Showing posts with label Jamie Driscoll. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jamie Driscoll. Show all posts

23 February 2026

Jeremy Corbyn’s Arrogance & Disdain for Democracy Plus His Belief That He Alone Can Lead Your Party Is Destroying It

We Are Seeing a Repeat of Corbyn’s Disastrous Labour Leadership - He Has Learnt Nothing From His Expulsion of Anti-Zionists & Betrayal of Comrades

Corbyn's Car Crash Interview on London Politics Program 2 November 2025

The following blog is, as the title suggests, extremely critical of Jeremy Corbyn and his behaviour in the formation of Your Party and his treatment of Zarah Sultana. I do not expect those who substitute hero worship for critical analysis to understand or accept what I write. I hope though that before denouncing what I write that people take the time to read what I say.

Reason can never defeat blind faith. That is the secret of religion.  But for those who are open to rational argument the case I make is powerful. No one can defend Corbyn's behaviour as leader of the Labour Party in dancing to the Zionist tune. In years to come no one will defend his obstinacy, delay tactics and undemocratic practices in Your Party. What will seem obvious in the future eludes many people now.

Bob Dylan's I Threw It All Away Could be Corbyn's Signature Tune

Your Party started out with a massive advantage. Within weeks it had 800,000 potential supporters yet Corbyn by his petulance and nepotism has thrown it all away.

With Reform and Authoritarianism growing day by day the need for a strong socialist and left wing party is overwhelming. Corbyn's refusal to subordinate his own prejudices and whims to that of the movement is indefensible. His rejection of a co-leadership with a young enthusiastic MP is nothing short of selfish and outrageous.

His wife, Laura Alvarez is said to be concerned about Corbyn's legacy. Ironically Corbyn's legacy will be one of failure, of someone who dithered, delayed and procrastinated when decisiveness was required. He will be seen to have betrayed not only his comrades like Ken Livingstone but also his own past reputation.  

It is a living tragedy and those who are blinded by idol worship will rue the day they didn't sit down and ask themselves how it is that Corbyn never once fought the Right when he became leader and today is repeating the same trick. Corbyn is singlehandedly sinking YP by refusing to accept that maybe being the sole leader of YP isn't his by right.

For the past few weeks Your Party has become obsessed with its own internal elections for the Central Executive Committee. It is as if the world outside, the deproscription of Palestine Action and the acquittals of the Filton 24 had never happened. The looming war on Iran is barely discussed.

I have been bombarded with increasingly frantic messages from Corbyn’s Peace & Justice Project [PJP] saying that if The Many slate, don’t win the internal elections then Your Party is doomed.

The latest message, sent on Sunday, says that ‘Jeremy Corbyn needs your help’ and that if I don’t vote for his slate then YP

is in real danger of becoming... an angry fringe party that conducts purity tests at the door and rails against potential allies.’

On 22 January I receive a mailshot from PJP, calling on me to endorse Corbyn from info@thecorbynproject.com.

On February 2 I was told that the Many ‘will make Jeremy Your Party’s Parliamentary Leader’ ignoring a ballot of members in favour of a collective leadership. It is ironic that in Parliament Corbyn describes himself as an Independent not a Your Party MP.

On February 4 another mailshot explained that Jeremy is uniquely placed for this role’ because of his ’record of moral clarity’. It didn’t mention his disastrous Labour Party leadership when he threw away victory by appeasing the Right.

On February 9 I was told that ‘Your Party [could[ become(s) the broad, inclusive party.’ On February 15 it was make or break for Your Party’. The choice being between ‘A mass socialist party’ or ‘A narrow fringe party.’

Last Friday they told me that The next three days will decide if Your Party survives as a viable political force.’ 

Leaving aside the increasingly frenetic nature of these messages I wonder how the PJP/ Corbyn Project have obtained my email address. I never joined PJP. Corbyn’s election campaign has had access to the YP mailing list because Karie Murphy and his wife Laura Alvarez, the power behind the throne, are running the elections, debarring candidates and doing their best to fix the results.

Were other candidates given the chance of mailing YP members or was it just Corbyn’s slate? This is a corrupt election practice. Murphy has never been elected. She’s accountable to no one yet she makes the decisions. This is Corbyn's idea of democracy.

I have had no mailshot from anyone else. Everyone else standing for election has had to make do as best they can.

There are some good people on The Many slate like ex-MP Laura Smith and there are also abusive characters like Terry Deans. I don’t like slates because they are all or nothing but a group that talks about fairness and equality has seized control of YP’s machine and is being anything but fair.

Corbyn is guilty of the same undemocratic practices which led to his failed leadership of the Labour Party. His strategy of appeasing Tom Watson and the Labour/Zionist Right led to his defeat and has warped his judgement. What made it truly laughable was his final act of proposing Tom Watson's elevation to the House of Lords.

The Corbyn I met and worked with in 1983, a young Bennite MP, is not the same as today’s Corbyn. Then he was a sponsor of the Labour Committee on Palestine, later to become the Labour Movement Campaign on Palestine, of which I was Chair. He supported a democratic, secular state in Palestine and Chaired a Labour Movement Conference that called for the disaffiliation of Poalei Zion (now the Jewish Labour Movement) from the Labour Party.

Corbyn praising the Father of Israel's Nuclear Bomb Shimon Peres - A Thorough Going Racist

When Corbyn was elected Leader of the Labour Party in 2015 the first thing he did was to act as the JLM’s messenger boy. Regular meetings with Jeremy Newmark, the corrupt leader of the JLM. Speaking at the Labour Friends of Israel fringe meeting in 2016 was part of his wooing the Zionists.

