Emily Thornberry, (Lady Nugee), is standing as the racist Zionist candidate for leadership of the Labour Party

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’.

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.  

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

Hiding Zionism's Racism Behind an ‘Anti-Semitic’ Mask

A Response to Rabbi Elli Sarah

Rabbi Elli Sara

Rabbi Elli Sarah is a Liberal rabbi in Brighton and Hove.  Liberal Judaism is supposed to be the most progressive form of Judaism, however Zionism has dragged it to the Right.  Reform Judaism, of which Liberal Judaism is a variant, wished to update Judaism in the 19th century in line with modern capitalism.  It was to Orthodoxy what Protestantism was to Catholicism.  Reform Judaism's reaction to Zionism when it first emerged was hostility.  It rejected outright the idea that the Jews were a separate nation.  That was the view of the anti-Semites and Reform Judaism wanted nothing to do with those who would reverse the tide of Emancipation. 

In one of the more amusing incidents of the social calendar, Rabbi Elli Sarah invited Julie Burchill, the non-Jewish Zionist Islamaphobe into her house and was dissed for it.  Elli Sarah doesn't see the irony that the Palestinians invited the Jews in their homeland and were expelled by way of gratitude.

Elli Sarah herself achieved a measure of notoriety a few years ago, because she is an openly lesbian rabbi.  My father was an Orthodox Rabbi.  If he and his fellow rabbis had their way Elli Sarah would have gone the way of Lot’s wife – turned into  a pillar of salt!  But Elli Sarah has, along with many political gays, moved to the Right. 

Elli Sarah has written an essay entitled ‘WhyAnti-Zionism is Anti-Semitism – but criticising Israel isn’t’   Her essay is a good example of how people can genuinely believe that what they write is profound and original, even though it is little more than an echo chamber for the received wisdom of establishment politicians and their media outlets.  Clichés and hackneyed phrases are dressed up as original. 

Elli Sarah has no criticism of the Zionist record vs the Nazi state - the above quote from Ben Gurion's official biography by Shabtai Teveth - the Burning Ground - suggests otherwise.  It would have been better to save half Germany's Jewish children in Palestine than all of them in England

Elli Sarah’s thesis is that anti-Semitism equals anti-Zionism.  It is a rather common theme.  Abe Foxman of America's right-wing Anti-Defamation League said, ‘Anti-Zionism 99 percent of the time is a euphemism for anti-Semitism.’  Elli Sarah is not being new or innovative in her thesis.  All that she is missing from her essay is a description of Jewish anti-Zionists as self-haters’ and traitors.

Even today Zionist groups work with anti-Semites

I have a different take.  Anti-Zionism is never anti-Semitism.  They are polar opposites.  If anti-Zionism is anti-Semitic then it isn’t anti-Zionism.  Anti-Zionists as individuals may, rarely, be anti-Semitic but anti-Zionism is a political ideology that is as different from anti-Semitism as chalk from cheese.

Rabbi Sarah has a saying on her website ‘At its heart, Judaism is about… trouble-making.’ Unfortunately this is not true, and Rabbi Sarah is the best example of why Judaism today is a religion of conformity, obedience and racist apologetics.  Judaism has not had had the equivalent of the Catholic’s liberation theology or even the Protestant Reformation.

When Jewish refugees from the pogroms in Czarist Russia came to these shores, they were met with open hostility by the Rabbinate.  Chief Rabbi Hermann Adler described the immigrants as “criminals... mentally or physically afflicted.’ [Geoffrey Alderman, The Jewish Community in British Politics, p.187, Clarendon Press]

One would have to go back to the prophets to find religious figures prepared to admonish the false priests and the worshippers of the golden calf.  That is why the Zionist movement is more happy with the Book of Genocide (Joshua) than the Book of Prophets.

The ability to cloak superficiality in the clothes of profundity is a useful skill.  It’s how people like Andrew Neil and David Aaronovitch make a living.  However it only serves to reinforce peoples’ prejudices whilst turning most people off politics altogether.  Its trade is in cynicism. 

