THE FIGHT AGAINST FASCISM IN BRIGHTON & THE SOUTH COAST

THE FIGHT AGAINST FASCISM IN BRIGHTON & THE SOUTH COAST

Speaker Tony Greenstein

Tony has been active in the fight against fascism, both locally and nationally. Tony is also Secretary of Brighton & Hove Unemployed Workers Centre and a founding member of Palestine Solidarity Campaign.

Price £8.99 please make cheques out to BUWC, 4 Crestway Parade, The Crestway, Brighton BN1 7BL

There will be a Pay Pal Facility Soon!

BRIGHTON BOOK LAUNCH

Saturday, 17 March 12 pm

The Friends Meeting House,

Ship Street, Brighton BN1 1AF

contact Terry on terrylhm@virginmedia.com www.labourhistory.co.uk

Brighton History Workshop

http://tinyurl.com/7xyd28t

No to Pinkwashing – No to Israel’s Use of Gay Oppression to Justify Palestinian Oppression

Peter Tatchell and Others Support Boycott, Divestment & Sanctions

This letter from Peter Tatchell and other gay and Palestine solidarity activists is to be welcomed. It is certainly overdue. One of the more unpleasant features of recent years has been how the far-right has demonstrated how ‘tolerant’ it is to gay rights unlike those ‘backward’ Muslims. This reached its height with the killing of the gay fascist leader, Pim Fortyn in The Netherlands.

Even in Britain the English Defence League pretends to be sympathetic to gay rights and the BNP came out with the ludicrous position that although we may not allow you to adopt kids and have equal rights, we won’t kill you!

We have the obscene spectacle of the Israeli government, which follows a policy of ethnic cleansing, torture whilst seeking an unprovoked war with Iran, declaring how progressive it is. Support for gay rights is ‘cool’ in an even more ‘cool’ Tel Aviv. In fact Israel is anything but cool. World Pride in Jerusalem in 2006 , which Peter made a mistake in supporting, had to be held inside a stadium because the ultra orthodox who make up a large proportion of Jerusalem’s Jews, have the same attitude to gays as their fundamentalist Islamic counterparts.

I have personally been told by an Orthodox Rabbi that whatever crimes Hitler committed against the Jews he got it right with the gays.

There was a time when Peter Tatchell and his Outrage group wobbled a bit, especially with the advent of anti-Islamic racism and the appalling attitude of fundamentalist Islam to gay rights. In particular Peter turned up at PSC demonstrations demanding that we condemn the persecution of gays within Palestinian society, without realising that solidarity demonstrations probably aren’t the best place to do so. This was based on a lack of understanding that in a feudal style society issues such as gay rights, equality for women raise questions about the frozen nature of the society itself, distorted as it is by colonialism. It is only in the past 20 or so years that British society has begun to accept gay equality. Margaret Thatcher was famous for her hostility to gays and of course Clause 28 which prevented teachers including gay sexuality within the context of sex education. So to expect economically backward and repressed societies to adopt sexual liberation is a step too far.

One has to pay tribute to Tatchell’s fearlessness, whether it was attempting to arrest Robert Mugabe when he was viciously attacked by Mugabe’s henchmen, being punched to the head and still suffering headaches to this day, or turning up at Al Quds Day and both supporting a Free Palestine and opposing the Iranian states murder of Atefeh Rajabi Sahaaleh, a 16 year old girl who was a victim of sexual abuse before being hanged by the blood drenched murderers who use the Islamic regime to justify and legitimise their murderous rule.

This is not, as Mark Elf says, going to be popular with the BNP supporting site Harry’s Place. One suspects that HP isn't going to be wishing Peter many more happy birthdays! Boycott Divestment and Sanctions is a prime example of ‘anti-Semitism’ to these to these woodenheads.

Not sure what fellow Outrage member Brett Lock, who used to be very keen on HP (but seems to have disappeared of late) will make of this, but I remember back in the 1980’s Peter being very supportive of Palestine solidarity within the Labour Party when he was a member. He was a speaker at the Labour Movement Campaign on Palestine at County Hall, the headquarters of the Greater London Council in about 1984.

I can also remember trudging the Council estates in Bermondsey in support of Peter when he stood against that rank opportunist Simon Hughes in an election where Peter’s sexuality was made the key issue. Led by the scum of the Sun, Peter was pilloried for his open and honest admission of his sexuality as the old Labour Right, led by Bob Mellish backed people like the bigotted former leader of Southwark Council O’Grady. Simon Hughes of course came out as gay about 20 years later having benefitted from the vicious anti-gay witch hunt against Peter, who lived under permanent threat on a Bermondsey Council Estate. Come the night and of course the witch hunt was successful and the ‘Liberals’ took the seat.

Part of the problem was that useless Worzel Gummidge of a Labour Leader, Michael Foot, who instead of a forthright denunciation of the bigots hummed and hawed. The rest is history.

It is therefore very welcome that Peter has come out in support of BDS and one suspects that he won’t be a hero to Nick Cohen of the Observer for much longer!

It is also good to see the name of Linda Bellos. Linda resigned many years ago from the collective of Spare Rib because she was half-Jewish and identified at that time with Zionism. It was the time of the Jewish (i.e. Zionist) Feminist Group and Zionist Feminism, a current that has all but disappeared.All signs that Israel is no longer 'cool'!

Tony Greenstein
　

PRESS RELEASE (London 9/2/12):

LGBT and Human Rights Advocates Speak Out Against Israeli Pinkwashing

As Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender History Month gets underway in the UK, human rights advocates are adding their voices to the global responses to Israel's attempt to 'pinkwash' its oppressive nature by portraying itself as progressive and liberal with regard to gay rights. In a letter to the press today, veterans of the Gay Liberation Front, Stop Clause 28, Outrage!, other campaigns and their allies express concern over the hi-jacking of LGBT rights as a propaganda smokescreen to divert attention from Israel's persecution of the Palestinians.

Pointing out that the gay rights movement originated at the time of civil rights, anti-apartheid and Women's Liberation movements, and drew inspiration from people striving for freedom from colonialism, they say it would be 'ironic if, in an attempt to gain a veneer of respectability by promoting itself as a liberal, tolerant haven for gay people and a prime gay holiday destination, a regime routinely violating human rights, practising institutional racism and dispossessing an indigenous population' tried to co-opt their hard-won progress.

