According to Thornberry –
Israel is a ‘beacon of freedom, equality
and democracy’ despite torture being routinely used, censorship being standard
and imprisonment without trial being the norm for Arabs
Emily
Thornberry has, quite undeservedly, gained a reputation, as being on the Left,
albeit the soft-Left. This is because she was one of the few who didn’t resign
in the ‘chicken coup’ of the summer of 2016. There can be no doubt however that
Thornberry is a die-hard racist and Zionist.
According
to Thornberry, if you don’t support a Jewish state, a state based on Jewish
ethnicity, a state that excludes non-Jews from the national collective, then
you are ‘anti-Semitic’.
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| Palestinian child imprisonment is one of Thornberry's examples of Israeli democracy at its best |
It is a
sign of the political and intellectual poverty of social democracy that people
like Thornberry have no understanding of history. The idea that one’s civic and
political rights should depend on one’s religion went out with the French
Revolution.
Britain
took slightly longer than France before Jewish
Emancipation was enacted. It was finally on 26 July1858 that Lionel
de Rothschild took his seat as the first Jewish member of the House of Commons.
He had first been elected for the City of London in 1847 but had had to swear
an oath ‘on the true faith of a Christian’.
 |
| According to Emily Thornberry this is an example of why Israel is a 'beacon of freedom' |
The battle
against religious coercion and for the separation of Church and State was one
of the main democratic achievements of the bourgeoisie revolutions. Under feudalism
rights were inherited.
Israel is a
Jewish state as was spelt out by Benjamin Netanyahu in response to popular
Israeli actress, Rotem Sala who exclaimed:
Dear god, there are also Arab
citizens in this country. When the hell will someone in this government convey
to the public that Israel is a state of all its citizens and that all people
were created equal, and that even the Arabs and the Druze and the LGBTs and -
shock - the leftists are human."
Netanyahu promptly explained
that
‘“First of all, Israel is not a country of all its citizens. According
to the nation-state law that we passed, Israel is the nation-state of the
Jewish nation,”
Netanyahu was of course correct. Israel is a state of the Jewish people
not its non-Jewish citizens. According to Thornberry, if you support the same
solution that was achieved in South Africa, a non-racial state for all who live
there, then you are anti-Semitic.
This is
what Labour’s ‘anti-Semitism’ crisis has been about. That is why the IHRA
‘definition’ of anti-Semitism,that the Zionists were so insistent on, conflates
anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. According to Lady Nugee ‘We
need to get on our hands and knees and ask for forgiveness’ to the ‘Jewish community.’ According
to Thornberry
When an expert looks into a
problem you have – whether it’s a doctor, a mechanic, or a plumber – you take
their advice and follow it without thinking twice.
So when the Board of Deputies,
the Jewish Labour Movement (JLM), and imminently the Equalities and Human
Rights Commission give the Labour Party specific recommendations about how we
need to root out the poison of antisemitism from our movement, our starting
point must not be to dispute their proposals but ensure every single one is
implemented unless we can rationally explain why not.
The mind numbing stupidity of Lady Nugee beggars belief. The BOD, JLM
are all political actors not technical experts. As for the EHRC they are a
state body whose interference in a democratic political party should have been condemned
from the beginning. The fact that Nugee welcomes the EHRC intervention
demonstrates how distant she is from socialist politics.
The idea that there are any ‘experts’ when it comes to anti-Semitism is
debatable. But the idea that the JLM, affiliated to the World Zionist
Organisation, which funds
the theft of Palestinian land is an ‘expert’ in
anti-racism is obscene. The JLM are racist apologists.
In what the
Independent described as ‘a warning aimed
at members of Jeremy Corbyn’s inner circle’ Thornberry called
for staff fingered by the EHRC to be “out
the door immediately”. Her comments were seen as ‘an attack on Mr Corbyn’s senior advisers, including his former chief
of staff Karie Murphy’. Clearly Lady Nugee’s
loyalty to Corbyn was contrived and calculated.
Thornberry
is also an opportunist. She is one of 36
Labour Friends of
Israel sponsors who are also supporters of Labour Friends of
Palestine. She not only
supports the Palestinians but she also supports their oppressors! That’s what’s called even-handedness.
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| Substitute 'Thatcher' for 'Thornberry' and 'South Africa' for 'Israel' and you should have the measure of Lady Nugee |
In an article for Labour
List Thornberry stated that ‘People who believe Israel does not have the
right to exist should be drummed out of the Labour Party.’ What she means is Israel’s right to be a
racist state not the right of Israelis to live there under a non-racial regime just
like White South Africans were welcomed to stay after the end of Apartheid.
