Why You Can’t Be a Genuine Supporter of the Palestinians Unless You Are Anti-Zionist

 Just as Supporters of Black Liberation in South Africa Opposed Apartheid, Supporters of the Palestinians Must Oppose Zionism and Israel as a ‘Jewish’ State

This is the logic of Zionism – if you believe in universal values then you are no better than the Jews who perished in the gas chamber – indeed it is a pity that you weren’t among them

I have written many hundreds of articles, thousands if you count my blogs, but my article in today’s Electronic Intifada Only anti-Zionists are real supporters of Palestine is one of the most important, I have written.

I have long grappled with the question as to why it was that those who purported to support the Palestinians in the Labour Party, gave their support to an ‘anti-Semitism’ smear campaign, whose sole purpose was to remove Jeremy Corbyn as leader because of his support for the Palestinians.

On 11 April 2016, I wrote to Ben Soffa, Secretary of Palestine Solidarity Campaign about the Zionists’ ‘anti-Semitism’ smear campaign. Rereading it today it seems prescient.

Despite initiatives from a number of Jewish groups… to stem the [anti-Semitism] attacks from the Board of Deputies, the BBC and the Guardian in particular, there has been complete silence from PSC. PSC prides itself on being the largest solidarity organisation in Britain. The Executive boasted in its Annual Report that it had contacted 1,042 candidates at the General Election, yet it hasn’t seen fit to contact any Labour parliamentarians to speak up against the attacks of the Zionists and the Labour Right… 

Why haven’t you for example organised a large public meeting on the issue with say Ken Livingstone and a sympathetic MP as speakers or issued press releases, produced leaflets, called press conferences, pressed for articles in the Opinion columns of the quality press etc?  I know that PSC is renowned for its caution and timidity but there must be some limits to this….

PSC has resources that other groups do not…. It is inexcusable that it has done absolutely nothing to respond to the Zionists daily attacks. …

… Part of the problem is undoubtedly the political weakness of PSC, which supports the Palestinians whilst not opposing Zionism. Historically PSC has prefered to act as a campaigning group around human rights whilst avoiding thorny issues such as Zionism and anti-Semitism. 

The ceaseless political attack by the Zionists on support for the Palestinians in the LP cannot simply be ignored.  They will not go away because their campaign is linked with the determination of the Right in the LP to remove Corbyn.  ‘Anti-Semitism’ is their weapon of choice….

Until Jeremy Corbyn firmly rebuts his critics he will continue to come under attack.  Appeasement rarely works.  It is no use Corbyn saying that he opposes anti-Semitism because what he means by anti-Semitism and the Zionists mean by it are two different things.… Until Corbyn speaks out saying that yes he opposes anti-Semitism but yes he supports the Palestinians, including the Boycott of Israel, giving chapter and verse on why Israel is a racist and apartheid state, then the attacks will continue.

Ben Soffa’s response oozed complacency. He began his letter to me of 20 April 2016 by quoting the 2010 Report of the Reut Institute.

A central objective is to change this situation by forcing them [Palestine solidarity organisations] to 'play defense'.

This means systematically exposing information about delegitimizers, their activities, and the organizations that they operate out of. The goal is to eventually frame them, depending on their agendas, as anti-peace, anti-Semitic, dishonest purveyors of double standards.

Despite saying that ‘It is clear that the upsurge in attempts to link support for the rights of the Palestinian people with anti-Semitism requires a new a concerted response.’ Soffa went on to say that

… I make no apology for the fact that we do not engage in every debate some would wish to involve us in. As the Reut Institute set out, there is a plan to force us to 'play defence' on the terrain chosen by those wishing to preserve the status quo in Palestine. We must not fall into the trap of allowing our opponents to set our agenda, which is precisely why PSC chooses to make the intervention we feel are most helpful to the situation, rather than seeking to make every intervention which might be possible…

There is much work to be done, but it is also not necessarily most effective for PSC to be the organisation leading on all aspects of this.

