Since early in 2016, debate about rights for Palestinians has been under severe threat because criticism of Israel and of its founding ideology, Zionism, has been misrepresented as antisemitic.
Antisemitism is hatred of Jews simply because they are Jews. It must be vigorously combatted, along with all forms of bigotry. Confusing it with opposition to the state of Israel or Zionism is to obscure the real meaning of the term antisemitism and make fighting against it more difficult.
The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism is about far more than the ever-present necessity to remember the Holocaust: it is about limiting debate about the nature and activity of the Israeli state.
The definition, and its earlier appearance as the EUMC draft working definition, has been used to try to prevent the description of Israel as an Apartheid state. Anyone is entitled to attack this description as mistaken or as malicious but to assert that it must not be used is a punitive restriction on free speech. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the meaning of Apartheid in Afrikaans is separateness. What critics of Israel call the apartheid wall, the Israelis call the separation barrier; hardly an example of lost in translation.
The Apartheid Wall next to the Aida Refugee Camp, Bethlehem
All across the United Kingdom at the end of February there will be events to mark 2017 Israel Apartheid Week. IAW has long been a high spot of the calendar of Palestine support – each year it is denounced as antisemitic on account of its name not because of some supposed outrage. The current
this was deemed by the Zionist claque to be indisputable evidence of antisemitism with any supporting facts. May’s adoption of the IHRA definition will empower the self-appointed Witchfinders General to harass defenders of human rights and international law.
Every day the Israelis are attempting to separate out the Palestinians from East Jerusalem through home demolitions and through revocation of residents’ rights to live in the city – who cannot see the replication of the practices of Apartheid South Africa in these practices? Only Zionist true believers and their acolytes in western governments, ready to apologise for and excuse almost every Israeli brutality. Every crocodile in every zoo in Europe and North America has been ruthlessly stripped of their tears to wet the handkerchiefs of May and Merkel and Hollande when they limply distance themselves from a particularly inexcusable excess. Trump, however, has not bothered any passing reptile: refusing to shed any tear, human or otherwise, for the plight of a single Palestinian. These politicians will turn round in ten years’ time to tell us they never supported Israeli apartheid and excoriated Netanyahu and his gang just as their predecessors told us with straight faces that they always supported Mandela.
Central to apartheid in Israel as in South Africa is differential rights to own and occupy property and land. Expulsion of Black Africans from Sophiatown is remembered for its brutality. The gradual expulsions from Silwan and Sheikh Jarrah is slower but no less traumatic. South Africa had its Group Areas Act; Israel has its Absentee Property Law with its Orwellian creation of present absentees. These are the inescapable equivalences that the IHRA definition seeks to proscribe.
A key signifier of antisemitism according to the IHRA is questioning the right of Israel to exist by claiming it is a racist endeavour. It is not some capricious act to raise these questions; they are demanded by any simple observation of the facts. The Absentee Property Law is central to land holding in Israel and it is an explicitly racist piece of legislation. The desire to expel Arabs (sic) has been a recurrent theme from Ben Gurion’s regime onwards. Even before the state was founded, the slogan “Jewish Labour only” was common in Mandate Palestine.
The fact that Israel, uniquely, is a state without a singular nationality is racist. The Law of Return allowing Jews with no connection to Israel beyond a self-claimed mythical biblical one are allowed to immigrate, while Palestinians remain to sojourn in refugee camps, can only be regarded as racist. Israel proudly claims to be a Zionist entity. Central to Zionism is the claim to a special status for Jews and a lesser status for others – this is as explicitly racist as anything in the Nurnberg laws (naturally, making this comparison is another sign of antisemitism).
The question of self-determination, although the substance of that right is never explained, is commonly translated into ‘questioning the right of Israel to exist’. This is a strange formulation. States do not have rights, people do. States are contingent and rise and fall. Scots contest the right of the United Kingdom to exist. The right of the USA to exist was challenged in a bloody civil war. Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia lost their rights to exist, one peacefully the other far less so. The right of Jews living in Israel not to be slaughtered is absolute; their right to live as they please regardless of their impact on Palestinians is not. If self-determination means they can dictate the conditions of life of others who are denied any engagement in a democratic process, then that is selfish not self.
In writing this I have consciously transgressed the strictures of the IHRA. I do that unapologetically; not because I am antisemitic or ‘self-hating’ but because my Jewish heritage instructs me to stand against injustice and oppression. Zionism is more harmful for Jews than anything since the holocaust because it frames Judaism as unjust. While I am not religious I require religions, maybe vainly, to be enablers of the transmission of virtue, generosity and justice: I demand no less of humanism and atheism. Israel is a living proof of the ludicrous optimism of my expectations.
“By falling so far short of the standards required (it) does disservice to the honourable cause of combating antisemitism in the united Kingdom: and fuels the fires of misunderstanding and ill feeling which dog its discussion…”; and that “If I was inclined to borrow an expression from the Committee’s Interim Chair” (when describing the Shami Chakrabarti Report), “I would say the Committee’s Report is not worth the paper it is written on.” [Paragraphs 9.4 & 9.5]
This is confirmed after seeing the astounding and undeniable revelations broadcast on 11 – 14 January in four half hour programmes on “Al Jazeera Investigates: The Lobby”.
It is now my firm conclusion that the vilification of the Labour Party by the Home Affairs Committee and others is without foundation. The Shami Chakrabarti Report got it right about the level of antisemitism in the Labour Party; the Home Affairs Committee got it very wrong.
It is also clear that there has been an organized campaign against the Labour Party and its Leader, in which the government of Israel, through the Israeli Embassy in London, has played a central and proactive part. A part described by the Al Jazeera programme presenter, Clayton Swisher, as “covert action that penetrates the heart of Britain’s democracy”; and which Peter Oborne calls “… outrageous interference in British politics … (which) shouldn’t be permitted … (and) … should be investigated by our intelligence services.” [Peter Oborne is associate editor of The Spectator and former chief political commentator of the Daily Telegraph.]
It appears from the programmes that parts of the Labour Party are involved in this “outrageous interference”, including the upper echelons of the Jewish Labour Movement (JLM) represented by Jeremy Newmark and the Labour Friends of Israel (LFI) through its Parliamentary Officer, Michael Rubin.
