D'ye Ken Why British Jews Distrust the Labour Party?

So the wily and egregious Ken Livingstone's in trouble (slap on the wrist stuff) with the Labour Party, and a number of usual suspects have hot-footed it to his aid.

It's not as if the antisemitic ex-Mayor of London and Greater London Council chief has been expelled from the party: he's been suspended for another year (on top of the year just passed), and can still attend branch meetings and vote in ballots.

Hence the tweet above from Luciana Berger MP.

To quote London academic David Hirsh here:

Last year

'Ken Livingstone has been suspended from Labour membership for two years, counted from last April, when he said on the radio that Hitler "was supporting Zionism - this was before he went mad and ended up killing six million Jews"....Livingstone keeps on repeating that his Jewish friends agree with him; and there is indeed a small but noisy coterie of Jews ready to bear witness against the Jewish community and to whitewash their hero....

Livingstone is not a jolly, harmless old bloke who is basically on the right side and who supports the Palestinians; he has spent much of his life crafting antisemitic discourse for mass public consumption.  

Last year

There is a bigger problem of political antisemitism in the Labour Party than Livingstone; the leadership of the party itself is implicated in the kind of politics which cultivates it.

And now, Labour is not even able decisively to distance itself from Livingstone by expelling him.  No doubt, Livingstone will still be invited to do media work and he will still be treated as a respectable and experienced political leader; because even now, that is how he is seen by many.'

There's an online petition afoot, denying that Red Ken (as he used to be known) is an antisemite.

I don't very often repeat guest blogposts of mine on other websites, but I feel compelled to repeat one I wrote about a year ago for Elder of Ziyon.

Apologies if you've read it before.

I include copies of recent eloquent tweets by Wales-based academic Dr James Vaughan, whom I mention in the following:

Regarding the current crisis in the British Labour Party regarding the pestilential antisemitism lurking in certain cliques on the party’s Left, British journalist Nick Cohen has observed with his customary insight  

“Challenging prejudices on the left wing is going to be all the more difficult because, incredibly, the British left in the second decade of the 21st century is led by men steeped in the worst traditions of the 20th.

 When historians had to explain last week that if Montgomery had not defeated Rommel at El Alamein in Egypt then the German armies would have killed every Jew they could find in Palestine, they were dealing with the conspiracy theory that Hitler was a Zionist, developed by a half-educated American Trotskyist called Lenni Brenner in the 1980s.

When Jeremy Corbyn defended the Islamist likes of Raed Salah, who say that Jews dine on the blood of Christian children, he was continuing a tradition of communist accommodation with antisemitism that goes back to Stalin’s purges of Soviet Jews in the late 1940s.

 It is astonishing that you have to, but you must learn the worst of leftwing history now. For Labour is not just led by dirty men but by dirty old men, with roots in the contaminated soil of Marxist totalitarianism. If it is to change, its leaders will either have to change their minds or be thrown out of office.”

The torrid abuse on social media (Twitter and Facebook) directed at anti-Corbyn Labour MP John Mann (pictured left, in an abusive Twitter post by an antisemite last year), a blunt honest Yorkshireman who exemplifies what is fair and honourable in the Labour tradition, has been a bulldoggish champion of Jews and foe of antisemitism  and who has had the grit and integrity to tell fellow Labour MP Ken Livingstone just what is odious about the latter’s outburst regarding Hitler and Zionism, illustrates the antisemitic ratbaggery which infests many of the party’s present rank and file.

From a current pro-Ken petition!

That rank and file has of course been swelled by far leftists of the Israel-hating breed who joined the party in 2015 in order to elect Corbyn as its leader.

