The Lie of Labour Anti-Semitism has but one purpose – the removal of Corbyn (I)

The Jewish Labour Movement motion that a Corbyn Labour Government ‘would not be in the interest of British Jews.” should result in their Immediate Disaffiliation

What more does it take for Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour leadership to understand that the JLM can never be appeased? There can never be an end to the false ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign for two reasons:

i.              Anti-Semitism is now defined as hostility to Zionism not Jews – that was the reason the IHRA misdefinition of anti-Semitism was adopted.

ii.           Because this campaign has only ever had one aim - the removal of Corbyn as leader.

The JLM’s ‘no confidence’ motion in Corbyn at its weekend conference should be reciprocated by saying  we have no confidence in the Jewish Labour Movement whose very existence is a living lie.

The time has come to end a situation whereby the ‘sister party’ of the racist Israeli Labor Party, a party that supports the deportation of 40,000 non-Jewish Black African refugees from Israel, and which even opposes dismantling Jewish settlements in the West Bank has all the privileges of an affiliated socialist society.

Since the JLM can’t even bring themselves to advocate a vote for a Labour Party led by Corbyn what possible reason is there for allowing them to remain an affiliated socialist society?

It’s time for the myth that the JLM is the ‘Jewish section’ of the Labour Party to be exploded.  The JLM, which claims a membership of 2,000 is predominantly non-Jewish. Although they do not disclose details of their members there is no doubt that at least 2/3 of their members are non Jewish. 

For example in Brighton and Hove right-wing Labour councillors such as Dan Yates, Warren Morgan, Emma Daniels, Caroline Penn and Julie Cattell to name but a few are members of the JLM. None of them are Jewish.

This Sunday Times montage portrays Jeremy Corbyn as the sinister, one-eyed devil at the heart of a conspiracy of hate

No Jew who is not a Zionist can possibly join a group which is affiliated to the settlement funding World Zionist Organisation. The majority of the Labour Party’s Jewish members are not Zionists so why is the JLM allowed to represent itself as the Labour Party’s Jewish section?

The JLM describes itself as the descendant of Poalei Zion, which affiliated to the Labour Party in 1920. The reason it was able to affiliate then was that the Labour Party was a fully paid up supporter of the British Empire and the Zionist colonial settlement was a strategic partner of British colonialism in the Middle East. That was the purpose behind the 1917 Balfour Declaration authored by the Tory Foreign Secretary Arthur ‘Bloody Balfour’.

The JLM was virtually dead up till 2015 when, in the wake of Corbyn’s election, it was refounded for the sole purpose of leading a campaign to remove Corbyn. In an article by Asa Winstanley which led to his suspension soon after, Asa described how Jeremy Newmark, Chair of the JLM and a key Israeli Embassy operative explained, in hitherto unused footage from Al Jazeera’s The Lobby how “a bunch of us sat in a coffee shop in Golders Green” around September 2015 to “talk about re-forming the JLM to do something with it.’ This came against the backdrop of what Newmark described as “the rise of Jeremy Corbyn” and “Bernie Sanders in the states.”

When the JLM decided to employ a Director, no doubt with funding from Israeli government sources, who did it turn to but Israeli Embassy political officer, Ella Rose. As Al Jazeera's The Lobby showed, Ella was most upset with Asa Winstanley when he exposed this fact.

Crooked Jeremy Newmark explains the JLM's strategy to his pro-Israel acolytes in the JLM

The JLM, which Louise Ellman described as having been founded in 2004 is an affiliated socialist society of the Labour Party with the right to put motions to annual conference and send delegates to and affiliate to local Labour Parties. Newmark’s plan was, as he told a JLM barbecue in September 2016, based on “utilizing the rights and privileges it [JLM] enjoys as a socialist society” within Labour. In other words the Israeli state, via its London Embassy would be represented at all levels of the British Labour party in order to destabilise it.

