Hunger for 50 million, no medical care for 40 million and yet a Massive Imperial Army Spread Across the Globe

This is the United States and the ‘Special Relationship’ that Labour Politicians Defend – this is what the ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign is about

When the Board of Deputies, which represents at best 20-30% of British Jews presented its 10 Commandments, Labour politicians fell over themselves to signal their acquiescence. Not merely Keir Starmer and Emily Thornberry but the ‘left’ candidate Rebecca Long-Bailey

Of one thing we can be sure. The Board of Deputies is not and never was concerned about anti-Semitism in Britain. Not merely because it is at historically low levels (despite the propaganda that tells you otherwise) but because the Board is a Zionist group.  Zionism from its inception was founded on the belief that anti-Semitism could not be fought. Which is why it never fought it.

Anyone disagreeing with me is invited to read a copy of the founding pamphlet of Political Zionism, Theodor Herzl’s The Jewish State or more accurately The State of the Jews. Herzl positively boasted of how useful and helpful anti-Semitism was to his Zionist project:

‘the governments of all countries scourged by Anti-Semitism will be keenly interested in assisting us to obtain the sovereignty we want.... Great exertions will hardly be necessary to spur on the movement. Anti-Semites provide the requisite impetus’

In other words anti-Semitism was vital if the Zionist movement was to succeed. Herzl also accepted all the calumnies and stereotypes (or ‘tropes’ to use the current lingo) about Jews.  He wrote:

‘When we sink we become a revolutionary proletariat... when we rise there rises also our terrible power of the purse.’

In his Diaries he wrote (p.9) that

I understand what anti-Semitism is about. We Jews have maintained ourselves, even if through no fault of our own, as a foreign body among’ the various nations. In the ghettos we take on a number of anti-social qualities

The US in Iraq

As Yigal Elam, an Israeli Labour Zionist Historian wrote:

‘Zionism did not consider anti-Semitism an abnormal, absurd, perverse or marginal phenomenon. Zionism considered anti-Semitism a fact of nature, a standard constant, the norm in the relationship of the non-Jews to the presence of Jews in their midst… a normal, almost rational reaction of the gentiles to the abnormal, absurd and perverse situation of the Jewish people in the Diaspora.’ [Zionism and its Scarecrows, Moshe Machover, Maria Offenburg, Khamsin 6]

If the Board of Deputies was concerned about anti-Semitism then it would have taken up the question of the Tory Party’s MEPs sitting in the European parliament with fascists and anti-Semites.  It might even have questioned Boris Johnson over the  many anti-Semitic and racist phrases and parts in his 2004 book 72 Virgins.

But of course the attacks on Corbyn had nothing to do with anti-Semitism but his anti-Americanism. This is well understood by the Labour Right – Keir Starmer, Emily Thornberry, Jess Philips. It is part of our unwritten constitution that both major parties must not question our relationship with the United States.

It is on that basis that I copy two articles.  The first on hunger in the United States. At a time when the US military is literally spending hundreds of billions of dollars a year fighting wars abroad, 50 million Americans go hungry, in particular children and 40 million Americans have no medical insurance cover.

‘The secret of politics under capitalism is to persuade the poor that they should hate other poor people. Their enemy is the 'scrounger', the asylum seeker, the disabled. Anyone but those responsible.’

The secret of politics under capitalism is to persuade the poor that they should hate other poor people. Their enemy is the 'scrounger', the asylum seeker, the disabled. Anyone but the rich. Scapegoatism is built into capitalist politics. What is essential is that people don't blame those who accumulate unprecedented wealth. They are the 'wealth creators' and in this New Labour was as complicit as the Tories.

The article by John Whitehead lifts the lid on American imperialism and its reach across the globe. This is and should be one of the major issues in the Labour Party leadership election. That is why the craven and pathetic acceptance by Rebecca Long-Bailey of the BOD Commands is not a triviality, some kind of irrelevancy. It is crucial to any definition of what it means to be a socialist or left in the 21st century.

That is why the idea that RBL should be supported is not one I support. Anyone who’s socialism rests on the shoulders of US imperialism is not a socialist. 

Tony Greenstein

The Richest Country’s Empty Plates. 50 Million Hungry Americans

By Larry Romanoff

December 19, 2019 "Information Clearing House" –

In July of 2013, Rose Aguilar wrote a wonderful article for al-Jazeera (1), in which she discussed the dire hunger crisis that envelops the US today. In her article, she brought back a memory of something I had long forgotten, an event that so outraged the American public that the government was temporarily forced to respond with more humane policies. That event was a 1968 CBS special hour-long documentary called Hunger in America, in which viewers literally watched a hospitalized child die of starvation. Nixon responded because the public outrage left him no choice, but Reagan quickly dismantled those improvements.

