The SWP Decision to Welcome Zionist Groups to its ‘anti-racist’ march in Glasgow last weekend proves that the SWP's support for the Palestinians is hot air
UPDATE
On
16 February, in response to an email on behalf of Brighton and Hove Trades Council, Scottish SUTR i.e. the SWP, reassured
me that:
SUTR
Scotland … has no formal relationship with Confederation of Friends of Israel
Scotland or any of its local groups. Claims it "works closely" with
or "invites" these groups are false. Neither is true that this
group has been "welcome" to marches. We have no knowledge of their
intention to attend the march in 2023.
Today Glasgow Friends of Israel posted this
message on Facebook:
‘a letter of
thanks from GFI chair Sammy Stein to Kier McKechnie and Mohammed Asif,
organisers of the SUTR march that took place on Saturday, who made sure that
GFI and COFIS members were kept safe during the march.
Hi Keir and Mohammad
It was good to see you both at the SUTR march in
George Square on Saturday and many thanks for the welcome you gave us.
The Letter of
Thanks ends:
‘I will of course
post this message on social media so that all the good folk in Scotland will
know about your kind and on-going support.’
Many thanks and I
look forward to meeting you again in 2024.
Keep safe
Sammy Stein
chair Glasgow
Friends of Israel.
I
don’t mind being lied to by the SWP/SUTR. Indeed I expect it. What I do object
to is being lied to on behalf of a racist Zionist group by those who dare to call
themselves socialists. Especially since they were lying to me in my role as an
Executive Member of Brighton & Hove Trades Council.
GFI is a 100% racist outfit. It had room on its Facebook page for a story about ‘A violent Palestinian mob attack on 2 German tourists’ who were
attacked when entering Nablus in a vehicle with Israeli license plates and an Israeli
flag. The tourists escaped with light injuries thank to the help of other Palestinians.
There
has been no mention on GFI’s Facebook page of the reign of terror by settlers
and the Israeli army on the West Bank. No condemnation of the call by Bezalel
Smotrich, the West Bank’s head of civil administration, to ‘wipe-out’ the town of Huwara. No mention of the pogrom in Huwara in which Israeli
soldiers accompanied and defended the settlers whilst attacking their victims, 1 of whom was killed and nearly 100 injured, some seriously.
No mention of the Jewish Nazi Ben Gvir who is now Israel’s
Police Minister. No mention of the ethnic cleansing of Masafer Yata.
Glasgow Friends of Israel are 100% racist scum yet the SWP welcome them onto its ‘anti-racist’ demonstration. The SWP have demonstrated that there is no principle that they are not prepared to sacrifice, no promise that they are not prepared to break, no ethic that they won’t undermine for the sake of building their party.
Whenever there is a Palestine
solidarity march you can be sure that there will be an SWP stall with posters
and placards. The impression given is that the SWP is in the forefront of Palestine
solidarity.
The reality is somewhat different.
The way the SWP works in practice marks it out as an organisation that combines
verbal support for the Palestinians with the most shameful appeasement of
Zionism and its British supporters.
Zionists on the march with the SWP's blessing
This contradiction has come to a
head again this year on the SWP/Stand Up to Racism march, March 18 in Glasgow.
Since 2017 the SWP has welcomed Glasgow Friends of Israel [GFI] and the
Confederation of Friends of
Israel–Scotland [COFIS] on its marches.
But we are now fighting back against the SWP’s capitulation to Zionism’s
far-right supporters. Dundee Trades Council’s refusal to support the SWP’s
march was joined this year by Brighton & Hove Trades Council. At Lewisham
Trades Council a similar motion of non-support was narrowly defeated. It is to
be hoped that next year more trade union branches and Trades Councils will join
in saying no to SWP/SUTR’s collaboration with far-Right Zionists.