For, of course, Corbyn’s anti-Israel activism goes back a long way, not least in lending his name to a defence group for the London-based Palestinians Samar Alami and Jawad Botmeh, post-graduates who, angry at what they foresaw as a peace deal, used their scientific training to make car bombs that exploded outside the Israeli Embassy in Kensington and outside a Jewish charity in Finchley (The Times, 12 December 1996) – and also his championship of Mordechai Vanunu, the convicted Israeli nuclear secrets traitor who is on record as declaring that Judaism is a “backward religion” and that “efforts should be redoubled to create a Palestinian state rather than a Jewish one.  There shouldn’t be a Jewish state.” (The Times, 20 April 2004).

The Labour Party’s infiltration by far left elements hostile to Israel began in the 1970s.  (I was working at the London School of Economics and remember the era well, including how pro-Israel material left on notice boards would be torn down virtually as soon as posted.)

At that juncture the Labour Party, with a few exceptions (notably MPs Christopher Mayhew – who in a BBC interview referred to Jewish MPs as “the Israeli army below the gangway” and

who in 1970 told the Institute of Race Relations “I would like the Institute to consider the proposition that Mrs Golda Meir is most unlikely to have ancestors who once lived in Palestine, and far less likely to have such ancestors than Yasser Arafat” – David Watkins and Andrew Faulds) was still very much pro-Israel.

Anybody with a serious interest in the topic of Labour’s relations with Israel and the pernicious influence of Mayhew and the gang should read the article “’Mayhew’s Outcasts’: anti-Zionism and the Arab lobby in Harold Wilson's Labour” by Dr James Vaughan, a lecturer at what is generally considered  the foremost International Relations Department in Britain, the long-established one at Aberystwyth University:

In order to illuminate what I write below, let me quote an extract from Dr Vaughan’s article (with footnote references omitted):

'An early sign that LMEC [Labour Middle East Council, founded after the Six Day War to counter “Zionist” influence in the party] and CAABU [the Council for the Advancement of Arab-British Understanding] were developing contacts with more radical pro-Palestinian groups can be seen in their members’ association with the Free Palestine newspaper in the 1970s.  Free Palestine had begun life as a ‘violent and crudely written’ newsletter in 1968 and indirect links to CAABU were established when Claud Morris agreed to publish the newspaper in 1969.

That business relationship proved to be short-lived but the newspaper continued to cultivate links with British MPs and activists.  Its editor, Louis Eaks, brought his own connections to the Young Liberal ‘Red Guard’ faction, and Free Palestine received political support and journalistic contributions from LMEC regulars like Mayhew, Watkins and Faulds.  Morris later claimed not to have been aware of Free Palestine’s links to Arafat and the PLO when he agreed to publish the newspaper in 1969.

Those connections, however, are not especially difficult to uncover.  A February 1975 editorial stated that Free Palestine’s line was ‘determined by the political and strategy decisions of the Palestine Liberation Organisation and Al Fatah’ whilst asserting that ‘this newspaper is not funded by either of these organisations.’  In 1981, inviting Andrew Faulds to join the editorial committee, Eaks claimed that Free Palestine was ‘independent of any specific Palestinian organisation’ although he noted that the newspaper was ‘committed to the Fatah/PLO line.’

Andrew Faulds?

A closer look at the newspaper’s parent company, Petra Publishing, however, reveals that among the firm’s directors was Khaled al Hassan (Abu Said), a founding member of Fatah and one of Arafat’s closest advisers. Another director was Saleh Khalili, who was also a member of Free Palestine’s editorial committee.  Khalili has been identified by Alex Mitchell as a London-based agent of Abu Jihad, head of the PLO’s military operations. 

According to Mitchell, Khalili’s job as the PLO’s ‘man-at-large in London’ brought him into collaborative liaison with Gerry Healey’s Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP), whose publications were subsidised by Libya’s Colonel Gadhaffi, and, through the WRP, to the Lambeth Council leader, Ted Knight, who sat alongside Ken Livingstone on the editorial board of the Labour Herald newspaper.  Mitchell has even claimed that Knight met with Arafat, Abu Jihad and Khalili in Tunis and succeeded in soliciting a £15,000 donation to the Labour Herald from the PLO.

