Below is the Speech I Would Have Made When Challenging the Police to
Arrest Me Again
Last night I posted a blog
advertising a speech I was going to give at the picket of Tzipi Hotoveli on
Friday evening. Tonight I received an email from Sam Weinstein of the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network
(IJAN) withdrawing that invitation. You can judge for yourselves whether the
reasons given were the real reasons and whether IJAN
feared that events were getting out of their control. I have saved both emails here.
In the last few days, our researchers at Fake Reporter alongside @HablocOrg have been monitoring far-right groups on Whatsapp and Telegram.
— פייק ריפורטר | FakeReporter (@FakeReporter) May 13, 2021
We saw how civilians are organizing and arming themselves, in order to violently attacks Arab businesses and civilians.
Thread >>> pic.twitter.com/Wq6LfdAqgB
The alleged reason for the cancellation
concerns my refusal to get involved, despite considerable pressure, in the case
of alleged harassment of an Israeli activist which dates back many years. I was
accused of taking the side of the alleged harasser, which I reject, but
nonetheless I confess that I have wrestled with the issue. I have taken the
advice of others not to make any further comment on it.
What is important though is the issue
of the Metropolitan Police implementing the ‘illustration’ of anti-Semitism in
the Zionists’ IHRA definition of anti-Semitism, which states that ‘Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli
policy to that of the Nazis’ is anti-Semitic. At a time of genocide this
and only this, is what matters, not an arcane personal dispute.
Below is what would have been my
speech to the picket/ demonstration next Friday.
I am only going to provide a few links,
not only because of the time it takes but because, if I had made the speech, I
would not have given any links!
Why comparisons between Israel’s
holocaust in Gaza and the Nazi holocaust are valid and relevant
Comrades,
Three months ago, on October 4 2023,
I was arrested at this demonstration by the institutionally racist Metropolitan
Police for a ‘racially aggravated’ public order offence. In essence I was being
accused of anti-Semitism for having compared the Zionist holocaust in Gaza to the
Nazi holocaust. Comparing the Nazi treatment of Jews to Israel’s treatment of
the Palestinians is now deemed by the Met to be ‘anti-Semitic’.
Despite being arrested, held for 7
hours in a cell and subject to restrictive bail conditions, I was informed 7
weeks later that the Crown Prosecution Service were not going to charge me. No
doubt even the CPS could see the absurdity of charging someone who is Jewish with
‘anti-Semitism’!
People often say to me that even if
allegations of Zionist collaboration with the Nazis is true it is better not to
mention them for fear of giving unnecessary offence to Jewish people. My response
is simple. We will never understand why Israel behaves the way it does unless
we understand Zionism, the ideology that governs the actions of the Israeli state
– its ethnic cleansing, its desire to ‘cleanse’ Gaza of the Palestinians and
now its deliberate and targeted extermination of Palestinian civilians.
Bear in mind that even the
terminology of the Israeli state today when it talks of ‘cleansing’ Gaza is
identical to Nazi descriptions of ‘cleansing’
areas of Jews.
The Nazi holocaust against the Jews is
being used today to justify Israel’s holocaust of the Palestinians. In the words of Gideon Levy, a Ha’aretz columnist:
I have yet to hear a single teenager come back from Auschwitz and
say that we mustn’t abuse others the way we were abused. There has yet to be a
school whose pupils came back from Birkenau straight to the Gaza border, saw the barbed-wire fence and said,
Never again. The message is always the opposite. Gaza is permitted because of
Auschwitz.
People often say that Israelis are
suffering from an ‘inter-generational holocaust trauma’. My response is no. What they are suffering
from is a settler-colonial trauma. The fear that the indigenous population that
they have oppressed so long will rise up against them.
The slave owners in the Caribbean and
the American colonies suffered from a similar trauma and their reaction to
slave uprisings was not dissimilar to that of Israel’s reaction to October 7.
The Zionists have magnified October 7 out of all proportion. They have said that this was the largest slaughter of Jews since the holocaust. In fact the largest death of Jews since the holocaust was under the Argentinian Junta (1976-83) which tortured to death 3,000 Jews, up to 12.5% of those who disappeared.
Israel doesn’t mention what happened
in Argentina however because at the time it was arming and training the Argentine
military. It even refused visas to Argentine Jews because they were ‘the wrong sort of Jew’, a phrase you may
have heard recently.
This is however a particularly
noxious and racist comparison. Jews in Nazi Germany were killed because they were Jews. Israelis were killed on October 7 because
they were occupiers not because they were Jews.
Israeli deaths on October 7 pale in
comparison with Israel’s repeated attacks on Gaza.
In Operation Protective Edge in the summer of 2014 some 2,200 Palestinians,
including 515 children, were killed.
Death of Israelis on October 7 were 1139, half of this. It is estimated that since the Nakba some 134,000 Palestinians
and Arabs have been killed.
On 7 October 400 of the dead were
soldiers and police and therefore legitimate targets. Because of Israel’s
Hannibal Directive, which mandates that it’s better to kill your own people if
they are taken hostage rather than allow them to be swapped for prisoners, that
it’s highly likely that the majority of the remaining 739 Israeli deaths were
at the hands of their own trigger happy military.
That is why we have had a non-stop
barrage of atrocity propaganda from Israel.
First it was 40 beheaded babies, baked babies and babies hung from
clothes lines. Then it the mass rape story despite there being no victims and
no forensic evidence.
October 7 was the catalyst not the
reason for the genocide taking place in Gaza today. Chants of ‘Death to the Arabs’ didn’t begin on
October 7. Ben-Gvir, who had a picture of Baruch Goldstein on his wall (the man
who murdered 29 worshippers in the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron in 1994) became Israel’s
Minister of Police at the beginning of 2023. Gvir is a fully-fledged Jewish Nazi. A Jewish Nazi list became the third
largest in the Knesset in the November 2022 elections, not October 2023.
The reasons for making comparisons between
Israel today and the Nazi period is quite simple. Any group of people, given
the right set of conditions and circumstances, can become genocidal maniacs and
Nazis. Racism is not a biological property.
There was nothing German about the Nazis’
extermination of the Jews. The Romanians were even more enthusiastic about
killing Jews when the Germans seemed to
be winning the war. Slovakia asked the Nazis to take the Jews off their hands.
Croatia even set up its own extermination camp, Jasenovac.
When Israeli ‘Defence’ Minister Yoav
Gallant began the genocide, he described the Palestinians as ‘human animals’ the very phrase that Himmler
had used about the Jews, when justifying the
Holocaust on October 4 1943 to senior SS Generals. Gallant also promised
to starve them and deny water and fuel. Also Nazi tactics.
Netanyahu invoked the example of
Amalek, the tribe that god had commanded the Israelites to wipe out – every man,
woman, child and infant was to be murdered.
The number of calls to genocide by Israeli
politicians is limitless. Israeli Heritage Minister Amihai Eliyahu suggested
that dropping a nuclear bomb on the Gaza Strip was “one of the possibilities”. Law for Palestine released a database of over
500 genocidal statements by influential Israelis, including the President and
Cabinet members.
Wiping out the Palestinians is a very
popular idea in Israel. The most popular car bumper sticker in Israel is ‘finish them off’. Indeed if the
comparison with Nazi Germany is wrong it is because the level of anti-Semitism amongst
ordinary Germans was far less than that in Israel.
When the presenters of Israel’s
oldest podcast ‘two nice Jewish boys’ said
‘If you gave me a button to just erase Gaza,
every single living being in Gaza would no longer be living tomorrow. I would
press it in a second’
there was
no condemnation in Israel, let alone a prosecution as would happen if an Israeli
Arab were to say the same about Jews. Incitement to murder Palestinians is not
an offence in Israel.
There are
some who go even further. Rabbi Eliyahu Mali, of the pre-military Yeshivah Shirat
Moshe, said:
‘“Whoever comes to kill you... does not only include the young man aged
16, 18, 20, or 30 who is now pointing a weapon at you, but also the future
generation (the children of Gaza), and those who produce the future generation
(women of Gaza), because there is really no difference,”
In other
words one should kill children as well as their mothers because they may become
the fighters of the future. Compare this with what Himmler said about killing Jewish
children in a speech on October 6th 1943.
‘I did not assume to have the
right to exterminate the men… and have the avengers personified in the children
to become adults for our children and grandchildren.’
When pogroms against Arabs broke out
in Israeli towns in 2021one user wrote
“We are no longer Jews today. People from Holon, Bat
Yam and Rishon Lezion go out to bring war. Today we are Nazis.”
Today in Gaza, with the destruction
of hospitals and the murder of patients and doctors and the detention of people
like Dr. Hussam Abu
Safiya, the
Director of Kamal Adwan hospital, in the Sdei Teiman torture centre, we can see
the degeneration of Israeli society before our eyes. A society where 65% of the
population is opposed to criminal prosecutions of those who rape prisoners.
Indeed in some respects Israel is
going beyond what the Nazis did. In Budapest it was the Nazis’ protégés in the Arrow
Cross, a Hungarian Nazi party, that murdered doctors and patients at two Jewish hospitals (Maros Street
and Varosmajor Street). The Gestapo did not touch the hospitals. In Berlin the Jewish
hospital survived untouched until the end of the war. It is Israel which has a peculiar attraction
for destroying Palestinian hospitals.
We should also ask ourselves whether the Nazi destruction of Jewish synagogues during Kristallnacht is any different to the Zionist destruction of virtually every mosque in Gaza?
Ever
since its creation Israel has laid claim to inherit the memory of the Jews who
died in the holocaust. The reality, as Gaza shows, is that Israel inherits the
memory of those who killed Europe’s Jews.
In the
words of an
article in the Jewish Chronicle quoting
what I said at Palestine Expo in 2019, ‘Israel
is Hitler’s Bastard Offspring’.
I
leave you with just one thought. If the level of racism in Israel today had
been present in Europe during the Holocaust it wouldn’t have been 6 million Jews
who died but 7 or even 8 million.