Last year an anti-pinkwashing picket of a state-sponsored Israeli gay art exhibition took place in Soho, and more actions under the banner ‘No Pride in Israeli Apartheid!’ are planned. Trade unionists, feminists, Palestine Solidarity campaigners, activists, actors, academics and artists are rallying to express condemnation of pinkwashing and solidarity with Palestinian queer groups, who are part of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, as are anti-occupation Israelis who oppose Israel's attempts to exploit LGBT rights to win legitimacy. ‘Marketing Israel to holiday-makers is particularly callous when there is a world-wide diaspora of ethnically-cleansed Palestinians prevented from returning to their homeland,' Sarah Colborne, Director of Palestine Solidarity Campaign, said. 'There are plenty of other places to enjoy beaches and clubbing without supporting a brutal, racist state at the expense of dispossessed people.'

'The state of Israel is increasingly desperate for positive PR, and is under huge pressure from the international BDS movement to end its apartheid system,' said campaigner Frankie Green, a GLF member in the 1970s. 'They are spending millions on rebranding Israel, and pinkwashing is a deliberate part of that. London is hosting World Pride 2012, and we hope anyone encountering pinkwashing will remember the movement's history and support the Palestinian quest for justice.'

No Pride in Israeli Apartheid!

Full text of letter below. For information contact 07999847254 or 07971424296
or see or pinkwatchingisrael or Israel & Pinkwashing, New York Times or Palestinian Queers for Boycott Divestment and Sanctions PQBDS or Israeli Queers for Palestine.

Dear Editor,

February brings events marking Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender History Month, and London will host this summer's WorldPride Festival, four decades on from the Gay Liberation Front's first Gay Pride events. Simultaneous and overlapping with the civil rights, anti-apartheid and Women's Liberation movements, GLF also drew inspiration from the national liberation struggles of people freeing themselves from colonialism. The LGBT rights we now celebrate originate in the groundbreaking work of that era.

How ironic it would be if, in an attempt to gain a veneer of respectability by promoting itself as a liberal, tolerant haven for gay people and a prime gay holiday destination, an oppressive regime which routinely violates human rights, practises institutional racism and dispossesses an indigenous population tried to co-opt that progress.

As long-term advocates of LGBT and women's rights, some of whom created the first Gay Pride events, we wish to express our concern at the cynical hijacking of those rights by Israel's 'pinkwashing' PR campaign. The specious freedoms enjoyed by some Israeli gay people and visitors to Tel Aviv's nightclubs bear no more relation to real equality than did the privileges accorded white people during South African apartheid. Pinkwashing tries to divert attention from the untold suffering caused by Israel's subjection of the Palestinians to siege, bombardment, military occupation, ethnic cleansing, land theft, settler violence, killings (180 in 2011 alone), imprisonment, forced exile, the crushing of economic, educational and social infrastructure and denial of legitimate aspirations to self-determination.

We write in solidarity with Palestinian LGBT and civil society organisations who initiated the burgeoning global Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement to bring pressure to bear upon Israel until it complies with international law, and endorse their insistence on the universality of human rights. We invite all who share our abhorrence of Israel's persecution of the Palestinians to observe the boycott of Israeli tourism and goods, and hope that LGBT people encountering pinkwashing will take pride in remembering the roots of our campaigning history and support the Palestinian quest for justice.

Sincerely,

Frankie Green, Mary McIntosh, Peter Tatchell, Stuart Feather, Miriam Margolyes O.B.E., Pratibha Parmar, Linda Bellos O.B.E., Rumana Hashem, Jane Lane, Sarah Colborne, Director, Palestine Solidarity Campaign, Professor Oishik Sircar
(message ends)

Israeli Jews? A Chosen People

How the Herrenvolk Sees Itself

In an article, ‘The End of the Secular Majority’ Israel’s only liberal daily, Ha'aretz laments the advance of the ultra-orthodox and the decline of the secular majority. What the early Zionist pioneers chose to ignore was that by basing their claims to Palestine on the holy scriptures, they had handed the power of defining who was chosen and privileged to the religious. It was logical therefore, in order to prevent any breach between the Israeli state and the religious, that personal matters – divorce, marriage, birth – were handed to the Israeli rabbinate, even though the definition of a Jew for the purposes of the Law of Return was based on the Nazi Nuremburg Laws.

It is interesting that despite the continual whines and protests about ‘anti-Semitism’ 67% - two-thirds of Israelis consider themselves the chosen people. Chosen to serve was the original religious notion but that, along with much else, has gone by the board. Choseness now has been transformed into an ideological plank of current Israeli perception. There is no serving but rather having others serve them – the thousands of imported labourers from Asia (no problematic political claims of a right to return). The Chosen People idea has been transformed through Israeli settler-colonialism into a belief in a Jewish Herrenvolk, the master race with Palestinians destined, at best, to play the role of hewers of wood and drawers of water.

Hat tip to jewsansfrontieres for spotting this.

Tony Greenstein

The end of the secular majority

A new survey reveals that 80 percent of Israeli Jews believe in God and 65 percent in life after death. Does the religious revival mean there's no hope for a democratic Jewish state?
By Assaf Inbari

Once there was a secular majority. No more. That's the finding of a comprehensive, newly published study, "Beliefs, Observances, and Values among Israeli Jews," conducted by the Guttman Center for Surveys, which operates under the auspices of the Israel Democracy Institute.

According to the survey, 80 percent of Israeli Jews believe in God; 67 percent believe that the Jews are the chosen people; 65 percent believe that the Torah and precepts are God-given; and 56 percent believe in life after death. It's no longer a matter of popular fondness for traditional customs. This is definitely a matter of belief: three of every four Israeli Jews are not atheists. Even if they are not Sabbath observers, they cling to the basic belief system of the Jewish religion.

The illusion of a "secular majority" has been with us for many years, sabotaging the prospect of forging a pluralistic Jewish melting pot in Israel. The reason this did not happen is that atheists who believe they constitute a majority are as domineering as Haredim. It will happen only if we understand that it's not atheism - which is shared by ever-declining numbers of Israeli Jews - but pluralism, which is still shared by the majority, that is the basis for a democratic Jewish state.

