Campaign Against Antisemitism is a campaign against Palestinians

Fake Zionist 'Charity' Demonises Anti-racists and Anti-Zionists

Tony Greenstein  Reprinted from The Electronic Intifada 20 March 2017

The UK-based Campaign Against Antisemitism was formed after massive protests against Israel’s military offensive in Gaza were held in London in the summer of 2014.  Andy Rain EPA

The Campaign Against Antisemitism is a British propaganda organization and registered charity that specializes in defaming Palestine solidarity campaigners. When I launched a petition calling for the group to be deregistered, it responded in a hostile manner.

It first tried to persuade the website Change.org to take the petition down. When that failed, its supporters attacked the petition in an article published by the Daily Mail, a paper which once praised Adolf Hitler for having “saved Germany from Israelites of international attachments.”

Originality not being its strong point, the Campaign Against Antisemitism then alleged that I was a “notorious anti-Semite.”

The Campaign Against Antisemitism was formed in August 2014 during a major Israeli offensive against Gaza. Its purpose was to paint Palestine solidarity campaigning and opposition to Zionism, Israel’s state ideology, as anti-Semitic.

There was massive opposition to the attack on Gaza among the British public; an estimated 150,000 people took to the streets of London in one protest. Such was the climate of opinion that Sayeeda Warsi, then a Foreign Office minister, resigned from the government, describing its support for Israel as “morally indefensible.”

For some time, there had been a constituency within British Zionists who felt that establishment groups such as the Board of Deputies of British Jews were not active enough in defending Israel.
The Campaign Against Antisemitism organized a demonstration outside the Royal Courts of Justice in London in late August 2014, which it claimed was 4,500 strong. Its purpose was to link the protests against the attack on Gaza to anti-Semitism.

Ephraim Mirvis, Britain’s chief rabbi, spoke at the event, as did Vivian Wineman, then president of the Board of Deputies. Wineman was loudly booed.

Promoting harmony?

If it was true that there was an increase in anti-Semitism as a result of the attack on Gaza, then the obvious thing to do would be to emphasize that Britain’s Jewish community is not responsible for Israel’s actions, and that despite its claims, Israel does not act in the name of all Jews, many of whom strenuously oppose its policies and actions. The Campaign Against Antisemitism had no interest in doing so.

One of the campaign’s stated objectives is to “promote racial harmony.” In practice, its activities are designed to achieve the exact opposite.

The Campaign Against Antisemitism consistently targets Muslims.

A search of the campaign’s archive reveals just two articles that mention Britain’s main fascist organizations – the British National Party, the English Defence League and the National Front. Those groups include Holocaust deniers within their ranks.

By way of contrast, there are some 77 articles attacking Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour Party leader and a veteran defender of Palestinian rights.

Meanwhile, 32 articles in the archive attack Shami Chakrabarti, a civil liberties campaigner and now a prominent Labour politician serving as shadow attorney general. In a 2016 report, she concluded that the Labour Party was “not overrun by anti-Semitism,” while acknowledging a “minority” of “hateful or ignorant attitudes and behaviors festering within a sometimes bitter incivility of discourse.”

That conclusion didn’t confirm the prejudices of the Campaign Against Antisemitism.

The Campaign Against Antisemitism reserved special animus for Gerald Kaufman, a longstanding lawmaker who died recently. In 2009, he compared the tactics of Israelis then attacking Gaza to those of the Nazis who killed his grandmother.

No less than 22 articles in the campaign’s archive attack Kaufman. The latest one – titled “Sir Gerald Kaufman MP’s words have left a rotting stain on our institutions” – shows that even death doesn’t prevent the Campaign Against Antisemitism deploying all its dirty tricks.

There is no one the Campaign Against Antisemitism hates as much as a Jewish opponent of Israel.

Serving the right

The campaign is at the service of the political right wing.

Rebecca Massey, a prominent Labour Party activist in Brighton and Hove, has been accused of anti-Semitism for tweeting articles critical of Israel.

Ivor Caplin, a former defense minister who supported the illegal invasion of Iraq, is among those who have slandered Massey. Her real offense? She is a Corbyn ally, who has (successfully) contested an election to be a local party officer.

In its attack on socialists in the Labour Party, the Campaign Against Antisemitism, as a matter of course, talks about “racist Labour,” thus demonstrating that it lacks the political neutrality expected of a charity.

The Campaign Against Antisemitism is chaired by Gideon Falter, who is also a board member of the Jewish National Fund UK. The Jewish National Fund has a long history of supporting ethnic cleansing in Palestine.

Far from promoting racial harmony, the Campaign Against Antisemitism has sought to stir up conflict between Muslims and Jews.

“Littered with flaws”

Last year it published a report on “British Muslim anti-Semitism.” The report included a “profile” of the kind of person that the campaign was making allegations against. The profile was highly racist and offensive; according to the campaign, the typical Muslim anti-Semite was likely to be a first-generation immigrant and living in public housing.

The Campaign Against Anti-Semitism's Typical Muslim

If someone had posted a similar portrayal of Jews, the campaign would have been the first to claim “anti-Semitism.”

The report alleged that “many British Muslims reserve a special hatred for British Jews.”

“On every single count, British Muslims were more likely by far than the general British population to hold deeply anti-Semitic views,” it added.

The conclusions were based on a poll conducted for the TV station Channel 4. Yet even the Community Security Trust, a staunchly pro-Israel group, raised doubts about the conclusions to which the Campaign Against Antisemitism jumped.