LFI staffer Michael Rubin expalin9ing how the Embassy hides its involvement
The four Al Jazeera programmes provide substantial and convincing evidence of Israeli Embassy initiatives through Shai Masot, its Senior Political Officer, and in other ways, to undermine the Leader of the Labour Party and his supporters in the Party who are seen to be sympathetic to the Palestinian people. This involves the active support and influencing of groups within the Labour Party including the Jewish Labour Movement, Labour Friends of Israel, Young Fabians, and We Believe in Israel / Britain Israel Communications & Research Centre (BICOM) – and the creation of other groups.
Amongst other things, Shai Masot, who first met the Al Jazeera undercover reporter at an LFI meeting, is recorded initiating a Young Labour Friends of Israel group through the reporter who is to be “chairman of it”, including getting him a job at the Israeli Embassy to support this activity. At a subsequent private meeting at a London hotel at which Ella Rose, Director of JLM was also present, the investigator meets Michael Freeman, Head of Civil Society Affairs at the Israeli Embassy, who explains that the Embassy is looking for someone to work on BDS (the world-wide Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign against Israel’s actions towards the Palestinian people). The Guest of Honour at this private meeting is Gilad Erdan MK, Israel’s Minister of Public Security, Strategic Affairs and Public Diplomacy. Mr Erdan is recorded as saying: “I grew up with the ideology that the land of Israel (by which he means the historic land of Canaan or Palestine) totally belongs to the Jewish people … It (BDS) is a strategic threat to the future of Israel because if we will allow them to continue with all the lies they are spreading against Israel we will lose this fantastic young generation …”
The evidence presented in the Al Jazeera programmes makes clear that it is in this context that the vilification of the labour Party and its Leader should be seen – as should the vilification of others including Malia Bouattia, President of the National Union of Students, and of Jackie Walker, Labour Party member and former Vice Chair of Momentum’s National Committee. All of whom are also vilified in the Home Affairs Committee’s report on antisemitism.
The Israeli Embassy’s interference in UK politics is not confined to the Labour Party. According to the programmes, other groups are also influenced including the Conservative Friends of Israel, the Young Conservatives and Conservative Future. The need to do this with the Conservative Party is seen to be less by the Embassy because, as Shai Masot says, new Conservative MPs are joining the CFI “automatically”, whereas Labour MPs are not joining Labour Friends of Israel and “… you need to get more people on board.” Nevertheless Shai Masot is recorded as noting that an initiative was taken to set up the Young Conservative Friends of Israel, “CFI yeah … CFI started with it one year ago because of my idea.”
A private meeting of “sympathetic Labour activists” at the Labour Party Annual Conference last September, was addressed by Mark Regev, the Israeli Ambassador, at which Shai Masot was also on the platform alongside the Ambassador, as was Jeremy Newmark of JLM. Jeremy Newmark is recorded as saying: “Just to get Clive Lewis, as one of Corbyn’s key lieutenants, onto an openly Zionist JLM platform took a lot of heavy lifting”, “Everything is wheels within wheels, it has created a bit of division within Momentum … We already have actual intelligence, that from Momentum political directors’ meeting last night they passed a vote of censure on Clive Lewis just for coming to our meetings and speaking.”
Shai Masot and JLC Chair Jeremy Newmark with Israeli ambassador Mark Regev speaking at an event at Labour party conference in 2016 (Al Jazeera)
Michael Rubin is recorded in the same programme as saying: “We work with the Embassy quite a lot. When bad news stories come out about Israel, the Embassy sends us information so we can still counter it. We work really closely together. But a lot of it’s behind the scenes … but they (young Labour people) wouldn’t be happy if it (LFI) was seen as an Embassy thing… Being LFI allows us to reach out to people who wouldn’t want get involved with the Embassy … we obviously want the same end goal of getting more people to be more pro-Israel and understand the conflict. It’s just how you do it.” Other remarks from Shai Masot on purportedly independent groups he has been instrumental in setting up in Britain, including nudge, nudge, wink, wink type body language, indicate his clear view that LFI is not a body independent of the Israeli Embassy.
The programmes show regular interaction of this kind between JLM, LFI and Israeli Embassy personnel including the Deputy Ambassador as well as the Ambassador at the Labour Party’s Annual Conference and elsewhere. This includes contact at informal events such as the JLM summer barbecue where another attendee said to the undercover investigator, “Oh, you know Shai? How interesting, I work with Shai. I work for the Ambassador.” It was at this event that Jeremy Newmark welcomed Ella Rose to her new post as JLM Director and made clear that, “Ella was by no means the person … that had the most Labour Party and political experience. But there was something … as trustees (of JLM) we felt mattered much more, which is that she is one of you” – referring to her experience as President of the Union of Jewish Students where “she … fought the campus battles alongside you …” and why trustees appointed her “… to go on to play an incredibly critical role at the lead of the struggle against antisemitism in the Labour Party.”
At the private meeting with Labour Party activists at the Party’s Annual Conference referred to above, the Israeli Ambassador, Mark Regev, is recorded as saying: “The fashion is, if you are on the left today, you are probably very hostile to Israel, if not antisemitic.” Mr Regev also describes Hamas and Hezbollah in wholly derogatory terms as “These people are misogynistic, they are homophobic, they are racist, they are antisemitic, they are reactionary. I think that’s what we need to say”. Mr Regev made no reference to the origins of these bodies in the establishment of the state of Israel in Palestine by which they were forcibly dispossessed, as they see it, or to their current status within the Palestinian diaspora in the government of Lebanon and Palestine Authority.
Some Labour MPs also appear caught up in these events, though it is not clear whether a wholly conscious part is being played or not. The vividly painful filming of Joan Ryan MP, Chair of the Labour Friends of Israel (LFI), when asked questions by the admirably persistent Jean Fitzpatrick at the LFI’s stand at the Labour Party’s Annual Conference last September, shows shameful resort by the MP to an allegation of antisemitism without any foundation in fact. Joan Ryan’s painfully embarrassing inability to answer Jean’s informed questions about the two-state solution, led her to make an official complaint of antisemitic conduct against her fellow Party member backed up by Alex Richardson, her Parliamentary Assistant, who witnessed the encounter. It is appalling to see how perfectly fair and polite, if persistent and clearly uncomfortable questioning, was first not addressed because Joan Ryan did not have an answer, and then “twisted” to use the Prime minister’s word, to conjure out of the air things which had not been said or implied to make them antisemitic. This is unintentionally acknowledged in Alex Richardson’s recorded remarks shortly after the encounter when he said: “… and although nothing antisemitic was said, I’m sure there were undertones of it and it was brought upon by that context.”