The imaginary melting pot, into which Israel tried in vain to stuff the ultra-Orthodox and national-religious population groups, never had a chance. The smashing of the melting pot had the effect of reinforcing the insularity of the different communities. With separate education systems, separate cultural constellations, niche parties, separate residential areas and the selective application of the country's laws, each group did what it thought best for itself. Underlying the dandyish academic talk about "multiculturalism" is a frightening reality of ongoing intercommunal enmity that threatens to boil over into fratricidal war. Israeli statehood, built without foundations, is crumbling into a politics of crude, unrestrained, underhanded opportunism that is increasingly racist and less and less democratic.

This is what happens when the "secular majority" exempts itself from Judaism and leaves it in the hands of the Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox - as though Judaism were a given, frozen entity whose essence is known to the Orthodox and the Haredim. But Judaism was never a frozen entity. If it had been, the siddur - the prayer book - would not have replaced animal sacrifices; the oral Law would not have provided the written Torah with a revolutionary exegesis; festivals and commemorative dates like Hanukkah and Tisha B'Av would not have been set; and we would have continued to stone wayward sons.

The history of Judaism is the history of its transformation, not to mention the multitude of streams that have existed in every historical period (Israel and Judah, Sadducees and Pharisees, kabbalists and philosophers, Hasidim and Mitnagdim, religious Zionists and anti-Zionist Haredim ). In the face of Haredi rabbis for whom Judaism means the exclusion of women and evading civil obligations, the secular stream should have come forward as a Jewish group fearful for the image of Judaism and its enlightened, egalitarian and democratic realization. As a Jewish stream engaged in a struggle for the image of Judaism, the secular stream should have confronted all the national-religious rabbis for whom Judaism means ignoring the existence of the Palestinians, perpetuating the discrimination against Israel's Arab population and viewing themselves as the true commanders of the Israel Defense Forces. This will not happen as long as the secular stream continues to think it is the majority, and as long as it thinks that as "the majority" it can allow itself to ignore Judaism in its constellation of considerations.

Common ground

Demographically, there are no two ways about it. Since the natural increase rate of the Orthodox and the ultra-Orthodox is 10 times that of the secular population, the future is already here. We need to deploy for it. We are living in the final moments when processes may still be set in motion to shape Israeli society as a pluralistic Jewish community, because people of moderate outlook still constitute a solid majority here. Just as only three percent of those asked in the Guttman Center survey describe themselves as "secular, antireligious" (as against 43 percent who describe themselves as "secular, not anti-religious" ), the majority of the Orthodox and the ultra-Orthodox are also not militant zealots. Not yet. But they will become increasingly extreme as their demographic heft morphs into a critical mass and consolidates their lordship. We have a few years of grace left between the secular hegemony of the past and the - still preventable - religious hegemony of the future. These will be years in which a cultural and perhaps also political alliance can be forged among the secular, traditional, Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox Israelis who share a view of Judaism as a living entity and wish to realize it in all the spheres of life from which it has been rabbinically excluded. A window of opportunity has been opened for cooperation between secular folk looking for roots and religious folk longing for the renewal of halakha - Jewish religious law. The question is whether we will act before the window closes.

Those who read the first Guttman Center survey on this topic, in 1991, were disillusioned early on about the "secular majority." That's because 56 percent of those asked at the time said, for example, that they believe wholeheartedly that the Torah is God-given (that 56 percent has now become 65 percent in the new survey ). The second survey, conducted in 1999, seemed to show that the erosion of the "secular majority" had been contained. In fact, that temporary turnabout was due to the mass migration from the former Soviet Union. That gave the Israeli body politic a secular blood transfusion for a few years, until the newcomers integrated into Israeli society and became traditional like the majority of Israeli Jews.

In other words, the wave of migration of the 1990s did not save the "secular majority," but only bought it time in its rearguard battle. In the meantime, right under the nose of this so-called majority, the Haredim and the Orthodox continued to be fruitful and multiply, and waxed exceeding mighty. As the executive summary of the new survey notes, "It is plausible that were it not for the mass immigration from the former Soviet Union beginning in the early 1990s, the increase in affinity to tradition and religion from 1991 to 2009 would have been constant."

Those are the findings, but the representatives of the "secular majority" are not confused by the facts. Take, for example, the poet Natan Zach, a prominent figure in Israeli secularism. "I don't think this country will last," he told the newspaper Maariv recently. "The society has disintegrated into fragments ... This nation has disintegrated into partisan factions permeated by hatred and zealousness ... It can't last."

But what held it together in the past, before the society Zach's answer might surprise his secular admirers. "The absence of a common base," he says, is what bothers him most of all. ""disintegrated into fragments"?The common bases - religion, history, remembrance of Zion, the Western Wall and the symbols that helped us perceive ourselves as one nation, which succeeded in shaping a Jewish image in the face of Christianity - all of those things disappeared. We actually have nothing."

Forthright words. But who would have believed that a secular leftist like Zach would invoke "religion, history, remembrance of Zion, the Western Wall and the symbols that helped us perceive ourselves as one nation" as our common ground?

Take note: It is this common ground, not the melting pot of the Ben-Gurion era, for which Zach now waxes nostalgic. Indeed, he dissociates himself from Ben-Gurion, who "thought that if you take different people from different faiths, from other parts of the world, from diverse traditions and cultures and put them all into the grinder in which our parents used to make meatballs, everyone comes out the same." Sixty years late, Zach acknowledges the baseless notion of the artificial melting pot, which demanded that non-secular Jews convert their concrete Jewish identity into a bland civil "Israeli" identity in the Tel Aviv sense of the word.

What Zach grasps now was understood 50 years before Israel's establishment by Ahad Ha'am (Asher Ginsberg ), Hayim Nahman Bialik and the other cultural Zionists. Though they had a high regard for the initiative advocated by Theodor Herzl, they maintained that Zionism would not solve the Jewish question if it did not address the question of Judaism. Would the Jews in their state live by the lights of their distinctive culture, Ahad Ha'am wondered in 1903, "or will the state be no more than a European colony in Asia," as Herzl's vision suggested? If the Jewish state was not destined to arise "on the foundation of the eternal bond between the past and the future," why insist on the Land of Israel, or on speaking Hebrew? Let the inhabitants of the Jewish state speak French (the lingua franca at the time of the first wave of Jewish immigration to Palestine, 1882-1903 ), or German (as Herzl, whose native language it was, suggested ).

