200,000 Demonstrators Say No To Israeli Apartheid as a few hundred Zionist Demonstrators Welcome Neo-Nazi Tommy Robinson into their ranks

Who does the Sunday Times and the popular press accuse of anti-Semitism? The Palestinian demonstration!!

The Largest Ever Palestinian Demonstration in Britain

The demonstration last Saturday was the largest Palestinian that has ever been held in Britain.  Some 200,000 people took part. The mass media looked desperately for signs of anti-Semitism. According to The Standard the rally was ‘hijacked by anti-Semitic protesters’. I have to confess that I didn’t see any sign of the stormtroopers!

Jewish Bloc on Palestinian demonstration - there were hundreds of Jews on the Palestinian demonstration - there were no Muslims or Arabs on the Zionist demonstration yet the Sunday Times accuses us of racism!!

Why this concern over ‘anti-Semitism’? The mass media are desperate to discredit supporters of the Palestinians. What was this 'antisemitism'? Protestors who ‘held placards displaying swastikas and references to Nazis.’ The inference from the headlines was that some of the demonstration were proudly displaying the swastika.

There is NOTHING anti-Semitic in these posters - they are not saying Hitler was right but that Hitler like the Zionists are evil

Did the placards say ‘Hitler was right’ or ‘Jews to the gas chambers’? According to The Sunday Times those placards read ‘Stop doing what Hitler did to you.’ Another read “Israel, the new Nazi state”. One placard referred to ‘Holocaust party 2’. Now these demonstrators might be accused of hyperbole or exaggeration but they were not in the slightest anti-Semitic. They were comparing the evils of Hitler to the evils of Zionism. Saying ‘Stop doing what Hitler did to you’ is what holocaust survivors have said. Is that anti-Semitic? The Murdoch Press and the Mail were desperate to find ‘anti-Semitism’.

However the next day at the Israel Genocide demonstration, racism was certainly on display. Tommy Robinson, the Islamaphobic bigot, former member of the holocaust denying BNP and associate of neo-Nazis was welcomed onto the demonstration, which was less than a thousand strong. Britain’s Jewish community had given this celebration of genocide a big no.

My letter to the Sunday Times pointing out their hypocrisy over racism

Despite the attempts of the major Zionist organisations to pretend that Robinson was not welcome it is clear from the film that the Zionist rank and file welcomed him with open arms. The Community Security Trust which stewards these demonstrations has never hesitated to manhandle anti-Zionist protestors. How come it allowed Robinson to participate?

The Jewish News exposed the problem of Zionist support for Tommy Robinson when it quoted a number of Zionists:

One pro-Israel activist, who goes under the pseudonym Nick from Enfield, and who attended the demo tweeted: “Tommy was invited … he came was polite he was supportive he was great unlike the disgusting supporters of palestinians who were chasing Jews around the streets.'

“We need all the friends we can get as Jews we are outnumbered and we welcome TR.”

Another demo attendee posted: “Thanks Tommy – how times change.”

One leading Jewish community Facebook page took down discussion about Robinson’s presence at the demo.

According to the Campaign Against Antisemitism Tommy Robinson too is fighting 'antisemitism'!!

It is clear that support for Tommy Robinson and his Islamaphobia is strong amongst British Zionists as I have said for many years.

The Twickenham Springbok Demonstration I attended as a school student

The Tectonic Plates of Zionism are Shifting

In 1969, when I took part in my first demonstration against the South African Springbok Rugby Tour, little did I realise that 25 years later we would see the first Black majority rule government.

A protest in Be'er Sheva in the Negev - right-wing thugs circulated messages calling on members to attack Arabs as the police stand by

The year 2021, a year which saw the election of a bona fide Jewish Nazi, Itamar ben-Gvir to Israel’s Knesset, may well be the beginning of the end for the Apartheid regime in Tel Aviv. Zionism has become more and more atavistic as it reverts to the most primitive and barbaric forms of colonialism.

Unprovoked police violence against a Palestinian in Umm el Fahm - will these bastards be prosecuted?  Of course not. Violence against Palestinians is not a crime in Israel

pogrom in Bat Yam - which the Israeli police allowed to happen

After having boasted for years that Israeli Arabs were equal citizens in Israel we now see the true mentality of Zionism. As Israeli Palestinians took part in demonstrations and protests against the threatened eviction of the inhabitants of Sheikh Jarrar and against the invasion by Israel’s military of Al Aqsa mosque, Jewish vigilante groups and settlers, aided by the police, began a series of pogroms in mixed cities such as Bat Yam and Lydd.

Today the Israeli Police are rounding up hundreds of Palestinians in Israel for having attacked Jews whilst  conspicuously ignoring the far greater attacks by the settlers. The Times of Israel reports that 70% of those arrested are Arabs but Aida Touma-Sliman a Joint List MK estimated it was closer to 90 percent.

New York's Huge Demonstration on Palestine

When Palestinian students at Ben Gurion University in the Negev tried to hold a demonstration against the bombing of Gaza they were first attacked by the Police and then subject to a pogrom by fellow Israeli Jewish students chanting ‘Death to the Arabs’. Many of them have fled back home in fear of their lives. Noone has been arrested.

The Colombian contingent on Palestinian demonstration was loud and enthusiastic - they too are victims of American imperialism

Electronic Intifada reports that these attacks on Palestinians were coordinated via social media groups. One Telegram user wrote

People from Holon, Bat Yam and Rishon Lezion go out to bring war. We are no longer Jews today. Today we are Nazis.

