Ten Year’s Hard Labour is the most important account yet of the defeat of the Corbyn Project

Chris Williamson describes how the Labour Right, with the complicity of Momentum, allowed the fake ‘Anti-Semitism’ narrative to destroy the Left 

Ten Year’s Hard Labour – Chris Williamson,

Lola Books, 2022, pp. 394

There is a tendency amongst many on the left to engage in an uncritical adulation of Jeremy Corbyn now that we see how awful is his successor, the serial liar and empty suit, Sir Stürmer. That would be a mistake.

Stürmer did not emerge from nowhere. Despite being part of the Chicken Coup, Corbyn embraced this latter day Brutus without once questioning his role as Director of Public Prosecutions in the cases of Julian Assange, IanTomlinson and other similar cases.

Without an analysis and understanding of where Corbyn and his entourage went wrong and why their policy of appeasement could only lead to disaster, the Left is destined to repeat the same errors.

Corbyn ended up throwing his friends to the Zionist wolves in a vain attempt to appease them

For those who wish to understand how the Corbyn Project went from the dizzy heights of near election victory in 2017 to catastrophic defeat two years later, Chris Williamson’s account is compulsory reading. Unlike books such as those by Owen Jones and Gabriel Pogrund/Patrick Wintour, it isn’t concerned with the gossip and tittle tattle of who did what in the Leader of the Opposition’s Office. [LOTO]

This is a book about the sustained attack that was mounted by Britain’s political establishment, in conjunction with the Zionist lobby and the secret state, on Corbyn and his allies. All with the connivance of Labour’s senior staff and the Labour Right. An attack which was fought in the name of ‘anti-Semitism’.

Today we can see where this fight has ended up. Starmer became leader of the Labour Party pledging to ‘root out anti-Semitism from the Labour Party’. Yet today Jews are five times more likely to be expelled for anti-Semitism than non-Jews. People like Jewish Voices for Labour members like Mike Howard, 72, for 40-years a Labour member and former Hastings councillor and Riva Joffe, a South African-born anti-apartheid activist in her 80s. Both died with the slur of ‘anti-Semitism’ hanging over them.

Not surprisingly Williamson’s book has been ignored by the mainstream press and those who were responsible for the fake anti-Semitism attacks on socialists and anti-racists in the Labour Party. Stürmer and General Secretary David Evans have ridden roughshod over all notions of natural justice and due process as they have launched a witchhunt, the likes of which has never been seen before in the Labour Party.

Those in the media who would have cried to the heavens if Corbyn had expelled Margaret Hodge or Ruth Smeeth, keep silent as thousands have been excluded by Stürmer.

I was the first Jewish person to be expelled in February 2018. When allegations of ‘anti-Semitism’ were first raised in the Labour Party we were told that we were paranoid to suggest that it was all about Israel and Zionism. Yet today Stürmer, who defines himself as a Zionist ‘without qualification’ makes no pretence about the fact that he considers anti-Zionism to be anti-Semitism.

What Williamson calls the ‘optics left’, such as Novara Media, Richard Seymour, Dave Renton and Owen Jones, played a major part in the defeat of the Corbyn project. This book raises the question as to whether the Left can ever win control of the Labour Party since the Right will stop at nothing, including open collaboration with the Tories and the prostitute press, to destroy anyone who isn’t committed to neo-liberalism and NATO.

This book isn’t an autobiography and, as it name suggests, covers the years when Williamson was MP for Derby North, from 2010-15 and 2017-19, ending in his defeat in 2019.

Bereft of ideas, Starmer's only concern is to turn Labour into a safe party of capitalism

Williamson ignores the period in the early to mid-2000s when he was Labour’s pragmatic leader of Derby Council making arrangements with the Tories in order that Labour could retain control of the Council and even using the Private Finance Initiative in order to buy up housing.

Chris Williamson followed in the footsteps of his hero, Tony Benn, in moving from right to left. Perhaps this was part of the reason why he was so hated by the right. Although Williamson came from a working class background unlike the aristocratic Benn, he defied the tradition in the Labour Party of Labour MPs moving in the opposite direction.

Williamson held on to Derby North, a red wall seat, in 2010 with a majority of just 613. In 2015 he lost the seat by the smallest majority in England, 41. In 2017, the first election under Corbyn, Williamson regained it with a majority of 2,015.

In 2015 right-wing Labour MPs, believing their own rhetoric that Corbyn would lose disastrously, asked voters to support them despite Corbyn’s leadership. Their campaigns, as we now know, were covertly funded by the rogue Ergon House operation run by Labour’s senior staff.