Corbyn trumps his ‘moral clarity’ and peace mongering but politically he is very weak. He doesn’t link war to capitalism and imperialism and doesn’t oppose Zionism as a settler colonial movement whose project, a Jewish State, means a state of Jewish Supremacy.

Zionism is not a fluffy form of Jewish identity. Zionism demands that Palestinian villages are razed to the ground to be replaced by Jewish settlements. They call it ‘redeeming the land.’ When the Zionist Opposition leader, Yair Lapid says that what he wants is ‘maximum Jews, maximum land and minimum Arabs’ he is articulating the politics of Zionism.

When over half of Israeli Jews call marrying a non-Jew ‘national treason’ and when marrying a Palestinian is a social taboo in Israel (it is impossible for a Jew and non-Jew to marry in Israel) we are in Nuremberg territory, as Hannah Arendt pointed out in Eichmann in Jerusalem.

The Nazis’ 1935 Nuremberg race laws made marriage between a Jew and an Aryan a crime. Yet despite this Corbyn refuses to call himself an anti-Zionist whereas Zarah Sultana has unequivocally stated that she is an anti-Zionist. Instead of joining with her Corbyn insists he supports the right of the Israeli Apartheid state to continue.

The survey was conducted, not in 2023 but 2003. It demonstrates the depth of racism in the ‘Jewish’ State. The poll  found that over 75% did not approve of apartment buildings being shared between Arabs and Jews. 60% said they would not allow an Arab to visit their home.

About 40% of participants agreed that “Arabs should have their right to vote for Knesset revoked”. Over half agreed that Israel should encourage its Arab citizens to emigrate. Over half said they would not want to work under the direct management of an Arab, and 55% said “Arabs and Jews should be separated at entertainment sites”. This is Zionism.

After 40 years of supporting the Palestinians Corbyn still hasn’t worked out why Israel is like it is.  He still supports a two state solution not a single, non-racist unitary state.

It is as if, in the day of South Africa Apartheid he were to support a separate White state. Did Corbyn condemn the human rights record of the Apartheid state but say that you couldn’t oppose Apartheid because it was a movement of White identity?

No one would have bought this nonsense for a moment but Corbyn refuses to oppose Zionism. His peace and love stuff is a cop out, a way of politically avoiding saying that a Jewish settler state is a racist state. 

The ‘Anti-Semitism Witchhunt’

In April 2020 a Report which originated as an internal, 860-page dossier, by staff in the final days of Corbyn's leadership, was leaked. It was a direct response to the EHRC investigation into allegations of ‘anti-Semitism’.

It included extensive, unredacted WhatsApp messages and emails from senior Labour Party staff who were opposed to Corbyn's leadership. These messages contained racist and sexist comments about Corbyn supporters and demonstrated how these staff had, under Iain McNicol, deliberately tried to sabotage the Labour Party’s electoral prospects.

The Witchhunter's Dirty Tricks Included Fixing the Composition of the National Constitutional Committee

The report was aimed at showing that Corbyn and his Leader of the Opposition Staff had done all they could to combat ‘anti-Semitism’. It never challenged the idea that the ‘anti-Semitism smear campaign’ had itself been fraudulent. This was its major political weakness and this was central to Corbyn’s inability to rebut the ‘anti-Semitism’ attacks.  See my two blogs on the Leaked Report here and here.

Corbyn's office ended up urging that the expulsions be carried out more quickly

The report was never submitted to the EHRC on legal advice. Prepared in March 2020 it was leaked to the media in April 2020, shortly after Starmer became leader. The leak triggered an inquiry led by Martin Forde QC (the Forde Report) which Starmer did his best to close down and then ignore.

Starmer launched expensive legal proceedings against those he thought had leaked the Report. He wasn’t concerned about the virulent racism and sexism of people like Emily Oldknow, John Stolliday and others – both of whom were employed later by the right-wing leadership of UNISON.

In a good example of genuine anti-Semitism my Jewish sounding name was used as a 'search term' on activists

In these extracts from the Labour Leaked Report two things stand out:

i.                   Corbyn’s close relationship with the JLM.

ii.                Corbyn’s refusal even to countenance the possibility that the ‘anti-Semitism’ that the JLM and Labour Right were talking about was anti-Zionism, opposition to the Israeli state.

Corbyn showed a complete lack of judgement. When I was suspended in March 2016 I had one message. It was that Jackie Walker and myself were not the real target. We were collateral damage. The real target was Corbyn. The Zionists made no attempt to disguise their hatred of Corbyn yet he was blissfully unaware. This was unforgiveable.

Corbyn had been around the Palestine solidarity movement long enough to know that ‘anti-Semitism’ was the first resort of the Zionists to any criticism.

Even Len McLuskey, whose own role was disgraceful, twigged that something was wrong when he wrote in Huffington Post in August 2018 that the Board of Deputies and JLM ‘are refusing to take yes for an answer’. Whatever concessions Corbyn made they wanted more – his scalp.

The JLM was dead up till 2015. When Corbyn was elected leader it was refounded for the sole purpose of leading the campaign to remove Corbyn. Asa Winstanley, in an article which led to his suspension, described how Jeremy Newmark and a key Israeli Embassy operative explained how“a bunch of us sat in a coffee shop in Golders Green” around September 2015 to“talk about re-forming the JLM to do something with it.’

Despite appeasing and acting as their errand boy, the JLM passed a motion of no confidence in Corbyn, days after he had begged them not to disaffiliate from the Labour Party. A bogus threat designed to win them sympathy.

Corbyn’s ‘strategy’ was to retreat, apologise and promise to do better. However the JLM had no intention of letting up because their explicit aim was removing Corbyn altogether.