Glasgow Friends of Israel Contingent 2023
It is no surprise that the ‘right’
of these Zionist groups to march was vociferously supported by that friend
of anti-racism, the Scottish Daily
Express! The SWP’s real reason for allowing Zionists to march each year is a
fear of being accused of ‘anti-Semitism’, in other words a surrender to the
campaign that brought down Corbyn.
In other words GFI will be marching against anti-Zionism i.e. the Palestinians, courtesy of the SWP
On 16 February Scottish SUTR wrote to me saying ‘SUTR has no policy on the Middle East’. However most anti-racist groups do oppose apartheid,
today in Israel yesterday in South Africa. Even the SWP used to oppose
apartheid.
If an anti-racist Zionist actually
exists then no one objects to them marching as an individual. Hopefully they will come to
recognise their own cognitive dissonance. The objection is to organised supporters
of Israeli Apartheid marching with flags and placards. To Palestinians
the Israeli flag is the equivalent of the Confederate flag for Black people or the Swastika to Jews.
The Lies that Justify Ethnic Cleansing from COFIS
As Mick Napier of Scottish PSC
said:
"SUTR
pretend to be neutral on the issue of of Israeli ethnic cleansing of the
Palestinian people. Bad enough to try to be neutral but in fact they are very
partisan. Their absurd claim that "we
cannot build a united anti-racist movement if the politics of the Middle East
are imported into the movement" is belied by their insisting on the
right of Friends of Israel to march with them, ie precisely to import the
Politics of the Middle East onto their demonstrations, thereby making them
no-go areas for Palestinians".
When I was a teenager I was a
member of the International Socialist group, which pre-dated the SWP. I
remember that they took a fierce anti-Zionist position. The first anti-Zionist pamphlet
I read was The Class Nature of Israeli Society by Moshe Machover and others.
Today the SWP is proud of the fact that
they have the support of the right-wing TUC and trade union bureaucracy. The
same people who are calling off the biggest wave of strikes we have seen in 40 years. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to them that
this ‘support’ is a way that they can parade their anti-racist credentials without
them doing anything.
If the TUC were serious about
fighting racism then they would have condemned the statement of Rachel
Reeves criticising the Tories for not having deported enough refugees.
It is more than ironic that on an
allegedly anti-racist march you have organisations marching whose sole purpose
in being there is to support racism.
The leader of GFI, Sammy
Stein, was caught fraternising
with Max Dunbar, an ex-BNP Treasurer. Stein was pictured on the
latest march with an SWP banner! GFI’s main support is from anti-Semitic Christian
Fundamentalists.
Stevie Harrison is Sutherland and together with Matthew Berlow (below) they faked an antisemitic attack which was intended to be blamed on Scottish PSC
Although GFI later dissociated
themselves from Dunbar, the statement confirming this was from Edward
Sutherland, who was reprimanded by the
General Teaching Council for sharing an anti-Semitic post online.
In a recent post on Facebook Sammy Stein demonstrates how far to the right he is, even for Zionists, when he cast doubt on the Deir Yassin massacre in April 1948 which he
calls ‘disputed’. Zionist militias
Irgun and Lehi carried out a savage massacre in the village. Over 100 women,
children and elderly died. David Ben
Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister condemned
it and the Jewish Agency sent Jordan's King Abdullah an apology.
Stein also repeated the myth of Palestinian refugees having voluntarily left of their own accord whereas this lie was designed to cover up the ethnic cleansing in 1947-8. Stein even made out that he supported refugees in this country. But not Israel of course where non-Jewish refugees are refused asylum automatically. But since Stein supports the rights of refugees in Britain so much perhaps he will support the Right of Return of the Palestinian refugees to Israel too? I somehow doubt it because he’s wedded to the Jewish supremacist nature of the Israeli state.
Has the SWP ever asked GFI if they support
the Right of Return of Palestinian refugees and if not why not?
That the SWP choose to align themselves with the likes of Sammy Stein demonstrates that they have learnt nothing from the rape scandal that nearly destroyed them in 2012/3. They have also learnt nothing from their association with the anti-Semitic Gilad Atzmon from 2005-2011.
