The Time Has Come for Britain’s Anti-Zionist Jewish Groups to Unite

At a Time of Genocide, Division and Disunity is a Luxury We Cannot Afford

When I ‘came out’ as an anti-Zionist Jew in 1970 it was a lonely experience. I lived in Liverpool where my father was a rabbi in a community of about 8,000 people (now less than 2,000).

The only other Jews I knew were in a socialist group which I joined at the age of 16 (expelled at 19!), the International Socialists (now the SWP). It was thanks to them that I read my first anti-Zionist pamphlet, the Class Nature of Israeli Society, by Moshe Machover, Haim Hanegbi and Akiva Orr.

This pamphlet, which first appeared as an article in the New Left Review, helped me to make sense of my instinctive hostility to Zionism as a Marxist. Zionism I began to see as an exclusivist ideology and movement whose only concern was the Jews. This was before the oppression and dispossession of the Palestinians and the Apartheid nature of Israeli society had become widely known.

At that time there was no Palestine solidarity movement in Britain and much of the left had illusions in Israel. Tony Benn and Eric Heffer, two stalwarts of the Labour left were members of Labour Friends of Israel.

Today everything is different. Jewish anti-Zionists are not rare. Zionism is no longer assumed to be the natural home of Jews. Its alliance today with the far-right – the EDL, Tommy Robinson, Bannon, Orban etc. – is well known, clear and unmistakable but half a century ago things were different.

interview with neo-Nazi Richard Spencer on Israel’s Channel 2 about why he calls himself a 'white Zionist'

Hasbara, the Zionist version of propaganda still held sway. The Labour Zionists who had formed the government of Israel from 1948-77 continuously spoke of peace whilst they waged war. As I wrote in Tribune in July 1984, there was nothing Likud had done that Labour hadn’t done before it.

It took the invasion of Lebanon in 1982 for the scales to fall from the Left’s eyes. Benn and Heffer resigned from LFI. For much of the left Israel had been an oasis of socialism in the Middle East. Even Hannah Arendt was fooled into believing that the Kibbutzim were ‘perhaps the most promising of all social experiments made in the 20^th century.’ [The Jew As Pariah, p. 185.

The image of the Kibbutzim seen in the West - Zionism and Socialism - however Arabs played no part in this 'socialism'

The kibbutzim were held to be models of socialism with their collective organisation and their lack of private property. No one told me that they were racially exclusive societies that banned Arabs from membership or that they had been established over the ruins of confiscated Arab villages whose inhabitants had been expelled. Nor had we been told that they had been established as the most effective and economical method of colonisation and were stockade and watchtower settlements.

Israel was not founded for the benefit of Jews. The West does not support Israel because it calls itself a ‘Jewish’ state. As James Baldwin noted in 1979:

Whenever criticism of Israel is made our rulers profess to be concerned about ‘anti-Semitism’. It is the only form of racism they are concerned about. Even Donald Trump, a bigot and racist for every season, is not only concerned about Jewish students (Zionist Jewish students naturally) suffering from anti-Semitism on campuses but he has cut federal funding from those universities and colleges which allow Palestine solidarity protests on campus.

This is at the same time that he is insisting that diversity and anti-racist programmes be ended, migrants be deported and that Confederate flags and symbols be preserved.

You would have to be stupid (unfortunately many people are) not to see how the rich and powerful, not least racists like Starmer, are using Jewish people and what they call ‘anti-Semitism’ (i.e. anti-Zionism) as a means to intimidate and frighten off support for Palestine and opposition to Zionism.

The same is true in this country. The racist Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Mark Rowley, has used the pretext of Jewish Sabbath Services to reroute, ban and delay Palestinian marches on the grounds that they might cause offence to Zionist Jews. Jewish residents of Swiss Cottage are the pretext for banning demonstrations against Israel's racist ambassador, Tzipi Hotoveli.

British and Western support for Zionism is not because of their concern for Jews but because of their own imperial interests. Jews constitute the moral alibi for imperialism in the Middle East.