Ms Sarah’s essay asserts that which it tries to prove.  The theme that anti-Zionism = anti-Semitism is the constant of every gutter Zionist and rabid nationalist.  The kind of people who march with their blue and white flags wrapped around them shouting ‘Israel lives’.  They proclaim their righteous nationalism in Palestinian blood. 

Ms Sarah graciously allow us the right to criticise the policies of Israel (but not too many of them) but we are forbidden to question where these policies and practices originate.  We can condemn the sinner but not the original sin. 

I began to consider my response to Elli Sarah after having written a tribute to one of the most remarkable Jewish women in the past half century, the late Hedi Epstein, who died last Thursday aged 91.  Hedi was on the Kindertransport that took nearly 10,000 Jewish children out of Nazi Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia to London in 1938-39.  Her parents and most of her family died in Auschwitz.  At the time the Zionist Organisation opposed the Kindertransport.  David Ben-Gurion, the then Chairman of the ZO wrote that:

“If Jews will have to choose between the refugees, saving Jews from concentration camps and assisting a national homeland in Palestine, mercy will have the upper hand and the whole energy of the people will be channelled into saving Jews from various countries. Zionism will be struck off the agenda not only in world public opinion, in Britain and the United States, but elsewhere in Jewish public opinion. If we allow a separation between the refugee problem and the Palestinian problem, we are risking the existence of Zionism.”

(Ari Bober (ed.), The Other Israel, p.171 quoted in Lenni Brenner Zionism in the Age of the Dictators, see also official biography of Ben Gurion 'The Burning Ground 1886-1948' Shabtai Teveth, p. 855)

Elli Sarah doesn't have a clue why Ben Gurion wrote this or if she does she won't be letting on because it would mean admitting that on the even of the holocaust the Zionist moving was desperately trying to prevent German Jews reaching any other refuge than Palestine, which the British had all but closed to new immigration.  The Zionist response to the Evian Conference which Roosevelt had called in 1938, on the even of war, was one of unmitigated hostility.  In the fairy tale history that is now painted of that period the idea that, as Ben Gurion said, it would be better for the refugees to die than go anywhere other than Palestine is not one that is admitted to.

Hedy Epstein who has just died.  A holocaust survivor who escaped on the kindertransport, Hedi was a Jewish saint - according to Rabbi Elli Sarah she was also anti-Semitic.  If the Zionist movement had had its way, she too would have died at Auschwitz rather 

Hedi Epstein became, like a number of holocaust survivors a Jewish anti-Zionist.  In her case this was because of the massacre of some two thousand Palestinians in 1982 in the Sabra and Chatilla refugee camps.  The massacres were carried out by Israel’s allies, the Lebanese Phalangist militia.  Israel had invaded Lebanon in 1982, killing some 20,000 people.  The PLO fighters had evacuated the camps shortly beforehand and they contained mostly old people, women and children.  Israeli troops lit up the night sky as the Phalangists went about their work, which included disembowelling and cutting off the breasts of women and castrating young boys.  The Phalange were named after Franco’s fascist Falange, and the alliance had been pioneered by the Israeli Labour Party.

According to Elli Sarah 'there is no historical evidence that Hitler supported Zionism.  If we take 'Hitler' to mean the Nazi State then there is a lot of evidence - see Lucy Dawidowicz's 'War Against the Jews' above.'  Heydrich, the 'engineer of the final solution' (Reitlinger) was explicitly pro-Zionist

Hedy Epstein was arrested at Fergusson Missouri aged 90 protesting the racist murder of a Black teenager, Michael Brown.  According to Elli Sarah, Hedi Epstein was an anti-Semite.  Indeed not only Hedi Epstein.  In 1938 the anti-Zionist Bund gained 17 out of the 20 Jewish Council seats in Warsaw and 61% of the Jewish vote in Poland.  It formed together with the Polish Socialist Party the ruling bloc in Warsaw and Poland’s major cities.  The Zionists gained precisely 1 seat in Warsaw.  According to Rabbi Sarah, the vast majority of Polish Jewry, 90% of whom were exterminated, were also anti-Semites. 