When Reagan came to power in 1980, there were 200 food banks in the US; today there are more than 40,000, all overwhelmed with demand and forced to ration their dispersals. Before 1980, one out of every 50 Americans was dependent on food stamps. Today, it is one out of four. Before Reagan, there were 10 million hungry Americans; today there are more than 50 million and increasing.

A substantial part of the Great Transformation included not only tax cuts and other benefits for the wealthy, but a simultaneous massive reduction in budgets for social programs – in spite of the fact that Reagan and the secret government were creating the conditions that would desperately require those same social programs.

That 50 million hungry Americans today includes the 25% of all children in the US who go to sleep hungry every night. About 25% of the American population today cannot buy sufficient food to remain healthy, with most of these being hungry for at least three months during each year. It is so bad that many college students have resorted to what we call “dumpster-diving” – looking in garbage bins for edible food.

Larry Romanoff is a retired management consultant and businessman. He has held senior executive positions in international consulting firms, and owned an international import-export business. He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University, presenting case studies in international affairs to senior EMBA classes. Mr. Romanoff lives in Shanghai and is currently writing a series of ten books generally related to China and the West. He can be contacted at: 2186604556@qq.com. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Note

(1)        https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/07/201371892231367525.html

The United States Can't Afford Universal Health Care But It Can Afford a Massive Military

Come Home, America: Stop Trying To Dominate The Planet and Put an End to Wars-Without-End

By John W. Whitehead

“Let us resolve that never again will we send the precious young blood of this country to die trying to prop up a corrupt military dictatorship abroad. This is also the time to turn away from excessive preoccupation overseas to the rebuilding of our own nation. America must be restored to a proper role in the world. But we can do that only through the recovery of confidence in ourselves…. together we will call America home to the ideals that nourished us from the beginning. From secrecy and deception in high places; come home, America. From military spending so wasteful that it weakens our nation; come home, America.”—George S. McGovern, former Senator and presidential candidate

January 10, 2020 "Information Clearing House" –

I agree wholeheartedly with George S. McGovern, a former Senator and presidential candidate who opposed the Vietnam War, about one thing: I'm sick of old men dreaming up wars for young men to die in.

It’s time to bring our troops home.

Bring them home from Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. Bring them home from Germany, South Korea and Japan. Bring them home from Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Oman. Bring them home from Niger, Chad and Mali. Bring them home from Turkey, the Philippines, and northern Australia.

That’s not what’s going to happen, of course.

The U.S. military reportedly has more than 1.3 million men and women on active duty, with more than 200,000 of them stationed overseas in nearly every country in the world. Those numbers are likely significantly higher in keeping with the Pentagon’s policy of not fully disclosing where and how many troops are deployed for the sake of “operational security and denying the enemy any advantage.” As investigative journalist David Vine explains, “Although few Americans realize it, the United States likely has more bases in foreign lands than any other people, nation, or empire in history.”

Don’t fall for the propaganda, though: America’s military forces aren’t being deployed abroad to protect our freedoms here at home. Rather, they’re being used to guard oil fields, build foreign infrastructure and protect the financial interests of the corporate elite. In fact, the United States military spends about $81 billion a year just to protect oil supplies around the world.

The reach of America’s military empire includes close to 800 bases in as many as 160 countries, operated at a cost of more than $156 billion annually. As Vine reports, “Even US military resorts and recreation areas in places like the Bavarian Alps and Seoul, South Korea, are bases of a kind. Worldwide, the military runs more than 170 golf courses.”

US military cadets

This is how a military empire occupies the globe.

Already, American military service people are being deployed to far-flung places in the Middle East and elsewhere in anticipation of the war drums being sounded over Iran.

This Iran crisis, salivated over by the neocons since prior to the Iraq War and manufactured by war hawks who want to jumpstart the next world war, has been a long time coming.

Donald Trump, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton: they all have done their part to ensure that the military industrial complex can continue to get rich at taxpayer expense.

Take President Trump, for instance.

Despite numerous campaign promises to stop America’s “endless wars,” once elected, Trump has done a complete about-face, deploying greater numbers of troops to the Middle East, ramping up the war rhetoric, and padding the pockets of defense contractors. Indeed, Trump is even refusing to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq in the face of a request from the Iraqi government for us to leave.

Obama was no different: he also pledged—if elected—to bring the troops home from Iraq and Afghanistan and reduce America's oversized, and overly costly, military footprint in the world. Of course, that didn’t happen.

Yet while the rationale may keep changing for why American military forces are policing the globe, these wars abroad (in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, Yemen and now Iran) aren’t making America—or the rest of the world—any safer, are certainly not making America great again, and are undeniably digging the U.S. deeper into debt.

War spending is bankrupting America.

Although the U.S. constitutes only 5% of the world's population, America boasts almost 50% of the world's total military expenditure, spending more on the military than the next 19 biggest spending nations combined.

