Danger to Rojava as United States Threatens to Stab Kurdish Allies in the Back

Washington stands by Turkey while expecting the Kurds to help fight tough battles against Islamist militants in Syria

The democratic organisation of society in Syrian Kurdistan stands in marked contrast to the Erdogan and Assad dictatorships, ISIS and the Israeli state.  It is a beacon of hope in a region without much hope.  The equality of women, with 40% of its fighting forces made up of women, stands in marked contrast to the feudal barbarism of ISIS and Ahrar al-Sham and the other US sponsored jihadi groups in Syria.

The United States has used the Kurdish YPG (People’s Protection Units) of the Kurdish Democratic Party (PYD) as their foot soldiers in the battle against ISIS.  It was always an unholy alliance since the United States is not interested in the liberation of the Kurdish people or indeed any people in the region.

Rojava - Kurdish Autonomous Enclave in Syria

  

The alliance was however useful for the Kurdish people as the YPG would not have managed to have ousted ISIS from Kobane over a year ago without the help of US air support.  However the US has many other fish to fry in the Syrian quagmire. 

Things are now looking very dangerous for the Kurds and that is why western solidarity with the Kurdish struggle is so important.

The Assad regime, which historically has brutally suppressed the Kurds was forced during the civil war to withdraw from Rojava, the Kurdish autonomous region and even have a non-aggression pact as the Syrian Army came under sustained attack.  With the strengthening by Russia of the Assad regime’s position and the new de facto alliance between Assad and the Turkish dictator Erdogan, the Kurdish position is under direct threat.

It was to forestall the two parts of Rojava uniting that the Turkish military in conjunction with Arab forces under US command has attacked and captured the town of Jarablus from ISIS.  Although this was ISIS’s main outlet to the outside world in Syria, the main purpose of the attack was to forestall the unification of Rojava.  Turkey does not want to seen an independent Kurdish statelet on its border.

This picture taken from the Turkish Syrian border city of Karkamis on August 24, 2016 shows smoke following air strikes by a Turkish Army jet fighter on the Syrian Turkish border village of Jarabulus.Bulent Kilic, AFP

Despite differences between Turkey and the USA, the position of Turkey in NATO is of some importance to the USA, especially given the recent raprochment of Erdogan and the Russians.  The Kurds in other words are facedd with the prospect of a united from consisting of Assad, Erdogan and the Russians to some extent against them.  It was into this configuration of power politics that US Vice President Jo Biden has appeared to make it clear to the Kurds that they should abandon all hope of uniting Rojava and to stay clear of the eastern banks of the Euphrates.  Once again the Kurds are at the mercy of the power play of larger forces in the region, forces they had hoped to play off against each other.  However both Erdogan and Assad have an interest in opposing Kurdish autonomy.  

Erdogan has also, separately, made his peace with Israel and thus stabbed the Palestinians of Gaza in the back too.

I post 3 articles below on recent developments.

Tony Greenstein 

Spilling Blood in War on ISIS, Kurds Pay Heavy Price for U.S.-Turkey Ties

Zvi Bar'el Aug 25, 2016 10:42 PM

Secretary of State John Kerry’s threat was unequivocal. If the Kurds did not pull back east of the Euphrates River, the United States would not help them, he said.

It is unlikely that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is relying on this threat. More important, will the Kurds heed it, and in exchange for what?

YPG in Tel Abyad

One day after the threat, the Kurdish forces also withdrew from Manbij, Syria, one of the Islamic State’s most important strongholds, which had been taken by Kurdish forces under cover of American air support in a battle that won them accolades for their important victory.

“It’s a slap in the face to the Kurds,” Erwin Stran, a U.S. volunteer who fought with the Syrian Democratic Forces against the Islamic State organization, told ARA News, a Kurdish press agency covering northern Syria and the Kurdish areas.

A Turkish army tank and an armored vehicle are stationed near the border with Syria, Karkamis, Turkey, August 23, 2016.IHA via AP 

The SDF was established by the United States as an alliance of Kurdish, Arab and other militias to blur the organization’s Kurdish character — necessary to allow Washington to continue to support the Kurds without overly angering Turkey.

But now it seems that the Kurds are once again paying in blood for the complex and tense relationship between Ankara and Washington.

An official in the Kurdish administration in Iraq told Haaretz that the American threat “conveys a frustrating and dangerous message not only to the Kurds in Syria but to the entire Kurdish people, who are spilling blood in the war against ISIS and were relying on the U.S. government to stand by them."

Pro-Ankara Syrian opposition fighters moving two kilometers west from the Syrian Turkish border town of Jarabulus.Bulent Kilic / AFP

"The Kurdish forces in Syria seek to establish an autonomous region and that is their right," he said. "They paid and are paying a heavy price to create territorial contiguity in Syria that they need to establish an autonomous region.

