Sam Semoff – a Fighter, a Socialist and a Jewish Anti-Zionist - an Adopted Son of Liverpool Departs This World

Sam was a true Jewish Comrade and a Scourge of Racism and Zionism

Updated with appreciations by John Davies and Greg Dropkin

See also the tribute by Free Speech on Israel

Sam in 2003 when I went up to Liverpool before heading off to Scotland with my daughter

Sam in 2003 when I went up to Liverpool before heading off to Scotland with my daughter

It is still difficult to believe that Sam, who was 75, will no longer be with us.  That unique blend of Liverpudlian humour and an American accent. Sam was raised on a poultry farm in New Jersey, having been born in Philadelphia, but only because his mother went into labour there.  Sam's doctorate was in Molecular Cell Biology, and that was why he came to Britain in 1979.  I met him shortly after he came here.

Sam only had one child. Shelah he had only one grandchild - Karlaya Mae. Whilst he had two brothers, only one is still alive.  Sam has I'm told left numerous nieces and nephews scattered across the States, from New York to California.

Sam was a community activist in Liverpool whose speciality was health campaigns.  In particular he was the scourge of the PFI takeover of Liverpool’s new hospital, the cutbacks and all the other attacks.  Sam was also a class fighter.  He rejected Zionism for the same reasons that he rejected all forms of racism. 

Sam speaking at one of many demonstrations he participated in

He was a medical researcher and worked for years at Liverpool University.  He lost a battle in the Employment Tribunal and then the Employment Appeal Tribunal under the right-wing judge Simon Brown, who was hostile to all equalities legislation.  He was fighting against the endemic racism of one of the old style colonial outposts, the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine.  The School had been founded, like its London counterpart, as part of the attempt to colonise Africa which was then known as the Dark Continent on account of the impenetrability for White people of its interior.  Because of malaria and other diseases, White men were unable to conquer the savage interior of Africa and that was the reason the tropical medicine schools were founded.  They were the medical spear of British colonialism.

Sam threw himself into a variety of grassroots community campaigns in Liverpool and was highly respected amongst the Black and Somali communities.

It was Sam’s hatred of racism that meant that he could be no other than an anti-Zionist.  I first met Sam in around 1980 and we worked together at first in the British Anti-Zionist Organisation.  We also resigned from BAZO together when we had accumulated enough proof that it was controlled by Iraqi Baathists.  Sam went on to be a committed activist in Liverpool Friends of Palestine.

I left Liverpool in 1974 but I used to come back quite often to see my parents.  Whenever I returned I would make a point of going for a drink with Sam and a meal, often with his former wife Lil.  When my children came up to Liverpool they stayed with his daughter Shelah and Karlaya Mae.  Sam took very easily to being a grandfather and baby sitting.

Sam was a dedicated Jewish anti-Zionist and proud of that fact.  He could always be counted on to sign a Jewish anti-Zionist petition or letter.  Sam really was the unsung hero of our movement.  Whereas people like me have risen to prominence (and infamy!) Sam was someone who preferred to stay in the background.

The last time I saw Sam was in June 2016 when I came to speak at a Liverpool Friends of Palestine meeting in the wake of my suspension from the Labour Party over the fake anti-Semitism campaign.  It was a packed meeting that the Zionists had, as usual, tried to have cancelled.  Afterwards the speakers and Liverpool activists went for a Chinese meal in the centre of Liverpool where we discussed the latest attacks inside the Labour Party.  Sam had, like so many of us, left the Labour Party in the Blair years and had come back with the election of Jeremy Corbyn.

I stayed with Sam in his flat in Ullet Road and I was shocked then at the deterioration in Sam’s health.  He had to walk around with oxygen canisters.  I wondered how long Sam could continue to survive.  However he hadn’t lost his sense of humour and he thoroughly enjoyed the meeting.  Sam had previously enjoyed smoking cannabis but he was now no longer able to smoke anything. Many was the time when we smoked dope  together!

I can remember over 30 years ago Sam was busy helping to produce an issue of the short-lived Liverpool Labour Briefing, which included an article by me.  When I got married in 1989 Sam came down and stayed with us in Brighton as he did three years ago when I was extremely ill and thought I was going to die. 