In fact, the Pentagon spends more on war than all 50 states combined spend on health, education, welfare, and safety.

The American military-industrial complex has erected an empire unsurpassed in history in its breadth and scope, one dedicated to conducting perpetual warfare throughout the earth.

Since 2001, the U.S. government has spent more than $4.7 trillion waging its endless wars.

Having been co-opted by greedy defense contractors, corrupt politicians and incompetent government officials, America’s expanding military empire is bleeding the country dry at a rate of more than $32 million per hour.

In fact, the U.S. government has spent more money every five seconds in Iraq than the average American earns in a year.

Future wars and military exercises waged around the globe are expected to push the total bill upwards of $12 trillion by 2053.

Talk about fiscally irresponsible: the U.S. government is spending money it doesn’t have on a military empire it can’t afford.

As investigative journalist Uri Friedman puts it, for more than 15 years now, the United States has been fighting terrorism with a credit card, “essentially bankrolling the wars with debt, in the form of purchases of U.S. Treasury bonds by U.S.-based entities like pension funds and state and local governments, and by countries like China and Japan.”

War is not cheap, but it becomes outrageously costly when you factor in government incompetence, fraud, and greedy contractors. Indeed, a leading accounting firm concluded that one of the Pentagon’s largest agencies “can’t account for hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of spending.”

Unfortunately, the outlook isn’t much better for the spending that can be tracked.

A government audit found that defense contractor Boeing has been massively overcharging taxpayers for mundane parts, resulting in tens of millions of dollars in overspending. As the report noted, the American taxpayer paid:

$71 for a metal pin that should cost just 4 cents; $644.75 for a small gear smaller than a dime that sells for $12.51: more than a 5,100 percent increase in price. $1,678.61 for another tiny part, also smaller than a dime, that could have been bought within DoD for $7.71: a 21,000 percent increase. $71.01 for a straight, thin metal pin that DoD had on hand, unused by the tens of thousands, for 4 cents: an increase of over 177,000 percent.

That price gouging has become an accepted form of corruption within the American military empire is a sad statement on how little control “we the people” have over our runaway government.

Mind you, this isn’t just corrupt behavior. It’s deadly, downright immoral behavior.

Americans have thus far allowed themselves to be spoon-fed a steady diet of pro-war propaganda that keeps them content to wave flags with patriotic fervor and less inclined to look too closely at the mounting body counts, the ruined lives, the ravaged countries, the blowback arising from ill-advised targeted-drone killings and bombing campaigns in foreign lands, or the transformation of our own homeland into a warzone.

That needs to change.

The U.S. government is not making the world any safer. It’s making the world more dangerous. It is estimated that the U.S. military drops a bomb somewhere in the world every 12 minutes. Since 9/11, the United States government has directly contributed to the deaths of around 500,000 human beings. Every one of those deaths was paid for with taxpayer funds.

The U.S. government is not making America any safer. It’s exposing American citizens to alarming levels of blowback, a CIA term referring to the unintended consequences of the U.S. government’s international activities. Chalmers Johnson, a former CIA consultant, repeatedly warned that America’s use of its military to gain power over the global economy would result in devastating blowback.

The 9/11 attacks were blowback. The Boston Marathon Bombing was blowback. The attempted Times Square bomber was blowback. The Fort Hood shooter, a major in the U.S. Army, was blowback.

The assassination of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani by a U.S. military drone strike will, I fear, spur yet more blowback against the American people.

The war hawks’ militarization of America—bringing home the spoils of war (the military tanks, grenade launchers, Kevlar helmets, assault rifles, gas masks, ammunition, battering rams, night vision binoculars, etc.) and handing them over to local police, thereby turning America into a battlefield—is also blowback.

James Madison was right: “No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.” As Madison explained, “Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes… known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.”

We are seeing this play out before our eyes.

The government is destabilizing the economy, destroying the national infrastructure through neglect and a lack of resources, and turning taxpayer dollars into blood money with its endless wars, drone strikes and mounting death tolls.

Clearly, our national priorities are in desperate need of an overhauling.

At the height of its power, even the mighty Roman Empire could not stare down a collapsing economy and a burgeoning military. Prolonged periods of war and false economic prosperity largely led to its demise. As historian Chalmers Johnson predicts:

The fate of previous democratic empires suggests that such a conflict is unsustainable and will be resolved in one of two ways. Rome attempted to keep its empire and lost its democracy. Britain chose to remain democratic and in the process let go its empire. Intentionally or not, the people of the United States already are well embarked upon the course of non-democratic empire.

This is the “unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex” that President Dwight Eisenhower warned us more than 50 years ago not to let endanger our liberties or democratic processes.

Eisenhower, who served as Supreme Commander of the Allied forces in Europe during World War II, was alarmed by the rise of the profit-driven war machine that emerged following the war—one that, in order to perpetuate itself, would have to keep waging war.

