salute. Not even the lowliest clerk at the Israeli Embassy attended. No official representative of any international
Jewish organisation attended either.
John Rose has been the
SWP’s main theoretician on Zionism since Cliff. He has never understood the
internal dynamics and logic of Zionism. Imperialism has used the tragedy of the
Holocaust to legitimise its barbarism and to paint anyone opposed to Zionism as
‘anti-Semitic’. Unfortunately Rose and the SWP instead of standing up to this have
bowed to it and the winds of chauvinism. In an article critiquing Norman
Finkelstein, Rose wrote that:
Even
in its most reactionary form, Zionism before the second world war was one of
the voices of oppressed Jews facing the growth of violent anti Semitism as a
mass movement everywhere.
This statement
represents an abandonment of any class politics. Zionism was the voice of the reactionary
Jewish petit-bourgeoisie who, given half the chance, would betray working class
Jews as Marcel Liebman demonstrated so vividly when describing his experiences
as a child seeking refuge in Nazi-occupied Belgium. He described one leader of
the Belgian Judenrat, the Association of
Jews of Belgium telling a poor Polish Jewish woman:
Well, well!
If you ended up in Eastern Europe what would be wrong with that? You are all
from Poland anyway! You’d just be going back where you came from!
Another wealthy
Zionist member of the AJB, ‘S.V.’
wrote in his diary on 12 December 1942, after the Germans had released a Jew
who was married to a non-Jewish woman:
I find it extraordinary that someone
should be recompensed for having been unfaithful to his religion.
Two-thirds of the
Judenrat, which were hated by poor and working class Jews, were Zionists but
Rose saw them as the voice of the oppressed, writing that ‘Zionism was perfectly capable of inspiring resistance to the Nazis’.
Rose went on to say
that ‘Zionism later mis-used its
genuinely heroic anti-Nazi resistance fighters for cynical ideological ends in
Palestine.’ How surprising! The Zionists also misused the Holocaust to
justify ethnic cleansing in Palestine. Why? Because historically the Zionists were indifferent to the Holocaust.
To many Zionists those who died in the Holocaust brought it upon themselves. Idith
Zertal observed that:
This is more than cynicism.
It is the exploitation of the Holocaust in the service of imperialism and Israel’s
war against the Palestinians.
Rose referred to
Hitler’s view of the Jews as a ‘satanic race’.
Hitler didn’t just think that Jews were
a distinct race. He also thought that they were a Satanic race, and ultimately,
that they were a Satanic race that had to be exterminated.
Rose echoes Zionist holocaust
historians such as Yehuda Bauer who attributed anti-Semitism to ‘a political elite that had come to power
with pseudo-messianic concepts of saving humanity from the Jews.’
What Bauer was saying
was that Nazi anti-Semitism lay outside of history. It was inexplicable. That
is also what Rose is saying. That the Holocaust lies outside class politics.
This is simply anti-Marxist.
Did the
elimination of up to 3 million Polish intelligentsia occur because the Poles
were Satanic? Or the Russians or Disabled? The attempt to exterminate the Jews
was not unique. Why did Hitler want them gone? Because the Jews were seen as
the biological parents of their main enemy, Bolshevism. Hence the term
Judeo-Bolshevism.
Rose wrote about the
truly sinister
cat and mouse game the Nazis were playing when they appeared to be supporting
the Zionist project in Palestine even if did mean some German Jews, by moving
to Palestine with Hitler’s agreement, escaped the death camps.
Rose did not understand
the Ha'avara agreement (or the Nazis’ Jewish policies) which led to just 20,000
wealthy German Jews moving to Palestine. They had to have £1,000 (today about
£85,000). These Jews would have found refuge in other countries.
If anything Ha'avara undermined
the position of other Jews wanting to emigrate. Between 1933 and 1939 the Nazis’
policy was expulsion not extermination. There were no death camps to escape
from. The first death camp, Chelmno was established in December 1941.
The problem with the
SWP is it shouts slogans about Zionism but has never taken the time nor trouble
to understand it.
