The Gaza Ghetto Uprising

If Ha'aretz's Gideon Levy were in the Labour Party he would be expelled for comparing Israel’s actions to those of the Nazis!

This is an excellent article.  There is nothing I can add that can improve it.  One can only wonder at the bravery of Gideon Levy who writes from the belly of the beast.

In describing Gaza as a ghetto and making a comparison with the Warsaw Ghetto he is doing no more than the last Commander of the Warsaw Ghetto Resistance Marek Edelman, who became a non-person in Israel and for Zionism thereafter.

As Ha’aretz wrote on 9^th August 2002 in an article Letter to 'Palestinian Partisans' Raises International Storm

Dr. Marek Edelman, the last of the uprising leaders still living, wrote an "open letter" to Palestinians this week, asking them to stop the bloodshed and enter into peace negotiations. But the letter has prompted a dispute among the remaining survivors of the uprising and their families, since in his letter Edelman does not mention the word "terrorism."

Moreover, the letter is filled with hints of comparisons between the Palestinians' fight and that of the ghetto residents. He addresses "the commanders of the Palestinians armed organizations and the partisan organizations, and the soldiers of the armed Palestinian organizations."

There is a report on Al Jazeera that a ceasefire has come into operation. 

People have asked why Palestinians in Gaza continue to fire rockets despite the enormous disparity in strength between them and the Zionists – the answer is quite simple.  They have nothing to lose such is the desperate conditions they live in. Gaza is the largest such prison camp in the world.  It is a concentration camp.

The Gaza Ghetto Uprising

Gideon Levy

May 05, 2019 2:14 AM

The cruelty and temerity of the people in Gaza once more reached new heights Saturday: dozens of rockets on Israel before the week of its Independence Day, just after its Holocaust Remembrance Day, and worst of all, two weeks before its Eurovision. How dare you Gaza, how dare you.

Israel still hasn’t recovered from the Holocaust, is preening itself for its Independence Day, the musicians are starting to arrive at Ben-Gurion Airport, and you’re firing Qassam rockets. How will we be able to celebrate? News reports give the impression that Israel is under siege; Gaza is threatening to destroy it. Twitter has already suggested “Eva’s Story on the Gaza Border” – a play on the social media campaign about the Holocaust.

Pundits explain that it’s all because of Hamas’ greed. Ramadan is beginning and “they’re under crazy pressure for cash.” Or, “It’s all because of the weak security policy that has gotten the terror groups used to Israel; we only strike buildings.”

And so they shoot, those villains. Hamas wants money, Israel’s too soft on them, they are terror, we are peace; they were born to kill. On Friday the army killed four protesters by the Gaza border fence, but who’s counting. In Israel a teenage boy tripped while running for a shelter. “When a lack of policy and continuity yields to blackmail,” a voice of wisdom mumbled, and nobody could figure out what he was proposing. Benny Gantz, the alternative. This is what we have an opposition for.

Everything is completely disconnected from context and reality, intentionally and willfully. Half a week after Holocaust Remembrance Day,  the knowledge that 2 million people have been locked up more than 12 years behind barbed wire in a giant cage doesn’t remind Israel of anything and doesn’t arouse anything. Half a week before Independence Day, the struggle for freedom and independence of another people is perceived as murderous terror for no reason.

Even the desperate attempt to prevent the brink of starvation is perceived as greed; the effort to somehow impart the appearance of a holiday in the holiest month of the year is depicted as extortion. That’s how low the brainwashing goes and no one protests. Everyone accepts it with a shrug.  Anyone who doubts how hollow and destructive the inculcation of the Holocaust is in Israel should look at the responses in Israel to this Gaza Ghetto Uprising. Anyone who ignores the reality in Gaza or tries to deny its disaster has learned nothing.

Gaza is a ghetto and what’s happening in the south is a ghetto uprising. There's no other way to describe it. You can make claims against Hamas but you can’t make any claims against Gaza. It’s fighting for its freedom and no struggle is more just than its struggle, and Hamas is its leader.

The countdown to Hamas’ death has already begun: Only seven more months until the UN report, until Gaza is unfit for human habitation. But Israel yawns and its spokespeople only know how to tout “deterrence,” that monster we’ve created to justify every killing, closure and bout of destruction, as we lie ourselves to death that there’s something to deter 2 million unemployed, desperate, humiliated people, some of whom are hungry or dying for lack of medical care, and all of whom are locked up.