Nick Cohen summed up their mentality just one month before Theresa May announced the 2017 election. Cohen described the election disaster that was around the corner:

On current polling, Labour will get around a quarter of the vote... Will there be 150, 125, 100 Labour MPs by the end of the flaying? My advice is to think of a number then halve it.’

When the results were announced Labour had achieved a 40% share of the vote and an increase of 30 in the number of seats. It was the largest swing since 1945 and 9.6% more than Ed Miliband’s miserable performance in 2015.

Williamson took a principled stance and far from distancing himself from Corbyn issued a press release announcing himself as ‘the most Corbyn-friendly candidate standing anywhere in Britain.’  [93]

The Miliband Years

Williamson devotes relatively little time to his period in parliament from  2010-2015 when he was a Shadow Fire Minister under Ed Miliband before being sacked after standing on an FBU picket line. Williamson was not a firebrand or anti-imperialist when he was first elected. In March 2011 he supported a resolution approving the imposition of a no-fly zone in Libya, the precursor to NATO’s bombing of Libya. A decision he was to later regret.

Williamson describes how Miliband, having been elected as the left-wing candidate, proved a bitter disappointment. Williamson savages the decision to abstain as the Tories took the axe to social security benefits. Under Miliband the approach to austerity was that the Coalition, in the words of Shadow Chancellor Alan Johnson, was ‘cutting too far and too fast.’ [5]

Chuka Ummuna, who was later to defect to the Lib Dems, was put in charge of opposing the privatisation of the Post Office. When Williamson urged Ummuna to commit Labour to renationalising the Post Office, the answer was revealing as to who really wields power in Britain: ‘We can’t do that.  The City wouldn’t wear it.’[26]

Williamson recalls Nicky Morgan, the Education Secretary, remarking that ‘One of the first acts of the Coalition government was to turbo-charge Lord Adonis’s academy programme.’ [28] The privatisation of local authority schools had been inherited from New Labour.

As Williamson observed ‘The Shadow of New Labourism continued to linger on in the Miliband years.’ The book however is most revealing for its description of the Corbyn years and how Corbyn and the Labour Left snatched defeat from the jaws of victory in 2017.

The Corbyn Years

From the very beginning of his leadership Corbyn faced the unremitting opposition of Labour’s senior staff who, it was revealed in Labour’s Leaked Report, had openly wanted a Tory victory. When the polls began to turn in Corbyn’s favour they openly expressed their disappointment.

Corbyn’s election had been a fluke. The Labour Right had convinced itself that one-person one-vote would ensure that the Left would be forever marginalised. Right-wing MPs like Sadiq Khan had persuaded themselves that Corbyn could never win and therefore nominated him in order to make the process seem democratic. As Margaret Beckett ruefully remarked later, she was a ‘moron’ for having done so.

After having attacked Corbyn on a variety of grounds without success, the Right settled on ‘anti-Semitism’ as their chosen weapon. There were many reasons for this, not least that it gave them the moral high ground to be seen to be attacking Corbyn as a racist.

Lansman ended up working with arch-Zionist and witchhunter, Luke Akehurst

This should have been called out for what it was from the beginning. This was the most catastrophic mistake of Corbyn and the Labour Left, especially Momentum under Jon Lansman’s baleful influence.

It wasn’t as if it was difficult to point out the hypocrisy of the Labour Right adopting the mantle of anti-racism. The British National Party  even sent Margaret Hodge a bunch of flowers in appreciation of her proposal for a Whites only housing policy.

Tom Watson, who declared that he wouldn’t rest easy until every last anti-Semite had been expelled from Labour, had a long record of playing the race card stretching back to the Birmingham Hodshrove by-election in 2004 when he told the electorate that Labour was ‘on your side’ unlike the Lib Dems who ‘were on the side of asylum seekers’. 

When Phil Woolas, who had run a racist campaign in 2010 designed to ‘make the white folks angry’, was removed by an Election Court from Parliament for lying about his Lib Dem opponent, Watson wrote about how he had lost sleep thinking about ‘poor Phil’

Others who led the ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign included John Mann, who had previously issued the Bassetlaw Anti-Social Behaviour Handbook which labelled a whole ethnic group, Gypsies, as anti-social. Mann ended up being interviewed by the Police under caution.

The worst New Labour racists had suddenly become concerned about anti-Semitism. Of course the Labour Party, with nearly 600,000 members harboured a handful of anti-Semites. It would be surprising if they didn’t. Statistically the Labour Party no doubt harboured a few paedophiles but no one suggested that Labour was overrun by them.