Israel is a leftover from the days of European fascism. The settlers claim a ‘god given right’ to expel Palestinians because god gave them the land. Such a claim, like fascist ideology, is irrational. Rights derive from the societies which people belong to. These people claim their ‘rights’ from a mythical past and a god whose word is unchallengeable. As Thomas Jefferson wrote, democracy and worship of the past are incompatible.

Brave demonstrators at Elbit's Leicester factory - Palestine Solidarity Campaign refuse to support them out of political cowardice

Sometimes time appears to stand still. Nothing seems to change. At other times years pass in minutes. Today we seem to be entering the latter phase. We are living in a time of great social and political movements even if it is hard to gauge their importance at the time.

Itamar Gvir - the Judeo-Nazi who has been elected to the Israeli Knesset and is now part of the government coalition

The murder of George Floyd last year unleashed the largest political movement in the history of the USA. Over 25 million people marched for racial justice and against White Supremacy. It was inevitable that the Black Lives Matter movement and the movement for justice in Palestine would coincide. At root the causes are the same, just as they were half a century ago when the fight of the Black Panthers reflected the fight against White Supremacy in South Africa.

Jack Mendel, the Jewish News Political Correspondent speaks of non-existent antisemitism at the Palestinian rally but admits shame that neo-Nazi Robinson attended the Israeli demonstration. He should now ask why.

The connections between White Supremacy in the USA and Jewish Supremacy in Israel are particularly close. The Israeli Police have been teaching their American counterparts the finer arts of how to kill, choke and strangle for years. The majority of such training is organised by the Zionist Anti-Defamation League, which portrays itself an anti-racist group but which last year was subject to a successful boycott when it sought to train Starbucks staff. ADL previously has infiltrated and spied on the left and anti-racists going so far as to act on behalf of the South Africa secret police BOSS.

The Lies of the Sunday Times - whose Stupid Reporters Can't Even Recognise the Difference Between Support & Opposition to Antisemitism

Despite the fulminations and tantrums of Donald Trump and his supporters, with his violent attacks on Antifa and anti-racist protestors in Portland, Washington and other cities, including the killing of at least 3 anti-fascists, Joe Biden swept to power on the coat tails of BLM. But for the death of George Floyd it is likely that Trump would be in his second term now.

Why the Delegitimisation of Israel is a Palestinian priority

In 2010 in response to the growing success of BDS, the Reut Report was commissioned by the Reut Institute and ADL. It described ‘delegitimisation’ as an existentialist threat to the Israeli state. Point 9 of the Report stated that:

A tipping point in this context would be a paradigm shift from the Two-State Solution to the One-State Solution as the consensual framework for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Trafalgar Square - a carnival of multiracism unlike the Whites only Zionist demonstration

The Two State Solution is the Apartheid solution - Bantustanisation. Point 11 envisaged that

‘The issue of Israel's Arab citizens may become the next ‘outstanding issue' driving delegitimization in the event that an Israeli-Palestinian Permanent Status Agreement is secured

Electronic Intifada provides a useful analysis of the Report.

What then is meant by delegitimisation? The main fear of Zionism and the defenders of Israel is not criticism of particular policies, it is criticism which challenges the Jewish supremacist nature of the Israeli state, Zionism. The Israeli state in its settlement drive, house demolitions and ethnic cleansing has demonstrated why, despite the best hasbara, Israel is a settler colonial state.

The strategy of fighting delegitimisation found its expression in the IHRA Misdefinition of Anti-Semitism. The IHRA had no problem with ‘criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country’.  What the IHRA called anti-Semitism was ‘requiring of it [Israel] a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.’ This was of course disingenuous since there are no ethno-religious democratic states.

Israel’s headlong rush to the Zionist right, which unlike the Zionist left at least has the merit of honesty, signals that Zionism is no longer concerned to hide the reality of a Jewish state. The leader of Religious Zionism group, Bezalel Smotrich  spelt it out when stated that

“Arabs are citizens of Israel, for now, at least. They have representatives, MKs, for now at least.’

One of the most remarkable aspects of the war on Gaza was that Palestinian Israelis came out en masse for the first time. The attacks on Al Aqsa mosque by Israeli police struck a raw nerve. Al Aqsa and the Golden Dome are as much political as religious symbols.

What this has done is expose ‘co-existence’ in Israel for the sham it is. Israeli Palestinians have been accepted into a ‘Jewish’ state only as long as they accepted their guest status. The minute that they demand equality they are attacked with the full force of the Israeli state. Last week, for the first time since 1936 there was an Arab General Strike that encompassed the West Bank and Israel.

What is happening in Israel today is a problem for its defenders in the West. The old days when apologists for Zionist Apartheid like Emily Thornberry could proclaim that ‘Israel stands out as a beacon of freedom and democracy’ are over.

Palestine is NOT a human rights issue

The approach of many supporters of the Palestinians is to believe that it is simply a human rights issue. People like Caroline Lucas MP raise questions of Israel’s human rights abuses whilst supporting a Jewish state. We have to be clear. Our opposition to Israel is not simply about its human rights record. There are worse countries in the world when it comes to human rights such as Burma and now India.

Israel like South Africa is a state based on racial supremacy. That was what set Nazi Germany apart, long before the holocaust. The colour of your skin or your religious affiliation dictates your rights and privileges. As Albert Luthuli, the founder of the ANC said, you can change your politics but not the colour of your skin.

What Zionism fears is not a challenge to individual Israeli policies but to its existence as a Jewish Supremacist State. Any organisation claiming to support Palestine solidarity cannot avoid the Jewish nature of the Israeli state. It would be like opposing, 50 years ago, human rights abuses in South Africa whilst supporting Apartheid.

