Free Speech on Israel

Via English PNN

As members of the Palestinian Diaspora in Britain, many of us British citizens, we have long been familiar with the ploys of Zionists and their supporters in politics and the media. We observe the desperate attempts to silence the ever-growing world-wide criticism of Israel’s actions by conflating opposition to Israel’s brutal policies towards our people with hostility to Jews. We urge all to note that pro-Israeli elements have a vested interest in flagging up, exaggerating and inventing incidents of anti-Semitism to achieve the core Zionist aim of stimulating Jewish emigration to Israel/Palestine.

Suppressing a people necessitates suppressing a truth. The current cynical attacks on supporters of Palestinian freedom as ‘anti-Semitic’ aims to conceal a truth which cannot be hidden much longer, the fact of Israel as a full-blown Apartheid regime. Bishop Desmond Tutu noted that, compared to the harshness of the system imposed on Palestine by the Israelis, even the humiliation and violence that Africans experienced in Apartheid South Africa “was a picnic”.

We Palestinians are horrified that David Cameron told a meeting of Zionists he will commemorate the centenary of the Balfour Declaration that launched the colonisation of our homeland by European colonists, and led to our dispossession and expulsion. We condemn the Foreign Office statement that it is “proud of the role that Britain played in supporting the birth of the state of Israel”. Continue reading “Statement by Palestinians in Scotland on attempts to silence pro-Palestine voices as racist”

Please read the article in full on openDemocracy, 7 May

Excerpt: ‘… Before returning to the specific question of Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party, we need to place the three issues – ‘delegitimisation’, talking to ‘terrorists’, and exceptionalism – in a historical perspective.

‘Delegitimisation’, talking to ‘terrorists’ and exceptionalism

For many years the hot question was whether the best solution for the Israel-Palestine conflict was two states or one binational state. This debate intensified after the 1993 Oslo Accord which pointed to, but failed to deliver, two states. Since Oslo, Israel has expanded its colonies and their infrastructure on the West Bank to a point where a viable Palestinian state is no longer feasible. By signing the Oslo Accord the PLO gave up its claim to 78% of mandate Palestine in the expectation of eventually getting an independent state on the remaining 22% comprising the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. But it was not to be. Israel under the leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu, following the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, reneged on its side of the deal.

By pursuing the aggressive and illegal Zionist colonial project on the West Bank, Israel has all but eliminated the two-state solution. Once this falls by the wayside, the one-state solution comes to the fore. This re-opens the question that has been present since the inception of the state: how is an ethnocracy with one ethnic group dominating the polity compatible with equal rights for all its citizens?

It is stating the blindly obvious that in a one state scenario with no Jewish majority, Israel would face an even starker choice between being an ethnocentric state or a democratic one. Israel’s leaders know this all too well. This is why they have so far avoided formal annexation of the West Bank, preferring to secure their control through creeping annexation. If a one state is the only serious alternative to the status quo, it is surely not antisemitic to interrogate its nature and substance or to argue for a secular state with equal rights for all its citizens…. Continue reading “AVI SHLAIM and GWYN DANIEL: The Labour Party, Israel, and antisemitism”

Hadley Freeman has waded into the Labour antisemitism debate with a particularly fatuous opinion piece in the Guardian, today. Freeman has previously protested that her Twitter followers never let her forget her unique contribution to the Israel/Palestine issue, in August 2014. At the height of the Israeli military’s 2014 massacre of largely civilians in the besieged Gaza strip, Freeman added her support to the campaign of intimidation against the Tricycle theatre.

London’s Tricycle theatre had exercised their right to reject Israeli embassy funding of the UK Jewish Film Festival (read more on the controversy here). Freeman’s piece entitled ‘Please don’t tell me what I should think about Israel,’ informed her readers she thinks the Tricycle ‘demonstrated thinking so nervy and so potentially hypocritical that at least one legal expert said it “may well count as unlawful discrimination”.’ Case closed. Except it isn’t: the faux-‘legal opinion’ she linked to was a blog post by Adam Wagner who is not an expert on the Equality Act. Wagner later wrote that he ‘received some interesting emails from senior lawyers suggesting issues which I hadn’t considered such as standing under the Act as well as problems in finding an appropriate comparator.’

Hadley Freeman’s latest piece is her sarcastic take on the Left’s defence of suspended politicians, Naz Shah and Ken Livingstone (click on the links for responses to each case). Freeman does manage one decent joke at the expense of George Galloway, observing that, in insisting ‘this was “an entirely synthetic crisis”’, he was ‘perhaps confusing the crisis with his hat.’

A far less harmless joke is her snide remark that NUS president Malia Bouattia’s historic comment that the mainstream media is ‘Zionist-led’ is ‘about as political as a joke about hooked noses.’ Freeman must have been left unmoved by Bouattia’s piece in the same paper, last month, in which she exposed a racist, misogynistic campaign of intimidation against her and her family, and defended her political position, adding that she would ensure in future her words could not be misinterpreted:

Over the last two years I have received untold vitriol online – rape and death threats in abundance. I had to involve the police for my parents’ protection. But I stood strong, I persevered and, after serving as the NUS black students’ officer, student representatives across the country have shown faith by electing me.