The problem in Scotland is part of
a wider problem with the politics of the SWP on Zionism, racism and imperialism.
Instead of treating racism as flowing from imperialism and Britain’s role in
the world the SWP treats racism and imperialism as separate entities.
On the one hand the SWP will
proclaim that Zionism is racist and Israel is an apartheid state, but when it
comes to anti-racist work, the issue of Palestine disappears as the SWP allies
with these very same racists! The fact that Israel and Zionism is to the fore
of Islamaphobia is simply ignored.
On the GFI Facebook page a
supporter wrote, after the murder of 50 Muslims in New Zealand that:
‘it’s payback for the attacks that muslims have
perpetrated across the globe. perhaps this will curb their appetite for
bloodshed.’
It is difficult to think of a more vile
racist comment yet the SWP is unconcerned. Imagine that someone had celebrated
the murder
of 11 Jews at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018 because of
the Palestinians murdered by the ‘Jewish’ state. The air would be thick with cries
of anti-Semitism, prime amongst them the SWP.
Also on the GFI FB group was a post which talked about Israel ‘euthanasing’ 3 Palestinians. This is language which one would normally expect from neo-Nazis. The SWP supports refugees coming to Britain but it refuses to ask why they come and to integrate this understanding into broader anti-racist struggles.
The SWP confines itself to broad
statements of support for Palestine solidarity but rarely discusses the causes
of their dispossession and the role of Zionism except once a year at Marxism when anti-Zionism is brought out
on display.
At the 2021 Palestine Solidarity
Campaign conference, the Executive proposed a new constitution eliminating
anti-Zionism. The two SWP members present, Tom Hickey and Rob Ferguson, spoke
in support of the Executive’s proposals and against those who wanted PSC to
remain an anti-Zionist organisation.
The arguments of Hickey and
Ferguson were that we should concentrate on activism and not get
distracted by Zionism. Except that Zionism, as an ideology
and movement, was responsible for the dispossession of the Palestinians. How can you
support the Palestinian struggle and have nothing to say about Zionism? This, more than
anything, reveals the bankruptcy of SWP politics.
The question of Zionism was a
central feature of debates inside the Labour Party. Yet to the SWP what matters
is activity for its own sake despite the
fact that Israel, unlike South Africa, depends on maintaining political support
in the West. Anti-Zionism is not a theoretical luxury but a necessity. We
constantly have to win the argument on campuses and in trade unions.
The reluctance of the SWP to argue
for anti-Zionist politics is a product of their opportunistic politics. Tony Cliff, their founder
did understand Zionism being born in Mandate Palestine but SWP theoreticians
today – John Rose and Rob Ferguson – do not have that background.
The SWP and Zionist Relations with the Nazis
In ‘Don’t fall into your
opponents’ traps’, John Rose criticised
Ken Livingstone for even mentioning the subject:
… the anti-Zionist,
pro-Palestinian case must be argued effectively and sensitively. Traps must be
avoided which favour our opponents. On Thursday Ken Livingstone created then
walked into precisely such a trap. The argument about Zionist collaboration
with the Nazis has been around for a long time. It is rightly ignored by
solidarity activists with Palestine….
It’s true that when
Hitler came to power some Zionist leaders stupidly thought that they could do a
deal with him that would enable some German Jews to go to Palestine. But Ken
should have known that this disgraceful manoeuvre bitterly divided the Zionist
movement.
Rose went on to say that ‘there
was no coherent, united Zionist leadership in the 1930’s. It was deeply
split.’ This is simply untrue, indeed it is a lie. As I show in Zionism
During the Holocaust it is also ahistorical nonsense. There was almost
complete agreement about the need to create a Jewish State and ‘transfer’ the
Palestinians out of it in the 30s and 40s. The differences amongst the Zionist
leadership between Weizmann and Ben Gurion were about which imperialist partner
they preferred – Britain or the United States. Even the differences between
Labour and Revisionist Zionism were tactical.