Whatever the truth of that, it is certainly clear that much of the Labour Herald’s content was, in its anti-Zionism, scarcely distinguishable from that of Free Palestine.  Free Palestine was also connected to the Palestine Action group, founded by Ghada Karmi in June 1972.  It was Eaks who first informed Andrew Faulds of plans to establish ‘an anti-Apartheid type of organisation’ to lobby on behalf of the Palestinians ‘within the Labour, Communist and Liberal parties’ in April 1972 and the new group’s political platform included support for:

1. The restitution of all the rights of the Palestinians, especially the right to return to their homes.

2. The creation of a unitary, secular, democratic Palestine in which all citizens have equal rights irrespective of race or creed.

3. The struggle of the Palestinians for the liberation of their homeland.

LMEC considered the desirability of cooperation with Palestine Action at a meeting of its Executive Committee in October.  Evidently, there were doubts about the wisdom of a formal association and, noting that ‘an approach had been made to LMEC to support the newly formed Palestine Action group’, it was ruled that ‘no official support should be given to this movement.’ However, whilst LMEC resolved to keep its distance from Palestine Action, there were no such restrictions upon individual members.  Indeed, Andrew Faulds, a member of LMEC’s Executive Committee since January 1973,became far more than a passive supporter of Palestine Action.

In December 1973, Karmi wrote to Faulds to confirm that ‘you have been elected President of Palestine Action at our AGM’; an honorary position that Faulds happily accepted. Faulds played a key role in a major breakthrough for Palestine Action at the BBC.  It came in the form of a television programme, ‘The Right to Return’, broadcast on 26 November 1976 as part of BBC 2’s ‘Open Door’ series. Faulds presented the programme, overseeing guest appearances from David Watkins and the anti-apartheid campaigner and Young Liberal chairman, Peter Hain.

A few days after the broadcast, Karmi reported that no less a PLO luminary than Abu Lutof (Farouk Kaddoumi) had praised the programme as ‘the best film he had ever seen on the Palestine issue’ and CAABU’s John Reddaway also congratulated Faulds for making ‘a notable contribution towards the exposition and defence of Palestinian rights.’”

You wouldn’t know it from his Wikipedia entry, but former British Labour MP and Cabinet minister Peter Hain (once touted as a future prime minister and now ensconced in the House of Lords) was the Peter Hain mentioned above, an anti-Israel activist of intemperate views.  See my post here

As I note there,  the Jewish Chronicle (5 September 1975) reported:

“Calls for the destruction of Israel as a state and for British Government recognition of the Palestine Liberation Organisation were made by more than 1500 pro-Arab supporters who marched from Speakers’ corner to Downing Street on Sunday while the Jewish rally was in progress.” 

Flanked by some 500 police officers, marchers included Communists, Marxists, Young Socialists, Young Liberals, as well as hundreds of Palestinians, Syrians, Iraqis and other Arabs. Hain called on “radicals on the left-wing in Britain” to fight for the Palestinian cause.

(As will be seen in that blogpost of mine linked to above, Hain a few years ago attempted to put the “one state solution” – entailing the eradication of the sovereign state of Israel – back on the political agenda, but his views were disowned by the then party leadership.)

On 16 September 1978 The Times reported “growing concern” that the ANL had been infiltrated by, and was increasingly beholden to, the Trotskyite Socialist Workers’ Party (SWP), which of course is so notoriously represented in anti-Israel protests today.

The 16,000-strong Federation of Conservative Students had accordingly dissociated itself from the ANL, and Dr Jacob Gewirtz (d. 1996), head of the Research Department of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, ‘says he is convinced that the league was the brain-child of the SWP and that party has “other fish to fry”’.

In a letter published in The Times on 25 September 1978, concerned reader George Mandel stated:  

“The leaders of the ANL could dispel our doubts if they were to state publicly whether or not they believe that Zionism is fundamentally racist.  If the answer is no, many Jews will be reassured.  If it is yes, they should explain (not only to us but also to their own supporters) why they are inviting unrepentant racialists to join them.”