To be a supporter of the Palestinians you must also oppose Zionism, the ideology of that state. It is the myth that Zionism is an integral part of being Jewish or part of Jewish identity that we have to explode. Zionism is not an inherent part of being Jewish. The first Zionists weren’t Jewish but Christian Evangelists or Dispensationists.

2021 is the Year of Challenging the Legitimacy of the Israeli State and Zionism

In January of this year the largest Israeli human rights group, B’Tselem issued a report This is Apartheid:  A regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. Allegations that Israel was an Apartheid State were once confined to the outer fringes of political debate. B’Tselem’s Report has brought this into the mainstream. As its Director, Hagai el-Ad wrote

One cannot live a single day in Israel-Palestine without the sense that this place is constantly being engineered to privilege one people, and one people only: the Jewish people. 

At the end of April Human Rights Watch issued a 231 page report which was even more damning  - A Threshold Crossed: Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution. This time the mass media could not ignore the story.  I understand a third report along the same lines is due to be issued by Amnesty International. 

The game is up for Zionism and its bastard child, Israel. For as long as the Israeli Labour Party was in charge of the Israeli state it was able to hide Israel’s apartheid character. The kibbutzim were even seen as a radical social experiment rather than ethnic cleansers. But the advent of Likud dictated that politics and Israeli reality would sooner or later come into line.

The first shock to Israel’s left wing supporters was the Lebanon invasion in 1982 when Tony Benn and Eric Heffer resigned from Labour Friends of Israel. Today Netanyahu has personally acted as the midwife to the election of Religious Zionism, a Judeo-Nazi party. The illusion that Israel is a democracy has disappeared. Only Keir Starmer and the Tories still cling to it. 

The far-right 'charity' Campaign Against Antisemitism cries 'antisemitism' whilst ignoring the welcome given to Tommy Robinson  by the Zionist demonstrators

Israel’s Fightback

No one of sound mind can today pretend that Israel is a democratic state. Even John McDonell, who went along with the fake ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign inside the Labour Party, now supports BDS and calls Israel an apartheid state. The campaign against Corbyn temporarily rehabilitated the Israeli state but the recent attacks on worshippers in Al Aqsa mosque and the proposed ethnic cleansing of Sheikh Jarrar and then the blitzkrieg on Gaza have undone all of that.

We are at a turning point

Jonathan Freedland has fronted the fake ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign for the past 5 years, turning the Guardian into a Zionist rag. He has been their Zionist gatekeeper. Freedland, an archetypal liberal Zionist has recently been fretting about the state of affairs in Israel. In his Jewish Chronicle column he objected to the nomination of an open racist, former Israeli General Effi Eitam, as the next Chair of Yad Vashem, Israel’s holocaust propaganda museum.

Eitam is on record as supporting the completion of Israel’s ethnic cleansing of its Palestinian population. He also presided over the beating to death of a Palestinian prisoner.  As such you would have thought he was eminently suitable to chair Yad Vashem, which has welcomed all manner of fascists and anti-Semites through its doors. Freedland wrote, quoting  a petition against Eitam that:

appointing Eitam, given his history of “hateful rhetoric,” would make Yad Vashem an object of “mockery and a disgrace.” It would be an act of reckless self-harm, turning an institution that currently enjoys deep international respect into a prime target for protest and boycott.

Freedland has also been worrying recently that the fiction of Israeli Jewish-Arab coexistence is dead. People often forget that settler colonial states are usually ruled by stupid and brutal politicians whose only answer to a crisis is repression. That was true in South Africa and it is true in Israel today. That is why the situation is not going to return to what Freedland terms ‘normal’. Today's politicians in Israel are as thick as their Afrikaaner counterparts were.

Freedland, who dishonestly ran the Guardian campaign attacking Corbyn for Labour ‘anti-Semitism’ because anti-Zionism challenged the pro-Israel identity of most British Jews, has now, it would appear woken up to the monster he has been defending. In what for him was an unusually perceptive article, he noted that Israel should take note: the weight of opinion is turning against it. Therein lies the problem.

Despite the use of the IHRA to outlaw the idea that Israel is an Apartheid State, it is fast becoming an accepted truth. The recent Gaza attack by Israel was, in his view, a ‘strategic disaster’. The demands of Black Lives Matter have crossed over to the Palestine solidarity movement with placards proclaiming that Palestine Lives Matter and Palestine Can’t Breathe.

Freedland is a ‘liberal’ Zionist who is prepared to put up with any iniquity on behalf of his beloved 'Jewish' State. The only problem is that others aren’t. As he sees it the writing is already on the wall for Israel.  It cannot continue along the path to the far-right because it won’t survive another attempt to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians.

You can’t stop colonisation half-way. Its either all or nothing. Sheikh Jarrar is part of the Master Plan to ‘Judaise’ Jerusalem. That is how Israel has always behaved. Zionism without ethnic cleansing is like trying to play cricket without a ball!

What worries Freedland is that the ground is moving underneath the feet of the Zionists. In the United States, a bastion of bipartisan support for Israel, things are changing. He writes that

‘No less striking than Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez branding Israel an “apartheid state” was this week’s move by longtime pro-Israel Democrats in Congress to delay the transfer of an arms package to Israel.

It is this  which explains the new willingness of the Guardian to carry articles that it wouldn’t have a year ago. Chris McGreal, who authored two long pieces in the Guardian Worlds apart and Brothers in arms - Israel's secret pact with Pretoria, both of which outraged the Zionists 15 years ago has now come back to remind people that Boycotts and sanctions helped rid South Africa of apartheid – is Israel next in line? There is also Nesrine Malik’s article 2 days ago. Whether this represents a genuine change by the Guardian or it is simply adapting to a changing political climate remains to be seen.