No one in Israel can imagine life in Gaza over the past 12 years. There are people who see to it that we don’t know, including Israel’s ban on the entry of Israeli journalists, which has stoked no protest at all. “Eva’s Story” should be filmed in Gaza way before it's filmed in the Gaza border area.

A country that is established on the memory of the ghettos, which only a few days ago sanctified that memory, hides its face from the much larger ghetto that it built with its own hands and doesn’t want to see, one hour from the center of that country. A country that was established in a bloody struggle will not recognize the justness of the struggle of another people and wonders whether that people even exists. A society that considers itself exemplary, which was established on the world's indifference to its suffering, shows monstrous heartlessness to the suffering it is causing.

“What were they before?” a woman asked me Friday in a lecture I gave in Tel Aviv. And what were we? What have we become?

Brighton and Hove Labour Party Emerges as the Largest Party in the Local Elections Despite the Best Efforts of the Zionists

Tweeting Your Opposition to Israeli Apartheid Can Get You Suspended as the racist Jewish Labour Movement makes clear their opposition to a Corbyn led Labour Party

Below are photos of Alex's leafleting team - despite being suspended, Alex obtained the highest vote of the labour candidates 

The election results were Labour 20 (23), Tories 14 (20) and Green 19 (11) Independent 1 (0) with the 2015 election results in brackets.  

In fact Labour held 20 seats prior to the elections because there had been 2 defections to the TIG group, including former leader Warren Morgan and one councillor, Ann Meadows, crossed the floor and joined the Tories.

Meadows, a councillor for 20 years stood again for the Tories and obtained just 627 votes, 47 votes ahead of the next Tory and 23 votes below the third placed Green!  The Labour candidates all gained over 1,500 votes which demonstrated that after 20 years as a councillor she hadn’t secure a personal following, thus proving the wisdom of deselecting her.

In Wish Ward, Momentum supporter and the only Black woman standing, Alex Braithwaite was suspended. Her offence was to call into question the fake anti-Semitism campaign supported by the Tory press.  According to The Argus her offence was that

‘She retweeted an article by Vox Political entitled ‘A general election is in the offing – time for another anti-Semitism smear against Jeremy Corbyn’

According to that well known anti-racist paper, the Daily Mail Alex ‘shared messages supporting Ken Livingstone and claiming the Rothschild family controlled the European Central Bank.’

The Nazis struck a coin, with the Zionist Star of David on one side and the Swastika on the other after the Head of the Jewish Desk in the Gestapo , Baron von Mildenstein, came back from a 6 months visit to Zionist settlements in Palestine. The Zionists were delighted at the time but now referring to Zionist relations with the Nazis is 'antisemitic'

Even worse ‘she posted a cartoon which suggested the BBC was controlled by the ‘terrorist state’ of Israel.’

Supporting Ken Livingstone is now part of the definition of anti-Semitism! Suffice to say sharing a tweet five years ago about the Rothschilds hardly counts as anti-Semitism either.

The Sussex Jewish Representative Council (which is fronted by Fiona Sharpe of Sussex Friends of Israel) sent this tweet:

 “We are very concerned by a tweet from Labour candidate, Alex Braithwaite.

“Once again she has questioned and belittled the allegations of anti-Semitism within the Labour Party.

“More than this, she again suggests that it is concocted to ‘smear’ Jeremy Corbyn.”

So questioning the fake anti-Semitism smear campaign is itself proof of ‘anti-Semitism’. Just as challenging the claims of witchcraft in Salem could earn you a place on the gallows.

Every week the Jewish Chronicle runs a new story accusing Corbyn of ‘anti-Semitism’. This week there is a bonus. The next has been extended to John Prescott, Labour’s former Deputy Prime Minister for suggesting that the fake anti-Semitism campaign is about Israel!

John Hobson's classic book on Imperialism

And as if to prove Alex and John Prescott are correct the Jewish Chronicle Editor and former Daily Express editor, Stephen Pollard, wrote an editorial Hobson’s Voice, which openly called Jeremy Corbyn an anti-Semite. Pollard wrote

Week after week, more evidence emerges cementing the inescapable conclusion that Jeremy Corbyn is an antisemite. So, once again, we pose this question to mainstream, decent Labour MPs: How can you, in all conscience, work towards making a racist politician Prime Minister?

