Free Speech on Israel

The ninety-seven signatories include Chair of Momentum, Jon Lansman, Gillian Slovo, Miriam Margolyes OBE, and Susie Orbach:

This submission has been drawn up by a group of Jewish Labour Party members who have been active within human rights organisations, anti-racist and anti-fascist campaigns and training, refugee support, education in a range of contexts and at all levels, and have been involved in a range of Jewish organisations and projects such as:

Jewish Socialistsʼ Group, Jews for Justice for Palestinians, Independent Jewish Voices, Jewish Cultural and Anti-Racist Project, Jewish Music Institute, Friends of Yiddish, Kehillah North London.

Our submission is relevant to all the terms of reference of the inquiry, but we focus particularly on those aspects that aim to:

• understand and address antisemitism in the wider context of racism in general;
• provide the most effective context for training on these issues at all levels of the party; and
• ensure that Jewish people are welcomed and integrated into the party alongside other minorities.

We feel strongly that the education and training of Labour Party members and officers on issues relating to antisemitism must be the responsibility of an inclusive and progressive Jewish group that is able to meet the demands of this role because it would be positively focused on Jews in the Labour Party here in Britain.

Before this Inquiry was announced, a number of us had been discussing the need for such a representative group as a permanent element within the Labour Party. The events during the run-up to the local and Mayoral elections, and the establishment of the Inquiry, have encouraged us to address this more urgently. With our long, deep and broad range of experience, we intend to help form such an inclusive group, along the lines stated in the following proposal.

Proposal on Jewish representation in the Labour Party

We wish to see the setting up of a broad-based organisation which can become a “Jewish Section” or an affiliated organisation of the Labour Party.

It will be open to all Jews who are members of the Labour Party.

Its guiding principles will be rights and justice for Jews everywhere without wrongs and injustice to other peoples anywhere.

Welcoming the fact that Jews are an international people with communities in many countries, its outlook will be internationalist and anti-racist and it will link the interests of Jewish people with those of other minorities and oppressed groups.

While individual members of the new group may have particular attitudes towards or connections with Israel/Palestine or any other country, it will not impose on its members a stance on proposed solutions to conflicts in the Middle East; instead it will encourage a free and respectful exploration of the issues from Labour/socialist perspectives, and will reserve the right to criticise any regime on the grounds of human rights violations.

Its purposes will be to:

• provide a platform to represent the concerns and interests of Jewish members at all levels of the Party;
• campaign against antisemitism and all forms of racism and discrimination, and assert a progressive Jewish identity as part of multicultural Britain;
• strengthen links between Jews and other ethnic minorities in Britain;
• uphold and continue the long tradition of Jewish involvement in struggles against oppression and for social justice, both locally and globally;
• act as a cultural and social hub, which can share the cultural resources of Jewish members and organise social and cultural events as well as political forums in which issues can be freely debated from various viewpoints; • seek support for the Labour Party among the wider Jewish community.

Its constitution will affirm that its primary allegiance is to socialism and the values of the Labour Party.

Such a section or group would expect to be consulted by the Party leadership and the National Executive Committee where issues directly concerning Jewish members arise.

It would also expect to fulfil a training role in the Labour Party, and act as an advocate in cases where disputes arise concerning Jewish matters.

We do not feel that the Jewish Labour Movement (known until 2004 as Poʼale Zion, Workers of Zion) is the correct vehicle for this role because it has an explicitly Zionist constitution, is committed to promoting “the centrality of Israel in Jewish life”, and requires that its members adhere to a particular view of the Israel/Palestine conflict and Zionism. In doing so it excludes a large proportion of Jewish Labour Party members, including many of the signatories to this submission. We believe our Jewish perspective has a natural home in the Labour Party, but would not wish to sign up to the constitution of the Jewish Labour Movement, nor would we be welcome to join it. Continue reading ““Jews for Jeremy” submission to Chakrabarti Inquiry: the Zionist Jewish Labour Movement should have no role in training Labour members”