We failed to heed his warning.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, there’s not much time left before we reach the zero hour.

It’s time to stop policing the globe, end these wars-without-end, and bring the troops home before it’s too late.

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His new book Battlefield America: The War on the American People  is available at www.amazon.com. Whitehead can be contacted at johnw@rutherford.org.

See also No Kid Hungry

Moshe Machover on What is Zionism and why the accusation that Anti-Zionism = Anti-Semitism is a lie

Falsely accused of anti-Semitism

Professor Moshe Machover very kindly agreed to provide expert witness testimony to my Expulsion Hearing before Labour’s National Constitutional Committee. 

Moshé was himself ‘autoexcluded’ from the Labour Party at the beginning of October 2017.  Because of the outrage this caused in the Labour Movement, Moshe was quickly reinstated.

It’s purpose is to provide the Panel which is hearing my case with no excuse for saying ‘We did not know’.  After the last war many people said that ‘we didn’ know’ about what happened.  They were in the dark.  It is important that if I am expelled it is not because the members of the panel can say they didn’t know or were not aware of Israeli Apartheid and Zionism’s crimes.

My suspension is as a direct result of the lobbying of the Jewish Labour Movement and its Chair, Jeremy Newmark. The JLM is the British representative of the Israeli Labour Party, a party which was responsible for the expulsion of ¾ million Palestinian refugees in 1948. 

Right-wing Chair of the National Constitutional Committee Rose Burley - defeated by the Left in elections last year but she's still on the NCC

The ILP is a disgusting racist party that should have no contact with the Labour Party.  Its last leader Isaac Herzog declared that his nightmare was waking up to find that Israel had a Palestinian Prime Minister and 61 Palestinian Members of Israel’s Knesset .   Herzog also declared that he wanted to dispel the impression that the ILP were ‘Arab Lovers’.

Imagine that someone were to say that their fear was that Britain might have a Jewish Prime Minister or that the Labour Party was not a ‘Jew lovers’ party.  The term ‘Jew lover’ and ‘N***** lover’ used to be part of the language of the National Front and BNP. 

On May 24th Herzog wrote an article attacking Netanyahu's government for not being tough enough with the Eritreans refugees who comprise 2/3 of Israel's total.  Herzog wrote that 'Nearly two-thirds of infiltrators come from one country adjacent to the Red Sea: Eritrea.'  The reason Herzog called them 'infiltrators' was because this was the racist term applied to Palestinian refugees who tried to return to the lands from which they were expelled.  It conveys the racist idea that the Jewish state is being 'infiltrated' by non-Jews.  Herzog deliberately refused to call the Eritreans what they are, refugees and seeks to associate them with that other Zionist demon - Palestinian refugees.  .

Herzog has recently been replaced as leader by Avi Gabbay, who served in Netanyahu’s Cabinet.  He has supported Netanyahu’s proposal to physically deport African refugees from Israel because they are not Jewish.  He has also declared that he won’t sit in Israel’s cabinet with the Arab parties of the Joint List but he didn’t rule out sitting in the Knesset with Avigdor Lieberman of Yisrael Beteinu, a man who has said he would like to drown the thousands of Palestinian prisoners in the Dead Sea. 

The pretext for Moshe’s expulsion was his participation in the 2016 Communist University organised by the Communist Party of Great Britain.  In fact Moshe and I both spoke together in 2016 and 2017 at the Communist University.    

empty solar panels stands - the Israeli army confiscated them

Palestinians are being dispossessed

This testimony is addressed to the Labour Party National Constitutional Committee in connection with its hearing called to consider accusations of ‘anti-Semitism’ that have been made against Tony Greenstein by person or persons unknown.

I am a dissident Israel citizen, born in Palestine in 1936. I have been living in London since 1968 and am a naturalised British citizen. I am a member of the Labour Party, Queen’s Park branch (Hampstead and Kilburn constituency).

I have known Tony Greenstein for over 40 years as a staunch socialist - active in defence of the rights of workers, in particular the unemployed - and against all racism, including anti-Semitism. In line with this, he is an uncompromising opponent of the Zionist project of colonisation and of Israel’s Zionist regime, which makes it a colonising settler state. He has devoted much scholarship and thorough research to the history of Zionism and the dialectic of its complex and paradoxical relationship with anti-Semitism. Having myself also done much reading on the subject, I find his statements on it well grounded in fact.

In what follows I address three related questions. First I discuss the nature of Zionism, then the conflation between opposition to Zionism and anti-Semitism. Finally I deconstruct the deliberate misdefinition of ‘anti-Semitism’ and its weaponisation as a means of attacking leftwing critics of Israel.

The Apartheid wall

What is Zionism?

Zionism is a political movement that combines an ideology and a project. While - like most political movements - it comprises a variety of currents and shades of opinion, they all have a common core.

