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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

First She was Chair of Labour Friends of Palestine

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

and then a regular on PSC Platforms

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

and then the JLM's preferred candidate for leader

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tony Greenstein

Only anti-Zionists are real supporters of Palestine

Tony Greenstein The Electronic Intifada 3 October 2023

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PSC climbdown

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Appeasement

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She wrote in the report that:

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

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

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

Confusion as a badge of honor

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

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

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

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

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

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

Theirs is the monstrosity that is called Israel.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tony Greenstein is the author of Zionism During the Holocaust.

See my blog from January 2020

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

Sharon Graham & Gary Smith – Zionists and Imperialists Stand in Solidarity with Ukraine’s Neo-Nazis As the Slaughter Continues

  The TUC Decision to Support NATO’s Proxy War in the Ukraine is Shameful but Not Surprising Given Its Record of Subservience to the British State

It is no surprise that Gary Smith of the institutionally sexist and racist GMB and an avid Zionist, has backed NATO's neo-Nazi allies in Ukraine. The fact that Zelensky has approved laws stripping workers of their rights and banning left-wing parties, including Platform for Life, which has 44 seats in the 450-seat Ukrainian parliament, has been no deterrent to Smith, since he also does his best to suppress workers’ struggles.

What is more remarkable is that Sharon Graham, who has a reputation for supporting strikes but declared herself ‘non political’ when she was elected General Secretary, has also got into bed with the Zionists. In particular taking advice from the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, an organisation set up and funded by the Israeli state and the Jewish National Fund, about banning Jeremy Corbyn – The Big Lie. Graham also has given her support to NATO’s proxy war in Ukraine.

One can only hope that the Socialist Workers Party and the Socialist Party, who have both up till now supported Graham, see the error of their ways and reconsider their support for this British chauvinist.

The TUC motion, which was opposed by only two unions – the FBU and Bakers Union with the RMT and NEU abstaining – called for more weapons to be supplied to Ukraine. These reactionary union bureaucrats, fools all, should bear in mind that a large percentage of the arms already supplied have found their way onto the private market. Ukraine is Europe’s most corrupt state.

Azov Demonstration 2014

The United States and Britain have been directly supplying neo-Nazi forces in Ukraine since 2014, despite a Congressional motion cutting aid to Azov in 2018. We face the prospect of a new Libya in Europe with private militias and an ongoing civil war.

There have already been credible threats that if Ukraine doesn’t receive enough weaponry then they will resort to terrorism in Europe. What does NATO think is going to happen when the war ends? Do they think the fascists will disarm? We could see an outbreak of terrorism in Europe which will make ISIS seem like a tea party.

flag of the Ukrainian NPGU mining union courtesy of Skwawkbox

Azov symbol bears remarkable similarity to that of the NPGU mining union

The sonnenrad or sunwheel is one of a number of ancient European symbols appropriated by the Nazis. It bears a remarkable similarity to that of the NPGU mining union which was on display at the TUC Congress

Mark Serwotka of PCS, who has previously been considered on the left, joined the warmongers in offering “unequivocal support for those currently suffering occupation by a brutal Russian invasion”. Serwotka said that ‘We are with the Ukrainian people and for Russia out, only the people of Ukraine should decide what the outcome looks like.”  For Serwotka the activities of open neo-Nazis and the attacks on Russian speaking Ukrainians since 2014 count for nothing.

Paul Massaro is a senior US governmentpolicy advisor for counter-corruption and sanctions

Victoria Nuland, Assistant Secretary of State in the Biden administration admitted that the US had funded, to the tune of over $5 billion, the overthrow of the elected President Yanukovych in 2014. Fascists were heavily armed when they outgunned the police.

“Our solidarity must know no borders,” said GMB President Barbara Plant. Not a word that the GMB is used to using when it comes to workers nearer home. Unite backed the motion despite its Executive having issued a statement saying that “wars are never in the interest of working people”. One wonders whether Sharon Graham even realises that opposing war and supplying more weapons to Ukraine is a contradiction.