The Labour Right was full to the brim with Islamaphobes but nobody mentioned that. Yet Corbyn, McDonnell and Lansman, alongside the openly Zionist AWL adopted the anti-Semitism narrative wholesale.

The ‘anti-Semitism’ allegations were clearly about Israel. Today every human rights organisation accepts that Israel is an apartheid state. The only defence Zionist supporters have is to cry ‘anti-Semitism’. Unfortunately Williamson was the only Labour MP to get it.

When Black anti-racist activist Marc Wadsworth was suspended and then expelled for having criticised Ruth Smeeth MP at the Chakrabarti Inquiry press conference, only Williamson stood up for him. When Jackie Walker, a Black-Jewish member was suspended it was Williamson who stood by her. Williamson supported Labour Against the Witchhunt and spoke on its platforms alongside expelled and suspended members.

At Wadsworth’s hearing a ‘lynch mob’ of all-White MPs accompanied Smeeth to the hearing. Yet instead of Corbyn coming out in support of his old friend, Marc was told by LOTO that ‘it won’t help Jeremy if there is a demonstration.’[86] When Marc told the press that Corbyn had phoned him personally to give support LOTO went out of their way to deny it.

When Williamson appeared on a platform with Jackie Walker, Ben Folley of LOTO told Williamson to heed the Zionists’ ‘advice’ not to do so. [111] As Williamson recounted:

The febrile atmosphere bludgeoned every MP but me into accepting the false narrative. I was, literally, the only MP prepared to challenge it publicly.

To this day I wonder why it never occurred to Corbyn’s advisors such as Seamus Milne that retreating only encourages your enemies. In Milne’s case he knew from personal experience how Israel’s supporters deploy accusations of ‘anti-Semitism’. The question must arise as to who Milne was working for.

If Jeremy had stood up to the weaponisation of anti-Semitism he could have turned the tables on his detractors. He could have pointed to New Labour’s racist record and mobilised the 70% of Labour Party members who consistently refused to accept that Labour was an anti-Semitic party.

The Zionist lobby in the Labour Party led by the Jewish Labour Movement [JLM] had its knives out for Williamson who they outrageously called a ‘Jew-baiter’. Williamson who had fought National Front influence on building sites, often with his fists, was now called a racist by those who had never fought either racism or anti-Semitism.

In March 2018 the Board of Deputies called a demonstration to protest at Labour ‘anti-Semitism’. Among the ‘anti-racists’ who attended were Norman Tebbit MP of the ‘cricket test’ and Ian Paisley Jnr, of the anti-Catholic DUP. Tebbit had previously said that those who supported the Indian or Pakistani cricket teams were not really British was now an anti-racist!

This was the first ‘anti-racist’ demonstration that the Board had ever called. When Oswald Moseley’s British Union of Fascists tried to march through the East End in October 1936 they were repulsed at the Battle of Cable Street despite the Board advising Jews to stay indoors and keep their heads down. The Jewish Chronicle wrote:

Jews are urgently warned to keep away from the route of the Blackshirt march and from their meetings. Jews who, however innocently, become involved in any possible disorders will be actively helping antisemitism and Jew-baiting. Unless you want to help the Jew-baiters, keep away.”

When the National Front was mobilising on the streets in the 1970s the Board repeated the same message.

The Zionist movement has never fought anti-Semitism. The Zionist  movement, when it first arose at the end of the 19^th century, was greeted by most Jews as a form of Jewish anti-Semitism. Zionism believed that anti-Semitism was a virus that all non-Jews carried around with them and therefore it was futile to fight against it.

Williamson is suspended by Jennie Formby

Corbyn and his advisors, rather than standing up to their detractors, appeased and apologised, throwing first Ken Livingstone and then Williamson to the wolves.

Williamson was suspended in 2019. It was a classic example of what George Orwell called Doublethink. In the eyes of Jennie Formby and the witchhunters Black was White. At a meeting of Sheffield Momentum in February 2019 Williamson gave a speech in which he stated ‘We’ve been too apologetic. What have we to apologise for? For being an anti-racist party?’ [150]

This was twisted by the Yorkshire Post into ‘Chris Williamson tells a Sheffield Momentum meeting that Labour has been “too apologetic” about  anti-Semitism”

A good example of how the McCarthyist ‘guilt-by-association’ technique had been adopted and accepted by Corbyn and Formby was the comment in the right-wing Labour magazine Prospect on hearing of Williamson’s suspension.

