The Answers that Corbyn Should Have Given to the Question What He Most Admired about Israel

By Tony Greenstein

At the JW3 ‘debate’ earlier this week, Jeremy Corbyn was asked what he most admired in Israel. This was an ideal opportunity to tell the audience and the questioner some home truths about both the Occupied Territories and Israel itself.

He could have told them that Israel today is an Apartheid Society.  Of the approximately 6 million Palestinians it rules over, just 1.5 million have a vote and that is increasingly circumscribed with the Arab parties in Israel under increasing attack. Balad arrests won’t be the last in Israel’s ethnocracy

Unfortunately, Jeremy felt the need to fawn and flatter his audience rather than telling them some home truths.  Some people will say ‘what does it matter’.  I suggest this is why.  In the event Corbyn becomes Prime Minister he would, on this evidence, bow and buckle to the much greater pressure of the City of London and industrialists.  But also because a strategy based on appeasement is destined to failure.  You stand up to your foes you don’t hand them olive branches to hit you in the face with.  This is not just true of the Zionists.  It is equally applicable to his MPs.  Those who refuse to accept the legitimacy of his election should be told to depart or they will be deselected and have the whip withdrawn.

I have therefore taken the liberty of drafting the answers to the question that Corbyn was asked which he should have given!  It is in the hope that next time he will have the courage of his convictions.

Q:        Jeremy & Owen – I wanted to find out from you what aspects of Israel & its achievements do you most admire

Jeremy Corbyn:  Thank you for a most interesting questions. The things I admire most about Israel include:

Its no nonsense arrest of Palestinian children as young as 12 and their shackling in chains.  In particular Israel’s willingness to assault and even torture them if necessary, as articulated by the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel.  It really takes some nerve to do this and claim you are still a democracy.  You can’t help admiring Israel for this.  I have to say I particularly like the Military’s practice of getting the children to sign confessions in a language they don’t understand (Hebrew).  Serves the blighters right.  It’s downright anti-Semitism refusing to learn the language of the occupying power.  It is pleasing to note that the Military Courts under which these brats – sorry children – are charged have a 99.7% conviction rate.  That might seem rather high but on the other hand it does demonstrate that it is possible to obtain a conviction but given the genius of the Israeli military it’s not surprising that they only get it wrong about once every 300 times.

It really is irrelevant that Jewish children in the same territories are entitled to things like a responsible adult attending an interview, social workers, nice warm offices and of course that they can’t be tried if they are under 14.  We really must understand that there is no comparison between Palestinian and Israeli Jewish children.  Those who take umbrage at this are, as my friend Jeremy Newmark says, out and out anti-Semites and Janet Royall has already had harsh words for those who alleged Apartheid at Oxford University Labour Club.

I particularly admire the annual Jerusalem day demonstration where thousands of settler youth express their tender and loving feelings towards Jerusalem’s Arabs by shouting ‘Death to the Arabs’.  You have to admire Israel’s ability to get away with this and in particular the actions of Israel’s police in arresting any anti-racist protesters out to cause trouble.  I understand that this year, the slogans were more varied and included the quite novel one, ‘A Jew is a soul, an Arabis a son of a whore.’  You have to give it to Israel’s democracy, it is most inventive.

I also admire the determination of Israel to ‘cleanse’ the Negev (southern desert area) of Israel of Bedouin villages such as Al Arakabh which get in the way of those nice, Jewish towns.  This process of Judaisation might upset people but we must remember this is a Jewish state.

Of course I deprecate the repeated vandalism and arson at the Hand to Hand school, one of the few mixed Jewish-Arab schools in Israel.  However Israel is a Jewish state and it is understandable that State schools in Israel are segregated.  It is anti-Semitic to compare this with similar schools in Apartheid South Africa.  Israel is a Jewish state.  South Africa was a White Apartheid state.  Anyway if do gooders insist on setting up private mixed schools which encourage Jewish and Arab children to mix,  thus encouraging the possibility of sinful Jewish-Arab relationships, is it any wonder that religious Jews take offence?I personally applaud the efforts of the Israeli government to discourage miscegenation.  Tzipi Hotoveli, Israel’s religious nut of a Deputy Foreign Minister was quite correct, when she said that it was “important to examine procedures for preventing mixed marriages, and Lehava members are the right people for that,”   It’s true that Lehava is technically a fascist organisation that hates gays, beats up Arabs and sets fire to Churches and Mosques, but it is doing important work to preserve the Jewishness of the Jewish state.  Those who oppose this work are, Mr McNicol informs me, anti-Semitic and will be suspended forthwith from the LP.