What matters to Nugee is Israel’s role as the West’s warrior state.
The
Balfour Declaration
Similarly Thornberry
used a speech
commemorating the centenary of the Balfour Declaration, which began the process
of Palestinian ethnic cleansing, to make the same point. She stated that
‘there should be no place in
modern society, and – let me stress – no place in the Labour Party for anyone
who holds that kind of abhorrent view.’
It would seem that if you deny the right of a racist state,
Israel, South Africa or Nazi Germany, to exist then you have no place in modern
society, let alone the Labour Party! Maybe, being a lawyer, Thornberry wants to
reinstate the feudal concept of the outlaw.
Of course
it was somewhat ironic for Thornberry to denounce racism when praising the
Zionists’ friend Arthur Balfour. Balfour when Prime Minister introduced the
Aliens Act 1905 preventing Jewish refugees from Czarist Russia entering Britain
was. Before become Foreign Minister he was also known as ‘Bloody Balfour’. As Chief Secretary for Ireland he ordered troops
to open fire killing 3 Irishmen who were demonstrating in Mitchelstown, County
Cork. In 1893, he spoke in parliament
describing how Cecil Rhodes, the godfather of white supremacy, was “extending the blessings of
civilization.” Two years later –
then in opposition – he described Black people as “less intellectually and
morally capable” than whites. [The racist worldview of Arthur Balfour, David Cronin]
Clearly
paying tribute to a racist and imperialist went to Thornberry’s head. Under the guise of opposing racism, she
called for anti-racists to be expelled from the Labour Party and society. Let
us remind ourselves of who the man was who signed the Balfour Declaration,
which enabled Britain to give the land of the Palestinians to the Zionist
settlers.
In
1906, the House of Commons was engaged in a debate
about the native blacks in South Africa. Nearly all members of Parliament
agreed that the disenfranchisement of the blacks was evil. Not so Balfour, who
– almost alone — argued against it.
“We have to face
the facts men are not born equal, the white and black races are not born with
equal capacities: they are born with different capacities which education
cannot and will not change.”
It is no
surprise that Balfour is a hero to the Zionists. What is surprising is that he
is a hero to a prominent Labour politician.
It should be
noted that like most non-Jewish Zionists, Balfour also didn’t like Jews very
much either. He told Chaim Weizmann, President of
the Zionist Organisation and Israel’s first President, that ‘he agreed with
some of Cosima Wagner’s ‘anti-Semitic postulates’. Apparently Germany’s
Jews had
“captured the
German stage, press, commerce and universities and were putting into their
pockets, only a hundred years after emancipation, everything the Germans had
built up in centuries”. [Chaim Weizmann, Trial and Error, p. 153].
As
Leonard Stein noted, if Balfour was an ardent Zionist, “it was not out of a
sentimental tenderness for Jews”. When the leader of British Jewry, Lucien
Wolf, appealed to him to intercede with the Russian government to end Jewish
persecution, Balfour “admitted that the treatment of the Jews was abominable
beyond all measure”, but went on to remind Wolf that “the persecutors
had a case of their own”. See Centrepiece of imperial strategy.
Corbyn
apparently passed the invitation to speak to Thornberry who was only too happy
to pay tribute, on behalf of the Labour Party, to someone who was both an
anti-Semite and a white supremacist.
It is
understandable that the Jewish Labour Movement should honour the memory of
Balfour. The JLM’s ‘sister party’ the almost defunct Israeli Labour Party organised a colour bar in
Palestine. Jewish employers who employed Arabs were picketed by the Zionist
trade union Histadrut
Historically
Labour support for Zionism and colonisation in Palestine was on a par with its
support for the British Empire. It was only a minority of Labour members under
people like Fenner Brockway who supported the Movement for Colonial Freedom (renamed
Liberation) from 1947 onwards. The
Attlee government built the welfare state on the backs of Black and Asian
people.
The Kibbutz
was portrayed as an oasis of socialism where there were no private property
relations and everything was shared in common. The fact that no Arab could be a member of the
Kibbutz was ignored. The natives rarely featured in social democracy’s vision
of the world. Today the Kibbutzim are no longer mentioned.
It was the
Lebanon War in 1982 that led to a political realignment. Tony Benn, Eric Heffer
and others on the Labour Left resigned from Labour Friends of Israel after the
latter’s support for the Lebanon War. It was the Right who took up the cudgels
for Zionism. This was because of the increasingly open support for the Israeli
state from America. The Right of the Labour Party, as symbolised by Blair’s
support for Bush’s war in Iraq, has always seen support for US foreign policy
as axiomatic.