In a blog post for the Community Security Trust website, Dave Rich wrote: “This latest poll showed something else that is interesting, and is not specific to Muslims: that people who believe anti-Semitic things about Jews rarely think of themselves as anti-Semitic.”

“What is perhaps curious, though, is that this is not reflected in a more basic question that was asked in the same poll about how favorable or unfavorable Muslims feel towards Jewish people as a religious group,” Rich added. Asked what their feelings were towards Jews: on a sliding scale from 0-100 – where 0 is the least favorable – British Muslims scored 57.1 in their feelings towards Jews.
This hardly suggests rampant anti-Semitism.

The Campaign Against Antisemitism specializes in distorting statistics. In its annual “anti-Semitism barometer” report for 2015, it claimed that an opinion poll showed that “almost half (45 percent) of British adults believe at least one of the anti-Semitic statements shown to them to be true.”

The questions were carefully chosen to elicit the required answers. As Anshel Pfeffer from the Tel Aviv newspaper Haaretz observed – regarding the statement that Jews talk about the Holocaust too much in order to gain sympathy – “too many Jews … are often too quick to bring up the Holocaust in order to make a point. … Holding that opinion doesn’t necessarily make you an anti-Semite.”

Another statement was that “Jews’ loyalty to Israel makes them less loyal to Britain than other British people.” Is it surprising that one in five people believe this given that Jewish anti-Zionists are regularly accused of being “traitors”?

Clearly, many Zionists believe that their first loyalty is to Israel. That was why Israel’s ministries for foreign affairs and immigrant absorption distributed a questionnaire to American Jews a few years ago, asking where their loyalties would lie in the event of a crisis between the two countries.

Pfeffer’s conclusion was that the Campaign Against Antisemitism created “its own definition of anti-Semitism, which is more a reflection of what is impolite to say in public than what is actual bias against Jews.”

Anti-Semitism is hostility to Jews as Jews, not the holding of ephemeral beliefs.

The Institute for Jewish Policy Research in London has found that the Campaign Against Antisemitism’s “barometer” report was “littered with flaws” and the group’s work “may even be rather irresponsible.”

The institute has criticized the way that the Campaign Against Antisemitism has used data collected by the polling agency YouGov to make the “rather sensationalist claim that almost half of all British adults harbor some sort of anti-Semitic view.” YouGov had been commissioned to undertake the poll by the Campaign Against Antisemitism.

According to the Institute for Jewish Policy Research, “a far more accurate and honest read” of the data would “highlight the fact that between 75 percent and 90 percent of people in Britain either do not hold anti-Semitic views or have no particular view of Jews either way, and only about 4 percent to 5 percent of people can be characterized as clearly anti-Semitic.”

“Bordering on hysteria”

The Campaign Against Antisemitism has claimed that one in four British Jews had considered leaving the country in the past few years because of rising anti-Semitism.

Even The Jewish Chronicle – an unmistakably pro-Israel publication – poured cold water on that claim. The newspaper’s own poll published in 2015 concluded that 88 percent of British Jews had no intention of emigrating.

The Campaign Against Antisemitism has also claimed that more than half of all British Jews felt that anti-Semitism echoed that of the 1930s. Anshel Pfeffer witheringly observed that if the Campaign Against Antisemitism and most British Jews “actually believe that, then it’s hard to take anything they say about contemporary anti-Semitism in their home country seriously.”

Pfeffer added that the conclusion showed “a disconnect bordering on hysteria … not only are they woefully ignorant of recent Jewish history but have little concept of what real anti-Semitism is.” Which just about sums up the Campaign Against Antisemitism.

The Campaign Against Antisemitism has claimed, too, that 84 percent of Jews believed boycotts of businesses selling Israeli products to be intimidation. This “finding” contrasts sharply with a rigorously controlled, academic survey on “The Attitudes of British Jews Towards Israel” by the sociology department at City, University of London.

That 2015 survey found that 24 percent of British Jews would support some sanctions against Israel if they thought it would encourage Israel to engage in the “peace process.” A “sizeable minority” (34-41 percent) among the young, the highly qualified academically and those who were not affiliated to a synagogue were in favor of sanctions under such circumstances, according to the survey.

The City survey also found that while 59 percent of British Jews identify themselves as Zionists, nearly a third – 31 percent – didn’t.

Other “findings” that have alarmed the Campaign Against Antisemitism were that 45 percent of Jews felt their family was threatened by Islamist extremism, 77 percent of Jews have witnessed anti-Semitism disguised as a political comment about Israel and 82 percent of respondents said that media bias against Israel fuels persecution of Jews in Britain.

These were not only replies to loaded questions, but ideas planted in the heads of people with the goal of obtaining the “right” answer. No attempt was made to put a question based on countervailing assumptions such as “Do you agree that criticism of Israel is not the same as anti-Semitism?” The result of such an approach would have been interesting, but it wasn’t on the agenda of the Campaign Against Antisemitism.

No doubt, the campaign is unconcerned with the criticisms that have been made of its work. The purpose of its work appears to be to make Jewish people feel insecure and encourage them to leave for Israel.

Zionism is founded on the “negation of the diaspora” – the belief that Jews do not belong in a non-Jewish society. After the killing of four Jews in a Paris kosher supermarket two years ago, Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, flew to France and told French Jews to emigrate.
Fighting anti-Semitism has never been part of Zionism.