I particularly applaud the bold and courageous decision of the Education Ministry to ban that disgraceful book Borderland by Dorit Rabinyan. [Israeli-Palestinian love story omitted from curriculum tops bestseller lists].  This book portrayed as normal relationships between Arab and Jewish teens.  In a Jewish state this is likely to undermine the purity of the ruling race, I mean group and as such is something only terrorists would support.  As Dalia Fenig, an Education Ministry spokesperson explained:

 ‘“Adolescent youth tend to romanticise and don’t have, in many cases, the systematic point of view that includes considerations about preserving the identity of the nation and the significance of assimilation,”

As you will see it was a question of protecting Israel’s national identity, that is Israel’s ‘Jewish national identity.’  I think this is a particularly brave decision as otherwise Jewish children would grow up with the idea that an Arab girl or boy friend was a normal choice to make.

As you may know, the practice of the Jewish National Fund, which controls 93% of Israeli land, was to forbid Arabs to rent or lease Jewish national land.  Unfortunately when Adalah, a trouble making NGO and a Mr Kadan, a trouble-making Arab, went to the High Court the Judges could not find a legal reason to forbid Arabs from renting ‘national’ land.  Attorney General Mazuz then issued a ruling barring such practices.

This is of course disgraceful.  The Israeli Labour Party, those good friends of that nice Mr Jeremy Newmark, were outrage and quite rightly so.  Didn’t the judges understand that Israel is a Jewish state?  The JNF has been in existence since 1901 buying up land for Jewish use.  To call it racist is in itself a form of anti-Semitism.  Just because Jews can only access the land it doesn’t mean that Arabs suffer anything.  As the JNF said, it is Jewish Peoples Land and Arabs should recognise they are in the Jewish state as guests, on sufferance.  Fortunately the Knesset, which as you all know is Israel’s democratic parliament,  stepped in to pass the Acceptance to Communities Law.  This will help keep Arabs out of Jewish towns as they will have to ‘fit in’ and existing (Jewish) residents will have the final say on who is accepted into the community.

I particularly respect the practice that has grown up in Israel’s hospitals that a Jewish woman is offered the choice of not having to share a maternity ward with an Arab.  As the American Jewish magazine says, Maternity Ward Segregation (is) Just Tip of the Iceberg in Israel.  When having a Jewish baby it is totally wrong to have an Arab in the next bed.

As we all know, Jewish students suffer terribly from anti-Semitism these days.  I can only applaud Israel’s Technion University amongst other Israeli Universities, which offer Jewish students a choice of not having to share accommodation with Arabs.  As you know Arabs do not share the same standards as Jews and this is not racism but a question of hygiene and culture.  Also of course they are anti-Semites.  [Arab and Jewish students live in separate housing at the Technion].  I know there are some anti-Semites who will raise objections, but I hope people will understand that Jews are at a higher level of civilisation than Arabs.

I applaud the crackdown on left-wing Israeli human rights organisations and NGOs.  Organisations such as Breaking the Silence which distributes the testimony of former soldiers about so-called human rights crimes, are doing the work of terrorists.  These allegations are undermining Israel’s reputation as a democracy and the Occupation which we know is the most benign in history.  Israel’s new Transparency Law will therefore require all NGOs to disclose any foreign funding in order that these NGOs can be vilified as the unpatriotic, terrorist supporters that they are.Some of these so-called human rights organisations, such as Btselem, actually provide these Arabs with cameras to catch our brave troops off guard in the West Bank.  Recently one soldier who lost it with an 8 year old Palestinian girl, who was doing her best to be annoying, was caught on camera destroying her bike.  Clearly this was a case of entrapment.  They teach their children young, being anti-Semites, and the poor soldier was pilloried as a result of Btselem’s irresponsibility.  Of course right-wing NGOs and politicians like Netanyahu who receive private as opposed to public funding from abroad will be able to preserve their privacy.  That is how it should be.  Private funding of Im Tirzu and similar fascist NGOs should not be inhibited by unwelcome publicity to donors such as the American billionaire Sheldon Adelson.

I have to confess that as a budding Prime Minister I particularly admire Prime Minister Netanyahu’s video on Facebook for encouraging Jewish voters to get out and vote by warning that ‘droves’ of Arabs were coming out to vote.  Of course this is not racism it is merely encouraging Jewish voters to turn out at the voting booths.

