Day: 21 June 2016

Advisory position paper for TU & Labour members & delegates on antisemitism, training & disciplinary procedures

This is a downloadable leaflet.

Who We Are – Free Speech On Israel 

Free Speech on Israel is a network of labour, green and trade union activists in the UK, mainly Jewish, who came together in April 2016 to counter attempts by pro-Israel right wingers to brand the campaign for Justice for Palestinians as antisemitic. Many of us are members of Jews for Justice for Palestinians, Jews for Jeremy, Jewish Socialists’ Group, Independent Jewish Voices, Jews for Boycotting Israeli Goods, Young Jewish Left and Jewdas.

  • We do not believe there is a wave of antisemitism in the Labour Party
  • The attacks form part of two highly orchestrated campaigns: one is to undermine the Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party. The other is to suppress the pro-Palestinian voices of Jews, Muslims, Christians, and others of many faiths and none, campaigning for freedom, justice and equality, of which Jeremy Corbyn has been a leading spokesperson.
  • We reiterate our strong commitment to combating all forms of racism and to defending those who are subjected to it. This means opposing Islamophobia, prejudice against migrants and racism against ethnic and religious minorities, including antisemitism.
  • We reject the suggestion that questioning the current Zionist ideology of the Israeli state and its supporters, both Jews and non-Jews is antisemitic. Not all Jews are Zionists. Not all Zionists are Jews. Zionism is a political ideology, it is not an article of religious faith nor is it intrinsically a part of Jewishness.
  • In the very best traditions of the British Labour movement we campaign to end the injustices inflicted by Israel on the Palestinian people.

The Jewish Labour Movement

  • The JLM is affiliated to the World Zionist Organisation (WZO), a major funder of the illegal settlements.
  • The JLM is an affiliate of the World Labour Zionist Movement (WLZM), supporting its Jerusalem Programme – which claims its homeland to be Eretz Yisrael (Great Israel), i.e. all the land from the sea to the Jordan river, thus appropriating the whole of the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
  • The WLZM claims all of Jerusalem as its capital, which means expelling the Palestinians from East Jerusalem.
  • The purpose of the JLM is to justify the actions of the Israeli state, whomsoever is in power. 
  • The JLM’s parent party is the Israeli Labour Party, which has never condemned the occupation. Labour’s Premier, Herzog, recently stated, “I wish to separate from as many Palestinians as possible, as quickly as possible…we’ll erect a big wall between us”. There are 1.4 million Palestinians who live in Israel itself.

Leading Israeli Cabinet members have made the following statements:

  • Speaking of Israeli Arab members of Parliament, Defence Minister Lieberman said, “The fate of the collaborators in the Knesset will be identical to […] those who collaborated with the Nazis […] executed after the Nuremberg trials at the end of the War. I hope that will be the fate of collaborators in this house.” And, “When there is a contradiction between democratic and Jewish values, the Jewish and Zionist values are more important.”
  • Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked, posted on Facebook during Israel’s 2014 attack on Gaza, “The entire Palestinian people is the enemy […] including its elderly and its women, its cities and its villages, its property and its infrastructure.”
  • The JLM makes no criticism of these statements nor disassociates itself from them. In fact Herzog sought to join his Israeli Labour Party to Netanyahu’s coalition government.

For these reasons many Jews in the Labour party do not accept that the JLM can represent us. Continue reading “Advisory position paper for TU & Labour members & delegates on antisemitism, training & disciplinary procedures”

David Cronin: Why is EU anti-Semitism chief smearing solidarity?

fighting the anti-Israel Boycott-Divestment-Sanctions (BDS) movement were high on the agenda of the ECI annual policy conference in the EU parliament.
Fighting the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement was high on the agenda of the ECI annual policy conference in the EU parliament, in April.

Associate editor of the Electronic Intifada, David Cronin is one of the authors of a new report, The Israel lobby and the European Union.

He reports in his EI article (below) that the source for the EU’s anti-Semitism coordinator’s claim that antisemitic incidents rise after BDS activities on campuses, is the European Union of Jewish Students (EUJS). At last month’s ‘Stop BDS’ conference hosted by the Israeli mission to the UN and the World Jewish Congress, EUJS endorsed a call for Zionist students to report their schools and professors, and its president Benny Fischer said that BDS activists are really calling for the destruction of Israel.

This week, World Jewish Congress president Ronald Lauder told a Board of Deputies of British Jews meeting in London that BDS is “evil” and even more absurdly that it “has ties to the Muslim Brotherhood.”

David Cronin, Lobby Watch, 20 June 2016

Read the article in full on Electronic Intifada.

Has a senior European Union official been smearing the Palestine solidarity movement based on hearsay?

A few days ago, I learned that Katharina von Schnurbein, the EU’s anti-Semitism coordinator, felt that comments she made at a recent pro-Israel conference had been misquoted. So I called von Schnurbein asking precisely what she had said.

Von Schnurbein confirmed that she did not regard an article on the European Jewish Press website as accurate.

The article claimed that she viewed the Palestinian call for boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel as motivated by a hatred of Jews.

After a brief telephone conversation, von Schnurbein emailed me what she described as her “exact words” at the conference, which was organized by the European Coalition for Israel, a Christian Zionist group.

According to the transcript she provided, von Schnurbein told the conference that “anti-Semitism can hide behind anti-Zionism,” before stressing the “EU’s firm rejection of the boycott, divestment and sanctions attempts to isolate Israel.”

“In the context of fighting anti-Semitism here in Europe, we are particularly worried about the discriminatory repercussions activities by the BDS movement might have on Jews and, in particular, Jewish students across Europe,” she added. “Reports show that anti-Semitic incidents rise after BDS activities on campuses.”

Von Schnurbein’s message did not refer to any specific “reports,” so I sent her a follow-up query asking for an example.

She replied: “On the Internet, you will find many reports from across the world. Also, the European Union of Jewish Students regularly report incidents on their website.”

Vibes

Eager to find out about such incidents, I checked the website she mentioned. A search for “BDS” yielded 14 results. None of them detailed a correlation between Palestine solidarity campaigning and anti-Semitism.

Instead of solid information, I found an article in which one student spoke of “anti-Israel vibes” in European universities.

As well as having to feel such “vibes,” students had to deal with seeing posters defending Palestinian rights in the corridors of some colleges, according to that article. In some cases, it added, students had to walk by fruit counters in supermarkets where stickers urging a boycott of the Jaffa brand have been posted or a swastika had been carved into a few oranges.

If that is the kind of “incident” that von Schnurbein is worried about, then I humbly suggest she needs to do a bit more research.

“Vibes” are, by definition, intangible. And this is the first time I have ever heard of anyone complaining about a swastika being engraved in a Jaffa orange. The idea that such a tactic is being widely employed by BDS activists — if at at all — is ludicrous.

I have no objection in principle to having an EU coordinator against anti-Semitism. Every form of religious and racial bigotry should be carefully monitored so that effective strategies for combating that bigotry can be developed.

Yet von Schnurbein does not appear to be interested in careful monitoring. Rather than assessing how widespread hatred of Jews is in Europe today, she spends much of her time hanging out with the pro-Israel lobby.

Continue reading here.

Show Buttons
Hide Buttons