Disclosed a Jewish resident of Hove, Sussex, J. [Jack] Garnel, in a letter in The Times (27 October 1978):

Hain the Pain

‘I am able to quote a reply to part of Mr. Mandel’s question.  It was given to me by Peter Hain, who describes himself as the Press Officer of the Anti-Nazi League.  In November 1977, I wrote to Hain protesting about an anti-Zionist article of his published in Free Palestine ...'  In his reply, dated November 11 [1977], Hain declared: “I believe Zionism to be a racist creed”. I agree with the decision of the Jewish Board of Deputies not to affiliate to the ANL.  As a supporter of the right of Israel to exist, I am like most Jews classified as a Zionist.  In combatting neo-Nazism, I have no desire to rub shoulders with anti-Zionists who support the PLO, which has been rightly described by Begin as a “Nazi organisation” and whose covenant is regarded by Israeli Jews as an Arabic Mein Kampf.’

On 1 November The Times carried a response from Peter Hain and the Jewish actress Miriam Karlin (whose name was misprinted as Karling at the foot of the letter), describing themselves as “Steering Committee, Anti-Nazi League”.  Their letter began:

“The Anti-Nazi League has been subjected to a number of specious criticisms in your columns recently.  First, J. Garnel … attacks the League because some of its members are opposed to Zionism.  But many others involved in all levels of the league are pro-Zionist.  Indeed, the signatories to this letter disagree on this matter.” 

(That will certainly come as a surprise to those who remember the late Miriam Karlin as a leftist Israel basher and member of Jews for Justice for Palestinians; I suppose the alleged contrast between her and Hain suggests just how extreme Hain’s position was and seemingly still is.)

The letter continued:

“The only criterion for membership of the Anti-Nazi League is opposition to the Nazi activities and racist ideas of the National Front.  We have no policy as an organisation on other political issues and our neutrality on the question of Zionism has been accepted by the Jewish Chronicle, which endorsed the League in an editorial last week…”

That assertion elicited a clarification (The Times, 3 November 1978) from the Jewish Chronicle’s acting editor, David Nathan:

‘In a leader last week the Jewish Chronicle suggested that there might be opportunities for the Board of Deputies to “loosely cooperate with the ANL in those areas of anti-racialist endeavour where the Board can satisfy itself that there is no political gain to the Socialist Workers’ Party or other anti-Zionist forces …. That is very far from blanket endorsement of the ANL.’   

Also worth reading, by anyone interested, is the joint letter from Hain and ANL Organising Secretary Paul Holborow in The Times of 21 September 1978, and the joint letter in the same issue from Neil Harvey and Ian Harvey of Birmingham.

In response to the former letter, Graham Smith, Research Department, National Association for Freedom, observed that in the Socialist Worker of 27 May 1978 Holborow had appealed for funds for that paper in the following terms:

“The [ANL] has won support from people coming into politics for the first time.  We must ensure that many of these people are won to the Socialist movement… We need to have Socialist Worker leading the way in this important job …. Any regular donation to the SWP will not only help to get rid of the Nazi rats, but to begin to get rid of the capitalist sewer that encourages them to breed.’

To quote Dr Vaughan again

‘The cry of ‘Israeli apartheid’ soon became a staple feature of British anti-Zionism.  Writing in Free Palestine under the headline “Palestine must win”, Peter Hain likened Harold Wilson’s views on Israel to “statements rationalising and condoning racialism by right-wingers returning from South Africa”.  The radicalism of Hain’s position at this time can be gauged from his rejection of UN Security Council Resolution 242 and his assertion that “the case for the replacement of Israel by a democratic, secular state of Palestine must be put uncompromisingly” …. The tactic of equating Zionism with Nazism was another distasteful feature of the emerging language of anti-Zionist activism…. 