The problem with not engaging with the ‘anti-Semitism’ smear campaign was that it didn’t then go away. What it did mean was Britain’s largest Palestine solidarity group was absent from the fight against the Zionist lobby and their allies, the Labour Right.

There is good reason to believe that PSC did not want to align itself with the Corbyn left since their strategy involved aligning and working with those bitterly opposed to Corbyn. The problem with this was that the Labour Right, even those like Nisa Nandy who professed to support the Palestinians, would willingly throw the Palestinians under the bus to get rid of Corbyn.

Almost all the trade unions affiliated to Palestine Solidarity Campaign, who proudly use their affiliation as ‘proof’ that they support the Palestinians, were at one and the same time supporting the IHRA ‘definition’ of anti-Semitism and the Jewish Labour Movement. The IHRA’s sole purpose was to label supporters of the Palestinians as anti-Semitic.

Lisa Nandy's Concern for Palestinian Children's Rights Didn't Prevent Her 'Barnstorming' Speech to Labour Friends of Israel - PSC was happy to provide a Platform for these Creatures

In some unions like the GMB, the IHRA has been used to expel genuine supporters of the Palestinians like Bert Schouwenburg.

Even the most stupid trade union leaders, like Gary Smith or Sharon Graham, understand the purpose behind the IHRA. Nearly all of the IHRA’s examples of ‘anti-Semitism’ involved opposition to Israel and Zionism. It completely ignored the genuine anti-Semitism of the far-right, yet PSC took a conscious decision not to raise the IHRA with its trade union affiliates.

Since PSC never asked anything of Nandy, Thornberry et al. they got nothing back except platitudes

When PSC held a trade union conference in 2019 Director Ben Jamal asked me to leave because I had distributed leaflets opposing the IHRA. Why is it that PSC is so reluctant to raise ‘difficult issues’ like the weaponisation of anti-Semitism with trade unions? Why does PSC value affiliations which are politically worthless?

First She was Chair of Labour Friends of Palestine

The conclusions I reached don’t make for easy reading but we have to face up to unpleasant truths. The trade unions, with the support of PSC, were able to proclaim their support for the Palestinians at one and the same time as they supported a Jewish Supremacist state.

and then a regular on PSC Platforms

As Jesus wisely observed you cannot serve two masters, God and Mammon. You have to make a choice between opposition to Israeli settler colonialism and support for the Palestinians or support for Israel as a Jewish State.

and then the JLM's preferred candidate for leader

PSC has chosen to ride two horses which is why it is ineffectual politically. On the one hand it supports the Palestinians and on the other it refuses to challenge the imperialist neo-colonial narrative of support for the two state solution. It doesn’t even challenge the anti-Semitism narrative that says Jews are an oppressed group still less argue that Israel as a ‘Jewish’ state must inevitably be a racist state.

PSC has failed to master the art of riding 2 horses at the same time

The result is that PSC’s narrative is entirely incoherent and all that it can do is point to Israel’s human rights abuses. That of course is fine but how is PSC different from a human rights NGO such as War on Want? In many ways PSC is less effective than WOW.

When it came to supporting Corbyn against the Zionists PSC was conspicuous by its absence. PSC put up no opposition to the Zionists’ anti-Corbyn campaign for fear of upsetting trade union leaders and the Labour Right. PSC abandoned Palestinian supporters inside the Labour Party. They left the field clear to the Zionists.

Anyone claiming to support both Black people in South Africa and Apartheid would have been ridiculed yet today you have large numbers of people who claim to both support the Palestinians and the Israeli state. Quite simply you cannot support the Executioner and the Condemned Man – politics is about making choices not compromises.

No one was too opportunistic or right-wing to go on PSC's platforms

Today supporters of a two state solution are in reality supporters of an Apartheid Solution in Palestine. They are supporting the continuing existence of a state based on ethnic cleansing whilst at the same time supporting their victims. The time has come for genuine supporters of the Palestinians to say to groups like PSC that you have to make a choice. You cannot continue to try and ride two horses.

I resigned from PSC in 2021 when it adopted a Constitution which abandoned opposition to Zionism. PSC did this with the support of the Socialist Workers Party and others who claim to be on the left.

