Israeli Arabs Singled Out For Dismissal and Attack in Israel

Oppression targets Palestinians in Israel

Israeli policemen arrest protesters as Palestinians living in Israel and left wing activists protest against the Israeli attack on Gaza in down town Haifa, July 18, 2014. Israeli police arrested 28 activists, as protesters took the streets and blocked roads calling to put an end to the attack. (Fiaz abu-Ramele/Activestills.org)

Israeli Palestinians are now being subject to an increasing wave of repression, killings and firing on demonstrators.  Avigdor Lieberman calls for Palestinian Arab Knesset member, Haneen Zoabi to be gaoled (she has already been suspended for an unprecedented 3 months) and for the deportation of the Arabs of the Triangle.

The Jewish State is now showing what that actually means.  Israeli Arabs are now not even a tolerated minority, the Foreign Minister and Prime Minister are calling for their removal to the West Bank.   Below is a report from: 

 Patrick O. Strickland Electronic Intifada Haifa 19 November 2014

Amid Jerusalem violence, Arab workers pay with their livelihoods

Twenty-seven East Jerusalem bus drivers quit their jobs, other go on strike, after fellow driver found hanged in bus; 'people are frightened.'

Israeli Minister of Housing Uri Ariel expressed support for sacking Arab workers from their jobs and for the mayor of Ashkelon's decision to prevent Arabs from working in the city

Nir Hasson Nov. 21, 2014 5:00 

Taxi driver Riyad Jatt of the Silwan neighborhood says he stopped to pick up two female passengers near the entrance to Jerusalem Thursday morning.

“They asked me, are you Jewish or Arab? When I told them I was an Arab they didn’t get in,” he says, adding that after 20 similar incidents he stopped counting. “One man stopped me outside the municipality, looked at me and said no and got out. In [ultra-Orthodox neighborhood] Mea She’arim two women wanted to get in, saw I was an Arab and walked away.”

Palestinian taxi drivers make up at least half the city’s taxi drivers; in a sense, they’re on the very frontline of the confrontation tearing the city apart. It’s hard to find a driver who says he hasn’t been cursed at or beaten up.

Since the attack on a synagogue Tuesday, cruising for passengers in West Jerusalem has become a humiliating and even dangerous experience. Many drivers say they’ve stopped working or have given up working at night.

“People say they don’t want to be the next victim,” says Jatt. As a colleague of his puts it: “I haven’t worked for three days, there’s no work. Nobody comes into the taxi.”

Twenty-seven East Jerusalem bus drivers quit

Twenty-seven East Jerusalem bus drivers quit their jobs on Thursday and dozens of Palestinian drivers employed by bus company Egged have gone on strike for fear of being attacked. The walkout began after driver Yusuf Hassan al-Ramouni was found hanged in his bus in the capital this week.

The bus drivers say Ramouni was murdered by Jewish extremists, despite the coroner’s report that he had committed suicide.

“People are frightened,” says Ala Jalgal, a driver who quit. “They have children; some of their wives tore up their clothes so they couldn’t go to work.”

Egged spokesman Ron Ratner commented on the drivers’ walkout. “In the last few days a handful of drivers from the eastern part of the city have chosen to stop working at Egged for personal reasons,” he said.

“It’s a big privilege to be an Egged driver, and we don’t stand in the way of anyone who gives it up. The drivers’ feelings following the suicide are understandable, but even in these tense days they’re in no danger if they go back to work.”

As tensions have increased in Jerusalem in recent months — and climbed in recent days — Arab taxi drivers say they have been the victims of verbal and physical attacks. Employees in various types of businesses are being fired and others are afraid to go to work. Social media are spreading the hatred — among Jews, there are demands that Arabs be fired and businesses that employ them be boycotted.

On Thursday, right-wing activists and organizations launched a campaign to have Arab workers fired in Jerusalem. Some organizations disseminated lists of businesses that don’t employ Arabs.

On social networks, businesses have announced that they have fired their Arab staff and seek to employ Jews only. Many posts are calling for a boycott of businesses that don’t do the same.

Supermarket-chain owner Rami Levy has come under similar pressure; posts on social networks are calling for boycotts of his stores. But Levy said no worker of his would be fired for being an Arab; he accused his competitors of conspiring against him.

'What if the janitor is a terrorist?'

Meanwhile, parents in the religious state school Harel in the Ramot neighborhood demanded that a Palestinian janitor be replaced.

“It’s not because he’s an Arab, but he’s a young man — we don’t know what he’s done or where he comes from. I’m not judging; he could be a good person, but he could also be a terrorist,” says Gilad Cohen, head of the school’s parents’ committee.