It is for that reason alone that it is incumbent upon Jews who are not Zionists to say in both words and deed that what Israel does is not in my name.

Jews in America, for a number of reasons have been in advance of British Jews. From May 1-4 over 2,000 members of Jewish Voice for Peace gathered in Baltimore for a member’s conference (see Massive JVP member meeting vows to fight Zionism, fascism, and the weaponization of antisemitism).

In the United States 40% of young Jews see Israel as an apartheid state and one suspects that that figure is far higher today in the midst of the current genocide. No one who is progressive and Jewish has any excuse any longer for neutrality. Non-Zionism is no longer an option. It is fence sitting.

As Martin Luther King said ‘The hottest place in Hell is reserved for those who remain neutral in times of great moral conflict.’  

Archbishop Desmond Tutu observed that if you are neutral at a time of injustice you have chosen the side of the oppressor.

Today it is not difficult to be Jewish and anti-Zionist. On April 10, the Zionists’ propaganda organ, the Jewish Chronicle, woke up to the fact that young Jews were turning against Zionism and carried an article ‘Who are the young Jews turning against Israel?’ by Jane Prinsley.

Former General Amiram Levin

Of course Jane, like all the Jewish Chronicle’s journalists is a Zionist. If she wasn’t she wouldn’t be working for them. The JC had started to realise that ‘Radical new groups for Jews who do not support Zionism have formed on campuses up and down the UK’. It went on to say that

‘radical Jewish student groups have emerged to cater to Jews who do not support Zionism. From Leeds, Liverpool, Brighton and Birkbeck to Edinburgh, Warwick, Cardiff, Cambridge and UCL, students have formed Jewish communities, or kehillot.’

This followed an article by Karen Glaser who used to be a features writer on the New Statesman where she wrote what I called the most ‘trivial, trite and superficial’ article the NS has ever run. Its subtitle was  ‘How Karen Glaser’s ex-boyfriend had a very very narrow escape!’ The article was about how Ms Glaser had kicked her Corbyn supporting, socialist boyfriend out of the nest at 2 am in the morning because he doubted that Corbyn was quite the anti-Semite that his girlfriend imagined.

So the article ‘I can’t discuss Israel with my anti-Zionist kids – it’s pointless’ was on a par with Glaser’s normal output. It described how 11 year old Talia had given her mother back the Star of David she had been given as a baby and further that she was ‘resigning as a Jew’.

Not only that but Talia had disposed of her mother’s big Israeli flag! Bright and intelligent child you might think. Clearly someone to interview. Karen though thought differently:

Zionist parents whose children are scared of being associated with Israel; youngsters who have internalised antisemitism, in particular its political iteration, anti-Zionism. Their parents say these young people openly loathe the Jews’ nation state. And anecdotal evidence suggests that the problem has grown exponentially since the October pogroms.

Karen Glaser is nothing if not stupid. That after all is why the Jewish Chronicle sought her out. It probably hadn’t occurred to her that it isn’t internalisation of anti-Semitism but detestation of burning children alive and bombing hospitals that is making Jewish youngsters puke at the mere mention of the ‘Jewish’ state. Talia doesn’t sound like someone who is intimidated.

Naturally I wrote a letter to the JC suggesting that it might have been a good idea to interview the children concerned and find out their views. And equally naturally the JC refused to print it. The last thing the JC wants to admit is that there may be good reasons why young Jewish kids detest Jewish racial nationalism.

Shortly after these articles 36 members of the Board of Deputies signed a letter to the Financial Times. It was not an anti-Zionist letter. Far from it. But even hardened Zionists had begun to realise that they were defending the indefensible. A war driven by neo-Nazis in Israel's government.

Equally predictable was the reaction of the genocide supporting President of the BOD, Phil Rosenberg, and the rest of the Board's Executive. There is no atrocity, no genocide that they cannot support. The presence of open fascists in Israel's government worries them not. They immediately suspended Harriett Goldenberg, the Vice-Chair of its International Division and opened disciplinary proceedings against all 36 signatories.