The core of Zionist ideology is the belief that the Jews of all countries constitute a single national entity rather than a mere religious denomination; and that this national entity has a right to self-determination, which it is entitled to exercise by reclaiming its historical (or god-given) homeland - pre-1948 Palestine (Eretz Yisrael, the Land of Israel).

Here, for example, is an authoritative formulation:

Zionism is the national revival movement of the Jews. It holds that the Jews are a people and therefore have the right to self- determination in their own national home. It aims to secure and support a legally recognised national home for the Jews in their historical homeland, and to initiate and stimulate a revival of Jewish national life, culture and language.¹

However, this claim begs a couple of questions. Do the totality of Jews constitute a nation in the modern secular sense, to which the right of national self-determination is applicable? This is at best extremely questionable, and has in fact been denied by many Jews, who assert cogently that Jewish identity is not national, but primarily based on religion.

Burnt out Arab villages in the Nakba, it was the Labour Zionist militias who did this

Thus, when Lucien Wolf - distinguished journalist and leading member of the Conjoint Foreign Committee of British Jews - was confronted with Chaim Weizmann’s effort to obtain what was to be known as the Balfour Declaration, he wrote a worried letter to James de Rothschild, dated August 31 1916:

Dear Mr James de Rothschild 

At the close of our conference with Dr Weizmann on the 17th inst, you asked me to write you a letter defining my view. ....

I have thought over very carefully the various statements made to me by Dr Weizmann, and, with the best will in the world, I am afraid I must say that there are vital and irreconcilable differences of principles and method between us.
The question of principle is raised by Dr Weizmann’s assertion of a Jewish nationality. The assertion has to be read in the light of the authoritative essay on ‘Zionism and the Jewish future’ recently published by Mr Sacher, more especially those written by Dr Weizmann himself and by Dr Gaster. I understand from these essays that the Zionists do not merely propose to form and establish a Jewish nationality in Palestine, but that they claim all the Jews as forming at the present moment a separate and dispossessed nationality, for which it is necessary to find an organic political centre, because they are and must always be aliens in the lands in which they now dwell (Weizmann, p6), and, more especially, because it is “an absolute self-delusion” to believe that any Jew can be at once “English by nationality and Jewish by faith” (Gaster, pp92, 93). 

I have spent most of my life in combating these very doctrines, when presented to me in the form of anti-Semitism, and I can only regard them as the more dangerous when they come to me in the guise of Zionism. They constitute a capitulation to our enemies, which has absolutely no justification in history, ethnology, or the facts of everyday life, and if they were admitted by the Jewish people as a whole, the result would only be that the terrible situation of our coreligionists in Russia and Romania would become the common lot of Jewry throughout the world.²

And on May 24 1917, as negotiations that were to lead to the Balfour Declaration were at an advanced stage, Alexander and Claude Montefiore - presidents respectively of the Board of Deputies of British Jews and of the Anglo-Jewish Association - wrote a letter to The Times in the name of the Conjoint Committee of these two bodies, protesting against the fallacies and dangers of political Zionism. After declaring their adherence to Lucien Wolf’s position, the writers went on to say that the theories of political Zionism undermined the religious basis of Jewry, to which the only alternative would be

Palestinian refugees in 1948

a secular Jewish nationality, recruited on some loose and obscure principle of race and of ethnographic peculiarity. But this would not be Jewish in any spiritual sense, and its establishment in Palestine would be a denial of all the ideals and hopes by which the survival of Jewish life in that country commends itself to the Jewish conscience and Jewish sympathy. On these grounds the Conjoint Committee of the Board of Deputies and the Anglo-Jewish Association deprecates earnestly the national proposals of the Zionists.

The second part in the Zionist programme which has aroused the misgivings of the Conjoint Committee is the proposal to invest the Jewish settlers [in Palestine] with certain special rights in excess of those enjoyed by the rest of the population ...

In all the countries in which Jews live the principle of equal rights for all religious denominations is vital to them. Were they to set an example in Palestine of disregarding this principle, they would convict themselves of having appealed to it for purely selfish motives. In the countries in which they are still struggling for equal rights they would find themselves hopelessly compromised ... The proposal is the more inadmissible because the Jews are and probably long will remain a minority of the population of Palestine, and might involve them in the bitterest feuds with their neighbours of other races and religions, which would severely retard their progress and find deplorable echoes thought the Orient.

The view - evidently held by these leaders of the British Jewish community - that Jewishness is religion-based rather than a national category relies on basic facts. Indeed, the only attribute shared by all Jews around the world is the religion, Judaism, practised by them or by their recent forebears. Further, a necessary and sufficient condition for a non-Jew to become Jewish is undergoing a religious conversion: giyyur. Thus Jews can belong to various nations: a Jew may be French, American, Italian, Scottish, etc. But Jewishness excludes other religious affiliations: a Jew cannot be Muslim, Hindu or Roman Catholic.