Ha’aretz, the liberal Zionist Israeli paper is also worried that Israel is becoming a new Yugoslavia. The New York Times, long seen as the bastion of Zionism is also slowly changing. First they got rid of Bari Weiss, the Opinion Editor and Zionist gatekeeper and then four days ago they finally printed a piece Life Under Occupation: The Misery at the Heart of the Conflict which describes what life is like for Palestinians under occupation.

Liberal Zionists face the choice of either digging in, like Freedland, or moving to the left like Peter Beinart, who has disowned a Jewish State. As Rabbi Meir Kahane, the Jewish Nazi explained years ago, Israel can either be a Jewish state or a Democratic state.  It cannot be both.  And that is the dilemma that faces liberal Zionists.

For Freedland a Jewish State must survive at any price, even at the cost of apartheid. For Beinart this is unacceptable. It is our job in the solidarity movement to widen these fissures not help our opponents as Palestine Solidarity Campaign does.

Tony Greenstein

Below are more pictures of the huge London demonstration

America’s Jewish Currents, of which Peter Beinart is an Editor, says it represents the Jewish Left – but which Jewish Left?

Jewish Currents refuses to print any response to Joshua Leifer’s ‘The real Corbyn Tragedy’ – finding that Corbyn should have prostrated himself to the Board of Deputies 

America’s Jewish Currents describes itself as ‘a magazine committed to the rich tradition of thought, activism, and culture of the Jewish left.’  When Joshua Leifer penned a 5000+ word article The Tragedy of Jeremy Corbyn offering his advice as to where Corbyn had gone wrong I felt impelled to respond.

Leifer’s analysis can be summed up as saying that:

i.                   Yes there was a basis to the ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign, because various tropes and remarks surfaced on social media, thus completely redefining the meaning of racism from actions such as discrimination and physical attacks to the froth and foam of Twitter.

ii.                That the problem in Britain was that there was

‘no left-wing Jewish organizational infrastructure in Britain comparable to what has recently emerged in the US…. there were few progressive Jewish voices that could meaningfully challenge them.’

In fact Jewish Voices for Labour was specifically set up to address this problem and the impact it had on the ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign was negligible, because it was never about Jews or anti-Semitism. They were a metonym for the determination of the Right to oust Corbyn.

iii.             Leifer quotes Matt Seaton of the New York Review of Books as saying that

“the fight between Corbyn skeptics and Corbyn fans over Jews and Israel has become a ruinous proxy for what is, in its essence, a struggle between social-democrats and socialists for the soul of the party.”

Leifer drew no conclusions from this statement regarding the fake ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign.

iv.             Leifer accepted that ‘The British Jewish establishment would brook no compromise with Corbyn’. Nonetheless he argued that:

Corbyn and the left’s initial failure to adequately address accusations of antisemitism meant that when he took a stand against the IHRA definition, he had no political room to maneuver. For his protest to have had even the slimmest chance of success, he also would have needed partners within the British Jewish community: people with public respect and Jewish bona fides who were willing to challenge the notion that opposition to the IHRA definition was beyond the pale.

v.                The problem with this is that the British Jewish Establishment in the form of the Board of Deputies has hardwired into its constitution support for Israel i.e to

‘Take such appropriate action as lies within its power to advance Israel's security, welfare and standing.’

The JLM which Leifer refers to was specifically refounded in 2015 in order to unseat Corbyn.  It is a right-wing anti-socialist group, the overseas wing of what is left of the Israeli Labour Party. In fact plenty of prominent Jews opposed the IHRA, e.g. Professor David Feldman, Sir Geoffrey Bindman, Sir Stephen Sedley and others. They too had no effect.

vi.             Leifer however had found the solution whereas those of us on the ground had completely missed it. If only Corbyn had apologised to the ‘Jewish community’ when Andrew Neil, who when Editor of the Sunday Times hired Holocaust denier David Irving, had asked him! Leifer wrote that:

Corbyn appeared stubbornly determined to insert his foot directly into his mouth. In a 2019 pre-election interview, the BBC’s Andrew Neil asked him if he would like to apologize to the British Jewish community. … With only a few words—“yes, I’m sorry”—Corbyn might have been able to avoid bad press in a crucial stretch leading up to the election.

Anyone acquainted with the situation knows that anything Corbyn had said would have been used against Labour and apologising would have confirmed the Labour ‘anti-Semitism’ myth. Leifer’s brilliant conclusion? ‘

It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that Corbyn’s maladroit media appearances led, at least in part, to his defeat.

vii.          Leifer concluded his article with a series of ‘what ifs’

What if, instead of retreating into defensiveness, they had moved to reconcile sooner with the British Jewish communal institutions where reconciliation was possible? What if those communal institutions had faced internal opposition to launching an all-out campaign against Corbyn? 

What if kosher pigs could fly? I wrote to JC offering the outline of a proposed reply. You can see the outline of my article, which was published yesterday on Mondoweiss. I was not the only person to respond to Jewish Currents.

Arielle Angel

Donna Nevel submitted a letter which Editor Arielle Angel, refused to print. Her excuse? That it was the only letter they have received which was being economical with the truth given my response. Mondoweiss published Donna’s letter but it should not have had to.

After waiting a week without a response I sent a follow up email and this time Arielle did reply saying that they simply did not have the ‘bandwidth’  to publish a full response article. Which begs the question why publish mediocre articles if you are not prepared to have a debate?