The Campaign Against Antisemitism has stated that it was formed to tackle anti-Semitism of “both a classical ethno-religious nature and also a political nature related to Israel.” In fact, the campaign devotes virtually all of its time to the latter and what it calls the “international definition of anti-Semitism.”

This definition is virtually identical to a working definition of anti-Semitism drawn up by the European Union’s Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia (now the Agency for Fundamental Rights) in Vienna. The definition was not formally adopted by the EU and was removed from the website of the agency several years ago.

The “definition,” previously vanquished, has come back to life. Originally drawn up in consultation with the pro-Israel lobby, the definition has now been given a veneer of respectability having been endorsed – with minor amendments – by an intergovernmental body called the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, which consists of 31 countries including the far right and anti-Semitic Polish and Hungarian governments. The definition conflates criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism.

Not only Britain’s Prime Minister Theresa May, but Jeremy Corbyn too has lent his support to this bogus definition of anti-Semitism.

All Britain’s major political parties are signed up to this definition. The Campaign Against Antisemitism is one of the beneficiaries.

Our task is clear. Palestine solidarity activists have to build a campaign against this definition of anti-Semitism, just as they did with its predecessor.

Tony Greenstein is a founding member of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign and the author of The Fight Against Fascism in Brighton and the South Coast.

Just an Everyday Example of Israeli Racism - The Boycott You Never Hear About

It’s barely worth commenting on.  It is just one more example of the everyday racism in Israeli society.  A bar putting on a Palestinian beer in Haifa, one of the few mixed cities in Israel, is the subject of a Boycott because it’s subsidising the ‘enemy’ and it is like ‘drinking Jewish blood’ (the old blood libel resurfaces with a vengeance).

Ironic when Israeli propagandists tell us, and their faithful Tory/New Labour supporters echo, that Boycott=Anti-Semitism and these disgusting racist hypocrites never once tell us about the real Boycott – the Boycott of Palestinians by Israel.

Tony Greenstein

An Israeli Bar Put a Palestinian Beer on Tap. Then the Depressingly Expected Happened

Roni Kashmin Feb 09, 2017 4:13 PM

Customers sampling Palestinian- and Israeli-made beer at the Libira Brewpub in lower Haifa, in northern Israel, February 2017.

The Jewish owners of the Libira Brewpub, located in downtown Haifa, faced an online hate campaign after it stocked alcohol from a Palestinian brewery in the West Bank. Libira Brewery

The owners of the Libira Brewpub in lower Haifa just wanted to give their customers a chance to sample a Palestinian beer from the Shepherds Brewery in Ramallah, and made it available for a month. They never imagined that it would become a political hot potato and evoke angry reactions. Indeed, for the past week, there has been a growing number of calls online to boycott their establishment completely.

 “We don’t want any beer made from Jewish blood!!!” one person wrote in a post, going on to curse the owners and call for a boycott of the pub. Other comments included “All proceeds go to terrorism,” and, “Let me know when you stop selling this beer so I’ll think about coming back.”

Palestinian- and Israeli-made beer at Libira Brewpub in Haifa. “Whoever sells beer from the PA should be boycotted by Israel,” wrote one commenter. Courtesy Libira Brewpub

 “It all started with two posts [by us] on Facebook,” says Leonid Lipkin, one of the three owners of Libira, which is located on Hanamal Street and open daily. “One was a post about how we we’re going to host beers from the Shepherds Brewery in Ramallah, and the second was a post we shared from that brewery – about the beer festival they were having in Ramallah. I just left it as was, without getting into any politics.”

Beers from different breweries are frequently featured at the Haifa bar, explains Lipkin, whether it’s beer from the West Bank, or the Judean Hills in Israel, or abroad. It's all part of the open approach he developed when running an earlier incarnation of Libira, which also went by that name.

Lipkin: “I thought it would be nice, as part of the concept of the place, for us to offer a changing selection of beers from other breweries. It’s also interesting to taste a different beer each time, and I thought this was important, too. And so natural – a good way to get to know the surroundings. The same kind of thing can happen with food from different places, through getting to know other people’s culture and customs, as well as by means of the beer they make. It’s all part of the same picture.

Angry social media backlash and calls for a boycott followed the sale of Ramallah-made brew at a pub in Haifa. But the owners remain steadfast.

“When we opened the new place, there was no question that we would continue the tradition of featuring a selection of beers from guest breweries, and we did so from the start. In addition to our own five beers, we always offered different varieties from other breweries in Israel and abroad.”

Among the beers Lipkin's pub has offered are products of breweries like Srigim in the Elah Valley, southwest of Jerusalem; Dancing Camel in Tel Aviv; BrewDog in Scotland (“a real role model”); and beers from the Taybeh and Shepherds breweries, "which both happen to be in what’s known as ‘the territories’ or ‘Palestine’ or the ‘Palestinian Authority,’” as he puts it.

Once, he notes with some irony, he had to go to Tel Aviv to drink beer produced by the Taybeh Brewing Company – though he says he has had a long personal connection with its owners. Taybeh is a predominantly Christian village located northeast of Ramallah, and its brewery hosts an annual Oktoberfest event.

 “Taybeh and Shepherds – they’re both breweries of our neighbors, and if they make good beer, I don’t see what the problem is with drinking it. In fact, I think we should all have a natural interest in the people around us, especially in Haifa, with its mixed population of Jews and Arabs," Lipkin continues. "As far as these breweries in the PA territory are concerned, it’s kind of sad, without getting into politics. Because who makes beer? The Christians. And one can imagine that they’re sort of stuck between a rock and a hard place.”