Secular and spiritual

"We want to create an autonomous life here, which has its own features and special character," Bialik declared in 1928, at the cornerstone-laying ceremony for the Ohel Shem cultural center in Tel Aviv, adding, "In order to create original and true ways of life which bear a national aspect, the material for their creation must be taken from the foundation stones of the ancient ways of life."

Ahad Ha'am and Bialik were concerned that the Jewish state would not endure without a cultural base common to religious and secular: Hebrew, the Bible, the land, history, the legends of the ancient Jewish sages, classic and modern Hebrew literature, the Jewish festivals, the passages of life and the symbols. They proposed a free Judaism, not freedom from Judaism. They proposed that we live Judaism not as a religion that had congealed, not as a rabbinical package deal brokered back when Jewish men were forbidden to listen to women singing, but as a resurgent and relevant national culture. They offered us the common Jewish base whose loss Natan Zach is now remembering to lament.

The same approach was taken by the most prominent of the founders of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. "It is not destined for the state that will arise to be a state of Jews, but a true Jewish state," the philosopher Martin Buber said in 1918. "I doubt that the secular ideal is capable of remaining strong for very long," the first rector of the new university, Samuel Hugo Bergman, stated in 1936, in remarks made at the start of the new academic year. The reason, he explained, was that the social and national ideals advocated by the various Zionist parties "are no more than forms derived from the comprehensive ideal of the Jewish people: to repair the world under the sovereignty of God." And Bergman was being gentle in comparison to Gershom Scholem, the scholar of the kabbala, who said in 1970 that "the severing of the living connection to the heritage of the generations is educational murder," and that "the State of Israel possesses value only because of the consciousness of Jewish continuity."

The spiritual leaders of the labor movement also wished to fashion a rooted national culture here, one not detached from its Jewish sources. "If the Jewish people will only be dragged in the wake of others, if what is created here will be only a Hebrew translation of European life, it will not be sustainable," A.D. Gordon wrote in 1920; and 20 years later Berl Katznelson added, "For a great many of those who are coming to us, or who are being brought to our shores from far as well as near (and, I fear, for no few of those who are being brought up here or were born here ) those shores have not yet become home. Our educational mission is to turn this land, and the spiritual world which gave birth to it, into a home for them, to which the soul clings and abides. That will not be achieved without an atmosphere of love with no scores to settle, respect without falsity, attachment to the nation and its destiny and to its tragic history, its spiritual values, its living creation and the vision of its revival."

Yitzhak Tabenkin, the spiritual leader of the Kibbutz Hameuhad movement, said in 1928, "Not to be moved by Tisha B'Av is barbarism." Meir Yaari, the spiritual mentor of the left-wing Hashomer Hatzair movement, wrote in 1923, "One thing only is clear to me: that a whole nation cannot continue to exist for long without a metaphysical principle and a religious symbol. Otherwise, it will decline. And no economic and social conception will help here."
If we want the native-born Israeli to understand what he is doing here, "we must implant in him the Jewish consciousness which draws on the great spiritual heritage of the Jewish people, on the riveting destiny shared, knowingly or not, by all parts of the Jewish people wherever they may be, and on the messianic vision, the vision of Jewish and human redemption imparted to us by the biblical prophets," the prime minister of Israel, David Ben-Gurion, wrote in 1956 in his cabin at Kibbutz Sde Boker.

No economic or social concept will render us a nation, nor will any civil concept void of identity. Social solidarity is dependent on national-cultural solidarity. Only social consciousness anchored in the biblical concepts of social justice, in the community-based sensitivity of the Jewish sages, in the precepts of charity propounded by Maimonides and in a sense of belonging to this nation and to its history; only a conception of Judaism as a dynamic culture to which each of us is invited to contribute his share; only this will make it possible for secular, Orthodox and Haredi, and also for the Arabs who dwell among us, to speak to one other and not only about one another.

Dr. Assaf Inbari is a novelist and the author of "Home" (2009), which tells the story of a kibbutz.

Save the life of Khader Adnan

Release All Israel’s Administrative Detainees

Please sign the petition to try, even at the 11th hour, to save the life of Khader Adnan. Like all Palestinian administrative detainees, he is subject to ‘occupiers’ justice’ i.e. no justice at all. In Ireland internment, imprisonment without trial, was a major issue in the early 1970’s and its failure led to the fall of the Stormont Government.

Israel has routinely detained, without trial but with torture, thousands of Palestinian prisoners. This has merited no response from those who are so concerned at human rights in Syria. It has also merited no response from the International Committee of the Red Cross. The ICRC throughout the 2nd World War repeatedly failed to take up the case of the civilian population in Nazi occupied areas. They even allowed the Nazis to use them to whitewash the the ‘model’ camp of Thereinstadt in the Czech Republic. In anticipation of the ICRC visit, a few thousand detainees were ‘transferred’ to Auschwitz where they were murdered. Even at Auschwitz the ICRC allowed itself to be fooled by the Czech children’s camp, where in contrast to the rest of the camp, the children were treated humanely, until it was time to be gassed –after the ICRC had long left never to return or inquire.

Over Guantanamo and torture the ICRC has kept silent, so it is not surprising that the conditions of Palestinian prisoners merit no mention. Its record over the hunger strike of Khader Adnan is no exception.

But Israel is behaving like the most stupid occupier. It believes that the use of force is all that is necessary and it has behaved with the utmost brutality, failing to even understand the outrage at detaining people at will on secret evidence for months and years at a time.

Khader Adnan’s life at risk as He enters day 56 of hunger Strike - since 17 December 2011‏

By Anan Odeh (Contact)
To be delivered to: ICRC

We are writing to express our frustration at your slow acting in regards to the Palestinian detainee, Mr. Adnan Khader, who has been on hunger strike since 17 December 2011. Mr. Khader is protesting his being held under administrative detention by the Israeli occupation forces. Adnan's detention is based on military order with secret evidence that he and his attorney are not allowed to review. According to the order, he was sentenced to jail for a six month period that may be renewed without limitation. His detention is continuing without trial or charges. According to International Humanitarian Law, it is the responsibility of the ICRC to take active steps to save his life by applying pressure on the Israeli government to release him.