Peter Beinart - Editor-at-large at the Jewish Currents

I also copied the correspondence to the JC's Editor-at-large Peter Beinart, America’s premier liberal Zionist. Beinart famously broke with a Jewish State and supported a single binational state last July Yavne: A Jewish Case for Equality in Israel-Palestine.

Despite being someone who has criticised the totalitarian mentality of the Zionist lobby and its apologists Beinart, who is a Professor Journalism at the City University of NY, has not deigned to respond.

In my reply to Arielle Angel I asked exactly what the JC is for:

You say that you are a paper of the Jewish Left. If this article stands without a response and maybe more than 1 response, then you should amend this to say that you represent the non-socialist and the non-Marxist left.

JC says it is of the ‘left’ but is meaningless if it is a left divorced from socialism, anti-imperialism or solidarity with the oppressed.

Below is my article in Mondoweiss

The real Corbyn ‘tragedy’ — and ‘Jewish Currents’ refusal to publish an opposing view

In a recent article on the "tragedy" of Jeremy Corbyn, Jewish Currents overlooks the rightwing bigoted records of those criticizing Corbyn because of his support for Palestinian rights.

By Tony Greenstein December 22, 2020

At the end of November Joshua Leifer, an Associate Editor of Jewish Currents [JC], wrote an article about the “tragedy” of Jeremy Corbyn. He did not seek the opinions of any Jewish victims of the “antisemitism” witchhunt in the Labour Party. As the first Jewish member of the party to be expelled I submitted a response.

At first I was simply ignored and after a reminder, Arielle Angel, Editor-in-chief, explained that it was a lack of resources that prevented them publishing my reply. JC “simply do not have the bandwidth to publish full response articles to articles we’ve published”. So I am publishing my response here.

Who sponsored the false ‘antisemitism’ campaign against Corbyn

The first question to ask is who was behind the campaign to root out “antisemitism” in the Labour Party? Were they genuinely concerned about antisemitism or defending Israel? Were the allegations confected?

The first article exposing Corbyn as an “antisemite” came from the Tory Daily Mail. On 7 August 2015, even before Corbyn was elected, it published an ‘exclusive’ revealing that Corbyn was an associate of a Holocaust denier, Paul Eisen. It was untrue but mud sticks.

This is the same Daily Mail which, according to Professor Tony Kushner, “has been an anti-alien newspaper since the 1900s. There’s great continuity.” The Daily Mail is the paper which supported Hitler and which had an infamous front page ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts’. Nor is this ancient history.  Despite this, Leifer quoted Dan Hodges of the Daily Mail uncritically accusing Labour of being a racist party. Hodges is hardly neutral, an ex-New Labourite, right-wing and hostile. 

Just three months later the Mail employed an ex-Sun columnist against Corbyn, Katie Hopkins who had previously described refugees as ‘cockroaches’. The whole of the British press, from the Sun to the neo-liberal Guardian, was mobilised in the cause of fighting ‘antisemitism’.

The Conservative Party and the Labour Right also joined hands in opposing Labour “antisemitism”. These were the same political forces that had supported the disastrous 2014 Immigration Act and the official policy of creating a “hostile environment” for immigrants that had led to hundreds if not thousands of Black British citizens being deported to the West Indies. Just 6 Labour MPs voted against the Act, including the “antisemitic” Corbyn. In fact, Labour’s Right was permeated with antisemitism. After a racist Labour MP Phil Woolas was removed from Parliament by the High Court in 2010 for election offences, which included running a campaign aimed at stirring up racial strife by “making the white folk angry” he was defended by Tom Watson, who “lost sleep” over “poor Phil.” Watson later became Corbyn’s unfriendly deputy leader and led the ‘antisemitism’ witchhunt.

Historically it was the Right of the Labour Party which was antisemitic. The Board of Deputies of British Jews, which claims to be the representative body of British Jewry (although in fact it represents at best 40% of British Jews), raised no objection when Sidney Webb (1859-1947), Colonial Secretary, founder of the Fabians and New Statesman, remarked that there were ‘“no Jews in the British Labour party” and that while “French, German, Russian Socialism is Jew-ridden…We, thank heaven, are free”, adding that was probably the case because there was “no money in it”. (Paul Kelemen, “The British Left and Zionism: The History of a Divorce”, Manchester University Press 2012)

Herbert Morrison, Home Secretary during World War 2, adamantly refused to admit Jewish refugees. Hundreds if not thousands died as a result. 

We see this today with Labour leader Keir Starmer. He has expressed his determination to “root out the poison” of antisemitism from the Labour Party. Yet Sir Keir, was unable to challenge a racist caller on the talk show station LBC, who stated that White people would be in a minority by 2066 and asked why Britain can’t be like Israel which

“has a state law that they are the only people in that country to have self-determination. Well why can’t I as a white British female have that same right?”

Perhaps it was the comparison with Israel that threw Keir!

Not once did Joshua Leifer ask simple questions as to why, if the Board of Deputies was concerned with Labour “antisemitism,” it had said nothing about Boris Johnson’s genuinely antisemitic and racist 2004 novel “72 Virgins” or about the fact that the Tories sat in the European Parliament in a “conservative and reformist” bloc with fascists and antisemites such as Roberts Ziles and Michal Kaminsky. When the Leader of the House of Commons, Jacob Rees Mogg, spoke last year of the “Illuminati who are taking the powers to themselves,” in reference to two Jewish fellow MPs, there was no comment on this patently antisemitic reference.