Sam was one of those who was to the forefront in trying to remove the racist Zionist MP for Liverpool Riverside and the supporter of Israel’s abuse of Palestinian children, Louise Ellman.

The short video clip I am including here for the first time was when I was visiting Liverpool on the way to Scotland with my daughter Ellie.  It was in 2003 and I still had my Renault 5!  In the clip I had taken my late mother and Ellie to meet Sam, I think in Lodge Lane, Liverpool 8, which was near where he lived.

Sam was the best of comrades and never had an ill-word to say about anyone.  It is really hard to imagine that Sam is no longer with us.  My heart goes out to Sam’s daughter and his grandchild, Karlaya Mae.  He will be sorely missed.

There are a lot of tributes at the Save Liverpool Womens Hospitals Facebook Page, please have a look at them and post your own tribute if you knew Sam or at his Facebook page.  Here are also some of the tributes that have been paid on his own Facebook page.

Tony Greenstein

Sam Semoff

Sam Semoff died peacefully on 11 Jan in the Royal Liverpool Hospital after a long illness. Hundreds of us in Liverpool and elsewhere knew him as a friend and comrade. He was warm, intense, committed, and ready to engage with anyone he met. He lived in Liverpool 8 (Toxteth) as an American in exile, an anti-racist, lifelong opponent of Zionism and supporter of the Palestinian people. We knew each other best through his work in defence of the NHS. As a founder member of Keep Our NHS Public Merseyside, Sam continued chairing meetings even while carrying an oxygen bottle and undergoing dialysis.
No-one – porter, domestic, nurse, medic or Consultant - got within a few feet of Sam in hospital without being asked their attitude to the Private Finance Initiative (PFI), or the latest government plans to undermine the NHS. During the Junior Doctors strike, he persuaded staff to let him appear at the Atrium window above the demonstration in the ambulance forecourt. Sam phoned through to a mobile pressed to the megafone and addressed the strikers.

Good morning everybody. I am a patient on the Cardiology ward here in the Royal. I’ve been in here two weeks and I can tell you the care has been absolutely great.
Jeremy Hunt is a liar – he says we need a 24/7 service, well we have 24/7 service. I have been in here two weekends and a doctor was always available, so were support services.
Hunt is also a hypocrite – he talks about patient safety, yet he wants to remove requirements that limit junior doctors working unsafe hours, putting patients lives at risk.
The doctors went into medicine to help people, their main concern is their patients’ needs above all else... Hunt knows this and takes advantage of it, he thinks he can push them to the limit and they will not do anything.
But they have said enough is enough, they know the risks to their patients in going along with Hunt’s proposals are greater than doing nothing. I wish a lot more health workers would reach that point.
The Government is determined to decimate the NHS and turn it into a market based health care system like in America. They have eroded the principles of universality, of a comprehensive integrated service that is publicly accountable and they are now working to undermine publicly provided, as the NHS is broken up into bits and turned over to the private sector where the overriding aim is profit.
When they get around to removing the principle of a service free at the point of delivery based on need, it will be too late.
I hope to see you out here next week and the week after.

Sam's deep knowledge of the communities in Liverpool 8 came to the fore when NHS England handed over the management of a dozen Liverpool surgeries to the private firm SSP. Sam was a patient at Princes Park Health Centre, which had pioneered community treatment for the whole person in the 1980s. So SSP wasn't just an affront to his politics. It was personal. Sam hit back with 10,000 leaflets in Arabic, English and Somali, delivered door to door and to every shop on Lodge Lane. He had been Sec. of Granby Ward Labour Party, and ran this like an election campaign.