Jewish Chronicle 'journalist' Rosa Doherty was informed of Asa Winstanley's suspension before he was

The JLM operates a double act with Labour Friends of Israel, which it was responsible for founding in 1957 in the wake of the Suez debacle. Whereas LFI defends the actions of the Israeli state, for example the shooting dead of unarmed demonstrators in Gaza, the JLM has concentrated exclusively on an ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign directed at Palestinian supporters. It is noticeable that the JLM doesn’t, at least in its own name, support or even comment upon Israeli actions. It has nothing to say about things like water theft and Israel’s treatment of Palestinian children.

However JLM MPs have been extremely active and outspoken in supporting Israeli repression. Louise Ellman MP in particular has repeatedly supported the IDF’s torture and abuse of Palestinian children as documented by UNICEF and others. For example in January 2016 she interrupted other MPs 3 times in a debate on Palestinian child prisoners.

The JLM has been the primary vehicle of destabilisation in the Labour Party. Realising that it was difficult if not impossible to defend Israel’s actions, they decided that they would instead attack their opponents as ‘anti-Semites’. Anyone mentioning the word ‘Zionism’ would be attacked because 'Zionist' was held to be a ‘euphemism’ for Jews in the words of Chakrabarti, someone who understands nothing about Zionism or Palestine. The only people who use ‘Zionist’ and ‘Jew’ interchangeably are Zionists and anti-Semites. When fascists use the term 'Zionist' it is not a euphemism but a disguise or cover. 'Euphemism' is entirely the wrong word. 

When the history of these times comes to be written the ‘anti-Semitism’ allegations will be seen to have been manufactured and confected by the Establishment and its tame ‘journalists’. There are very few journalists today prepared to buck the Establishment consensus that the fake ‘anti-Semitism’ crisis is genuine.  I can only think of Robert Fisk and Patrick Cockburn of The Independent. There isn’t a single Guardian journalist – not Gary Younge, Aditya Chakrabortty, Owen Jones or George Monbiot - prepared to defy the Guardian’s anti-Semitism narrative as laid down by Jonathan Freedland.

No doubt in 20 or 30 years time some bright young thing at the Guardian, if it still exists, eager to establish their reputation, will put in a freedom of information request in Washington and discover that the allegations of ‘anti-Semitism’ which accompanied Corbyn’s election as leader were as genuine as a 9 bob note. Rather than being the spontaneous outpouring of Jew-hate that those well known anti-racist papers, the Sun and Daily Mail would have us believe, the false anti-Semitism smears were cooked to order.

If our Guardian journalist is particularly bold they will establish a link between Corbyn’s support for the Palestinians and opposition to American foreign policy with the different stages of the anti-Semitism affair starting with the anti-Semitism allegations at Oxford University Labour Club to the East End mural that suddenly appeared after 6 years.

Al Jazeera’s programme, The Lobby, gave us a glimpse of the Israeli state’s role in this affair. No doubt the American and British secret services will also be seen to have played a part in what will come to be seen as a classic example of political destabilisation, the kind that we are witnessing in Venezuela today and which was common in Central and South America in the 1970’s.

After having tweeted initially in support of the Sunday Times article Mehdi Hassan quickly rowed back

At the weekend we had a double whammy. Firstly there was the Sunday Times Corbyn Factory of Hate which began to unravel almost as soon as it hit the press. Then barely 150 people at the JLM’s AGM overwhelmingly passed a vote of no confidence in Corbyn. It is clear from the article by their new Chair Mike Katz in the New Statesman, that the Murdoch Press and the JLM operate in tandem, synchronising their moves and feeding off each other. Not once did Katz challenge the veracity or motives of the Sunday Times. On the contrary he and the JLM have deliberately tried to get the soft State, via the Equality and Human Rights Commission to attack the Labour Party. You might have been forgiven for thinking that the EHRC had its work cut out on a genuine example of racism such as the Windrush scandal, whereby British citizens were illegally deported.

There isn’t a trace of anything progressive still less socialist in the politics of the JLM. They are totally unconcerned with opposing austerity, the cuts, privatisation or indeed any left-wing campaign. Their sole concern is with ‘anti-Semitism’ in the Labour Party.  Real issues of racism such as the Grenfell fire or the Windrush deportations are of no concern to them. 