On 31 May, the Israeli mission to the UN and the World Jewish Congress hosted the first international #StopBDS conference at the United Nations headquarters in New York. Reporting on the event for Electronic Intidada, Rania Khalek cites the contribution of the British/Israeli World Union of Jewish Students Chairperson, Yosef Tarshish, a former president of Union of Jewish Students in the UK:

an estimated 1,500 people, many of them college aged, attended the summit to learn and discuss strategies for crushing the Palestinian-led boycott, divestment and sanctions movement burgeoning on US college campuses. […] Yosef Tarshish, chairperson of the World Union of Jewish Students, called for Zionist groups to incorporate intersectionality into their advocacy.

“Intersectionality is the theory of interrelated forms of oppression,” Tarshish told the audience. “A lot of anti-Israel organizations have managed to infiltrate this conversation.”

“We need to remind students around the world that they need to stand with us because we will stand with them when their rights are trampled,” he said, adding that “Jewish students need to speak the language of the left.”

That BDS is modeled on those very movements was completely lost on conference participants. More importantly, so is the fact that appealing to the left will be a near impossible task for the anti-BDS effort. Its base is inherently right-wing and supports a blatantly racist regime led by far right nationalists and proto-fascists committed to denying basic human rights to Palestinians, stealing their land, demolishing their homes and corralling them into walled-off ghettos.

The impossibility of this task in the UK is best illustrated by the controversial election of Malia Bouattia as NUS president in April.

Incensed by her popular candidacy, university Jewish Societies (JSocs) mobilised to try to block Bouttia who was to become the first female, black, Muslim president. The Union of Jewish Students, which represents its membership through JSocs, is a member of the World Union of Jewish Students, which in turn is an affiliated member of the World Zionist Organization: a major conduit of funds to the illegal settlements. In the lead up to the NUS conference – in an attempt to smear her as an antisemite and ISIS supporter – dozens of JSoc presidents published two open letters demanding she explain her anti-Zionist, progressive politics.

Ultimately unsuccessful in their attempt to stop Bouattia, Zionist students have continued to weaponise antisemitism when arguing both for and against disaffiliation from the NUS. Some in the “Yes to NUS” camp have revealed the extent to which Zionists have hijacked an independent review into whether the NUS is institutionally racist. The review was launched last year in response to claims that were made at a meeting of the national executive committee by Malia Bouattia, then NUS Black Students’ Officer. It is an audit of “direct or indirect racism within [the] NUS’s culture, systems, policies, processes and structures.” The criticism is that universities are “white, male and stale” environments, and employ few black female professors. The idea that our universities are institutionally antisemitic is simply not borne out by the facts.

This week, Oxford University Student union voted to stay, in what became a toxic campaign:

In her May 24 column for the Jewish Chronicle on Cambridge University’s own affiliation referendum, entitled ‘No one should have to compromise religion for politics – but the NUS elections made me doubt myself,‘ Noa Gendler makes no explicit reference to Bouattia, but is otherwise extraordinarily frank:

there’s no way I can decide whether or not [Cambridge University Students Union] should disaffiliate from the NUS without my Judaism coming into play. I’ve had to ask myself whether the NUS can offer me, as a Jewish student, representation and equality, and I’ve had to ask myself if its support for other minority students is more important than its support for me, as a Jewish student. Essentially, I’ve been forced to choose between two fundamental aspects of my life and values: being Jewish, versus liberation and equal opportunities for all minorities.

Commenting on Gendler’s article, Robert Cohen wrote that,

Our Jewish students can’t work out why their minority rights (when defined in terms of supporting Zionism) aren’t considered valid in the same way as other groups’ desires for self-determination.[…] I’d recommend Jewish students struggling to understand why NUS President  Malia Bouattia has a problem with their “liberation movement” to also consider the information available to all of us in 2016.[…] How can I support a “national liberation movement” that has to force out and then institutionally discriminate against an indigenous people in order to establish its ambition? How can I support a “national liberation movement” that describes children born to an indigenous people as a “demographic threat” to its well-being? […] If Britain’s Jewish students could grasp all of this then the conflict between their Jewish identity and protecting other people’s rights would fall away. Being Jewish and protecting minority rights could all be part of the same thing.