It culminated in a public meeting of around 130, almost all of whom were current or former patients at Princes Park, furious at how the service had collapsed. It was held in three languages with interpreters and a PA system, allowing Somali women who sat with their friends in a side room to address the entire gathering. The meeting led directly to a survey, a report, and the intervention of the CQC which eventually kicked SSP out of Liverpool, though some NHS staff were victimised in the process.
Sam led the fight against PFI funding for the new Royal Hospital. He was vilified in the Echo, which ran the scurrilous headline “Bogoff Semoff”, claiming that an American was trying to deny healthcare to the people of Liverpool. No-one ever apologised for that, even when the newspaper finally woke up to the PFI catastrophes at Whiston Hospital and around the country.
Sam brought a Judicial Review which forced the Royal to re-run their consultation as they had not even mentioned that the new hospital would be funded by PFI. Every Liverpool Labour MP backed the scheme, as did Cllr Nick Small and Joe Anderson, at that time leader of the Labour group within the Council. The Royal PFI was signed off by Andy Burnham as Health Secretary on the eve of the 2010 General Election. Sam lodged a second Judicial Review, challenging the claim that the PFI would deliver Value for Money.
On 17 Nov 2010 BBC Radio Merseyside put Sam up against Joe Anderson, who declared "I know it doesn't provide Value for Money now or in the future, but it's the only game in town". That admission ricocheted all the way up to a Treasury Select Committee Inquiry into PFI. But the JR was derailed when Cllr Small approached the Legal Assistance Board and got them to pull the funding for Sam's challenge.
Sam had already left the Labour Party over Iraq, but rejoined more recently in support of Jeremy Corbyn. He joined Unite, and was active in the Community Branch of the union. He knew construction workers blacklisted by Carillion, but didn't quite live to see the company collapse with the new Royal half-built. A few days earlier, Sam commented “Workers united, is the only defence they have.”
When the news of his death came through, a demo at the Health and Wellbeing Board turned into a tribute to Sam.
We all miss him. Let's honour him by continuing the fight.
Greg Dropkin

It was with great sadness that we heard yesterday morning of the passing of the much loved American Jewish socialist and fighter, Sam Semoff.

Sam was a stalwart of Liverpool Friends of Palestine for many years, but also became the figurehead of the campaign against the PFI funded new Royal Liverpool Hospital. Attacked personally by Liverpool's mayor in the Liverpool Echo, Sam continued to campaign for the NHS during the last days of his life, and his death a week before the collapse of Carillion cheated him of some well justified amour propre.

His involvement in politics went back to the sixties, something I only learned about recently. He acted as my Silent Friend when I was interviewed by the Labour Party's Compliance Unit last year, and it was during this interview that I caught a glimpse of this history. Sam wasn't a very good silent friend, in that he wasn't at all silent. We recorded the interview, so I can quote him here, word for word. When the Labour Party interviewer recklessly invited Sam to ask a question at the end of the interview, Sam asked him for his definition of anti-Semitism. I quote:

"I moved to Britain in the seventies. Ahm. I was brought up in an orthodox Jewish household, in New Jersey.… the majority of the community was Jewish but there was a small segment of Polish Catholics who used to beat me up as a kid coming home from school because I killed Christ. I lost an aunt in the holocaust. So I’m a bit sensitive, ahm, when I keep hearing the word, which you used frequently, anti-Semitism. I would just like to ask, plain and simple, what’s your definition of anti-Semitism?"

When he received the answer that the Compliance Unit was using the Zionist definition used by the Community Security Trust (a pro-Israel lobby group, which incorporates anti-Zionism within the definition of anti-Semitism) Sam gave the young man a lecture on the difference between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. Again, Sam's words:

"By using the CST definition of anti-Semitism, which includes opposition to a Jewish state in its anti-Semitism definition, well, it will completely skew any report that you will do. I’m Jewish, as I say, my definition of anti-Semitism is when someone says to me, ‘I hate you because you’re Jewish’. If someone expresses dislike or animosity toward a group of individuals because they’re Jewish, that’s anti-Semitism. It has nothing, and I mean nothing, to do with a, a Jewish state. I’m a Jewish person and I question its existence and if you’re gonna use the CST definition of anti-Semitism, then that will skew your investigation completely."

The exchange (if you can call it that - the young interviewer was completely out of his depth and didn't have much to say in reply) was very funny, despite the seriousness of the issues. It ended with Sam adding a parting comment, in which he explained his journey from youthful left Zionist to campaigner on behalf of Palestinian rights, and in which he also encapsulated what he felt was the heart of Jewishness. It chimes with me, and is why I am such an admirer of many Jewish people and their traditions.