“We’re demanding that he be replaced by a woman so that if something happens, heaven forbid, the school staff — all female teachers but two — can at least react. I get text messages and calls all day from worried parents. One mother wrote: ‘What if he decides to slaughter an entire class? Ten kids will die by the time the security guard shows up.’ On the other hand, some parents are urging us to stop the ranting and raving.”

According to Paz Cohen, the head of the city’s parents’ committee, “I can understand the fear, but you don’t fire a person because of his nationality. Still, today more and more people from the mainstream are saying it’s legitimate.”

For his part, Mayor Nir Barkat has spoken out against firing workers because of their origin.

Jerusalem - The Unholy City

Jerusalem  - At the Forefront of the Resistance

Uri Avnery

November 21, 2014

IN ITS long and checkered history, Jerusalem has been occupied by dozens of conquerors.

Babylonians and Persians, Greeks and Romans, Mamluks and Turks, Britons and Jordanians – to mention just a few.

The latest occupier is Israel, which conquered and annexed Jerusalem in 1967.

(I could have written "East Jerusalem" – but all of historical Jerusalem is in today's East Jerusalem. All the other parts were built in the last 200 years by Zionist settlers, or are surrounding Arab villages which were arbitrarily joined to the huge area that is now called Jerusalem after its occupation.)

This week, Jerusalem was in flames - again. Two youngsters from Jabel Mukaber, one of the Arab villages annexed to Jerusalem, entered a synagogue in the west of the city during morning prayers and killed four devout Jews, before themselves being killed by police.

Jerusalem is called "the City of Peace". This is a linguistic mistake. True, in antiquity it was called Salem, which sounds like peace, but Salem was in fact the name of the local deity.

It is also a historical mistake. No city in the world has seen as many wars, massacres and as much bloodshed as this one.

All in the name of some God or other.

  

JERUSALEM WAS annexed (or "liberated", or "unified") immediately after the Six-day War of 1967. 

That war was Israel's greatest military triumph. It was also Israel's greatest disaster. The divine blessings of the incredible victory turned into divine punishments. Jerusalem was one of them.   

The annexation was presented to us (I was a member of the Knesset at the time) as a unification of the city, which had been cruelly rent asunder in the Israeli-Palestinian war of 1948. Everybody cited the Biblical sentence: "Jerusalem is builded as a city that is compact together." This translation of Psalm 122 is rather odd. The Hebrew original says simply "a city that is joined together".  [As Moshe Machover points out, Uri Avneri, as a member of the Knesset, voted for its annexation]

In fact, what happened in 1967 was anything but unification.

If the intent had really been unification, it would have looked very different.

Full Israeli citizenship would have been automatically conferred on all inhabitants. All the lost Arab properties in West Jerusalem, which had been expropriated in 1948, would have been restored to their rightful owners who had fled to East Jerusalem.

The Jerusalem municipality would have been expanded to include Arabs from the East, even without a specific request. And so on.

The opposite happened. No property was restored, nor any compensation paid. The municipality remained exclusively Jewish.

Arab inhabitants were not accorded Israeli citizenship, but merely "permanent residence". This is a status that can be arbitrarily revoked at any moment – and indeed was revoked in many cases, compelling the victims to move out of the city. For appearance's sake, Arabs were allowed to apply for Israel citizenship. The authorities knew, of course, that only a handful would apply, since doing so would mean recognition of the occupation. For Palestinians, this would be paramount to treason. (And the few that did apply were generally refused.)

The municipality was not broadened. In theory, Arabs are entitled to vote in municipal elections, but only a handful do so, for the same reasons. In practice, East Jerusalem remains occupied territory.

The mayor, Teddy Kollek, was elected two years before the annexation. One of his first actions after it was to demolish the entire Mugrabi Quarter next to the Western Wall, leaving a large empty square resembling a parking lot. The inhabitants, all of them poor people, were evicted within hours.

But Kollek was a genius in public relations. He ostensibly established friendly relations with the Arab notables, introduced them to foreign visitors and created a general impression of peace and contentment. Kollek built more new Israeli neighborhoods on Arab land than any other person in the country. Yet this master-settler collected almost all the world's peace prizes, except the Nobel Prize. East Jerusalem remained quiet.

Only few knew of a secret directive from Kollek, instructing all municipal authorities to see to it that the Arab population – then 27% - did not rise above that level. 

KOLLEK WAS ably supported by Moshe Dayan, then the Defense Minister. Dayan believed in keeping the Palestinians quiet by giving them all possible benefits, except freedom.

A few days after the occupation of East Jerusalem he removed the Israeli flag which had been planted by soldiers in front of the Dome of the Rock on the Temple Mount. Dayan also turned the de facto authority over the Mount over to the Muslim religious authorities.