The 'equation of Nazism with Zionism' is anti-Semitic.  Presumably Hannah Arendt (above) was anti-Semitic too?

Far from anti-Zionists being anti-Semitic it is Elli Sarah who comes closest to this.  She has contempt for the Jews who died in the holocaust even though she is happy to use them as the alibi for a state that is modelled on the same principles as the European fascist countries, Nazi Germany included.  Hannah Arendt pointed out, in her book ‘Eichmann in Jerusalem’ how ironic it was that the Nazis Nuremberg Laws were denounced during the Eichmann trial when in Israel too it was impossible for a Jew and a non-Jew to marry.

From 'War Against the Jews' the Zionists were not to be treated with the strictness that the non-Zionist Jews merited

Elli Sarah’s essay is completely divorced from the reality of Israel today.  A demonstration of thousand Jews in Tel Aviv 3 weeks ago supported the soldier who executed a severely wounded Palestinian in the head.  Some 60% of Israeli Jews supported his action.  The demonstration was held under a banner ‘Kill them all’ and the chant went up ‘Death to the Arabs’.  One Jewish journalist, David Sheen, who was though to be from the human rights organisation Bt'selem, was beaten up.  Because human rights NGO's have been targeted by the Netanyahu coalition.  Indeed one banner said ‘My loyalty is my honour’ the slogan of the SS!

Just 8% of Israelis define themselves as leftists.  We have as Israel’s new Defence Minister a man, Avigdor Lieberman, who has spoken of beheading Israeli Arabs and drowning thousands of Palestinian prisoners in the Dead Sea.  His Deputy Eli Dahan describes Palestinians as beasts and remarked that ‘“A Jew always has a much higher soul than agentile, even if he is a homosexual.” I guess that his concession on gays is some progress. 

Nor are Dahan and Lieberman unusual.  According to Pew’s Israel’s Religiously Divided Society  a plurality of Israeli Jewish voters want to expel Arabs and 79% believe Jews should receive preferential treatment.  Israel is an apartheid society.  It is a state, not of its own citizens – Jewish and non-Jewish - but of all Jews, wherever they live.

Why should Elli Sarah and me have the right to ‘return’ to a country we have no attachment to when Palestinian refugees, who were expelled in 1947-8 have no such right?  Why should Jews have the right to lease 93% of Israeli land when Arabs have no such right?  Does the fact that a book, Borderlife, was banned by Israel’s Education Ministry from high school English syllabuses because it depicted a relationship between Jewish and Arab teenagers and thus threatened Jewish ‘national identity’ not have eery echoes of the 1930’s?  Does not the refusal to admit refugees, because of Israel’s Jewish ‘national identiy’ not give her pause for thought?  Or do examples of Israel’s racism cause Elli Sarah’s brain to go on vacation?

Borderlife  was banned for the same reasons that the Nazi Nuremberg Laws banned miscegenation, an ugly word that was first used in relation to the Deep South of America, i.e. sexual relations between Jew and non-Jew.  The Israeli government funds an openly fascist organisation Lehava which campaigns against mixed Jewish-Arab relationships and whose leader Benzi Gopstein openly callsfor the burning of mosques and churches.

If British Jews were treated in the same way as the Palestinians Ms Sarah would be the first to shout ‘anti-Semitism’.  Elli Sarah knows that she can’t defend the indefensible.  She therefore resorts to the same defence that supporters of apartheid South Africa use:  ‘why don’t you protest the Black African states.  Their human rights record is worse than ours.’  The answer then and now is that Apartheid is a particularly unique evil.

The suggestion that we single out Israel amongst all the other countries for reasons of ‘anti-Semitism’ is risible.  Israel is 'singled out' because it singles itself out.  It says it is the Middle East’s only democracy.  It receives the highest US aid of any country in the world.  Motions condemning its settlement activities are routinely vetoed by the USA in the UN Security Council.  Israel receives favoured nation trading status in the EU.  It even competes in the Eurovision despite being in the Middle East.  Israel likes to portray itself as a western country but its chorus of apologists complain when we hold it to its self-proclaimed standards.