I hope that my article stimulates the discussion that is necessary if we are going to see a strategic change of direction for the Palestine solidarity movement in Britain. PSC’s ‘strategy’ of ‘mainstreaming’ is dead in the water. The British Establishment is wedded to support for Zionism, as it has been for over a century. No amount of rational argument will change the minds of racists like Robert Jenrick.

I am grateful to Electronic Intifada, the most important Palestinian news site there is, for carrying my article.

Tony Greenstein

Only anti-Zionists are real supporters of Palestine

Tony Greenstein The Electronic Intifada 3 October 2023

Britain’s Palestine solidarity movement is at a crossroads. Loredana Sangiuliano ZUMA Press

The statement that you can’t be a supporter of the Palestinians unless you are an anti-Zionist may seem dogmatic, even sectarian to some.

But it is the failure of Britain’s Palestine solidarity movement to understand this simple truth which is responsible for so many of our recent setbacks. It is this which has enabled the successful weaponization of anti-Semitism.

Subjectively speaking, it is perfectly possible to support the Palestinians and the “right of Israel to exist” at the same time. In theory, there was no reason at all why good men and women could not sit down and draw the boundaries of a two-state solution equitable to all.

There was only one problem. Such a solution failed to take into account the dynamics of settler-colonialism and of Zionism in particular.

Many supporters of the British Empire, liberal imperialists such as Thomas MacCaulay and the Labour Party Fabians, really did believe that there could be a benevolent imperialism that was compatible with supporting the rights of the colonized. It was called “trusteeship.”

Moving from PSC to Labour Friends of Israel is effortless for Emily Thornberry because PSC asks so little of its speakers

Many honest people believed that the colonies were the “White Man’s Burden,” as the British novelist and poet Rudyard Kipling infamously put it, and that we were only in India and Africa out of the goodness of our hearts.

The Church Missionary Society and people like John Philip would have been aghast if you had accused them of supporting white supremacy. Yet that is what they did.

Thornberry repays PSC's invitation by attacking BDS to Israeli Embassy Group Labour Friends of Israel

Holding contradictory ideas inside one’s head is what most people do, for much of the time. It’s called “cognitive dissonance” or as George Orwell termed it, “doublethink.”

However, for a solidarity organization to do the same renders its task impossible. Sooner or later a choice has to be made.

Solidarity with the Palestinians, although it involves opposing many egregious abuses of human rights, is not at bottom a question of human rights. Just as apartheid in South Africa was not primarily about human rights but Black liberation from white minority rule, so too is the Palestinian question primarily about liberation from Zionism and a state of Jewish supremacy.

PSC climbdown

In 2022 I resigned, for the second time, from the organization I had helped found, the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, because it had adopted in March of that year a new constitution which eliminated its previous opposition to Zionism. If the truth be told, opposition to Zionism had long been abandoned by PSC. But by removing this from its constitution PSC made explicit what before had been implicit.

Prior to its March 2022 annual general meeting (when the PSC executive railroaded through the changes) the PSC’s old constitution had included an unambiguous clause stating that one of the group’s objectives was “opposition to racism, including … the apartheid and Zionist nature of the Israeli state.”

The new constitution has watered this down significantly, stating only that Israel’s system of apartheid and settler colonialism is “motivated by Zionism,” without explaining PSC’s position on Zionism. The argument privately used by the PSC to “justify” this change was that Zionism means different things to different people.

Zionism is the racist creed and movement which led to the dispossession and expulsion of the Palestinians.

It was the failure of former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and much of the Labour left to combine support for the Palestinians with opposition to Zionism that was their Achilles’ heel. It was no surprise that the Jewish Labour Movement and its faithful poodle Jon Lansman wanted to abolish any mention of Zionism.

Their reasoning was that some people used the term “Zionist” when they really meant “Jew.” But it was the Zionists themselves who had deliberately sought to confuse the distinction in the minds of people.