Chris Williamson was the ONLY Labour MP to oppose the 'anti-Semitism' witchhunt

18 months ago Jackie Walker, Chris Williamson, myself and others wrote to Corbyn saying that it was time to admit that thousands of Labour members had been victim of false allegations of anti-Semitism and that if he had fought back against the Zionists he might have been Prime Minister.

Corbyn refused to respond, despite two reminders. To this day Corbyn has refused to accept that he made any mistakes in throwing his political friends overboard.

It is this which explains his witchhunting today. Corbyn has a bad conscience over how he behaved when he was leader of the Labour Party. He cannot come to terms with the fact that instead of appeasing the Zionists and their false anti-Semitism allegations he should have fought them.

Corbyn betrayed those who had stuck out their necks to support him. Not only did Corbyn say nothing over the expulsions of Jackie Walker, Marc Wadsworth or myself but he actually urged that our expulsions be sped up.

Corbyn betrayal of Ken Livingstone, the former leader of the Greater London Council, was shameful. Livingstone had stuck his neck out to defend Corbyn. He had repeatedly come to Corbyn’s rescue but Corbyn didn’t lift so much as a finger to support him. Instead he cast him to the wolves and John Mann.

Nothing that Livingstone had said, about the Nazis supporting Zionism was wrong. Hitler had supported the Ha’avara trade agreement between the Zionists and the Nazis when sections of the Nazi party had opposed it. Livingstone was forced out of the Labour Party for raising a historical fact. See my debate with Google’s AI!

When I was interviewed by Vanessa Feltz on BBC London, (Feltz had conducted the original interview with Livingstone), I made mincemeat of her. Yet Corbyn apologised to all his critics.

When the Zionists targeted Chris Williamson, Corbyn’s most ardent supporter in the Parliamentary Labour Party, who alone of the Campaign Group understood what the ‘anti-Semitism’ witchhunt was really about, he too was betrayed.

Corbyn refused to stand up for Williamson when Tom Watson organised a campaign to resuspend Chris.

I don’t know what went through Corbyn’s head at this time. He shied away from any confrontation with the Labour Right. With General Secretary Jennie Formby he stepped up the expulsion of any critic of Israel who fell foul of the Zionists. Anne Mitchell, the Secretary of Brighton and Hove PSC, was expelled for criticising Israel. It was  obvious to us what was happening. Corbyn however saw nothing.

At the 2018 Labour Party Conference Corbyn opposed the Open Selection of Labour MPs and got Len McLuskey to break his mandate. As I wrote at the time, this marked the death of the Corbyn Project. Corbyn was protecting the Right.

In 2019 he and Jennie Formby sought to speed up the witchhunt of socialists and so they proposed a ‘fast track’ system whereby anti-Semitism cases would be dealt with without even a hearing, thus avoiding the National Constitutional Committee.

At conference delegates were told that only the most ‘egregious’ cases would be dealt with in this way. This was a lie.  Every single anti-Semitism case was fast-tracked.

In an interview with Middle East Eye in June 20 Corbyn said:

“I then realised there was a logjam building up in the party on individual cases. And so I proposed the expansion of the National Constitutional Committee, which was duly done in order to deal with cases more quickly. I also introduced a system where egregious cases could be dealt with very quickly, but still within the ambit of rules of natural justice. So I feel that the attacks on me have been extremely unfair on this.”

How could expelling people without a hearing be compatible with natural justice? This was an egregious lie. From then on the NCC did not deal with any ‘anti-Semitism’ cases. You were accused, asked for a response and then expelled.

This self-serving lie demonstrated, even after the election of Starmer, that Corbyn still did not understand what had happened. He still thought the allegations of ‘anti-Semitism’ were genuine. This is the man who believes that he is capable of leading Your Party when the reality is that he would cave in at the first whiff of ‘anti-Semitism’ being alleged.

The Formation of Your Party, Zarah and Karie

When Zarah Sultana resigned the Labour Whip and announced that she and Corbyn would be co-leaders immediately 70,000 people expressed an interest in joining a new party. Within weeks this had grown to 800,000. But equally soon people became disillusioned with Corbyn's delaying tactics and prolonged sulks. See I quit Alba to join Your Party (but I resigned)

Corbyn had dithered and delayed for months in announcing the formation of a new party. Zarah bounced Corbyn into it. Instead of being grateful he resented this upstart secular Muslim woman and turned for solace to the male Muslim MPs, who also told him that he should work with Zarah.

Frustration at Corbyn’s behaviour and his reliance on his old failed advisors led to Jamie Driscoll’s defection to the Green Party and the withdrawal altogether of Andrew Feinstein who gained over 7,000 votes against Starmer in the General Election.

Corbyn’s behaviour has been that of a petulant spoilt child. He prefers to make Your Party his plaything rather than work together with Zarah as joint leaders. He forced the ballot on the method of leadership and when the outcome of the vote was not to his liking he announces that he is going to ignore it.

If the membership had been offered the choice of co-leadership I have no doubt they would have voted for that but his mate Karie Murphy chose the questions.

Despite conference voting that people can be members of two parties Murphy has been expelling people deemed members of another party and some who aren’t members.

I accept that if someone is a member of a party standing candidates against YP or using YP to recruit to their sect there is a problem. However the way to deal with it is not through bureaucratic expulsions but by building a mass membership.

The worst indictment against Corbyn is that instead of agreeing a temporary interim civil service in YP consisting of supporters of both him and Zarah, he inserted Murphy, his wife and other advisors into YP’s central office, wherever that is, and they made the decisions without any accountability.

I have no faith whatever in a party led by Corbyn because Corbyn has shown that he cannot stand up to the Right.