"That was clear to the Americans from the outset and they said nothing when the Kurds declared Kurdish autonomy in Syria. Now they have decided to stand with Turkey and at the same time they expect the Kurds to continue helping in the war against ISIS.”

Turkey, which has changed its attitude about direct military involvement in Syria after years of helping Islamic State and other extremist militias, is holding a major means of leverage.

The renewal of ties between Turkey and Russia and the establishment of a commission for military, intelligence and political cooperation between the two countries has earned Washington’s support.

But at the same time, Turkey can threaten to withhold cooperation with the United States if the latter allows the Kurds to establish an autonomous region on its border with Syria.

Turkey can also pressure Washington to extradite Turkish Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen, whom Turkey claims was behind the recent failed coup.

The United States is not anxious to extradite Gulen, but it began legal discussions with Ankara this week to examine the evidence against him and it may be assumed that the threat against the Kurds is part and parcel of efforts to ease the diplomatic tension.

But there are two more heavyweights in this muddy arena. Over the past year, Russia has become an ally of the Kurds in Syria and was even able to mediate between them and the Syrian regime.

The Russian-Kurdish alliance blossomed in the wake of the crisis between Turkey and Russia after the downing by Turkey of a Russian Sukhoi aircraft in November 2015.

But even after the two countries reconciled, Russia did not abandon the Kurds. Last week Moscow initiated a cease-fire between the Syrian regime and the Kurds in the Hasakah region in northeastern Syria.

According to the terms, the Syrians could maintain a symbolic police force in two cities of Hasakah and Qamishli, the two sides would trade prisoners and the dead, and the Kurds would be in charge de facto of security in those cities.

Kurdish government workers who had been dismissed due to the war would return to work and negotiations even began over the “Kurdish problem.”

Ostensibly this was “merely” a local accord, but its special importance is that it strengthened the standing of Russia, which, unlike the United States, can establish a cease-fire, create “areas of quiet” and translate its aerial assaults into achievements on the ground.

According to Syrian media reports, Russia is trying to change Turkey’s position vis-a-vis Syrian President Bashar Assad, and agree to his remaining in office at least until elections can be held.

This initiative has already seen partial success with Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim’s declaration that Assad is an important player in the Syrian crisis and Turkey could agree to his remaining temporarily in office.

Iran is trying to encourage Turkey, and worked behind the scenes to further Turkish-Russian reconciliation. Iran sees the axis of Russia-Turkey-Iran leading diplomatic initiatives to resolve the crisis. The importance of this axis to Iran is not only the chance of ending the war, but also to neutralize diplomatic moves by Saudi Arabia, Tehran’s bitter adversary, and to distance Turkey from the Sunni coalition that Saudi King Salman has established. Iran’s realpolitik approach is unimpressed by the fact that Russia is an “infidel” state and that Turkey is Sunni. Iran has already proven that when the need arises, it is prepared to cooperate with any entity that serves its interests, including the United States, with which it signed the nuclear agreement.

But Russian-Iranian rapprochement comes at a political cost. That has recently manifested itself in verbal blows exchanged between Iranian Defense Minister Hossein Dehghan and the Speaker of the Iranian Parliament, Ali Larijani, over granting permission for Russian planes to operate from Iran’s Hamedan airfield.

Dehghan said that since permission was only for takeoffs and landings, no parliamentary approval was needed, and that parliament should keep its mouth shut in matters that do not concern it.

Larijani responded that the defense minister “had better avoid statements against parliament and act according to the customs of the regime.”

The problem worsened when Dehghan said the Russian planes had stopped operating from the airfield and Larijani said the opposite.

Russia wants to establish a regular base in Iran for refueling, bomb storage and a large technical team, while for now Iran is willing only to allow landings, takeoffs and refueling. The dispute is wider because Russia is not willing to attack targets of interest to Iran and does not coordinate its flight destinations with Tehran.

This is not a crisis in ties between the two countries, but an arm-twisting effort in the context of Iran’s concern over what it considers Russia’s takeover of Syria. Hence the importance Iran accords the partnership with Syria and its actions now to sort things out over Assad’s future.

According to the Saudi daily Asharq Al-Awsat, Turkey sent a retired general, Ismail Hakki (not to be confused with the former Turkish chief of staff) to Tehran where he met with senior Syrian officials.

Hakki was the Turkish coordinator of the 1998 Adana Agreement that ended the crisis between Turkey and the Hafez Assad regime in Syria over actions of the Kurdish PKK in Syria.