Another fatal weakness of the justifications of Zionism as implementing an alleged right of Jewish national self-determination is that, whatever group of people the right of national self-determination may apply to, it does not entitle them to pick and choose at will the territory over which they may exercise that right. Claims that the group’s alleged distant ancestors lived in the coveted territory many centuries ago, or that it was promised to them by a deity in whose existence many of them happen to believe, or that they have long wished to possess it, are simply not good enough. The right to self-determination certainly does not license any group to colonise a territory long inhabited by other people.

But the key fact about the Zionist project is precisely that it is a project of colonisation of Palestine - an inhabited land; and it is precisely this essential fact that is conveniently omitted by the definition of Zionism offered by its present-day propagandists. They avoid the word ‘colonisation’ like the proverbial plague; it has become too compromising.

Ze'ev Jabotinsky - leader of the Revisionist Zionists - sympathetic to fascism

Earlier Zionist leaders and ideologues had no such qualms. Thus, for example, Vladimir Jabotinsky (1880-1940) - the political and spiritual progenitor of five Israeli prime ministers, including Binyamin Netanyahu³ - used in his seminal article, ‘The Iron Wall’ (1923), the term ‘colonisation’ repeatedly and unselfconsciously to describe the Zionist project:

Every native population in the world resists colonists as long as it has the slightest hope of being able to rid itself of the danger of being colonised. That is what the Arabs in Palestine are doing, and what they will persist in doing as long as there remains a solitary spark of hope that they will be able to prevent the transformation of ‘Palestine’ into the ‘Land of Israel’ ...

Colonisation can have only one aim, and Palestine Arabs cannot accept this aim. It lies in the very nature of things, and in this particular regard nature cannot be changed ..

.

Zionist colonisation must either stop or else proceed regardless of the native population. Which means that it can proceed and develop only under the protection of a power [ie, Britain - MM] that is independent of the native population - behind an iron wall, which the native population cannot breach.⁴

Many years later, Zionist historian Yigal Elam wrote:

Zionism couldn’t appeal to the principle of self-determination and rely on it in Palestine. This principle worked clearly against it and in favour of the local Arab national movement ... 

From the viewpoint of national theory, Zionism needed a fiction that was incompatible with the accepted concepts of national theory ... [It] needed a much broader conception than the simplistic one. In this other conception ... referendum of the worlds Jews superseded referendum of the population of Palestine.⁵

Conflation with anti-Semitism

As we have seen, Zionism is a political ideology-cum-project. The State of Israel - a product of the Zionist project as well as an instrument for its continuation and extension - is, like any state, a political entity.

Israel has been in military occupation of the West Bank and the besieged Gaza Strip for over 50 years and is exercising harsh oppression over millions of Palestinian Arabs, who have no civil or national rights. It has been avidly stealing their land and colonising it with illegal, exclusively Jewish settlements. Israel may not be worse in this respect than other states that ruled over other nations and colonised their land - for example, Britain in its former colonies, such as Kenya.⁶ But Israel is also no better than other colonising states, nor is there any reason to expect it to be any better: colonisation has its own logic, and generally involves harsh, racist oppression and occasional atrocities, justified by the ‘need to keep order among the natives’. Israeli officially inspired and fomented racism is by now widely known and condemned.⁷

Opposition to Zionism and to the colonising regime and policies of Israel is therefore a legitimate political position. It only becomes illegitimate if it is motivated or accompanied by illegitimate aims or arguments: for example, such as stem from generalised hatred or prejudice against Jews as Jews. But such illegitimate motives or arguments need to be proven before accusing an opponent of Zionism and Israel’s regime of ‘anti-Semitism’; they cannot simply be assumed or taken for granted. In the absence of proof, accusation or insinuation that anti-Zionist discourse and opposition to the Israeli regime are per se ‘anti-Semitic’ is a despicable calumny.

Nevertheless this kind of calumny has often been maliciously made; and latterly it is often directed against people on the left, including members of the Labour Party. I have been besmirched in this way by some party officials - for which they have yet to apologise. And many others, including Tony Greenstein, are victims of similar character assassination.

Jews in the diaspora, including this country, are deeply divided in their attitude to Zionism and Israel. Many have made attachment to Israel part of their Jewish identity, as a supplement - and in some cases as a surrogate - to their religion, Judaism. They support Israel ‘right or wrong’ and tend to assume that hostility to Zionism must be motivated by anti-Semitism.