Corbyn's Car Crash interview on BBC London Politics

In November Jackie Walker and myself sent an Open Letter to Corbyn explaining why we couldn’t support him as sole leader of Your Party. This was based on a car crash interview with Samantha Simmonds on BBC London Politics Show. When questioned about the ‘anti-Semitism’ smear campaign instead of rebutting the whole premise he accepted the framing and simply explained that he did his utmost to get rid of those the Zionists demanded.

Corbyn is incapable, even in the middle of a Zionist genocide, of understanding that Zionism doesn’t oppose genuine anti-Semites, it works with them. See Two Jewish activists withdraw support for Corbyn’s Your Party bid over ‘unlearned lessons’

Even if the Grassroots slate and the Independents win it’s hard to see how YP will recover from the sabotage of Karie Murphy, Laura Alvarez and Corbyn. They have completely lost momentum, have driven thousands of socialists into the pro-capitalist, pro-NATO Green Party and have disillusioned those who believed Your Party (whose name should have been Left Party) was a feasible project.

Your Party had a chance of becoming a significant socialist alternative, not just to the Labour Party but to  Reform.  Thanks to Corbyn they have blown it.

Tony Greenstein

8 June 2023

Perdition - Why Ken Loach is not Anti-Semitic (& nor is Roger Waters!)

Zionism During the Holocaust describes the background to the Kasztner Trial & Perdition which was the pretext for the Deselection of Jamie Driscoll as Mayor for North Tyne 

Roger Waters Rebuts the Zionist Lies About the Wall Being Fascist

The false accusations of anti-Semitism have not gone away now Corbyn is no longer leader. Keir Starmer, in what is clearly a libelous letter, has defamed Roger Waters and accused him of ‘spreading deeply troubling anti-Semitism’. Starmer has also shown himself out to be the repressive little shit that he is by calling for the cancellation of Roger Water’s gigs.

As Skwawkbox puts itRoger Waters has money. Let’s hope he sues the arse out of Starmer’s trousers.’ There is nothing too despicable for Starmer to put his name to it. But when it came to the murder last week of 2 year old Muhammed Tamimi by Israeli soldiers who shot him in the head, Starmer said nothing. No matter what Israel does it is untouchable. The Labour Party today is led by a despicable racist and liar.

As I wrote in any essay over 30 years ago, ‘anti-Semitism’ is the false antiracism of the Right and so it is proving. Indeed to be accused of ‘anti-Semitism’ today is to be accused of anti-racism!

Why is the Establishment and figures like Starmer so concerned about ‘anti-Semitism’?  It is because Jews aren’t the victims of racism and the economic and class discrimination that come with it.  If Jews were the targets of a real, widespread anti-Semitism that  is sponsored by the state then Starmer and his Tory/ Labour protégé, Christian Wakeford, who  have both called for the cancellation of Roger Water’s gigs, would not want to know.

Last week Jamie Driscoll, the Mayor for North of Tyne, was deselected by a Labour NEC panel. No reason was given.

Called the ‘last Corbynista in power’ Driscoll told the Guardian that he was not given any reason for being blocked from standing, but suspected it was “because I would have won” and because “my political positions have fallen out of favour with the current party leadership”.

Driscoll’s ‘crime’ was believing serial liar Starmer when he made 10 pledges in order to become leader, in particular Pledge No. 5 which said

Public services should be in public hands, not making profits for shareholders. Support common ownership of rail, mail, energy and water; end outsourcing in our NHS, local government and justice system

Starmer, whose campaign was secretly funded by rich Zionists, believed not a word of it but was happy to make pledges he had no intention of keeping.

Driscoll himself cited his support for a wealth tax and common ownership of utilities – a Labour party policy under Jeremy Corbyn, which has been ditched by Starmer. Driscoll also supports proportional representation, which Starmer doesn’t.

In a friendly sit-down interview with Mr Driscoll during the 2020 Labour leadership contest Starmer told Driscoll: "There is more that unites us than divides us". The Independent reported that:

anonymous sources have linked it to Mr Driscoll once appearing on a panel with film director Ken Loach, who has himself been kicked out of the Labour party for supporting a proscribed organisation.

Luke Akehurst defend Israeli snipers opening fire on unarmed demonstrators in Gaza in 2018, killing 234 including 49 children

This was confirmed by far-right Labour NEC member Luke Akehurst, who is the Director of We Believe in Israel. In 2019 Akehurst defended Israel using snipers to murder and maim thousands of unarmed Gazans, including over 50 children, who demanded the right of return to their original homes in Palestine.

On his Twitter thread Akehurst made it very clear why Loach, Britain’s most distinguished film producer, a veteran socialist who has produced award winning films such as Kes, The Wind that Shakes the Barley and I Daniel Blake, was nonetheless anti-Semitic. Akehurst who is non-Jewish felt confident to speak about what the ‘Jewish community’ felt:

He seems absolutely oblivious to the role Ken Loach has played over many decades in the debate about antisemitism or the extent to which the Jewish community find association with Loach abhorrent and offensive.

What Akehurst was referring to was the Zionist leadership of British Jews.  What had particularly outraged them and Akehurst was Loach’s role in the production of Jim Allen’s play Perdition.

Akehurst cited in his support an article by David Cesarani, a Zionist historian, ‘Perdition – Stage-managed anti-Semitism?’,.  I am going to analyse what Cesarani says in this article and explain why it is flawed.

Cesarani was an ideologically driven historian and his best book, Final Solution, came out after he died at the age of 58. It is true that Cesarani wrongly branded Perdition as anti-Semitic. However he also regretted his attempt to censor it. This kind of nuance is too much to comprehend for the likes of Akehurst who is a propagandist.