The UN conference participants were given a booklet in English, entitled “Build Bridges not Boycotts: A Guide for combatting modern-day anti-Semitism,” containing new directives for Hasbara [propaganda] on campuses: It includes the cynical instruction to recite “Israel wants peace,” show empathy towards Arabs and befriend minorities.

In a section worthy of Orwell, the guide suggests that whenever they speak about nuclear-superpower, military occupier and coloniser Israel, “every other word out of your mouth should be ‘peace’. Every action Israel takes is dedicated to attaining ”peace’, and the creation conditions for ‘peace’.  ‘Peace, peace,  peace.'” Continue reading “Zionist students told to “speak the language of the left” at anti-BDS conference in UN”

Via Tony Greenstein’s blog:

Greenstein has painstakingly transcribed what was slightly more than an hour’s interrogation, on bank holiday Monday, having been suspended from the Labour Party on March 18. Read the transcript in full here.

Excerpt:

Harry Gregson – Labour’s SE Regional Organiser: … second item which was raised in the original complaint.  It was about Zionist  collaboration with the holocaust.  Following on from the original thing I sent you I have also found this article which the original comments referred to Zionism and the Holocaust

Tony Greenstein: Yes that’s an article I probably produced in the Weekly Worker.  It’s quite a long article do you want to comment on any particular aspect since you are worried about it?

HG There’s quite a few things in it that I think that I think some people may find

TG What is the question?

HG One of the comments which is highlighted on page 6 is ‘all wings of the Zionist movement played down reports of annihilation and obstructed the rescue efforts of others’.  That suggests that everybody who was in favour of Zionism at the time played down the holocaust [I ask HG to point out exact reference, which I then quote from]

TG ‘Why did all wings of the Zionist movement play down reports of annihilation and obstruct the rescue efforts.’  and then I quote Nathan Schwalb.  In fact the quotes from Nathan Schwalb were from a letter sent to Rabbi Weissmandel who was a leader of Slovakian Jewry.  Slovakia was a separate Nazi puppet state which was created out of the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Hitler in March 1939.  He was sent a letter by the leader of Hehalutz Nathan Schwalb, in Switzerland.  He actually denied sending it at the time of Perdition [a play in London about 25 years ago which dealt with the collaboration of Hungarian Zionism with the Nazis]  I don’t suppose you remember the play Perdition about some of those events.  It was a controversy in Britain when the play was banned by the Royal Court [Theatre].  He brought legal action for libel and he lost it because he was unable to provide legal proof from his own archives as to whether he had sent the letter.  

[The letter from Schwalb was reproduced in the article that HG quotes from:  It reads:

“After the victory [of the Allies], they will once again divide up the world between the nations, as they did at the end of the first war,¦ we must be aware that all the nations of the Allies are spilling much blood and if we do not bring sacrifices, with what will we achieve the right to sit at the table when they make the distribution of nations’ territories after the war? … Because only through blood will the land be ours.  And so it would be foolish and impertinent on our side to ask the nations whose blood is being spilled for permission to send money into the land of their enemies in order to protect our own blood.  Because “rak b’dam tihyu lanu haaretz” (only through blood will the land be ours). “[S. Beit Zvi, Post-Ugandan Zionism on trial, Tel Aviv 1991, pp.295-96].