The GMB has never extended solidarity to anyone outside Britain. It has consistently supported Israel’s ethnic cleansing and has repeatedly sided with the Jewish Labour Movement, the British wing of Israel’s racist Israeli Labor Party. At the moment it is trying to expel a former International Officer Bert Schounberg for moving a motion at his branch calling for the disaffiliation of the JLM.

Last year a GMB resolution supported by Unite under its war mongering General Secretary, Sharon Graham, called for increased arms spending. Unbelievably it called on the TUC to back an increase in arms spending to 3 per cent of GDP. This at a time when the NHS and schools are being starved of money. As Chris Nineham of Stop the War Coalition wrote

‘It actually put the TUC to the right of the Tory government which even now only dares to push for 2.5 per cent arms spending.

John McDonnell has thrown in his lot with Ukraine's neo-Nazi infested armed forces

Andrew Murray wrote

Last year GMB general secretary Gary Smith persuaded the TUC Congress to vote, shamefully if narrowly, to campaign for increased military spending.

At a time of austerity and a cost-of-living crisis, that decision prioritised the arms industry over the vital interests of millions of working people, not least the tens of thousands of GMB members in the beleaguered public services.

It also revealed that Smith believes that the British government can be trusted with more weapons, despite overwhelming evidence that they are used either for wars of aggression or for sale to despotic regimes.

Given Smith’s support for Apartheid Israel, it is no surprise that this appalling reactionary should demand that the Tories divert yet more money from the NHS and their own workers in the health service to feed America’s war industry. It is a shameful comment on the British trade union movement that this motion was passed.

The neo-Nazi credentials of the Azov battalion, which has been integrated into the army and now promoted to brigade status, is well documented. That did not stop Arsen Avakov, Ukraine’s Interior Minister, a man personally responsible for integrating far-right groups into the state from defending them to the online newspaper Ukrayinska Pravda in 2019.

“The shameful information campaign about the alleged spread of Nazi ideology (among Azov members) is a deliberate attempt to discredit the ‘Azov’ unit and the National Guard of Ukraine,”

As even NBC had to admit

even though Putin is engaging in propaganda, it’s also true that Ukraine has a genuine Nazi problem… important as it is to defend the yellow-and-blue flag against the Kremlin’s brutal aggression, it would be a dangerous oversight to deny Ukraine’s antisemitic history and collaboration with Hitler’s Nazis, as well as the latter-day embrace of neo-Nazi factions in some quarters.

NBC went on to remind us that

On the eve of World War II, Ukraine was home to one the largest Jewish communities in Europe, with estimates as high as 2.7 million, a remarkable number considering the territory’s long record of antisemitism and pogroms. By the end, more than half would perish. When German troops took control of Kyiv in 1941, they were welcomed by “Heil Hitler” banners. Soon after, nearly 34,000 Jews — along with Roma and other “undesirables” — were rounded up and marched to fields outside the city on the pretext of resettlement only to be massacred in what became known as the “Holocaust by bullets.”

The Babyn Yar ravine continued to fill up as a mass grave for two years. With as many as 100,000 murdered there, it became one of the largest single killing sites of the Holocaust outside of Auschwitz and other death camps. Researchers have noted the key role locals played in fulfilling Nazi kill orders at the site.

Those locals were led by Stepan Bandera’s Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and its armed wing the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). Ukraine is the only country in the world to have a national holiday in memory of a Nazi collaborator, Stepan Bandera. The Times of Israel described how Hundreds of Ukrainian nationalists march in honor of Nazi collaborator.

Today the British press plays down the threat of the neo-Nazis in Ukraine. However at the time of the Maiden coup in 2014 they were singing a different song. The Guardian described how Azov fighters were both Ukraine's greatest weapon and its greatest threat.

They quoted Dimitary, a member of the Azov group as saying that

"I have nothing against Russian nationalists, or a great Russia, but Putin's not even a Russian. Putin's a Jew."

You might think that Zionist groups like America’s Anti-Defamation League would be prominent in denouncing these neo-Nazis and anti-Semites. After all they are usually able to spot ‘anti-Semites’ before they have time to unfurl the Palestinian flaga. But strangely enough they have kept remarkable quiet. Even worse they have been excusing and justifying them.