Washington has no contribution at all in any of these moves. At the moment it can only prepare the assault on ISIS in Mosul, Iraq and Raqqah, in Syria.

On those two fronts, its plans depend on massive cooperation on the part of Kurdish forces. We can only watch to see how the Kurds will operate after the slap in the face they received this week. 

The Turkish Army & Syrian Rebels Push ISIS Out of Border Town Jarablus

Syrian rebels retake town with aid from Turkish tanks, special forces and warplanes. U.S. and Turkey agree to limit Kurdish expansion to east of Euphrates.

Reuters and The Associated Press Aug 24, 2016 7:53 PM

Turkish special forces, tanks and jets backed by planes from the U.S.-led coalition launched their first co-ordinated offensive into Syria on Wednesday to try to drive Islamic State from the border and prevent further gains by Kurdish militia fighters.

Syrian opposition forces said they are in control of Jarablus only hours after Turkey launched a cross-border operation to help them oust the Islamic State group from the border town in northern Syria.

Several rebel factions involved in the fighting announced they had liberated the town from ISIS, but were still fighting small pockets of militants.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which monitors the Syrian civil war, says rebels are in almost full control of Jarablus, adding that ISIS had lost its last link to the outside world.

Ahmad al-Khatib, an opposition media activist embedded with the rebels, says they control 90 percent of the town and posted photos of rebels purportedly in the town's center.

funeral for the victims of a suicide bombing in Gaziantep

After the takeover of Jarablus, a Turkish official said the operation in Syria will continue until Turkey is convinced that threats to its national security were neutralized. According to the official, the operation aims to permanently stop the influx of foreign fighters to Syria and cut supply lines to Syrian militias.

The Turkish and Syrian governments said the cross-border incursion on the town on Jarablus was backed by U.S. airstrikes. Hundreds of Syrian opposition fighters also joined the assault. Just hours after the operation began, U.S. Vice President Joe Biden landed in Ankara.

The unprecedented incursion marked a dangerous escalation in the Syrian conflict — and demonstrates the twisted rivalries that run through the war.

This picture taken on August 24, 2016 shows a Turkish army tank driving towards Syria in the Turkish-Syrian border city of Karkamis, in the southern region of Gaziantep. Bulent Kilic, AFP

 The U.S. has long pushed for more aggressive action by Turkey against the Islamic State group. But Turkey's move to thwart Kurdish ambitions puts it on a path toward potential confrontation with Kurdish fighters in Syria who are also supported by the United States and have been the most effective force battling ISIS in northern Syria.

Turkey has been deeply concerned by the advances of the main U.S.-backed Syrian Kurdish militia, known as the YPG, which after months of taking territory from ISIS is poised to control nearly the entire Syrian side of the border with Turkey. The YPG is also linked to Kurdish rebels waging an insurgency in southeastern Turkey.

Speaking in Ankara, Biden backed Turkey's demand for limits on Kurdish expansion. Kurdish forces "must move back across the Euphrates River. They cannot, will not, under any circumstance get American support if they do not keep that commitment," he said.

A senior U.S. administration official said U.S. advisers have been working closely with Turkey on plans for the Jarablus operation, providing intelligence and air cover. The official was not authorized to discuss the military operations publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said the military operation aims to prevent threats from "terror" groups, including the Islamic State and the YPG. He said the operation was in response to a string of attacks in Turkey, including an ISIS suicide bombing at a wedding party near the border which killed 54 people.

A senior official with the YPG's political arm warned Turkey will pay the price. Saleh Muslim, the co-president of the Democratic Union Party or PYD, tweeted that "Turkey is in Syrian Quagmire. Will be defeated as Daesh" will be. He used the Arabic language acronym for IS.

Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu accused the Kurds have a secret agenda to establish a state. "If his (Muslim) intention had been to fight Daesh then he wouldn't oppose such an operation... And so the PYD's secret agenda is out in the open.”

ISIS-held Jarablus is a key lynchpin in the Turkish-Kurdish rivalry. The town lies on the western bank of the Euphrates River at the point where it crosses from Turkey into Syria.

The YPG and other Syrian Kurds stand on the east bank of the river, and from there they hold the entire border with Turkey all the way to Iraq. They also hold parts of the border further west, so if they ever took control of Jarablus, they would control almost the entire stretch.

Last month, Kurdish forces and their allies scored a major victory, crossing west of the Euphrates to retake the town on Manbij from Islamic State militants. They now say they will push further west to assault the ISIS-held town of al-Bab.

Turkey codenamed its cross-border assault "Euphrates Shield," suggesting the aim was to keep the YPG east of the Euphrates River.

Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said that in Biden's talks in Ankara, the two sides reached agreement that that the Syrian Kurdish forces "should never spread west of the Euphrates and not enter any kind of activity there."

