HnH Scores Own Goal As First It Cancels Joe Solo and then Offers Him Back the Money he Won!

 Hate not Hope and the vile Ruth Smeeth Use McCarthyite Tactics to Smear Joe as an ‘anti-Semite’ for Supporting Chris Williamson 

Watch Tony Greenstein and David Miller on Resist TV

The Problem with Hope not Hate

Wednesday 24 November 7.00 pm

I first saw Joe Solo at the Festival of Resistance 6 weeks ago, a genuinely empathetic working class street performer. So it was no surprise that a socialist, an anti-racist and anti-imperialist should come in for a vicious attack by the misnamed Hope not Hate which is a right-wing ‘anti-fascist’ group.

HnH was first formed in 2004 and in 2011 it split with its parent organisation, Searchlight Anti-Fascist Magazine which also had a record of smearing anti-fascists and anti-racists. The split was not based on any principled disagreements but about money. Nick Lowles, its Director wanted to be free of the ageing Zionist Gerry Gable in order to make as much money as he wanted without restrictions placed on what he could do with it.

At first Lowles proclaimed that he was not ‘vocalising’ about Palestine and the group had no position on Israel/Palestine. But that soon changed as it was made clear that if he didn’t take sides then money would dry up, certainly from Establishment and Zionist sources.

One of the tweets that Hate not Hope objected to

Literally Hate not Hope sold its soul to the Zionist devil. It leaps upon any manifestation of sympathy with the Palestinians and describes it as ‘anti-Semitic’.

In June 2015 the detestable racist former MP Ruth Smeeth was appointed as Deputy Director of HnH. Two years later HnH became part of the ‘anti-Semitism’ smear campaign against Corbyn and later against Chris Williamson. Smeeth is now a Director of HnH.

Liron Velleman

Nor is Smeeth the only paid-up Zionist at HnH. Liron Velleman, the Political Organiser at HnH is policy officer for the rabidly right-wing Jewish Labour Movement. It’s a small world as they say!

Gurinder Singh Josan

And just in case you were worried the trustee board is chaired by Labour far right NEC member, Gurinder Singh Josan.

On 1 November HnH invited people to vote from a shortlist of 6 for their ‘Hope Hero’ awards. Out of the 6 people selected, Joe Solo won the award. What happened next was predictable. The ‘anti-Semitism’ smear campaign went into operation.

On 17 November HnH issued a statement with scab ‘union’ Community, the only trade union to support Zionism and the State of Israel, that they were withdrawing the award. People had voted for Joe on the basis of the work he had put in in forming ‘We Shall Overcome’ an artist led response to growing poverty. Just the kind of grassroots work anti-racists and anti-fascists should be involved in.

This vitriolic statement from Nick Lowles MBE was made because tweets had been uncovered in which Joe had defended Chris Williamson from the attacks which had received. Chris, one of the few working class MPs the Labour Party had was also the only one to oppose the fake ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign.

Joe Solo at the Festival of Resistance

Tony Booth on the Not the Andy Marr  Show with Crispin Flintoft

If HnH had its ear to the ground then they would know that Joe also performed at Chris Williamson’s Festival of Resistance on the evening of Saturday October 16. As Chris noted:

HnH is basically a smear machine. Its latest attacks on Joe Solo and me have plumbed new depths. Joe was instrumental in establishing the ‘We Shall Overcome’ initiative in 2015, which brought musicians together to give hope to disadvantaged communities and raise money to help others. Yet Joe is now being smeared.‘

Like the bullies and liars that they are, HnH reckoned without the anger of the ordinary mass of people. In many ways HnH are like Nicola Doward, Headmistress of Stretford High School who tried to steal the funds children had collected for the Palestinian victims of Israeli bombing and hand them over to an Israeli charity. She was taken aback by the furore.

See Joe Solo at this year’s Tolpuddle Martyrs Festival

Crowdfunder

Likewise with Nick Lowles. He mixes in such rarefied and reactionary circles that he has come to believe all this nonsense about Labour anti-Semitism and in particular Chris Williamson. So they were taken aback at the reaction to their decision. Nick Lowles doesn’t understand that ‘Labour Anti-Semitism’ was a ruling class narrative.  Most people were oblivious to it.