Moshe Yalon – Ben Gvir & Smotrich are Mein Kamp Reversed

Being good Zionists the last thing they wanted to see is any discussion over the rights and wrongs of the actions of what I have called ‘Hitler’s Bastard Offspring’. The BOD is there to support whatever Israel does, right or wrong. Jewish neo-Nazis like Itamar Ben-Gvir trouble them not. After all even Gvir and Smotrich are Jewish and Zionism is about the unity of the Jewish tribe.

Rosenberg then issued a disingenuous statement that proclaimed ‘The Board of Deputies is a democratic organisation’ without mentioning the suspension of one officer and the disciplinary process (in the form of a complaint) that was taken against the dissenters.

It is clear that the worm is beginning to turn. That all those who have not become overt fascists and racists, like Rosenberg and his Executive, have developed qualms about the genocide being conducted against 2 million Palestinians in the name of a war against Hamas.

It is therefore incumbent upon Jewish anti-Zionists to come together and form one united organisation like Jewish Voice for Peace in the United States.  At the moment we have a plethora of organisations. I am in Jewish Network for Palestine, there is Jewish Voice for Labour, formed in the Labour Party during the ‘anti-Semitism’ smear campaign against Corbyn and there is the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Organisation and the newcomer on the block Na'amod, which contains a few Zionists, non-Zionists and anti-Zionists. Na'amod is the most moderate and probably the largest.

There is also the older Jews for Justice for Palestinians which is a 2 states group that does very little except canvass for signatures for its founding statement and there is also Independent Jewish Voices which made a big splash when it was created in 2007 but which is now inactive. Its website was last updated a year ago and its last meeting was over four years ago.

By my estimates there are about 2,000 people who are members of the above organisations. There are undoubted differences between people but there is no reason why there should be so many organisations.

JfJP and IJV are not membership organisations. Clearly Na'amod, in so far as it contains some Zionists, will not be able to join a unified anti-Zionist organisation but there is no reason why the 3 anti-Zionist Jewish organisations cannot come together into one single anti-Zionist Jewish organisation.

Although JVL has not explicitly declared itself as anti-Zionist, in practice it is. There will obviously be differences over things like one or two states though the consensus today is that two states cannot be achieved given the number of settlers in the West Bank.

However we owe it to the Palestinians who are undergoing such terrible massacres and pogroms to put aside minor differences in the name of not only unity but effectiveness. A single united anti-Zionist Jewish group would be a pole of attraction, in particular to young Jews who do not wish to have to bear the strain and the stain of being seen to support genocide in the name of Jews. Most Jews who have grown up with the exploitation by Zionism of the memory of the holocaust find it strange that the most ardent supporters of Zionism today are the neo-Nazi and far right in politics.

When Tommy Robinson, Donald Trump and Viktor Orban are on your side, with neo-Nazi Richard Spencer declaring that he is a White Zionist, many Jews will decide that they have had enough of Zionism and its quest for Jewish racial purity. It is the duty of the existing anti-Zionist groups to facilitate that journey not to erect obstacles to it.

Tony Greenstein

Why does Stand Up To Racism refuse to stand up to racism when it comes to Israeli Apartheid?

 Racism Came to Britain with the Empire -  Colonialism is the handmaiden of racial supremacy 

Click here to register

When a member of the SWP proposed that Brighton & Hove Trades Council sponsor a meeting on UN anti-racism day I was naturally in favour. UN anti-racism day was originally established in 1966 as a commemoration for the 60 Black Africans killed by the Apartheid police in South Africa in 1960. 

It was particularly appropriate because on January 12^th Israeli human rights organisation, B’Tselem had declared that Israel was an Apartheid state. What made this statement important is that B’Tselem is the quintessential liberal human rights organisation. Founded in 1989 as a liberal Zionist organisation this declaration represented a break from the view that Israel was a flawed Western-style democracy.  In B’Tselem’s own words:

The Israeli regime enacts in all the territory it controls (Israeli sovereign territory, East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip) an apartheid regime. One organizing principle lies at the base of a wide array of Israeli policies: advancing and perpetuating the supremacy of one group – Jews – over another – Palestinians.