"No, there’s something else. It’s just… I remember a political gathering at a friend’s house, just after the six day war. 1967. Sorry, but it’s relevant. We were mostly Jewish. I was still clinging by my fingernails to some notion of left Zionism, but there was an old fella there who didn’t say too much, and he changed me. He’d come down from New York, and he was in a wheelchair. He was in a wheelchair cos of the Freedom Summer. 1964. He’d gone down on a voter registration drive in Mississippi and he’d taken a bullet in the spine. Right? This old guy personified to me what being Jewish was about. Being Jewish, it’s about equality, it’s about the struggle for justice, right? And the whole idea of the only ethnic state on the planet, right, it’s an obscenity. And I’m saying that as a Jewish person."

You were a mensche, comrade. Farewell.

 Sam Semoff was born to an orthodox Jewish mother and a Jewish communist father, who emigrated from Eastern Europe to Pennsylvania to become homesteaders.  An early attachment to left Zionism was dispelled by a meeting in the late sixties with a wheelchair using Jewish activist who’d taken a racist’s bullet whilst on a voter registration drive in the deep south. The germ of his pro-Palestine campaigning was sown by this meeting:  “This old guy personified to me what being Jewish was about. Being Jewish, it’s about equality, it’s about the struggle for justice, right? And the whole idea of the only ethnic state on the planet, right, it’s an obscenity. And I’m saying that as a Jewish person."

Working in the early days of electron microscopy, Sam arrived in Liverpool in the early eighties, having been offered a PhD place, and then a research post at the School of Tropical Medicine. Two lists of student landlords were discovered, one of landlords who accepted non-white tenants and another which didn’t. Sam’s complaint to Senate over this condoning of racial profiling was denied and when he went public, the promised research position went to someone else. 

He was active in the Labour Party during the eighties, resigned over the Iraq war, and then rejoined with the election of Corbyn as leader. He was briefly Chair of Liverpool Riverside CLP just before his longtime political adversary Louise Ellman, a committed Zionist, was accepted as candidate. His activism involved him with the Somali community, with which he had close links, pro-Palestine solidarity, and, latterly, with campaigns to save the NHS, against the closure of Liverpool Women’s Hospital and to prevent the building of the new PFI funded (Carillion!) Liverpool Royal Hospital. He was a regular on pickets and demos, latterly lugging his bottle of oxygen.

Zionism grievously damaged the inspiring tradition of Jewish leadership in struggles against injustice and autocracy. Sam Semoff’s life is a shining example of how it has nevertheless survived. His warmth, engaging twinkle and unquenchable battling spirit will be hugely missed.

John Davies

Anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism

Guardian Letter from 88 Jews Rejects Chief Rabbi's Claim That Zionism is Integral to Judaism

The Guardian today carried a letter from the Free Speech on Israel group containing the signatures of 88 Jews.  The letter was originally sent to The Telegraph in response to a letter by the Chief Rabbi Ken Livingstone and the hard Left are spreading the insidious virus of anti-Semitism which asserted that claims that Zionism is a:

 ‘political; that it is expansionist, colonialist and imperialist’ movement  are ‘a fiction.’  According to Mirvis, Zionism is apparently ‘a belief in the right to Jewish self-determination in a land that has been at the centre of the Jewish world for more than 3,000 years. One can no more separate it from Judaism than separate the City of London from Great Britain.’

I guess that when your whole life is based on a fictional character called god, writing fiction comes easy.  Jewish life in the past 3,000 years is not one seamless tapestry.  Even at the time of the Roman occupation of Palestine in 63 BC the majority of Palestine’s Hebrews had emigrated to the Hellenised cities of the Mediterranean.  If there was a centre of Jewish life it was in Vilna not Jerusalem.  Palestine was the last place that Jews wanted to go.  Of the 2.5 million+ Jews who emigrated from the Russian Pale of Settlement from the mid 19^th century until 1914, about 98% went to the United States and Britain.  Palestine was the last place Jews wanted to go.