Cesarani wrote in the Jewish Chronicle (3.7.87.) after the Perdition controversy:

Was it worth all the fuss?... Had the play gone on it would have been seen by around 2,000 people…. We need to master the art of exposing and debunking, instead of instantly branding antagonists as anti-Semites…

Note those words: ‘instantly branding antagonists as anti-Semites’. That’s what happened and it rebounded because most people weren’t convinced by the ritual accusations of ‘anti-Semitism’ and the more they looked the more they asked their own questions.

Professor Robert Wistrich of Tel Aviv University, a right-wing Zionist historian, albeit an honest one (a rare breed) went even further and condemned ‘as unwise’ the attacks on the play as anti-Semitic. Wistrich held that ‘the entire Jewish leadership of that generation – including the Zionists – failed the test of the times.

Wistrich conceded that ‘the major priority of the Zionist movement at the time was indeed building Palestine’ and that the Holocaust took second place. He accepted that ‘a reasonable case’ could be made that Zionists did not fight anti-Semitism before 1939 ‘with the appropriate vigour’ and further

‘that some Zionists wanted to develop a ‘special relationship’ with the Nazis…. To deny these points… is not only stupid but unnecessary.’ [Wistrich, Between Redemption & Perdition: Modern Antisemitism and Jewish Identity, p. 244. Routledge 1990]

In Final solution (p.96) Cesarani confirmed what Ken Livingstone had said writing that:

 ‘The efforts of the Gestapo are oriented to promoting Zionism as much as possible and lending support to its efforts to promote emigration.’

Was Cesarani correct that Perdition was ‘Stage-managed anti-Semitism?

Cesarani’s article can be found in Jewish Socialist No. 9 in Spring 1987. It is littered with mistakes and hyperbole. Attempts to find conspiracy theories where there are none. Waffle instead of analysis.

Cesarani described the judge, Benjamin Halevi, as ‘unsympathetic’. Initially that was not true. It was as the evidence mounted up that Halevi became unsympathetic.

Cesarani started off by saying of the Kasztner case in Israel, in which a holocaust survivor Malchiel Greenwald was sued for libel by Kasztner, a prominent member of the governing Israeli Labour Party and former leader of Hungarian Zionism that:

‘Although he won the case technically the court awarded derogatory damages and Kasztner was forced to appeal, without success. He was assassinated before a court finally cleared his name’.

Clearly Cesarani knew nothing about the trial. There were four allegations against Kasztner:

(a)    collaboration with the Nazis;

(b)   preparing the ground for murder of Hungary’s Jews;

(c)    sharing the monies and valuables looted from Hungary’s Jews with Becher 

(d)   saving a war criminal (Becher) from punishment after the war.

Far from winning the case technically, Halevi found that charges (a) (b) and (d) were proven. Only (c) was not proven. There was no technical victory in the lower court. It was in the Supreme Court that Kasztner won a technical victory in that it was held that in a libel trial you must win on all counts, not just 3 of them.

But even then, the decision to uphold the appeal was by 4-1, not a unanimous verdict and one of the four, Justice Goiten, refused to exonerate Kasztner.

The Supreme Court did not clear Kasztner. They upheld all the facts found by the lower court and unanimously found that charge (d) was proven as Kasztner had lied about having given testimony to the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal in favour of Kurt Becher, Himmler’s personal emissary in Hungary and a war criminal.

It later transpired that Kasztner had given testimony in favour of 6 Nazi war criminals including Hermann Krumey and Dieter Wisliceny who were responsible for the deportation of Jews from Slovakia, Greece, Poland and the atrocity at Lidice. Krumey was Eichmann’s second in command in Hungary and in charge of the deportations.

 They had the blood of millions on their hands yet Kasztner testified for them. The decision to appeal was so controversial that it caused the fall of the second Israeli government of Moshe Shertok.                                                      

Kasztner was assassinated by agents of Israel’s Shin Bet (internal security police) to shut him up.

Cesarani said that Perdition ‘raised the agonizing dilemmas confronting Jewish leaders in Nazi Europe: should, could they have done more to resist’ and cites Hannah Arendt in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem (which the Zionists excoriated as ‘anti-Semitic’) ‘where she accused the Jewish leadership of incompetence.’ What Arendt actually said was:

Wherever Jews lived, there were recognized Jewish leaders, and this leadership, almost without exception, cooperated in one way or another, for one reason or another, with the Nazis… The whole truth was that if the Jewish people had really been unorganized and leaderless, there would have been chaos and plenty of misery but the total number of victims would hardly have been between four and a half and six million people. (p.125)

Cesarani was wrong. Arendt was not alleging incompetence.

Nonetheless Cesarani conceded that German Zionism ‘echoed German volkish rhetoric about blood and soil’ suggesting that this ideological symmetry with Nazi views on the Jews was ‘exploited by Zionists in Germany after 1933 to get concessions from the Nazis in order to expedite Jewish emigration to Palestine.’ This too was untrue. 

German Zionism exploited its ideological agreement with the Nazis, that Jews did not belong in Germany and that they were aliens, in order to operate legally under the Nazi regime. They were unconcerned about the emigration of most German Jews and indeed the Ha’avara trade agreement with the Nazis made it harder for most Jews to emigrate.

The Zionists helped destroy the Boycott of Nazi Germany and thus stabilise the Nazi regime. Elie Wiesel, a survivor of Auschwitz wrote:

‘Surely, Jewish Palestine... needed money to finance its development, but this brazen pragmatism went against the political philosophy of a majority of world Jewry. There developed a growing perception that instead of supporting and strengthening the boycott, Palestine was, in fact, sabotaging it.’  (Review: ‘The Land That Broke Its Promise : The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust,’ LA Times, 23.5.93.)