But an increasing number of Jews have a very different attitude: they are deeply offended by the actions of a state that claims to be the ‘nation- state of the Jewish people’, and professes to represent all Jews and act on their behalf. They abhor the implication that they, as Jews, are complicit in Israel’s crimes. Jewish opponents of Zionism include many secular Jews, as well as the ultra-Orthodox (Haredi) community, whose long-standing and deep-seated hostility to Zionism is based on their religious faith.⁸

Opposition to Zionism has been increasing among younger Jews, especially those on the left, including the Labour Party. This is the firm impression I have formed through extensive contacts and it was indeed corroborated by events and general atmosphere at the party conference in September 2017. This trend is not fully reflected in the various polls and surveys that purport to show much Jewish support for Israel. The reason is that these polls suffer from an inbuilt statistical bias. Since there is no database listing all Jews in Britain, the samples used by the polls miss out on the very large number of persons of Jewish background who are not affiliated to any synagogue or other official or semi-official Jewish organisation. And it is those not included in the sample space who tend to be less inclined to Zionism and attachment to Israel.

Deliberate misdefinition

Jewish opposition to Israel’s colonisation of Palestinian land and oppression of the Palestinian people is part of a growing trend in progressive public opinion around the world. This is reflected in the rapid growth of the global campaign for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS), aiming to apply economic and political pressure on Israel to end its violations of international law.

Faced with this serious damage to its image, the Israeli government has taken steps to attack and 

discredit its critics by a variety of means, fair and foul. Worldwide operations with this object are orchestrated by the Ministry of Strategic Affairs. Since 2015, this ministry is headed by cabinet member Gilad Erdan, who is also minister of internal security and information. Erdan himself is on record as stating that his “achievements should be kept hush-hush”.⁹The Guardian, reporting on his secret meeting in London in September 2017 with disgraced Tory minister Priti Patel (following her return from a ‘holiday’ in Israel), comments:

Erdan’s ministry was asked in 2015 to “guide, coordinate and integrate the activities of all the ministers and the government and of civil entities in Israel and abroad on the subject of the struggle against attempts to delegitimise Israel and the boycott movement” ... Erdan has been put in charge of large-scale efforts to target foreign individuals and organisations ... [with] staff recruited from the Mossad foreign intelligence agency, the Shin Bet domestic intelligence agency, and the military intelligence directorate.¹⁰

One of the main weapons in these “efforts to target foreign individuals and organisations” who criticise Israel, especially those who support BDS, is to accuse them of ‘anti-Semitism’. In this campaign, Erdan’s operatives in foreign countries harness local pro-Israel lobbies. An exposé of how such an undercover operative, Shai Masot, worked in this country, and his attempts to meddle in the Labour Party, was provided in January 2017 by Al Jazeera in a fascinating four-part TV series, The lobby.¹¹

Since Tony Greenstein’s accusers are concealed behind a veil of anonymity, it is impossible to ascertain whether, or to what extent, their efforts (which involved formidable trawling for ‘incriminating’ material) received help, encouragement and guidance from Erdan’s operatives. But in light of the Al Jazeera revelations - which included illustration of false accusations of ‘anti-Semitism’ - this supposition cannot be entirely ruled out. In order to dispel suspicions of this kind, the identity of the accusers must be made known and they must be subjected to cross-examination, as natural justice demands.

A weapon regularly used in the false accusations of ‘anti-Semitism’ is the set of 11 illustrative examples appended to the so-called working definition of anti-Semitism proposed by a US-based group calling itself ‘International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’ (IHRA). To the best of my knowledge, the Labour Party has not adopted the illustrative examples, but only the definition itself:

Anti-Semitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of anti-Semitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.

However, the accusations made against Tony Greenstein quote the illustrative examples and make extensive use of them. While the definition itself is in my opinion unsatisfactory, the examples are deeply problematic. Most of them are concerned not with Jews as such, but with Israel, and are deliberately designed to ring-fence Israel against robust criticism and conflate hostility to its Zionist regime with ‘anti-Semitism’. These examples have indeed been harshly criticised by eminent legal authorities: Hugh Tomlinson QC¹² and retired appeal court judge Sir Stephen Sedley.¹³

Please consult these authoritative opinions and note their warning that applying the examples may well conflict with the right to free speech. Here I will illustrate the absurdity of the examples by examining two of them.

Example 7 of alleged anti-Semitism appended to the IHRA definition is: “Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination: eg, by claiming that the existence of a state of Israel is a racist endeavor [sic!].”

Now, as Sir Stephen Sedley has pointed out, this begs several questions. Let me spell them out.

What is the relationship between the first and second part of this example? How does the ‘eg’ part of the statement have any connectionwith the first part? It is clearly possible to affirm that there exists aJewish people and it has a right to self-determination, but at the sametime to believe that its alleged implementation in the State of Israel isa racist endeavour.