Reply to an Idiot Atzmonite - Ruth Tenne

Or Why It’s Not a Good Idea to Accept Your Ideas from Zionists

Last week Ruth Tenne, an Israeli anti-Zionist sent a letter to the Weekly Worker, paper of the Communist Party of Great Britain, deploring our ‘witch-hunt’ against holocaust deniers in Palestine Solidarity Campaign. This followed on from our success at the PSC AGM when one Atzmonite, Frances Clarke-Lowes, was expelled for being a holocaust denier and policy was passed affirming PSC’s opposition to holocaust denial or its minimilisation, as well as anti-Semitism and all other forms of racism.

This week both Abe Hayeem, a prominent Jewish anti-Zionist and founder of Architects & Planners for Justice in Palestine and myself had letters responding to Ruth Tenne’s muddleheaded nonsense. I reprint them because they help elucidate the muddle-headedness and utter stupidity of the average Atzmonite.

Tony Greenstein

Letters

Muddled denier

Ruth Tenne’s letter is a good example of the political muddle and confusion of Gilad Atzmon’s supporters in the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (February 2).

Of course, the Zionist movement has exploited the Nazi holocaust for its own political purposes, thus demonstrating its contempt for those who were murdered. What makes this even worse is that, throughout the period 1941-45, the Zionist movement and its leadership ignored or minimised the holocaust, in some cases citing Nazi sources to rebut the reports that were coming out of Europe. Their one priority was building a Jewish state. They opposed the emigration of Jews from Europe to any destination other than Palestine. Between August and November 1942, at the behest of the US administration, the Jewish Agency sat on the Riegner cable from Switzerland that provided definite confirmation of the holocaust.

As Saul Friedlander observed,

“The rescue of the Jews in Europe was not at the top of the yishuv leaders’ list of priorities. For them, the most important thing was the effort to establish the state” (Tom Segev The 7th million London 1994, p.467).

Likewise, Noah Lucas, another Zionist historian, described how Ben Gurion saw the holocaust

“as a decisive opportunity for Zionism ... Ben Gurion above all others sensed the tremendous possibilities inherent in the dynamic of the chaos and carnage in Europe ... the forces unleashed by Hitler in all their horror must be harnessed to the advantage of Zionism” (pp. The Modern History of Israel pp. l87-88).

Even Ben Gurion’s own official biographer, Shabtai Teveth, remarked that:

“If there was a line in Ben Gurion’s mind between the beneficial disaster and an all-destroying catastrophe, it must have been a very fine one” (Ben Gurion: the burning ground 1886-1948 p.851).

It is therefore another example of their hypocrisy that the Zionists use the holocaust to justify their racist treatment of the Palestinians when theirs was a movement of collaboration and worse. And this is compounded by the fact that the Zionist movement used the reparations from West Germany after the war for their own pet projects, leaving the holocaust survivors, for whom the monies were meant, in dire poverty. Yet the more stupid and reactionary of the Palestinians’ supporters have instead taken to denying the holocaust, falling right into the trap that the Zionists have set for them.

Thus Ruth Tenne speaks of “alleged, or imaginary, holocaust deniers”. Yet the position in the Palestine Solidarity Campaign was quite clear. As I wrote in my article, the supporters of Gilad Atzmon and Paul Eisen, who believe that denying the holocaust is the key to unlocking support for Zionism, have caused significant disruption in a number of branches (‘No room for anti-Semites’, January 19).

Francis Clarke-Lowes, whose appeal against expulsion was rejected at the conference, wrote in an email on the Brighton and Hove PSC list: “You are, of course, right that Paul, like me, is proud to call himself a ‘holocaust denier’” (April 4 2011). On April 8 he developed his theme: “the evidence for and against the six million figure, the gas chambers and the plan for Jewish extermination by the Nazis ... are quite technical issues ...” And two days later he wrote: “I do not believe that millions of Jews and others were gassed in an industrial process of extermination ... The traces of Zyklon B gas (hydrogen cyanide) are, I believe, far too low in the places at Auschwitz-Birkenau where the gas chambers are supposed to have been, and are much higher in the places where the decontamination areas were.”

Holocaust deniers are nothing if not stupid. They commissioned an execution ‘expert’, Fred Leuchter, to write a report based on traces he took from the walls of the gas chambers in Auschwitz. Compared to the residues where clothing, etc, was disinfected, they were of very low concentration. Here was their proof that the holocaust was a myth. Unfortunately, they forgot that human beings require very low concentrations of hydrogen cyanide to kill them, whereas bugs and such like require very high concentrations.

What Tenne fails to understand is that the holocaust occurred and there are countless witnesses to the selections, the disappearance of whole trainloads of Jews who only ever made a one-way journey. Where are the half a million Jews of Warsaw? What was the purpose of Treblinka and Belzec, since they were never labour camps, if not extermination? The evidence is overwhelming.

There is nothing that the Zionist ideologues want more than to see Palestinian supporters embracing holocaust denial. It is proof that support for the Palestinians is not because they are an oppressed people, but because we are anti-Semitic. Unfortunately, some people are stupid enough to fall into the trap that the Zionists set for them. Indeed, in his own speech to PSC conference, appealing his expulsion, Clarke-Lowes referred to the “holocaust myth”.

Tenne says that I will, by the definition of one Tanya Gold, “be regarded as ‘one of the leftwing anti-Semites [who] despise Israel, but are [not?] vocal on the crime of other oppressive countries’. Yet, Tony, like Ms Gold and the pro-Zionist camp, is bent on cleaning out PSC of any alleged holocaust deniers and anti-Semites.”

This is a non-sequitur. The second sentence bears no logical relationship to the first. Yes, I will be considered an anti-Semite by the Zionists’ definition. The point is that I don’t accept their definition! Ruth, like most Atzmonites, falls into the trap of believing the enemy’s propaganda.

The decision of Camden PSC to remove Gill Kaffash as secretary, in the light of her consistent support for Paul Eisen, an open holocaust denier, is to be welcomed. However, that was the decision of the local group. It had nothing to do with national PSC.