This week matters came to a head. In the space of 48 hours we have seen Williamson attempt to host an event in Parliament with a woman who has been suspended from the Labour Party under investigation for antisemitism before telling an event in Sheffield that the Party has been “too apologetic” about the same topic.

These two things in one week alone should have been enough to warrant disciplinary action even if they had come from nowhere. But Williamson has a well-established history of upsetting the Jewish community

Jonathan Freedland of The Guardian was prominent amongst who prostituted themselves for the Israeli state

The weasel words of these press whores, because journalists they are not, are a wonder to behold. They build their case resting one lie on top of another. Who in the ‘Jewish Community’ (is there one?) was upset?  We are not told. Apparently it is unacceptable to host an ‘event’ (a film called, appropriately enough The Witchhunt) because it is with a woman accused of, anti-Semitism. In other words you are guilty until proven innocent (although Jackie Walker was at no time accused of antisemitism).

Yet what was the response of LOTO?  To defend Williamson? To call out the harlots of the press and the Labour Right? No their advice was to apologise. Not only did the Socialist Campaign Group not defend Williamson but Laura Pidcock told him not to attend any more meetings! [159] 

Solidarity was never the SCG’s strong point. McDonnell’s advice was to ‘apologise again and again’. [198] The only members to offer any support were Richard Burgon and the MP for Crewe, Laura Smith.

Like Dave Renton, another SWP exile, Richard Seymour ended up justifying the witchhunt

All the soft-Corbynites from Guardian journalist Owen Jones to Jon Lansman and Novara Media joined the calls for Williamson’s expulsion. Even Richard Seymour, the ex-SWP writer repeated the lie that Williamson had said Labour was too apologetic about anti-Semitism. [173] Yet what Williamson said was easily available.

In June 2019 a National Executive panel voted 2-1 to reinstate Williamson. Almost immediately a hue and cry was raised and Tom Watson launched a petition amongst right-wing peers and MPs. What Corbyn should have done was to issue a statement welcoming the decision and reaffirming his earlier statement of 31 January 2019 to the Derby Telegraph that ‘He is not an anti-Semitic in anyway.’ [192]

Yet Corbyn not only didn’t defend Williamson he issued a statement implying that he was anti-Semitic. Once again Corbyn had done the work of the Right. Williamson was duly resuspended 48 hours later.

Williamson went to court and applied for a Declaration that the suspension was unlawful. In September 2019 Justice Popperwell ruled that it was indeed unlawful. In anticipation Labour General Secretary Jennie Formby had issued a third suspension on a flimsy pretext but this was enough to carry the day and Williamson remained suspended.

Formby was appointed General Secretary in the wake of Iain McNicoll’s resignation. She was a supporter of Corbyn yet she had engineered a situation where the demands of the Right for Williamson’s head were met. Not for nothing does Williamson label her ‘Judas Jennie’  though perhaps this is unfair. Judas was paid 30 pieces of silver whereas Jennie betrayed Williamson for nothing!

After the high hopes of September 2015 and his success in defeating the challenge of Owen Smith MP in 2016 Corbyn, instead of fighting Labour’s pro-capitalist MPs had succumbed to them. As Williamson said of LOTO ‘they were one-trick ponies, whose only strategy was to appease and capitulate to hostile forces.’

Did this appeasement of the JLM achieve anything? Did Formby not understand that when she boasted of the expulsion of hundreds of Labour Party members for ‘anti-Semitism’ that all she was doing was confirming the Right’s false anti-Semitism narrative? 

Labour’s Leaked Report (p.306) sums up the policy that Corbyn and his advisors had adopted of appeasing the Zionist lobby:

Jeremy Corbyn himself and members of his staff team requested to GLU that particular antisemitism cases be dealt with. In 2017 LOTO staff chased for action on high-profile antisemitism cases Ken Livingstone, Tony Greenstein, Jackie Walker and Marc Wadsworth, stressing that these cases were of great concern to Jewish stakeholders and that resolving them was essential to “rebuilding trust between the Labour Party and the Jewish community”.

Well we were all expelled or forced out of the party. Was trust rebuilt? Of course not. It simply whetted the appetite of Corbyn’s accusers who went on to demand more and more heads until there was no one left to expel but Corbyn himself.

Not content with preventing Williamson stand at the 2019 election, Corbyn and Formby introduced ‘fast track’ expulsions for the most ‘egregious’ of cases, which were subsequently used against hundreds of people including Corbyn himself.