Israel is a democracy for Jews and a Jewish state for Palestinians.  Its democracy is but skin deep.  It has rigorous military censorship, administrative detention (internment without trial), it holds secret trials where even the name of the defendant cannot be mentioned, it uses torture regularly against Palestinian detainees (and recently when Jewish terrorists were tortured there was a mighty uproar).  It maintains two legal systems in the West Bank (military courts for Palestinians and civil courts for Jews) which is as good a definition of apartheid as it gets.

If the ‘Jewish’ state was Jewish in the same way Britain is Christian, i.e. a constitutional adornment, then there could be little complaint.  If Israel was simply a place of refuge for Jews suffering persecution, that too would be acceptable.  However Israel isn’t even that.  When the only post-war neo-Nazi government came to power, under the military junta in Argentina (1976-83), when up to 12% [3,000] of those who disappeared [i.e. died under torture] were Jewish, Israel turned its back.  As the late Yossi Sarid MK of the left-Zionist Meretz observed, ‘‘the government of Israel never once lifted a finger and co-operated with the Argentine murderers because of their interest in arms deals….In Argentina, Israel sold even the Jews for the price of its immediate interests.’ “Yes, I Accuse,” Ha'aretz, 31 August 1989.

I suspect Elli Sarah has never read Jacobo Timmerman's book 'Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number' of his experiences in prison in Argentina.  He was a prominent editor and a left-Zionist (or at least he was until he went to live in Israel!).

In her attempt to prove ‘anti-Semitism’ Elli Sarah focuses on Naz Shah’s facetious joke about transplanting Israel to the United States.  In fact the map she used came from the Jewish Virtual Library!  The remark came about during Israel’s attack on Gaza when over two thousand people, including 551 ‘terrorist’ children were murdered.  Perhaps Ms Sarah has forgotten the chant of the Israeli mob 'There's No School In Gaza,There Are No More Kids Left'  This at a time when Israelis moved armchairs and a coffee machine to a hill overlooking Gaza so they could enjoy the bombing.

The hypocrisy of these holocaust mongers is best demonstrated by the fact that they pick up on Naz Shah's reference to the 'transportation costs' of moving Israel to the United States (note that it is automatically assumed that it is only the Jews of Israel who are involved).  'Transportation' symbolises death trains to Auschwitz.  It is as if Jews never use the word transport, still less trains for fear that they might be carted off to an extermination camp!  What utter hypocritical rubbish.  Unfortunately Naz Shah was intimidated, like the defendants in Stalin's purge trials, into admitting her guilt.

Elli Sarah speaks about the Holocaust survivors who found refuge in Israel.  In fact most of them wanted to go to the United States not Israel but their path was blocked by the opposition of the Zionist movement in the USA.  They have become the alibi for the Israeli state but Israel’s use of the holocaust as a propaganda weapon is in stark contrast to their treatment in Israel.  As Ha’aretz (6.2.13) noted, ‘Israel Is Waiting for Its Holocaust Survivors to Die’ as it then won’t have to pay them the meagre benefits they receive.

Ms Sarah refers to the kibbutz movement as an ‘ideal way of living as a Jew’.   She omits to mention that they were institutions founded on land from which the Arab peasants had been evicted and of which only Jews could be members.  In other words they were racially exclusive clubs, stockade and watchtower settlements.

Elli Sarah states that there is no historical evidence that Hitler supported Zionism.  In fact there is a lot of evidence that the Nazis favoured the Zionist movement over and above all other Jewish groups before and even after 1941.  There is the Kasztner trial in Israel when survivors of the Hungarian holocaust accused the Jewish Agency and its representative Kasztner of collaborating in the round-up and entrainment of the Jews.  The verdict of the Jerusalem District Court  brought the second Israeli government of Moshe Sharrett down in 1955.