John Bercow, the recently retired Jewish Speaker of the House of Commons, was asked in an interview if Corbyn was an antisemite. His response was that he had known Corbyn for 22 years and there wasn’t a ‘whiff’ of antisemitism about him. Bercow also recalled how he remembered an MP saying:  

“If I had my way, Berkoff, people like you wouldn’t be allowed in this place.” On inquiring whether  his antagonist meant being lower-class or Jewish?’ the response was ‘Both’!

The idea that the Conservative Party, the party of Empire,  is opposed to racism, including antisemitism, lies in the realm of fantasy. Yet Leifer asked no questions as to the bona fides of Corbyn’s right-wing antagonists.

Almost as soon as the ‘antisemitism’ controversy raised its head I had my doubts.  Was antisemitism spontaneously arising in the Labour Party because of Corbyn’s election or were we seeing the state destabilisation of Labour?

My answer came on March 18^th when I was suspended. All the allegations that were put to me later were about Israel. Did I compare Israel’s marriage laws to those of Nazi Germany? My answer was yes, but so did Hannah Arendt, a refugee from Nazi Germany! Did I say that Israel was hoping that Holocaust survivors would die in order they could save on their welfare benefits?  Yes I did but so did Ha’aretz!

It takes little imagination to guess at the reaction to Corbyn’s election – from the CIA HQ at Langley Virginia, to MI5 to Israel. Corbyn was a veteran anti-imperialist, anti-nuclear and hostile to NATO. He was now leader of the second party of government in the US’s closest ally in Europe. Al Jazeera’s The Lobby gave us a snapshot of what was happening when we saw Israeli Embassy operative Shai Masot being deeply involved in Labour’s ‘antisemitism’ crisis.

The facts can be true, yet the narrative can be false

Are there antisemites in the Labour Party?  Of course there will be a few. Any party of ½ million is bound to have them. Does that mean that Labour or any other political party was overrun by them?  Of course not. Yet Leifer, instead of probing beneath the surface, declares that ‘If people are exposing a valid problem, you have to deal with it’.

But there wasn’t a problem. Leifer mentioned the infamous mural, erased in 2012, that the right-wing former Director of Labour Friends of Israel Luciana Berger made an issue of before the 2018 local elections. It depicted six bankers, two of whom were Jewish. They had fat, not hooked noses.  Corbyn had opposed their erasure on free speech grounds. Opinions differ as to whether the mural was antisemitic but the real issue was why this had been raised 6 years later. No one had considered the matter important in 2012.

It was clear that sections of the press and others were researching everything that Corbyn had ever said and putting the worst possible interpretation on it. This was in contrast to ignoring the openly racist record of Prime Minister Boris Johnson who in 2002 spoke about “picanninies” and Black people having “watermelon” smiles.’

Nearly half of Conservative Party members oppose having a Muslim Prime Minister. Yet these bigoted attitudes were never problematic. Why? Because it was not antisemitism that was the real issue in Labour, but defence of Israel.

What antisemitism there is in the Labour Party is confined to social media; and much of that, such as Rothschild/banker conspiracy theories, are a way in which people try to explain what they see as the extraordinary power of the Israel lobby to bend politicians to their will.  This is a power that Israeli politicians like Prime Ministers Benjamin Netanyahu and Ehud Olmert have openly boasted of.  Israel calls itself a Jewish state and it’s unsurprising that  lacking an understanding of how imperialism works, people can ascribe American responsiveness to Israel’s demands as the bowing to Jewish power rather than the interplay between an imperialist power and its watchdog in the region. In my own experience, people who talk of the Rothschilds don’t even realise that they are Jewish.

Antisemitism is not what some idiot writes on social media bearing in mind that one person can post a million tweets. Antisemitism is what people do to Jewish people not what they tweet about. No one died from a tweet.

Who were the victims of the antisemitism witchhunt?

Leifer failed to ask basic questions such as, who were the targets of the ‘antisemitism’ witchhunt? Not only was I expelled but so was Jackie Walker, a Black Jewish women who was utterly demonised. Jackie was active in the fight against the National Front and the far-Right UKIP.

Another person expelled was Marc Wadsworth, who criticised former Israel lobbyist Ruth Smeeth for her assisting the Tory Daily Telegraph. Wadsworth didn’t even know Smeeth was Jewish when he criticised her at the launch of the Chakrabarti Report in June 2016 into racism in the Labour Party. In the campaign against Police racism over the murder of Stephen Lawrence, which led to the Government MacPherson Inquiry that found the Metropolitan Police institutionally racist, Wadsworth introduced the Lawrence family to Nelson Mandela and put the campaign on the map. Then Marc was expelled because of the lies of an Israel lobbyist turned MP. Yet in Jewish Currents, Leifer stayed silent or oblivious of this context.

I spent most of my youth involved in anti-fascist work as first Secretary of the Anti-Nazi League in Brighton and then served on the Executive of Anti-Fascist Action. The Board of Deputies spent most of their time attacking us, not the fascists, because we were anti-Zionist!

The Board of Deputies has never opposed antisemitism

The Board of Deputies and the Jewish Chronicle, which led the ‘antisemitism’ attacks on Corbyn, have never campaigned against genuine antisemitism. In 1936 when Moseley’s British Union of Fascists attempted to march through the East End of London the Board of Deputies and the Jewish Chronicle told Jews to keep away.  Thousands of Jews and non-Jews ignored them in what became known as the Battle of Cable Street.  After the war the 43 Group of Jewish ex-serviceman took the battle to the resurgent Union Movement and literally smashed them off the streets.  The Board vehemently opposed them.  In the 1970s and 1980s it was the same story.