This tweet was the straw that broke the camel's back - calling the JLM what it is - an Israeli Embassy proxy

Criticism of Israel and in particular the Zionist nature of the Israeli state is to them, by definition, anti-Semitic, hence their support for the IHRA ‘definition’ of anti-Semitism whose sole purpose is to conflate criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism.  As Stephen Sedley, the Jewish former Court of Appeal Judge noted, it isn’t even a definition, being open ended. As well-known human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson QC observed, the IHRA isn’t ‘fit for purpose’. The IHRA has been savaged by legal and academic scholars yet it is the common sense of our Establishment.  

It was a crucial mistake of Corbyn and his advisers to have adopted the IHRA when Theresa May did so.  It is a decision which should be reversed at the earliest opportunity. Unfortunately instead of standing up to these false allegations Corbyn, McDonnell and the Labour leadership have continually apologised, promised to do better and increased the pace of the witchhunt. And the more victims that were purged the more that the JLM and the Zionists demanded. Everytime the Labour leadership has made a concession the Zionist lobby has thrown it back in its face and demanded another.

A Sun headline which was quickly withdrawm

It is not of course anti-Semites who have been caught in the net but anti-racists -  Black and Jewish activists such as Jackie Walker, Marc Wadsworth, Asa Winstanley, Ken Livingstone and myself. All of us just happen to be outspoken critics of Israel and Zionism.

If there was any truth to the allegations that Labour is overrun with anti-Semitism then what is most surprising is that newspapers such as the Daily Mail and Sun who have continually demonised asylum seekers and refugees, to the extent that they employed Katie Hopkins for whom refugees were cockroaches, were so concerned about anti-Semitism.

Why should the Tory and Murdoch press be so concerned about anti-Semitism when for example the Sunday Times doesn’t hesitate to employ arch Islamaphobes such as  Rod Liddle as columnists?  This is the same Liddle who, not so long ago, suggested that suicide bombers should blow themselves up in Tower Hamlets because it is a ‘decent distance from where the rest of us live’.

Why should the Daily Mail be so concerned about 'anti-Semitism' when it criticised Labour's former Jewish leader Ed Miliband for not being able to eat a bacon sandwich or which attacked his Marxist father Ralph Miliband as a Marxist who 'hated' his country? Why is the press which which demonises George Soros as the 'puppet master', a typical Jewish financial manipulator so up in arms about 'anti-Semitism'?

Unfortunately instead of resisting the 'anti-Semitism' narrative sections of the Left, led by Jon Lansman and Owen Jones, have appeased, flattered and supported the JLM as they led the witch-hunt of people like Chris Williamson. In many ways Lansman has done more damage to Corbyn by his support of the false anti-Semitism campaign than anything the JLM has managed. Lansman has helped prevent any concerted opposition to the movement whose aim is to topple Corbyn.

In my next blog I am going to show how Labour’s ‘anti-Semitism’ witchhunt is aimed not at anti-Semites but almost exclusively at critics of Israel and Zionism.

Lest We Forget - The Dog That Failed Even to Whimper

Ella Rose, the JLM's new Director was none too happy at her former employment  being revealed

If you annoy me you are a fucking anti-Semite!

The Jewish Labour Movements fragrant Ella Rose giving vent to her feelings about anti-Zionists

I have taken this amusing but very true piece by Jonathan Rosenhead, a Professor at the LSE, from the newsletter of Bricup - British Universities Palestine.  It echoes the piece I did when the Al Jazeera  revelations first broke - why wasn't the story of state and Israeli interference in the Labour Party and the false anti-Semitism allegations revealed by the British press.  The answer of course is that our 'free press' was up to its ears in manufacturing stories about 'anti-Semitism'

Tony Greenstein

Al Jazeera's 'The Lobby' and the British Media

Jonathan Rosenhead

Iain 'Crooked' McNicol, Labour's General Secretary, has just exonerated the fragrant Rose despite her threats of violence

we couldn't put it better ourselves - the winning is all that counts with Ella Rose

Many readers of the Newsletter will already be aware of the ground-breaking Al-Jazeera English series The Lobby, broadcast on 4 consecutive nights from January 11th. Some will not – and in this they will be in the good company of the vast majority of the UK’s population. It got a front-page splash in the Daily Mail (of all places), but this was not followed up by the sort of in depth coverage elsewhere that its explosive contents deserved.