The evidence is quite clear.  In your researches you probably didn’t come across a book by Shabtai beit Zvi ‘Ugandan Zionism in the Crucible of the Holocaust’.  It’s a book by a Zionist, an ultra-Zionist, who went through the papers of the Jewish Agency and the Palestinian press at the time, all of whom played down reports of the holocaust.  The Jewish Agency, the Zionist government-in-waiting in Palestine repeatedly denied that there was a holocaust or extermination of the Jews up until its admission on November 23 1942 that there was a holocaust.  But even after that they reverted to type and said ‘yes many thousands of Jews were being killed but there was no extermination.  The Jewish Agency and the Palestinian press repeatedly did that and they quoted from Nazi papers.  This is a matter of historical fact and what I find strange about this suspension process is that what you are questioning me about are matters of history.  History which might be disputed but there is no doubt that the Zionist movement obstructed rescue  because the Zionist position at the time was a very simple one.  They wanted Jews to go to Palestine and there is a famous quote from David Ben-Gurion [the Chairman of the World Zionist Organisation at the time and later first Prime Minister of Israel] that if he had the choice between saving half Germany’s Jewish children in Palestine or all of them in England, this is at the time of the Kindertransport.  I don’t know whether you know anything about the Kindertransport when 10,000 Jewish children were taken to England from the Greater German Reich in 1938-9, [repeat of quote].  That was the Zionist policy throughout the war.  It’s a fact.

[the full quote was:  ‘If I knew that it would be possible to save all the children in Germany by bringing them over to England, and only half of them by transporting them to Eretz Yisrael, then I would opt for the second alternative. For we must weigh not only the life of these children, but also the history of the People of Israel.’ The Burning Ground 1886-1948, p.855 Shabtai Teveth, official biography of Ben-Gurion]

HG: But my point was that you contend that there was collaboration between the Nazis and the Zionists

TG: Well there was, it’s not what I contend

HG: But that point in the article suggests that all wings of the Zionist movement….

TG: All wings did but not all Zionists did.  There is a complete difference.  I’m talking about the leadership of the Zionist groups.  Do you know anything about ….?  The problem is that you don’t know a great deal about this.  The Warsaw ghetto resistance included Zionists in it, leaders of the Zionist youth movements. It was led by the Bund, the major anti-Zionist Jewish group (which in the last free elections in Warsaw in 1938 gained 17 out the 20 Jewish council seats compared to one for the Zionists) but the Zionist youth led by Mordechai Anielwicz they had to rebel against their own Zionist parties, all of whom opposed the resistance.  [I could have added the Zionist parties in Palestine sent orders not to take part in further resistance!]  So yes, Zionists participated in resistance without a doubt, but the leaders of those movements, without exception, collaborated.   Continue reading “Labour’s Inquisition: Tony Greenstein reveals details of his interrogation by Compliance Unit”

We received this article from an authoritative Zionist source who wished to remain anonymous.

S/he had “been concerned about recent events for many weeks now, and have penned an article for you which I think your readers may find interesting. It links to a long-forgotten legal case and is timely, in part because it concerns UCU (the union currently holding its annual Congress in Liverpool and currently being attacked for its latest Israel motions), in part because it concerns the current head of the Jewish Labour Movement, Jeremy Newmark, and the head of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Anti-Semitism, John Mann MP. Importantly, it links them with a past (failed) attempt to equate anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. My argument in this article is that the Chakrabarti review simply gives them the latest opportunity to do just that.”

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The direction of travel has long been clear, as has the goal: to equate criticism of Israel with hatred of Jews, making the former as unacceptable as the latter. In Britain, those pursuing this insidious agenda have had more success in 2016 than in all years previous. The culmination is forthcoming. Shami Chakrabarti’s inquiry is imminently to draw a line. Where she draws it will determine how far ‘the equators’ have come, or (one hopes) how far short of their goal they have fallen.

Events are not random. This has been a long time in the making. Given that most of the offending comments by Labour members were made years ago, the chronology of this recent scandal is a work of art, with the odd and added bonus (Livingstone) thrown in for good measure. The party, to its credit, has conducted itself well, suspending and investigating where it needs to, reviewing where appropriate. But the comments of a few were the latest identified opportunity to equate criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism, and they were by far the best, as has thus far been proved.

Some characters in this drama hold, or have held, the most senior positions in the British Jewish community and claim, or have claimed, to represent that community. In fact, they only represent the worst aspects of it, but play on the fears of most: the fear of Jew hatred. That fear is tailored to the opportunity, in this case the idea that Britain’s largest political party is infested with it. ‘Simplify and exaggerate’ – it’s a very simple formula.