In 2019 – before it became politically necessary to whitewash them – the ADL itself warned that an “extremist group called the Azov Battalion has ties to neo-Nazis and white supremacists” and issued a report on how the Ukrainian militia was trying to “connect with like-minded extremists from the US.”

This Ukrainian extremist group, called The Azov Battalion, has ties to neo-Nazis and white supremacists. Our latest report on international white supremacy details how they try to connect with like-minded extremists from the US: https://t.co/GtvssxwzbN https://t.co/gGHMM8L46k

— ADL (@ADL) September 23, 2019

Ali Abunimah described how the ADL has been turning a blind eye to Hitler’s accomplices in Ukraine and even justifying their record. As Abunimah observed ‘So when Washington goes to war, the lobby will often lend its propaganda services to the cause.’

This shows that the Zionist lobby, of which the ADL is the most prominent, are first and foremost supporters of US imperialism. So now it is rehabilitating the Ukrainian collaborators who helped Hitler exterminate Jews and Poles.

This Holocaust revisionism is motivated by the need to whitewash the present-day, far-right Ukrainian nationalists and neo-Nazis.

The reason the US, NATO and the European Union gives for sending weapons and mercenaries to Ukraine is that they are helping a fellow democracy defend its independence and sovereignty against an illegal invasion by an expansionist, megalomaniacal madman.

Anrdrii Melnyk is currently Ukraine's Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs

At the outset of my visit to Munich met with UKR community & laid down flowers on the tomb of our hero Stepan Bandera

— Andrii Melnyk (@MelnykAndrij) April 27, 2015

It is therefore very awkward from a Western perspective that the Ukrainian regime is underpinned by hard-right fascists and neo-Nazis.

Acknowledging this fact, Western war propagandists fear, would legitimize Putin’s claim that the Russian invasion – which has been overwhelmingly condemned by the UN General Assembly – is justified by a need to “de-Nazify” and demilitarize Ukraine.

The dilemma is summed up in an NBC News headline: “Ukraine’s Nazi problem is real, even if Putin’s ‘denazification’ claim isn’t.”

But most Western media will no longer even go as far as NBC News in acknowledging this reality.

The current war can be traced directly to the 2014 coup in Ukraine, during which the US and its allies supported far-right and neo-Nazi elements. The goal was to install a US-friendly regime that would bring Ukraine into NATO. Moscow has long seen NATO expansion as an existential threat.

Key actors in the US-supported coup were neo-Nazi groups like Right Sector, the Azov Battalion and C14. They are part of a broader Ukrainian nationalist movement that venerates Bandera, the leader of the OUN, which collaborated with Hitler during World War II.

In an interview with Andrew Srulevitch, ADL Director of European Affairs, Professor David Fishman exonerated the UPA and Bandera, who were responsible for the slaughter of 300,000 Jews and Poles. Asked about torchlit marches in Kyiv with red and black flags, Fishman had this to say:

“For Ukrainian nationalists, UPA and Bandera are symbols of the Ukrainian fight for Ukrainian independence. The UPA allied with Nazi Germany against the Soviet Union for tactical – not ideological – reasons.... When Ukrainian nationalists and Jews look at those red and black flags, we see two different things.’

In fact UPA attacks on Jews were so ferocious that Jews sought the protection of the Germans.

The Banderite bands and the local nationalists raided every night, decimating the Jews

a survivor testified in 1948.

Jews sheltered in the camps where Germans were stationed, fearing an attack by Banderites. Some German soldiers were brought to protect the camps and thereby also the Jews.

ADL, which purports to oppose anti-Semitism, carried the interview with Fishman on its website and in its newsletter. Zionist organisations, which are usually so concerned about ‘anti-Semitism’, simply echoed NATO propaganda. As Abunimah observed:

Fishman’s excuse that Bandera and other Nazi collaborators are “symbols” of the “fight for Ukrainian independence” mirrors the claims from American white supremacists that their display of the Confederate battle flag is merely to honor their “heritage” and not to celebrate a regime that went to war to protect its “right” to enslave people from Africa.

Dozens of Ukrainian streets are named after Bandera and in a particularly nice touch Bandera’s street runs right up to the site of Babi Yar.