Yet both he and Joan Ryan had no compunction in making an official complaint to the Labour Party about a fellow Labour Party member on this non-existent basis. Not only that, but Joan Ryan went on that same evening to announce at a rally to combat antisemitism organized by the JLM, “We have also had three incidents of antisemitic harassment on our stand to the people who are staffing that stall today” – of which she makes clear subsequently that the one involving Jean Fitzpatrick was in her view the worst. Is this the stuff on which the internal assault on Jeremy Corbyn using allegations of endemic antisemitism as hammer blows with which to strike him, is based? Judging by this and other recorded episodes such as that of Ruth Smeeth MP described in my Critique, I share the view of Ilan Pappe, Israeli historian, expressed on the Al Jazeera programmes that as evidence they are “pathetic”. They are also illustrative of a disturbing mind-set, apparently all too willing to perceive inconvenient or uncomfortable behaviour as antisemitic, including justified criticism of Israel’s indefensible and unlawful conduct in the occupied West Bank. Despite being informed of the results of Al Jazeera Investigates, Joan Ryan asserted that her actions were “entirely appropriate”. This beggars belief.
The Al Jazeera programmes show that the LFI’s parliamentary officer, Michael Rubin, is not the only LFI officer to have regular contact with Shai Masot and the Israeli Embassy. Michael Rubin confirmed this in respect of LFI’s Chair, Joan Ryan MP, saying “So she’ll speak to Shai most days.”
The programmes also revealed the insensitive subsequent handling by the Labour Party of the complaint made by Joan Ryan, which caused Jean Fitzpatrick great and wholly unjustified anxiety. The Party’s letter to Jean Fitzpatrick does not make clear who the complainant was, referring inaccurately to her allegedly having spoken “… to a member of party staff”, not to the complainant. The complaint was eventually not upheld.
At the same LFI stand at the Labour Party Annual Conference, we also heard Chuka Umunna MP, after he had hugged Jennifer Gerber, Director of the LFI, and heard Alex Richardson’s unspecific account of the alleged antisemitic incidents involving Party members, say: It’s disgraceful. We’ll prevail. We’ll prevail in the end”. This was shortly after the re-election of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour Party Leader and shortly before publication of the Home Affairs Committee’s Report. This apparent reference to events inside the Labour Party provides further support for my Critique’s conclusion that the Home Affairs Committee’s inquiry into antisemitism had been hi-jacked by the internal Labour Party dissension following the PLP’s vote of no confidence in Jeremy Corbyn, a dissension which was pursued in the Committee’s Report.
The unacceptable treatment of Jackie Walker is also fully revealed in the Al Jazeera programmes. The alleged antisemitism took place at the same Labour Party Annual Conference at a purported training session led by Mike Katz, one of the Vice Chairs of JLM. Someone was secretly recording the trainer’s contribution and the subsequent debate. There is no antisemitism in what Jackie Walker said. Some might take exception to her comment on International Holocaust Day but it is not antisemitic. There was clear misunderstanding of her intent in making that remark, which Jackie Walker attempted to correct, but there was no exploration of her explanation, which is most surprising in a training session. It is clear that Jackie Walker, like Malia Bouattia, is an anti-Zionist, not an antisemite. I agree with Jackie Walker’s reaction of – let’s have a debate about that – Zionism and anti-Zionism – not about this – the false and destructive equation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism.
In practice, the abuse seems to be the other way round; first in the leaking of information to a news outlet, the Jewish Chronicle, from a training session by, it is claimed, a member of the JLM; second in the subsequent statement by the Board of Deputies of British Jews who called Jackie Walker “an unapologetic Jew baiter” – a most outrageous and unfounded remark from a supposedly respectable body towards a Jewish, black woman who is an anti-racism trainer and advocate in relation to the African Holocaust at the hands of the slavers; and third in the recorded conduct of Ella Rose, the then new Director of the JLM and formerly an official at the Israeli Embassy in London. Ella Rose, in addition to expression of a number of expletives, is recorded as saying: “I saw Jackie Walker on Saturday and thought, you know what, I could take her, she’s like 5’ 2” and tiny. That’s why I can take Jackie Walker; Krav Maga training.” [A hand to hand combat technique developed by the Israeli military.] I agree with Jackie Walker’s response when shown this recording that it was “breath-taking” and that it “says it all”.
Unless it has evidence of which I and others are unaware, the Labour Party should drop the allegation against Jackie Walker forthwith. It is not acceptable that the matter has not been concluded to date, which is also the case I understand with the complaint against Ken Livingstone.
These events illustrate the chilling effect on free speech the unjustified vilification of the Labour Party could well have – and appears to be having now. This is to the detriment of our open democracy and to our hard won right to speak up without fear or favour – in this instance for the cruelly oppressed people of Palestine. This is wholly unacceptable as the de facto annexation of the West Bank takes place in plain view through the Israeli state sponsored settler movement and the frequent bulldozing of Palestinian homes, olive groves and business premises – most recently resulting in the deaths of two Palestinians in the dawn raid by Israeli troops on 18 January to demolish the Palestinian Bedouin village of Umm Al-Hiran. In plain view, that is, to those who have open minds and eyes willing to see it – but not to those whose minds are closed and do not wish to see it for what it is.
Here we have, as they see it, a dispossessed people being oppressed and further dispossessed by the strongest military power in the Middle East for whom the accustomed status of victimhood fits increasing ill. And which seems determined upon expansion of its territory way beyond Israel’s internationally recognized 1967 boundaries, not just in respect of the bitterly disputed areas of East Jerusalem. Yet our government seems unwilling to say boo to this goose and, in common with other governments, huffs and puffs to no effect, preferring occasional votes at the UN. Yet Mr Netanyahu asserts that legitimate protest through the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign by the Palestinian people and others is “a moral outrage” – with no gainsay from those with the power to make it count. If anyone has the right to feel “moral outrage” it is the people of Palestine; and the people of our own country at a foreign government’s now exposed efforts to interfere in our democratic affairs.