Cavusoglu said Syrian Kurdish forces must cross back to the east side of the Euphrates as soon as possible. "Otherwise, and I say this clearly, we will do what is necessary."

The Syrian government denounced the Turkish military incursion and called for an immediate end to what it described as a "blatant violation" of Syrian sovereignty. It said Turkish tanks and armored vehicles crossed into Syria under the cover of U.S.-led airstrikes.

Turkey has backed rebels against Syrian President Bashar Assad throughout Syria's civil war. It has conducted small, brief special forces operations in the past.

But Wednesday's assault was its first major ground incursion.

The operation began at 4 A.M. with intense Turkish artillery fire on Jarablus, followed by Turkish warplanes bombing ISIS targets in the town. Then up to 20 tanks and a contingent of special forces moved across the border, according to Turkey's private NTV television and several Syrian opposition activists.

Ahmad al-Khatib, a Syrian opposition activist embedded with the rebels, said some 1,500 opposition fighters were involved. He said the fighters come from the U.S.-backed Hamza brigade, as well as rebel groups fighting government forces in Aleppo, such as the Nour el-Din el Zinki brigade, the Levant Front, and Failaq al-Sham.

Fighters from the powerful and ultraconservative Ahrar al-Sham brigade are also present, he said.

Biden's visit comes at a difficult time for ties between the two NATO allies. Turkey is demanding that Washington quickly extradite a U.S.-based cleric blamed for orchestrating last month's failed coup while the United States is asking for evidence against the cleric and that Turkey allow the extradition process to take its course.

But Biden's comments put Washington and Ankara on the same page on limiting the advances by the United States' other main ally in the conflict, the Syrian Kurds.

The capture of the town of Manbij last month from ISIS heightened Turkey's fears. It was seized by the Kurdish-led group known as the Syria Democratic Forces, or SDF. The U.S. says it has embedded some 300 special forces with the SDF, and British special forces have also been spotted advising the group. 

The Real Target of Turkey's Syrian Operation Is the Kurds, Not ISIS

The Kurdish takeover in Manbij and their stated intention to further encroach on ISIS territory raised the stakes for Ankara, which understood that if it doesn't act now it may find a new Kurdish entity on its border.

Zvi Bar'el Aug 24, 2016 9:48 PM

See map:  

“We will cleanse the area of all the terrorists,” declared Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim on the eve of  the Turkish invasion of Syrian territory near the city of Jarablus. But the Turkish definition of terrorists does not relates solely to Islamic State operatives or Al-Qaida; it also includes, perhaps primarily, the Kurdish rebels in Syrian territory that are considered a threat to Turkey.

Herein lies the paradox of the Turkish military operation. Ostensibly it is a reprisal operation for the mortar fire from Syrian territory early this week and the suicide attack that killed 54 people at a wedding in Gaziantep, only a few dozen kilometers from the battle site. But the Islamic State had committed large attacks before without drawing a Turkish invasion of Syria. The main reason for the incursion was to launch a military plan that had already been drawn up to prevent the Kurds from creating territorial contiguity for themselves.

Jarablus is a relatively small city, but its strategic importance lies in its location between two districts controlled by Syrian Kurds that have an enclave controlled by the Islamic State (also known as ISIS or ISIL) between them. Until now, that enclave has prevented the two Kurdish districts from merging, a move that would provide the geographic infrastructure for establishing a continuous Syrian Kurdish district that could become an independent enclave, like the Kurdish region in Iraq.

That is why for years Turkey ignored – and, according to American reports, even assisted – the logistical traffic of Islamic State fighters and equipment between the little town of Karkemish, in Turkish territory, and Jarablus on the Syria side. Until the Turkish attack that began on Wednesday, Jarablus was the only direct crossing point between the Islamic State enclave and Turkey; this campaign may close that route.

The question is whether Turkey plans to leave a permanent military presence in Syria to prevent the Kurdish rebels from seizing control of the ISIS territory or whether it can succeed in enlisting enough non-Kurdish rebels, particularly from the Free Syrian Army, to act on its behalf.

The Turkish decision was not based solely on the ISIS mortar fire but primarily on developments in the field and the intervention of the great powers. The Kurdish conquest of the city of Manbij, south of Jarablus, and the Kurds’ plan to also capture Al-Bab, south of Manbij, made it clear to Turkey that it was liable to find itself facing a new reality on its border that would be difficult to change if it didn’t act immediately. The cooperation of the United States and Russia with the Kurdish rebels made Turkey realize that it was losing control over what was happening in the region close to its border.