Jews were allowed into the Temple compound only in small numbers and only as quiet visitors. They were forbidden to pray there, and forcibly removed if they moved their lips. They could, after all, pray to their heart's content at the adjoining Western Wall (which is a part of the compound's ancient outer wall).

The government was able to impose this decree because of a quaint religious fact: Orthodox Jews are forbidden by the rabbis to enter the Temple Mount altogether. According to a Biblical injunction, ordinary Jews are not allowed into the Holy of Holies, only the High Priest was allowed in. Since nobody today knows where exactly this place is located, pious Jews may not enter the entire compound.

AS A result, the first few years of the occupation were a happy time for East Jerusalem. Jews and Arabs mingled freely. It was fashionable for Jews to shop in the colorful Arab market and dine in the "oriental" restaurants. I myself often stayed in Arab hotels and made quite a number of Arab friends.

This atmosphere changed gradually. The government and the municipality spent a lot of money to gentrify West Jerusalem, but Arab neighborhoods in East Jerusalem were neglected, and turned into slums. The local infrastructure and services degenerated. Almost no building permits were issued to Arabs, in order to compel the younger generation to move outside the city borders. Then the "Separation" Wall was built, preventing those outside from entering the city, cutting them off from their schools and jobs. Yet In spite of everything, the Arab population grew and reached 40%.

Political oppression grew. Under the Oslo agreements, Jerusalemite Arabs were allowed to vote for the Palestinian Authority. But then they were prevented from doing so, their representatives were arrested and expelled from the city. All Palestinian institutions were forcibly closed down, including the famous Orient House, where the much admired and beloved leader of the Jerusalem Arabs, the late Faisal al-Husseini, had his office.

KOLLEK was succeeded by Ehud Olmert and an Orthodox mayor who didn't give a damn for East Jerusalem, except the Temple Mount.

And then an additional disaster occurred. Secular Israelis are leaving Jerusalem, which is rapidly becoming an Orthodox bastion. In desperation they decided to oust the Orthodox mayor and elect a secular businessman. Unfortunately, he is a rabid ultra-nationalist.

Nir Barkat behaves like the mayor of West Jerusalem and the military governor of East Jerusalem. He treats his Palestinian subjects like enemies, who may be tolerated if they obey quietly, and brutally suppressed if they do not. Together with the decade-old neglect of the Arab neighborhoods, the accelerated pace of building new Jewish neighborhoods, the excessive police brutality (openly encouraged by the mayor), they are producing an explosive situation.

The total cutting-off of Jerusalem from the West Bank, its natural hinterland, worsens the situation even more.

To this may be added the termination of the so-called peace process, since all Palestinians are convinced that East Jerusalem must be the capital of the future State of Palestine.

THIS SITUATION needed only a spark to ignite the city. This was duly provided by the right-wing demagogues in the Knesset. Vying for attention and popularity, they started to visit the Temple Mount, one after the other, every time unleashing a storm. Added to the manifest desire of certain religious and right-wing fanatics to build the Third Temple in place of the holy al-Aqsa Mosque and the golden Dome of the Rock, this was enough to create the belief that the holy shrines were indeed in danger.

Then came the ghastly revenge-murder of an Arab boy who was abducted by Jews and burned alive with gasoline poured into his mouth.

                                                  

Individual Muslim inhabitants of the city started to act. Disdaining organizations, almost without arms, they started a series of attacks that are now called "the intifada of individuals". Acting alone, or with a brother or cousin whom he trusts, an Arab takes a knife, or a pistol (if he can get one), or his car, or a tractor, and kills the nearest Israelis. He knows that he is going to die.

The two cousins who killed four Jews in a synagogue this week – and also an Arab Druze policeman – knew this. They also knew that their families were going to suffer, their home be demolished, their relatives arrested. They were not deflected. The mosques were more important.

Moreover, the day before, an Arab bus driver was found dead in his bus. According to the police, the autopsy proved that he committed suicide. An Arab pathologist concluded that he was murdered. No Arab believes the police – Arabs are convinced that the police always lie.

Immediately after the Synagogue killing, the Israeli choir of politicians and commentators went into action. They did so with an astonishing unanimity – ministers, Knesset members, ex-generals, journalists, all repeating with slight variations the same message. The reason for this is simple: every day the Prime Minister's office sends out a "page of messages", instructing all parts of the propaganda machine what to say.

This time the message was that Mahmoud Abbas was to blame for everything, a "terrorist in a suit", the leader whose incitement causes the new intifada. No matter that the chief of the Shin Bet testified on the very same day that Abbas has neither overt nor covert connections with the violence.