Without speculating further on why beer producers in the territories should be the target of so much criticism, he adds: “It seems so natural and obvious to me to want to know one’s neighbors, that it shouldn’t even need an explanation. And yes, the same goes for here, when some of the neighbors are Arabs.”

However, for some of those commenting after Libira's posts about offering Shepherds' beer, Palestinians are apparently enemies, first and foremost.

“You support the enemy and are proud of it! You’re the lowest of the low!” ranted one. “Keep on supporting Palestine,” protested another. “Whoever sells beer from the PA should be boycotted by Israel,” wrote another.

If this wasn't bad enough, angry commenters have also made sure to give the brewery a one-star (out of five) rating, and added a (Hebrew) tag: “Boycott Libira.” The pub's status began to be affected.

Still, despite everything, Lipkin seems to be quite calm (“Even though the racist and inciting comments are still trickling in”).

 “Obviously, it’s not pleasant and of course I reported [the ratings] to Facebook,” he says. “But only about those who I knew for certain gave the pub a low rating just because of the recent events and not because they had a bad experience there. Still, I’d like to maintain an objective rating."

How can he know the reasons behind the different ratings? “It’s easy to tell, and not just because of the timing, but because the comments posted with these recent ratings directly indicated it – you can see the prejudice. They’re full of incitement and racism or, in the best case, pure rubbish. When you see something like, ‘We won’t drink beer that’s made from the blood of Jews’ – come on! And you know what? If we get less customers who think like that, we won’t really be sorry – the air in the place will be fresher,” says Lipkin, barely pausing for air himself.

 “We usually love all our customers at Libira, but we don’t need everyone to come here. And the customers that we do want? They won’t let such reactions affect them, so we’ll keep on doing things the way we want to.” 

West Bank beer gains global following

From small Christian village, Taybeh beer has its sights set on American market

jn1.tv|Published:  05.01.13 , 08:02

Taybeh beer, the only beer brewed in the Palestinian territories, has become a shining success story out of the small Christian village where the brewery operates in the West Bank.

Started after the Oslo Accords in the mid 1990s by the Khoury family, Taybeh Brewing Company began in the optimistic time when it looked like Palestinians and Israelis would soon find a solution to their ongoing conflict.

While the hoped-for solution proved elusive, Taybeh beer has kept on brewing, carving out a market for itself even in quite challenging business circumstances.

Says Nadim Khoury, co- founder and master brewer at the Taybeh Brewing Company, “Well, I want to make something for my homeland, for Palestine. I'm a risk-taker, I'm an entrepreneur. I believe I just want to do something different than any others in Palestine.”

The beer is a proudly local product. Its name, "Taybeh," which means delicious in Arabic, is also the name of the brewing location. Crushed barley from the brewing process is given to local farmers who feed it to their livestock.

The brewery, which can produce 4,000 bottles per hour, plays a role in the local economy and Taybeh beer has made the village more well-known.

Since 2005, Taybeh has been holding an Oktoberfest each year, bringing scores of visitors from across the West Bank, Israel and abroad to this small, but welcoming locale.

 “Taybeh beer became the famous number one product in Palestine," says Khoury. "Palestinians have lost their nationalistic feeling for so many years because we've been under the wars, under occupation, and now they are proudly serving Taybeh beer in bars and we create a good market in Palestine.”

Beyond its local role, Taybeh is also making a mark globally. The Japanese have developed a taste for the beer and it is also brewed under license in Germany.

Taybeh is produced with equipment that had to be imported from all around the world, but the beer retains a local flavor. Master brewer Nadim Khoury, an engineer by training, fixes all the machinery himself and his signature appears on every bottle of Taybeh.

According to co-owner Madees Khoury, “People all over the world don't know that Palestinians maybe drink beer or drink alcohol or produce high-quality products. Our beer made Taybeh famous and people now know the name Taybeh, know the beer, know the town. It's internationally recognized; it's sold internationally. It's a high quality product.”


From this village of 2,000 nestled in the West Bank, Taybeh beer has made a name for itself in the West Bank and in Israel, and has now set its sights on the American market.

Comparing Israel, the Holocaust and Nazi Germany

How the Zionist movement tries to have it both ways

You might think it is a no-brainer that refusing to rent Israeli state land to non-Jews was racist but in a Jewish state such logic doesn't apply

According to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of anti-Semitism,

‘Contemporary examples of antisemitism ... could, taking into account the overall context, include, but are not limited to: ....Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.’

This definition, first proposed by the Home Affairs Select Committee last year, was subsequently adopted by Theresa May and, not wanting to feel left out, Jeremy Corbyn.

The IHRA was based on the Working Definition of Anti-Semitism [WDA], which was junked in 2013 by the Europe Union's Fundamental Rights Agency, after vehement opposition to its conflation of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism.  The WDA has resurfaced, like the undead in a Dracula horror movie, in the guise of the IHRA.

I decided on a bit of graffiti on the IHRA Facebook page - this definition is backed by a host of far-Right anti-Semitic governments such as that in Poland

So if were to accuse Israeli Jews who chant ‘Death to the Arabs’ on demonstrations of being no different from Nazi demonstrators who chanted ‘death to the Jews’ 80 years ago, then according to the IHRA, this too is a clear example of ‘anti-Semitism’.