Their other argument was that “Zionism” covered a multitude of sins – from left to right, obscuring the fact that all wings of Zionism agreed on establishing a Jewish state with a large majority of Jews.

Corbyn was undoubtedly a supporter of the Palestinians but he had no understanding of Zionism and could not therefore explain why or how the Palestinians had become marginalized and oppressed in Israel.

Appeasement

When the “anti-Semitism” campaign first began, Corbyn effectively became a Zionist.

He supported a Palestinian state but also recognized the legitimacy of the Jewish Labour Movement’s claim to represent Jews in the Labour Party. Instead of seeing the JLM as a lobby group, the primary purpose of which was support for the Israeli state and therefore the oppression of the Palestinians, Corbyn accepted that the group’s purported concerns about anti-Semitism were genuine.

There was absolutely no excuse for Corbyn’s pathetic response to the JLM and the Board of Deputies of British Jews (another pro-Israel group which led the “anti-Semitism” campaign against him).

Having spent 30 years as a campaigner for Palestinian rights, Corbyn above all was familiar with the Zionist accusation of “anti-Semitism.” Yet when he became leader he forgot all of this.

Support for the two-state solution enabled Corbyn to both support the Zionists and support the Palestinians. Saying, as he did, that there was a place for both Zionists and anti-Zionists in Labour was in effect saying there was a place for both racists and anti-racists in the party.

Corbyn’s human rights concerns disappeared as he lent his support to the very organization, the JLM, which was formed to remove him.

Those who accept Israel’s “right to exist” accept the legitimacy of Zionism. They fail to understand that a “Jewish” state, as an expansionist ethno-nationalist settler-colonial state, could never accept anything more than a set of mini bantustans.

When Corbyn decided to commission the Chakrabarti inquiry he set the seal on this process. He accepted that there was a problem of anti-Semitism in the Labour Party.

Having appeased the Zionists once, Corbyn went on to appease them repeatedly until he himself became a victim.

The resulting report, authored in 2016 by human rights lawyer Shami Chakrabarti, found no evidence that Labour was dominated by anti-Semitism as was being claimed at the time. Nevertheless, it made some key concessions to this false narrative.

Chakrabarti defined Zionism not as a political creed or movement but as a form of Jewish identity. In so doing she completely failed to understand where the accusations of anti-Semitism were coming from.

She wrote in the report that:

A further complexity comes from left-wing British Jewry, including, but not exclusively, young people becoming increasingly critical of, and disenchanted with, Israeli government policy in relation to settlements in the West Bank and the bombardment of Gaza in particular. This has led to some people personally redefining their Zionism in ways that appear to grant less support to the state of Israel and more solidarity to fellow Jewish people the world over … It seems to me that it is for all people to self-define their political beliefs and I cannot hope to do justice to the rich range of self-descriptions of both Jewishness or Zionism, even within the Labour Party, that I have heard.

Of course, anyone can self-define their political beliefs and what they understand Zionism means. However, there is no obligation on anyone else to accept such an identity.

The only meaning of Zionism that counts is that of those who suffer its ill effects – the Palestinians. People who define themselves as Zionists tell us nothing other than what is going on in their heads.

Confusion as a badge of honor

The ability to combine both support for the Palestinians with support for Zionism enabled political charlatans like the lawmaker Lisa Nandy to chair Labour Friends of Palestine whilst denouncing opposition to Zionism as anti-Semitic.

Just imagine that someone had said that although they supported the rights of Black South Africans they refused to oppose apartheid. They would have been ridiculed, yet that is precisely what is happening when people claim to support the Palestinians yet refuse to identify as anti-Zionists.

This is why I term support for a two-state solution, with its assumption that a racist “Jewish” state could co-exist alongside a Palestinian state, as support for the continued oppression of the Palestinians.

Jeremy Corbyn, with his support of the two-state solution, made his own political confusion over Palestine into a badge of honor. He also disarmed his supporters and gave confidence to his detractors.

By supporting the state of Israel, Corbyn also supported the idea that Israel was the nation state of the Jews.