[…] I want to be clear, again, that for me to take issue with Zionist politics is in no way me taking issue with being Jewish. In fact, Zionist politics are held by people from a variety of different backgrounds and faiths. For me it has been, and will always be, a political argument, not one of faith or ethnic identity. Zionism, religion and ethnicity must not be seen as one and the same. If the language I have used in the past has been interpreted any other way then let me make this clear – it was never my intention, although my political ideologies and beliefs remain unchanged.

Few public figures have been so thoroughly vindicated in their controversial views as Malia Bouattia: in the wake of her election as the first black, Muslim female NUS president last month, she came under a sustained and vicious attack by every mainstream media outlet, from the Telegraph and The Times, to the BBC, Independent and Guardian. In the Telegraph Simon Heffer referred libellously to Bouattia’s ‘long record of vilifying Jews,’ and Aaron Simons to the ‘dark message‘ she was sending to Jewish students. In the liberal press, the response was no less vicious, prompting a number of letters of support from British Jews, which pointed out that the ‘false equation ‘Jewish = Zionist’ comes from Israel’s supporters, not from the Palestine solidarity movement.’ Continue reading “Guardian’s Hadley Freeman adds her voice to the ‘antisemitism’ smear campaign”

Letter sent by Professor Jonathan Rosenhead to Labour Party General Secretary Iain McNicol, 5 May. Rosenhead was reacting to the latest, most egregious case: the Labour Party suspension of anti-racist campaigner, Jacqueline Walker.

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Dear Mr McNicol

I am frankly flabbergasted. As a Jew brought up in the Zionist tradition, who first joined the Labour Party in 1961, and who was subsequently a Labour Parliamentary candidate, I find the current wave of suspensions on suspicion of antisemitism beyond belief.

There is antisemitism in this country, so there is undoubtedly antisemitism in some Labour Party members. Maybe I am lucky, but I have never actually experienced it within the party in either word or deed. It is rare. Whether it is going up or down is hard to tell, because it is so insignificant. So why these suspensions? Why Tony Greenstein, a committed anti-racist campaigner? Why Jackie Walker for God’s sake? Both, extra-ordinarily, of Jewish heritage.

What has been going up, both within the Labour Party and in civil society generally, is an unwillingness to keep quiet about what Israel is inflicting on the Palestinians. What has been going up is the effort put out by Israel (and its unconditional supporters) to brand those who criticise Israel as, on the slightest excuse, antisemitic.

Why is the Labour Party buying this pernicious nonsense? Surely by now you must be aware of the downright lies being manufactured to ‘incriminate’ targets (and intimidate others). This is a mendacious campaign to which the Labour Party is giving credibility by its supine behaviour.

I have been campaigning for the Labour Party here in Hackney over the past weeks and today. It makes me sick at heart to see the Party brought into such disrepute by actions for which, I assume, you take ultimate responsibility. That means that you have the power to stop it.

Yours
Jonathan Rosenhead

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Dear Jonathan

Thank you for your email.

Jackie Walker has been suspended pending an investigation and, therefore, no further comment can be made at this time.

Yours sincerely
Iain McNicol
General Secretary

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Please sign the petition calling for Jackie Walker to be reinstated to the Labour Party

On Mondoweiss, Donald Johnson asks why no one calls out anti-Palestinian bigotry:

Excerpt: ‘…In the British argument over whether anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism, the pro-Israel side is lumping in defensible statements, dumb or insensitive statements, and actual antisemitic statements from the anti-Zionists into one big pot. And so the well-intentioned commentator, like Gaby Hinsliff, in this Guardian piece (“Antisemitism has rocked Labour’s self-belief”) is too lazy to try and make the distinctions and then screws up herself– when she says it’s anti-Semitic to deny “Israel’s right to exist” without seeming to realize that Israel wouldn’t exist as a Jewish state without ethnic cleansing and discrimination.

Because nobody cares about anti-Palestinian bigotry.

‘No other human rights movement I can think of is automatically accused of being racist. The underlying assumption is that Palestinians just don’t matter that much, so anyone who expresses moral outrage or uses the normal tools of protest, like boycotts, can’t possibly be motivated by human rights concerns. They must be antisemites or at least examined very closely for antisemitism before being given a clean bill of health.

‘Who examines the examiners for their bigotry? No one….’

Continue reading here

Presenting her contribution to the Labour antisemitism controversy as an unpleasant obligation reluctantly fulfilled, Spectator columnist Tanya Gold delivers one of the more muddled opinions on the subject in the Telegraph.

Gold declares that ‘the intensity of the loathing for Israel – the Jewish state – in parts of the far Left is curious.’ Any serious reflection on the subject would lead to the conclusion that it is one of the least curious phenomena in the post-colonial era to – in her emotive language – ‘loathe’ a state that exists because of large-scale, ongoing ethnic cleansing and racial discrimination. It’s what the far Left does, when not cowed by false accusations of racism.