Corbyn, who in a different era had been Secretary of Labour Against the Witchhunt, opposed the very things he had always fought for such as Open Selection of MPs at the 2018 conference. In doing so he sealed his own fate.

Possibly the main fault of Williamson’s book is his tendency to seek revenge against detractors like Edward Isaacs of Bristol University when they are simply unimportant. Williamson also does not really deal with whether what happened is inevitable in a reformist social democratic party which seeks to manage capitalism rather than change it.

However this book will be ignored by the Left at its peril.  It is not about personalities or the weakness of Corbyn and Formby but about socialist strategy and whether Labour is doomed to remain a pro-capitalist party.

Tony Greenstein

Riddled by Racism: The Board of Deputies is Overrun by Islamaphobes and Racists yet it has the nerve to accuse people of ‘anti-Semitism’

 Beyond Satire – The Union of Jewish Students and Jewish Labour Movement Complain that the Head of a group committed to ethnic cleansing is a Racist!

In October 2010 49 of us had a letter published in the Guardian calling for Ed Miliband not to follow in Blair and Brown’s footsteps and become a patron of the ethnic cleansing JNF.

We were successful and Miliband defied tradition. A few months later David Cameron resigned his sponsorship.

Sam Hayek, the Chair of JNF UK responded to our letter writing:

To accuse the JNF of being "actively complicit in the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians" represents a distortion of the truth on the grandest of scales. Our environmental and humanitarian work is not based on any political or religious affiliation, but rather on supporting Israel and its population – whatever their background.

I wrote

If diplomats are virtuous men sent abroad to lie for their country (Henry Wotton), what is Samuel Hayek of the Jewish National Fund's excuse.... the JNF's own entry on the Charity Commission website states that its objects include “such charitable purposes as benefit persons of Jewish religion, race or origin".

Although JNF UK has now changed the wording it hasn’t changed its activities.

Top: the JNF's Charitable Objects today and Bottom the JNF's Charitable Objects in 2010

Out is ‘benefiting Jewish persons’. In is ‘For the benefit of the population of the State of Israel ’ The only mention of Jews is:

To advance the Jewish religion, Jewish beliefs and religious education (including supporting the education of Jewish culture, history, practices and beliefs).

Hayek did not respond to my letter because he had been showns to be a liar.

It is no surprise that we now learn that Hayek is an Islamaphobe who agrees with the neo-Nazi White Replacement Theory whereby Muslim immigrants are driving out White Christians from Europe.

In an interview with the Jerusalem Post Hayek declared that “Jews have no future in England”. He told the Jewish News:

The evidence is the number of immigrants to England. The demographic of British society is changing.

Asked if he was referring to issues around Muslims, he replied: “You are not wrong,” adding:

Our problem in the West is that we do not understand Islam. In Islam there is not a term for ‘peace’.

Hayek suggested that British Jews should consider emigration, the Zionists’ wet dream:

Gary Mond - Islamaphobic bigot and JNF trustee

Last week the Senior Vice-President of the Board of Deputies, Gary Mond, was forced to resign. Mond had written on Facebook and tweeted that ‘all civilization’ is ‘at war with Islam.’ Mond is also a trustee of JNF-UK, as is Gideon Falter, its Vice Chair and CEO of the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism. The CAA’s 11 trustees are a roll call of some of the most viciously racist British Zionists.

The JNF's 11 racist trustees

The Charity Commission, which has repeatedly been written to regarding its refusal to deregister UK JNF has at last been forced to open an investigation into this so-called ‘charity’.

Two motions have been submitted to the BOD which criticise the JNF for “failing to disavow the inflammatory and bigoted remarks of its chair Samuel Hayek”. One censures JNF trustees for not disavowing Hayek’s remarks. The other calls on it to suspend the JNF’s Board membership until Hayek steps down. The motions are proposed by Union of Jewish Students president-elect Joel Rosen and Finchley Reform Synagogue member Robert Stone.

Gary Mond, the then Senior BOD Vice-President, spoke of his “respect” for Hayek over the comments.

Mond also liked two tweets by Pamela Geller – a White Supremacist and fascist, who has been banned from entry to the UK. According to the Southern Poverty Law Centre

Geller has a long history of working with extremists and racists in the United States, Canada and Europe, including the Jewish Defense League, the English Defense League and the white nationalist group Bloc Identitaire, among others.

A Facebook post by Mond stated that"We just have to hope that our leaders wake up to the fact that all civilisation-west and east, American, Russian, Chinese, Israeli, whatever - is at war with these evil bastards, and I have to say it at war with Islam. And, just as Islam has lost before in history, it will lose again."