Ha’avara broke the Boycott of Nazi Germany. That was why the Nazis agreed to it. It came to the rescue of the Nazi regime when it was weakest. At no time did the Zionist movement join the international campaign against Nazi Germany. As soon as the Nazis came to power the Zionist movement sought to exploit it for the purposes of building a ‘Jewish state.’

The Investor’s Review of 5 August 1933 reported that ‘authoritative opinion is that Hitlerism will come to a sanguinary end before the New Year.’ (‘Hitler hard up’, JC 11.8.33.)

Cesarani wrote in his book Final solution (pp. 81-2) that those who doubted the viability of the regime ‘were not engaged in wishful thinking’ and that it was beset by enemies coupled with a chronic balance of payments deficit. Israeli historian Yf’aat Weiss wrote (The Transfer Agreement and the Boycott Movement, p. 20)

The Zionist movement found itself in a profound conflict between transfer and boycott and, in the broad sense, between the needs of the Yishuv and the sentiments of the Jewish people.

Edwin Black, author of the definitive history of Ha’avara, wrote (p.253)

the Nazi party and the Zionist Organization shared a common stake in the recovery of Germany. If the Hitler economy fell, both sides would be ruined.

Ha’avara may have saved Hitler from being overthrown. (p. xiii) Black speculated that some Zionists ‘wondered if the Transfer Agreement’s aborting the nascent boycott of German goods had precluded any chance of the anti-Nazi crusade succeeding.’

The Zionists’ main argument is that accusations of collaboration with the Nazis is like blaming the Jews for their own murder. We should remember that just 2% of Germany’s half million Jews were Zionists.  Zionists were a freak sideshow in the German Jewish community. They were seen as Hitler Juden with their volkish ideology.

Alfred Rosenberg, the Nazi Party’s main theoretician who was hanged at Nuremberg, wrote in 1919 that

Zionism must be vigorously supported in order to encourage a significant number of German Jews to leave for Palestine or other destinations.’

Francis Nicosia wrote in [The Third Reich and the Palestine Question, (p. 25)] that Rosenberg ‘intended to use Zionism as a legal justification for depriving German Jews of their civil rights’ and ‘eventually the Jewish presence in Germany.’

Cesarani said that Lenni Brenner, the author of Zionism in the Age of the Dictators and Jim Allen (he doesn’t mention Ken Loach) attributes to the Zionists only half-hearted, rescue attempts because they only wanted ‘racially pure’ and strong Jews in Palestine. But this is not true.

The Zionist movement during the Holocaust was uninterested in any rescue attempts that did not involve Palestine because they believed that if the plight of Europe’s Jews could be solved without recourse to Palestine what was the point of a Jewish state?  They preferred their death to their rescue in countries other than Palestine. This is not conjecture.  David Ben-Gurion, the Chair of the Jewish Agency and Israel’s first Prime Minister opposed the Kindertransport when Britain agreed to immigration of 10,000 German Jewish children.

On 9 December 1938 Ben Gurion explained that:

If I knew that it would be possible to save all the children in Germany by bringing them over to England, and only half of them by transporting them to Eretz Yisrael, then I would opt for the second alternative. For we must weigh not only the life of these children, but also the history of the People of Israel. (Yoav Gelber, ‘Zionist policy and the Fate of European Jewry,’ Yad Vashem Studies (1939-42) p. 199; Tom Segev, The Seventh Million, p. 28).

It was this, not racial purity that was at the heart of Zionist opposition to rescue schemes that did not involve Palestine.

Cesarani resorts to making accusations of conspiracy. He held it was anti-Semitic to accuse Kasztner of buying his and other Zionist activists lives with the price of silence over the holocaust, but that is precisely what he did when he or his deputy Joel Brand reached an agreement in late April/early May with either Eichmann or Krumey for a train out of Germany for the Zionist elite in exchange for silence over the destination of the deportation trains. That was precisely the charge made after the war by the survivors of the Hungarian holocaust when they testified in the Kasztner trial.

Why was Cesarani’s appalling article printed in the Jewish Socialist?  Probably because the most influential member of the Jewish Socialists Group, David Rosenberg, was a friend of Cesarani. This article, with its generalised accusations of anti-Jewish conspiracies, was the kind of stuff that was being printed in the conservative press at the time.

Cesarani took offence at the accusation of betrayal but this was not Ken Loach’s or Jim Allen’s theme, but that of the Hungarian holocaust  survivors at Kasztner’s libel trial. Zionism was a quisling movement that betrayed Europe’s Jews. That was why in Poland the Zionist movement grew weaker. In the last free elections in Poland in 1938 the anti-Zionist Bund won 17 out of Warsaw’s 20 Jewish Council seats. The same was true all over Poland. As Isaac Deutscher wrote [Non-Jewish Jew]:

To the Jewish workers anti-Semitism seemed to triumph in Zionism, which recognised the legitimacy and the validity of the old cry ‘Jews get out!' The Zionists were agreeing to get out.

Cesarani complained that Jim Allen and Ken Loach responded to criticism of the play as anti-Semitic by saying that all the heroes are Jews.  ‘But what sort of Jews are they’ writes Cesarani ‘They are anti-Zionist or communist.’ That was precisely what was wrong with Perdition as far as  Cesarani was concerned. It told the truth!

Ken Loach, in a letter to the Guardian, before the paper became Freedlandised wrote:

The writer Eric Fried, many of whose family were murdered by the Nazis, wrote: "I am envious I have not written [this play] myself ... To accuse the play of faking history or anti-Jewish bias is monstrous. Perdition should be staged wherever possible."

Ironically Paul Bogdanor, a far-right Zionist. set out to rebut the charge that Kasztner was a collaborator. During his research he came to the opposite conclusion. In Kasztner’s Crime. Bogdanor accused Kasztner of being a Gestapo agent! Far from being spotless white as Cesarani and his apologists in the JSG would have you believe,  Kasztner was indeed the Nazi collaborator that anti-Zionists had all along maintained.