If this was the case, and if Jews were indeed a nation, despite living in most of the world’s countries, then clearly Jews have the right to self-determination. Ipso facto, one must welcome Israel’s new neo-Nazi police minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir.

Theirs is the monstrosity that is called Israel.

Instead of calling out the Jewish Labour Movement as supporters of a racist, settler-colonial state, Corbyn bought into the idea that Israel was guilty of nothing more than Jewish nationalism and its opponents were guilty of anti-Semitism. The tragedy was that the Palestinians themselves, in the form of the Palestine Liberation Organization, had abandoned their own anti-Zionism in the belief that Zionism could be confined within only part of historic Palestine – what the Zionists term Eretz Yisrael (Hebrew for the land of Israel).

To say you support the Palestinians while refusing to oppose Zionism, the movement with a primary goal not of fighting anti-Semitism but fighting the native Arab Palestinians, is to accept the left-Zionist narrative of a “conflict” between two peoples, a clash of right vs right. It renders any solution, other than a neo-colonial one, impossible and in practice it means surrendering to the existing power structure in Palestine.

Nowhere is this clearer than in Britain’s trade unions.

Nearly all major trade unions are affiliated to the Palestine Solidarity Campaign. All of them claim to support the Palestinians.

Yet Gail Cartmail, the assistant general secretary of Unite – which calls itself Britain’s leading union – justified banning the film Oh Jeremy Corbyn: The Big Lie and a talk by Asa Winstanley covering his new book Weaponising Anti-Semitism (which documents the fake “anti-Semitism” campaign) all on the grounds that Jews have been hurt and even made afraid by journalism that seeks to tell the truth.

The reality is that by adopting Israel’s twisted definition of anti-Semitism, British unions are facing both ways at the same time. They support the Palestinians yet also support the Jewish Labour Movement and those who took down Corbyn.

The trade unions can only get away with this because supporters of the Palestinians in the Labour Party, including Corbyn, fail to understand how anti-Semitism has been weaponized in the service of state and nation.

Tony Greenstein is the author of Zionism During the Holocaust.

See my blog from January 2020

Without an anti-Zionist critique solidarity with the Palestinians is nothing more than charity

Gary Smith and the Jewish Labour Movement Attack Free Speech in the GMB as former International Officer Bert Schouwenburg is Suspended for Proposing Severing Relations with the JLM

Whilst the GMB Claims to Support the Palestinians in practice it is a Supporter of Israeli Apartheid

Bert Schouwenburg

On January 26 the Walthamstow branch of the GMB unanimously passed a motion which stated that

the decision to work with the Jewish Labour Movement (JLM) runs contrary to GMB’s support for Palestine, has brought the union into disrepute

and that the JLM

is effectively the UK wing of the Israeli Labour Party, a racist organisation that governed Israel from 1948 to 1977 and was directly responsible for the massacre or the expulsion of three quarters of a million Palestinians

The motion noted that the ‘JLM conflates anti-Zionism with antisemitism’ and that by continuing to support the JLM the ‘GMB is leaving itself open to accusations that it is supporting the racist treatment of Palestinian people.’ It therefore called on Congress to ‘instruct(s) the General Secretary and the CEC to sever all ties with JLM forthwith.’

It is a perfectly reasonable motion. There is nothing in the slightest anti-Semitic about it. Proposer, Bert Schouwenburg, was an organiser for the GMB’s London Region before taking up the post of International Officer until he retired in 2018 after Tim Roache, the General Secretary, who was alleged to have raped and molested female members of the GMB, took over. Roache was forced to resign and was in turn succeeded by Gary Smith, who is both a Starmer supporter and a racist Zionist.

Smith is such an ardent supporter of the Israeli state that even the far-right Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, praised him. The CAA, an Israeli state proxy, was set up specifically to counter solidarity with the Palestinians with accusations of ‘anti-Semitism’. It is so far to the Zionist right that even Margaret Hodge, the parliamentary representative of the JLM, attacked the CAA as being more interested in attacking the Labour Party than opposing anti-Semitism.