The anti-racist and anti-fascist movement in this country had always opposed Apartheid in South Africa. How could SUTR not adopt the same attitude to Israeli Apartheid? What was different?

But to SUTR and the SWP it was different. A majority of Jews in this country support the Israeli state whereas South Africa had few expatriates to support it. Another difference is that whereas South Africa defended the Apartheid political system the Israeli state and its Zionist apologists have always denied that it was an apartheid state. Israel boasts for example that Israeli Arab citizens can vote. Many British socialists used to see Israel as a socialist oasis in the Middle East. Generations of Labour Party left-wingers had been ardent Zionists.

Nazis and Zionists gather together at Capitol Hill in support of Trump

It was only with the war in Lebanon in 1982 that the scales began to fall from peoples’ eyes. Tony Benn and Eric Heffer resigned from Labour Friends of Israel. The 1982 Labour Party conference passed an emergency motion calling for a democratic secular state. But till then Israel had been virtually immune from criticism and what criticism there was came from the Labour Right, people like Christopher Mayhew and David Watkins

The events of the past 5 years, in particular the false anti-Semitism campaign which was devised to demonise and destroy Jeremy Corbyn have represented a political setback. Support for Zionism and opposition to the Palestinians have become the trademark of the Labour Right. Unfortunately some on the left too, like Jon Lansman and Owen Jones, have also ended up in the Zionist camp.

Many trade unions like UNISON and even UNITE tried to square support for the Palestinians and support for Israel and Zionism. The unions have supported the IHRA misdefinition of anti-Semitism uncritically. This campaign has also taken its toll on sections of the far-left, the SWP in particular.

Following the January meeting of Brighton & Hove trades council I attended two meetings of SUTR where I proposed that a meeting on UN Anti-Racism Day be devoted to Apartheid in Israel.

SUTR is, as most people know, a front for the SWP. It is owned, lock stock and barrel by them and is their main ‘front’ organisation today.  Despite this it often does good work and I have gone on their demonstrations and attended their meetings.

After I had made my proposal member after member of the SWP got up to propose that we do anything other than hold a meeting on Israeli Apartheid. Refugees were the favourite choice of topic yet no member of the SWP was honest enough to admit to why they were opposed to holding a meeting on Israeli Apartheid.

In response to this one of those in attendance, Aidan Pettit, sent an email to SUTR (which the SWP Secretary refused to distribute to other members) stating that

‘it's not logical to oppose the racism meted out to refugees when they're in the UK but not the racism that drives many of them here in the first place

At the following meeting I repeated my proposal. This time another SWP member, Jeremy, got up and explained that it was very ‘delicate’.

What Jeremy and other SWP members meant was that they didn’t want to offend or cut links with liberal Zionist like Rabbi Sarah (we have a gay rabbi in Brighton). The SWP calls itself a Marxist, indeed a revolutionary socialist organisation yet it wasn’t prepared to adopt a consistently anti-racist position for fear of offending a liberal racist.

A simple question arises. How can you fight racism if you are not prepared to confront racists and if necessary offend them? Rabbi Sarah may not want to face up to the implications of a ‘Jewish’ state for the Palestinian, a state that vaccinates half of the population (Jewish) and not the other half (Palestinian) but surely the point of a socialist organisation is that it doesn’t allow itself to be held back by the more reactionary, backward elements in society?

What happened in Brighton is not unique. In Scotland for 3 years the Confederation of Friends of Israel Scotland and Glasgow Friends of Israel, two far-Right Zionist organisations which have worked with fascists, have been allowed to take part in the annual SUTR march.

A wide variety of organisations such as Scotland Against Criminalising Communities condemned the SWP’s willingness to accede to the Zionist demands.