However that silence is not the one this article’s title refers to. This silence is analogous in its essentials to that of the dog in the Sherlock Holmes story The Silver Blaze. The crux of the plot is the disappearance one night of a famous race horse, and the violent death of his trainer. The dog slept in the stables where this happened. The celebrated dialogue runs like this:

Joan Ryan MP, LFI Chair inquiring about the money she had applied for

Labour Friends of Israel Chair Joan Ryan MP receiving the good news that she had won over £1m for her slush fund.  Her only other claim to fame is claiming more expenses than any other MP in 2005 and 2006

Gregory (Scotland Yard detective): "Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?"

Holmes: "To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time."

Gregory: "The dog did nothing in the night-time."

Holmes: "That was the curious incident.”

The dog that signally failed to bark, not for one night, or over the last month, but for year after year is the entire British mainstream media – print, radio, television. What is the story that they missed and why did they miss it?

Labour Friends of Israel's Parliamentary Officer and Fabian Michael Rubin letting us know that he works closely with the Israeli Embassy

The set up

The Lobby is still viewable at  and if you haven’t seen it you should. It makes gripping viewing.

The programmes depend on ‘Robin’, whose face we never see. He created a cover story as an aspiring Labour party activist with strong Israeli sympathies, and for 6 months managed to penetrate the shadowy world where Israeli embassy officials set up sham organisations to support Israel, mingle with very willing activists (both Labour and Conservative) and make funds available to them. And all the while Robin wears a concealed camera.

We have known about ‘The Israel Lobby’ in the US, and its most notable unit AIPAC, for years. Mearsheimer and Walt wrote a celebrated book with that title. The Lobby however is about the UK’s own Israel Lobby. To UK activists its existence has been known, in principle, for years. There has been circumstantial evidence galore - the inside track which Israel so evidently makes use of, the lavish funding of pro-Israel organisations, the sabotage of pro-Palestinian events. So we ‘knew’. But now we really know.

Joan Ryan MP has tropes on her brain and precious little else

It is worth pointing up here the reason why the activity revealed in The Lobby is taking place at all - the growing world-wide success of the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. This is now seen by Israel as the principal strategic threat to its continuing domination over the Palestinian people. The frenetic and multi-headed activity of Israel’s friends, supporters and proxies revealed in these programmes is, paradoxically, a measure of BDS’s success. Israel can no longer afford to rely just on discreet words in sympathetic ears; it is mobilising on many levels. In the process, they run a greater risk of their slips showing.

For supporters of academic boycott, such as BRICUP, and of BDS as a whole, the revelations of The Lobby are both an education, and a motivator.

It is tempting, I'll agree

The plot

There is so much material in these programmes that I can only be selective. But I’ll give a fairly detailed rundown of what is in the first programme, and then get more selective.

In Episode 1 we see Robin swanning around in the milieu of Labour Friends of Israel, the Israel Britain Alliance (a Zionist Federation Project), BICOM, Sussex Friends of Israel, Jewish Labour Movement. He is under the wing of Shai Masot of the Israeli Embassy, an unimpressive but gregarious character, anxious to be popular. He is quite deeply embedded – claiming for example to know all 200 London-based members of the Young Fabians. And in fact he did organise a trip to Israel for the Young Fabians in 2015. As Masot says in conversation: “Delegation to Israel – always a good start”.

The subtlety of fragrant Rose's analysis leaves us speechless

The revelations come thick and fast. We meet a couple of NUS Vice-Presidents plotting against their President Malia Bouattia, who supports Palestine. (The Chair of Labour Students is in on the plot.) One of them, not I think Jewish, had been taken on an expenses-paid Union of Jewish Students trip to Israel. The Israeli Embassy actually funds UJS itself! A University College London pro-Israel student activist has set up the Pinsker Centre which channels funds from AIPAC to appropriate causes.