Although Turkey has signed a military cooperation agreement with Russia, Russian aid to the Kurds has not stopped. Russia, which saw the Kurds as a way to aggravate Turkey during the months of crisis between the two countries, believes the Kurds will not oppose keeping the regime of President Bashar Assad in place.

Actually, the military cooperation between Russia, the United States and Turkey created a dilemma for the Turks, who had to decide where their most important interests lie. Is it more important to maintain the ISIS enclave, which split the territory held by the Kurds, or to cooperate in the battle against it?

For now, there is only one solution to this dilemma; to deploy Turkish forces in the field and help the Free Syrian Army seize control of the enclave, in the hope that these forces won’t then cooperate with the Kurdish rebels, who are considered the most effective fighters in the war against ISIS.

The problem is that the Turkish invasion and the involvement of the Free Syrian Army may cause an internal battle between the invading forces and the Kurdish militias and divert the focus of the battles from the war against ISIS to a struggle for territorial gain.

The Turkish invasion interferes with the plans of Russia and the United States, which have declared their desire to preserve Syria as a united entity, but in practice have not categorically rejected the idea of establishing an independent Kurdish zone that they will take under their wing. On the other hand, Russia and the United States cannot stop the Turkish invasion, which has acquired legitimacy because it’s being portrayed as a battle against ISIS.

At the same time, the Turkish campaign publicly demolishes the strategy of non-intervention on the ground that the great powers have been upholding until now. It’s true that a few hundred American fighters and trainers are operating in the field alongside the rebels, Russian ground troops are involved in the fighting and, of course, Iranian forces have been fighting in the Syrian arena for years. But as a declared policy, the powers have stressed that they do not plan to deploy ground troops. The Turkish move is liable to change that approach, particularly since plans to conquer the cities of Mosul in Iraq and Raqqa in Syria from ISIS are advancing in the background.

Turkey recently came to the realization that its immunity to ISIS attacks on its territory has faded and that the period in which it cooperated with the organization didn’t bring the hoped-for results. It seems that Turkey is also rethinking its strategy and may no longer be so insistent about blocking Assad’s continued rule at any price.

Last week, for the first time, Yildirim said that, “Assad is one of the players in the Syrian arena,” and that he could be allowed to continue his rule temporarily. This approach is based on the desire to keep Syria united in the face of demands to create a federated state in which the Kurds would have an officially recognized independent district.

Despite Assad’s sharp condemnation of the Turkish invasion, he too wants to prevent the establishment of an independent Kurdish district, and would prefer Turkey as a possible partner over the Kurdish or other rebel groups. 

Open Letter to Joan Ryan MP – Chair of Labour Friends of Israel

Letter to Joan Ryan MP

 To:    Joan Ryan MP

Chair, Labour Friends of Israel

          House of Commons

          London SW1A 0AA

Thursday, 25 August 2016

To:  joan.ryan.mp@parliament.uk

Dear Ms Ryan,

As the only Jewish member of the Labour Party to have been suspended for ‘anti-Semitism’, I note with interest the open letter which you recently wrote to Richard Burgon MP regarding his comments that Labour MPs should quit Labour Friends of Israel and that Zionism is the enemy of peace. 

You suggested that the comments were so far outside the boundaries of what passes for acceptable political debate in the salons and interview rooms of Westminster, that they must have been misreported.  I think we can assume that this is merely a literary device on your part.  If you had any doubts that the above comments were genuine, you would have written a private not public letter.   

I shall not indulge in fake politeness on a subject which involves the racial subjugation and immiseration of millions of human beings.  When one and a half million Palestinians in Gaza are forced to live through a decade long siege, when people die because basic medicines cannot be imported and when they are forced to drink polluted water, 95% of Gaza’s water is polluted as a result of Israel’s water theft and bombing of water purification plants, then one should not engage in semantics.  Keeping Palestinians thirsty is no doubt part of Israel’s war on ‘terrorism’.

You profess outrage that anyone could suggest not wanting to associate with LFI.  You must be aware that in 1982 large numbers of MPs, Tony Benn and Eric Heffer among them, resigned from LFI because of its support for Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, when some 20,000 civilians were killed and 100,000 injured. 

During the invasion of Lebanon, Israeli soldiers besieged Beirut in alliance with their fascist friends the Phalange (named in honour of Franco’s Falange).  Israel’s army lit up the night sky with flares and sent Phalangist death squads, armed with knives, to perpetrate an ISIS style slaughter of the inhabitants of the Sabra and Chatilla refugee camps.  Some 2,000 women, children and old people were slaughtered, women had their breasts cut off and young boys were castrated. 

Despite this atrocity, Israel’s then Defence Minister, Ariel Sharon went on to become Israel’s Prime Minister between 2001 and 2006.  Your friends in the Israeli Labour Party formed a coalition with Sharon, the ILP ‘s current leader, Yitzhak Herzog, serving as Minister of Housing and Construction.