Nor was there anything ‘stupid’ about negotiating with Nazis from
the Zionist perspective. Ha'avara,
the Nazi-Zionist trade agreement was not about saving German
Jews. What it sought to do was rescue their wealth.
David Ben Gurion was the most
important pre-state Zionist figure. A cursory reading of the final chapter, Disaster Means Strength, of his biography
by Shabtai Teveth makes it abundantly clear that the Zionist leadership welcomed
the rise of the Nazis and Hitler. The very title of the chapter gives us a
clue.
On the eve of Hitler becoming
Chancellor, in January 1933, Ben-Gurion explained his thinking to the Central
Committee of Mapai (Israeli Labour Party) when he warned that
‘Zionism…
is not primarily engaged in saving individuals’ and that if there was ‘a
conflict of interest between saving individual Jews and the good of the Zionist
enterprise, we shall say the enterprise comes first.’
In November 1935,
after the passage of the Nuremberg Laws he said:
To the disaster of German Jewry we must offer a Zionist response, namely, we must convert the disaster into a source for the upbuilding of Palestine.
On 15 October 1942, by which time the Zionist leadership was aware
of the holocaust, Ben Gurion remarked to the Zionist Executive:
Disaster is strength if channelled to a productive course. The whole trick of Zionism is that it knows how to channel our disaster, not into despondency or degradation, as is the case in the Diaspora, but into a source of creativity and exploitation.
Berl
Katznelson, a founder of Mapai and editor of Davar, saw the rise of Hitler as ‘an opportunity to build and flourish like none we have ever had or
ever will have.’ Ben-Gurion predicted that ‘The Nazis’
victory would become “a fertile force
for Zionism.”
It is to
the critical Zionist historian Noah Lucas, not John Rose, that we must turn if
we want to understand Zionism’s approach:
‘As the European holocaust erupted, Ben-Gurion saw it
as a decisive opportunity for Zionism... In conditions of peace,… Zionism could
not move the masses of world Jewry. The forces unleashed by Hitler in all their
horror must be harnessed to the advantage of Zionism. ... By the end of 1942…
the struggle for a Jewish state became the primary concern of the movement.’ [A
Modern History of Israel, pp. 187/8].
Rose was
also wrong when he said that ‘this disgraceful manoeuvre bitterly
divided the Zionist movement’ The Labour Zionists were united in support of Ha'avara. The General Zionists and
Religious Zionists of Mizrahi supported it too. Only the Revisionists under
Jabotinsky opposed Ha'avara.
Ordinary Zionists bitterly opposed Ha'avara and didn’t
understand what was happening but the Zionist movement was not a democratic
movement and their voices counted for nothing.
On June 21 1933 the German Zionist Federation voluntarily wrote
to Hitler expressing their opposition to the Boycott and their agreement with
Nazi fundamentals. They wrote:
On the foundation of the new state, which has established the principle of race... fruitful activity for the fatherland is possible…. Precisely because we don’t wish to falsify these fundamentals, because we too are against mixed marriages and are for maintaining the purity of the Jewish group… The realisation of Zionism could only be hurt by resentment of Jews abroad against the German development. Boycott propaganda… is in essence fundamentally unZionist, because Zionism wants not to do battle but to convince and to build.’[Lucy Dawidowicz, A Holocaust Reader, pp. 150-153].
The Zionist leaders were
not stupid. If anyone can claim credit for the founding of Israel it is Hitler. Between 1933 and 1939, as a result of the rose of the Nazis, the
Jewish population of Palestine more than
doubled from around 215,000 to 449,000, giving the settlers a critical
mass. 60% of capital investment in Palestine between 1933 and 1939 came from Nazi Germany.