Binyamin Netanyahu faced the cameras and with a solemn face and lugubrious voice – he is a really good actor – repeated again what he has said many times before, every time pretending that this is new recipe: more police, harder punishments, demolition of homes, arrests and large fines for parents of 13-year old children who are caught throwing stones, and so on.

Every expert knows that the result of such measures will be the exact opposite. More Arabs will become incensed and attack Israeli men and women. Israelis, of course, will "take revenge" and "take the law into their own hands".

For both inhabitants and tourists, walking the streets of Jerusalem, the city which is "joined together", has become a risky adventure. Many stay at home.

The Unholy City is more divided than ever before.

Let Mads Gilbert Back Into Gaza - Norwegian doctor banned from Gaza for life

Israel – the only State where it is a crime to save life

But see it from Netanyahu’s perspective.  Israel spends much time and money killing as many Palestinian civilians as possible and then this upstart from Norway, who should be minding his own business, tries to subvert their efforts by saving peoples’ lives.  Not only should he be banned but but he should count his blessings.   Israel could have let him come, arrested  him and then charged him with terrorism instead

Tony Greenstein

The Norwegian 67-year-old has travelled to and from Gaza to treat Palestinians. This summer, the chief physician who lives and works in northern Norway, was back working at Shifa hospital, Gaza, where he spend more than 50 days treating many of the 11,000 injured.

The doctor was attempting to return to the region in October to help in the hospital and was stopped by Israeli officials from entering.

Gilbert says: “When we came back to the Erez border station, the Israeli soldiers told me that I could not go in to Gaza.”

 Now the Israeli government is stating that Gilbert is banned for security reasons, according to an email from the Norwegian embassy in Tel Aviv. The embassy took up the case on Gilbert's behalf after he was refused entry last month.

Norway's Secretary of State, Bård Glad Pedersen, said to VG: “From the Norwegian perspective, we have raised Gilbert's exclusion from Gaza and asked Israel to change their decision. The humanitarian situation in Gaza is still difficult and there is a need for all health workers.”

Gilbert himself believes the decision is connected to his critical comments against the state of Israel.

 The outspoken peace activist wrote a letter to the global media in July this year in which he spoke about the extreme conditions at the Gaza hospital where he worked. 

---

Campaign created by Tariq Ziyad

To appeal to the Israeli Government to lift their imposed life ban on Dr Mads Gilbert returning to Gaza

Why is this important?

Dr Gilbert worked tirelessly trying to save the children of Gaza during the recent bombing campaign by Israel, the Israeli government are attempting to silence him for speaking out about the atrocities that he witnessed first hand, Dr Gilbert carried out great humanitarian work in the most difficult of circumstances, banning from entering Gaza for like is tantamount to a kind of punishment and is certainly not the actions of a 'democratic government' 

http://bit.ly/1sMZrV3

The Origins of Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC)

A Talk I Gave to members of Brighton PSC on 31^st August 2014

We often work in organisations which are so embroiled and rightly so in their day-to-day work, that they forget where they came from.  I am posting for others the transcription of the speech.  Passages in Bold have been added subsequent to the talk

Although slow at first to come aboard the BDS campaign, PSC has persuaded the lumbering carthorse of the TUC to support a boycott of settlement (but not Israeli) produce

PSC was formed in 1982 but I don’t want to start there.  I think you have to give some context and the background to what happened. 

Tony Greenstein speaking at the 2013 PSC AGM

I was brought up in a very Orthodox Jewish background.  At that time the media and public opinion was overwhelmingly pro-Zionist in the wake of the 1967 (6 Days) war.  There wasn’t a newspaper in the land which wasn’t supporting Israel. [The Independent wasn't yet yet existence] The only newspaper which even attempted at some balance was the (Manchester) Guardian, originally the most pro-Zionist of all papers under CP Scott.  It was reviled, of course, as a result.

Being a lover of Hitler, these young fascists recognise that Israel is the most racist anti-Muslim state of all

I can remember when Jerusalem was captured by Israel in the 1967 War, the BBC correspondent, Michael Elkins, was more enthusiastic than anyone else.  He was in fact an Israeli citizen.  He was ghastly and awful but this was accepted at the time.  Most people thought it was a very simple matter.  The Jews wanted a little portion of somewhere to live in the Middle East and the Arabs were intent on preventing this and refused to make peace. 