As Skwawkbox noted Smith

was a key participant in the campaign against Scottish Labour leader Richard Leonard. He also led a campaign against Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon on the same issue.

The CAA’s Chairperson, Gideon Falter, is Vice Chair of the Jewish National Fund UK. The JNF funds the building of settlements in the Occupied West Bank. The JNF only allows Jews to rent or lease its property and it owns or control 93% of Israeli land. The JNF has consistently fought the idea that Jews and non-Jews should have equal access to its land. Faltiel is also a supporter of Hindutva, Hindu Supremacy as espoused by the Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi (who is also an ardent admirer of Zionism).

Gary Smith is praised by the CAA, whose Chair Gideon Falter is Vice-Chair of the JNF which refuses to lease land to Arab citizens of Israel

Hardeep Matharu wrote about how

In 2018, the Hindu Forum of Britain arranged a private meeting with Gideon Falter, CEO of the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism (CAA). The chair – none other than Conservative MP Bob Blackman, who has a history of hosting Islamophobes – declared that there was a need to “learn from the way the CAA had got the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism passed in the Labour Party” with regards to supposed anti-Hindu sentiment.

A year later, two weeks before the 2019 General Election, a spokesperson for the Hindu Council UK supported Rabbi Mirvis’ claim that the Labour Party is antisemitic and added that it is anti-Hindu too because a conference resolution had criticised Modi’s policies in Kashmir. 

Amrit Wilson described how Falter assured the meeting that he and his supporters

would do all they could to help eradicate the ‘duty’ on the government to make Caste an aspect of race in the Equality Act of 2010.

In other words the CAA supports discrimination against Untouchables or Dalits. This is where the campaign against ‘anti-Semitism’ has ended up.

The far-right misnamed Campaign Against Antisemitism loves Gary Smith because they recognise a fellow racist

The same CAA described some of Gary Smith’s notable achievements noting that

he has spoken out against Richard Leonard, the former Scottish Labour leader, for failing to support the International Definition of Antisemitism.

The International Definition (the IHRA) has one purpose. Conflating support for the Palestinians and anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism. The GMB has also adopted the IHRA. As Stephen Sedley, a Jewish former Court of Appeal judge observed the 500+ word IHRA ‘fails the first test of any definition: it is indefinite.’

The CAA recalled how, in March 2019, during the fake anti-Semitism campaign against the Labour left and Jeremy Corbyn, Smith

‘labelled the Labour Party’s handling of antisemitism “disgraceful” and revealed that he even thought about leaving the Party himself.

In a private email, Bert described how

‘for reasons I have never fully understood, there has long been a reluctance to fully embrace the Palestinian cause [in the GMB] despite numerous resolutions.’

On 28 April 2023 Schouwenburg received a letter from London Region Secretary Warren Kenny suspending his GMB membership because of the motion on the JLM. As Schouwenburg noted

I do not think that he [Warren] is capable of sufficient independent thought to have made the decision to suspend me himself though I can only speculate as to why it was considered necessary to shut me down

Speculating that ‘I needed to be made an example of pour encourager les autres.’ In other words anyone who decides that in order to support the Palestinians one needs to oppose Zionism, the Jewish Supremacist ideology that has led to the Palestinians dispossession, needs to be aware that they will be expelled.

In his barely literate letter, Kenny alleged that the motion ‘contained several factual inaccuracies. The motion also contains serious, potentially legally actionable, and antisemitic allegations.’

However there was nothing in Warren’s letter explaining what these inaccuracies were or why the motion was deemed anti-Semitic. Nor did Warren explain what was ‘potentially legally actionable.’

The reason why Warren’s assertions were unsupported was because they were false. Bert was immediately suspended from benefit, banned from holding any GMB office and banned from taking part in any GMB business and affairs.

The motion passed by the branch contained not a hint of anti-Semitism nor was it inaccurate. It read:

Congress accepts that the decision to work with the Jewish Labour Movement (JLM) runs contrary to GMB’s support for Palestine, has brought the union into disrepute and should never have been countenanced.