The Daily Torygraph faithful to its traditions of free and open debate refused to take a reply, hence why we wrote to the Guardian referring to its coverage of Mirvis’s absurd letter.  It would be interesting to see how Mirvis explains the opposition of Chief Rabbi Hermann Adler to Zionism.  Writing in the English Review in 1878 responded to the question ‘what was ‘the political bearing of Judaism?’  Adler replied that ‘Judaism has no political bearing whatever.’

‘Ever since the conquest of Palestine by the Romans we have ceased to be a body politic.  We are citizens of the country in which we dwell.  We are simply Englishmen or Frenchmen or Germans, as the case may be, certainly holding particular theological tenets and practising special religious ordinances; but we stand in the same relation to our countrymen as any other religious sect, having the same stake in the national welfare and the same claim on the privileges and duties of the citizens.’ [Leonard Stein, The Balfour Declaration, 1961, London]

"then each took the hand of the other and then they were seen no more"

A powerful and moving song by Leon Rosselson, Britain’s foremost protest folk singer.  Leon Rosselson is a socialist who has devoted his musical talents to supporting the oppressed.  He has signed many letters to the newspapers attacking Israel’s murderous policies and he is both an anti-Zionist and a member of Jews for Boycotting Israeli Goods.

The song below will be ‘controversial’ only to those whose eyes are blind to the parallels between Nazism 80 years ago and its bastard offspring, Zionism.

It is precisely because Zionism wishes to exonerate the Nazis that Netanyahu (& he wasn’t alone) put forward the thesis at the last World Zionist Organisation Congress that the responsibility for the holocaust of European Jews was not that of Hitler but the Palestinian Mufti of Jerusalem.

Leon Rosselson

For Zionism today, any opposition to racism, even of the Nazi kind is embarrassing and does not fit with its war against the Palestinians.  Hence the desire to draw an equals sign between the Palestinians and the Nazis whereas the correct designation is that of Leon Rosselson, between Zionism and the Nazis.

Tony Greenstein

I was watching the news from Gaza

And I fell asleep on my chair

And when I woke up from my slumber

A young girl was standing there.

She said, My name is Rivka

They killed me because I’m a Jew

I died in the ghetto of Vilna

In nineteen forty two.

The ghetto was like a prison

They wouldn’t allow us to leave

Some said they were going to kill us all

We didn’t know what to believe.

That day I wore my new red dress

My bubbe had made for me

And in that crowded ghetto

It made me feel proud and free.

I looked up at the soldier

I looked him in the eye

I forgot to bow my head down

And so I had to die.

He smashed my head with his rifle

Because I was too bold

I was killed in the Vilna ghetto

When I was seven years old.

And then out of the darkness

A young boy’s gaze met mine

He said, My name is Mohammed

My country is Palestine.

I’ve lived all my life in Gaza

And the only time I feel free

Is when I go down to the harbour

And feel the wind from the sea.

That day I went with my cousins

We ran down to the beach to play

Then the soldier fired a shell at me

And blew my life away.

They want to crush our spirits

They want us to be afraid

Locked up in the prison of Gaza

The prison that they have made.

To them our lives don’t matter

They force us to live in a cage

I was killed on the beach in Gaza

At eleven years of age.

They don’t think that we deserve freedom

Or belong to the human race.

Mohammed, my brother, said Rivka,

This world is a cold, cold place.

Mohammed, my friend, my brother,

Let us leave this world of war.

Then each took the hand of the other

And then they were seen no more.

But I saw spokesmen and politicians

Lining up to speechify

And every word was a hypocrite

And every word was a lie.

I saw children still being slaughtered

The monster must have its fill

While the people with power sat on their hands 

And supplied the weapons that kill.

I weep for the people of Gaza

And they are weeping still

And I curse the ones who do nothing

And encourage the monster to kill. 

Comparing Nazis to Jews? Leon Rosselson explains‘The Ballad of Rivka & Mohammed’

February 17, 2016 by Robert A. H. Cohen 

It’s shocking.

But that’s the point.

You’re not supposed to do this. But he has.

Songwriters have creative licence but has Leon Rosselson gone too far?