To rub salt in the wounds not only had Hate not Hope removed Joe as a prize winner and taken away the £5,000 prize he had won but they suggested that this working class fighter against racism needed ‘training’ on anti-Semitism. Training as Tony Booth says is what you give to a dog.  Human beings have education, which is a 2 way affair.

But it’s not Joe who needs anti-racist education but Nick Lowles Liron Velleman and the execrable Ruth Smeeth. They need to understand that when you demolish homes of Palestinians in order to move Jewish settlers in that is racist.

When I can go to Israel anytime I like and claim citizenship, because I’m Jewish but my friend who is a Palestinian, born and brought up there, has no such right that is racism.   

If you go to the statement that HnH issued alongside the scab Community Union, then what is remarkable is the number of adverse comments. It is clear that Lowles and Smeeth have misjudged the mood of people.  Talk of Labour ‘anti-Semitism’ may have been common at the dinner tables in North London but real people did not buy into this fable.

And if you go to Joe’s Facebook page there are literally hundreds of supportive comments and only the odd Zionist.

Statement by Joe Solo on Facebook

So when Tony Booth put up a fundraiser to replace the £5,000 that was Joe’s prize it was no surprise that within 4 days it had raised over double that amount. So strong was the reaction to Hate not Hope’s decision that Lowles’ lackeys were forced to go, cap in hand to Joe and ask him to take their soiled money, donated no doubt by some Zionist millionaire, after all.  Unsurprisingly Joe turned them down with a statement that sums up everything about Joe:

I am a Working Class Socialist Trade Unionist and I’m afraid taking that money after the abuse I have suffered this last 36 hours would be the equivalent of hanging my head in shame and crossing a picket line. Something I would not and could not do.

But Hate not Hope and Nick Lowles have form. Back in 2018 the National Union of Students Black Students made it clear that they did not want Lowles as a speaker because of his Zionism and Islamaphobia, which are really Siamese twins.

Nick Lowles was also taken to task by Liz Feketo of the Institute of Race Relations for his adoption of a racist narrative during the ‘grooming affair’ in the North of England in accepting the conflation of Pakistani men with child abuse.

HnH has been in the forefront of the false and confected moral panic over Labour ‘Anti-Semitism’. A moral panic that newspapers like the Daily Mail and The Sun did their best to promote.  The same papers that had no difficulty employing a neo-Nazi Katie Hopkins as a columnist. To those who doubt this I suggest you watch Chris Williamson’s Reaching Over The Noise - Is Labour Really Antisemitic? which is a retort to the deliberately deceptive and dishonest BBC Panorama programme ‘Is Labour Anti-Semitic?’

HnH’s Zionism did not come out of nowhere. It began with Searchlight Magazine. In the 1980s, during the Reagan era, it ran with an overtly anti-Arab racist agenda positing what it called ‘The New Axis’ made up of Arabs and Black leaders together with fascists.

Its editor, Gerry Gable, had resigned from the Communist  Party because it was no longer pro-Zionist.  Gable himself worked both with Israeli and British intelligence. We discovered this when the New Statesman published a leaked memo from Gable to his boss, Barry Cox, at London Weekend Television. It spoke of MI5’s ‘left watchers’.

Gable followed this up with a concerted attempt to destabilise Anti-Fascist Action by making a series of false accusations of  Nazi links about anarchist groups and individuals such as Class War.

Gable and Lowles were both implicated in a series of racist incidents prompting an impressively large number of Black organisations to write an Open Letter to Searchlight (which of course it didn’t print but which Labour Briefing did print).

In 1977 the then Labour Home Secretary, Merlyn Rees, was proposing to deport American journalist Mark Hosenball and ex-CIA agent Phil Agee. Gable was willing to spread dirty about both of them alleging that Phil Kelly, who later became editor of Tribune and an Islington Councillor, had trained as a ‘terrorist’ in Jordan with the PLO and other nonsense.

Gable calls me a 'Jew hater' for solidarity with the Palestinians

I crossed swords with Gable frequently in my role as a member of Anti-Fascist Action’s Executive and as part of my role in fighting fascism in Brighton. Gable called me a ‘Jew hater’ in an editorial in the Winter 2015/16 issue, just as the fake ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign was being rolled out in the Labour Party. Gable offered, in the same editorial to ‘give evidence about the current probems that urgently need to be tackled.’

Sir Keir Has Just Gone and Confirmed that Labour Party ‘anti-Semitism’ was ALWAYS About Zionism/Israel NEVER About Anti-Semitism

 Like most non-Jewish Zionists, Stürmer is not only a Vile Racist he is also Anti-Semitic!

Remember when the false ‘anti-Semitism’ allegations first began to emerge in the Labour Party? If you said they were about Israel and Zionism not anti-Semitism you were accused of being a ‘conspiracy theorist’. We were just being paranoid they told us.

It was obvious from the beginning that the ‘anti-Semitism’ crisis was not about anti-Semitism but Israel/Zionism. When had the Zionist movement previously been concerned with anti-Semitism?

Israel's racist Ambassador, the religious nut Tzipi Hotovely, calls Starmer and Rayner her 'friends' - Hotovely supports the ethnic cleansing of the West Bank's Palestinians and opposes 2 states

The Board of Deputies welcomed Trump to power. It was happy for Zionists like Tommy Robinson and his Jewish supporters, like Jonathan Hoffman, to attend the Board’s rallies in support of Israel. Let us recall the various stages in the fake ‘anti-Semitism campaign.

The first major outing for the ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign was at Oxford University’s Labour Club in 2016. Its Chair, Alex Chalmers, alleged that his fellow members had ‘problems with Jews.’ But Chalmers himself admitted that the catalyst for his resignation was the support of the Labour Club for the Israel Anti-Apartheid Week. Well today everybody bar Sir Stürmer accepts that Israel is an Apartheid State.

Starmer repeats Zionist propaganda - Israel is the 'only' Jewish state in the world. Any socialist worth his salt would oppose ANY ethno religious states.  South Africa used to claim it was the only Christian state - so what?

The next milestone was Ken Livingstone who alleged that Hitler supported Zionism. Well the Nazis did single out Zionism for favourable treatment. This is a historical fact. As Zionist historian David Cesarani wrote ‘The efforts of the Gestapo are oriented to promoting Zionism as much as possible and lending support to its efforts to promote emigration.’ [Final Solution p.96].

Then we had the Chakrabarti Report and the press conference where Marc Wadsworth criticised Ruth Smeeth for her chumminess with Telegraph journalists. This was a major ‘anti-Semitic’ incident despite the fact that Wadsworth didn’t know Smeeth was Jewish and that Smeeth had been an employee of BICOM, the main pro-Israel Lobby Group in Britain. Some facts it seems aren’t important.

Corbyn's utterly futile and stupid attempt to appease his enemies

Corbyn abandoned a Black anti-racist activist who he had known and worked with in favour of a right-wing Labour MP, who Wikileaks revealed was a ‘protected asset’ of the USA. This is what appeasement of the Right meant – abandoning your friends.

In May and again in September 2016 Jackie Walker, a Black-Jewish socialist, was suspended for raising the question as to why Holocaust Memorial Day doesn’t include the slave trade, the African holocaust.

At the end of 2016, following Theresa May’s adoption of the IHRA definition, Corbyn followed suit. This 38 word definition read:

“Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.”

Virtually no one uses this illiterate 38 word production of Ken Stern. Anti-Semitism isn’t a perception so much as an ideology, a form of prejudice, discrimination and violence against Jews as Jews. If it is a ‘certain perception’ we are never told what that perception is. If it ‘may be expressed as anti-Semitism’ what else might it be expressed as? Anti-Zionism? The second sentence, which says it could be directed at Jews or non-Jews (i.e. everyone!) is tautological.

But Corbyn, eager to prove his credentials, adopted the IHRA when there was a simple definition from the Oxford English Dictionary: ‘hostility to or prejudice against Jews.’ Corbyn preferred to appease the Zionists even though they were unappeasable.

On the International Day of Solidarity with Palestine Starmer & Rayner spent their time attacking Palestinian supporters at a meeting of LFI and the JLM

It wasn’t long before the Jewish Labour Movement and the Board of Deputies demanded that the full IHRA definition, with its 11 examples of ‘anti-Semitism’, 7 of which referenced Israel, be adopted. Len McLuskey, threw his weight behind it on the basis that once it was adopted the ‘anti-Semitism’ affair would go away.

Of course not only did it not go away but it intensified. You don’t need to be a genius to understand that once the Zionists got Labour to adopt the definition they weren’t going to let up. They had got their weapon adopted and they were intent on wielding it.

Jenny Formby even boasted about how many expulsions she had engineered. If she thought the Zionists would be grateful then that is proof of her stupidity. The more people who were expelled the more the Zionists demanded until there was only Corbyn left. And if there were more expulsions then that was proof that ‘anti-Semitism’ was a problem. Every single step of the way Corbyn and his supporters – Lansman, Formby, McLuskey, McDonnell and Owen Jones – sang the Zionist narrative.

Corbyn made it easy for Sir Stürmer. It was Corbyn and Formby who proposed ‘fast track’ expulsions. We were told they were only for the most ‘egregious’ of cases but Formby lied. Everyone was fast tracked from this point onwards and they were all anti-Zionists.

The adoption of the IHRA definition was clear proof that the ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign had been about Israel. Why else would you want a definition that said that anti-Semitism was:

Applying double standards by requiring of it [Israel] a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation

Leaving aside the small fact that Israel is not a democratic nation or that there is no Israeli nationality, this is based on the idea that if you criticise Israel and leave out China, the Congo and everywhere else, you are anti-Semitic. According to the IHRA’s ‘logic’ anyone who only criticises the Egyptian regime is anti-Egyptian! Hannah Arendt explained why Jews get involved in anti-Israel campaigns:

‘But I can admit to you... that wrong done by my own people naturally grieves me more than wrong done by other people.’ [The Jew as a Pariah, p.247]

Perhaps Arendt too, a refugee from Nazi Germany was also anti-Semitic? Well yes. Well that is what the Zionists accused her of when she published Eichmann in Jerusalem.

More racist (and anti-Semitic) nonsense from Sturmer - only antisemites claim Jews are a separate nation from those they live amongst

Corbyn was incapable of resisting the attacks of the Right because he did not understand that the anti-Semitism campaign was aimed at removing him not anti-Semitism.

Corbyn exacerbated his problems. When people said that there was no problem of anti-Semitism in the Labour Party Corbyn called that ‘denialism’. In other words denying something is proof of your guilt!

Imagine that you are prosecuted and asked to plead. You say ‘not guilty’ and the Judge looks up and says that pleading innocence is proof of your guilt! Of course Stürmer has taken it to a new level. But Corbyn unfortunately was never an intellectual. The idea behind ‘denialism’ being proof of one’s guilt was the underlying theme of the Salem witch trials in the 17^th century. This was why the only women to be hanged were those who denied they were witches. Those who confessed escaped the noose.

Criticising the EHRC Report is now proof of ‘anti-Semitism’ despite the fact that it has more holes than a colander. Why? Because Starmer wants the pretence of anti-Semitism in the Labour Party as a cover for the attack on the left. If Corbyn had had any sense he would have condemned its ‘investigation’ from the beginning.

Of course there are those on the soft left like Lansman and David Renton (whose abysmal book I’ve just reviewed) who continue to argue that Labour had an ‘anti-Semitism’ problem. That is why we should be grateful to Keith for admitting the truth.

Well Stürmer has just confirmed everything we said. When he told a meeting of Labour Friends of Israel that support for the Palestinians was ‘anti-Zionist anti-Semitism’ because it ‘denies the Jewish people alone a right of self-determination.’ he let the cat out of the bag.

Even were the Jews a single people, then they would by no means be unique. The Kurds, the Tamils, the Basques, Catalans are just some of the nations who have been denied national self-determination.

The concept of Jewish self-determination is a thoroughly reactionary one. There were many demands that Jews made in Britain when they arrived on these shores but the demand for self-determination was not one of them. Self-determination applies to nations. Jews demanded equal rights and an end to discrimination not separation.

The idea that Jews are one nation was an anti-Semitic one. It was the anti-Semites who argued that Jews weren’t part of the German nation, that they were a separate people. Wilhelm Marr in 1879 popularised the term ‘anti-Semitism’ because what he was alleging was that Jews weren’t European but Middle Eastern i.e. Semites. Hence the term ‘anti-Semitism’.

When Zionism first made an appearance its fiercest opponents were Jews who it as a form of Jewish anti-Semitism. Lucien Wolf, Secretary of the Conjoint Foreign Committee [CFC] of the Board of Deputies said of the idea that British Jews were part of a ‘Jewish nation’ that:

I have spent most of my life in combating these very doctrines, when presented to me in the form of anti-Semitism, and I can only regard them as the more dangerous when they come to me in the guise of Zionism. They constitute a capitulation to our enemies.’ [B Destani (ed) The Zionist movement and the foundation of Israel 1839-1972, p.727].

Pogroms against Palestinians are 'democratic' and 'rumbustious' according to Sturmer

Zionism began as a Christian not a Jewish idea and it was promoted by anti-Semites. Edwin Montagu, the only Jewish member of Lloyd George’s War Cabinet in 1917 was also the only one to oppose the Balfour Declaration. He accused his fellows of anti-Semitism:

It is no more true to say that a Jewish Englishman and a Jewish Moor are of the same nation than it is to say that a Christian Englishman and a Christian Frenchman are of the same nation [On the Anti-Semitism of the Present (British) Government, https://tinyurl.com/yxpopr9b 23.8.17].

Stürmer went on to argue that anti-Zionism

“equates Zionism with racism, focuses obsessively on the world’s sole Jewish state and holds it to standards no other country is subjected.”

Yes anti-Zionism holds that Zionism is racist. What else is it? It sought a Jewish ethnic state, a state ‘cleansed’ of Arabs. In 1948 it expelled 80% of its Palestinian inhabitants to achieve an artificial majority. A Jewish settler colonial state cannot be other than racist and with the 2018 Jewish Nation State Law, which reserves national rights only for Jews, Israel is an explicitly racist state.

But is Israel held to different standards? It is worth examing this lie, which is the underlying assumption of the IHRA definition. Perhaps Stürmer can tell us:

1.            which other country in the world brands human rights groups as ‘terrorists’? Even Apartheid South Africa didn’t do this.

2.            which other country has two sets of legal systems within one territory (the West Bank) for two different ethnic groups –Jewish settlers and Palestinians? That is the definition of Apartheid.

3.            which other country seizes children in the early hours of the morning from their beds, blindfolds, beats them denies them access to their parents and lawyers and coerces them into signing confessions in a language they don’t even understand (Hebrew)? Of course this only applies to Palestinian not Jewish children.

4.            Which other country has a law (the Absentee Property Law 1950) which is used to confiscate land from one ethnicity (Arabs) and hand it over to another ethnic group (Israeli Jews)?

According to Sturmer, pogroms against Palestinians are part of Israel's 'rumbustious' democracy

I could spend all day giving examples of Israeli Apartheid. People can look up the B’Tselem and Human Rights Watch Reports, both of which describe why Israel is an Apartheid Jewish Supremacist State.

Stürmer  also had the bare faced cheek to say that ‘under my leadership every Jew will count.’ Presumably this is why Graham Bash, a Jewish anti-Zionist, a member of the Labour Party for 53 years has just been expelled? Today we learn that Jewish councillor Jo Bird has been expelled. Perhaps Starmer will explain why these Jews don’t count. Is he saying that anti-Zionist Jews aren’t Jewish?

On 25 August this legal crook put the late Riva Joffe, a veteran of the fight against South Africas apartheid, under ‘investigation’. If you are Jewish in the Labour Party you are 5 times more likely to be suspended or expelled than non-Jews! Lies come easily to Stürmer.

But Stürmer is right to say that anti-Zionism is the ‘antithesis’ of Labour’s tradition. That is because the Labour Party was as much a party of the British Empire as the Tories. Labour adopted Zionism even before the Tories, because they too had an imperial mindset.

Arthur James Balfour, who gave his name to the Balfour Declaration was a self-declared anti-Semite who, in 1905, as Prime Minister, introduced the Aliens Act aimed at preventing the immigration of Jewish refugees from Russia. Anti-Semites have always supported Zionism because both wanted Jews to be go to Palestine not Britain.

It is amusing to see this legal liar’s 10 Pledges in which he promised to be a unity candidate. I’ve saved them as a pdf since it is only a matter of time before they disappear.

Pledge No. 4 ‘Promote peace and human rights’ stated:

No more illegal wars. Introduce a Prevention of Military Intervention Act and put human rights at the heart of foreign policy. Review all UK arms sales and make us a force for international peace and justice.

We haven’t heard much of this recently! Labour policy is an arms embargo on Israel but I didn’t catch mention of this in Stürmer ’s speech. As for human rights, if you campaign for human rights in Israel you are accused of being ‘obsessive’ and anti-Semitic.

Stürmer oozes insincerity in almost everything he says. One of the reasons why he engenders such dislike is that when he tries to sound sincere he comes across as merely trying. Take this passage:

My resolve was hardened when David Baddiel recently gave me a copy of his brilliant book, “Jews Don’t Count”, which shows so clearly – just as the Royal Court theatre demonstrated last week – how racism against Jews is held to a different standard from other kinds of racism.

And who is this ‘brilliant author’? Could it be the same David Baddiel who ‘blacked up’ in order to ridicule and persecute Black footballer Jason Lee? Black writer Gavin Lewis wrote:

Baddiel and his comedy partner Frank Skinner, spent much of the 1996 ITV series of Fantasy Football insulting the ethnic appearance of the Black soccer player Jason Lee... and inciting others to do so. Lee was singled out for a campaign of vilification simply because he had chosen to adopt the locks-and-cornrows style of his Afro-diasporic heritage.’

It turns out that Stürmer’s role model when it comes to anti-Semitism is an out and out racist. But that’s not surprising given that his hosts, LFI, are an Israeli Embassy front.

Balfour was not only an anti-Semite, he was also a racist. When Chief Minister in Ireland where he earned the soubriquet of ‘Bloody Balfour’ owing to his role in the shooting of Irish protestors at Mitchellstown. In a debate in the House of Commons in 1906 he defended the refusal to give the vote to Blacks in South Africa:

‘We have to face the facts, Men are not born equal, the white and black races are not born with equal capacities: they are born with different capacities which education cannot and will not change. [Yousef Munayyer, The Forward, 1.11.17., citing Critics of Empire: British Radicals and the Imperial Challenge, p.306, Bernard Porter https://tinyurl.com/y4ey42p7]

This is the man who was the Zionists’ best friend. Zionism in Britain at the beginning of the century supported the anti-immigration Tories who were soundly defeated in the East End in 1906.

Chaim Weizmann, the leader of British Zionism and Israel’s first President wrote favourably of his friendship with William Evans-Gordon MP, the founder of the anti-Semitic British Brothers League in his autobiography Trial and Error [pp. 90-91]

. Although conceding that Evans-Gordon was “widely and unfavourably known to the Jewish people” Weizmann believed that:

‘our people were rather hard on him. The Aliens Bill in England and the movement which grew around it were natural phenomenon which might have been foreseen... Sir William Evans-Gordon had no particular anti-Jewish prejudices... he was sincerely ready to encourage any settlement of Jews almost anywhere in the British Empire, but he failed to see why the ghettos of London or Leeds or Whitechapel should be made into a branch of the ghettos of Warsaw and Pinsk.

The BBL was the precursor of the British Union of Fascists. William Stanley Shaw, the President of the BBL wrote:

I am a firm believer in the Zionist movement, which the British Brothers League will do much incidentally to foster. The return of the Jews to Palestine is one of the most striking signs of the times…. All students of prophecy are watching the manifold signs of the times with almost breathless interest… [Jewish Chronicle 8.11.01].

Starmer proved that what he had previously said, that he was a Zionist ‘without qualification’ was, for once, the truth. How did Starmer deal with the allegations that Israel was an apartheid state which the veterans of the struggle against apartheid in South Africa have declared as far worse than even the Afrikaaners?

as the principles enunciated in its Declaration of Independence show – the State of Israel... was built on a worldview that promotes the goals of universal freedom, justice, equality and peace.

They were fine principles in Israel’s Declaration of Independence and David Ben Gurion meant not a word of them! That is why the Declaration has no legal effect. They are there for show only. To be used by stool pigeons like Stürmer.

The rest of Stürmer’s speech merely demonstrates that in the alliance between the Zionists and the Labour Right the latter is quite happy to swallow all the lies that Israel has traditionally used to explain away its demolition of Arab homes, theft of water etc.

According to Stürmer Israel has ‘a rumbustious democracy, ‘independent judiciary’.’ In the midst of the settler terror in the West Bank Stürmer sees‘a path to peace and prosperity which is worthy of our admiration and support.’

One wonders what Stürmer would have said on the eve of the Nazi invasion of Poland? That this Hitler fellow was after all elected and he did sit down and negotiate at Munich. Stürmer would have been a more enthusiastic appeaser than Chamberlain!

Stürmer was ‘proud of the fact’ that ‘our friends in the Israeli Labor party helped to bring the Netanyahu era to a close and is back in government.’

It is true that Netanyahu is no longer Prime Minister and Naftali Bennet, leader of a far-Right settler party Yamina is in power. Interior Minister, Ayelet Shaked, makes no effort to hide her distaste for Arabs and non-Jews. She has sought to prevent African refugees from obtaining health care and issued a statement that:

“On instructions from the health minister, the representatives of his ministry tried to dramatically expand the scope of the insurance and to apply it to the entire population of infiltrators from Sudan and Eritrea, including adults. The minister opposes any step that would lead to this population to settle down in Israel,

Shaked calls asylum seekers ‘infiltrators’. This term was first used by the Labour Zionists in the 1950s to describe expelled Palestinian refugees who tried to return to their lands. None of this deterred Stürmer from waxing lyrical about how

Israel’s most precious features are its Jewish and its democratic identities. To retain both we must have a two-state solution.

On maintaining Israel as a Jewish Apartheid State there is broad agreement between left and right-wing Zionists. That is why the present far-Right government includes both ‘left’ Zionist parties, the ILP and Meretz. ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ is meaningless in Zionism . Their only differences are on tactics not on principles.

People often think that because Stürmer is a QC that he is intelligent. This is a mistake. It is obvious that Israel can either be a Jewish or a Democratic state. It cannot be both. If one ethnicity must always be in the majority, then it is inevitable that the state will take on the character of an ethno-supremacist nature.

Where else in the world would you have government approved demonstrations chanting ‘Death to the Arabs’. This takes place each year on the Jerusalem Day march. The video of the 15^th June demonstration this year showed that when Palestinians objected to a settler mob chanting this they were the ones harassed by the Police.

Imagine that there was an Arab demonstration (which of course would not be allowed) in Israel chanting ‘Death to the Jews’. News would travel far and wide.  It would be shown on the BBC yet a demonstration out of the Nazi past goes unremarked in this ‘rumbustious democracy’.

The Pew Report shows that more Israeli Jews support the physical expulsion of Israeli Arabs than oppose it - yet Sturmer is silent on this and more

But settlers and the right-wing chanting ‘Death to the Arabs’ is the tip of the iceberg. In the Pew Report Israel’s Religiously Divided Society a plurality – 48% to 46% - of Israeli Jews wanted Israel’s Arab citizens to be expelled. This too is Israel’s rumbustious democracy’.

The proof that Israel is an apartheid state is evidenced in the wide ranging discrimination against Israeli Palestinians such as the hundreds of Jewish only communities from which Arabs are legally barred. Arabs are confined to about 2% of the land whereas 93% of the land is in the hands of the Jewish state. According to the Jewish Nation State Law ‘Jewish settlement’ is a national objective.

As former Israeli Prime Minister, Netanyahu, said:

“Israel is not a state of all its citizens. According to the basic nationality law we passed, Israel is the nation state of the Jewish people – and only it.”

Yet Stürmer’s solution is two states, which is a smokescreen for continued colonisation. No Zionist party is in favour of complete withdrawal from the West Bank. According to Stürmer’s

... we are pro-Israel, pro-Palestine, and pro-peace... I also want to be clear that Labour does not support BDS. BDS would not only target the world’s sole Jewish state, but it is counterproductive: driving people apart when we should be bringing them...

These are weasel words. Would Stürmer have said we are pro-Black and pro-White in South Africa? You can’t be on the side of the oppressed and oppressor. Stürmer doesn’t support BDS but he says nothing about Israel’s enforced sanctions on Gaza. He takes the same position as Thatcher did on South Africa. Sanctions would be ‘counterproductive’. They would hurt the Palestinians more.

The Labour Party passed policy this year, not only calling Israel an apartheid state but supporting an arms embargo. None of this stopped Stürmer condemning the student demonstrations against Israeli Ambassador Tzipi Hotovely last week at the LSE.

Hotoveli is the far-religious nut who was made Ambassador by Netanyahu. She has said of the Palestinians that they have no history or culture. She once declared that ‘“This land is ours. All of it is ours. We did not come here to apologise for that.” She is an out and out racist which for Stürmer seems part of the appeal.

In 2011, as Chair of the Knesset’s Status of Women Committee, she invited the Lehava to give testimony in order that they could ‘explain how they prevent romantic contacts between Jews and Arabs.’ In response to criticism, Hotovely said it was

"important to examine procedures for preventing mixed marriages, and Lehava members are the right people for that,"

Hotovely had a point. Lehava were the ‘right people.’ In 2014 Lehava held a demonstration outside the marriage ceremony of an Arab man and a Jewish woman with the inevitable chant ‘Death to the Arabs’.

Other actions by Lehava include setting fire to one of Israel’s few mixed schools in Jerusalem, the Hand in Hand school.

There is no Zionist atrocity that LFI won't defend

Lehava is a fascist group that attacks Arab men in what they term ‘Jewish areas’ who they believe might form relationships with Jewish women. In the words of one spokesman, ‘“we must break their faces, bury them alive”

From Chair of Labour Friends of Palestine to Zionist footwipe - Lisa Nandy wouldn't know what principles were if they were to bite her nether regions

None of this prevented Hotovely from thanking Stürmer and Nandy ‘over their show of solidarity’. Hotoveli also

‘praised LFI and said she accepted their had been difficult years under Jeremy Corbyn. Hotovely said she felt as though she was amongst “friends” at the lunch.’

LFI defends shooting unarmed demonstrators - not one word of criticism of the Israeli state or army - it's all Hamas

If Hotovely considers LFI her friends then that is understandable. After all the Embassy funds them. Behind all their rhetoric of 2 States LFI have never spoken out against the military occupation of the West Bank and called for Israel’s withdrawal.

No matter what Israel does in the West Bank, the demolition of schools, the outlawing of 6 human rights organisations, the destruction of roads and water pipes in the Massafa Yater area, the toleration of settler violence against Palestinians and the destruction of crops and trees as ‘letting off steam’ Stürmer will justify it. The attacks on Palestinians by settlers is Israeli policy..

To all of this turns a blind eye, repeating the mantra about Israel being the ‘only democracy in the Middle East.’ We should be under no illusion as to why this is. Israel is the West’s strategic watchdog and you can’t kick the mutt that does your dirty work.

Tony Greenstein