We eavesdrop on the summer barbecue of the Jewish Labour Movement (JLM). We meet Ella Rose, who has been President of UJS, and has just been appointed Director of JLM. As she herself says, her CV didn’t have the most Labour Party experience among the candidates. But hey, what does that matter if you are applying from a staff position within the Israeli Embassy? (Later, unknowingly on camera, Rose boasts that with her martial arts training – from Israel – she could easily ‘take’ anti-racist campaigner Jackie Walker.)

Joan Ryan can't contain her glee at learning that she's won the Zionist jackpot

And then Masot invites Robin to chair the Young Labour Friends of Israel. It doesn’t exist – Robin’s job is to set it up. He is invited to apply for a job at the Embassy, first by Masot and then by its Head of Civil Affairs, who says his job would be to research the UK’s BDS movement.

What we get is a picture of a heady swirling mix of right-wing politics, ambition, wads of Israeli and US money, fake and shadow organisations, and over-weening self-confidence. Stirring the mix is an Israeli diplomat who isn’t even a diplomat.

Later episodes

We are really spoilt for choice. Episode 2 shows the famous JLM training session (on antisemitism!) at the Labour Party conference in Liverpool. This was the session at which Jackie Walker was set up, and secretly filmed so that an edited version of her interventions could present her in a bad light. It worked – she was ousted as vice-Chair of Momentum and suspended from Labour Party membership.

Shai Masot is on the scene at the conference, sometimes in convoy with Regev, or sitting hugger-mugger with him and the Chair of JLM Jeremy Newmark at a private meeting with pro-Israel supporters. (Regev says that people on the 3 left are very opposed to Israel “and probably antisemitic”.)

We share the delight of Joan Ryan MP, Chair of Labour Friends of Israel, when Masot tells her he has more than £1 million from Israel needed to fund trips to Israel by influential Labour MPs. We share her fury when a conference delegate persistently asks her how a 2-state solution can work – persistently because her interlocuter is dissatisfied with the non-answers she is getting. Ryan then persuades herself that the questioner has indulged in an antisemitic trope (about Jews working for banks – which we can see is Ryan’s own subconscious interpolation of material that wasn’t said). Ryan makes a complaint; the delegate is suspended from party membership.

Of course it isn’t only happening in and around the Labour Party. Masot seems to be best buddies with Maria Strizzolo, the young chief of staff to MP Robert Halfon, a Minister in the Government, and deputy chair of the Conservative Party at the time the recording happened. Simultaneously she is also a Westminster-based civil servant. Their highly indiscreet conversation is recorded as ever by Robin’s attentive camera. They talk about setting up a ‘City Friends of Israel’ for young finance professionals, with AIPAC’s assistance.

The crunch point, politically, is when she and Masot discuss the possibility of ‘taking down’ some non-compliant Tory MPs. As Strizzolo says “If you look hard enough, I’m sure there is something that they are trying to hide”. The one name that they put in the frame for this treatment is Sir Alan Duncan – certainly well known for showing more sympathy for the Palestinian predicament than most of his colleagues. But he was, and is, Deputy Foreign Minister! This small indiscretion has lost Maria Strizzolo both her jobs, and got Masot sent back to Israel in disgrace. The Foreign Affairs Select Committee is now investigating “How UK policy is influenced by other states and interested parties”.

Strategic Affairs

So that’s all right then? Well, not really. This is the tip of a rather large iceberg. Craig Murray has ferreted out of a reluctant Foreign Office the fact that Masot was supposed to be a member of the embassy’s ‘technical and administrative staff’, a grade well below the diplomatic salt. But as we see in the series, Masot is Ambassador Regev’s chosen travelling companion to the Labour Party conference – not really a technical and administrative duty. Evidently this is not all above board.

In fact Murray has examined the register of Israeli Embassy employees, and believes he has discovered what he calls ‘a large nest of Israeli spies’. It is, he says, “simply impossible” that the FCO would normally grant seventeen technical and administrative visas to support sixteen diplomats, when six of those sixteen are already support staff. So it seems that we have quite a bunch of supernumerary staff at the Embassy, up to something, and connived at by the UK government.