The reason for the SWP’s political cowardice was without doubt the ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign in the Labour Party and the involvement of trade union leaders who have gone along with the demands of the Zionists that they be protected from ‘anti-Semitism’. The SWP, which has never had a sophisticated understanding of how anti-Semitism has been weaponised ran a mile.

In London on Holocaust Memorial Day they actually withdrew an invitation to Glynn Secker of Jewish Voices for Labour to speak after the Board of Deputies sought and obtained from Tower Hamlets Council the cancellation of a meeting.

However Brighton & Hove Palestine Solidarity Campaign took the decision that we would not allow the SWP/SUTR’s cowardice to prevail.  We are therefore holding on April 5^th a meeting with a variety of different speakers.

Ronnie Kasrills is the Jewish former commander of the ANC’s military wing, Umkonto we Sizwe and a former government Minister under Nelson Mandela will be speaking as will Ramzy Baroud, a journalist, author and editor of the Palestine Chronicle.

Also speaking is well known Asian anti-racist and former Birmingham councillor, Salma Yaqoob. Salma has been the target of the Labour Right and former Labour MP Ian Austin in particular.

Rania Muhareb is another speaker. Rania is a legal researcher and advocacy officer with the Palestinian human rights organization Al-Haq. She is currently taking a PhD at the Irish Centre for Human Rights in Galway.

Rana Nazir, the Chair of the Kashmiri Womens Association, is also speaking. The situation in India under the Islamaphobic BJP Prime Minister Narendra Modi is fast becoming similar to that in Israel. Israel is India’s major arms supplier and Modi is a member of the RSS political group that is the core of the BJP. Founded by supporters of the Nazis, the RSS aspires for India to become like Israel, an ethno-nationalist state.

Recently India has promoted legislation that for example excludes the immigration of Muslim refugees.It has also repealed Article 370 of the constitution whereby Kashmir is granted autonomy. Instead India has recolonised Kashmir in a similar way to that of Israel on the West Bank.

It is particularly appropriate as the trial of Derek Chauvin, George Floyd’s murderer, gets underway, that Kweku Martin Peprah of Brighton Black Lives Matter has agreed to speak.  BLM have organised a series of well attended marches in Brighton in protest against police racism.

And lastly I intend to say a few words on behalf of Brighton Palestine Solidarity Campaign. The meeting is sponsored by Brighton & Hove Trades Union Council and I hope that as many people as possible will be able to attend. (Register here)

One thing we should take away from the meeting is the idea that the fight against racism, be it in Kashmir, the United States, Britain or Israel is indivisible. Either you are opposed to racism or you are not. There are no special exceptions, no get out clauses which exempt people simply because they are Jewish or Hindu. Racism is a poisonous and pernicious evil, whose effect is to divide the oppressed. No socialist should, for one minute, turn a blind eye to racism simply because they see a sectarian advantage to doing so.

I hope to see you at the meeting.

Below is an Open Letter which I wrote to SUTR/SWP about what happened. It has been endorsed by Brighton & Hove PSC.

Tony Greenstein

Open Letter to Brighton & Hove Stand Up To Racism re UN Anti-Racism Day

Dear Nick,

I attended meetings of Brighton & Hove SUTR on January 20 and February 3^rd in order to discuss plans for the UN’s International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.

The Day was established after the Sharpeville massacre on March 21 1960 when South Africa Police opened fire killing 69 Black demonstrators against the apartheid “pass laws”.

On 12 January 2021 the Israeli human rights group, B’tselem, which was founded in 1989 as a liberal Zionist organisation, issued a statement THIS IS APARTHEID – A regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan to the Mediterranean Sea.

The past 30 years have convinced Btselem that democracy and a Jewish state are incompatible. In a carefully worded statement Btselem stated that:

The Israeli regime enacts in all the territory it controls (Israeli sovereign territory, East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip) an apartheid regime. One organizing principle lies at the base of a wide array of Israeli policies: advancing and perpetuating the supremacy of one group – Jews – over another – Palestinians.