Bogdanor, a Zionist fanatic, then wove a tale that Kasztner acted as an individual rather than a representative of the Zionist movement. However this is historically untenable. Kasztner represented the Jewish Agency when he went to Nuremberg to give testimony in favour of Nazi war criminals. Indeed they paid his expenses. His accuser in the Palestine Office in Budapest, Moshe Krausz, was dismissed after making a complaint against Kasztner to the Jewish Agency.

The reason I have devoted a blog to resurrecting the 1987 play Perdition is because the controversy is now being resurrected to prove that Ken Loach is anti-Semitic. Zionism relies on recycling lies hoping people will forget the truth. This play was in no way anti-Jewish. It was anti-Zionist and it accurately portrayed the Zionist  movement as having collaborated with the Nazis in the extermination of nearly half a million Hungarian Jews.

Below is what I wrote in my recent book, Zionism During the Holocaust, on the Perdition Affair. To understand the background, viz. the holocaust in Hungary, you will have to buy the book though!  If  you wish to do this please contact me at tonygreenstein104@gmail.com

Tony Greenstein

Perdition

An article that appeared in Ha’aretz less than four weeks after the German surrender asked: ‘Did the Jews also have a hand in the horrible bloodshed committed against our nation?’ [1] It was sentiments such as these that led to the staging of Perdition.

Based on the Kasztner Trial, Perdition was the subject of a ferocious Zionist campaign to ban it. It was due to be shown at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs in January 1987. After pressure was put on its artistic director Max Stafford-Clarke, it was cancelled because ‘it would cause distress to members of the [Jewish] community.’[2] In other words it would have upset Britain’s powerful Zionist lobby.

Martin Gilbert and David Cesarani supported this campaign, claiming that Perdition was historically inaccurate.[3] But when Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses was published, the British Establishment and its tame press cried free speech. It was irrelevant that Rushdie’s book distressed many Muslims. When Charlie Hebdo mocked the Prophet Muhammad, free speech was again prioritised. The double standards were all too clear.

Jim Allen, who wrote the play, gave some indication of the tactics used when describing how Stephen Roth of the Zionist Federatopm told Stafford-Clarke that he could imperil the Royal Court’s funding by contacting friends in New York and London. One London producer was told that ‘I own nine theatres, my friend owns six. Put the play on and you’re finished.’[4] Ken Loach wrote:

Perdition was stopped by public abuse and private manipulation organized by a political tendency, Zionism, that will not acknowledge its past because of the light it sheds on the present.[5]

According to Cesarani the play ‘purported to reveal a gigantic conspiracy by powerful Jews (to) … mercilessly sacrifice(d) fellow Jews.’ It did no such thing. It revealed the true record of the Zionist movement.[6]

However the ban backfired and Perdition was shown at Conway Hall for six nights as well as at the Edinburgh Festival fringe.[7] It was the subject of letters and articles for weeks in the mass media and set off a far wider debate over Zionism and its role during the Holocaust.

The controversy in The Guardian’s letter columns continued for over two months. For The Times the issue was ‘the right to travesty the past and to slander a nation.’ The idea that there is only one version of history and that any others are a ‘travesty’ or that nations can be ‘slandered’ is indicative of the pernicious standards of Perdition’s critics.[8]

The genie was out of the bottle. Both Cesarani, who described Perdition as a ‘calumny’,[9] and playwright Arnold Wesker, came to regret the Zionist campaign.[10]

Professor Robert Wistrich of Tel Aviv University, an ardent Zionist ideologue condemned ‘as unwise’ the attacks on the play as anti-Semitic. Wistrich held that ‘the entire Jewish leadership of that generation – including the Zionists – failed the test of the times.’ Wistrich conceded that ‘the major priority of the Zionist movement at the time was indeed building Palestine’ and that the Holocaust took second place. He accepted that ‘a reasonable case’ could be made that Zionists did not fight anti-Semitism before 1939 ‘with the appropriate vigour’ and further ‘that some Zionists wanted to develop a ‘special relationship’ with the Nazis…. To deny these points… is not only stupid but unnecessary.’ [11] Professor Wistrich was one of that rare breed, an honest Zionist.

Channel 4 staged a debate between Lenni Brenner, Marion Woolfson and Jim Allen and their opponents led by Churchill biographer Martin Gilbert, Stephen Roth of the Institute of Jewish Affairs and Rabbi Hugo Gryn. Gryn confessed he was ‘deeply depressed by the discussion’.[12] The Zionists had argued for censorship to hide their inability to substantiate their claims that Perdition was historically inaccurate.

I interviewed Jim Allen.[13] At the time his wife was dying with cancer and the Perdition Affair was not something he wanted to devote his time to. Jim Allen, who had written Days of Hope, Big Flame and other TV plays, was one of Britain’s finest socialist playwrights. All through his life he had stood on the side of the working class and the oppressed. The attacks on him as anti-Semitic by establishment toadies like Martin Gilbert were nauseating. Perdition was attacked for what it didn’t say. According to Bernard Levin in The Times, Ben-Gurion ‘smiled on the Holocaust’.

Roger Waters & Cancel Culture

Roger Waters Sets the Record Straight

There has been a vile campaign by the Zionists and its Establishment echoes, like Starmer to cancel Roger Waters. All those who favour free speech when it comes to genuine racists want to cancel an anti-fascist and anti-racist performer on the grounds that he is ‘anti-Semitic’. The real reason the Jewish Chronicle wants him banned is Palestine not fascism.