The Imperialist leadership of the Labour Party - Corbyn and McDonnell have, like Theresa May, supported the IHRA definition of 'anti-Semitism' which defines anti-Zionism as anti--Semitism 

Notwithstanding this, Zionists and supporters of Israel are allowed to claim that the Holocaust justifies Israel’s apartheid practices.  Only last week Baroness Deech sent a letter to the Jewish Chronicle concerning a new national Holocaust memorial and learning centre which it is being proposed should be built next to Parliament.  Costing £50m you might think that Deech was enthusiastic in welcoming this project?  Not  a bit of it.  What was the point of such a centre if it had nothing to say about Israel?  Deech whinged that:

“We already have in this country about 10 Holocaust memorials. None has prevented the recent rise in antisemitism and attempts to delegitimise Israel.”

Note how the purpose of learning about the Holocaust is not to prevent racism or anti-Semitism.  It is to prevent ‘delegitimisation’ i.e. criticism of Israel as a Jewish state. 

Deech wondered ‘why some students, who have studied the Holocaust at school, seem not to have made the connection between that event, and Jewish people and their state today.”  A good question.  Perhaps the reasons might lie in the fact that many people find it hard to reconcile the Nazi state’s pre-1941 discrimination against German Jews with Israel’s discrimination against Palestinians?  The good Baroness explained that “you have to improve the relationship between Holocaust education and attitudes to Jewish people and to Israel.”

Netanyahu used the meeting of the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj al Amin Husseini with Hitler in November 1941 to suggest that the Mufti had forced Hitler into the Final Solution - except that the Holocaust began in June 1941

In other words Holocaust ‘education’ should concern itself not with historical understanding of the Holocaust and why it happened but with propaganda aimed at supporting the Israeli state.  A state which has two separate legal systems – one for Jewish settlers and another for Palestinians on the West Bank.  A state which seeks to ethnically cleanse not simply Palestinians living in Jerusalem but Arabs and Bedouin within Israel itself.  According to Deech any Holocaust memorial should be modelled on Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust propaganda museum which has a picture of the Palestinian Mufti of Jerusalem prominently displayed.  As Tom Segev noted, its purpose being to ensure that ‘the visitor is left to conclude that there is much in common between the Nazis’ plan to destroy the Jews and the Arabs’ enmity to Israel.’ [The Seventh Million p.425]

The purpose of Holocaust education is not so much to foster an understanding of the iniquities of racism and the singling out of an ethnic group for blame or scapegoating but rather to help bolster support for a state based upon the same principles of ethno-religious discrimination as Nazi Germany.

The article below was originally published on February 10, 2017 by The Clarion, which describes itself as ‘an unofficial magazine by Labour Party and Momentum activists.  It would fairer to describe Clarion as the magazine and web journal of the Alliance for Workers Liberty, a Zionist ‘Trotskyist’ group and its sympathisers.  Its Editorial Board includes Rhea Wolfson of the Jewish Labour Movement, who was elected to Labour’s National Executive Committee as part of the grassroots slate of 6. 

Are Comparisons Between Israel and the Nazis Anti-Semitic?

According to Shami Chakrabarti in her Report on Racism and Anti-Semitism in the Labour Party:

In day -to-day political debate , it is always incendiary to compare the actions of Jewish people or institutions anywhere in the world to those of Hitler or the Nazis or to the perpetration of the Holocaust. Indeed such remarks can only be intended to be incendiary rather than persuasive.’

Shami Chakrabarti knew nothing about Zionism or the background to comparisons between Zionism and the Nazi era.  What has been compared is not the treatment of the Palestinians to the Holocaust, because clearly Israel isn’t attempting to exterminate millions of Palestinians, (though there are powerful elements, especially amongst religious Zionists who would like to see their physical elimination) but three things:

i.              The ideological congruence between Nazi attitudes to the Jews from 1933 onwards to the Jews and Zionist attitudes to Palestinians as manifested in Israeli Apartheid today.

ii.             The fact that sections of the Zionist community in Israel have adopted a genocidal attitude towards the Palestinians.  For example in 2010 Rabbis Yitzhak Shapira and Yosef Elitzur wrote a book ‘Torat Hameleh’  [The King’s Torah] which explained that:

The prohibition 'Thou Shalt Not Murder' applies only "to a Jew who kills a Jew," write Rabbis Yitzhak Shapira and Yosef Elitzur of the West Bank settlement of Yitzhar. Non-Jews are "uncompassionate by nature" and attacks on them "curb their evil inclination," while babies and children of Israel's enemies may be killed since "it is clear that they will grow to harm us."

iii.            The repeated comparison by Zionists of the Palestinians with the Nazis and those who perpetrated the Holocaust.  This has been most evident in the portrayal of the Mufti of Jerusalem, who was a Nazi collaborator and war criminal, as representative of the Palestinians.  In his address to the World Zionist Congress in 2015, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu laid the blame for the Holocaust at the feet of the Mufti not Hitler (see Rewriting the Holocaust – Jacobin). 

The Zionist suggestion that the Mufti of Jerusalem was representative of the Palestinians and that opposition to Zionism is therefore motivated by anti-Semitism, is an example of the hypocrisy of Zionism.  The Mufti was never elected by the Palestinians.  It was the ardently Zionist British High Commissioner Herbert Samuel who appointed Haj al Amin Husseini as Grand Mufti in 1920 despite him coming fourth in the elections for the position, However this kind of double standard is perfectly acceptable to the Deeches of this world.

As the article below explains, the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism is worse than idiocy.  It is based on a combination of ignorance and malevolence.  The 31 governments which agreed to this definition include the states of Hungary, Poland, Croatia and the Baltic republics, all of which have manifested differing degrees of anti-Semitism and racism towards refugees.  Like most such governments they combine anti-Semitism and support for Zionism.