Ruth speaks of the definition of racism that she and Kaffash proposed. But what a definition. If it had been debated, it would have gone the same way as Kaffash’s other amendment and been overwhelmingly defeated. It was too clever by half. So clever that not only did it exclude holocaust denial, but also anti-Muslim racism and anti-Arab racism, from its remit, since they are primarily cultural, not biological.

The rest of Ruth’s letter is equally incoherent. It starts off by describing the death of her grandparents and relatives in the holocaust, then talks of the “holocaust narrative” of the Zionists. It is irrelevant whether five or seven million died. What makes one a holocaust denier is if you deny that there was systematic extermination and intentionality, coupled with the use of poisonous gas to aid this task. There can be no doubt about the use of poisonous gas. Even David Irving conceded this in his libel action against Penguin. It was, after all, mentally and physically handicapped Germans who were first gassed, between 1939 and 1941, so this is hardly something conjured out of thin air.

We simply don’t know how many Jews (or gypsies) were murdered. The records of many Jewish communities vanished with those communities. An unknown number of Jews fled into the USSR, possibly as many as 1.5 million. There are plenty of unknowns about the holocaust, just as there is in physics and astronomy, but who when debating the virtues of the big bang would start arguing that the sun goes round the earth?

The Palestine solidarity movement, by its very nature, is anti-racist. To allow anti-Semitism or any other form of racism to gain a foothold would be to undermine the very cause that we support.

Tenne speaks with authority, as a Jewish person whose relatives perished in the holocaust. I have to tell her that, according to Atzmon’s Not in my name, “Jews cannot criticise Zionism in the name of their ethnic belonging because such an act is in itself an approval of Zionism.” She too is, by her mentor’s definition, a Zionist!

Tony Greenstein
Brighton

Mischief-makers

Ruth Tenne’s letter draws a parallel between unravelling the Zionist mythology about the foundation of the state of Israel - which needs to be challenged to reveal the truth of events surrounding it - and ‘revisiting’ the facts and events of the holocaust, of which there is universally recognised and meticulous documentation.

She fails to see the distinction between the use of the holocaust as emotional blackmail (which every anti-racist is against) and denying or questioning the holocaust, which is a diversionary tactic employed by true anti-Semites. She conflates challenging the Zionist narrative of 1948 with the need to challenge the facts of the holocaust, a dangerously misguided and misleading approach. The PSC had every right to establish its anti-racist credentials against those mischief-makers who are detracting from the Palestinian struggle by introducing the deliberately fractious element of holocaust questioning, which has nothing to do with the Palestinian struggle and campaigning. This has the effect of diverting attention from action and campaigning, and playing into Zionists’ hands by trying to defend the holocaust deniers, and giving them meat to accuse the PSC of tolerating anti-Semitism.

Tenne erroneously quotes eminent historians like Pappe, Finkelstein and Mark Ellis in their challenging of Zionist history or the use of the holocaust. But they have never questioned the clear historical evidence of the holocaust itself - a tactic used by anti-Semites. Omar Barghouti, the leading Palestinian supporter of the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement, very specifically stated at the PSC annual general meeting that there was absolutely no room for anti-Semitism, racism or for holocaust minimising or denial.

Anyone using the ‘witch-hunt’ description for the PSC places that person firmly in the court of defending the deniers, which does not enhance a reputation of the same person being a discerning critic of the Zionist state, and being able to sift out what needs to be challenged and what damages one’s case. Unfortunately, Ruth Tenne’s statement backing her and Gill Kaffash’s motion to the PSC executive will make them even more likely to confirm that the action taken by the AGM in removing avowed holocaust deniers was the right one and more likely to refuse their muddled and illogical motion and statement.

Abe Hayeem
email

Iran – the Danger of a Unilateral Israeli Attack

For the past 4 years or so there have been continuous stories of how Israel is going to take out Iran’s nuclear facilities. My own judgement has always been that the threat has been inflated out of all proportion. Certainly what is the case is that the United States didn’t, whilst it had its hands full in Iraq, have another war to take on, with the consequent instability caused in Iraq itself and throughout the region.

But in recent weeks it appears to me that the danger has become far greater and in particular, the signs are that Israeli leaders are seriously considering defying their paymasters in Washington. I do not doubt that the United States does not want a war with Iran, though I also have no doubt that there are powerful sections in the US Establishment who would like to take revenge for the 1979 revolution in Iran when the Shah was forced out.

In addition, with the likely defeat of the Syrian regime, Iran stands out as the only independent state in the Middle East in foreign policy terms, even if internally it engages in savage repression of the left and minorities. The removal of the Iranian fly in the ointment would indeed be a tantalising goal for the neo-cons. However those with a modicum of realism to their political outlook realise that in their desire to control oil supplies they may destroy more than they gain. In particular the whole neo-imperial settlement in the Middle East, despite the Arab Spring, is in danger of unravelling if Israel is able to unilaterally attack Iran.

An Israeli attack would inevitably be seen as an American attack especially if, as is likely, the US steps in to aid its close ally. There was a time when the US was not afraid to face down its allies. But the last time this happened was over 55 years ago, during the Suez crisis. Then Britain and France were cut off diplomatically by the US| and their currencies were effectively ambushed, with a massive run on the pound and the loss of reserves. This is unlikely to happen this time around. In 1956 Israel was forced to disgorge its conquests. As President Eisenhower stated, a country that engages in aggrandisement is not to be allowed to set conditions on its withdrawal. The chances of Obama saying the same thing is close to zero percent.

I am happy to purloin this article from Weekly Worker, the main paper of the socialist left in Britain. Although only a tiny group it has a newspaper which is downloaded by over 15,000 people each week which makes it the biggest circulation newspaper on the socialist left. The larger groups like the Socialist Workers Party and the Socialist Party have papers which are not only as dull as ditchwater (especially the latter) but they contain a complete absence of any meaningful analysis or debate, preferring instead to concentrate on the latest strike (admirable of course in itself) and naked party/sect building. I amy return to this problem of the left in a futher article.

The article is by Moshe Machover, a founder of Matzpen, the Socialist Organisation in Israel and a veteran anti-Zionist, whose article, with Haim Hanegbi and Akiva Orr, 'The Class Nature of Israel' some 40+ years ago convinced me that Zionism was opposed to everything that socialism stood for.