Zionism was a movement of settler colonialism not self-determination as Elli Sarah maintains - above is from the founder of Political Zionism Theodor Herz, making overtures to mass murder and white settler leader Cecil Rhodes

Elli Sarah describes Zionism as ‘a movement for the self-determination of the Jewish people, in response to virulent anti-Semitism.’.  In fact the founders of Zionism were clear that their model was that of Cecil Rhodes, the settler leader after whom Rhodesia was named, not Garibaldi or the leaders of the French Revolution.  Zionism was indeed a response to anti-Semitism but one that accepted the anti-Semitic framework that Jews did not belong in the societies they lived in.  Ms Sara to accepts the thesis of the anti-Semites when she says that Jews had been ‘living a marginal existence in other peoples’ lands for most of our 4000 year history.’

Herzl's fruitless approach to Cecil Rhodes, whom the Zionists much admired

This isn't so.  Elli Sarah and I live in Britain as full citizens.  It is as much our country as anyone else’s.  Only anti-Semites and Zionist proclaim otherwise.  When Ms Sarah proclaims that ‘One of the main objectives of the early Zionists was the ‘normalisation’ of the Jewish people.’ She is accepting the anti-Semitic trope that Jews were abnormal.  It is somewhat ironic that Rabbi Sarah then goes on to accuse others of ‘anti-Semitism’!

On June 4^th Brighton will see an attempted march by a fascist and anti-Semitic group of neo-Nazis.  Palestine Solidarity Campaign has been busy helping to organise the counter-mobilisation, as we did in 2012 when the March for England was halted in its tracks.  EDL/MFE - We Won the Day 
Once thing is for certain.  Elli Sarah and all the rest of the Zionist claque will play no part in opposing the real neo-Nazis who will try and march in the streets of Brighton. Zionism never has opposed anti-Semitism.  It is far more interesting in painting the opponents of anti-Semitism as anti-Semitic.  Zionists have no interest in opposing anti-Semitism except where defence of the State of Israel is concerned.  That is the lie at the heart of Rabbi Elli Sarah’s thesis.

Tony Greenstein

Why Anti-Zionism is Anti-Semitism – but criticising Israel isn’t

Sodastream in Brighton - A Loss Leader in the Fight Against Apartheid

Why Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu Oppose Israeli Apartheid and Support BDS

Nelson Mandela - a long-time opponent of Israeli Apartheid

Christian fundamentalist supporters of Sodastream - 20 years ago the same people supported South African Apartheid

Black Zionist who tells anti-Zionist Jews they should have been annihilated by Hitler - and then claims that Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu would have agreed with them!

PSC stall in background as we hand leaflets out

One of many PSC leafletters

Zionists looking demoralised as they are shunned by the public

one of the Zionists tries putting on imaginary handcuffs (for Palestinians of course)

Simon - the Zionist jester looking non-too pleased

Christian Zionist (potty mouth) holds up poster proclaiming Jews have lived  in Palestine for 3,000 years (actually dear they were Canaanites then!)

handing out leaflets

At the regular Saturday picket today, local Zionists hit on a new ploy.  They go into the shop, buy something and then claim it as some kind of victory.  Meanwhile over 90% of members of the public who we talk to, don't want anything to do with an apartheid shop.  Of course there are few reactionaries who enter the citadels of Israel's apartheid shop.  But there were also people who gleefully broke the anti-Nazi boycott of Germany between 1933 and 1939.

Every week we are in danger of running out of leaflets as the Zionists stand around gossiping at their stall or hurling a few insults at us, which results in normal people finding that if the supporters of a cause are obnoxious, then the cause itself must be obnoxious.

The picketers are mainly Christian fundamentalists and Jewish Zionists.   The former even have a Black woman who tries to pretend that South African Apartheid and Zionist Apartheid are not the same and that she supports Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Tutu!  Today this particular creature told me, and it was recorded, that I should have been annihilated by Hitler.  Such lovely people the Zionists mix with!