I also warmly appreciate the honesty of Deputy Defence Minister Rabbi Eli Dahan that ‘“even gay Jews have higher souls than all non-Jews, gay or straight.”  Of course the learned Rabbi explained that he didn’t therefore support gays, it was just that Arabs were even lower in the human racial hierarchy than gay Jews.  Indeed he later clarified that Palestinians are “like animals, they aren’t human.” At a time of political correctness, such honesty is breathtaking.  Of course there are some misguided people who don’t understand that Israel is a democracy, a live one, with verve and spirit.  Why Prime Minister Netanyahu explained that Israel needed a fence around it to protect it from ‘wild beasts’ [there are non in the Middle East – he meant the local Arabs]

I guess what particularly pleases me and I’m sure little Owen Smith would agree, is the democracy that Israel embodies.  In a region known for dictatorship, Israel is a beacon of light.  I was particularly interested in the recent Pew Research Centre’s Survey on Israel’s Religious Divided Society.  I know Owen will join me on this.  When a plurality of Israel’s Jewish population (48%-46%) says that Israel’s Palestinian population should be expelled and when Israel’s fascist foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman recently reiterated this as good democrats we should tell Israel’s Arabs that they must go.  As even the leader of Israel’s Labour Party Isaac Herzog said, Labour is not an ‘Arab lovers’ party.  It is good to hear such frank comments from the Jewish Labour Movement’s sister party in Israel.  I’m sure that wonderful man, Jeremy Newmark, was happy to hear that Israeli Labour are no slouch when it comes to Arabs.

I was also interested that in the same survey, 79% of Jewish respondents said that Jewish citizens of Israel should have preferential treatment.  Is there anyone who seriously doubts this should happen in a Jewish state?  I hope not.

Israel’s vibrant democracy is an example to all.  I only learnt recently of the new law that will enable the majority of Israel’s Knesset (parliament) to expel troublemakers from its ranks. Israel’s Knesset passes law that allows expulsion of lawmakers Although neutrally worded, everyone knows that it is aimed at a few Israeli Palestinian trouble makers from the Balad party.  Unfortunately, despite our best efforts to stop them standing, they have been allowed to do so by our High Court and these misguided Arabs keep voting for them.  I understand that Ayelet Shaked Israel’s Justice Minister is determined to reform the Court.  I know that some people pillory Ayelet and even accuse her of supporting genocide.   This is most unfair, she was only saying that Palestinian mothers give birth to little Palestinian snakes whose sole desire in life is to blow Jews up.

In future when someone like Haneen Zoabi, a particular reprehensible anti-Semite who called Israel’s soldiers murderers, for having executed (I mean killed) 10 people on board the Marva Marmara, which was breaching Israel’s unlawful blockade of Gaza, behaves in this way, then we will be able to expel them from the Knesset.  It is unfortunately a loophole in Israel’s democracy that people who don’t support a Jewish state (like Arabs) are able to take advantage of our democracy in order to subvert it.  This is only to be admired.  There are a few MPs like  Hilary Benn  I would like expel from our Parliament so I believe that this should be welcomed.

Can I just add a word of praise for Israel’s healthy and democratic foreign policy.  When all around were boycotting it, Israel was Apartheid South Africa’s best friend.  Brothers in arms – Israel’s secret pact with Pretoria.  This takes real courage comrades.  In particular, when the United States cowardly cut off arms supplies and weapons supplies to regimes such as Pinochet and the Argentinian generals, Israel was always prepared to step into the breach.  I think we should be deeply appreciative of Israel’s support for democracy in Central and South America.  Mothers of the disappeared in Latin America feel Gaza’s pain

Comrades and friends, Israel is a vibrant and thriving racial democracy.  It ill  behoves us to criticise it for what we perceive as its failings when it is one of the world’s strongest states and our ally against enemies of the West.’

A Sad Reflection of Corbyn’s Political Drift
The above is, of course, not the answer Corbyn gave but it is the answer he should have given.  I knew Jeremy Corbyn over 30 years ago, even before he became an MP.  There was no stronger supporter of the Palestinians.  He has been to Palestine at least 6 times and every year without fail, Jeremy Corbyn turned up at Palestine Solidarity Conference.  Today he seems to have forgotten what Israel’s behaviour is like.  He has been so tranfixed by the ‘anti-Semitism’ allegations that he no longer knows what to believe in.

No one is more aware than Corbyn of the horrors of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians.  Yet at the JW3 ‘debate’ earlier this week he grovelled and flattered the supporters of Israel.  When asked what he admired about Israel (see transcript below) he said ‘Its verve and spirit’.  That is, of course, one way of putting it.

The madness of this type of behaviour is illustrated by the fact that the Zionist Jewish Labour Movement voted by 92% to 4% to support Owen Smith.  Corbyn will not gain the support of the Zionists and racists of the Israel lobby.  If he had been better advised he would have left Owen Smith to speak alone to JW3 whilst he spoke to his supporters.