Tony Greenstein

Weekly Worker 900 Thursday February 09 2012

Netanyahu's war wish

The threat of a military provocation by Tel Aviv against Iran is very real, warns Israeli Marxist Moshé Machover

One thing is beyond any doubt: a major aim of Israel’s foreign policy is the overthrow of the Iranian regime. What is not generally understood are the motives behind this aim, and the present Israeli government’s preferred means of achieving it. In this article I would like to say something about the motives, and then explain why prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s preferred means is war - one likely to ignite a major conflagration.

Motives

In my 2008 article ‘Zionism: propaganda and reality’,^[1] I quoted a recent Jerusalem Post report on a conference at Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies. That report deserves to be read very carefully, so here it is again:

“Iran’s success in obtaining a nuclear capability will deter Jews from immigrating to Israel, cause many Israelis to leave and will be the end of the ‘Zionist dream’, former deputy defence minister Ephraim Sneh said Tuesday.

“‘A nuclear weapon in Iranian hands will be an intolerable reality for Israel,’ Sneh said during a conference on Iran’s nuclear programme at the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) in Tel Aviv. ‘The decision-making process in Israel will be under constant [Iranian] influence - this will be the end of the Zionist dream.’

“Former Mossad chief Ephraim Halevy slammed Israeli political leaders for calling Iran’s nuclear threat ‘an existential threat’. ‘There is something wrong with informing our enemy that they can bring about our demise,’ Halevy said. ‘It is also wrong that we inform the world that the moment the Iranians have a nuclear capability there is a countdown to the destruction of the state of Israel. We are the superpower in the Middle East and it is time that we began behaving like [a] superpower,’ he said.

“Iran’s real goal, Halevy said, was to turn itself into a regional superpower and reach a ‘state of equality’ with the United States in their diplomatic dealings.

“Sneh said that, while the military option was not preferred, Israel needed to keep it on the table, since such a possibility was the motivation for the international community’s efforts to use diplomacy to stop Iran. Sneh added that he was confident that the [Israeli Defence Force] was capable of successfully carrying out a military strike against Iran. ‘We grew up in a place that when the political echelon wanted something, the professional echelon knew how to do it,’ he said. ‘I believe this has not changed in 2008.’”^[2]

Two points in this report are particularly noteworthy. First, one of the experts, a former chief of the Mossad (Israel’s counterpart of MI6 and the CIA) is talking here about the prospect of Iranian nuclear capability rather than actual production and possession of a nuclear weapon. As all experts are well aware, there is no evidence that Iran has a programme for producing such a weapon. This is as true today as it was in 2008. Indeed, the US defence secretary, Leon Panetta, confirmed this quite recently.^[3] (Nuclear capability is the ability to produce a usable nuclear weapon at fairly short notice. It is a policy pursued by several other governments, and is not prohibited by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, of which Iran - but not Israel! - is a signatory.)

Second, contrary to Israeli and western hype, neither expert claims that Iran is actually planning to attack Israel, let alone subject it to a nuclear holocaust. The former Mossad chief is dismissive of the scaremongering propaganda alleging that Iran poses a credible military threat to Israel. Ephraim Sneh, a former brigadier general and senior Labour Party politician, does mention the (purely hypothetical) prospect of Iran producing a nuclear weapon, but even he believes that the threat it would pose to Israel is political rather than a direct military one.

Indeed, Israel’s worry regarding Iran is the real political threat it poses to Israel’s regional hegemony, not the imaginary threat of being attacked by the Islamic Republic. Possession of nuclear capability is certainly a component of this political threat, inasmuch as it would contribute to Iran’s diplomatic muscle in its dealings with other Middle Eastern states and with the US. But it is only a component. Even without the nuclear issue, the Zionist state has a clear interest in replacing the present Iranian regime by one compliant with global US hegemony.

Divergence

As far as this aim is concerned, the interests of US and Israel are in complete agreement. But, as regards the means, there appears to be a divergence between the Obama administration and the Netanyahu government.

The US, smarting from the wounds of its adventurous wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, would like to avoid an outright open military conflict with Iran, a state that can inflict serious damage to its attackers. Moreover, in the present economic climate a sharp rise in the price of oil - an inevitable concomitant of war in the Middle East - may have catastrophic consequences for the global capitalist economy. True, the scary game of ‘chicken’ the Obama administration is playing against Iran can inadvertently get out of hand and lead to disastrous unintended consequences. (Recall the classic James Dean film, Rebel without a cause …). But the administration is hoping to keep this danger under control and avoid outright war - at least for the time being.

Not so the Israeli government: there are increasing signs that Netanyahu and his defence minister, Ehud Barak, are considering - against the advice of some of their military and intelligence experts - a provocation that would lead to a major war. This causes the Obama administration serious worry: they do not wish to be dragged into such a war by their Israeli junior partner.

On January 20, while on an unadvertised and little noticed visit to Israel (no press conference, no public statement), general Martin Dempsey, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, “told Israeli leaders … that the United States would not participate in a war against Iran begun by Israel without prior agreement from Washington … Dempsey’s warning, conveyed to both prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Israeli defence minister Ehud Barak, represents the strongest move yet by president Barack Obama to deter an Israeli attack and ensure that the United States is not caught up in a regional conflagration with Iran.”^[4]

His warning seems to have fallen on deaf ears. On February 2, Associated Press reported:

“US defence secretary Leon Panetta won’t dispute a report that he believes Israel may attack Iran this spring in an attempt to set back the Islamic republic’s nuclear programme.

“Panetta was asked by reporters to comment on a Washington Post opinion column by David Ignatius that said Panetta believes there is a ‘strong likelihood’ that Israel will attack in April, May or June. Ignatius did not say who told him this.

“Asked whether he disputes the report, Panetta said, ‘No, I’m just not commenting’ …

“He noted that Israel has stated publicly that it is considering military action against Iran. He said the US has ‘indicated our concerns’.”^[5]

In my opinion this is not just sabre-rattling on Israel’s part. There is reason to believe that Netanyahu is seriously considering a provocation designed to trigger off a major Middle East conflagration, despite the enormous risks, that include Iranian retaliation causing loss of many Israeli lives.