Hugh Lanning of PCS is the national Chairperson of PSC

The expulsions in 1947-48, the complexities never dawned on them.  It was fortuitous that I broke from that. Partly because we had a school debate and I played the devil’s advocate. The Zionist Federation wasn’t happy about a Jewish school hosting a debate on the rights and wrongs of Zionism!.  That began to open my eyes and then I went on a school trip to Israel, which was heavily subsidised by the Zionist Federation in order to get Jewish school students ‘aware of their roots’.  The only place I liked was Jerusalem.  They guided you around but if you had enough nous you spoke to people independently, which I did, particularly in Bethlehem, to ordinary Palestinian Christians to see what they felt about this benign occupation.  That was 1968-9 and I was about 15.

Jeremy Corbyn and Kamel Hawash on a demonstration outside Parliament

The other thing was that I became a socialist and a Marxist and participated in the anti-Springbok demonstrations against the South African rugby team.  I joined a group which was the precursor of the SWP, called the International Socialists.  There I met one or two other Jewish anti-Zionists.  They were few and far between compared to today where Jewish anti-Zionism has really taken off and become a major headache for the Zionists because it deflects the accusation of anti-Semitism but that was the position in the 1960’s in the wake of the 6 Day War.

Brighton PSC stall in Churchill Square.  Every Saturday Brighton PSC runs a stall

It was only in the 1970’s with the establishment of the settlements, they began in 1968 under the Israeli Labour Government and people like Yigal Allon and Yisrael Gallili of Ahdut H’avoda (one of the components of the Israeli  Labour Alignment).,

Scottish PSC after a failed attempt to prosecute 5 members for disrupting a performance of the Jerusalem Quartet

The massive expansion of the settlements began under Menachem Begin who became Israeli  Prime Minister in 1977.  That was the climate for the beginning of a a solidarity movement. 

PSC Conference speaker

I joined the British anti-Zionist Organisation which was controlled, although I didn’t realise it at the time, by the Iraqi  Ba’athists and the and this was always a problem for any solidarity movement, retaining one’s independence. 

Zionist Wishful thinking as Cherie Blair's anti-Semitic half-sister attacks PSC

But there were other major initiatives.  One was a Labour movement conference in Bradford, around 1981, where I met with Andrew Hornung, a member of Socialist Organiser, a precursor of today’s overtly pro-Zionist Alliance for Workers Liberty, which was then anti-Zionist, and decided to form a Labour Committee on Palestine.  When SO moved into the Zionist camp Andrew left the organisation.  At a well attended meeting at the GLC’s County Hall, in July 1982, we ejected the organiser of the Labour Friends of Israel, Peter Grunberger and set up the LCP as a formal organisation.  In the wake of Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, in which 20,000 were killed and Beirut was heavily bombed, the LCP introduced an emergency motion to the Labour Party Conference that autumn, calling for a democratic, secular state in Palestine.  The resolution was actually passed! I had been elected as its Chair and Andrew as the Secretary and Ted Knight, leader of the Labour group on Lambeth Council was Treasurer. 

However unknown to me and others, Knight was an operative in the Labour Party for the Workers Revolutionary Party of Vanessa Redgrave fame, working behind a paper called the Labour Herald, which Livingstone helped front, and it was funded by various Arab regimes.  The LCP was a useful trophy to display to its funders to demonstrate its political prowess.  At its founding conference in November, some 100 WRP delegates, most of whom didn’t even know why they were there, trooped in to vote accordingly and we left to form the Labour Movement Campaign on Palestine.  We got a good story about what happened published in the Diary column of The Guardian (Knight of a 100 Introductions).

A spontaneous demonstration erupts when the EDL tries to attack the PSC stall.  All 5 of them run for it

The LMCP organised with the early PSC a Labour Movement Conference on Palestine at the Greater London Council’s County Hall.  At the latter, many of the luminaries of the Labour Left spoke – Jeremy Corbyn MP, Peter Tatchell, Richard Balfe MEP (now a member of the Tory party!).  On the day of the Conference the Zionists tried to sabotage the Conference by sending out fake letters in my name with a badly forged signature, cancelling the conference!  However the ploy failed.

Jewish Chronicle Report of founding of Labour Committee on Palestine

Guardian Diary Report of Ted Knight's  sabotage of the LCP Conference

But remember the context.  In the Labour Party for example the most ardent supporters of Israel were on the Labour Left, the Tribunite Left.  Tony Benn and Eric Heffer.  Stalwarts of the Left were members of Labour Friends of Israel.  One of the things that has developed as a result of the 1982 invasion of Lebanon was that the Left began to reject Israel with few exceptions (Jo Richarson MP).  The old Ian Mikardo wing disappeared or died out.  People on the Left supported the Palestinians whereas those on the Right, the New Labourites, made it an article of faith to support Israel. 