Yet this is not just the failure of one man. It is testimony to the unremitting ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign, with its wall to wall media coverage, that has created the appearance of an all pervasive anti-Semitism and the accompanying headlines out of absolutely nothing.  Ask someone to name any specific anti-Semitic incident or comment and they would be hard pressed to do so.  To this day no one has refuted Asa Winstanley’s exposure of the bogus and crooked allegations that led up to the Oxford University Labour Club accusations. [How Israel lobby manufactured UK Labour Party’s anti-Semitism crisis]

Ruth Smeeth, the false victim of ‘anti-Semitism’ at the Chakrabarti press conference talks of 25,000 ‘abusive’ tweets.  I suspect that there were thousands of messages, not least from me, attacking her for being a Drama Queen, a fake and a phony but I doubt there were many anti-Semitic posts.  If there were any genuinely anti-Semitic posts they would have come from fascists not from people in the Labour Party.

Corbyn’s experiences over the past year are a sombre warning to all those who believe it is possible to support the Palestinians on the basis of Israel’s human rights violations without understanding that the latter are a result of the Jewish nature of the Israeli state.  It is Zionist settler colonialism, its search for an ethnically pure state, its constant desire to effect ethnic cleansing at the same time as it colonises and consolidates its occupation, which leads to the human rights violations.
It is a lesson that  Palestine Solidarity Campaign has yet to learn.  You cannot support the Palestinians unless you reject Zionism.  Two statism, support for a Jewish  state, is incompatible with self-determination and justice for the Palestinians.

When I think of Corbyn’s behaviour in feeding the hand that keeps smacking him in the face I recall one of David Cameron’s better jokes.  Towards the end of his premiership Cameron told Corbyn that he admired the Labour leader’s “tenacity” in clinging on to power despite attempts by MPs to oust him. “He has reminded me of the Black Knight in Monty Python’s ‘Holy Grail’. He has been kicked so many times but he says, ‘keep going, it’s only a flesh wound’.”

It is a joke but it contains a kernel of reality.  Instead of constantly trying to appease the unappeasable Corbyn should have said at the outset to the Jewish Labour Movement and their friends that yes he condemns anti-Semitism but he also condemns attempts to use anti-Semitism as a weapon against supporters of Palestine.
The reality in the last year is that Corbyn has denied, until he is blue in the face, that he is an anti-Semite.  This has had no effect on his critics because what they mean by anti-Semitism is not the traditional Jew hatred, which is non-existent in the Labour Party but the so called ‘New anti-Semitism’ which defines opposition to Israel as a Jewish state as anti-Semitism.  It is new because it is opposition to a state rather than Jews as individuals or a group.

The level of debate amongst both politicians and the mass media is abysmal.  It appeals to the lowest common denominator.  It deliberately obfuscates and confuses categories.  You don’t have to be particularly intelligent to understand that racism can only be directed at people.  You can’t be racist against a state.  A state is an inanimate structure or in Marx’s words, a body of armed men.  Leaving aside the absurdity of the Zionist claim that people campaign against Israel because it is Jewish.

I have provided an alternative transcript.  It is the one that Jeremy Corbyn could, if he had had the backbone and verve, to use his word, to use.  It is the one he would have used 3 years ago.

TRANSCRIPT

Debate Between Jeremy Corbyn and Owen Smith at the JW3 September 18^th

Q:        Jeremy Corbyn Will you support that – the Jewish Labour Movement rule change?

Yes it will be going to Conference & it follows on from the general anti-racist statement that I’ve proposed to the National Executive some months ago which was actually unanimously agreed by the NEC as a prelude to putting forward a rule change at this years Conference.  There something really sad that we are the only political party that has ever had a general statement of anti-racism in its… so thank you very much for your Question and good luck on the NCC.

[the Jewish Labour Movement Rule Change will make anti-Semitic ‘beliefs’ not just their expression an offence.  The     explanatory wording states that Zionism should not be a term of ‘abuse’ even though this racist ideology and movement is by definition abusive – the Rule Change also says that the ‘victim’ of an anti-Semitic should be taken at their word and that there should be an overwhelming presumption of guilt against someone accused.  So if a Zionist accuses a supporter of Palestine of being anti-Semitic then that accusation must be accepted.  To his shame Corbyn has accepted this lock, stock and barrel.]

Q:        Jeremy & Owen – I wanted to find out from you what aspects of Israel & its achievements do you most admire

Compere:  Mr Corbyn what do you most admire about Israel and its achievements?

Jeremy Corbyn – I admire the verve and spirit of the towns and cities in Israel – the life and the way people conduct themselves, I admire the separation of legal and political powers and the system of democratic government that is there and I admire many of the technical and industrial achievements that Israel has made and its very advanced technology in so many way that it has developed in medical and telecommunications technology.

Owen Smith – I admire the incredible strength….