Those who campaign to put today’s Labour into power are, inescapably, working to put an antisemite into Ten Downing Street.

Outrageous McCarthyism against someone who, unlike Pollard, has spent his whole life fighting racism, anti-Semitism included.

The subject of Pollard’s ire is the foreword that Jeremy Corbyn wrote in 2011 to John Hobson’s 1902 book, Imperialism: A Study. The book Imperialism some 8 years ago.  Hobson like so many people a century or more ago believed that Jews were the centre of world finance.  Many Zionists like Theodor Herzl also wrote about the ‘terrible power of our purse’.  However malevolent racists and defamers like the Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland forget about Zionism’s anti-Semitic pedigree, included its alliances with anti-Semites like Viktor Orban and Steve Bannon today.

As Guerilla Wire points out in a 1995 pamphlet for the Fabians (page 11), Tony Blair described Hobson as “probably the most famous Liberal convert to what was then literally ‘new Labour’.” – strangely no mention of ‘anti-Semitism’ there.  Likewise in his 2005 Chatham House speech on liberty and the role of the state, Gordon Brown cited Hobson with approval – also nothing was said about ‘anti-Semitism’.

Indeed despite the fulminations of the Guardian’s racist and Zionist columnist Jonathan Freedland, the cover of the 2011 edition to which Jeremy Corbyn wrote the foreword, carries a Guardian review which said ‘Hobson’s Imperialism belongs to the small group of books in the years from 1900 to the outbreak of war that have definitely changed the contours of social thought.’

Again no mention of ‘anti-Semitism’ and in 2015 the Guardian’s former political editor Michael White wrote:

“At his Nottingham rally someone thrust into my hand a copy of JA Hobson’s influential classic, Imperialism (1902) whose 2011 edition contains Jeremy’s own perfectly decent introductory essay. Its analysis will impress many”. 

Strangely enough Michael White made no mention of ‘anti-Semitism’. 

If anything proves that the ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign against Corbyn and people like Alex Braithwaite is fake then the attacks on Corbyn over his review of a classic text on Imperialism by John Hobson proves it definitively.

It’s not surprising Corbyn didn’t mention the 10 or so anti-Semitic lines in a book of 400 pages because they were wholly irrelevant. As Guerilla Wire says:

‘Phil Miller quoted Glyn Secker, secretary of Jewish Voice for Labour:

“Daniel Finkelstein, in his scurrilous piece for the Times (April 30th), ingeniously cobbles together quotes from two different books by Hobson . . . (he) does in one passage make a reference to the Jewish element in international finance and to the Rothschilds as did many others at that time. But he also referred to JP Morgan and Cecil Rhodes — neither of them Jewish — as examples of financiers backing imperialism”.

In other words the racist duo, Finkelstein and Freedland, deliberately manufactured a story out of nothing with the sole intention of  maligning Corbyn.

The Editor of the Jewish Chronicle, Stephen Pollard, has form.  When the Tories formed an alliance with anti-Semitic parties in the European Parliament in 2009 they were attacked by the then Foreign Secretary David Miliband. Who defended the Tories?  Stephen Pollard, who wrote that Michal Kaminski, the Polish Law & Justice Party MEP was “one of the greatest friends to the Jews in a town where anti-Semitism and a visceral loathing of Israel are rife.’ And it is true.  Besides being an anti-Semite, Kaminski was, like Trump and Bannon and many others, a strong Zionist.  Because Pollard defines anti-Semitism in terms of Israel not Jews. Whereas to most people anti-Semitism is hatred of Jews to Pollard anti-Semitism is criticism of Israel.

Once upon a time Jonathan Freedland called out genuine racists and anti-Semites including Jewish Chronicle Editor Stephen Pollard

Ironically on this occasion Freedland waxed lyrical about Kaminski and his fascist origins. He wrote in an opinion piece:

there was a time when no self-respecting British politician would have gone anywhere near such people. Kaminski began his career in the National Rebirth of Poland movement, inspired by a 1930s fascist ideology that dreamed of a racially pure nation. Even today, the PiS slogan is "Poland for Poles" … In 2001 he upbraided the president for daring to apologise for a 1941 pogrom in the town of Jedwabne which left hundreds of Jews dead. Kaminski said there was nothing to apologise for – at least not until Jews apologised for what he alleged was the role Jewish partisans and Jewish communists had played alongside the Red Army in Poland.

Today Freedland sings a different tune alongside Pollard. However that is no reason why the Labour Party should sing the same song.

Alex Braithwaite’s offence was being an anti-Zionist not an anti-Semite. Hove must be one of the most anti-Semitic places in Britain! Although the Tories retained Wish Ward the other Labour candidate gained 1,107 votes whereas Alex gained 1,275, 168 or 15% more votes! Despite the false claims of Fiona Sharpe that Jewish voters in the ward would be concerned, voters made it very clear what they thought of these false allegations.

The sooner that the Labour Party begins to stand up to this bogus campaign from the Jewish Labour Movement and Zionist pressure groups, the sooner the anti-Semitism issue will be put to bed. The JLM have made it clear that they will not support a Labour Government led by Jeremy Corbyn.  This racist group should be disaffiliated immediately.

Right-wing Labour candidate defeated in Hanover - member of Apartheid supporting Jewish Labour Movement (although she's not Jewish)

The results for Labour in Brighton were mixed. In Hollingdean and Stanmer Ward, Labour lost one of its seats to the Greens. Phil Clarke, former General Secretary of the Trades Council was defeated by 56 votes. In Preston Park Ward, Labour lost its two councilors as the Green Party won all 3 seats. An excellent local activist Denise Frend was defeated but the consolation prize was the defeat of JLM member, the racist Julie Cattell who belongs with Chuka Ummuna’s TIG. Likewise in Hanover and Elm Grove, although Danielle Spencer, a Momentum supporter was defeated another JLM supporter Emma Daniels was defeated, a clear victory for anti-racism.

Daniel Yates, Blairite leader of Labour Group, member of racist JLM who banned the public from the election count for the first time ever

In Queens Park a strong challenge by the Greens meant that Labour lost one of the 3 seats and Momentum supporter Colin Piper.  A number of good socialists were elected in wards such as in Moulsecoomb where Kate Knight was elected and East Brighton where Nikki Brennan was elected. Overall the balance in the Labour Group is estimated as tilting towards the left. Currently the leader Daniel Yates is a Blairite and member of the JLM. It is to be hoped that he is replaced by a socialist.

I also found it strange that for the first time ever, under Yate's undemocratic administration, local people were refused access to the election announcements unless they had pre-existing passes. I await an explanation.

There can be no doubt that the campaign waged by the Right of the Labour Party in Brighton & Hove aimed at destroying the chances of success in the local elections. In this they were unsuccessful. Prominent amongst these were Luke Stanger, a racist who believes that Travellers are a ‘nasty blight’.  But although Stanger has been suspended the kid glove treatment he has been afforded makes it clear that ‘anti-Semitism’ is a privileged form of racism in the Labour Party today.

Tony Greenstein

Rabbis tell their students that “Hitler was correct in every word he said… he was just on the wrong side.”

'The gentiles will want to be our slaves. Being a slave to a Jew is the best'

Just as Israel was getting ready to commemorate Holocaust Memorial Day, news broke of Rabbis Eliezer Kashtiel, head of the Bnei David pre-military academy in the settlement of Eli and Rabbi Giora Redler, telling their students it wasn’t Hitler who was in the wrong, it was the Jews he killed.

Redler can be heard describing Hitler as

‘the most correct person there ever was, and was correct in every word he said… he was just on the wrong side.”

In other words Hitler’s only fault was that he targeted the wrong people, Jews, instead of those who were members of the lower race (Arabs?).

“The real Holocaust was not when they murdered the Jews, that’s not it. All these excuses — that it was ideological or systematic — are nonsense,” he said. “Humanism, and the secular culture of ‘We believe in man,’ that’s the Holocaust.”

The rabbis are not alone.  It is a widespread belief amongst religious Zionists that the ‘real Holocaust’ is assimilation, inter-marriage even abortion because all of these involve a loss to the Jewish race.

Rabbi Shimon Elitov, a member of Israel’s Chief Rabbinate told a conference in Budapest in 2014 that “Assimilation in the shocking numbers that we see is worse that the physical Holocaust that we saw,” (my emphasis) Rabbi Yisrael Eichler, a Knesset member for the Haredi United Torah Judaism told a Knesset Committee that assimilation was the ‘silent Holocaust’.

If you believe that what is most important is the preservation of the Jewish nation/race then there is a racist logic that the physical extermination of Jews should be seen as the equivalent of those Jews who have been ‘lost’ to assimilation.

Rabbis Kashtiel and Redler were giving a lecture to recruits to the Israeli army. The videos of their lectures featured on Israel’s Channel 13 last Monday. They can be heard calling for the enslavement of the “stupid and violent” non-Jews due to their genetic inferiority.

Again the Bnei David rabbis were not unusual in advocating that non-Jews should be slaves to Jews. The late Sephardi Chief Rabbi Ovadia Yosef also urged that non-Jews become the slaves of Jews and that non-Jews should be banned from living in Israel.

Rabbi Kashtiel told his young audience that

“The gentiles will want to be our slaves. Being a slave to a Jew is the best. They’re glad to be slaves, they want to be slaves, instead of just walking the streets and being stupid and violent and harming each other, once they’re slaves, their lives can begin to take shape.”

“All around us, we are surrounded by peoples with genetic problems. Ask a simple Arab [because all Arabs are simple - TG]‘where do you want to be?’ He wants to be under the occupation. Why? Because they have genetic problems, they don’t know how to run a country, they don’t know how to do anything. Look at them,”

“Yes, we’re racists.’ He said.

‘We believe in racism… There are races in the world and peoples have genetic traits, and that requires us to try to help them. The Jews are a more successful race.”

What is important to understand is that these people are not marginal cranks.  They hold power in Israeli society. United Torah Judaism is part of Israel’s ruling coalition. The idea that assimilation, Jews marrying non-Jews, is the equivalent of the Holocaust is common to secular Jews too because racial supremacy is the knot that binds secular and religious Jewry.

The leader of the ‘centrist’ Yesh Atid and one of the leaders of Israel’s Blue & White party, Yair Lapid reacted to the wedding of Israeli Arab broadcaster Lucy Aharish to Jewish actor Tzachi Halevy by saying that intermarriage was problematic because “we haven’t recovered from the Holocaust yet.”

Students at the Bnei David pre-army academy learn in the study hall. (Screen capture/YouTube)

This isn’t the first time that Bnei David has been in the headlines. In July 2016 Bnei David Rabbi Yigal Levinstein, was recorded calling LGBT people “deviant.”  Less than eight months later, Levinstein told IDF recruits that military service drives female soldiers “crazy” and strips them of their Jewishness. In February of this year, another Bnei David rabbi, Yosef Kelner, lectured students on women being “weak-minded” and possessing a reduced capacity for spirituality.

The Jerusalem Post explained why, despite former Defence Minister Avigdor Lieberman threatening to cut their funding, Bnei David has been the darling of the Israeli military. It all began in the late 1980s when the then-head of IDF Central Command Amram Mitzna and Rabbi Levenstein conceived of a program that would encourage more religious-Zionist young men to become IDF officers.

In 1988, together with Rabbi Sadan, Levenstein created the very first religious pre-military academy. Today there are dozens of such pre-military academies throughout Israel. In 2016, Sadan received the Israel Prize, its highest award, for the project.

As the Jerusalem Post explained ‘It would not be an exaggeration to say that the religious pre-military academies revolutionized the religious-Zionist approach to military service.’ Quite simply there are now hundreds of religious-Zionist zealots in the IDF, all of them influenced by the racist, sexist and homophobic teachings they have received and for whom the Palestinians are no more than subhuman.

As the religious manual Torat HaMelech, a guide to killing non-Jews legally explained, the Arabs are the historic biblical enemy Amalek and in war it is one’s duty to wipe out every Arab, children included.

After the footage was broadcast Kashtiel and Redler claimed their comments were taken out of context! Rabbi Kashtiel stated that

“yes, we are racist. We believe in racism, there are races in the world and genetic qualities of nations. This requires us to think how to help them.”

Rabbi Radler explained that the Holocaust was a divine punishment designed to make the Jewish people leave the diaspora and that the true Holocaust, according to him, “is secular culture in which we believe in man, that is the Holocaust.”  

In other words the Holocaust was punishment for Jews who refused to leave the diaspora. Which was what Christian fundamentalist Pastor John Hagee, President of Christians United for Israel said when he described Hitler as a ‘hunter’ sent by god to chase the Jews to Israel.

Rabbi Radler went on to say that “Hitler was the rightest person there was” and that Nazi ideology was true as there is a

“masculine side which fights and is focused on honor and the brotherhood of men and a feminine world which is soft and moral and claims one should submit the other cheek.”

It will be claimed that what the two rabbis said was an aberration. That they are a couple of bad apples. The reality is different.  Rather than being the odd one’s out, Radler and Kashtiel are normative.

Repeatedly religious rabbis, especially the Military Rabbinate, have urged that Arabs be treated with extreme cruelty and that the civilian population is a legitimate target. Chief Military Rabbi Avichai Rontzki was responsible for religious propaganda being given to soldiers during Operation Cast Lead in 2008-9 arguing that soldiers should consider all Palestinians, as legitimate targets. The attack on Gaza was portrayed as a religious wars against the Jews’ ancient enemy, the Philistines. One of their favourite phrases was ‘being kind to the cruel [the Arabs] is to be cruel to the kind. [Jews]’

The sexism on display at Bnei David is anything but exceptional. Another Military Chief Rabbi Colonel Eyal Krim supported the idea of rape in war ruling that “Even though fraternizing with a gentile woman is a very serious matter’ it was permitted during wartime.

Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu

Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu, son of a former Sephardi Chief Rabbi and justified in a 2002 article the use of rape in war. David Sheen, an Israeli journalist described how Eliyahu justified genocide in Gaza arguing that 100,000 or even a million civilians should be killed.

Eliyahu was also the Safed Chief rabbi who banned Jews from renting rooms or flats to Arabs.  A position dozens of Israeli rabbis supported.

Mordechai Kedar, a Professor at the religious university of Bar-Ilan urged the use of rape in war since the fear of having one’s sister or mother raped would deter Arab ‘terrorists’.

Nor is their racism at all exceptional. After all the Deputy Defence Minister Rabbi Eli Dahan, in charge of the West Bank’s Civil Administration, described Palestinians as ‘animals’ sub-humans.

“To me, they are like animals, they aren’t human.” Dahan explained that ‘A Jew always has a much higher soul than a gentile, even if he is a homosexual,” If these are views of the Deputy Defence Minister why is it any surprise that ordinary rabbis admire Hitler?

This virulent racism is not confined to just a handful of rabbis. A plurality of Israeli Jews also supports the physical expulsion of Israel’s Palestinian population.

Israel is a Jewish settler state in which Arabs are now officially 3^rd class citizens.  It is a state that does its best to encourage Jewish immigration whilst refusing to readmit Palestinian refugees. It is a country that needs to have a perpetual enemy and is a state of racial supremacy where relationships between Jews and Arabs are officially disapproved.

Israel in short is a state of racial supremacy and it should be no wonder that some Rabbis are coming to the conclusion that Hitler was much misunderstood and that his basic message was correct even if his target, the Jews, was misplaced.

There is no fundamental difference between the ideology of racial supremacy in Nazi Germany, of separation between Jew and non-Jew under the 1935 Nuremburg Laws, and the situation in Israel today.

It is that which explains the background to the Hitler supporting words of the two Israeli rabbis.

See Richard Silverstein’s Senior Rabbis at Israeli Military Prep School Say “Hitler was Right”

How to Create Anti-Semitism in 2 easy steps

First you say that Zionism is the same as being Jewish, then, when people criticise Israel you cry ‘anti-Semitism’

What is remarkable about the false anti-Semitism campaign waged by Labour’s racist Deputy Leader Tom Watson and child abuse supporter Margaret Hodge is how often they get away with it. 

[There was a time when Jewish Chronicle then Daily Express Editor Stephen Pollard wrote about Hodge that ‘It’s difficult to imagine a more blatant, shameful and utterly contemptible piece of two-faced hypocrisy than the behaviour of Margaret Hodge‘. It was true then and it’s true now!

Jeremy Corbyn became Labour leader because of a desire to see fundamental change. However the people who supported him were political novices who were unprepared for the backlash that followed.

It was not easy for the Right to attack Corbyn who won as the anti-Austerity candidate. Arguing, as did the Dark Prince Peter Mandelson that he was “intensely relaxed about people becoming filthy rich” whilst people were using food banks or sleeping on the streets did not convince many people. Liz Kendal tried it in 2015 and flopped with 4.5%.

‘Anti-Semitism’ was a much more useful weapon, almost custom made. It had an aura of moral righteousness about it. Fighting ‘anti-Semitism’ could make even the worst reactionary feel good. It is, as I once wrote in an essay for Return No. 5, ‘The False Anti-Semitism of the Right’.