As those charged with protecting Britain’s Jewish community will tell you, context is crucial. But for those hell-bent on equating anti-Zionism and anti-Israel sentiment with the world’s oldest hatred, ‘context’ simply means a battleground, with those battles often fought in court.

The father of Britain’s most recent drive towards officialising the ‘new anti-Semitism’ (anti-Zionism) is Anthony Julius, a lawyer who founded one of the City’s most respected firms. He has thoughtfully but incorrectly argued that criticising Israel or its ideological underpinning equates to hating Jews. With mixed results, Julius has acted against those fighting the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign in the world of trade and finance, and those fighting discrimination or harassment cases in the world of employment.

The latter saw him represent (pro bono) Ronnie Fraser from 2008-13, in a case against an academic union (UCU) estimated to have cost £500,000. This case warrants renewed attention now, since it features the same arguments as Shami Chakrabarti will hear, and even some of the same characters who will no doubt be advising her.

Fraser took the University and College Union to an employment tribunal alleging that UCU’s criticism of Israel was ‘institutional anti-Semitism’. This, Julius argued, constituted his harassment as a Jew, and the case perfectly illustrates the purposeful blurring of lines between Judaism and Jewish identity (in this case, protected characteristics), and of Zionism and/or a similarly ideological belief in/attachment to Israel (an unprotected characteristic). Just as will Chakrabarti’s ‘expert witnesses’ argue, Julius said Fraser’s strong attachment to Israel was “a non-contingent aspect of his Jewish identity… that is, of his race and/or religion or belief”. He added that Jews’ attachment to Israel was “an aspect of their self-understanding as Jews”.

The judge dismissed this argument, and his ruling is well worth reading. In it, he summarises the debate, saying: “At one extreme, criticism [of Israel] could be seen as intrinsically anti-Semitic simply because Israel is the Jewish State. The polar opposite view is that the actions and policies of a state are by their nature political, and accordingly criticism of acts by or at the behest of the Israeli government and institutions cannot be anti-Semitic. Between lie many intermediate positions.” Continue reading “Why Newmark and Mann’s past (failed) attempt to equate anti-Zionism with antisemitism is relevant now”

Via The Age, Australia

Vision of everyday life in Palestine too bleak for some

Samah Sabawi, June 2

My play Tales of a City by the Sea sold out its 2014 and 2016 seasons to standing ovations by many, including people from a Jewish background. Despite this overwhelming support, a small yet vocal group hit the panic button when the play was selected for the VCE drama curriculum.

It seems that I, the writer, missed the memo that I can’t write an artistic piece about Palestinian life without inserting Israel’s point of view into my art. This is wrong on so many levels.

Most alarming was the false accusation by the B’nai B’rith organisation that the play “peddles classic anti-semitic themes” (ABC radio, May 27). For the record, the play does not mention Jews, Judaism, the Jewish people or have any Jewish characters. This false allegation insults me as the author of this play as well as others including the cast and crew, La Mama theatre, the VCAA, the Australian Jewish Democratic Society as well as any one else who supported, attended, applauded and worked on this production.

I believe B’nai B’rith must apologise unequivocally to all of us. Anti-Semitism must always be taken seriously. False claims of anti-Semitism used to drive political agendas only trivialise and undermine our fight and resolve to eradicate it and other forms of racism.

Some criticised the play for not including Israeli voices. The reality is the only times Israeli voices are heard in Gaza is when an Israeli soldier phones a Palestinian family and orders them to leave their house before it is bombed, over a megaphone if a Palestinian boat gets too close to the forbidden line in the sea, or when a Palestinian walks too close to the fence that surrounds Gaza and Israeli soldiers shout at them from the surveillance towers to turn back. Continue reading “Samah Sabawi’s Gaza play triggered “hyperbole of fear-mongering and racist reactions””