• Do the totality of Jews around the world constitute a distinct nation, to which the right of self-determination would apply? As I have shown above, it is perfectly legitimate to assert that Jewishness is not a national but a religious category. And this has indeed been argued by eminent Jewish leaders. But the internationally recognised political right to self-determination applies to nations, not to religions.
• Does the Jewish community in this country constitute part of a non-British national minority, entitled to seek self-determination in another country?
• Does a group that is assumed to have the right of self-determination thereby also have right to colonise a territory inhabited by other people and displace these indigenous inhabitants? Surely not! But the Zionist project from its beginning, more than 100 years ago, did arrogate to itself such a ‘right’.
• Can an endeavour of colonisation - which Zionism is, and openly declared itself to be in its early days - avoid being racist towards the indigenous people of the colonised territory? I know of no example of non-racist colonisation; and the Israeli settler state definitely conforms to the general rule.

Example 10 of alleged anti-Semitism appended to the IHRA definition is: “Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.”

Now, comparisons of this kind have in fact been made by Israeli scholars. As recent examples, let me refer you to two articles by professor Daniel Blatman, a historian of holocaust and genocide in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem¹⁴ and to a report about a pronouncement made by professor Ofer Cassif, who teaches politics and government at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.¹⁵

But look again at that example 10. Let me concede for a moment that comparing contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis is an unjustified slur. But slur against what or whom? At worst, it could be a slur against a state, Israel; and as such it may well upset supporters of that state and those who still believe in it. But how can it possibly be a slur against the Jews, and hence ‘anti-Semitic’? Well, the only way in which it could bear such an interpretation is if we hold all Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel.

However, example 11 of anti-Semitism appended to the IHRA definition reads: “Holding all Jews as collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel.”

This is evidently correct: it is indeed clearly anti-Semitic to hold all Jews collectively responsible for the deeds of Israel. But if we accept that example 11 is indeed a true example of anti-Semitism, as it clearly is, then the assertion that example 10 is a true example of anti-Semitism is itself an anti-Semitic assertion!

Thus the set of 11 examples taken together is self-contradictory and self-incriminating. They ought to be discarded; and most certainly they should have never been used so shamefully to smear Tony Greenstein - a veteran campaigner against all racism.

Notes

1. Zionism on the web: Zionism defined (www.zionismontheweb.org/zionism_definitions.htm). For similar but briefer formulations, see, for example, Jonathan Freedland in The Guardian, March 18 2016 (www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/mar/18/labour-antisemitism-jews-jeremy-corbyn); or Eylon Aslan-Levy in The Times of Israel, December 8 2013 (http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/the-trouble-with-anti-zionism).

2. Photocopy of typewritten original in B Destani (ed) The Zionist movement and the foundation of Israel 1839-1972, 10-volume set: Political diaries 1918-1965 Cambridge 2004, Vol 1, p727. My emphasis.

3. The others are Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Shamir, Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert.

4. ‘The iron wall’ (‘O Zheleznoi stene’), published November 4 1923 in the Russian- language journal Rassvyet (Dawn); English translation: www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/quot-the-iron-wall-quot.

5. Y Elam, ‘Hanahot hadashot leota tzionut’ (‘New assumptions for the same Zionism’) Ot No2, winter 1967; my translation (emphasis in original).

6. M Perry, ‘Uncovering the brutal truth about the British empire’ The Guardian August 18 2016.

7. See, for example, comment by the senior Israeli journalist, Akiva Eldar: ‘Israeli defense minister’s comments highlight “plague of racism”’ Al Monitor December 14 2017 (www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2017/12/israel-xenophia-racism-minorities-human-rights-liberman.html).

8. See A Ravitzky, ‘Ultra-Orthodox and Anti-Zionist’ (www.myjewishlearning.com/article/ultra-orthodox-anti-zionist).

9.   www.facebook.com/gilad.erdan/photos/a.225201850853267.56972.207139259326193/1265886783451430/?type=3&theater (August 7 2016).

10. ‘What did Israel hope to gain from Priti Patel’s secret meetings?’ The Guardian November 8 2017.

11. www.aljazeera.com/investigations/thelobby.

12. ‘Opinion: In the matter of the adoption and potential application of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance Working Definition of Anti-Semitism’, March 8 2017 (http://freespeechonisrael.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/TomlinsonGuidanceIHRA.pdf).

13. Talk delivered at a meeting in the House of Lords on March 27 2017: http://freespeechonisrael.org.uk/sedley-ihra/#respond. Revised version: ‘Defining anti-Semitism’ London Review of Books May 4 2017.

14. ‘The Israeli lawmaker heralding genocide against Palestinians’ Ha’aretz May 23 2017 (www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-1.791115); ‘Smotrich’s stage-by-stage plan’ (Hebrew) Ha’aretz June 10 2017 (www.haaretz.co.il/opinions/.premium-1.4158915).

15. ‘Hebrew U professor: Israel today similar to Nazi Germany’ Jerusalem Post June 23 2017 (www.jpost.com/Israel-News/Hebrew-U-professor-Todays-Israel-similar-to-Nazi-Germany-497731).