The Labour
Left today has forgotten why Tony Benn and Jeremy Corbyn supported the
Palestinians. Israel was seen, rightly, as the armed watchdog of US imperialism
and the West, not as some kind of cuddly refuge for Jews searching for their
identity.
There should be no place in Labour for Israel’s ‘Right to Exist’
Thornberry
made two statements that need to be challenged. If you challenge the Israeli state’s ‘right to
exist’ then you should not be in the Labour Party. I wonder if Lady Nugee would have said the
same about the Apartheid State’s ‘right to exist’. We should challenge every
racist and ethno-nationalist state’s ‘right to exist’. No state has a ‘right to exist’ least of all
racist states. Only human beings have
the right to exist.
The Israeli
state is a special kind of state like its South Africa cousin of 25 years ago.
It is a self-declared ‘Jewish state’ – which means it is a State of Jews, not
merely Jews in Israel but throughout the world. A Report by the Pew
Research Centre Israel’s Religiously Divided Society showed that 48% of Israeli Jews support the physical
expulsion of Israel’s Arab citizens, compared to 46% who don’t.
The Israeli state
is the most racist state in the world. The Israeli Democracy Institute’s 2017
Report ‘Jews and Arabs: Conditional Partnership’
found that 2/3 Israeli Jews are opposed to Arabs buying land anywhere but in
Arab areas (3% of Israel’s total land) and 25% oppose them buying any land! This is the state that Emily Thornberry
defends up to the point of expelling socialists from Labour. This is the state that Thornberry calls a ‘beacon of freedom’.
A Palestinian State
Thornberry’s
response is that a Palestinian state should exist side by side with Israel. In
other words Partition, segregation and ethnic cleansing. Such a state wouldn’t even be a Bantustan. The
Bantustans in South Africa had greater
powers than the enclaves envisaged for the Palestinians.
After 50
years of military dictatorship in the West Bank and Gaza (as well as the Golan
Heights) there is no prospect of any Palestinian state emerging. The leader of the Israeli Labour Party, Avi
Gabbay made Labour’s position quite clear in an interview with Israel’s Channel 2.
“I won’t evacuate settlements in the
framework of a peace deal, If you are making peace, why do you need to
evacuate? If you are making peace, why
do you need to evacuate?”
Without
dismantling the settlements there can never be a two state solution. Gabbay is
right. No Israeli government could possibly withdraw over ½ million settlers
without a civil war. There is no political force in Israel that wants a
2 state solution. Zionism has always
claimed the whole of the Land of Israel, not half. God gave all of it!
Thornberry
is aware of this. She knows that the
settlements are here to say. She also knows that Israel cannot give the vote or
accord any basic democratic political or civil rights to the 5+ million Palestinians
living under occupation without the end of the Jewish state.
As the
Jewish National Fund, one of the main architects of Israeli apartheid made clear when challenged over its policy of
only allocating land to Jews,
‘A survey
commissioned by KKL-JNF reveals that over 70% of the Jewish population in
Israel opposes allocating KKL-JNF land to non-Jews, while over 80% prefer the
definition of Israel as a Jewish state, rather than as the state of all its
citizens.’
The situation in
the Occupied Territories will continue indefinitely because Israel is not
prepared to become a democratic state at the expense of being a Jewish state. In reality there are no Occupied Territories.
There is no border except in the heads of racist hypocrites like Thornberry,
between Israel and the West Bank. The Green Line has gone. It does not appear
on Israeli maps. In its place is an Apartheid state from the Mediterranean to
the Jordan in which half the population has no rights whatsoever and a small
proportion of the Palestinian, some 1.5 Israeli citizens are seen as a fifth
column in Israel’s midst, awaiting a future move to ‘transfer’ them.
Those who talk of a
non-existent Peace Process are deliberately drawing a shroud over the real
issue, democratic rights for all Israelis and Palestinians.If Thornberry can’t
understand that human beings should not be divided on grounds of ethnicity it
is she who should be expelled.
Israel uses
torture routinely against Palestinian prisoners and it even uses it against children, Palestinian
children of course. 60% of Palestinian children who are detained are tortured by Israeli forces.
Yet in what
Asa Winstanley called ‘a groveling address in front of the Israeli
ambassador at the Labour Friends of Israel annual dinner’ in
November 2017, Emily Thornberry declared that
‘even today... modern Israel stands out as a beacon
of freedom, equality and democracy, particularly in respect of women and LGBT
communities.’
As Private Eye used to say: ‘Pass
the sick bag Alice.’
Tony Greenstein