A Nazi soldier smashes the head of Rivka, a seven year old girl wearing her new red dress in the Vilna ghetto in 1942. An Israeli soldier fires a shell onto a Gaza beach and kills Mohammed, an eleven year old boy playing football with his cousins in 2014. In the songwriter’s dream, Mohammed and Rivka take each other’s hand and “leave this world of war” – together.

The Polish ghetto has been twinned with the Gaza Strip.

Nazis are on a parallel with Israelis.

And in life and in death, Rivka and Mohammed are together and equal.

Leon Rosselson has given us a new song that will outrage some but bring many more to tears.

But is the comparison of Rivka and Mohammed fair? Isn’t such a coupling of victims a dishonest slur against the state of Israel, a gross exaggeration, and an offence to the memory of the six million?

Hold those questions in your head while I introduce you to Leon Rosselson, England’s finest radical songwriter.

Radical songwriter/Compassionate heart

At the age of 81 Rosselson has just announced that his new album ‘Where are the barricades?’, will be his last.

It marks the end of more than fifty years of recordings that have charted the struggles between the left and the right, the rich and the poor, the strong and the weak. And, in more recent years, the struggle between Israelis and Palestinians, Zionists and anti-Zionists, and between Jews and Jews.

Leon Rosselson gained national recognition in the early 1960s through appearances on David Frost’s BBC satire show That Was The Week That Was (TW3). Over the years he’s sung with many of the greats of the 1960s and 70s English folk music scene including Martin Carthy, Roy Bailey and Sandra Kerr.

I first discovered Rosselson’s music in the early 1980s through a passionate Billy Bragg rendering of probably his most well known song ‘The World Turned Upside Down’. The song tells the doomed story of a community of 17th century English radicals called the Diggers whose attempt to ‘build a common treasury for all’ is violently crushed. Rosselson succeeds in turning the story of their defeat into a song of inspiration and hope.

Invariably Leon Rosselson delivers his songs with wit, humanity and a great deal of compassion. His best songwriting tells stories or describes emotionally charged encounters. He chooses his words with great care and sings them as a concerned, committed, chronicler of our times rather than an angry revolutionary. In fact, it’s hard to imagine this Jewish son born into a communist household in North London ever climbing barricades or storming the citadels of power. That would have been a waste of his talents anyway.

Not a nation, not a religion

If you want to understand how Rosselson’s Jewish and communist roots have informed his songwriting you can find it beautifully set out in a song called ‘My Father’s Jewish World‘.  Rosselson’s take on the Judaism he inherited from his parents is summed up in the chorus:

It’s not a nation

Not a religion

This Jewish Spirit is still unbroken

It’s like the candle that mocks the darkness

It’s like the song that shatters the silence

It’s like the fool that laughs at the dragon

It’s like the spark that signals rebellion

It’s like the dance that circles unending

All of this needs to be understood as we return to ‘The Ballad of Rivka & Mohammed‘.

Rivka & Mohammed

Rosselson wrote the song while Israel’s 2014 Gaza assault was still underway. Mohammed was one of the more than 500 Palestinian children killed by Israeli forces during that summer. Before the new album version was recorded, Rosselson put this front room performance on YouTube:

On first hearing ‘Rivka & Mohammed’ it struck me how many political taboos Rosselson was breaking.

Through his story-telling/song-writing we see the two characters not as representatives of Jews or Palestinians but as children killed because of hatred, cruelty and the ability of human beings to dehumanise each other.

The Levellers

Rosselson universalises their situation refusing to allow politics and nationalism to create a divide of righteous and unrighteous dead. The point is that Jews cannot forever been seen as only and always the ‘victims’. We have shown our ability to be bringers of pain, suffering and death. In such circumstances, where should a Jew, still filled with the Jewish Spirit of our ancestors, choose to stand?

Rosselson’s song succeeds in ‘shattering the silence’ and it would be good to think that Rivka and Mohammed could ‘signal a rebellion’ against the collective denial about Israel that still grips most Jews.

It’s wrong to equate Israel with Nazi Germany and the Holocaust  in my view. Such attempts at direct historical comparisons are poor history and invariably lead to a row about anti-Semitism rather than current oppression and suffering. But if the question is: Can the hatred, intolerance and violence seen perpetrated by Nazis against Jews been seen in the behaviour of Jews towards Palestinians (with the Jewish state itself as a protagonist) then the answer is ‘yes it can’.