You profess to be surprised that Richard described Zionism as an ‘enemy of peace’.  You even advise him to take note of Shami Chakrabarti’s advice to use the term ‘“Zionist” advisedly, carefully and never euphemistically.’  I am happy to follow her advice.  I can assure you I would never use Zionism ‘euphemistically’ given it is one of the most pernicious racial movements in colonial history.    

The Zionist movement was formally established in 1897 by Theodor Herzl, at the first World Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland.  As you probably do not know, it was originally scheduled to be held in Munich, Germany but the local Jewish community objected because Zionism was seen as a form of Jewish anti-Semitism.  Zionism reflected the anti-Semitic belief that Jews did not belong in the countries of their birth.

Zionism’s aim was the formation of a Jewish state in Palestine in alliance with a colonial power.  In 1917 it formed just such an alliance with British imperialism, in what became known as the Balfour Declaration.  Like many colonial movements it campaigned on the slogan of ‘a land without a people for a people without a land.’  The native Palestinians were invisible in the eyes of the Zionists.

You claim that Zionism is ‘the broad ideological movement for Jewish national self-determination in Israel.’  Perhaps you would enlighten me as to when Zionism was first described as a ‘national liberation movement’?  It appears you are attempting to bask in the reflected glory of liberation movements such as the African National Congress.  Incidentally, the notion that Jews form a separate nation is, in itself, deeply anti-Semitic and basis of the world Jewish conspiracy theory.

Zionism was a movement of settler colonialism.  That was why Israel was the best friend of Apartheid South Africa, breaking the arms embargo and supplying it with weaponry including nuclear weapons.  Perhaps you were not told about the visit of John Vorster, South African Prime Minister to Israel in April 1976?  Vorster, who was interned during the war for his support of the Nazis and membership of the Broederband, nonetheless paid homage to the Holocaust dead at Yad Vashem!

Israel is the state that helped train the death squads of Central America, supplied the Argentinian Junta with weaponry (despite murdering up to 3,000 Argentinian Jews) and armed and trained the Guatemalan army which in the 1980’s murdered up to 200,000 Indians.  Your suggestion that Zionism shares anything in common with the ANC is obscene.

The aforementioned Theodor Herzl wrote to Cecil Rhodes, the founder of Rhodesia, asking for his support for Zionism.  Herzl wrote ‘How, then, do I happen to turn to you since this is an out-of-the-way matter for you?  How indeed?  Because it is something colonial.’  This can be found in Herzl’s Diaries, Vol. 4, page 1194.  The founders of Zionism always saw it as a colonising movement.

You are right.  Zionism was indeed a consequence of European anti-Semitism, in the 19^th (not 20^th) century.  It was unique amongst Jewish movements since it accepted the basic premise of the anti-Semites that Jews were aliens in the lands in which they lived and were born.

You said that it is a great pity that ‘the Labour Party’s relationship with the British Jewish community has been so damaged by the events of the past year.’  I agree.  The deliberate making of false claims of ‘anti-Semitism’ by MPs such as Ruth Smeeth and papers such as the Daily Mail, which in the 30’s opposed the entry of Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany, has indeed been damaging.  I can only hope that you use your influence to bring these false accusations of anti-Semitism to an end.

You profess to support a two-state solution.  Why then do you support the military dictatorship in the West Bank and the unremitting attacks on Gaza?  Your call for a 2 State solution serves only as a cover for Apartheid.  It enables Jewish settlement to take place whilst providing a pretext for the denial of any political or civil rights to the indigenous Palestinians.

Perhaps you could name even one Israeli government Minister who believes in a 2 state solution?  Deputy Foreign Minister Tsipi Hotoveli is typical when she said that ‘This land is ours. All of it is ours. We expect as a matter of principle of the international community to recognize Israel’s right to build homes for Jews in their homeland, everywhere.”

Even the ILP does not support a 2 state solution.  It supports segregation and a Bantustan.   Herzog explained that ‘I want to separate from the Palestinians. I want to keep a Jewish state with a Jewish majority. I don’t want 61 Palestinian MKs in Israel’s Knesset. I don’t want a Palestinian prime minister in Israel.’  If you don’t understand why this is racist imagine someone saying they didn’t want a Jewish Prime Minister in Britain. [Who needs the Right when we have Isaac Herzog?]

In an ILP election video Herzog was described as ‘someone who “understands the Arab mentality” and “has seen Arabs in all kinds of situations,” including “in the crosshairs.”  Why did we forget about Herzog's anti-Arab campaign? +972 Magazine 23.3.15.  Again imagine someone describing the ‘Jewish mentality’.  Racist?  Historically the Israeli Labour Party was more racist than Likud.  It was the party of the Nakba, the expulsion of ¾ million Palestinian refugees.