She gets particularly angry when told that the heroes of the Anti-Apartheid struggle saw Israel as an apartheid state and hence support BDS.  However the evidence is quite clear.  On the occasion of his visit to Israel in 1999 Mandela stated that 'To the many people who have questioned why I came, I say: Israel worked very closely with the apartheid regime. I say: I've made peace with many men who slaughtered our people like animals. Israel cooperated with the apartheid regime, but it did not participate in any atrocities'.  Indeed he was being very diplomatic.  Dr Verwoerd, South Africa’s former Prime Minister described Israel as a fellow partner in crime:

'The Jews took Israel from the Arabs after the Arabs had lived there for a thousand years. In this I agree with them. Israel like South Africa is an apartheid state. Rand Daily Mail 23. 11. 1961.'   Indeed from the very beginning of Zionism, there was an affinity with the white settlers of Southern Africa.  To Cecil Rhodes, the British imperialist after whom Rhodesia is named, Theodor Herzl wrote:  'Please give me a statement saying you have examined my programme and found it appropriate. And why do I come to you, Mr Rhodes, you will ask. Because- my programme is. a colonial programme.' T Herzl; Diaries, , Vol III p.l05

  Anti-Apartheid hero Nelson Mandela demands end to Israeli Apartheid

Nelson Mandela (born 18 July 1918)  is a former President of South Africa (the first to be elected in fully democratic election) 1994 to 1999. Before his presidency, Mandela was an anti-Apartheid activist and the leader of the African National Congress (ANC). Mandela served 27 years in prison, spending many of these years on Robben Island. Following his release from prison on 11 February 1990, Mandela supported reconciliation and negotiation, and helped lead the transition towards multi-racial democracy in South Africa. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993 (see) In this letter, Arjan El Fassed, mimicks a similar letter Friedman wrote, purporting to be from George Bush to Yasser Arafat.  Instead it is from Nelson Mandela to Friedman! Nelson Mandela, Letter to Thomas L. Friedman (columnist New York Times) (March 2001): “March 30, 2001 To: Thomas L. Friedman (columnist New York Times) From: Nelson Mandela (former President South Africa) Dear Thomas, I know that you and I long for peace in the Middle East, but before you continue to talk about necessary conditions from an Israeli perspective, you need to know what's on my mind. Where to begin? How about 1964. Let me quote my own words during my trial. They are true today as they were then: "I have fought against white domination and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die." Today the world, black and white, recognise that apartheid has no future. In South Africa it has been ended by our own decisive mass action in order to build peace and security. That mass campaign of defiance and other actions could only culminate in the establishment of democracy. Perhaps it is strange for you to observe the situation in Palestine or more specifically, the structure of political and cultural relationships between Palestinians and Israelis, as an apartheid system. This is because you incorrectly think that the problem of Palestine began in 1967. This was demonstrated in your recent column "Bush's First Memo" in the New York Times on March 27, 2001. You seem to be surprised to hear that there are still problems of 1948 to be solved, the most important component of which is the right to return of Palestinian refugees. The Palestinian-Israeli conflict is not just an issue of military occupation and Israel is not a country that was established "normally" and happened to occupy another country in 1967. Palestinians are not struggling for a "state" but for freedom, liberation and equality, just like we were struggling for freedom in South Africa. In the last few years, and especially during the reign of the Labour Party, Israel showed that it was not even willing to return what it occupied in 1967; that settlements remain, Jerusalem would be under exclusive Israeli sovereignty, and Palestinians would not have an independent state, but would be under Israeli economic domination with Israeli control of borders, land, air, water and sea. Israel was not thinking of a "state" but of "separation". The value of separation is measured in