To explain Netanyahu’s reckless calculation we need to turn our attention to Zionism’s nightmare: the Palestinian ‘demographic peril’.

One state, Zionist style

By now most people are aware that the present Israeli government has done all in its power to torpedo a so-called ‘two-state solution’. What is less well known is that opposition to a sovereign Palestinian state in any part of Eretz Yisrael is not a mere quirk of a rightwing Israeli government, but a deep-seated and fundamental principle shared by all mainstream Zionist parties.

In 1975, General Moshe Dayan put it like this:

“Fundamentally, a Palestinian state is an antithesis of the state of Israel … The basic and naked truth is that there is no fundamental difference between the relation of the Arabs of Nablus to Nablus [in the West Bank] and that of the Arabs of Jaffa to Jaffa [in Israel] … And if today we set out on this road and say that the Palestinians are entitled to their own state because they are natives of the same country and have the same rights, then it will not end with the West Bank. The West Bank together with the Gaza Strip do not amount to a state … The establishment of such a Palestinian state would lay a cornerstone to something else … Either the state of Israel - or a Palestinian state.”^[6]

Thus, for mainstream Zionism any admission that “the Palestinians are entitled to their own state because they are natives of the same country and have the same rights” would undermine the legitimacy of the Zionist state, and eventually its very existence.

This has remained a cornerstone of Israel’s political strategy. For this reason, no Israeli government has ever signed a legally binding commitment to accepting a Palestinian Arab state. This applies, in particular, to the Oslo accords of 1993, which the second government of Yitzhak Rabin co-signed with the Palestinian leadership under Yasser Arafat. In this treaty there is no mention of a Palestinian state. This was not an accidental omission: when presenting the Oslo accords to the Knesset for ratification - on October 5 1995, a month before he was assassinated - Rabin pointedly stressed that what Israel was going to insist on was a Palestinian “entity which is less than a state”.

Many observers have been puzzled by Israel’s adamant rejection of any Palestinian sovereign state, however small, west of the Jordan River. This seems terribly short-sighted. For, if the whole of pre-1948 Palestine is to remain under Israeli sovereignty, that would mean that Israel would have to rule over a hostile Palestinian Arab people. In effect, the whole of that territory will be one state. Right now there is a rough numerical parity between the two national groups. Since no large-scale Jewish immigration is expected, and since the natural rate of increase of the Palestinian population is higher that that of the Hebrew population, the former will considerably outnumber the latter within a few decades. Surely, the Palestinian majority cannot indefinitely be denied equal rights; but equal rights would lead to the demise of the Jewish state. For Zionism this ‘demographic peril’ is worse even than a sovereign Palestinian mini-state. So it would seem that by sabotaging the creation of such a state, Israel is heading for what its own ruling ideology regards as the abyss.

This apparent contradiction disregards a third option: neither a two-state solution, nor a single state with an Arab majority, but ‘population transfer’. Large-scale ethnic cleansing of Palestinian Arabs would result in a single state in the entire territory, with a large Jewish majority, which is the ultimate aim of all mainstream Zionist parties.

But implementing ethnic cleansing on a sufficiently large scale - while technically quite easy, as explained by the Israeli military theorist, Martin van Creveld^[7] - is politically very tricky. It cannot be done in normal, politically tranquil circumstances. It requires what in Zionist parlance is called she’at kosher: an opportune moment of major political, and preferably military, crisis.

Interestingly, quite a long time ago, on November 16 1989, a junior minister in the Shamir government made precisely this point in a speech delivered at Bar-Ilan University, a hotbed of clerical ultra-chauvinist Zionism.

The Jerusalem Post of November 19 1989, quoting a tape recording of the speech, reported that the deputy foreign minister (roughly equivalent to parliamentary under-secretary of state in Westminster) “has called for Israel to exploit political opportunities in order to expel large numbers of Palestinians from the [occupied] territories”. He told students in a speech at Bar-Ilan University that “the government had failed to exploit politically favourable situations in order to carry out ‘large-scale’ expulsions at times when ‘the damage would have been relatively small. I still believe that there are opportunities to expel many people’.”

Oh, the name of that junior minister: Binyamin Netanyahu.

A sacrifice worth making

A war with Iran would present a golden opportunity for large-scale expulsion of Palestinians, precisely because (unlike the Iraq invasion of 2003) fighting would not be over too soon, and major protests and disturbances are likely to occur among the masses throughout the region, including the Palestinian Arabs under Israeli rule. What better way to pacify such disturbances than to “expel many people”.

Of course, a decision to ignite a war against Iran is not one that any Israeli leader would take lightly. There is a non-negligible risk that Israel would suffer many casualties. This is not a price that even the most adventurous prime minister would consider paying, unless the expected prize is extremely high. But in this case the prize is the highest possible one from a Zionist point of view: eliminating the demographic threat to the future of Israel as a Jewish ethnocracy. So Netanyahu will be sorely tempted to make a sacrifice of his own people for the greater national good.

I assume that American policy-makers are aware of Israel’s special interest in a military denouement of the conflict with Iran, an interest not quite shared by the US. This is why they are worried, and issue stern warnings to Netanyahu and Barak - discreetly and behind the scenes, of course, because especially in this election year, when he will face Republican crazies, Obama cannot afford to appear pusillanimous.

However, Netanyahu cannot flagrantly go ahead and start a war without US approval. Therefore the most likely scenario is a series of provocations instigated by Israel, mostly by devious and covert means, in order to escalate the conflict and drag the US by degrees into mission creep.

I do not wish to sound too alarmist, but the coming few months may well be ‘interesting’ in the Chinese sense l

Notes

1. Weekly Worker September 18 2008.

2. ‘Iranian nukes mean end of Zionism’ The Jerusalem Post internet edition, September 9 2008.

3. ‘Panetta: Iran has not yet decided to make a nuclear bomb’ Associated Press, January 8 2012; reported by Fox News:

4. IPS report, February 1 2012:

5. Washington Post February 2 2012.

6. Ha’aretz December 12 1975.

7. Martin van Creveld, ‘Sharon’s plan is to drive Palestinians across the Jordan’ The Sunday Telegraph April 28 2002: