Day: 10 May 2016

The list of 88 signatories includes Mike Leigh, Miriam Margolyes, Alexei Sayle, Selma James and Michael Rosen.

Tuesday 10 May, Guardian Letters

In his Daily Telegraph article on which you report (Chief rabbi: Labour has severe problem with antisemitism, theguardian.com, 4 May), Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis said the antisemitism crisis engulfing Labour had “lifted the lid” on bigotry.

He joins in the sensationalist allegations of antisemitism in the Labour party, where the headlines’ decibel level is in inverse proportion to the evidence supporting them. Ignoring the more serious anti-Muslim racism in electoral politics, Rabbi Mirvis attacks the Labour party by launching a defence of Zionism which turns it from a political ideology (that can be supported or opposed) into a religion that is beyond question. We British Jews reject this categorically.

Mirvis attacks as “antisemitic” those who separate Judaism from Zionism. Yet most Jews who perished in the Holocaust were indifferent to Zionism and many opposed it. In the last municipal elections in Europe’s largest Jewish community, in Poland, just before the second world war, Poland’s Jews voted overwhelmingly for the secular, anti-Zionist, socialists of the Bund, while Zionist parties got derisory votes. Is Rabbi Mirvis recasting those victims of the Holocaust posthumously as enemies of Judaism and therefore as antisemites?
George Abendstern
Seymour Alexander
Julia Bard
Sue Bard
Graham Bash
Craig Berman
Rica Bird
Haim Bresheeth
Elizabeth Carola
Linda Clair
Jim Cohen
Norman Crane
Wendy Crane
Judith Cravitz
Mike Cushman
Ivor Dembina Continue reading “Guardian Letters: Response to Chief Rabbi Mirvis: Anti-Zionism does not equate to antisemitism”

Read article in full here.

Excerpt: ‘…when liberal columnist Peter Beinart told me recently in Haaretz that Jews like me have broken ‘the bonds of peoplehood’ by embracing BDS, I heard an assertion that reflects the consensus of the old Jewish world, not the contours of the new. In Beinart’s view, while pro-BDS Jews like me do indeed hold strong Jewish identities and build robust Jewish communities, the fact remains that we have broken sharply with the mainstream Jewish communal consensus.

For embracing a call for solidarity from Palestinians who experience daily violence from the Israeli state, we are denounced from the local synagogue bimah, denied jobs at the local JCRC, and ridiculed around the local mah-jongg table. We have prioritized our ethical values over the commandment, in Beinart’s words, to ‘protect other Jews’. And for making this choice, we have excommunicated ourselves from klal Yisrael (the Jewish collective).

But whose ‘peoplehood’ have we broken, exactly? Who determines the boundaries of what Beinart calls the collective ‘family’? Mainstream synagogues, with their ‘We Stand With Israel’ banners facing the street and Israeli flags adorning the bimah, are struggling to find members under the age of 50. In many places, a growing majority of Jews don’t pass through the doors of their community JCRC or their campus Hillel. For a variety of reasons, institutions like these have for decades been inaccessible not only to pro-BDS Jews, but to queer Jews, Jews of color, Jews from interfaith families, working-class Jews, disabled Jews, and many others. Continue reading “Haaretz: To Peter Beinart: We pro-BDS Jews Are as Much Part of Jewish People as You Are”

Staunchly pro-Israel newspaper, the Jewish Chronicle, has revealed another Muslim Councillor ‘has been spoken to by the [Labour] party after the JC brought his comments to light.’ Waseem Zaffar sits on Birmingham City council.

Zaffar made a number of considered & insightful comments on the role played by the UK government’s support for what he identified as Israel’s state-sanctioned terrorism in ‘fuelling “violent fundamentalism”.’ He was also filmed endorsing the Palestinian civil society call for a boycott of Israel.

The JC has seen a letter posted on Zaffar’s website, in which he responds to an invitation from Ruth Jacobs (Representative Council of Birmingham & West Midlands Jewry) to meet with the Acting Israeli Ambassador to London, Eitan Na’eh, when he visited Birmingham in October 2015. Zaffar outlined the concerns he wished to be conveyed to the Ambassador.

Here is his principled letter in full:

Dear Ruth,

Thank you for your invitation to meet the Acting Israeli Ambassador ‪on 14th October.

Unfortunately I will not be able to attend as I will be on a training course on that day.  However, I would like to have been able to attend to convey to the Ambassador the anger that is felt amongst Birmingham citizens about the way that Israel has treated and continues to treat the Palestinians.  This anger has been expressed by thousands on our streets a number of times and in campaigns for boycott, disinvestment and sanctions.  We are a multicultural and multi-ethnic city with a powerful tradition of fighting for equality and civil rights and against racism in all its forms.  Israel’s actions are diametrically opposed to this tradition and our values.

As the situation in Palestine/Israel looks more and more like the beginning of a third intifada, I would have wanted to ask the Ambassador how could the Israeli Government believe that, by maintaining an inhumane blockade of Gaza, by shooting dead protestors, by continuing to build illegal settlements, by doing little to stop settler violence against Palestinians and by daily humiliations at road blocks, it was securing a future for all the people who live there, whether Jewish, Muslim, Christian, other faiths or of no faith.  Surely a path of talking to and treating the Palestinians as equal human beings, ceasing land expropriations and home demolitions  and seeking a just agreement would be more likely to lead to a sustainable peace? Continue reading “Labour reprimands a Muslim Cllr for speaking the truth about Israeli state-sanctioned terrorism”