terms of the ability of Israel to keep the Jewish state Jewish, and not to have a Palestinian minority that could have the opportunity to become a majority at some time in the future. If this takes place, it would force Israel to either become a secular democratic or bi-national state, or to turn into a state of apartheid not only de facto, but also de jure. Thomas, if you follow the polls in Israel for the last 30 or 40 years, you clearly find a vulgar racism that includes a third of the population who openly declare themselves to be racist. This racism is of the nature of "I hate Arabs" and "I wish Arabs would be dead". If you also follow the judicial system in Israel you will see there is discrimination against Palestinians, and if you further consider the 1967 occupied territories you will find there are already two judicial systems in operation that represent two different approaches to human life: one for Palestinian life and the other for Jewish life. Additionally there are two different approaches to property and to land. Palestinian property is not recognised as private property because it can be confiscated. As to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, there is an additional factor. The so-called "Palestinian autonomous areas" are bantustans. These are restricted entities within the power structure of the Israeli apartheid system. The Palestinian state cannot be the by-product of the Jewish state, just in order to keep the Jewish purity of Israel. Israel's racial discrimination is daily life of most Palestinians. Since Israel is a Jewish state, Israeli Jews are able to accrue special rights which non-Jews cannot do. Palestinian Arabs have no place in a "Jewish" state. Apartheid is a crime against humanity. Israel has deprived millions of Palestinians of their liberty and property. It has perpetuated a system of gross racial discrimination and inequality. It has systematically incarcerated and tortured thousands of Palestinians, contrary to the rules of international law. It has, in particular, waged a war against a civilian population, in particular children. The responses made by South Africa to human rights abuses emanating from the removal policies and apartheid policies respectively, shed light on what Israeli society must necessarily go through before one can speak of a just and lasting peace in the Middle East and an end to its apartheid policies. Thomas, I'm not abandoning Mideast diplomacy. But I'm not going to indulge you the way your supporters do. If you want peace and democracy, I will support you. If you want formal apartheid, we will not support you. If you want to support racial discrimination and ethnic cleansing, we will oppose you. When you figure out what you're about, give me a call.” [1]. 2. Nelson Mandela speech on International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinians (excerpt) :   "The temptation in our situation is to speak in muffled tones about an issue such as the right of the people of Palestine to a state of their own. We can easily be enticed to read reconciliation and fairness as meaning parity between justice and injustice. Having achieved our own freedom, we can fall into the trap of washing our hands of difficulties that others faces. Yet we would be less than human if we did so. It behooves all South Africans, themselves erstwhile beneficiaries of generous international support, to stand up and be counted among those contributing actively to the cause of freedom and justice. Even during the days of negotiations, our own experience taught us that the pursuit of human fraternity and equality -- irrespective of race or religion -- should stand at the centre of our peaceful endeavours. The choice is not between freedom and justice, on the one hand, and their opposite, on the other. Peace and prosperity; tranquility and security are only possible if these are enjoyed by all without discrimination. It is in this spirit that I have come to join you today to add our own voice to the universal call for Palestinian self-determination and statehood." [2]. [1]. Arjan El-Fassed, “Letter from Nelson Mandel to Thomas Friedman”, Bint Jbeil, March 2001: http://www.bintjbeil.com/E/occupation/mandella.html . [2]. Edward. C. Corrigan, “Israel and apartheid: a fair comparison?”, rabble.ca, 2 March 2010: http://www.rabble.ca/news/2010/03/israel-and-apartheid-fair-comparison .