There is certainly some circumstantial evidence for this reading in Masot’s own biography, in so far as it is known. Until quite recently he was a major in the IDF. London was his first ‘diplomatic’ assignment, it was temporary, and he was not a regular member of the diplomatic service. The very credible suggestion has been made that his placement in London was the responsibility not of Israel’s Foreign Ministry but of its Ministry of Strategic Affairs. The MSA was set up in 2010 to counter Israel’s perceived ‘strategic threats’, principally the international BDS campaign. In the last year or two it has been on a spending spree for new ‘talent’, quite affordable from its $50 million budget. The new employees are “mostly former officers from Israel’s intelligence community”. All this fits Masot’s profile rather well. And then there is the fact that when the Minister of Strategic Affairs Gilad Erdan visited London last September, Masot was among the Israeli officials he met.

No wonder, then, that Israel removed Masot from the UK at something approaching the speed of light, and that the FCO in an unseemly rush pronounced the matter satisfactorily closed. We must hope that the Foreign Affairs Select Committee will not so easily be deflected from its task.

The second scandal

In fact the fiasco of Masot’s incompetent machinations is only one, and perhaps the lesser, of two scandals. The other scandal is how this can have been going on, evidently for years, yet no British news organisation with the resources to do so thought it worth investigating. Why do we have to rely on Al-Jazeera to cleanse our stable? It is that overwhelming silence that shouts complicity.

There is one honourable exception to this charge sheet. In 2009 the respected right-wing journalist Peter Oborne made a television programme Inside Britain's Israel Lobby for the Dispatches series. He concentrated then on the Conservative Friends 4 of Israel (barely touched on in The Lobby), which the programme makers describe as "beyond doubt the most well- connected and probably the best funded of all Westminster lobbying groups". (The full text is available on line.)

Oborne is interviewed for comment on the Al-Jazeera programme, and is almost incandescent with indignation about the revelations of Israeli interference with UK political processes. But some of that rage should surely be diverted and redirected at our own media. In the USA the operations of big oil and the gun lobby in distorting the political agenda are well known and visible. This relative transparency doesn’t just happen – it needs an alert, vigilant media with the courage and freedom of its convictions.

The British media is a watch dog that hasn’t barked. It is as appropriate to ask why that is so, and perhaps more useful, than to fulminate about the iniquity of Israel’s ruthless pursuit of what it perceives to be its interests. Are the watchdog’s teeth rotten beyond repair? Is it muzzled? What are the mechanisms that have maintained this complaisant silence in the presence of a blatant affront to open democracy?

Postscript

We left Conan Doyle’s dog in the stables waiting for Sherlock to sort out the mystery of its silence. But nowadays the government has adopted a problematic ‘definition’ of antisemitism, and the Anti-Antisemitic Tropes patrols are out in force. So I won’t draw any possible analogy. You’ll just have to read the story yourself.

The Demolition of Um al Hiran in Israel’s Negev is why Israel is a racist, settler colonial state

2 Palestinian Israelis killed as Bedouin village is destroyed to make way for a Jewish town

No new Palestinian towns have been built since Israel's creation [Menahem Kahana/AFP]

There are those who naively believe that the illusory ‘two states’ will provide a solution to the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis.  That all that is required for peace is the achievement of  a Palestinian state.  Even were such a state possible, which it isn’t, then it would not address the racism that Israel’s 1.5 million Palestinians experience.

Even within Israel Israeli Palestinians are considered a ‘demographic threat.’  In blunt language, there are too many of them.  Israel is a Jewish state, not like the UK is a Christian state, where religion is a constitutional anachronism with no political meaning.  In Israel being Jewish means possessing privilege.  You get to live in better accommodation, you get paid more, you don’t suffer racial discrimination.  Um al Hiran was a village established in 1956 when the Bedouin were evicted from the south of the Negev.  They were placed here against their will.  Now today they have been violently evicted again by the bulldozers of the Jewish National Fund and the militarised police.   Two Palestinians have been murdered.  According to Al Jazeera, the driver of the car was met by a hail of bullets from the Israeli Police.