That wasn’t always the case.  In Liverpool I remember, with my school, attending a debate where the only pro-Arab or Palestinian speakers were either from the Labour Right, people like Christopher Mayhew MP or the Guardian journalist, the late Michael Adams.  He was the first journalist I can remember who was not pro-Zionist.  One of the Guardian’s correspondents and was rather shabbily treated from what I recall.  He was the first journalist to speak out against Israel’s ‘benign occupation’.

PSC AGM Notice with Omar Barghouti as speaker - At this meeting one of the leading  Atzmonites, Francis Clark-Lowes, was expelled for holocaust denial, something Omar applauded.

I can only describe the background to the growth of a solidarity movement from my own perspective.  I came down to Brighton in 1974 to Brighton Polytechnic and there was established by General Union of Palestinian Students a quite thriving Palestine society.  It was the days of very low-cost fees when you would pay £100-150 to get on a degree course, which now cost thousands of pounds.  So there were a lot of Palestinian students on Engineering and Science courses.  There built up an alliance between overseas students and the White left whereby a sleepy, reactionary and backward student union was captured by the far-left.  I was elected as Vice-President of the Student Union, two years in succession.  In Xmas 1977 I moved the first ever motion at the National Union of Students Conference supporting a democratic, secular state in Palestine.  It didn’t win of course, but it set down a marker for things to come.  In the student movement, in the 1970’s, Palestinian organisation and opinion in Britain was taking root via GUPS.

It wasn’t like now where Fateh are wrapped up in the Palestinian Authority.  I remember two of the activists.  Hannah, a bespectacled Ph. D student who went back to Jerusalem who was aligned with the Palestinian Communist Party and there was someone I called Brother Joseph, who I saw for the first time in a decade at the first Gaza demonstration in London, who was a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and firmly on the left of the movement.  Unfortunately he is very ill now and going blind.  These were some of the unspoken about heroes of the beginnings of the solidarity movement in this country and at Brighton Polytechnic, which was more active on Palestine than Sussex University, where there was also a Palestinian Society. 

There was a burning need for a national solidarity movement which was given the necessary impetus by the 1982 invasion of Lebanon.  People don’t recall but there was a precursor to the invasion where Israel went in and the United States under Reagan (!) forced it to withdraw.  Then it went back in for a major invasion, using the pretext of the attempted assassination of the Israeli Ambassador to London, Shlomo Argov.  In fact the attack was by Abu Nidal, a renegade PLO member living in Iraq and controlled by the Ba’athists.  It was nothing to do with the official PLO but any excuse was sufficient for Israel to go into Lebanon, as we have seen in the attack on Gaza.  The carnage it caused was a catalyst for the solidarity movement in this country and world wide.  The image of Israel as a peaceful state, beleaguered on all sides, was shattered.  

Benn, Heffer and a number of Labour left-wingers resigned from Labour Friends of Israel.  Gradually the Palestinians began to have a voice in Parliament.  Not always a useful voice, for example Tony Marlowe, Tory MP, Monday Club member, for Northampton North who was more of an anti-Semite than a supporter of the Palestinians.  But there was a coalescence among the Labour left that you’d never ever seen before.  I personally began writing a whole series of articles for Tribune, house paper of the Labour Left and George Orwell’s former paper.  These were a sign of the times.  The New Statesman was another paper which swerved from support of Israel to criticism of it. 

Ariel Sharon had achieved quite a bit during the invasion of Lebanon, including complete revulsion for what Israel had done.  It was after the initial false start that a group of people, it must have been about 15 or 16 people, came together at the University of London Union in Malet Street.  Besides myself there was Jeremy Landau, Helen Stollar, who I met at the most recent Brighton demonstration and is ill now.  There was Roland Rance of Jews Against Zionism, Moshe Machover and Haim Skotario of Matzpen – the Socialist Organisation in Israel.  Moshe’s article The Class Nature of Israel which New Left Review published around 1968 and the International Socialists published as a pamphlet later is, even now, extremely worth reading, even after more than 30 years.  Machover was a brilliant speaker on Zionism and is, despite his age, still active. 

There were a number of others, most of whom I can’t remember, Over half the meeting was Jewish!  There were people like John Gee, the future Chair of Palestine Solidarity Campaign.  There were a number of Palestinians and one very vociferous, outspoken and articulate member of the Lebanese National Movement.  Because Israel had ensured, via Assad’s Syria, that the Left did not win the civil war. The aim was to ensure the victory of the fascist Phalange, in order to prevent the unification of the Lebanese nation. 