As the Editor of the Searchlight anti-fascist magazine, Maurice Ludmer wrote:

“In the face of mounting attacks against the Jewish community both ideologically and physically, we have the amazing sight of the Jewish Board of Deputies launching an attack on the Anti Nazi League with all the fervour of Kamikaze pilots… It was as though they were watching a time capsule rerunof the 1930’s, in the form of a flickering old movie, with a grim determination to repeat every mistake of that era. ” (Issue 41, November 1978)

The first time that the Board held an ‘anti-racist’ demonstration was against Corbyn outside Parliament in March 2018. Who took part?  Arch Tory racist Norman Tebbit, proponent of the racist ‘cricket test’ (the idea that immigrants who support the Indian/Pakistani cricket teams weren’t really British) and sectarian bigot, Ulster Unionist MP Ian Paisley! Even the Zionist placards were antisemitic!

Antisemitism was weaponised

‘Antisemitism’ was the chosen weapon of attack on the Labour left.  It played to their weak spot, identity politics. It was easier to attack Corbyn over ‘antisemitism’ than austerity or his anti-nuclear politics. The fact that so many Jews are being suspended today over supposed antisemitism attitudes because of their criticism of Israel proves that this is not about antisemitism.  According to Jewish Voices for Labour, at least 25 Jewish members were investigated for ‘antisemitism’, and many of them suspended, in recent years, with no coverage of the purge in the mainstream media.

The British Jewish Community is not the American Jewish Community

Leifer operated under the belief that the Jewish community in Britain and the United States are comparable.  They are not. American Jewry is not centrally directed by Zionist bodies like in Britain. I am the son of an Orthodox Rabbi.  I knew the Jewish community and modern Orthodoxy pretty well. Former Chief Rabbi Joseph Hertz visited my house. It is a deeply conservative and racist community (anti-Arab/Muslim). There is no comparison with the American Jewish community which is largely Reform/Conservative. The British Jewish community is far more insular.  It is a community which has for the last 50 years voted Tory by overwhelming majorities. Even under Labour’s first Jewish leader Ed Miliband, it voted by more than 3-1 for the Tories. The days of the Jewish workers in the East End joining and voting Communist are long gone.

Leifer mentions a letter from 60 rabbis attacking Corbyn. What he doesn’t mention is the letter signed by 29 Ultra Orthodox rabbis dissociating themselves from the Board’s attacks saying they did not represent the Ultra Orthodox community, which is the fastest growing part of the British Jewish community.

Would Jewish groups like If Not Now or JVP have helped?

Leifer argues that if there had been similar Jewish groups in Britain to America’s If Not Now or Jewish Voice for Peace then things might have been different.  I don’t believe so. American Jewry is more liberal. This was why Jewish Voices for Labour was formed in Britain. But they were ignored during the antisemitism controversy because the campaign was not about either Jews or antisemitism. The proof of this lies in the fact that the Board of the Deputies and the Zionist Jewish Labour Movement focused on the IHRA (International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance) definition of antisemitism, which conflates antisemitism and anti-Zionism.  It is the same IHRA that the antisemitic Trump and the equally antisemitic Viktor Orban of Hungary have taken to heart.

The EHRC report on Labour ‘Antisemitism’

Leifer quotes uncritically the recent report of the Equality and Human Rights Commission that concluded that “there were unlawful acts of harassment and discrimination for which the Labour Party is responsible” and identified “serious failings in leadership and an inadequate process for handling antisemitism complaints.”  

The EHRC is hardly a reliable source. The EHRC is a state-appointed, state-funded body that has refused to investigate Tory Party Islamophobia.  It has an abysmal record on racism and has recently come in for criticism by the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights. Until recently it didn’t have a single Black or Muslim Commissioner. Leifer might have mentioned the author of the report. The Anti-Semitism Report on Labour was produced by Alasdair Henderson, a supporter of fascist Roger Scruton and Douglas Murray, whose book “The Strange Death of Europe” articulates the White Replacement Theory. The EHRC is held in contempt by Black people yet Leifer said nothing about this miserable record.

Leifer quotes Britain’s Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis who issued a statement attacking Corbyn during the General Election over Labour ‘antisemitism’. Leifer failed to tell his readers that Mirvis trained at a yeshiva on a West Bank settlement, Alon Shvut. Mirvis joined in and encouraged others to march, in Jerusalem’s annual March of the Flags, when thousands of settler youth parade through Palestinian neighborhoods in East Jerusalem chanting ‘Death to the Arabs’. Mirvis marched despite appeals in the Times of Israel and Ha’aretz.

Leifer gives as examples of Labour ‘antisemitism’ former London Mayor Ken Livingstone’s assertion that the Nazis supported Zionism in the 1930’s. Even were this untrue it wouldn’t be antisemitic. But a Zionist historian, Professor Francis Nicosia, has spoken of the ‘illusory assumption’ of German Zionism that Zionism “must have been well served by a Nazi victory.” Another Zionist historian, David Cesarani wrote in his book “Final Solution” that “The efforts of the Gestapo are oriented to promoting Zionism as much as possible and lending support to its efforts to promote emigration.” It may be inconvenient today to remember Zionism’s record during the Nazi period, but to tell the truth is never antisemitic.

The IHRA definition of antisemitism

It should be obvious that the IHRA definition of ‘antisemitism’ is about Zionism not antisemitism. What has comparing Israel to pre-war Germany got to do with antisemitism? Was the late Professor Ze’ev Sternhell, a child survivor of the Holocaust, also antisemitic for making such a comparison? Was Knesset member and former deputy chief of staff Yair Golan antisemitic when he made the same comparison?