The essential truth is that any people in any place can become afflicted with Nazi behaviour if the circumstances are right. That ought to be the real lesson of the Holocaust. The tragedy for both Jews and Palestinians is that Zionism has created those circumstances in Israel/Palestine.

So what does Rosselson himself have to say about the song? I’m grateful to Leon for agreeing to answer my questions.

An interview with Leon Rosselson

Leon Rosselson

Cohen: Your song about Rivka & Mohammed draws an equivalence between Gaza today and the Vilna ghetto in 1942. Is it the individual suffering or the political circumstances that you’re  comparing, or both?

Rosselson: I am not the only one to see parallels between Jews in the ghettos of Warsaw and Vilna and Palestinians in the ghetto of Gaza.  There’s a youtube video of photos of the destruction in the Warsaw Ghetto alongside photos of the destruction in Gaza with Paul Robeson singing the Vilna Ghetto song & a quote from a Nazi chief-of-staff to the effect that ‘Jewish terrorists’ are to blame for the death & destruction in the Warsaw ghetto alongside a quote from an Israeli functionary that ‘Hamas terrorists’ are to blame for the destruction in Gaza.

The racism of the Nazis, dehumanising Jews (and so making them disposable), is matched by the racism of prominent Israelis and government spokesman dehumanising Palestinians, calling them ‘little snakes’, ‘two-legged beasts’, ‘drugged cockroaches’ and suggesting – as in an article in The Times of Israel – that there are times when genocide is permissible.

That’s the background. But the song is a story about two children who share a common humanity and a common fate. The key line, for me, is ‘Then each took the hand of the other’.  Given the contempt in which Zionism and Israelis hold the Jews of Eastern Europe for going passively into the gas chambers (as the myth has it), it’s not a stretch to show that this Jewish child sees – not an Israeli child – but this Palestinian child as her friend, her brother.

So the song is both personal and political.

Cohen: You must have known the song would be provocative and controversial, even outrageous, for some listeners. Was that your intention from the start or just where the creative process took you?

Rosselson: I don’t write songs to be controversial or provocative.  Any song that implies criticism of Israel is going to be seen by Israeli supporters as provocative so that really doesn’t enter my consciousness.

I wanted to express my anger and dismay at what Israel was doing in this attack on Gaza, what those who called themselves Jewish were doing to another people. I don’t think that saying directly what I think, what I feel makes for a very good song so I looked for a story that would carry what I wanted to say.  When I’d calmed down a bit, I changed the ending, omitting the curse.

Cohen: Does the ‘monster’ only represent Israel?

Rosselson: It seemed to me that it was an appropriate word for a state that uses its immense military power to crush a defenceless people. Doubtless there are other monsters in the world.

Cohen: What reactions have you had to the song as a recording and in performance?

Rosselson: I haven’t so far had any hostile response, probably because Jewish supporters of Israel don’t usually come to my concerts. Sometimes they do, particularly in America. Mostly audiences are moved by the song.  My daughter can’t listen to it without crying and it took me time to be able to sing it without openly showing emotion. It is, after all, desperately sad.

Cohen: What for you would be a good outcome for Israel/Palestine?

Rosselson: I think now there is no 2-state solution however desirable some, like Uri Avnery and, of course, mainstream politicians think it would be. It’s not going to happen. It wouldn’t anyway solve the problem (the ‘demographic’ problem, as Israelis see it) of what rights Palestinians – 1 in 5 of the population – would have in a Jewish state.

I’m against a Jewish state as I’m against an Islamic state or any state that excludes, by definition, a minority of its population. So one state with equal rights for all its citizens would be the best solution. So no Palestinian state either. Until that happens,far off into the future, the conflict will continue.

‘The Ballad of Rivka & Mohammed’ can be found on Rosselson’s final album ‘Where are the Barricades’. You can buy from his website or on iTunes. For more of his songs with an Israel/Palestine theme ‘The Last Chance’ is the album to buy.