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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Former General Amiram Levin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Moshe Yalon – Ben Gvir & Smotrich are Mein Kamp Reversed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tony Greenstein

Just when B’Tselem declares Israel to be an Apartheid State up springs another liberal Zionist group

 Na'amod decides that anti-Zionism, i.e. challenging Jewish supremacy is a step too far

Last Sunday I attended a webinar held by the latest kid on the block Na'amod, which styles itself as ‘British Jews against occupation’. Na'amod is not the first such group to confine itself to Israel’s ‘occupation’ i.e. Israel’s rule over the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

What declaring oneself against ‘the occupation’ means is making a distinction between the West Bank/ East Jerusalem and the rest of Israel. As B’Tselem’s statement made clear there is but one regime over the whole territory from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River.

There are different rules and systems of administration for Palestinians, depending on where they live, but everywhere Jews have superior rights. Palestinians in pre-1967 Israel have an inferior version of Israeli citizenship but it is superior to the military regime governing Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. That is why Israel has repeatedly tried to transfer Israeli Palestinians into the West Bank something that they fear is part of the Trump Plan.

Every part of Greater Israel is under one regime whose guiding principle is Jewish supremacy.  Another word for Jewish supremacy is Zionism.

I say this because there were some in the audience last Sunday who were clearly Zionists. One of them proclaimed in the chat that ‘this is biased’ to which I took objection. I explained the workings of the West Bank Mediterranean to the Jordan River Gaza Trump Plan Greater Israel 1950 Absentee Property Law, introduced by the Israeli Labor Party government, which enabled Palestinians to be dispossessed by treating them as the Orwellian ‘Present Absentees’. In other words even if they were present in the Israeli state and had not been expelled they were to be treated as absent even if they had only fled a mile or so from their village because of the fighting.

I explained that this law, which is being used to dispossess Palestinians in East Jerusalem has never been used against Jews. In other words it is a nakedly racist law. It would appear that this was too much for Naomi and her well meaning liberal Zionist friends.

Although no Zionist was removed after a short time. I found myself ‘bumped’. Thinking that maybe it was my computer I rejoined only to be thrown out again. The third time there was a notice that ‘the host has removed you’. Although Zionists of any stripe were welcome at the meeting, anti-Zionists who made their views known were not welcome.

To add insult to injury, ‘Naomi’ then wrote me a letter thanking me for my attendance at the webinar! It is clear from the letter, which mentions Yachad and Peace Now by name that Na’mod represents an affirmation of Zionism, not a break with this Jewish supremacy, by seeking to put create an artificial distinction between Israel pre-1967 and Israel post-1967.

As B’Tselem makes clear, there is no Green Line between Israel and the West Bank, neither physically nor on Israeli maps. It only exists in the minds of Zionists in the West who use the fiction of ‘two states’ in order to justify the present Occupation. If Na’amod are genuinely sincere about opposing the Occupation then they also need to abandon support for 2 states and Zionism.

2 states is supported by groups such as the Israeli Embassy front Labour Friends of Israel and the Jewish Labour Movement, both of which refuse to condemn any aspect of military rule in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. 2 states  exists solely in the minds of those who wish to perpetuate military rule over 5 million Palestinians.

As Palestinians reject the 2 states paradigm liberal Zionists cling to it ever more firmly. 2 States provides a smokescreen for continued military rule over the West Bank and the expansion of settlements.

It is of course welcome that a new group has sprung up amongst British Jews but it is not unique. Jews for Justice for Palestinians are the original 2 state group and they have made little impression as their politics have become rapidly outdated and irrelevant. JfJP have long sought, for reasons I’ve never understood, affiliation to the Board of Deputies.

Yachad actually did manage to achieve affiliation to the Board as it is an explicitly Zionist group unlike JfJP. Na’mod will have to decide where it stands on the Jewish supremacist nature of Israel, i.e. its Zionist nature.  The omens don’t seem good

Tony Greenstein

See Israel Democracy Institute uncovers shocking racism in 'apartheid state'

Letter to Na’omod

Dear Naomi,

You don't need to thank me for joining you at Sunday's webinar on Settlement Activity and Dispossession in East Jerusalem, just as I don't need to thank you for the fact that I was 'bumped' from the webinar for asking difficult questions and making certain observations about the causes of the repression that your speakers were explaining to us.

What the two speakers, Mohammed El-Kurd and Sami Ershied, were saying was very moving as was their description of their experiences which is why it is a pity that you moved to prevent any discussion of the causes of the demolitions, evictions and settler terrorism that they spoke about.

However without seeking to tackle the causes of their plight you will certainly not remedy the effects. I realise that you are too young to remember Apartheid in South Africa but it is as if you were to have condemned the brutal policies of the South Africa government in Soweto without calling into question Apartheid itself.

I should add that nothing in the history of South Africa Apartheid compares to the use by Israel of planes and missiles in bombing refugee camps and ordinary peoples’ housing in Gaza, Jenin and elsewhere. Nor is there any counterpart to the thousands of Palestinian homes which have been demolished.

However horrific South Africa Apartheid was it does not compare to the bloodshed and brutality of Zionism in Israel.

The dispossession and terror that the speakers experienced at the hands of the settlers and the Israeli state did not come out of nowhere. They are not an accident of god. They are the result of the Zionist Project which, from its very inception, sought to remove the Palestinians from first the land and then the country.

Zionism, unlike settler colonial movements in Southern Africa, dressed this up in the language of 'mutual recognition', 'self determination' and other euphemisms. Zionism was a Janus faced movement which spoke with two tongues. Out of one face it preached mutual respect, brotherhood of man and tolerance. Out of the other face it breathed transfer, expulsion, massacre and dispossession.

This tactic of Zionism, which deliberately said one thing and did another, was best summed up in the 1930 Hope-Simpson Report which the British Government commissioned as a result of the 1929 riots in Palestine.

The effect of the Zionist colonisation policy on the Arab.— Actually the result of the purchase of land in Palestine by the Jewish National Fund has been that land has been extraterritorialised. It ceases to be land from which the Arab can gain any advantage either now or at any time in the future. Not only can he never hope to lease or to cultivate it, but, by the stringent provisions of the lease of the Jewish National Fund, he is deprived for ever from employment on that land. Nor can anyone help him by purchasing the land and restoring it to common use. The land is in mortmain and inalienable. It is for this reason that Arabs discount the professions of friendship and good will on the part of the Zionists in view of the policy which the Zionist Organisation deliberately adopted.

I understand that Na’amod is connected to If Not Now as opposed to Jewish Voice for Peace which is an explicitly anti-Zionist group. From what I understand Na'amod harbours illusions that it can persuade synagogues to break away from the Board of Deputies.

The Board represents the most reactionary section of British Jewry.  British Jews themselves have moved significantly to the right from the days, 80 years ago, when Jews formed the backbone of the left.  Ever since the 1960’s, with the temporary exception of the Blair years, British Jewry has voted overwhelmingly for the Conservatives in the past half a century.

We saw the results of this with the fake anti-Semitism attacks on Labour’s most left-wing leader ever, Jeremy Corbyn.

The question is whether you are going to following the path of Yachad and try to reconcile Zionism with Justice and Peace or whether you are going to follow B’Tselem which has concluded that the Israeli state is an Apartheid State.

It is a stark and binary choice but any other decision and you will be fooling yourself and others.  Zionism has always been a Jewish Supremacist movement and Labour Zionism, its ‘left-wing’ has been the most racist of all.

The choice is yours.

Tony Greenstein

Letter from Na’mod

Thank you for joining us at Sunday's webinar on Settlement Activity and Dispossession in East Jerusalem, co-hosted with Free Jerusalem.

Free Jerusalem have contributed to this document, which provides more detailed information about the dispossession of Palestinians and settlement activity ongoing in East Jerusalem.

If you were unable to attend the event live, would like to watch it back or wish to send it on, you can find the recording here.

We were extremely grateful for the chance to hear from Mohammed El-Kurd and Sami Ershied, J.D, and for the excellent questions asked by many of the attendees. One of the questions which came up several times was, 'How can I help?'

If you are in the UK, please write to your MP and ask them to raise this issue with UK Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab, and to attend the APPG Palestine parliamentary briefing on this issue. This is being held on Wednesday 3rd February 2-3pm, with Mohammed joined by Hagit Ofran from Peace Now's Settlement Watch. Yachad have prepared a template which you can use for this.

We have seen that international pressure can and does work: in 2011, an international campaign forced the Jewish National Fund (KKL) to delay the eviction of the Sumarin family from their home in Silwan. Under the latest evictions orders, the family are once again facing displacement from their own home and their community at the hands of the JNF.

If you are Jewish, please consider joining our movement. We are British Jews making our voices heard: the occupation must be opposed by our community with Actions not Words.

We are a grassroots movement and depend on donations from our supporters to cover our costs and continue our work. If you can support us with a donation we would be incredibly grateful.

Please look out for our next webinar, which will be held next month!

Na'amod