Brighton Rally and March Against Genocide in Palestine

The Longer Israel Attacks a Defenceless People the More Its Support Drains Away

There was a massive rally at the Clocktower in Brighton today and then an even larger march, with over a thousand people taking part, to the Level in Brighton.  Here are some photographs and videos.

Once again it shows that Brighton is the capital of the anti-Zionist and Palestinian struggle in Britain!  Well the Zionists claim we are the anti-Semitic capital but we know what Zionists mean when they say ‘anti-Semitism’.

Also I am including a wonderful video made by the journalist Abby Martin in Gaza describing life under siege in Gaza.

And below that I include an article on the other aspect of what is happening in Israel itself. For the first time since the beginning of the Second Intifada in 2000 Israel’s Palestinian population have mobilised in support of the struggle against the occupation and in particular the desecration by Israeli police thugs of the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem.

This has been met with vigilante squads of Israeli fascists attacking Israeli Palestinians in their homes, including burning down mosques and Palestinian shops.  This vigilante violence, although condemned by Israeli politicians has been supported if not encouraged by the Israeli police who have stood by as Palestinians have been lynched and dragged out of their cars.

Let us remember that the Zionist movement can trace its origins to the pogroms against Jews in Odessa in 1881. Zionism has now decided to replicate the actions of the anti-Semites with its own pogroms against Palestinians. That is some achievement.

It demonstrates that racism and fascism is not genetic or peculiar to any people or group.  Given the right set of circumstances any people can become racists and murderers and that is Zionism’s achievement in its ‘Jewish’ state.

News has also come in of Italian Dockers Refusing to Load Arms Shipment to Israel in Solidarity with Palestine

Abby Martin

Jerusalem protests: The mob ‘breaking faces’ learned from Israel’s establishment

4 May 2021

A quarter of Israeli Jews recognise their rule over Palestinians as ‘apartheid’. The question is whether they think that’s a bad thing

Jonathan Cook

Middle East Eye – 4 May 2021

Inside the Israeli parliament and out on the streets of Jerusalem, the forces of unapologetic Jewish supremacism are stirring, as a growing section of Israel’s youth tire of the two-faced Jewish nationalism that has held sway in Israel for decades.

Last week, Bezalel Smotrich, leader of the far-right Religious Zionism faction, a vital partner if caretaker Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stands any hope of forming a new government, issued a barely veiled threat to Israel’s large Palestinian minority.

Expulsion, he suggested, was looming for these 1.8 million Palestinians, a fifth of the Israeli population who enjoy very degraded citizenship. “Arabs are citizens of Israel – for now at least,” he told his party. “And they have representatives at the Knesset [Israeli parliament] – for now at least.” For good measure, he referred to Palestinian legislators – the elected representatives of Israel’s Palestinian minority – as “our enemies sitting in the Knesset”.

Smotrich’s brand of brazen Jewish racism is on the rise, after his faction won six mandates in the 120-member parliament in March. One of those seats is for Itamar Ben Gvir, head of the neo-fascist Jewish Power party.

Ben Gvir’s supporters are now in a bullish mood. Last month, they took to the streets around the occupied Old City of Jerusalem, chanting “Death to Arabs” and making good on promises in WhatsApp chats to attack Palestinians and “break their faces”.

For days, these Jewish gangs of mostly youngsters have brought the lawless violence that has long reigned largely out of sight in the hills of the occupied West Bank into central Jerusalem. This time, their attacks haven’t been captured in shaky, out-of-focus YouTube videos. They have been shown on prime-time Israeli TV.

Equally significant, these Jewish mobs have carried out their rampages during Ramadan, the Muslim holy month of fasting.

Arson attacks

The visibility and premeditation of this gang violence has discomfited many Israelis. But in the process, they have been given a close-up view of how appealing the violent, anti-Arab doctrines of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane – the ideological inspiration behind Jewish Power – are proving with a significant section of young Jews in Israel.