In 1979, along with a group of others, we visited Lebanon.  The Embassy in Britain was controlled by the Phalange and they refused us visas.  So we went to Syria first and after a couple of days, we were taken off by the PLO in a jeep across the border, without any visas of course.  We were taken by this mountain of a guy.  It was very difficult as you go up on the hills above Damascus and see the city shimmering in the night.  It was a wonderful scene.  It was semi-desert and there were traditional villages and families by the roadside, with tents and lanterns, selling fruit.  We were taken to Beirut where we stayed at a hotel called Triomphe, which the PLO controlled.  Three years later the Israelis bombed. 

It was tragic.  We visited the refugee camps of Bourj-al-Barajneh, Sabra and Shatilla.  The people we saw were lambs to the slaughter three years later, as the Israeli troops lit up the night sky with flares as their fascist friends in the Phalange butchered them, after the PLO fighters had left Beirut under an American sponsored agreement. 

I can remember, with another member of our delegation, crossing the frontier to Christian (East) Beirut from West Beirut, to see Tel al Zataar, a refugee camp, where some 2,000 Palestinians were massacred in August 1976.  This was a consequence of the Syrian invasion of Lebanon, which the USA and Israel had given the green light to, in order to help the Phalange which was in danger of being defeated by the leftist Lebanese National Movement, which included the Druze of the Bekaa Valley.  You saw the destroyed buildings with massive gaping holes where the shells had pierced.  That was a precursor to the Sabra and Shatilla massacres.  We were arrested on the way back, for not having visas, by the Lebanese army, which was few in number and dug in behind sand bags in the strip dividing Beirut.  We told them we were guests of the Syrian government and were released pretty quickly! 

Back in London, PSC was formed three years later, in 1982, and they were small beginnings.  We met I think every 2 weeks in Oxford House, a trade union and community centre in Bethnal Green and I would estimate that after a year we only had a couple of hundred members.  If we organised a demonstration we‘d be lucky if we got more than a couple of thousand people.  When we look back to the monster demonstration on 9^th August 2014 we can see the major advances in PSC since that time. 

Growth in PSC was slow but steady.  PSC took over, two offices in a shabby building, which housed other voluntary and campaigning groups, in the backstreets of London near Finsbury Park Tube Station and after about a year we began employing a part-time worker.  I can remember that one of the workers was Anne Gray, who is still active on the Left and in PSC.

We publicised ourselves at the various GLC festivals on the South Bank of the Thames, anti-racist festivals and similar gatherings.  PSC also worked with the Labour Movement Campaign for Palestine and held public meetings and displays. Slowly but surely PSC gained name recognition.  In particular PSC organised, in Camden Town Hall, a major conference on Anti-Arab racism, funded to the tune of about £2,000 by the GLC (which Thatcher abolished and was headed, in his radical days, by Ken Livingstone).  This produced a major outcry from the Zionist Establishment and the Jewish Chronicle famously wrote that there was enough Arab money within a stone throw of Marble Arch.

It was picketed by Herut, the dominant party of the Likud coalition in Israel and the ‘Marxist’ Zionists Mapam.  We let a few of the latter in (we had heavy security) given the campaign against the Conference.

I objected vehemently to this racist statement (substitute ‘Jewish’ for ‘Arab’ and see why) and after the Jewish Chronicle refused to carry a letter from me I submitted a complaint to the Press Council (the precursor of the Press Complaints Commission).  Much to the Editor, Geoffrey D Paul’s surprise (his main defence was that my letter was too long and ‘boring’) and also my surprise, the PC upheld my complaint and the Jewish Chronicle was forced to print the adjudication, though it also printed an angry self-righteous defence.

Brighton PSC's successful picket of the Sodastream shop - Sodastream is now in deep financial crisis

There have of course been setbacks amongst the Palestinians, notably the 1993 Oslo Accords.  This had a knock-on effect on PSC which held an Emergency General Meeting and voted by 2-1 to support the Accords.  Later the Chair of PSC, who chaired the meeting, with Uri Davies from Israel at his side, told me how wrong he had been.  But regrets after the Accords had been agreed were worthless. 

A number of us resigned from the organisation because, as I wrote in National Labour Briefing (in a debate with Julia Bard of the Jewish Socialists Organisation) this was the biggest setback to the Palestinian since the Nakba.  It was a historic defeat.  Everything I wrote then has, unfortunately, turned out to be correct.  All that has happened is that the faces of the Israeli military have been replaced by that of Palestinians, trained by the Americans and supplying every ounce of Intelligence that the Israelis require.  It is a major obstacle on the road to liberation, to which the Palestinians have to find their own answer. 

I rejoined the organisation locally in the early 2000’s at the suggestion of the then Chair Frances Clarke-Lowes (who ironically I played a major part in having expelled nationally and locally for holocaust denial).  I had taken part in a demonstration from Palmeira Square to Brighton on Palestine, as a result of one of many Israeli attacks on the Palestinians and Lebanese.