At the same time it is important to get a better understanding of what is driving the forces inside Israel whose actions are seen to be so oppressive by Palestinians – as well as many Israeli and British Jews – and intrusive upon our democratic process – yet which seem from the point of view of those concerned to be appropriate and justified. Notwithstanding the military power referred to above, the fear of attack amongst Israeli civilians referred to in my Critique is not in any way confined to the areas within rocket range of Gaza – indeed it appears to be much more widespread and to play a significant part in the bitter division of views which surrounds the current debate of antisemitism in this country. [Paragraph 5.2]
It is in this bitterly divided context that the Al Jazeera programmes also vividly illustrate the great danger of the government’s proposed definition of antisemitism. They help to make clear the considerable scope for incorrect interpretation of a fair exercise of free speech in the intended examples in that definition, including: “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination …”, which many people unjustifiably equate with informed and persistent questioning of Israel’s behaviour towards the Palestinians, or with anti-Zionism which is inaccurately equated with antisemitism; and “Manifestations might include the targeting of the state of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity”, which as I point out in my comments on the proposed definition, is precisely how many British and Israeli Jews do see Israel – including, according to his own recorded words, Israel’s Minister of Public Security, Strategic Affairs and Public Diplomacy (see above).
From the Al Jazeera programmes and from other events such as Ruth Smeeth MP’s conduct at and after the launch of the Shami Chakrabarti Report, my clear impression is that there is an over-propensity on the part of some people involved in these matters to interpret conduct as antisemitic when to the objective ear it is not. It is imperative that the government does not encourage this by adopting its proposed definition. Its adoption would be harmful not helpful to the cause of combating antisemitism – and would risk that honourable cause being brought into disrepute.
It is also most important, as Peter Oborne says in the Al Jazeera programmes about Shai Masot and the Israeli Embassy’s “outrageous interference” in the United Kingdom’s democratic process, that it should not be tolerated in the quiescent manner the government affects. It requires full, fearless and open investigation.
It is imperative that the Labour Party respects the informed and objective conclusion of the Shami Chakrabarti Report that “The Labour Party is not overrun by antisemitism…” And that the Party disregards the conclusions of the Home Affairs Committee’s Report in this regard – as not being worth the paper they are written on.
It is time to stand up and speak out against these various outrages and not to be cowed by fear of being falsely accused of antisemitism. An accusation which does as much harm to Israel and its legitimate right to live without fear within its internationally recognized boundaries as to the equally legitimate right of the Palestinian people to be secure in their own homeland. This is what Jean Fitzgerald was asking Joan Ryan MP about: it is to our collective shame that answer was there none, other than hurtful accusation. We must also speak out against the neglect of the true facts by the BBC and the large majority of the privately owned British media. We need to stand up and be counted as true democrats in the honourable tradition of Tom Paine who, I guess, would have a thing or two to say about the current state of affairs. Perhaps “He who dares not offend cannot be honest” might be apposite.
In response to a recommendation of the House of Commons Home Affairs Select Committee in its Report, Antisemitism in the United Kingdom, the Government has agreed to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism “for the criminal justice agencies and other public bodies to use…” [CM 9386]
David Plank
I am concerned at the lack of clarity in the Prime Minister’s announcement of the Government’s decision and at the party political comment which accompanied it. I am also concerned that the Home Affairs Committee’s recommendation on which that decision relies is not well founded in evidence. My Critique of the Report noted that –
“… the Committee … omits to address the cause of much current and past dispute which concerns the definition of acts which are or are not antisemitic according to different sincerely held views which may or may not be mistaken or antisemitic. In this signal regard the Committee has failed to get to the root of the matter …” [Paragraph 8.13]
The single sentence that forms the IHRA’s working definition may be useful to some as just that – a working definition. The problem arises from the associated examples which the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) has adopted to guide its work, some of which are the subject of the controversy and outright disagreement referred to in my Critique. [Paragraph 7.20]
For instance, the IHRA’s guidance includes as an example of antisemitism in public life “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination …” and gives as an example of this “…, by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavour.” But the first part of this statement is much broader than the instance in the second part. The first part can be read to mean that the assertion by Palestinian people of their comparable right of self-determination is antisemitic because it might be seen to deny or conflict with the Jewish right. And it will be read in this way by many people. The first part also runs the serious risk of suppressing expressions of the great anger felt by many Palestinians at what they see as the annexation of their country and its continuing “colonisation” through the establishment by Israel’s Government of Jewish settlements on land which, according to the United Nations, is unlawfully occupied by Israel. Surely, our basic right to free speech should allow such expressions of indignation without fear of prosecution for an alleged crime of antisemitism – and it should allow us to hear and be influenced by those expressions without fear of reproach or allegation. If the IHRA’s guidance is adopted as well as the single sentence definition, the right to free speech without fear of prosecution is put at risk.
Another example given in the IHRA’s guidance is “Accusing Jewish citizens of being more loyal to Israel, or to the alleged priorities of Jews worldwide, than to the interests of their own nations.” Is “Jewish citizens” intended to apply to an individual Jewish citizen or to Jewish citizens as a whole? Clearly, such an accusation against Jewish citizens as a whole is likely to be antisemitic as it appears to be based in a prejudiced stereotype of Jewish people, i.e. “a certain perception of Jews” as the IHRA’s working definition puts it. However, is it not possible that an individual Jewish citizen might be criticized in this way not because he or she is Jewish but because that is what he or she does? In this circumstance, whether or not the criticism was fair or accurate, it would not be racist. Do we want to encourage allegations of antisemitism for such a criticism of an individual? I think not. But this is the probable effect of adopting this example as part of the proposed definition. This could of course be down to poor drafting. If so, it is not the only example as there are a number in the IHRA’s guidance – which in itself makes it unsuitable for wider adoption in its current form, particularly adoption in the law or associated statutory guidance.
And then there is the preamble to the examples given in the IHRA’s guidance which states “Manifestations might include the targeting of the state of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity.” But that is how many British and Israeli Jews do see Israel, which is likely to mean that the subsequent sentence in the guidance would in day to day practice be ignored: “However, criticism of Israel similar to that levelled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic.” This qualification would probably be overlooked or forgotten by some with resultant allegations of antisemitism and reports to the police of an alleged crime. This does not seem likely to assist good community relations.