Btselem is not alone. The foremost liberal American Zionist Pete Beinart reached much the same conclusion in an article in the NYT headed I No Longer Believe in a Jewish State.

When I proposed that SUTR hold a meeting on Israeli Apartheid to mark UN Anti-Racism Day it met with concerted opposition from members of the SWP. They suggested that refugee events be held instead. Such events can be held any day of the year. As Aidan Pettitt wrote in an email which you refused to distribute to other members:

‘it's not logical to oppose the racism meted out to refugees when they're in the UK but not the racism that drives many of them here in the first place

The real reason for the SWP’s opposition to making UN Anti-Racism Day into Israel Apartheid Day was made clear by Jeremy. The issue was, he said, ‘delicate’. I think we all know what he meant. SUTR is afraid of alienating liberal Zionists.

This is of a piece with Scottish SUTR’s decision to allow the far-Right Confederation of Friends of Israel to participate, with Israeli flags, on their demonstrations. As a Joint Statement from the Islamic Human Rights Commission and other organisations declared:

we are dismayed that Stand Up to Racism Scotland will be allowing organisations that actively support Israeli apartheid and racism to participate in its annual anti-racism march in Glasgow. We believe that their presence is incompatible with Stand Up to Racism’s intention of celebrating International Day Against Race Discrimination

In 2019 SUTR withdrew an invitation to a Jewish anti-Zionist, Glyn Secker, to speak at a meeting in Tower Hamlets on Holocaust Memorial Day, after a campaign by Zionist groups. There is a long history of SUTR refusing to oppose racism when perpetrated by Israel.

SUTR’s refusal to confront the issue of Zionism, Israeli Apartheid and its connections to British racism is because of a fear of being accused of ‘anti-Semitism’ Perhaps you will also refrain from opposition to the BJP’s anti-Muslim policies and its occupation of Kashmir for fear of being accused of ‘Hinduphobia’? SUTR is afraid that its Labour Party sponsors will abandon it if it takes a principled position.

SUTR appears incapable of recognising the connection between the Israeli state, Zionism and the far-Right today. Perhaps it has escaped your attention that on January 6^th at Capitol Hill, amongst the Confederate flags and shirts bearing slogans such as 6MWE (6 million wasn’t enough) and Camp Auschwitz were Israeli flags.

In this country the EDL, Britain First and other fascist groups have long displayed Israeli flags on demonstrations. Tommy Robinson has stated that he is a Zionist. The neo-Nazi founder of the alt-Right, Richard Spencer, openly declares that he is a ‘White Zionist’.

The far-Right admire and love Israel precisely because it is the kind of ethno-nationalist state that they aspire to create. Fascists and racists support Israel for the same reasons as they supported Apartheid in South Africa.

The admiration of the far-Right for Israel is not all one-way. There has long been a link-up between right-wing Zionists and the supporters of Tommy Robinson. People like Katie Hopkins, a guest at the Israeli Embassy, combine anti-Semitism with Zionism. In return she has been supported by many Zionists for her Islamaphobia.

We have racist regimes such as Orban’s Hungary, which combine support for Israel with anti-Semitism. The anti-racist movement in Britain never hesitated to oppose South African Apartheid but when it comes to Israeli Apartheid you look the other way. Why?

The reason is obvious. The Israeli state is supported by a majority of Jews in the West. If a quarter of a million White South African émigrés had lived in this country would you have said that the question of Apartheid in South Africa was a ‘delicate’ matter?

Millions of people have seen how Israel has vaccinated its Jewish population whilst denying the vaccine to 5 million Palestinians living under occupation. That is what racist regimes do and that is what the UN Day Against Racism is about.

It is for this reason that Brighton & Hove PSC have decided that it will go ahead and organise its own meeting on Israeli Apartheid. It is to be regretted that SUTR refuses to stand up to one of the main sources of racism and Islamaphobia in the world today for fear of upsetting the British Establishment and its Zionist outriders.

Click here to join

In Solidarity

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