Fighting for lower taxes for the rich is far less morally uplifting than opposing racism against those who suffered from attempted extermination. Even if it means getting into bed with racists!

The Daily Mail, which during the 1930’s supported Hitler abroad and Sir Oswald Moseley’s British Union of Fascists at home in addition to campaigning against the admission of Jewish refugees from the Nazis, began the fake anti-Semitism campaign with a story alleging Jeremy Corbyn had worked with a holocaust denier Paul Eisen.

There is a good tradition for this kind of thing.  When British imperialism conquered India it did it so in the name of fighting Suttee, a Hindu custom of burning widows on the pyre of their husbands. It didn’t mention bleeding India dry of its wealth and resources or blasting people from the barrels of cannons.

That is why it is disappointing that Richard Burgon MP, one of the better members of Corbyn’s Shadow Cabinet should first deny and then distance himself from his perfectly reasonable view that Zionism is a threat to peace.

Zionism based its whole project on the  slogan that Palestine was a ‘land without a people for a people without a land’. The slogan had first been coined by a Christian Restorationist, Alexander Keith.

The main accusation against Burgon should have been that it was a statement of the obvious. Saying Zionism is a threat to peace is like saying that dogs bark or fish swim. Why should be want to deny it?

The JLM demonstrate that their concern is Zionism not anti-Semitism

It is irrelevant whether or not Burgon remembered saying that Zionism is a threat to peace. Obviously he must have believed it and why not? Israel has, since it was founded, based its whole existence on creating enemies. First it was Gamel Abdul Nasser of Egypt, then the PLO, then Hezbollah and now Iran. The Israeli state could not justify its existence without an enemy. 

Recently the enemy has become the 40,000 Black refugees within its borders whose only crime is to be Black and not Jewish. The term used by Netanyahu is ‘infiltrators’ which the Israeli Labour Party’s Avi Gabbay repeated. Infiltrators conjures up another enemy of Israel, the Palestinian refugees who ‘infiltrated’ back into Palestine after their expulsion in 1948. Hundreds if not thousands of them were murdered by the Israeli army in the 1950’s. Calling refugees ‘infiltrators’ is an attempt to equate them with ‘terrorists’.

The lies of Jonathan Freedland - the famous mural had no 'hooked-nose' Jewish bankers in it and 4 of the bankers were non-Jewish

But it’s not only within the Middle East that Israel has been a threat to peace. It has consistently supported the most repressive and genocidal regimes abroad. It actively aided the genocide in Guatemala where up to 200,000 Mayan Indians were slaughtered. It supported the death squad regime in El Salvador. Shipped weapons to the Nicaraguan Contras when the US Congress cut them off.  It supported Pinochet in Chile (Israel’s Supreme Court recently refused to allow the files to be opened on ‘national security’ grounds).  It armed the neo-Nazi Junta of Argentina between 1976-1983 when it murdered up to 3,000 Jews and of course more recently it armed the Burmese regime as it committed genocide. Israel was also of course the main arms supplier to the Apartheid regime in South Africa, including nuclear weapons.

Tom Watson defended 'poor Phil' who campaigned on this racist leaflet from Phil Woolas in 2010 - the High Court removed Woolas from the Commons for lies in a campaign that aimed to 'make white folk angry'

Colin Shindler described in the Jewish Chronicle how

Despite a US arms embargo, Israel trained personnel and provided equipment which could be used against Pinochet’s opponents. In 1989 Eitan Kalinsky and his wife were sent as Israeli emissaries to teach at the Jewish school in Santiago. They attended the now public protests against Pinochet’s regime and were amazed to note that the riot-control vehicles had been manufactured by Beit Alfa, a left-wing Hashomer Hatzair kibbutz.

Kibbutz Artzi was the kibbutz federation of the so-called Marxist Zionist Mapam party!

So the question is why Burgon didn’t proudly admit that he called Israel a threat to world peace and defy his accusers to do their worst? After all Israel is an openly apartheid state which for half a century has maintained a military dictatorship in the Occupied Territories.

The reason is Zionist Political Terrorism. The fake anti-Semitism campaign run by the Israeli Embassy, as Al Jazeera documented, has successfully intimidated otherwise decent politicians like Richard Burgon into denying their own private views.