You state that you support a negotiated settlement in Israel/Palestine.  Israel has spent billions of dollars on building its settlements and stealing its land and water.  It’s not going to negotiate them away.  As Martin Luther King famously wrote in Letter From a Birmingham Jail ‘Lamentably, it is an historical fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily.’

You say you support peace.  Perhaps you could tell me if you have ever opposed Israeli repression in the Occupied Territories?  You supported the 2014 war in Gaza which killed 550 children.  You have kept silent about the continued destruction of Palestinian homes and European Union funded structures, over 600 of which have been destroyed this year alone, in the West Bank.  Have you nothing to say about Jewish roads and separate entrances for Jews and Palestinians at checkpoints?  What I do know is that Louise Ellman, an LFI officer, supported the imprisonment and torture of Palestinian children as young as 12 in a recent debate in the House of Commons.

Your complaints about Hamas’s Charter, which is a dead letter, would be more impressive if it wasn’t for the fact that Israel played a crucial part in the creation of Hamas as a counterweight to secular Palestinian nationalism.  [see Israel’s Jerusalem Online News Agency for Wikileaks revelations or the Wall Street Journal How Israel Helped to Spawn Hamas]

I would be more impressed by your concern about anti-Semitism if you displayed an equal concern about the most recent survey by Pew Research Centre which found that a plurality of Israeli Jews (48%) support the physical expulsion of Israeli Palestinians and 79% believe that Jews should be given preferential treatment. [Israel’s Religiously Divided Society]

You will be pleased to hear that I agree with you that ‘fostering links with, and supporting, progressive forces in Israel is an important task for an internationalist party’.  However the ILP is not such an organisation.  There are such organisations, like the soldiers group Breaking the Silence, which has revealed the truth about Israeli military atrocities but the ILP is hostile to it.

I hope you will now understand why increasing numbers of Jews oppose Zionism and why we join Archbishop Desmond Tutu in supporting a campaign of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against Israel.  Boycotting Apartheid is never anti-Semitic nor racist.

Yours sincerely,

Tony Greenstein

Why Zionism is a murderous, expansionist and racist settler colonial movement

Joan Ryan MP, formerly a junior Home Office Minister under Blair/Brown, is a pretty non-descript right-winger, with no obvious talent other than to claim vast sums of money as expenses.  She was one of those caught out changing her second homes designation as she attempted to get the tax payer to buy her another house whilst paying for repairs on her main accommodation.  As such she was an excellent choice as Chair of Labour Friends of Israel - no principles and no morals.

On 8^th August Richard Burgon MP, who is one of the best Labour MPs there is, a strong supporter of Jeremy Corbyn, made the unremarkable statement that Zionism is an ‘enemy of peace’.  Yes, I hear you say, so what?  You might be forgiven for thinking that Burgon had informed people that the Earth is round or that 1+1=2. 

As befits a Zionist, Ryan nominated Liz Kendall last time around and Owen Smith this time - hostility to Corbyn goes with the grain

Any objective view of Israel, which has just bombarded the utterly defenceless people of Gaza with 50 rocket strikes in response to the launching of a firecracker, could not help but conclude that Richard Burgon was simply making a statement of the obvious.  Not so Joan Ryan.

Ryan and her Zionist friends decided to try and rewrite history - not this time about the Nakba (Catastrophe) of the expulsion of the Palestinian refugees in 1948 but Ryan's own Catastrophe!

Joan Ryan is the Chair of the Labour Friends of Israel, a group whose sole mission in life is to defend Israel right or wrong and which boasts of its relationship to the racist rednecks of the Israeli Labour Party.  Zionism she whined was a ‘Jewish national liberation movement’.  Quite who she thinks it was liberating Jews from is impossible to determine.  Possibly the laws of logic and rationality. 

To say that Zionism is a national liberation movement is like saying that Apartheid in South Africa was a liberating force or that Nazism was a German liberation movement (of course Hitler believed it was liberating the German people from a mixture of the Jews, Freemasons, Versailles etc.).  It is the rationale of the oppressor, who finds justification for their activities in some supposed oppression.  They come to believe that the people they are oppressing are in fact their oppressors.  It is a characteristic of all settler states that the settlers develop a siege mentality in which they are the subjugated.  Israeli Jews are the same in this respect as the Afrikaaners were. 