The lying statement of the Police said that:

"A vehicle driven by a terrorist from the Islamic Movement intended to strike a number of officers and carry out an attack," Micky Rosenfeld, police spokesperson, said in a statement.

However, Raed Abu al-Qiyan, an Um Al Hiran activist, denied that the driver of the car was seeking to harm police.

The man was a member of his Bedouin clan by the name of Yacoub Abu al-Qiyan.  Raed  told AFP news agency:  "The Israeli narrative is a lie. He was a revered school teacher.

"He was in his car and they shot at him from everywhere."  Al Jazeera’s report told how Israeli authorities regularly carry out demolitions of Bedouin homes they deem to have been built illegally.  However for Arabs in Israel, building permits are nearly impossible to obtain whereas Jewish Israelis are given preferential treatment.

Israel plans to demolish the whole of  Um Al Hiran and replace it with a Jewish village by the name of Hiran.

Um Al Hiran is just one of about 40 "unrecognised" Bedouin villages in Negev scheduled for demolition despite being home to tens of thousands of residents.

A Bedouin woman reacts during a protest against home demolitions on January 18, 2017 in the Bedouin village of Umm al-Hiran. MENAHEM KAHANA/AFP

Because of their "unrecognised" status, many of them are denied access to electricity, water and other municipal services.

Earlier in January, Palestinian citizens of Israel announced a nationwide strike after Israeli authorities demolished 11 Palestinian homes in the city of Qalansawe in central Israel.

These homes were also demolished on the pretext that they were built without a permit.

This is the naked racism of the ‘Jewish’ state.  During this demonstration the mild mannered head of the Joint Arab-Jewish list in the Knesset was treated no differently from anyone else.  He was hit twice by rubber bullets.

Those who support a ‘Jewish’ racist state in Israel, whether it is Jeremy Corbyn or the Jewish Labour Movement have a lot to answer for.  Israel is Jewish in the same way as South Africa was White or Nazi Germany was Aryan.  It is a badge of racial identification.

Tony Greenstein

Violence: the language of a Jewish state

18 January 2017

Here is another image (copyright: Keren Manor) that conveys the situation of Palestinians – these ones Palestinian citizens of Israel – more completely than any words. The man on the ground is Ayman Odeh, a member of the Israeli parliament, the head of the Joint List, the third largest party in the parliament, and the highest-ranking Palestinian politician in Israel.

Israeli police have just shot him with rubber-tipped bullets, not once but twice – including to the face. Odeh is one of the least confrontational politicians among Israel’s large Palestinian minority, a fifth of the population. His message is consistently one of peace and amity between all Israeli citizens, whether Jews or Palestinians. That does not seem to have protected him from the shoot-first, ask-questions-later approach of Israel’s security services towards Palestinians.

This image should be as shocking as seeing a bloodied Bernie Sanders or Jeremy Corbyn crawling in the dirt, watched impassively by US or UK police.

Um Al Hiran is home to several Palestinian Bedouin families [Menahem Kahana/AFP]

Context is important too. Odeh had joined the 1,000 inhabitants of Umm al-Hiran – all Palestinian citizens of Israel – early this morning in a demonstration to stop demolition crews destroying the 150 homes of their village in the Negev. Israel allowed these families to move to the area of Umm al-Hiran in the 1950s after it had driven them from their original, and much more substantial, lands during the Nakba. The pretext then for expelling them was that Israel needed their ancestral lands for an exclusively Jewish kibbutz.

That all occurred during a military government that ruled over Israel’s Palestinians for nearly two decades. More than 60 years later, exactly the same thing is happening again, but this time in front of the cameras. Umm al-Hiran is being destroyed so that an exclusively Jewish community, with the same name of Hiran, can be built over these families’ homes. Israel never issued Umm al-Hiran with a master plan, so now it can be declared illegal and its inhabitants called “squatters” and “trespassers”. The families are being ethnically cleansed a second time – not during hostilities or in a time of war, but by their own state in a time of peace.

They are far from alone. Thousands of other families, and their villages, face the same fate.

The truth is nothing has changed from the 1950s. Israel still behaves as if it is ruling militarily over its Palestinian citizens. It is still a Jewish state, one that privileges the rights of Jewish citizens over Palestinian “citizens”. It still treats all non-Jews as a threat, as an enemy.

Israel is not a normal kind of state. It is an ethnocracy, and one driven by an ideological variation of the ethnic nationalisms that tore apart Europe a century ago.

Odeh is a leader who campaigns for peace and equality between Jewish and Palestinian citizens. 

Today, he got his answer. His face is bruised, bloodied and bowed, crawling through the dirt. This is the language of a Jewish state.

 Jews, Make Your Voices Heard

The prime minister won't go quietly. Bulldozers are the ultimate refuge of the criminal suspect.

Odeh Bisharat Jan 18, 2017 8:37 PM

A Bedouin woman reacts during a protest against home demolitions on January 18, 2017 in the Bedouin village of Umm al-Hiran. MENAHEM KAHANA/AFP

In the eyes of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu all Arab citizens are terrorists, or, put euphemistically — they’re all a “demographic problem.” That’s been his theory forever, even when he was finance minister, and in light of the latest campaign by former senior security officials to keep Israel “Jewish and secure,” this legacy is not solely his.

Here are a few words about the demographic threat that “our forces” took care of on Wednesday in Umm al-Hiran. His name is Yakub Abu al-Kiyan, and he is a math teacher in Hura’s high school. His wife is Dr. Amal Abu Sa’ad, his brother Jabar is an Education Ministry inspector, and another brother Hamad is the principal of a school in Hura.

Koby, an activist in the Negev Coexistence Forum, reported on today’s encounter with this “threat.” He said that from the start police were aiming loaded weapons at people.

“I heard a few shots, and then I saw a white van start to move away from the policemen, not towards them,” he said. “After he started to move, he [the driver] was surely scared and tried to get away, the barrage of fire from the policemen started. They surrounded the truck, fired from all directions, some from in front and some from behind; at that point the driver was apparently wounded, lost control, continued down the hill, and that’s when the policemen were hurt. As far as I could tell, the driver was wounded and wasn’t in control of the vehicle.”

So this is the equal treatment referred to by Netanyahu, who conducts expulsions broadcast live, which will be remembered as the shame of the Jewish people for generations. This time it is impossible to declare, as in days of yore, that the Arabs are “rising up to destroy us,” or fled of their own free will.

Today all the authorities of the state of the Jewish people, from the government to the Supreme Court, are partners in a chilling action: Arabs out, Jews in. In dark times in history, the slogan was different, but the idea was the same: “Juden, raus” — Jews, out. I apologize for the free association working overtime on this insane day.

During the early years of the state, the Abu Al-Kiyan tribe was expelled from its lands in Hirbet Zubala, which they had cultivated for generations. After a period of wandering they were ordered in the 1950s by the military government to move to the Wadi Yatir area, where they established the village of Atir Umm al-Hiran. For the 60 years since, they’ve been fighting for recognition of their village, whose lands they occupied by government order.

But there is no shame. The government, with the backing of the Supreme Court, decided to expel the 1,000 residents, destroy the homes that were built with sweat and tears, and move the residents to a different village, which itself is overcrowded. Replacing them will be members of the chosen people.

The poet Mahmoud Darwish once wrote under similar circumstances, “Hooray for the conqueror of the village … Hooray for the tyrant who subdues the girl with eyes lined in blue.”

A few days ago Agriculture Minister Uri Ariel released his five-year plan as tidings for the Bedouin of the Negev. Attorney Sana Ibn-Bari managed to expose the plan’s intent to uproot unrecognized villages, so we now understand the plan’s true purpose. This is what the state is toward the Arabs; a state of bulldozers.

Writing in Haaretz last Friday, Yossi Verter predicted that Netanyahu wouldn’t go quietly. He will leave scorched earth behind, and the Arabs will be the first to feel his anger over the suspicions concerning his lust for power and love of luxury.

Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel. Bulldozers are the ultimate refuge of the criminal suspect. It’s important for those Jews who refuse to be part of this spectacle to make their voices heard.