One, sporting a “Kahane was right” badge, spoke for her peers as she was questioned on Israeli TV about the noisy chants of “May your village burn down” – a reference to so-called “price-tag” arson attacks committed by the Israeli far-right against Palestinian communities in the occupied territories and inside Israel.

Olive groves, mosques, cars and homes are regularly torched by these Jewish extremists, who claim Palestinian lands as their exclusive biblical birthright.

The woman responded in terms she obviously thought conciliatory:

“I don’t say that it [a Palestinian village] should burn down, but that you should leave the village and we’ll go live in it.”

She and others now sound impatient to bring forward the day when Palestinians must “leave”.

Machinery of oppression

These sentiments – in the parliament and out on the streets – have not emerged out of nowhere. They are as old as Zionism itself, when Israel’s first leaders oversaw the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from most of their homeland in 1948, in an act of mass dispossession Palestinians called their Nakba (catastrophe).

Violence to remove Palestinians has continued to be at the core of the Jewish state-building project ever since. The rationale for the gangs beating up Palestinians in occupied East Jerusalem are the actions pursued more bureaucratically by the Israeli state: its security forces, occupation administrators and courts.

Last week, that machinery of oppression came under detailed scrutiny in a 213-page report from Human Rights Watch. The leading international human rights group declared that Israel was committing the crime of apartheid, as set out in international law.

It argued that Israel had met the three conditions of apartheid in the crime of Ramadan,Meir Kahane Nakba East Jerusalem Human Rights Watch apartheid,Rome Statute: the domination of one racial group over another, systematic oppression of the marginalised group, and inhumane acts. Those acts include forcible transfer, expropriation of landed property, the creation of separate reserves and ghettos, denial of the right to leave and return to their country, and denial of the right to a nationality.

Only one such act is needed to qualify as the crime of apartheid but, as Human Rights Watch makes clear, Israel is guilty of them all.

Dragged out of bed

What Human Rights Watch and other human rights groups have been documenting is equally visible to the gangs roaming Jerusalem. Israel’s official actions share a common purpose, one that sends a clear message to these youngsters about what the state – and Israel’s national ideology of Zionism – aims to achieve.

They see Palestinian land reclassified as Jewish “state land” and the constant expansion of settlements that violate international law. They see Palestinians denied permits to build homes in their own villages. They see orders issued to demolish Palestinian homes, or even entire communities. And they see Palestinian families torn apart as couples, or their children, are refused the right to live together.

Meanwhile, Israeli soldiers shoot Palestinians with impunity, and drag Palestinian children out of bed in the middle of the night. They man checkpoints throughout the occupied West Bank, restricting the movement of Palestinians. They fire on, or “arrest”, Palestinians trying to seek work outside the closed-off ghettos Israel has imposed on them. And soldiers stand guard, or assist, as settlers run amok, attacking Palestinians in their homes and fields.

All of this is invariably rubber-stamped as “legal” by the Israeli courts. Is it any surprise, then, that growing numbers of Israeli teenagers question why all these military, legal and administrative formalities are really necessary? Why not just beat up Palestinians and “break their faces” until they get the message that they must leave?

Uppity natives

The battlefront in Jerusalem in recent days – characterised misleadingly in most media as the site of “clashes” – has been the sunken plaza in front of Damascus Gate, a major entrance to the walled Old City and the Muslim and Christian holy places that lie within.

The gate is possibly the last prominent public space Palestinians can still claim as theirs in central Jerusalem, after decades in which Israeli occupation authorities have gradually encircled and besieged their neighbourhoods, severing them from the Old City. During Ramadan, Damascus Gate serves as a popular communal site for Palestinians to congregate in the evenings after the daytime fast.

It was Israeli police who triggered the current explosive mood in Jerusalem by erecting barriers at Damascus Gate to seal the area off at the start of Ramadan. The pretext was to prevent overcrowding, but – given their long experience of occupation – Palestinians understood the barriers as another “temporary” measure that quickly becomes permanent, making it ever harder for them to access the Old City and their holy sites. Other major gates to the occupied Old City have already been effectively “Judaised”.

The decision of Israeli police to erect barriers cannot be divorced from a bigger context for Palestinians: the continuing efforts by Israeli authorities to evict them from areas around the Old City. In recent weeks, fresh waves of armed Jewish settlers have been moving into Silwan, a Palestinian community in the shadow of al-Aqsa Mosque. They have done so as Israel prepares to raze an entire Palestinian neighbourhood there, using its absolute control over planning issues.

Similarly, the Israeli courts have approved the eviction of Palestinians in Sheikh Jarrah, another neighbourhood under belligerent occupation close to the Old City that has been subjected to a long-running, state-backed campaign by Jewish settlers to take it over. Last month, Jerusalem officials added insult to injury by approving a plan to build a memorial to fallen Israeli soldiers in the midst of the Palestinian community.

The decision to close off the Damascus Gate area was therefore bound to provoke resistance from Palestinians, who fought police to take down the barriers. Police responded with tear gas, stun grenades and water cannon.

Those scenes – of uppity natives refusing to be disappeared back into their homes – were part of the trigger that brought the Jewish gangs out onto the streets in a show of force. Police largely let the mob rampage, as youths threw stones and bottles and attacked Palestinians.

Tired of half measures

The sight of Jewish gangs roaming central Jerusalem to hurt Palestinians has been described as a “pogrom” by some progressive US Jewish groups. But the difference between the far-right and the Israeli state in implementing their respective violent agendas is more apparent than real.

Smotrich, Ben Gvir and these street gangs are tired of the half-measures, procrastination and moral posturing by Israeli elites who have hampered efforts to “finish the job”: clearing the native Palestinian population off their lands once and for all.

Whereas Israeli politicians on the left and right have rationalised their ugly, racist actions on the pretext of catch-all “security” measures, the far-right has no need for the international community’s approval. They are impatient for a conclusion to more than seven decades of ethnic cleansing.

And the ranks of the far-right are likely to swell further as it attracts ever-larger numbers of a new generation of the ultra-Orthodox community, the fastest-growing section of Israel’s Jewish population. For the first time, nationalist youths from the Haredi community are turning their backs on a more cautious rabbinical leadership.

And while the violence in Jerusalem has subsided for the moment, the worst is unlikely to be over. The final days of Ramadan coincide this year with the notorious Jerusalem Day parade, an annual ritual in which Jewish ultra-nationalists march through the besieged Palestinian streets of the Old City chanting threats to Palestinians and attacking any who dare to venture out.

Turning a blind eye

Human Right Watch’s detailed report concludes that western states, by turning a blind eye to Israel’s long-standing abuses of Palestinians and focusing instead on a non-existent peace process, have allowed “apartheid to metastasize and consolidate”.

Its findings echo those of B’Tselem, Israel’s most respected human rights organisation. In January, it too declared Israel to be an apartheid regime in the occupied territories and inside Israel, towards its own Palestinian citizens.

Despite the reluctance of US and European politicians and media to talk about Israel in these terms, a new survey by B’Tselem shows that one in four Israeli Jews accept “apartheid” as an accurate description of Israel’s rule over Palestinians. What is far less clear is how many of them believe apartheid, in the Israeli context, is a good thing.

Another finding in the survey offers a clue. When asked about recent talk from Israeli leaders about annexing the West Bank, two-thirds of Israeli Jews reject the idea that Jews and Palestinians should have equal rights in those circumstances. 

The mob in Jerusalem is happy to enforce Israel’s apartheid now, in hopes of speeding up the process of expulsion. Other Israelis are still in denial. They prefer to pretend that apartheid has not yet arrived, in hopes of easing their consciences a little longer. 

Anti-Semitism and the Alt-Right - Why Zionists have nothing to say about Trump’s Anti-Semitism

Suzanne Schneider is wrong to say that only right-wing Zionists allied with anti-Semites –Labour Zionism was equally guilty

Steve Bannon - Trump's anti-Semitic advisor

It is a strange thing.  Zionists are usually brilliant at spotting ‘anti-Semitism’ even when it doesn’t exist.  They have been calling Jackie Walker an anti-Semite for months on the basis of omitting one word ‘among’ in a private conversation, i.e. ‘Jews were among the chief financiers of slavery’.  None is better at this than the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism which can even spot anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial in the words of Israel’s first Prime Minister, David Ben Gurion, (when wrongly attributing them to Jackie Walker).

But when it comes to the open anti-Semitism and White supremacism of Trump and his alt-Right supporters, then there isn’t a peep.  Not a squeak.  Like the 3 wise monkeys, they have become blind, deaf and dumb.  When it came to Trump’s Holocaust Memorial Day statement on the Holocaust, which managed to omit Jews altogether, [White House Blocked Holocaust Statement that Explicitly Mentioned Jews ] which in the words of alt-Right leader Richard Spencer ‘deJudified the Holocaust’ the Zionists were silent.  [White Nationalist Leader Praises Trump For 'De-Judification' Of The Holocaust

These are difficult days for America’s Jews, historically the most liberal section of America’s White population.  Despite their support for Israel they don’t want to live there.  Why swap a highly comfortable life in America for the hot house atmosphere of Israel, with a political atmosphere of endemic racism and war? 

Many of America’s Jews aren’t even properly Jewish in Israel.  Those who have been converted according to the Conservative or Reform branches of Judaism in America won’t even have those conversions recognised in Israel.  They are Gentiles.  Non-Jews.

Bannon's Breitbart makes defence of the Confederate flag of the southern slave states the symbol of its fight against 'cultural genocide'

Despite the Zionist belief that anti-Semitism everywhere was eternal and could not be fought, America has, like most of Europe, proven that anti-Semitism was not inherent amongst non-Jews. 

Donald Trump has been elected with the support of the White Supremacist Right.  He has put into the White House as his closest political advisor, Steve Bannon, former CEO of Breitbart News.  

Breitbart, combines being ardently pro-Zionist with anti-Semitism.  Bannon is a White Nationalist.    [Here's Why It's Fair—and Necessary—to Call Trump's Chief Strategist a White Nationalist Champion]  White Nationalism is just a nice way of saying White Supremacism.  Breitbart openly support the call for the display of the Confederate flag of the old slave states of the American south.  Hoist it high and proud:  the Confederate flag proclaims a glorious heritage and opposition to the ‘glorious heritage’ of slavery and lynching is nothing less than  cultural genocide.

Milo Yiannopoulos -  the gay anti-Semite who is a senior editor at Breitbart

Breitbart is the home of the Alt-Right whose luminaries include Richard Spencer, whose main claim to fame was the ‘Heil Trump’ gathering.  Its senior editor Milo Yiannopoulos, is openly anti-Semitic.  He has no problem saying that Jews control the media and own all the banks.  The Alt-Right is based on the idea of racial and ethnic nationalism.  That is why they support Zionism – which they see, not wrongly, as Jewish ethnic nationalism.

The Zionist movement and Israel has welcomed the ascent of Trump.  Not only Benjamin Netanyahu and Israeli’s government, but the Israeli Labour Party and its leader Isaac Herzog have also welcomed Trump to power. [see Israeli Labour Party Leader Isaac Herzog Extends a Warm Welcome to Donald Trump].  It is noteworthy that the Jewish Labour Movement, which is always eager to accuse anti-racists like Jackie Walker of ‘anti-Semitism’ was remarkably shy in condemning the leader of its ‘sister’ party for welcoming Trump.

part of the feminist opposition to 

In the United States itself, the Zionist Organisation of America invited Bannon to its annual Gala dinner in New York.  Owing to a large left-wing Jewish demonstration outside, a demonstration led by Jewish anti-Zionists, Bannon decided not to risk accepting the invitation.  The ZOA’s President Mort Klein was quoted as saying that ‘“I think Bannon was grateful that I defended him against this ludicrous charge of anti-Semitism,”  and not suprisingly because Klein's argument, a favourite of Zionism, is in his own words Bannon and Breitbart: Friends of Israel, not anti-Semites

Of course if your definition of anti-Semitism is support for Israel then Klein is right.  If anti-Semitism includes a belief in racial separation, that Jews belong with their own kind in their own state then Klein is wrong and Bannon and Breitbart are anti-Semitic.   But Adolf Eichmann too described himself as ardently pro-Zionist.  Indeed nearly all anti-Semites were known for their support for Zionism because it was through a Jewish state that the 'Jewish Question' could be solved.

Where the article below goes wrong is in its suggestion that it was only right-wing Zionists who allied with or supported anti-Semites.  On the contrary these alliances were equally the product of labour Zionism.

Richard Spencer of  the alt-Right's 'heil Trump' speech

It was Labour Zionism which entered into an economic alliance with Nazi Germany, Ha'avara in August 1933, thus breaking the Jewish boycott of Nazi Germany.  It was the Revisionist Zionists under Jabotinsky who opposed them.  It was the Labour Zionist/Haganah agent Feivel Polkes who offered to spy for the Gestapo in return for arms shipments.

It was the Labour Zionist Rudolph Kasztner who reached an agreement, helping to round up Hungarian Jews for the deportation trains in Hungary in exchange for a train out of Hungary with the Zionist elite on board.

The World Zionist Congresses between 1933 and 1939 which failed to unequivocally condemn either Hitler or the Nazis were controlled by the Labour Zionists.  The Revisionists abandoned the WZO after 1933. 

Both wings of Zionism accepted that anti-Semitism was inherent in non-Jewish society.  That the only answer to it was to flee and build a society based on the same principles of race they had escaped from. Their reasoning was that Jews had indeed adopted the anti-social qualities that the non-Jews ascribed to them  They based this reasoning on the fact that they had become estranged from their ‘homeland’ Palestine and that it was only by reuniting Jews with their roots that they could become normalised.  In Zionist jargon this was the ‘Negation of the Diaspora’.

Pinhas Rosenbluth, who later became a Minister of Justice in the first Israeli Labor Government , observed, Palestine was "an institute for the fumigation of Jewish vermin.". [Journal of Israeli History, 8]  The journal of Hashomer Hatzair, the ‘left-wing’ of the Zionist movement, which later formed Mapam in Israel, observed that ‘The Jew is a caricature of a normal, natural human being, both physically and spiritually. As an individual in society he revolts and throws off the harness of social obligation, knows no order nor discipline.’ [Our Shomer, ‘Welstanschaung’ Hashomer Hatzair, December 1936, p.12] cited in Lenni Brenner, Zionism in the Age of the Dictators, pp 22/23].

What American and other Jews are learning is that Zionist groups like the Jewish Labour Movement and Labour Friends of Israel are only interested in ‘anti-Semitism’ if it means opposition to the State of Israel.  Anti-Semitism which is merely about Jew hatred is not their concern.  After all without the push of anti-Semitism there would have been no anti-Semitism.  Or as Herzl remarked ‘‘Anti-Semitism, too, probably contains the Divine will to Good, because it forces us to close ranks, unites us through pressure, and through our unity will make us free. [Diaries p.231]

 Tony Greenstein

The Disturbing Alliance Between Zionists and Anti-Semites

Suzanne Schneider February 19, 2017Getty Images

Between the congressional hearing for David Friedman, the visit of Benjamin Netanyahu, and President Trump’s refusal to address the rising tide of anti-Semitism, it’s been a tense time within the American Jewish community. For those on the right, Trump’s abandonment of the two-state solution, much like Friedman’s nomination, comes as an assurance that the new administration will firmly commit itself to an expansionist form of Zionism. And along with the presence of Jared Kushner within the President’s inner circle, keeping Friedman and Bibi in the wings is taken by many as a signal that Trump is not really an anti-Semite, despite surrounding himself with figures of questionable persuasion. According to this logic, the strong commitment by Trump and Steve Bannon to Israel undermines any suggestion that they harbor antipathy toward Jews. Yet, for many centrists and liberals, the idea of Jared Kushner and Steve Bannon working together causes endless confusion: How could the descendent of Holocaust survivors find common cause with the ideological leader of the alt-right?

The answer may lie in the history of the Zionist movement, a history which demonstrates that there is no inherent contradiction between Zionism and anti-Semitism. The two ideologies have in fact often worked in concert to achieve their shared goal: concentrating Jews in one place (so as to better avoid them in others). Even before the modern Zionist movement arose in the late 19th century, Christian philosophers and statesmen debated what to do with the “oriental” mass of Jewry in their midst. As the scholar Jonathan Hess of the University of North Carolina has noted, one “solution” popular among Enlightenment figures who harbored anti-Semitic feelings was to deport Jews to a colonial setting where they could be reformed. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, among the founders of German Idealism, noted in 1793 that the most effective protection Europeans could mount against the Jewish menace was to “conquer the holy land for them and send them all there.”

Indeed, Zionism crystallized as a political movement among European Jews explicitly to solve the problem of political anti-Semitism. For Zionist pioneers like Leo Pinsker and Theodor Herzl, anti-Semitism was an inevitable phenomenon that would occur at any time and place where Jews were a sizable minority. Normal relations with other nations could only be established by moving Jews to a place where they were a majority. Thus rather than pushing contemporary states and societies to devise new ways of accommodating difference, Zionist thinkers of Herzl’s generation ascribed to the logic that the Jewish “problem” could only be settled by removing Jews from European states.
The idea that Jews belong not in their actual place of residence and origin, but in the Holy Land, was of course not a position that all Zionists ascribed to, either then or now. Yet it is not hard to see the very problematic logic that links such assertions to the sort of blood-and-soil nationalism that led to the destruction of European Jewish life. Nazism of course grew out of this context and insisted that Jews could never really be German. The Nazis, however, took this conclusion to a radically new place: it was ultimately extermination, rather than resettlement, that drove the Nazi position.

Though the scope of destruction was not yet known in the 1930’s and early 1940’s, many nevertheless find it astounding that there were attempts by right-wing Zionists during these years to establish ties with Nazi Germany. Numerous scholars have noted the fascist sympathies of certain members of the Revisionist Zionist camp, who bitterly feuded with mainstream Zionists and denounced them as Bolsheviks. The antipathy was apparently mutual, as David Ben-Gurion in 1933 published a work that described Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the founder of the Revisionist movement, as treading in the footsteps of Hitler. The Zionist Right’s flirtation with fascism reached its tragic peak in 1941 when Lehi, Avraham Stern’s paramilitary splinter group, approached Otto Von Hentig, a German diplomat, to propose cooperation between the nationally rooted Hebraic movement in Palestine and the German state. Nazi Germany declined his generous offer, having stumbled across quite a different “solution” to the question of Jewish existence.

It has been with this history in mind that I approach contemporary debates about Donald Trump’s presidency and the alliance it fosters between members of the white nationalist “alt-right” on one hand, and a certain segment of American Jews, on the other. The argument that the latter should work with the former because they all share a commitment to “Greater Israel” belies the fact that not all allies, or alliances, are created equal. When Richard Spencer voices his admiration of Zionism (because, in his understanding, the movement stands first and foremost for racial homogeneity), we should realize that this is not incidental to his suggestion that America might be better off with a peaceful ethnic cleansing of those population segments that are not of white, European descent. Do American Jews really believe that they will pass muster within such a state? And are the swastikas and other acts of intimidation that have been so abundant since Trump’s victory really just peaceful incentives to realize that our true home is in a land far, far away?

The answer must be a resounding “no.”

Jewish life flourishes in pluralistic societies within which difference is not a “problem” to be resolved, but a fact to be celebrated. The alliance of right-wing Zionists and the alt-right should not be viewed as an abnormality, but the meeting of quite compatible outlooks that assert — each in their own way—that the world will only be secure once we all retreat to our various plots of ancestral land. Nationalist thinking of this sort wrought more than its fair share of damage during the twentieth century. Let’s not enact a repeat performance in the twenty-first.

Suzanne Schneider is a historian of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the Zionist movement, and a director and core faculty member at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research.