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

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