Another key aspect of the guidance is likely to be overlooked in practice. The “contemporary examples of antisemitism” listed by the IHRA are all prefaced by a key clause that they “… could, taking into account the overall context, include …” The crucial qualification of “taking into account the overall context” is almost certain to sink without trace in the practical application of the proposed definition to alleged criminal offences by the police and the Crown Prosecution Service – and in relation to their responsibilities by local authorities, universities and other public bodies – which are those likely to be obliged to apply the definition according to a BBC report. [Breaking news, 12.12.16] Given the huge difficulty the police and others have had with the guidance that they should “believe” persons alleging child sexual abuse, it seems probable that equal if not greater difficulty would occur with this more complex issue – with the consequent serious risk of oppression by the authorities and persecution by the media of relatively defenceless individuals being seen as guilty until their innocence is proved or proceedings are dropped.
One also has to ask why antisemitism? What is it that singles out antisemitism from other forms of racism which warrants this very specific and high profile attention as to its definition and pursuit over and above what the law already provides? The evidence of recorded antisemitic incidents does not appear wholly to support such special attention. The Home Affairs Committee at the top of its report cites as its first key fact an 11 per cent increase in such incidents over the first six months of 2016 as reported by the Community Security Trust (557 incidents compared with 500 in the first six months of 2015). However, the Committee omits to mention from the same source that 77 per cent of this increase is via social media which, though very real and vile, is a different phenomenon; primarily for the reason of anonymity as addressed in my Critique allowing unaccountable behind the hand and behind the curtain gossip which was not widely broadcast before to take visible public form now. Nor does the Committee reflect in its key fact that, according to the same source, there was a 13 per cent fall in violent antisemitic incidents over the same period. The omission of this very welcome development from the key fact further discredits the Home Affairs Committee’s report and weakens it as a basis for special government action.
Clearly, antisemitism is a significant problem requiring determined action by the authorities within the law. Clearly, the level of recorded antisemitic incidents has increased since the 2014 ground invasion of Gaza by Israeli forces and is remaining at a higher level unlike previous spikes. However, it remains lower than the spike in the first half of 2009 when 629 incidents were recorded and social media was not as prevalent as it is now. Therefore, it is not clear why antisemitism amongst the various forms of racism is thought to require the special and singular attention it appears to be being given now. Why is not similar attention being given by the Committee and the Government to the equally appalling scar of Islamophobia in our society? Arguably, the case for combating Islamophobia is as great if not greater than that for antisemitism. So, why is the government not devoting similar attention to both? Without a clear answer to these questions I am uneasy about the basis upon which the government is proceeding. [Community Security Trust, Antisemitic incidents, January – June 2016]
This unease becomes concern when account is taken of the highly politicized context of the Prime Minister’s announcement of 12 December. On the same day the BBC in its breaking news issued a report headed “Anti-Semitism: Theresa May attacks “twisted” Labour views”. In this the Prime Minister is quoted as having said at a lunch of the Conservative Friends of Israel in London, “It is disgusting that these twisted views are being found in British politics. Of course, I am talking mainly about the Labour Party and their hard-left allies.” This was clearly timed to coincide with the Prime Minister’s announcement from 10 Downing Street. Given the highly dubious nature of the allegations against the Labour Party in general and Jeremy Corbyn in particular as evidenced in my Critique, this statement by the Conservative Prime Minister, which has not been denied by her office, looks like further evidence of highly regrettable party politicization of this most important, controversial and sensitive issue. The Prime Minister’s statement also reminds me of the Home Affairs Committee’s report’s denigratory tone where it refers to “hard-left” groups. The pejorative connotations of this are spelled out in my Critique. [Paragraphs 3.1 to 3.6]
The accuracy of the Prime Minister’s remarks is brought into question by the same account of antisemitic incidents issued by the Community Security Trust. This report shows that for the first six months of 2016, 24 per cent of all the 557 recorded incidents were “politically motivated” (135). Of these, 98 were classified as “Far Right”, 32 as “Anti-Zionist” and 5 as “Islamist”.
That the Labour Party is reported to have welcomed the introduction of a new definition does not improve this situation or make it more acceptable. In my view the Party has been scarred by its unjustified vilification and, understandably, may not want to be seen as obstructive at this time. After all, if the Party expressed well founded reservations, it would undoubtedly be portrayed as yet more evidence against it. Also, the Party may not take exception to the IHRA’s one sentence working definition which is consistent with the commonplace explanation of antisemitism Jeremy Corbyn gave in his evidence to the Home Affairs Committee. [Paragraph 11 of the Home Affairs Committee’s Report] But as I have said, it is the guidance which is the real problem not the one sentence. It is possible that the Labour Party will refine its position in due course.
It is regrettable that the Home Affairs Committee and now the Government appear to have overlooked the constructive work done in this very area for the Parliamentary Sub-Committee Against Antisemitism by Professor David Feldman in his January 2015 Sub-Report. This report by the subsequent adviser to the Shami Chakrabarti Enquiry seems to provide a more fertile base for progress in this vexed and contentious area.
For all these reasons I am very concerned at this ill-judged and ill-omened initiative. Proper conduct in government is crucial to a civilized and civilizing society. Such conduct is not evident to me in this policy announcement. In my view this initiative may set back the honourable cause of combating antisemitism not advance it. It is certainly not likely to advance the equally honourable cause of free speech; indeed it is likely to have a chilling effect upon it.
The Israeli Embassy has seventeen Israeli “technical and administrative staff” granted visas by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. The normal number for an Embassy that size would be about two. I spoke to two similar size non-EU Embassies this morning, one has two and one zero. I recall I dealt with an angry Foreign Minister during my own FCO career incensed his much larger High Commission had been refused by the FCO an increase from three to four technical and administrative staff.
Ambassador Mark Regev with Shai Masot
Shai Masot, the Israeli “diplomat” who had been subverting Britain’s internal democracy with large sums of cash and plans to concoct scandal against a pro-Palestinian British minister, did not appear in the official diplomatic list.
I queried this with the FCO, and was asked to put my request in writing. A full three weeks later and after dozens of phone calls, they reluctantly revealed that Masot was on the “technical and administrative staff” of the Israeli Embassy.
This is plainly a nonsense. Masot, as an ex-Major in the Israeli Navy and senior officer in the Ministry of Strategic Affairs, is plainly senior to many who are on the Diplomatic List, which includes typists and personal assistants. There are six attaches – support staff – already on the List.