Daniel Lazare, in a review of Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe’s Stepan Bandera: The Life and Afterlife of a Ukrainian Nationalist wrote:

Although Bandera and his followers would later try to paint the alliance with the Third Reich as no more than “tactical,” an attempt to pit one totalitarian state against another, it was in fact deep-rooted and ideological. Bandera envisioned the Ukraine as a classic one-party state with himself in the role of führer, or providnyk, and expected that a new Ukraine would take its place under the Nazi umbrella, much as Jozef Tiso’s new fascist regime had in Slovakia or Ante Pavelić’s in Croatia.

What we are seeing is a cynical attempt to rewrite history in order to portray Bandera and the OUN/UPA as mere Ukrainian nationalists. Why? Because NATO’s Ukrainian friends identify with Bandera’s alliance with Nazi Germany. Bandera saw things differently explaining that Ukrainian nationalism had taken shape “in a spirit similar to the National Socialist ideas”.

That the BBC and the yellow press is engaged in trying to prettify the Azov Battalion and assorted neo-Nazis is one thing (see Ros Atkin’s apologia What untruths is Russia spreading about Nazis in Ukraine?) but for a Zionist organisation which purports to oppose anti-Semitism to do the same is something else.

As Jimmy Dore observed, there are now good Nazis as well as bad Nazis. The good ones are pro-Western and publicly, at least, play down their anti-Semitism.

An example of Azov’s handiwork was the body of a woman found in the basement of Azov’s HQ in Mariupol. She had been tortured and a swastika was scratched into her chest. For which Western media blamed Russians.

Oleksiy Kuzmenko’s Far-Right Group Made Its Home in Ukraine’s Major Western Military Training Hub [George Washington University, September 2021] makes for sombre reading. Kuzmenko wrote that:

...  since 2018, the National Army Academy (NAA), Ukraine’s premier military education institution and a major hub for Western military assistance to the country, has been home to Centuria, a self-described order of “European traditionalist” military officers that has the stated goals of reshaping the country’s military along right-wing ideological lines and defending the “cultural and ethnic identity” of European peoples against “Brussels’ politicos and bureaucrats.” The group envisions a future where “European right forces are consolidated and national traditionalism is established as the disciplining ideological basis for the European peoples.”

The group, led by individuals with ties to Ukraine’s ...  Azov movement, has attracted multiple members, including current and former officer cadets of the NAA now serving in the Armed Forces of Ukraine. Apparent members have appeared in photos giving Nazi salutes and made seemingly extremist statements online.

The group has been able to proselytize Ukraine’s future military elite inside the NAA. Members have also gained access to Western military education and training Institutions.

The presence of the far right within the NAA is alarming because that institution is central to the Armed Forces of Ukraine, Western support for that country, and Western military presence there. Foreign military instructors routinely engage with the Academy’s cadets at both the Academy proper and the International Peacekeeping and Security Center it oversees....

Azov figures and groups linked to Azov also heaped praise on Centuria and shared its messages online. In January 2019, for example, Eduard Yurchenko, an ideologue of the Azov movement, praised the group on Telegram, where he now has more than 1,100 subscribers. “You should know that this is our legendary future growing,” Yurchenko wrote of Centuria, emphasizing that the group was holding events within the NAA. ...

Galician Youth, a group that is linked to the Azov movement and operates in the Western part of Ukraine, similarly shared Centuria propaganda on Telegram in 2019.

In May 2021, the United Jewish Community of Ukraine... accused Galician Youth of spreading anti-Semitic posters in Lviv. The group denied having any connection to anti-Semitic posters and stated that it condemned anti-Semitism and xenophobia. Belying these statements, however, Galician Youth events, patches, etc., feature white nationalist symbols.

The evidence is overwhelming that the AFU is being penetrated at all levels by neo-Nazi groups.

Hope not Hate, which never lost an opportunity to attack anti-racists like Chris Williamson for ‘anti-Semitism’, went out of its way to downplay genuine anti-Semitism in Ukraine. HnH withdrew an award to Joe Solo for having supported Chris, though it ended up with egg on their faces writing that:

Ukraine's contemporary Jewish community, while facing antisemitism that all Jewish populations sadly receive, has, in the post-communist era, become a thriving community in the country with freedoms and protections written in law.