Water’s parody of a fascist has been part of The Wall performance since 1980. It is now held to be itself a fascist production. His moronic critics would no doubt have called Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator a fascist play too. Waters demolishes the liars in the video above. He also said he had:

"attracted bad faith attacks from those who want to smear and silence me because they disagree with my political views and moral principles".

"The elements of my performance that have been questioned are quite clearly a statement in opposition to fascism, injustice, and bigotry in all its forms,"

Biden aide’s smear of Roger Waters’s ‘Wall’ performance is slammed at State briefing (Mondoweiss)

Roger Waters and   the State Department briefing

The State Department’s press briefing on Monday showed the new mood in Washington: reporters repeatedly raised Israel policy as problematic.

Roger Waters’s advocacy for Palestine shook the briefing room, as a reporter questioned why Deborah Lipstadt, the junk holocaust historian, had echoed the smear that Waters’s performance of “The Wall” was an example of Jew hatred, and failed to see that it is actually a denunciation of fascism akin to Charlie Chaplin’s parody of Hitler as “the great dictator.”

Reporter Sam Husseini, a reporter at the Institute for Public Accuracy, criticized Lipstadt’s comments at the State Department briefing Monday. accusing the Biden administration of deploying the antisemitism charge as “a way of denouncing people who stand up for Palestinian rights.”

Lipstadt, the State Department’s envoy to “monitor and combat antisemitism,” issued her comment on Waters’s performances on May 24:

“I wholeheartedly concur with [the EU Commission on antisemitism’s] condemnation of Roger Waters and his despicable Holocaust distortion.”

Lipstadt retweeted the European commission’s comment:

“Roger Waters gig in Berlin. Is there anything more antisemitic than using Anne Frank as a prop on a German stage while prancing around in a Nazi uniform attacking Jews?”

This is an incredible distortion of what happened. I don’t know if you’re familiar with The Wall, which is possibly the most classic rock opera in rock and roll history. So– unrelenting denunciation of fascism and racism, one of the songs in it features him as mocking a demagogue like Charlie Chaplin did, and talking to the crowd and saying, “Are there any queers, are there any Jews, are there any blacks in the audience tonight? Get them up against the wall.” And then he gets a machine gun and mows them down.

It’s an obvious attack on fascism, and yet your ambassador is denouncing it and pretending that Roger Waters, presumably because he defends Palestinian rights as well as other people’s rights, is an example of anti-Semitism. Are you going to distance yourself from this, or are you going to back down on this?

Sam Husseini asks why a Biden envoy is accusing Roger Waters of antisemitism by singing from the rock opera, “The Wall.” June 5, 2023, screenshot.

Vedant Patel of the State Department said he wasn’t familiar with “The Wall” and hadn’t seen Lipstadt’s tweet, so he wouldn’t weigh in. Husseini said that the comment is very much State Department business.

This is her portfolio… She is beyond parody distorting anti-Semitism and criticism of Israel. He [Waters] used Anne Frank’s name as a list of people, of martyrs, who he reveres. It’s an incredible distortion. I think it’s imperative if the State Department isn’t going to wholeheartedly dispense with any pretense about anti-Semitism being an actual problem and only use it as a way of denouncing people who stand up for Palestinian rights, you’ve got to do something.

Patel said that was “absolutely not our approach” to antisemitism. And Husseini said, “Well, prove it.” Matt Lee of the Associated Press also said State needed to answer for Lipstadt’s comment.

It is a situation where we’re talking about a British musician giving a concert in Germany, it doesn’t really have anything to do with the U.S., but the fact of the matter is, is that she did weigh in on it. So it’s a legitimate question.

Waters explained on May 26 that the depiction of an “unhinged fascist demagogue” has been an anti-fascist feature of The Wall since 1980.

The elements of my performance that have been questioned are quite clearly a statement in opposition to fascism, injustice, and bigotry in all its forms. Attempts to portray those elements as something else are disingenuous and politically motivated. The depiction of an unhinged fascist demagogue has been a feature of my shows since Pink Floyd’s “The Wall” in 1980.

I have spent my entire life speaking out against authoritarianism and oppression wherever I see it. When I was a child after the war, the name of Anne Frank was often spoken in our house, she became a permanent reminder of what happens when fascism is left unchecked. My parents fought the Nazis in World War II, with my father paying the ultimate price.


[1]        Segev, The Seventh Million, p. 181 citing ‘The Jews among the war criminals’ Ha’aretz, 3.6.45. p .2

[2]        The Guardian, Leader, 23.1.87.

[3]        The  Guardian, 21.3.87. This was untrue.

[4]        Perdition, p. 142. Jim Allen, Letter to The Guardian, 18.3.1987.

[5]        Ken Loach, letter to The Guardian, 19.3.1987; Perdition p. 142.

[6]        Cesarani, Anti-Zionism in Britain, 1922-2002, p. 147.

[7]        See The Guardian letter 26.4.99, Barbara Smoker of the South Place Ethical Society which ran Conway Hall https://tinyurl.com/y3pgysye

[8]        The Times, 23.1.87. and see letter from Andrew Hornung 28.1.87.

[9]        Cesarani, Genocide & Rescue: The Holocaust in Hungary, p. 151, Oxford 1977.

[10]      Arnold Wesker, ‘Why I changed my mind,’ JC 24.3.89.

[11]      Wistrich, Between Redemption & Perdition: Modern Antisemitism and Jewish Identity, p. 244. Routledge 1990, https://tinyurl.com/y76gdvda

[12]      JC 20.3.87, the debates can be found at https://tinyurl.com/5n7nw7t5 and https://tinyurl.com/mvuh79d

[13]      ‘Why Perdition should be shown’. Tribune, 27 February 1987. ‘