Gold has reduced a righteous anger at the total impunity Israel enjoys for its serial atrocities to an irrational and very personal emotional response to something disgusting.

She then asks a facile question: ‘Where is the similar loathing for hosts of countries who observe no human rights whatsoever, including Israel’s Arab neighbours?’ Her failure to acknowledge the relevance of successive British governments’ consistent and unequivocal condemnation of Israel’s neighbours – backed up by sanctions – is comprehensible only if one accepts her premise that this is about personal hatred, not outrage at impunity. Gold confuses her growing feelings of resentment at outrage on the Left, with a legitimate grievance. Again, this is understandable given she gets the power asymmetry the wrong way round: she thinks she is backing Israel the victim, not the aggressor. Continue reading “Tanya Gold doesn’t want to hear about Israel’s atrocities – the left is just being antisemitic”

Dave Rich is Deputy Director of Communications at the Community Security Trust. CST is a registered charity.

Writing in today’s Jewish Chronicle, Dave Rich provides what he calls a guide to ‘Jew-hate for the perplexed.’ It is impossible to take seriously the views of someone that believes Naz Shah’s satirical Facebook post (shared via American Jewish scholar, Norman Finkelstein’s website) was tantamount to

Endorsing the mass deportation of its citizens – ethnic cleansing, effectively and denying the legitimacy of Jewish sovereignty in the region.

By using the term ‘Jewish sovereignty‘ he – unwittingly – underlines the reality of Israel as an ethnic-supremacist state, like Apartheid-era South Africa.

Rich divides language used to criticise Israel into two types: he reluctantly concedes that although the first type used to criticise Israel, involving ‘human rights,’ ‘discrimination,’ and ‘inequality’ is ‘inaccurate,’ it is more likely to be legitimate.

The second type, he writes, ‘is the reservoir of antisemitic ideas that lies deep in Europe’s culture.’ As an example, he cites the alleged use of “Zio” by members of the Oxford University Labour Club. Electronic Intifada’s investigation concluded that cases of antisemitism at OULC were fabricated.

Rich claims ‘Zio’ is a term ‘only used by people who are hostile to Zionism’:

Jewish students do not call each other “Zio” as a term of endearment…. “Zio” is a derogatory term used in an abusive and bigoted way.

He dismisses the idea that it is ‘simply an abbreviation of “Zionist” with no further meaning.’ He is correct to observe that the term is pre-dominantly (though not exclusively) used by those critical of political Zionism, particularly on Twitter. But his fixation on the abbreviation of ‘Zionist’ serves to obscure his central argument: that it must never be used in a pejorative way. On this, he is in agreement with Momentum’s Jon Lansman. Continue reading “CST implies ‘Zionist’ should only be used as a term of endearment”

John Mann MP has given an interview to the BBC on election night, in which he appears to gloat over losses in Jewish majority wards.

John Mann, the MP for Bassetlaw and chair of the all-party group against anti-Semitism, said the results in Jewish areas had been a “sub plot” of the night – and predicted a similar impact in London.

Jewish News reports that Mann told the BBC:

It is clear the Jewish vote, which for generations in families has been Labour, has gone against Labour tonight. We’ve seen that Bury, in Glasgow, I think we’ll see it in parts of London.

This is going to define Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership – he’s got to get on top of this because Labour is not going to win power of it doesn’t get on top of the problem.

JN don’t add, however, that he also insisted “now is not the time” for any challenge to Mr Corbyn. Continue reading “Labour MP John Mann: ‘The Jewish vote’ has gone against Labour”

Please sign and share petition started by Bridget Chapman on ‘Change’ here

Continue reading “Petition: Reinstate Jacqueline Walker to the Labour Party”

Please read article in full on Middle East Eye here

Excerpt: ‘… Whatever the Zionists in Britain point to, as an expression of anti-Semitism, which in the main are legitimate criticism of Israel, have been said before in the last 50 years. The pro-Zionist lobby in Britain, under direct guidance from Israel, picks them up because the clear anti-Zionist stance of BDS has reached the upper echelons. They are genuinely terrified by this development. Well done the BDS movement!

The reaction, one has to admit, is powerful and vicious. However, succumbing to it by suspending party members, firing student leaders and unnecessarily apologising for crimes not committed is not the right way to confront it.

‘We are in a struggle for a free and democratic Palestine and Israel: fear of Zionist intimidation is not the way forward. The coming days will be very tough and we would need to be both patient and go back to the podium, the website, the radio and television and re-explain what for many of us is obvious: Zionism is not Judaism, and anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism.

‘Zionism was not the antidote for Europe’s worst chapter of anti-Semitism: the Holocaust. Zionism was the wrong answer to that atrocity. In fact, when European leaders lended without hesitation their support for Zionism their motives in many cases were anti-Semitic. How else can one explain a Europe that stood by when the Nazi regime genocided the Jews and asked for forgiveness by supporting a new plan to get rid of the Jews by despatching them to colonise Palestine? No wonder this absurd logic did not kill the anti-Semitic impulse but rather kept it alive. Continue reading “Ilan Pappe: Don’t surrender to Israel’s bullying on ‘anti-Semitism’”