Masot was plainly not carrying out technical and administrative duties. The term is a formal one from the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, and it is plain from the convention that technical and administrative staff are in official status lower than the diplomatic staff. The majority of support activities are carried out in all Embassies by locally engaged staff already resident in the host country, but a very small number of technical and administrative staff may be allowed visas for work in particularly secure areas. They may be an IT and communications technician, possibly a cleaner in the most sensitive physical areas, and perhaps property management.
These staff do not interact with politicians of the host state or attend high level meetings beside the Ambassador. The level at which Shai Masot was operating was appropriate to a Counsellor or First Secretary in an Embassy. Masot’s formal rank as an officer in his cover job in the Ministry of Strategic Affairs would entitle him to that rank in the Embassy if this were a normal appointment.
The Al Jazeera documentaries plainly revealed that Masot was working as an intelligence officer, acquiring and financing “agents of influence”. It is simply impossible that the FCO would normally grant seventeen technical and administrative visas to support sixteen diplomats, when six of the sixteen are already support staff. The only possible explanation, confirmed absolutely by Masot’s behaviour, is that the FCO has knowingly connived at settling a large nest of Israeli spies in London. I fairly put this to the FCO and they refused to comment.
I asked my questions on 10 January. On 12 January the FCO asked me to put them in writing. On 2 February they finally replied to the first three questions, but refused to comment on questions 4 or 5 about involvement of the intelligence services in Masot’s appointment.
Query about Shai Masot’s status
On 2 February I sent these follow-up questions to the FCO by email:
Follow up questions about Shai Masot’s status
FCO Media Department have replied that they refuse to give me any further information on the subject, and that I should proceed through a Freedom of Information request so the FCO can assess properly whether the release of any further information is in the national interest.
What is it they are always saying to us: if you have got nothing to fear, you have got nothing to hide?
I am confident I know what they are hiding, and that is FCO complicity in a large nest of Israeli spies seeking to influence policy and opinion in the UK in a pro-Israeli direction. That is why the government reaction to one of those spies being caught on camera plotting a scandal against an FCO minister, and giving £1 million to anti-Corbyn MPs, was so astonishingly muted. It is also worth noting that while the media could not completely ignore the fantastic al Jazeera documentaries that exposed the scandal, it was a matter of a brief article and no follow up digging.
This was not just a curiosity, it reveals a deep-seated problem for our democracy. I intend to continue picking at it.
You’ve seen them, haven’t you? The vicious personal attacks, the expletives, the death wishes? If you’ve read any writing like mine – writing by a Jew who acknowledges Palestinian humanity – and taken the time to look at some of the readers’ comments, you know what I mean.
Michael Lesher is an author, lawyer and Orthodox Jew who lives in Passaic, NJ. His most recent book is Sexual Abuse, Shonda and Concealment in Orthodox Jewish Communities (McFarland & Co., 2014).
If you don’t – well, for simplicity’s sake, let’s consider only the attacks on me personally. (Gideon Levy, Amira Hass, Norman Finkelstein and my friend Jonathan Ofir, among others, have all attracted similar vituperation.) An ostensibly religious Jew has publicly called me a “deviant,” “an enemy” and “the worst kind of Jew”; he has also compared me to Nazi collaborators, concluding that since I “lack[] the morality of a sewer rat,” it might be appropriate for a truly religious Jew to murder me.
An exceptional case? I wish it were. One of my recent columns in this space called attention to the dehumanization of Palestinians who resist Israel’s occupation. In response, an assortment of Jewish readers described me as “vile,” “a sub-category of human,” “a disgusting human being,” “an enemy to Judaism” and a “self-aggrandizing demented buffoon” with “sick, twisted opinions.” Another of my fellow Orthodox Jews – borrowing a leaf from the Nazi pamphlet Entartete Kunst – suggested that my concern with Palestinian rights could only mean a taint in my Jewish lineage.
And so it goes.
I could ignore these comments, of course. But I prefer trying to understand them. For if we don’t understand what drives Jews to such bizarre slanders – all the while believing themselves completely above reproach – it’s obvious that we won’t be able to change their minds. And if we don’t, it isn’t only Palestinian rights that must suffer: people incapable of civilized discourse about the institutions they cherish are eo ipso incapable of keeping their civilization alive. So it’s dangerous to turn one’s back completely on the invective, however stupid and shallow – the very stupidity of the attacks is the index of the threat their authors pose to their own culture. And to mine.
So why do the mudslingers hate us so much? Here are few things I think I can discern behind the ranting.
1) They’ve been deceived about themselves. For decades, many Jews – particularly Israeli Jews, and those raised to identify with Israel – have been taught that they belong to a higher breed of human being, one that by nature never harms anyone needlessly. Like the citizens of Mark Twain’s Hadleyburg, they believe in their moral superiority because it’s been preached at them, incessantly, as the essence of their identity: to doubt it is to doubt themselves.
Thus the celebrated Jewish-American writer Jeffrey Goldberg, who embraced Israeli citizenship in time to assist in the torture of Palestinian prisoners and the brutal military repression that characterized the IDF’s response to the overwhelmingly nonviolent first intifada, could still kvell in print over Israel’s martial prowess and piously insist that Israeli Jews are morally superior to the Palestinians they kill.
It’s not that Goldberg is stupid or deliberately dishonest. He’s just so wedded to the fantasy of Jewish purity that he cannot acknowledge the testimony of his own eyes without imperiling his sense of identity. Like Heinrich Himmler, who boasted that SS officers, having seen “a hundred corpses lying together,” “remained decent fellows” because of the Germans’ “harmless soul” and “idealism” – qualities never found among the “alien peoples” they were forced to exterminate – Goldberg must insist, against all evidence, that Palestinians are naturally violent while “we [Israelis] don’t try to kill children.”
2) They’ve been trained in fear. Just as they’ve been taught to assume their own superiority, our critics have been taught to hate and fear those they repress. And why not? If you want to hold other people down with a clear conscience, you need to persuade yourself – or allow yourself to be persuaded – that your victims are monstrous, evil by definition. Over two years ago, I quoted in one of my columns a widely-publicized sermon in which an Orthodox rabbi advised his flock to shun all non-kosher food because “the Arabs seek nothing else but Jewish blood” – implying that Palestinians were not just murderers but vampires, longing to suck the blood from Jewish veins but thwarted when that blood is pure. (Because they aren’t, I guess.) I have yet to hear from another Orthodox Jew who found this passage grotesque; on the contrary, several denounced me for questioning it.