But I returned in earnest in 2005 when a friend I knew from the Left, Sue Blackwell, a lecturer at Birmingham University, spearheaded the first major BDS campaign in the Association of University Teachers, later the University College Union.  AUT held a national conference in Eastbourne and she nagged me to go over and leaflet it, which I did, as did other Brighton PSC members (Zoe I remember) and the resolution passed narrowly. That caused an uproar, Tony Blair condemned it as did most establishment worthies.  But UCU held on, despite its leadership (the Left later captured the Executive) and we saw the culmination of Zionist lawfare tactics with the bringing of a case last year at an employment tribunal by Ronnie Fraser, a minor academic, alleging racial discrimination against UCU. 

In reality Fraser was just a front man and the eminence grise behind the case was none other than Anthony Julius, an ardent Zionist and former lawyer to Princess Diana, who trousered some £2m from the charitable trust set up in her name after she had died.  Julius, whose speciality is clearly not employment law, was out of his depth in trying to argue that being a Zionist is a ‘protected characteristic’ (protected characteristics for example age, sexual orientation, gender, race etc. are the grounds upon which you can sue for discrimination and harassment).  The problem, as the Tribunal noted, was that many Jews are also opposed to Zionism and the Tribunal held that the litigation was “an impermissible attempt to achieve a political end by litigious means”.  For a damning indictment of Zionist tactics and a defence of the Tribunal, from a Zionist lawyer see ‘Why the Ronnie Fraser case against the UCU was a legal and public relations disaster’ .

After the successful motion to the AUT Conference in 2005, a group of us were invited for Sunday lunch to Stephen and Professor Hilary Rose where the academic boycott group BRICUP was discussed and tactics planned.  Also in attendance was Betty Hunter, the then General Secretary of PSC who asked me why I didn’t rejoin PSC.  I mentioned Oslo and she said that today that was irrelevant, everyone opposed it now and as a result I felt it was churlish not to rejoin.

Tony Greenstein

Labour Heads for Electoral Disaster

Those Who Want to Replace Miliband Miss the Point - It's the Strategy that Needs Changing

That speech

New Labour MPs Panic as their Seats Are in Danger – But None Advocate a Change in Strategy

When I posted an article in July this year saying that there was no way Miliband could win the election, a lot of my friends told me I was wrong.  On the contrary, given the disarray of the Tories under Cameron and the threat from UKIP Labour stood a good chance of an overall majority.

I doubt if anyone today would repeat that.  The fact is that the chickens have come home to roost.  It wasn’t his disastrous speech at New Labour’s conference, parts of which he forgot, but the lack of any theme to articulate.  Instead Labour comes across as a pink and watered down version of Cameron’s Tories.  They support welfare reform, but not quite as much of it as the Tories and Lib Dems.  They favour capping pr ices on rail and utilities but public ownership is a no-no, but you can’t control what you don’t own.  It’s elementary and Attlee and Wilson understood this.  The policy wonk Miliband understands nothing.

Miliband Address the Zionist Labour Friends of Israel

It would be easy to target the 1% of Britain that owns 55% of its wealth, the savage rich and hangers on but that wouldn’t be the New Labour way and that is why Miliband is doomed.

Miliband Says Nothing in Hiw Own Long-Winded Way

To compound Labour’s misery, the Scottish heartland they took for granted is deserting them en masse.  The Scots rejected devolution but the working-class heartlands such as Glasgow voted to support independence.  Labour ran a campaign with Cameron, with that useless washed up disaster area, Gordon Brown, performing the role of a Tory patriot.  Well devolution was narrowly rejected but Labour has suffered the price of working with the Tories (as well as being stabbed in the back by Cameron the day after the vote).

Ralph Miliband - turning in his grave at the treachery of his sons!

The panic of Labour MPs says more about their fears for their careers than any rethink of  strategy or purpose.  The result may be Labour will struggle to even get 200 seats in the next General Election.   The tragedy is that the socialist left and in particular Left Unity, is so tied up witness navel gazing that it is in no position to take advantage of Labour’s problems.

Tony Greenstein

I posted the following on the Left Unity site.  I doubt it will see the light of day!

‘At a time when Labour is in disarray Left Unity is still obsessing about internal matters.

Who gives a fuck as to who is the principal speaker?  You've lost 1,000 of your members - one third - and have learnt as few lessons and drawn as few conclusions as Miliband has done.

Another left sect consigned to obscurity for which u can thank the ISG and navel gazing 'feminists'. 

Well done for squandering another opportunity for the Left.’