Denazify #Ukraine? Its President is Jewish, Mr. #Putin. Naked aggression is no justification in 2022. #russianinvasion https://t.co/IAW9HOIpNa

— SimonWiesenthalCntr (@simonwiesenthal) February 24, 2022

Eduard Dolinsky, the leader of Ukraine’s Jewish community clearly disagreed:

Our government encourages nationalistic groups. Our government encourages glorification of Nazi collaborator mass murderers and murderers of Jews.

Literally there are hundreds of monuments, streets named after killers of Jews. You can’t imagine in the West... a monument to a policeman who was escorting Jews to Nazi death camps.... We have anti-Semitic incidents every day – vandalism on Holocaust mass graves, vandalism on Jewish monuments. ... No one was ever convicted. They always deny the issue.

Zelensky’s Alliance with Ukraine’s Neo-Nazis

Western propaganda uses the fact that Zelenskyy is Jewish to legitimise Ukraine’s Nazis. This is not strange however. Zelensky is a rabid Zionist and Zionism historically has always koshered anti-Semitism. It did so with Nazi Germany.

Less than 3 weeks ago the Israeli  Ambassador to Romania, together with settler leader Yossi Dagan, met with the leader of the far-right Alliance for the Unity of Romanians party. This is a party that openly denies the holocaust and is descended from the Iron Guard who in 1941 staged a pogrom in Bucharest and hung the bodies of Jews from meat hooks in butcher shops. As Ha’aretz observed in its editorial ‘Shared Values’: Netanyahu’s Israel Cements Another Grim Alliance With Europe’s Far Right’

Zelensky is a puppet of Ukraine’s fascists who came to power thanks to patronage from Ukrainian oligarch, Ihor Kolomoisky. Kolomoisky funded  Zelensky’s election campaign whilst also funding the Azov Battalion and other far-right militias.

In 2019 Zelensky met with a range of fascist groups telling reporters “I met with veterans yesterday. Everyone was there – the National Corps, Azov, and everyone else.” A few seats away from Zelensky was Yehven Karas, leader of the neo-Nazi C14 gang.

In 2019, Zelensky defended Ukrainian footballer Roman Zolzulya against Spanish fans taunting him as a “Nazi.” Zolzulya had posed beside photos of Bandera and openly supported the AB. Zelensky, described Zolzulya as “not only a cool football player but a true patriot.”

In April 2021 Zelensky tried to appoint the neo-Nazi former head of the Right Sector in Odessa, Serhiy Sternenko as head of Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU). As the former head of the neo-Nazi Right Sector in Odessa, Sternenko was directly implicated in the 2014 Trade Unions House massacre in Odessa, when 46 trade unionists were burnt alive or shot whilst attempting to flee the burning building. It is a massacre that Smith and Graham are remarkably unconcerned or ignorant about.

In November 2021 Dmytro Yarosh, announced that he had been appointed as an advisor to the Commander-in-Chief of the AFU. Yarosh led the Right Sector from 2013-2015, vowing to lead the “de-Russification” of Ukraine.

A month later, as war with Russia drew closer, Zelensky awarded Right Sector commander Dmytro Kotsyubaylo the “Hero of Ukraine” commendation. Kosyubaylo keeps a pet wolf in his frontline base, and likes to joke to visiting reporters that his fighters “feed it the bones of Russian-speaking children.”

On March 1, Zelensky replaced the regional administrator of Odessa with Maksym Marchenko, a former commander of the extreme right Aidar Battalion, which has been accused of an array of war crimes in the Donbas.

Zelensky’s visit to Greece in April 2022 backfired dramatically in a country which was occupied during WWII. Zelensky’s address cut away to broadcast two members of the AB. Both said that they were of Greek heritage. It caused outrage. “Nazis Return to Parliament — Thanks to Mitsotakis” ran one headline referring to the fact that only recently had Greece managed to drive out its own neo-nazis.

The decision of the TUC to give blanket support to NATO’s proxy war in Ukraine, knowing full well that neo-Nazi groups are integrated armed forces is or should be a matter of shame. Clearly Gary Smith and Sharon Graham have no shame.

Tony Greenstein