The IHRA definition of anti-Semitism is designed to suppress free speech and close down debate.  In Israel the use of the Holocaust as a metaphor and an insult are legion, precisely because the Holocaust has helped shape, in the distorted context of settler colonialism, Israel’s Jewish self-identity.

For example on March 10^th in Ha’aretz Carolina Landsmann described how a new piece of legislation from Israel’s Knesset, a bill which sought to ban the Muslim call to prayer on the grounds of ‘noise’, brought to mind what the Zionist historian, David Bankier had said when describing how ‘Nazi propaganda deliberately fostered a sense of collective guilt among the Germans. Starting in 1942, the Nazis provided hints about what was happening to the Jews so that the Germans would feel they had crossed the bounds of morality along with their leaders.’

 What we have is a situation where the Holocaust is repeatedly used to justify Zionist crimes against the Palestinians but any attempt to reverse the equation and show how the depiction and scapegoating of the Palestinian minority of Israel bears a similarity to the treatment of the Jews of Germany is ‘anti-Semitic’.

These are the double standards of Zionism and its Tory apologists – unfortunately Jeremy Corbyn has also signed up to this Establishment hypocrisy.

Tony Greenstein

Palestine, Israel, Zionism and the Holocaust – a reply to Michael Chessum

By Tony Greenstein, Brighton Momentum activist

 (This is a reply to Michael Chessum’s explanation of why he voted to remove Jackie Walker as vice chair of the Momentum steering committee. It does not reflect the view of the Clarion editors or most of our contributors, but we publish it in the interests of debate on the left.)

When Israel's Supreme Court ruled that the JNF could no longer bar non-Jews from state lands, it issued the above statement on its web site - its survey showed that 70% of Israeli Jews oppose allocating state and JNF land to non-Jews and 80% of Jews prefer a Jewish to a democratic state of all of its citizens 

The JNF has an openly racist constitution - it is for the benefit of Jews only (it has now changed this to the people of Israel, but still defines its purposes as Jewish in nature)

The JNF's priorities - benefiting the 'Land of Israel' not the State of Israel.  The Land of Israel (Eretz Yisrael) is code for a Greater Israel whose borders extend into Jordan, Iraq and Lebanon.

Introduction

The present split in Momentum can be traced back to the night of the 3rd October when Jon Lansman moved to remove Jackie Walker from her post as Vice-Chair of Momentum. The pretext for this were comments that she had been secretly recorded making at a Jewish Labour Movement ‘training session’ on anti-Semitism at the last Labour Party conference. It is clear, in hindsight, that Jackie had been the victim of a political ‘sting’ by the Jewish Labour Movement, which is the emanation of the Israeli state inside the Labour Party.

None of the comments Jackie made were in the least anti-Semitic but a climate was created in which anything she said about anti-Semitism or the Holocaust would be twisted by the JLM into an allegation of ‘anti-Semitism’.

We saw how this was done in the third programme of Al Jazeera’s ‘The Lobby’ when Joan Ryan MP, Chair of Labour Friends of Israel concocted an ‘anti-Semitic’ incident at their stall when questioned by Jean Fitzpatrick as to what their ‘support’ for 2 States in Israel/Palestine meant in practice. In practice, as she found out, not a lot. It is mere rhetoric designed to cover up for their support for the existing status quo and the military occupation of the Palestinian territories.

Jackie’s ‘anti-Semitic’ statements that led to her removal as Momentum Vice-Chair were:

1. ‘wouldn’t it be wonderful if Holocaust Day were shared by all people who had experienced genocide’.

2. ‘I haven’t heard any definition of anti-Semitism that I could work with’

It is difficult to understand how either statement could be said to be anti-Semitic. They are expressions of opinion. Whether or not they are true is immaterial. It was as if Jackie had been urging a Pharaonic cull of the Jewish first born. The sincerity of her main antagonist, the JLM, can be judged by its silence over Israeli Labour Party leader Isaac Herzog’s effusive welcome for the election of Donald Trump and the anti-Semites he has brought in his wake in the form of Steve Bannon and the Alt-Right.(1)

Of course the Zionist lobby and their friends in the media have an unerring ability to create a synthetic symphony of outrage about ‘anti-Semitism’ out of nothing. All the newspapers – from the Tory tabloids to the Guardian were eager to damn Jackie. Instead of defending her, Jon Lansman threw her to the wolves. Stephen Pollard of the Zionist Jewish Chronicle reported that Lansman had ‘reached the end of his tether”. Lansman informed the Independent that “I spoke to Jeremy Newmark of the Jewish Labour Movement this morning, he’s very upset and I can understand that – I work closely with Jeremy…’

I can certainly believe that Lansman works very closely with Newmark, a man who works closely with the Israeli Ambassador Mark Regev, whose previous job as spokesperson for Benjamin Netanyahu included justifying the murder of hundreds of children and two thousand civilians in Gaza two years ago.

One would have expected, as a matter of course, that Jill Mountford of the AWL and Mike Chessum, who is politically close to them, to have opposed Jackie’s removal as Momentum Vice Chair, even if they didn’t agree with her comments. In agreeing to the Lansman witch-hunt back in October, they opened the door to Lansman’s support for the witch-hunt of the AWL and his coup in Momentum itself. You cannot be on both sides of a witch-hunt.