Ryan tweets her support for Owen Smith

Zionism however never liberated Jewish people from anything.  On the contrary they collaborated from the very start with the Jews' anti-Semitic oppressors.  Theodor Herzl, the founder of Political Zionism, declared in his Diaries that he saw in Zionism a 'divine will to the good'.  Anti-Semitism was seen as a useful force for 'educating' Jews into leaving their homes and colonising Palestine.  This attitude never changed and in the 1930's they adopted the same attitude to the Nazis, but this time with fatal results.

According to his official biographer, Shabtai Teveth, after Hitler came to power David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister, declared that it was imperative to ‘turn a disaster… into a productive force’ and that ‘The harsher the affliction, the greater the strength of Zionism.’  [The Burning Ground, p. 850] 

Zionism was never a national liberation movement because it never liberated anyone from anything and because the Jews were and are not a nation.  It was a nationalist as opposed to a national movement in just the same way as the Nazis were a nationalist movement.

You see here how Labour Friends of Israel follows both the Likud agenda, in attacking a respectable NGO on the basis of allegations only by Israel.  Their Palestinian worker has been tortured into making a confession, held without a lawyer for 40 days - none of this bothers this LFI whose professions of 'peace' are worthy of Netanyahu
It is also no surprise that LFI join in the disgusting attack on Shami Chakrabarti, suggesting that her peerage was the price paid for a report that the Zionists initially welcomed

As I explain to Ryan in my letter, Zionists have only recently called themselves a national liberation movement.  Zionism likes to capture the zeitgeist of the moment.  Today colonialism is out of fashion.  Liberation movements have inspired people who have seen the people of the colonial countries rise up and replace their oppressors, even if in most cases they have replaced the faces of the colonial oppressor with one of their own nationality.  American and European domination has continued behind the façade of self-rule.

When Zionism first began no one would have described it as a form of national liberation.  They openly called themselves colonists and appealed to the European imperial powers on that basis.  Next year we will ‘celebrate’ the 100^th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration when the anti-Semitic Arthur James Balfour promised the land of the Palestinians to the Zionist movement over the heads of the indigenous population and, incidentally, against the opposition of the only Jewish member of Lloyd George’s war cabinet, Sir Edwin Montagu.  It wasn’t the Jews who wanted Zionism it was anti-Semitic Evangelical Christians.  The Balfour Declaration was an agreement between British imperialism and Zionist settler-colonialism.  To describe such a movement is grotesque but then the LFI is indeed a grotesque and nasty little group.

During the original expenses scandal Joan Ryan was found with her paws in the kitty.  She was lucky not to be prosecuted as would a benefit claimant.   She is a fitting choice as Chair of LFI

Expenses Scandal

Joan Ryan herself is an unremarkable person.  She is not known as a parliamentarian or speaker.  She is of the far-Right Progress faction.  She was an MP until 2010 when she was defeated at the General Election.  Unfortunately she came back in 2015 Her entry in Wikipedia is extremely revealing.  According to the Evening Standard (26.10.07.) in 2005/6 she made the second highest expense claim of any MP.  In 2006/7 she did even better, achieving first place with a total of £173, 691.  It was no wonder that her electors rejected her in 2010.

In May 2009 Ryan claimed more than £4,500 under the Additional Costs Allowance for work on a house she had designated as her second home.[Telegraph 17.5.09.]   In February 2010 Ryan was asked to repay £5,121 mortgage interest which she had corruptly claimed.  [Evening Standard 4.2.10.]

Not surprisingly Ryan found her greed somewhat embarrassing and unhelpful when she was trying to get back into Parliament.  The Independent of 9th March 2012 reported that:

"[a]t least 10 attempts have been made from computers in Parliament to remove information about [Ryan's] expenses claims and a further 20 efforts to delete the information, some from her constituency of Enfield North, have also been recorded in Wikipedia's logs."

Ryan’s Wikipedia entry reports that to this present day ‘similar edits to hide Ryan's record continue to be made.' [Telegraph 26.5.15]   At least 10 attempts were made from computers inside the Houses of Parliament to remove information about Ryan’s expenses claims and a further 20 efforts to delete the information, some from her constituency of Enfield North, were also been recorded in Wikipedia’s logs. The efforts were successful and all mention of expenses claims were removed and instead replaced with a paragraph about edits to Wikipedia.

During the 2015 general election, The Daily Telegraph returned to this issue. In Ryan's case, the entire expenses section was deleted, including information on repairs and decorations on her home paid for out of her MP's expenses; the edits were made while Ryan was not an MP, and according to the Telegraph she denied involvement, though it’s difficult to think who, apart from her Zionist friends, would be interested in cleaning up her record.

Below is the letter that I wrote to Ryan.

Joan Ryan MP - racist who was caught by the expenses scandal - claimed the highest of any MP in 2006/7