Leifer quotes uncritically the assertion of the Zionist Board of Deputies that ‘Jeremy Corbyn, simply had no right to argue with Jewish organizations over the definition of antisemitism’. Why not?  No one has a monopoly on the definition of racism.

Not once did Leifer ask why British Jews and Zionist groups had the right to define antisemitism in terms that rule out the Palestinian expression of their experience of racism.

Nor did Leifer ask, Why the need for a definition. The Oxford English Dictionary defines antisemitism as ‘hostility to or prejudice against Jews.’ Why the need for a 500+ WORD definition? My dad took part in the Battle of Cable Street. He didn’t need a definition of antisemitism! Even the principal drafter of the IHRA, Kenneth Stern, has condemned the definition’s weaponisation and chilling of free speech, yet Leifer was seemingly oblivious to the motives behind the Zionist demands to accept the IHRA.

Should Corbyn have ‘apologised’ to the Jewish community?

Quite amazingly Leifer suggests that during the election Corbyn should have apologised for Labour’s ‘antisemitism’ to the Jewish community when asked to do so by BBC interviewer Andrew Neil. The proper response would have been ‘Apologise? What for?’ However, by that time Corbyn too had accepted the false narrative of ‘antisemitism’ and the more people he expelled the more ‘proof’ there was that Labour had an ‘antisemitism’ problem.

That was the real tragedy of Corbyn, not that he put up some resistance to the narrative.

Corbyn’s failure was to refuse to go on to the offensive. When Neil, a former editor of the Murdoch Sunday Times, asked Corbyn to apologise Corbyn should have asked Neil why he was so concerned by antisemitism when he had employed a Holocaust denier, David Irving, to interpret the Goebbels Diaries! Neil as Chairman of the Spectator also agreed to keeping the openly antisemitic Taki Theodoracopulos on as a columnist. (Taki openly praised the Greek Nazi party Golden Dawn and described himself as a “soi-disant anti-Semite”.) Corbyn had an easy response but he was incapable of punching a paper bag. His reformist politics were the problem, not his inability to apologise.

Leifer correctly criticises Corbyn for having ‘no real strategy for pursuing a boldly anti-imperialist, pro-Palestine politics or skillfully parrying the inevitable attacks from his opponents” but the criticism is rich coming from him. His only suggestion for how Corbyn should have parried is to ask ‘What if, instead of retreating into defensiveness, they had moved to reconcile sooner with the British Jewish communal institutions’

He can’t be serious. The answer to his suggestion lies in section 3(d) of the Board of Deputies Constitution which states that the  Board shall

‘Take such appropriate action as lies within its power to advance Israel’s security, welfare and standing.’

The Board of Deputies is an Israel, right or wrong, group. An organisation that tweets its support of the Israeli military when its snipers are mowing down children, is hardly likely to be won over to pro-Palestinian politics!

Appeasement is not a useful strategy. Labour’s Leaked Report makes it clear that Corbyn sincerely believed that if he offered Jackie Walker, Marc Wadsworth, Ken Livingstone and myself up as sacrificial lambs, the Board would be appeased. On page 306 it tells how

Jeremy Corbyn himself and members of his staff team requested to [the Governance and Legal Unit] that particular antisemitism cases be dealt with. In 2017 LOTO [Leader of the Opposition] staff chased for action on high-profile antisemitism cases Ken Livingstone, Tony Greenstein, Jackie Walker and Marc Wadsworth, stressing that these cases were of great concern to Jewish stakeholders and that resolving them was essential to “rebuilding trust between the Labour Party and the Jewish community”.

Well we were expelled but was trust reestablished?  Of course not. They simply demanded more victims like the one honourable MP Chris Williamson. You have to fight a wild animal and Corbyn was not prepared to do that. That was the problem which the ever clever Leifer wasn’t able to discern.

Corbyn’s period as leadership and his demise was indeed a tragedy, one which is now resulting in mass expulsions from the Labour Party. It is or should be crystal clear that the ‘antisemitism’ campaign was never about antisemitism and always about the threat that a party led by a socialist represented.

In 20-30 years some enterprising young journalist will no doubt use the Freedom of Information Act to uncover the names and details of who was at the centre of the anti-Corbyn campaign, orchestrating the different parts.

As for Jewish Currents, it describes itself as ‘a magazine committed to the rich tradition of thought, activism, and culture of the Jewish left.’ I was left wondering what it means to say that you stand in the tradition of the Jewish left?  It seems for many on the passive left this comprises a mixture of romantic kitsch and schmaltzy memories.

The traditions of the Jewish left – the Bund, the Communists, Socialists and Anarchists –can be summed up in one word – solidarity. An injury to one is an injury to all. It was in solidarity with the murdered millions of Jews of Poland that Shmuel Zygielbojm, the Bund representative in the Polish Government-in-exile, committed suicide in London in 1943. This was at the same time as his Zionist counterpart Ignacy Schwarzbart, was playing down the extent of the Holocaust.

The state-sponsored attack against Jeremy Corbyn and the movement that he led is a litmus test of whether or not you are a socialist. Joshua Leifer’s article was an attack on all those who have been victims of the Right’s heresy hunt, not least the Palestinians. I therefore wrote back to the editor suggesting that if Arielle Angel was going to refuse a reply to Leifer’s article then it would be more honest for JC to declare that it represented the non-socialist and non-Marxist left. It seems that to JC being on the ‘left’ is a lifestyle statement.

I have also sent an Open Letter to Peter Beinart.