In case there is still any doubt left about where Mandela and Tutu stand then the article on the Christian Fundamentalist site ‘Why Israel’ http://www.whyisrael.org/2012/09/04/south-africas-boycott-of-israel-is-mandelas-legacy/ should dispel all illusions:

South Africa’s Boycott of Israel Is Mandela’s Legacy

editor Tuesday 4 September 2012

By Giulio Meotti.. The South African government instructed that products made in Judea and Samaria not be labeled as “products of Israel.” Israel’s deputy foreign minister, Danny Ayalon, vehemently declared that South Africa “remains an apartheid state,” which is now turning its discrimination against Israel. A post-apartheid Pretoria boycotting Jerusalem is one of the more powerful victories for the boycott and divestment campaign. And it’s Nelson Mandela’s legacy.
On March 30, 2001, the anti-apartheid icon Mandela sent a letter to the American journalist Thomas Friedman. Israel, said Mandela, is “not a country that was established normally.”

Rather, it had “occupied another country.” He accused Israelis of indulging in “a vulgar racism.” And then came the peak of his anti-Jewish hatred: “Israel has deprived millions of Palestinians of their liberty and property. It has perpetuated a system of gross racial discrimination and inequality.” This is “an apartheid system.”

Since then, the definition of the Jewish State as an “apartheid state” has become the code word for evil. The labeling of Israel as an “apartheid state” is the embodiment of the new anti-Semitism.
Historically, black leaders in South Africa such as Desmond Tutu viewed the Jews as a part of the “capitalist camp,” and therefore exploitative of the blacks. Neo Mnumzama, chief representative of the ANC (Mandela’s party) at the United Nations, called Zionism an “ally of apartheid” and “an accomplice in the perpetuation of the crimes of Pretoria against the South African people.”

Mandela fabricated the comparison between Israel and South Africa. In his twisted version: both are small bastions of Western values and interests surrounded by a larger and non-Western people; both govern hostile majorities, using force and denying rights to subjugate them; both are run by nationalistic, racist governments unwilling to grant rights to these people but anxious to exploit labor. However, Mandela concealed the truth: in South Africa’s apartheid, there were 26 million blacks and 6 million whites, while in Israel there is a Jewish majority and a minority of Arabs who attack the Jews.

The special relationship between Israel and South Africa, according to Mandela, was an unholy alliance between pariah states (during the apartheid era, most of the black African states broke relations with Israel). The truth was another thing, however: like blacks in America before the civil rights movement, or in South Africa under apartheid, Israeli Jews and their connection to the holy land have been erased from the environment by the Arabs. It’s Palestinian anti-Semitism, not Israel’s Jewish democracy, which must be compared to apartheid’s Aryanism.

In 2000, the American Jewish Committee canceled a Washington luncheon scheduled to honor Mandela after he said that 13 Jews tried for “espionage” (read: Judaism and Zionism) in Iran were receiving a “fair trial.” While Jews — including community leaders and a rabbi — were presented as agents of Israel and the US, Mandela was laying a wreath on the grave of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the father of the Iranian revolution, and warmly greeting his successor, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

In 1990, Mandela likened Israel to a “terrorist state” and declared that “we do not regard the PLO as a terrorist organization. If one has to refer to any parties as a terrorist state, one might refer to the Israeli government because they are the people who are slaughtering defenseless and innocent Arabs in the occupied territories.”

In 1999 Mandela supported the Palestinian use of violence. With Yasser Arafat seated next to him at a Palestinian Legislative Council session in Gaza City, Mandela said: “All men and women with vision choose peace rather than confrontation, except in cases where we cannot proceed, where we cannot move forward. Then if the only alternative is violence, we will use violence.” “Arafat and Mandela – Freedom and Victory,” read one of the Palestinian Authority banners hoisted in Gaza for the visit. A few weeks later, the Palestinians began the Second Intifada. Fifteen hundred Jewish civilians have since been killed in suicide attacks and shootings; 10,000 have been wounded.

We should also mention Mandela’s friendship with Colonel Gaddafi (“my brother leader”) and his endorsement of Gaddafi’s long refusal to surrender for trial those accused of the Lockerbie atrocity.
Under Mandela’s apartheid analogy, the World Conference against Racism, held by the United Nations in Durban in 2001, was transformed into a racist conference against Israel. In the same city where President Mbeki held his festival of victory against real apartheid, another death sentence was passed for the Jews. Many black leaders were involved in the Durban proto-Nazi saga.

Nelson Mandela might be a symbol of goodness for many, but as the recent boycott has proven, for Israel’s Jews, Mandela has been an enabler of anti-Semitism.

‘In an article ‘Africans for Israel: A breath of fresh air’ the Jerusalem Post carried an op ed which told readers that ‘it would not be true to say that all Black Africans oppose Zionism and Israel.  A breath of fresh air was welcome on June 28 in the form of a peaceful and dignified protest, Africans for Israel, organized by the African Christian Democratic Party and the Inkatha Freedom Party. They were joined by the Shembe Church, estimated to have one million followers, many of them ANC members. The ACDP in turn invited the South African Zionist Federation to join among others.;

The only problem with this is that Inkatha and Buthelezi were African quisling groups who collaborated with Apartheid.  The ANC only took Buthulezi into government to avoid bloodshed in Natal but his record was one of collaboration with apartheid.  Given the close ties Israel and Apartheid South Africa, which included a visit by Buthulezi to Israel during the Apartheid years, it is no surprise that Buthulezi is now opposed to BDS