This profile of the average Muslim male appeared in a Report by the CAA - if such a drawing had portrayed the 'average British Jew' you can imagine the hypocritical fury of the Zionists

Mond attacked the Board for ‘leaning to the left’ (news to us!) and being unwilling to take account of different views. He didn’t mean anti-Zionist views either! But it’s true. The Board has silenced Palestinian voices for far too long.

Meanwhile, you will be glad to hear, a defence campaign for Hayek and Mond has been launched and who better to lead it than Jonathan Hoffman, the link man between far-Right Zionists and openly fascist groups like Britain First. Mond’s supporters are a roll call of openly fascist Zionists such as Damon Lenszner, Martin Sugarman, Sharon Klaff, David Collier, Board of Deputies member Yochy Davis and Ambrosine Shitreet of Pegida. In total more than 100 supporters signed an open letter in defence of Mond and Hayek, who has accused the Board of “cancel culture”.

Hoffman et al argue that

“the complex subject of anti-Jewish racism within the Muslim community appears a taboo subject — and those who dare mention it are branded ‘Islamophobic’!”

They declare support for Hayek’s right

to express an opinion without being targeted, subjected to harassment’ or calls for his resignation. Expressing an opinion with which others disagree should not be the subject of cancel culture nor misinterpreted as ‘racist’.

Unless of course it is support for the Palestinians and anti-Zionism in which case it is ‘anti-Semitic’ and they want it cancelled immediately as the case of Professor David Miller at Bristol University shows.

They also make the risible claim that pro-Israel supporters were “nearly lynched” at the pro-Israel rally last May during the attack on Gaza. Even worse:

‘Many of the anti-Israel protesters were “visibly of Asian heritage. Why would Jews want to live in a country where there is a high risk of life-changing injuries simply for holding an Israel flag in the street?”

The BOD issued a statement saying that “The Board of Deputies believes that there is no place in any Jewish communal organisation for anti-Muslim hatred” which itself is a lie. The BOD is infested with anti-Arab racists.

Roslyn Pine - the Board were quite prepared to forgive her calling Muslims 'the vilest of animals'

Three years ago the Board had to suspend for 6 years Roslyn Pine for describing Arabs as “the vilest of animals.” Three years previous to that Pine had said that it was a pity that the pro-Palestinian female Swedish foreign minister was “too old to be raped.” She has also called fellow deputies “kapos.”

Jewish News reported that ‘the Board’s executive ruled that she could return early if she apologised, showed contrition and expressed remorse’. Contrast that with the life-time expulsions that the BOD demanded for Labour members expelled for ‘anti-Semitism’ i.e. anti-Zionism. If the BOD was at all serious about tackling Islamaphobia in their ranks then they would have expelled her.

What was the reaction of her synagogue, Finchley United Synagogue, for whom she is a Deputy? Did it change its representative? Not at all. The Jewish News reported that

Finchley Synagogue will look into the plight of its suspended deputy Roslyn Pine as a matter of “urgency”. Note that word ‘plight’.

For some strange reason Tommy Robinson and Jonathan Hoffman's solicitor, who is a member of the Board of Deputies, has blocked me

If the Board were serious about getting rid of its racists it would have to suspend Robert Festenheim, a solicitor and advisor to Tommy Robinson and Robinson’s solicitor Daniel Berke.

There has been one voice that has been missing in all this. It is that of Gideon Falter. Not a word, not a peep, out of someone who sees ‘anti-Semitism’ behind every stone and pebble. This is not surprising since the CAA has done its best to stir up Jewish-Muslim discord. It is a viciously Islamaphobic organisation.

Nina Friedman - the racist President of UJS

The Open Letter from Young Zionists re Hayek's Comments come from hypocrites like Nina Freedman, President of UJS, Joel Rosen, Hannah Rose, ex-UJS President, and Edward Isaacs, former President of Bristol JSoc, an inveterate liar and Jack Lubner of UJS National Council and JLM.

These young supporters of the Israeli Labor Party, which is in government with the settler-right in Israel, is an example of the hypocrisy of the Zionist ‘left’. They criticise the trustees of JNF UK for racism but have nothing to say about the JNF itself.

The JNF is an organisation which was instrumental in the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. In December 1940, Joseph Weitz, Director of its Lands Settlement Department, wrote in his diary (20.12.40) [Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, p.27):

There is no way besides transferring the Arabs from here to the neighboring countries, and to transfer all of them, save perhaps for [the Arabs of] Bethlehem, Nazareth and Old Jerusalem. Not one village must be left, not one [bedouin] tribe. And only after this transfer will the country be able to absorb millions of our brothers and the Jewish problem will cease to exist. There is no other solution."

What do these young ‘left’ Zionists in UJS/JLM say about the JNF which, at this very moment, is involved in planting trees on Bedouin land as part of the ‘Judaisation’ of the Negev? (see below)

The JNF’s work has been firmly entrenched in our childhoods: many of us have fundraised for the JNF,... we have toured parts of Israel with the JNF. However, now we are gravely concerned about these comments and of JNF UK’s complete inaction on the matter. Our communal institutions... have taught us Jewish values of “loving thy neighbour”, and Hayek’s comments are the antithesis of this.

These hypocrites believe that ‘loving thy neighbour’ is compatible with the forcible dispossession of the Palestinians, the Judaisation of the land and the theft of Palestinian land for settlements in the West Bank.

I therefore thought it might be instructive to see what this ‘loving thy neighbour’ actually involved. Things like the destruction of the Samarin family home in Jerusalem and the planting of trees over Palestinian villages and now the same exercise in the Negev/Naqab.

What are the Jewish National Fund Up to in the Negev/Naqab?

The Times of Israel reported last week on a ‘controversial tree-planting project by the Jewish National Fund’. Controversial because the local Bedouin communities protested against the JNF’s afforestation project, a continuation of its historic mission of using tree planting as a means of displacing Palestinians, stealing their land and erasing all traces of Palestinian villages.

There has been extreme violence by the Israeli police which would never be used against Jewish demonstrators. The police treat the Bedouin protests as ‘potential “terror incidents” with a nationalistic motive.’ Only Jewish nationalism is allowed in Israel. The terror, which is all too real, is the terror of being displaced from your home and forcibly transferred to a township as happened to Black South Africans under Apartheid.

Note how the resistance of Israeli Palestinians to efforts to ethnic cleansing is classified as “terrorism”. Attacks by settlers are never described in such terms. Even Israel’s Army Radio noted that the

JNF had not consulted with police or other law enforcement bodies prior to starting the forestation project.

Nor did they consult the Bedouin of al-Atrash and other ‘unrecognised’ villages. The Times of Israel described how:

Negev Bedouin have a contentious relationship with the state. For decades, the government has sought to move them into recognized, planned cities, but many still live in a constellation of illegal hamlets that sprawl across Israel’s southern desert.

Bedouins accuse JNF of seeking to displace them, but the organization says it is merely fulfilling a request by other government bodies on public land. JNF works across Israel on nature and conservation projects

The ‘illegal hamlets’ are the villages where the Bedouin have lived before the State of Israel was founded. No Jewish villages are ever termed ‘illegal’. Note the reference to ‘public land’. This is a euphemism for Jewish National Land.

Far from the JNF’s Greenwashing preserving the environment it is destroying it

The ToI described how

Those with ideological objections call it colonialist, and environmentalists call it harmful because it has allowed a single species to spread unchecked, diminishing biodiversity and increasing the risk of forest fires.

The latter is a reference to the JNF practice of planting non-native pine which has enabled wildfires to spread rapidly.

The colonialism claims have resurfaced periodically in international media as part of their coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, linking forestation to the “Judaization” of previously Arab-owned land.

In fact the Israeli government drew up the Prawer Plan specifically aimed at Judaisation. Yaakov Franko, a lawyer specialising in landscape legislation claimed:

the trees, mostly Aleppo pines, are an invasive species and that each pine tree is like a gallon of petrol. The sap, the needles, the acorns, the trunks burn rapidly, spreading through the broken limbs near the root system, where no other plants can grow and moisten.

That’s why a single cigarette butt can light up the area between Hadera and Gedera,” he continued, naming cities at opposite ends of Israel’s center.

Far from benefiting the environment the JNF’s tree planting is causing environmental destruction. As befits European colonisers  the JNF

boasts about the Europe-like feel of its forests. One promotional article on their website from 2013 declares that Germany’s Black Forest “has got nothing on us.” And many hikers enjoy them. On a recent Saturday, Daniel Kobi, a father of two from Kiryat Ata, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that he enjoys coming to the forest named for his suburb of Haifa because “it feels like the Swiss Alps right around the corner” from his home.

The ToI claimed that

While JNF did use some invasive species, including the eucalyptus from Australia, the Aleppo pine has grown in Israel for millennia.