Congress notes that the JLM is effectively the UK wing of the Israeli Labour Party, a racist organisation that governed Israel from 1948 to 1977 and was directly responsible for the massacre or the expulsion of three quarters of a million Palestinians. Today, some of their Knesset members support the most right-wing Israeli regime in history.

JLM conflates anti-Zionism with antisemitism and by dint of its support, GMB is leaving itself open to accusations that it is supporting the racist treatment of Palestinian people.  Therefore, Congress instructs the General Secretary and the CEC to sever all ties with JLM forthwith.

In an article on Schouwenburg’s suspension Skwawkbox noted that the GMB officially supports the ‘Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions’ movement, which the JLM opposes and in both 2011 and 2013 passed resolutions not to allow its members to travel to Israel on delegations organised by ‘Trade Union Friends of Israel’.

There is very little on the GMB website concerning Palestine and no mention at all of BDS. Under the heading GMB Policy on Palestine we learn that the ‘GMB is a long-standing supporter of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign and Western Sahara Campaign and supports the statement below.’

The statement mainly opposes the Abraham Accords and for some reason includes GMB policy on the Sahrawi people of Western Sahara. The policy condemns Israel’s ‘continuing to flout international law through its ongoing occupation and colonisation of Palestinian land’, the expansion of settlements and the denial of the Palestinian right to self-determination. The policy states that:

global civil society must redouble its efforts to stand in solidarity with the Palestinian and the Sahrawi people until freedom, justice and equality are realised.’

Yet when Schouwenburg proposed a motion putting some teeth into this policy he was suspended which suggests that the GMB’s policy on Palestine is merely declaratory. 

Were there any ‘mistakes’ in the Walhamstow motion and why was it anti-Semitic?

The motion from Walthamstow branch noted that ‘the JLM is effectively the UK wing of the Israeli Labour Party’ [ILP]. If you go to the JLM website it states explicitly that the ILP is its ‘sister party.’ The motion described the ILP as

‘a racist organisation that governed Israel from 1948 to 1977 and was directly responsible for the massacre or the expulsion of three quarters of a million Palestinians.’

This too is a fact? The motion could have said that it was the ILP which kept Palestinians who weren’t expelled in 1948 under military rule from 1948 till 1966 and that it confiscated most of their land too.

The motion stated that the JLM

conflates anti-Zionism with antisemitism and by dint of its support, GMB is leaving itself open to accusations that it is supporting the racist treatment of Palestinian people. 

This too is a fact. Anyone doubting this should read Asa Winstanley’s new book ‘Weaponising Anti-Semitism – How the Israel Lobby Brought Down Jeremy Corbyn’.

The JLM were refounded in 2015 solely in order to spearhead the attack on Corbyn using anti-Semitism as its weapon. The JLM joined the CAA in making a complaint to the Equalities and Human Rights Commission about the Labour Party.

The unspoken assumption running through Kenny’s letter is that the JLM is the Jewish section of the Labour Party but this is not true. One of the JLM’s Values is

To promote the centrality of Israel in Jewish life and its development on the basis of freedom, social justice and equality for all its citizens.

Promoting the centrality of Israel among Jews is a Zionist not a Jewish principle. The JLM is a Zionist group which no Jewish person who is not a Zionist would join. The JLM is affiliated to the UK Zionist Federation and the World Zionist Organisation.

The hypocrisy of the JLM is proven in their assertion that they support equality for all Israel’s citizens but that they also support a Jewish state. An ethno-nationalist state based on the religion of only some of its citizens cannot, by definition, be a state where all its citizens are equal.

When Israeli actor Rotem Sala posted on Instagram:

When will anyone in this government tell the public that this is a country of all its citizens, and all people are born equal. “Arabs are also human beings. And also the Druze, and the gays, and the lesbians and… gasp… leftists.

the reaction of Prime Minister Netanyahu was swift. He stated that:

Israel is not a state of all its citizens. According to the basic nationality law we passed, Israel is the nation state of the Jewish people – and only it.