The JLM have successfully demonised Ken Livingstone, Chris Williamson, Jackie Walker, Marc Wadsworth, Chris Williamson and others, myself. Included. Unfortunately, instead of Momentum standing up to them, Jon Lansman and Owen Jones have gave gone along with the McCarthyites.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hoyo140ITc4

When Burgon first stated Zionism was a threat to peace, Joan Ryan MP wrote an open letter on 16^th August 2016 to him. I replied with another Open Letter four days later! This was a dead issue deliberately resurrected by the JLM in order to continue with its campaign of intimidation and vilification.

If Burgon had had the guts to stand up to the JLM and Katz and call these petty racists out, as Moshe Machover for example did, then Katz would have been reduced to the insignificant straw man that he is.

The arguments used by Katz of the Jewish Labour Movement to attack Burgon are interesting and show the dishonesty of the Zionists.  Katz stated that ‘the vast majority of British Jews identify as Zionists’ and that Burgon was therefore ‘insulting a core part of their identity.’

Leaving aside how you can ‘insult’ an identity as opposed to agreeing or disagreeing with it, his basic premise is untrue. In British Jews Attitudes to Israel conducted in 2015 just 59%, down from 71% five years previously, defined themselves as Zionists. 31% of British Jews said they were not Zionists. 59% is not ‘overwhelming’.

However even if an overwhelming majority of British Jews supported Zionism what would that say?  That the majority of British Jews were racists?  Stupid? Ignorant?  Choose your adjective. However if Zionism is racist, as it clearly is, then the views of British Jews are irrelevant.  Truth is more important.

Racism is about dehumanisation. Racism defines people as inferior according to arbitrary attributes such as ‘race’, colour or religion. It is not about challenging a political identity.

Salman Rushdie

When 40 years ago Salman Rushie published Satanic Verses the vast majority of Muslims considered it an insult to their identity as Muslims. Copies of the book were publicly burned and a fatwa was put on the head of Salman Rushdie by Ayatollah Khomeini.  Many of us on the Left had no hesitation in supporting Rushdie’s right to publish his book unharmed. Were we racist because we were opposed to a core element of some Muslim’s identity?  Of course not.

If some Africans believe that FGM is part of their identity is it racist to oppose it?  Zionism is just as much of a threat to Palestinians and FGM is.  If some Jews identify as Zionists that paints them as incorrigible racists who identify with the historic oppressors of Jews.

The right to criticise religion is a fundamental part of any free society.  Likewise the right to call an ideology, Zionism, racist or a threat to peace is called freedom of speech. It is irrelevant whether Zionism is the core part of the identity of many Jews. So what? It is also the core identity of Evangelical Christians and opposition to Zionism is the core identity of many anti-Zionist Jews. 

Eric Pickles defended the Tory link-up with anti-Semitic and racist parties in the European parliament

The tragedy is that under the baleful influence of the Zionist Jon Lansman, fake leftist Owen Jones and others such as Shadow Foreign Minister Emily Thornberry, supported by cowardly trade union leaders such as Dave Prentis, the Labour Party has adopted the IHRA definition of ‘anti-Semitism’ which conflates criticism of Israel and Zionism with anti-Semitism.  That is why out and out racists like Tory Eric Pickles have signed up to a definition of anti-Semitism that provides an ideological underpinning for British foreign policy. 

What the present campaign of equating anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism is doing is to identify British Jews with Zionist atrocities. All the things that the Israeli state does is equated with British Jews. That is why supporting Zionism is the best way to support anti-Semitism.

The fake anti-Semitism allegations have been much in evidence in the local elections. In Brighton the only Black woman council candidate, Alex Braithwaite has been suspended from Brighton Labour Party.  It is too late for her name to be taken off the ballot paper and we hope that in two days time she will nonetheless be elected to the council.

Another Labour Party member, Amanda Bishop, foolishly believed that Alex’s removal was as a result of the actions of local Jews, since what was done was in the name of the Sussex Jewish Representative Council and she made a suggestion on Facebook, more in jest, that we should march to the local synagogue!  She too has been suspended although Amanda too has a long and good record as an anti-racist in the days of Apartheid. The fake anti-Semitism campaign is being used by racists to attack anti-racists.

The only effect of the fake anti-Semitism campaign is to INCREASE anti-Semitism.  And that too will be welcome to Zionism because without anti-Semitism there is no Zionism or emigration to Israel.

Tony Greenstein