Conversely, such people have been taught to identify virtue exclusively with those they know. Instead of seeing loyalty, justice, compassion as qualities they share with humankind generally, their exposure to these traits in their own communities only reinforces their sense of uniqueness: if we are like that, then they cannot be. This is what Sartre had in mind when he wrote that “if the Jew did not exist, the anti-Semite would have to invent him.” It’s also why, as Laith Saud has remarked, those Americans (and Jews) today who want to see in themselves “an unadulterated Enlightenment” must picture the Other – Palestinians, Arabs, Muslims generally – as “purely barbaric.” To those trapped in this mindset, the good we know in ourselves must be ours alone if it is to be real.
3) They’re demoralized. Behind the bravado and the hate speech, today’s Israel-Firsters are a confused, beleaguered, unhappy lot. The state they once regarded as Olympian has revealed feet of clay. The airy utopianism of Israel’s early leaders has given way to a Jim Crow society where crowds of young Jews chant racist slogans while the Justice Minister, no less, openly condones murder. Israel supporters who rightly criticize Donald Trump’s anti-immigration policies, or condemn the Syrian army’s violence against civilians, are inwardly uneasy when they consider that Israel has been doing the same things for decades. They want to believe in their superiority, but facts keep getting in the way.
James Baldwin pointedly observed in the 1960s that “the absolutely prohibitive price the South has paid to keep the nigger in his place” had only “succeeded in having what is almost certainly the most bewildered, demoralized white population in the Western world.” The same is true of Israelis today, and just as true, I’m afraid, of the Jews who condemn me for repeating some of the facts about Israel’s history and its continuing occupation of Palestinian land. My sins, however these people might describe them, are venial next to the violence they’ve done to their own consciences. Jettison moral principles unless they further Jewish ethnic supremacy; throw away facts; turn your back on the human rights so painstakingly incorporated into international jurisprudence after the horrors of World War II; say no to justice and yes to apartheid; shuck off every acquaintance, every former friend who points out uncomfortable truths to you; trade your religion (if you’re religious) for a slice of stolen real estate – and what have you got to live for, except some dirt that was never yours to begin with? These Zionists are not to be envied; behind their fury, I think I can hear their pain.
So what is to be done with them? Sad to say, the obvious antidote – information to counter ignorance – is not really effective. If these people wanted the facts they would have absorbed them long ago: today, the real difficulty is keeping one’s head deep enough in the sand to avoid knowing the facts. So their ignorance is only the shell of a deeper malady.
I propose a different approach. Instead of educating our critics with facts, I suggest we first demonstrate to them the force of our own moral convictions. We do this not by answering insults with insults, but by addressing them as human beings – just as we address Palestinians. Without flagging for a moment in our pursuit of justice, we can calmly, sadly, insistently challenge our enemies to justify themselves. Do they support the occupation? Jewish settlements that violate the Geneva Convention? Why? Can they justify apartheid? Do they believe they can square Jewish ethics with robbery and violence? If so, how?
Such questions make more sense to me than apologetics. After all, it is our critics, not we, who ought to be apologizing; they, not we, who owe an explanation and a self-defense. And they need to see that we know that, and that we won’t stop affirming it, whatever happens. This may not stop the personal attacks. But I think it can shift the focus of the discourse.
By the way, I do not expect my enemies to be mollified by my attempt to understand their motives. They do not want to be understood; at bottom, they are terrified of understanding themselves.
I make the effort because justice for Palestine cannot be sought in a vacuum. Edward Said was fond of quoting a beautiful line from the poet Aimee Cesaire: “There is room for all at the rendezvous of victory.” The great things we strive for are meant for everyone. And the words we share about those goals must take everyone into consideration, too – even those who hate us.
Historian Prof. Avi Shlaim, of St Anthony’s College, Oxford, speaks about the manufactured campaign started by the Israel Lobby against the Left in the Labour Party in an interview with Haim Bresheeth
Anyone unaware of the years of research spent in dusty archives could well be forgiven for thinking this book was written in the publisher’s fast food kitchen to cash in on the current antisemitism soufflé whipped up by the unalloyed supporters of Israel and their right wing counterparts in the Labour Party and beyond.
When setting out to pen a short pamphlet on Zionism, a topic with which he was familiar and on which he believed himself to be well informed, Thomas Suarez came across some unusual references; checking their derivation lead him to the UK’s national archives at Kew and to a library of primary sources from the hands of individuals, British officials, the British secret services, national journals and Zionist organisations themselves. Many years of diligent work transformed the pamphlet into this seminal work, whose publication date fortuitously coincides with the very period when Political Zionism, having transmuted itself from a political ideology into a liberation theology deeply embedded in the existential identity of the majority of the Jewish community, has attained its apogee in popular European and American culture.
Suarez traces this trajectory from its beginnings in the second half of the 19C. to the Suez crisis of 1956. From its inception Revisionist Zionism was conceived as a biblical enterprise: building the Third Temple, founded on the rights of Jews as a race, claiming a divine right for all Jews and in the process trumping Jewish orthodoxy. The weapon of choice to carve out their temple was that of terrorism.
For many familiar with the history of the creation of Israel the received knowledge is that, in the aftermath of the Holocaust and in the pursuit of a safe haven for Jews, attacks were targeted by the incipient Israeli army on the British garrison in Palestine, and that in the quest for a state a number of atrocities were committed by small bands of extremists, the Irgun and Lehi (Stern) gangs, epitomised by the infamous massacre of Deir Yassin.
Suarez research lead him to a very different narrative: these small bands of extremists were integral, structured components of the regular armed force, the Hagana of the Jewish Agency – no model of the Geneva Convention itself, with its elite corps, the Palmach, its assassination unit the Pum and its deployment of barrel bombs loaded with shrapnel. All five groups were engaged in the programme of intimidation and terror, where the end, Eretz Israel – an exclusively Jewish state stretching east from the Mediterranean to include Transjordan, and from Egypt to the Lebanese boarder – justified Revisionist Zionism’s means. Obstacles in its path were the British, the other key players in the UN Partition plan, and not least the awkward existence of the indigenous occupants of Palestine.