John Rose was dazzled by meeting the last Commander of the Warsaw Ghetto Resistance, Marek Edelman in
1989. The anti-Zionist Bund, of which Edelman was a member and members of
left-Zionist groups such as Hashomer Hatzair and Dror, fought together. But the
Zionists fought, not because of their Zionism but despite it.
Mordechai Anielewicz,
the first Commander, expressed his regret over the ‘wasted time’ undergoing
Zionist educational work. I quote in my book the speech of one of these Zionist
fighters, Hayka Klinger, to the Histadrut Executive in March 1944. She described the Judenrate, the Jewish
Councils who collaborated with the Nazis thus:
after they began assisting the Nazis to
collect gold and furniture from Jewish homes, they had no choice but to go on
to help them prepare lists of Jews for labor camps... And precisely because
those who stood at the head of most of the communities were Zionists, the
psychological effects on most of the Jewish masses vis-Ã -vis the Zionist idea
was devastating, and the hatred towards Zionism grew day by day...
Klinger told the
Histadrut Executive that ‘we received an
order not to organize any more defence.’ To the Zionist leadership the
ghetto fighters were more valuable in Palestine. Klinger observed that
Without a
people, a people’s avant-garde is of no value. If rescue it is, then the entire
people must be rescued. If it is to be annihilation, then the avante-garde too
shall be annihilated.
After
the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, a Zionist emissary arrived in Bedzin in July 1943
to persuade Frumka Plotnicka to leave. She replied that ‘I have a responsibility for my brethren... I have lived with them and
I will die with them.’ The Zionist youth in Europe, such as Zivia Lubetkin
and Plotnicka, refused on principle to leave. One can only admire the bravery
and commitment of these young Zionist fighters who, given the choice between
the fight against the Nazis in the Diaspora and the Arabs in Palestine,
committed what in Zionist eyes, was a mortal sin. They chose the Diaspora.
One
of the Zionist emissaries, Yudke Hellman, described how in October and December
1939 he witnessed the return of Plotnicka and Lubetkin to German-occupied
Poland and how he had tried and failed to persuade them to leave for Palestine.
Frumka stood up and announced that her decision to return to Warsaw was final.
Never
was the ethical and moral distinction between the Jewish diaspora and
Palestine’s Zionist leaders clearer. Rose failed to perceive that Zionism was
established on the basis that anti-Semitism could not be fought and that its principal
task lay in the establishment of a Jewish state.
It was the Revisionists
who put up the strongest resistance in the Warsaw ghetto because they were
armed by their fascist friends. They had an abundance of arms unlike the
left-wing Jewish Fighting Organisation (ZOB). So yes, Zionists fought. It was
not because they were Zionists but because they were organised in groups. The
Zionist parties in Warsaw however were opposed to resistance.
Individual Zionists
are not the same as the movement. At times of despair the Jewish masses
supported the Zionists and when the fight against anti-Semitism grew, they
abandoned Zionism. In the last free elections in 1938 in Warsaw out of 20
Jewish Council seats the Zionists obtained precisely one compared to 17 for the anti-Zionist Bund.
As anti-Semitism grew
in Poland Poale Zion split into a right and left in 1919. Left Poale Zion had
effectively abandoned Zionism. But these contradictions entirely escape the SWP
and its theoreticians.
The Israeli state was extremely hostile
to Edelman, who had written an open letter to the Palestinians asking them to
enter into peace negotiations. The letter caused outrage because Edelman did
not mention the word ‘terrorism.’ Israeli leaders were incensed by its title: ‘Letter to Palestinian partisans’.
When Edelman
died on 9 October 2009 he was honoured with a state funeral and a fifteen-gun
salute. Not even the lowliest clerk at the Israeli Embassy attended. No official representative of any international
Jewish organisation attended either.
Edelman received Poland's highest honour
but he died unrecognised and
forgotten in Israel. The President of Poland spoke at his funeral and
two thousand people attended the grave-side ceremony.
John Rose has been the
SWP’s main theoretician on Zionism since Cliff. He has never understood the
internal dynamics and logic of Zionism. Imperialism has used the tragedy of the
Holocaust to legitimise its barbarism and to paint anyone opposed to Zionism as
‘anti-Semitic’. Unfortunately Rose and the SWP instead of standing up to this have
bowed to it and the winds of chauvinism. In an article critiquing Norman
Finkelstein, Rose wrote that:
Even
in its most reactionary form, Zionism before the second world war was one of
the voices of oppressed Jews facing the growth of violent anti Semitism as a
mass movement everywhere.
This statement
represents an abandonment of any class politics. Zionism was the voice of the reactionary
Jewish petit-bourgeoisie who, given half the chance, would betray working class
Jews as Marcel Liebman demonstrated so vividly when describing his experiences
as a child seeking refuge in Nazi-occupied Belgium. He described one leader of
the Belgian Judenrat, the Association of
Jews of Belgium telling a poor Polish Jewish woman:
Well, well!
If you ended up in Eastern Europe what would be wrong with that? You are all
from Poland anyway! You’d just be going back where you came from!
Another wealthy
Zionist member of the AJB, ‘S.V.’
wrote in his diary on 12 December 1942, after the Germans had released a Jew
who was married to a non-Jewish woman:
I find it extraordinary that someone
should be recompensed for having been unfaithful to his religion.
Two-thirds of the
Judenrat, which were hated by poor and working class Jews, were Zionists but
Rose saw them as the voice of the oppressed, writing that ‘Zionism was perfectly capable of inspiring resistance to the Nazis’.
Rose went on to say
that ‘Zionism later mis-used its
genuinely heroic anti-Nazi resistance fighters for cynical ideological ends in
Palestine.’ How surprising! The Zionists also misused the Holocaust to
justify ethnic cleansing in Palestine. Why? Because historically the Zionists were indifferent to the Holocaust.
To many Zionists those who died in the Holocaust brought it upon themselves. Idith
Zertal observed that:
This is more than cynicism.
It is the exploitation of the Holocaust in the service of imperialism and Israel’s
war against the Palestinians.
Rose referred to
Hitler’s view of the Jews as a ‘satanic race’.
Hitler didn’t just think that Jews were
a distinct race. He also thought that they were a Satanic race, and ultimately,
that they were a Satanic race that had to be exterminated.
Rose echoes Zionist holocaust
historians such as Yehuda Bauer who attributed anti-Semitism to ‘a political elite that had come to power
with pseudo-messianic concepts of saving humanity from the Jews.’
What Bauer was saying
was that Nazi anti-Semitism lay outside of history. It was inexplicable. That
is also what Rose is saying. That the Holocaust lies outside class politics.
This is simply anti-Marxist.
Did the
elimination of up to 3 million Polish intelligentsia occur because the Poles
were Satanic? Or the Russians or Disabled? The attempt to exterminate the Jews
was not unique. Why did Hitler want them gone? Because the Jews were seen as
the biological parents of their main enemy, Bolshevism. Hence the term
Judeo-Bolshevism.
Rose wrote about the
truly sinister
cat and mouse game the Nazis were playing when they appeared to be supporting
the Zionist project in Palestine even if did mean some German Jews, by moving
to Palestine with Hitler’s agreement, escaped the death camps.
Rose did not understand
the Ha'avara agreement (or the Nazis’ Jewish policies) which led to just 20,000
wealthy German Jews moving to Palestine. They had to have £1,000 (today about
£85,000). These Jews would have found refuge in other countries.
If anything Ha'avara undermined
the position of other Jews wanting to emigrate. Between 1933 and 1939 the Nazis’
policy was expulsion not extermination. There were no death camps to escape
from. The first death camp, Chelmno was established in December 1941.
The problem with the
SWP is it shouts slogans about Zionism but has never taken the time nor trouble
to understand it.