Except that Israel has only existed since 1948, hardly a century let alone a millennium. The reference is to the small city state Israel that existed in the 10^th Century BC, 3,000 years ago. But I forget. Palestine was a “land without a people for a people without a land”. In other words its people were invisible. To the colonialists indigenous people were always invisible. As even the Toi admits:

With their large crowns, Aleppo pines leave very little sunlight for lower shrubs. And they shed a thick blanket of needles that prevents the growth of most plants, and almost all of the flowers gracing the Israeli countryside — including its 30 species of orchids and 16 Iris species.

This means that the forests planted by JNF tend to have a much lower biodiversity than naturally occurring Mediterranean forests that nurture a multitude of insects, reptiles, birds and mammals.

The JNF give the game away when they said that

the tree planting began as an effort to “demonstrate ownership” over non-urban Jewish-owned land that could not be farmed.

In other words the JNF’s tree planting activities has nothing to do with the environment and everything to do with ‘demonstrating ownership’, Jewish ownership i.e. theft of Bedouin land.

Dozens of Palestinians in the Naqab (Negev) have been injured and arrested, as Israeli police attacked protests against the JNF that is threatening the livelihood of Bedouin communities in the area. 

The protests are focused in the al-Naqe area of the Naqab, a fertile area of land in the desert, which is home to around 30,000 Palestinians living in a cluster of several Bedouin villages.

Since December the JNF has been razing Palestinian lands and uprooting trees belonging to Bedouin communities in order to prepare the area for forestation.

The JNF’s campaign in the Naqab, with the full assistance of the Israeli police, has sparked widespread protests by Palestinian Bedouin communities in the area, who say the forestation campaign is just another effort to dispossess them from their land.

Videos and photos on social media have shown Israeli forces teargassing and violently detaining protesters, as well as demolishing tents in the area.

Middle East Eye reported that Israeli police have arrested at least 35 Palestinians from the Sa’awa and al-Atrash villages. Al Jazeera reported that more than 80 Palestinians, including minors, have been detained since the protests began.

Local media also reported Israeli police setting up checkpoints and blocking the entrances and exits to villages in the area in order to prevent people from attending the protests, which have swelled in recent days, and which have sparked solidarity protests in other Palestinian cities in Israel.

A history of violence & displacement

The Naqab makes up around half of Israel’s entire land mass, and is home to an estimated 300,000 Palestinian Bedouins who hold a nominal Israeli citizenship.

The Bedouins living in the Naqab are the descendants of those who remained after an estimated 80,000-90,000 Bedouins were forced to flee the area during the Nakba in 1948.

Around half of the Bedouins reside in 40 “unrecognized” villages, which Israel calls “illegal clusters.” Despite the fact that many of the Bedouins are living on the ancestral homelands, while others were internally displaced after 1940, Israel views them as “trespassers” and does not recognize their ownership over the land.

Due to their “unrecognized” status, Israel does not offer the Bedouins living in these communities any services and they are excluded from state planning. That means they have no local councils, are offered little-to-no government services in terms of education and sanitation, and are not connected to the electric grids or water networks.

Because they are considered “illegal”, these communities are under constant threat of demolition, with Israel having destroyed some villages close to 200 times.

For decades the state has aimed to remove these communities from their homes and put them in planned residential areas, which rights groups say amounts to forcible transfer, a war crime under international law. All the while, Israel has invested billions of shekels to develop and promote Jewish settlement in the area.

The JNF: Colonialism disguised as environmentalism

Founded in 1901 as a non-governmental organization, the JNF was established to purchase land for European Jews to settle in Palestine, in order to create and maintain a Jewish-majority state.

The JNF purports to be an environmental organisation. Its tree-planting initiatives are designed to cover up the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Today that means actively dispossessing Palestinian communities in the Negev.

The areas where the JNF plants its forests are often the sites of destroyed Palestinian villages which the JNF aims to erase any trace of. Today the JNF owns an estimated 15% of all Israeli land.

In occupied East Jerusalem, the JNF has been tied to shadowy purchases of Palestinian homes which the organization then turns over to Israeli settler groups. In the West Bank the JNF purchases privately owned Palestinian land in Area C — where Palestinians are not allowed to build — for settlement expansion and construction.

The group has worked with the Israeli government to make it nearly impossible for the country’s Palestinian citizens to gain access to state lands for residential, commercial and agricultural use. In the Negev the group has advocated for the destruction of Palestinian Bedouin villages in order to plant trees as part of its “Ambassadors Forest” initiative.

See What’s happening in the Naqab? Israel uproots Palestinians to plant trees