The ILP did not contradict him. That is why ‘Jewish Settlement’ is one of the ‘values’ outlined in the racist Jewish Nation State Law, a principle that the Israeli Labor Party adheres too.

Kenny also doesn’t explain why Schouwenburg has been suspended and not all those present at the branch meeting where the motion was passed unanimously. When a motion is passed it is the property of the meeting not one individual. Why was Schouwenburg singled out?

The GMB’s defence of a Zionist group which supports a state which has been condemned as committing the crime of apartheid suggests that under Gary Smith the GMB is supporting Israeli Apartheid.

That Israel is an apartheid state is not a matter of dispute. Every major human rights organisation – Israel’s B’tselem, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have condemned Israel as an apartheid state.

The only conclusion that can be draw from Bert Schouwenburg’s proposed expulsion is, in his own words, that the

‘GMB are trying to shut down any voices that dissent from their newly-found enthusiasm for Israel’s apartheid regime. Under Gary Smith, a union that once backed the call for Boycott, Disinvestment and Sanctions (BDS) is now supporting the most vicious, right-wing government in Israel’s history.

It is not Bert Schouwenburg who should be suspended pending investigation but Gary Smith and his poodle, Warren Kenny.

Smith was instrumental in having Black rapper Lowkey banned from the Tolpuddle Festival at the behest of various Zionist organisations. See my blog of January 1 2023 detailing how Gary Smith acted as a messenger boy for the Apartheid State’s lobby groups.

Gary Smith's love affair with Zelensky, a Jewish fascist who has no problem with a national holiday for a mass murderer of Jews during  WW2

Smith’s opposition to ‘anti-Semitism’ doesn’t prevent him from being an ardent supporter of Zelensky who has banned Ukraine’s leftwing parties and has also abolished the right to strike, using the war as a pretext. Zelensky is a fervent Zionist and supported Israel’s attacks on Gaza. His support for self-determination doesn’t include the Palestinians. Yet the GMB is fundraising to buy a vehicle for the Ukraine military and London Region has, I understand, handed them a donation of £5,000, as if the billions from Joe Biden and Boris Johnson/Sunak weren’t sufficient.

Stepan Bandera's Ukrainian Insurgent Army (OUP) played an integral part in the massacre of 33,000 Jews at Babi Yar in 1941. He is a national hero in Ukraine & the Zionists say nothing

Zelensky may be Jewish but he is also a Zionist and that explains why it is that he has formed alliances with Ukraine’s neo-Nazi militias. He has done and said nothing about the fact that Stepan Bandera is the only Nazi collaborator in the world to have a national holiday in his honour. Bandera’s Ukraine Insurgent Army murdered some 200,000 Jews as well as 100,000 Poles.

The GMB is affiliated to Palestine Solidarity Campaign. The silence of PSC in the face of Smith’s support for Israel and the Zionists, in blatant contradiction of his own union’s policy on Palestine, should have been called out. Instead PSC has remained silent as Smith and the JLM target Palestinian supporters like Bert Schouwenburg.

Members of PSC should be asking what is the purpose of a union’s affiliation if that union acts as an extension of the apartheid regime? I know that Barbara Plant, the GMB’s President is a genuine supporter of the Palestinians. PSC should be working with her to confront Smith and his Zionist sycophants like Warren Kenny.

Even past General Secretary Tim Roache, put his name to an advertisement in the Guardian in 2017 calling on the British government to apologise for the Balfour Declaration.

The British Brothers League was set up to campaign for anti-alienist legislation which Arthur Balfour, the Zionist hero, introduced in 1905. William Evans Gordon MP was a friend of Zionist Organisation President Chaim Weizmann and a supporter of the Zionist movement

Arthur Balfour was a dedicated anti-Semite who proposed the first immigration laws, the Aliens Act, against Jewish refugees in 1905. Weizmann, srael’s first President, described a conversation he had had with Balfour, who told him that he had met with Cosima Wagner, the anti-Semitic widow of Richard Wagner. Balfour explained that ‘he shared many of her anti-Semitic postulates.’ One suspects that Smith and Balfour would have got on quite well.

Tony Greenstein