Despite their protestations it is obvious that both Chessum and Mountford voted to remove Jackie Walker as Momentum’s Vice Chair because they deemed her remarks anti-Semitic. There is no other conclusion. All the stuff about ‘losing confidence’ is a mere circumlocution.

The Holocaust and Israel

The Holocaust has played a formative role in the creation of Israel’s own self image and its ideological legitimation. Is Chessum unaware of the role the ship the Exodus played in 1946 in opening the gates of Palestine and its use of Jewish refugees from displaced person’s camps to open the gates of Palestine to Jewish settler immigration?

Holocaust imagery pervades Israeli political dialogue.(2) The Holocaust has played a key role in the justification for a Jewish ethno-supremacist state. Where else is there a state, which defines itself on the basis of an imagined ethnicity of part of its population (Jewish) rather than on all those who reside there? A fictive nation (Jewish) that crosses every national boundary and language?

We often hear that Israel is the only Jewish state in the world. True but of course irrelevant. Britain is a Christian state but all its citizens, Christian and non-Christian are equal. In Israel being Jewish means that you possess privileges that non-Jews do not have and this is justified by reference to the trauma of the Holocaust.

Idith Zertal, one of Israel’s revisionist historians(3), wrote about how ‘there has not been a war in Israel, from 1948 till… October 2000, that has not been perceived, defined and conceptualised in terms of the Holocaust…. Auschwitz is not a past event but a threatening present and a constant option.’(4) The Holocaust has been consciously utilised in order to defend its actions against the Palestinians and to ward off criticism.

Examples of how the Holocaust has been used are legion. Menachem Begin, Prime Minister during Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon and siege of Beirut, compared Yassir Arafat to Hitler in his bunker. According to Begin the alternative to Israel’s genocidal war was ‘Auschwitz’. Israeli Labour’s Foreign Minister, Abba Eban told the UN that “I do not exaggerate when I say that it [the June 1967 map] has for us something of a memory of Auschwitz.” The Green Line between Israel and the West Bank is referred to in Israel as the ‘Auschwitz border’. Netanyahu told the 2015 World Zionist Congress that it was the Palestinian Grand Mufti who was responsible for Hitler’s Final Solution. Netanyahu has repeatedly compared Iran to Nazi Germany.

As Tom Segev, a critical Israeli historian explained, the only image of a Palestinian in Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust museum ‘(is) a photo featured prominently on a wall depicting the Mufti sieg heiling a group of Nazi storm troopers’. Its purpose being to ensure that ‘the visitor is left to conclude that there is much in common between the Nazis’ plan to destroy the Jews and the Arabs’ enmity to Israel.’(5) Effigies of Israeli Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin, were dressed in Nazi uniform by his political opponents as a prelude to his assassination.

As Zertal persuasively argues, the Israeli state has effectively nationalised the memory of the Holocaust and in the process ‘it directly excluded the direct bearers of this memory – some quarter of a million Holocaust survivors who had immigrated to Israel.’(6) This is why you have the terrible phenomenon of Israel, a rich and prosperous state, bristling with state of the art weaponry including nuclear weapons, condemning the actual survivors of the Holocaust to live out their life in penury as it keeps them in dire poverty despite having received reparations to provide them with a comfortable old age.(7)

Zionism has defined the Holocaust as something exclusive and unique to the Jews because of its ideological usefulness in Israel’s propaganda wars. Elie Wiesel held that to compare the Holocaust with the sufferings of others was a “betrayal of Jewish history”.(8) In a debate with Sybil Milton, the Senior Resident Historian at the US Holocaust Museum, Yehuda Bauer, Professor of Holocaust Studies at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem argued that the Nazis only attempted to annihilate one people, the Jews: “Roma were not Jews, therefore there was no need to murder all of them.”(9) To this day the US Holocaust Museum refuses to include the Roma victims of the Holocaust.

If you go to the Holocaust Memorial Day site and click on Holocaust you will be taken to a page that says ‘Between 1941 and 1945, the Nazis attempted to annihilate all of Europe’s Jews.’ There is no mention that the Holocaust began in 1939 with the extermination of the Disabled, the T4 Euthanasia program. The Roma and Gypsies are not mentioned either. If you click Nazi Persecution you will come to a page which begins ‘Singling out Jews for complete annihilation in the Holocaust was not the full extent of Nazi persecution.’ Although it goes on to mention other groups, they do this in the context of the ‘persecution of disabled people and gay people’. They do not mention that they too were exterminated. There is no mention of the extermination of 10 million Africans in the Belgian Congo or the estimated 14 million Africans in the slave trade.

This is why when Jackie Walker made criticisms of how the Holocaust is presented and used or how anti-Semitism is defined it has a direct bearing on how, in this country, Israel’s propaganda war is conducted.

Notes

1. See Open Letter from Jewish Members of the Labour Party to Jeremy Newmark and the Jewish Labour Movement

2. See e.g. Playing the Holocaust Card; Calling your political rival a Nazi is a time-hallowed tradition in Israel

3. That group of historians in the 1980’s onwards who began to challenge the foundational myths of Israel, most notably about the flight of the refugees in 1948. Until then it had been the consensus that they had voluntarily left at the urging of the Arab leaders whereas it is now accepted that they left forcibly and as a result of massacres

4. Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood, p.4, Idith Zertal, Cambridge University Press, 2011.

5. Tom Segev, The Seventh Million, p.425,Hill and Wang, 1991, USA

6. Zertal, p.5

7. See for example Israel is Waiting for Its Holocaust Survivors to Die, Ha’aretz 6.2.13. Ironically my quoting of this article formed part of my investigation hearing as the Labour Party Compliance Unit assumed that this must be some wicked invention by anti-Zionists seeking to libel the Israeli state.