Violence to the Palestinians, modelled on the antisemitic pogroms in eastern Europe, is traced to commence from the first settlers prior to the First World War, developing through the inter-war period, and rising to a crescendo of public bombing and the poisoning of wells with typhoid and dysentary, to provoke a reaction and to create a premise for full scale military operations in the period leading up to 1948. It culminated in the massacres of the inhabitants of tens of villages and the raising of many hundreds more: planned by military intelligence gatherers posing as hiking tourists, Plan Dalet was devised and executed, to create the Nachba of 900,00 refugees. The records show that, contrary to common understanding, the wanton violence was not brought to an end by the declaration of the state of Israel but was maintained, and continues to this day.
A significant portion of the book simply enumerates the hundreds of attacks on the British presence in Palestine, which hit both military and civilian targets. Violence to the regional powers ranged from assassination plans and actual attempts on the life of Churchill, Eden and Ernest Bevan, sabotage of British forces during WWII (compromising their capacity); plans to explode bombs in London, and UK facilities in France, Austria and Italy (mostly but not all foiled); false flag operations (such as the Lavrone affair in Egypt & the Bagdad Trials in Iraq) to ‘create’ antisemitic movements to justify Zionist demands; the sinking of British ships (resulting in 276 deaths) carrying Jewish refugees, when, contrary to Zionist demands they were diverted away from Palestine; the training and the use of child operators; selective assassinations of leading Jewish critics (most of the assassinations carried out by the Irgun and Stern gangs were of anti-zionist Jewish individuals); sabotaging Jewish anit-zionist printing presses and the targeting of institutions such as the Hashoma Club which argued for a two state solution. The litany is extensive and shocking.
Another dimension to the Zionist’s agenda was that they did all in their power to direct Jewish refugees away from offers of asylum by western democracies and to exert pressurise to divert Jews to Palestine. To this effect they were instrumental in seeing that Roosevelt’s plan in 1938 to accept 400,000 from Nazis Germany came to nothing.
It is instructive that these early Zionists listed in order of priority the opposition which they saw as critical: first were the anti-zionists in the Jewish communities, second came the offers of asylum from the democracies, and third was antisemitism. They referred to Jewish anti-zionists as ‘kikes’ which is the ’N’ word for Jew.
In the UK the startling rise of Jeremy Corbyn to leadership of the Labour Party, a person who has been both a life long champion of Palestinian human rights and a socialist committed to the substantial redistribution of wealth back to the poor, created major tremors simultaneously in the conservative and the Jewish establishments. Desperate to mount a counter-attack they seized on antisemitism as their weapon: a tool which, as this book describes, was fashioned by the Political Zionists from their beginning and was well honed over the ensuing decades in their drive to control the destiny of the Jewish community.
There are many quotations in the book from UK, UN, US and other international observers of parallels between the Irgun and Stern gang’s organisation and methods and those of the Nazis – statements which today would surely lead to expulsion from the Labour Party. A footnote observes that the relevant ‘Polkes’ papers in the Israeli archives remain classified. Referencing from Suarez’s book at a Labour Party meeting would certainly incur the wrath any Jewish Labour Movement or Labour Friends of Israel member present. It must be the author’s diligence in meticulously referencing every description of the legion of ruthless objectives and acts owned by the political and military wings of Zionism which has safeguarded him from legal action by the ‘lawfare’ department of Israel’s hasbora machine. (The references occupy one quarter of the book).
Intelligence reports in the period prior to 1948 put the Irgun and Stern gangs’ numbers at 8500, the Palmach at 5000, the Hagana army at 90,000, and a total call up potential of a fully equipped army and airforce of 200,000. (A Goliath against an ill equipped and disorganised alliance of squabbling Davids). It was from their positions in the comparatively small terrorist groups that the future leaders of Israel were able to set the agenda of violence to build Jabotinsky’s Iron Wall – who, as the father of the Irgun, put his boots where his mouth was. As small cogs in the gears of the military machine, in an environment where the British were exhausted by war and desperate to withdraw, and where the rule of law was disintegrating, these terrorist groups were able to dictate and drive the strategy: a reign of terror across the Mandate, with its tentacles reaching into the heart of its European masters to create mayhem until their objective was conceded. Conceived in a state of terror, terror became the new state’s modus vivendi, and its current leaders continue this macabre dance, still fixated on pursuit of the Third Temple.
It is this context which make sense of the seemingly incongruous fact that the commanders of the Irgun and Stern gangs, Ben Gurion, Menachim Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, became the first leaders of the new Israeli state. It also provides the historical context for the fact that Israel to this day has not defined its eastern boarder, and provides an explanation as to why successive peace talks, dating back to 1949 have produced no resolution.
For post 1948 second and third generation Jews growing up with a partial, bowdlerised narrative of Zionism, reading this book will either be a traumatic experience or it will be another volume to be consigned to the antisemitic waste bin. It is now well recognised that post Holocaust second generation Jews enveloped themselves and their children in a silence about their past. Suarez’s account of Zionist terror, which predated the Holocaust and which emanated from the pogroms of the 18C. and 19C., has exposed a second dimension of silence, in which the consolidation of Revisionist and Political Zionism has deployed the image of Humanitarian Zionism to cloak its past. For very many Jews Zionism is genuinely core to their identity, the very sense of their self, the solution to millennia of persecution. Suarez reveals it to have been yet another false flag on a grandiose and grotesque scale.
However, some third and fourth generation Jews, having looked beneath the cloak, have made the difficult and uncomfortable journey to disavowing Political-revisionist Zionism and are reasserting the international and Jewish values of human rights. It was wholly predictable that this would provoke a knee jerk response from the Political Zionists who have reached for their historical weapon of antisemitism, whilst those of us in a stubborn minority wave a contrary flag, that anti-zionism is not antisemitism, and seek to reclaim the genuine Jewish socialist tradition forged by the BUND in the period of revolutionary working class organisation at the start of the 20C. There is a Jewish tradition that even the smallest of minority voices shall be recorded, because one day they may prove to be the ones which should have been heeded.
This review first appeared in a shorter version in Labour Briefing
In these videos Black Jewish Labour activist Jackie Walker, former vice-chair of Momentum, describes how she was targeted by the Zionist Israel Lobby, and falsely accused as being anti-Semitic. The Al Jazeera series The Lobby, uncovered the shenanigans of the Israel embassy and its Senior Political Advisor, Shai Masot, in four programme during January 2017. The investigation detailed how the embassy worked with Zionist organisations within the Labour Party to defame and harass critics of Israel. Jackie, iconic for her proclamation of her joint Jewish and Black identities was a prime target of this campaign.