8. Wiesel, Against Silence, p.146, Schocken Books, 1988

9. The History Teacher, Vol. 25, No. 4., August 1992 pp. 513-521

A Fighting Start but It is Only the Beginning

Report of Grassroots Momentum Conference – March 11^th

Kelly Rogers from the Picture House Strikers addresses the conference

The Conference was scheduled to start at 10.00 but got underway shortly after 11.00.  Which is just as well as we were delayed by about an hour because someone decided to kill themselves by jumping in front of a train at East Croydon.

The first decision of the Conference was that all attendees from Momentum groups, delegates or not, could vote.  The delegates, including myself, voted by 43-24 to allow everyone to vote which meant that just less than 200 people were eligible to vote.  That was sensible and of course in marked contrast to the Lansman rally that is planned for later this month when there will be no votes on anything.

Despite the best efforts of Lansman the Conference was packed out

A Momentum  Conference was originally called back in November last year but Jon Lansman fought bitterly to prevent it.  Originally his pretext was One Member One Vote but we found out what OMOV really was when he imposed a Constitution on Momentum without any prior discussion at all. OMOV meant  that only 1 member would have a vote - Jon Lansman.   Lansman's coup received the support of people ranging from Owen Jones to Blair's adviser John McTernan thus showing exactly what its anti-democratic character was like.  

The difference, which was spelt out during the day is that the Grassroots Momentum will not be simply an echo chamber for Corbyn and McDonnell, applauding their every concession to the Right. We are not a personality cult but a socialist movement.  We have in many ways to act as the counter-pressure to the Right on the leadership.  Corbyn has already surrendered to the Zionist lobby and its witch hunt, which originally accused him of consorting with holocaust deniers.  He has backtracked over nationalisation and has ended up supporting Theresa May over Brexit.  However the Lansman owned Momentum will not discuss policy and will therefore be content to let Corbyn cruise to defeat either electorally or at the hands of the Right, most probably the latter.

Derbyshire Teaching Assistant strikers Nicol Hutley and Kate Walker explain how a Labour Council has cut their wages by 25%

Delia Mathis, the London Secretary of Momentum chaired the conference and she was accompanied on stage by Jackie Walker and Matt Wrack.  Given some of the sectarian wrangling she chaired very well.

The conference was addressed by FBU General Secretary Matt Wrack, Picturehouse/Ritzy cinema striker Kelly Rogers and Derby Teaching Assistant strikers Nicol Hutley and Kate Walker. A collection was held for both strikes..

The conference agreed a statement of aims and various campaigns including fighting school cuts; campaigning for the NHS and social care; supporting the Derby TAs, Picturehouse workers and others workers’ struggles; and fighting expulsions and suspensions from Labour.

Despite opposition from the Zionist Trotskyists (!) of the Alliance for Workers Liberty, the original statement to the conference opposing ‘unjust’ expulsions was amended to make it clear that fake allegations of anti-Semitism should be resisted.  I proposed this amendment and Graham Bash from the LRC seconded.  Both of us Jewish unlike the largely non-Jewish AWL whose concern about 'left anti-Semitism' is so touching.

There was debate about defending migrants’ rights as distinct from workers’ rights in general: this was resolved by moving support for workers’ rights and struggles to the top while maintaining a clear distinct point about migrants’ rights. It was also agreed that there should be a further conference in the Autumn.

There were 3 position that Conference had to vote for in the afternoon regarding future structure.  The first was in essence a repetition of the old Momentum structure of a National Committee which was rejected by a large majority  It came down to either Option 2 -  a proposal to have a six-strong coordinating committee consisting of officers such as Chair, Secretary and Treasurer.  This was defeated by 89 votes to 83 votes in favour of an absurd proposal put forward by the Alliance for Workers Liberty that there should be a ’15-20’ strong Steering Committee (it was 20). Conference agreed this should be voted for by first past the post as opposed to STV (proportional representation)).  My understanding of this is that a National Committee will not be put in place but I was out of the debate for most of the time so I can't be sure.

Momentum banners adorned the hall as about 40 groups sent delegates

39 candidates stood and the following were elected:
Matt Wrack – Waltham Forest (member of pre-coup Steering Committee)
Sahaya James – Lambeth (member of new National Coordinating Group)
Tracy McGuire – Darlington (pre-coup National Committee)
Jacqueline Walker – Thanet (pre-coup Steering)
Nick Wrack – Southwark (pre-coup NC)
Simon Hannah – Wandsworth
Delia Mattis – Enfield (pre-coup NC)
Kevin McKenna – Tower Hamlets
Jill Mountford – Lewisham (pre-coup Steering)
Graham Bash – Thanet
Rosie Woods – Harrow
Rida Vaquas – Oxford (member of NCG) (pre-coup NC)
Lee Griffiths – Tower Hamlets
Alec Price – Medway (pre-coup NC)
Pete Radcliff – Broxtowe
Ed Whitby – Newcastle (pre-coup NC)
Tina Werkmann – Sheffield
Jan Pollock – London, not sure of group
Richard Gerrard – Southwark
Joan Twelves – Lambeth

Myself and another candidate from Brighton weren’t elected and from a cursory reading at least 3 of the above were from the AWL (only 1 of whom declared their allegiance) suggesting it will be an interesting Committee!

Tony Greenstein