 Such imagery was not itself new … but there was something more calculated about the use of Nazi imagery as a means of delegitimising Zionism in the 1970s.  Mayhew certainly flirted with the analogy, writing in 1971 that “Germans who massacre Jews are tried and executed. Jews who massacre Arabs are elected to political leadership” …. Free Palestine pioneered visual representations of the Zionism-Nazism analogy.  The front page of its April 1975 issue was adorned with the image of a Palestinian prisoner reaching out from a prison cell window, the bars of which formed the shape of a swastika. Ken Livingstone’s Labour Herald newspaper adopted the “Zionism equals Nazism” trope with equal enthusiasm in the 1980s; perhaps the most notorious example being the 1982 cartoon which, under the caption “The Final Solution”, depicted Israel’s Prime Minister, Menachem Begin in SS uniform, standing atop a mound of bloodied corpses, making a Nazi salute.’

In The Times (31 May 1984) regular columnist Bernard Levin drew attention to a campaign against Freemasons instituted by the Labour-majority Council of the London borough of Brent – “which was marked down by Mr Ken Livingstone for his prospective parliamentary pocket-borough, [and] has long been in the forefront of extremist local government politics…. In March, the previously subterranean campaign against Masons broke surface [in the borough]….”

To people who denied the analogy between the persecution of Jews and the persecution of Freemasons on the grounds that “a Jew cannot help being a Jew but a Mason does not have to be a Mason”, Levin pointed out scathingly that in a free society a person is entitled to belong to whatever group he wishes until such time long as an associated wrongdoing is involved, and added:

“Secret membership...”  Thus do the kissing cousins of anti-semitism jusfify the new bigotry and discrimination … But I know a good many people who, though Jewish, go under an assumed non-Jewish name and do not admit their origin.  Are they, too, unfit to serve on, or under, the Brent Council?  And if I pass their names to a gossip columnist of The Guardian, will he, as he did with Masons, print a daily Jew-list, exposing them as doubly sinister, first because they are Jews and second because they conceal the fact?’

Levin went on: “anti-Semitism in Britain became socially and politically unacceptable when the world learnt just what it could lead to.  But the bacillus was not altogether eradicated, and it has now found another potential group victim.  And a group, so far from being safer than an individual, is more vulnerable, because it has no individual human identity, and can thus more easily be portrayed as truly diabolical.”

The Times of 7 March 1985 carried an article entitled “Why Labour is Losing its Jews” which is eerily pertinent to the present situation.  I assume the author, Peter Bradley, described there as a member of the executive committee of Poale Zion, is none other than the Peter Bradley who from 1997 until 2005 sat as a Labour MP.

Mr Bradley began by observing that whereas in the immediate post-war years perhaps 75 per cent of Anglo-Jewry supported the Labour Party, the figure was now around 40 per cent.

Acknowledging that “many complex factors” underlay this downward trend, he held that one of them was “the fear that certain extreme forms of anti-Zionism are tainted with anti-semitism”.

After citing Shadow Defence Spokesman Denzil Davies’s contention at the 1984 Labour Party conference in Blackpool that an “antisemitic strand” was running through some parts of the party, Bradley gave two more recent examples of antisemitism.

One was the outburst of Sheffield Labour councillor George Moores, chairman of the South Yorkshire Police Authority, who said of Home Secretary Leon Brittan:

“I don’t know how to describe him.  But if I did, I’d be accused of being a racist.  There are too many of his ilk in Parliament.  It’s worth looking into, that, even though there are quite a few of them who are Labour.”

 Bradley remarked: 

“In past decades such crudities might have served as isolated, proverbial exceptions to the rule of Labour tolerance, humanity, and, indeed, philo-semitism.  But the apparent establishment of anti-Zionism as a cornerstone of Labour-left ideology has contributed to a significant change of atmosphere within the Labour movement which many otherwise tough-skinned Jewish socialists are finding altogether inimical.”

Of Ken Livingstone, then leader of the Greater London Council, he wrote:

'In an interview with the Israeli trade union paper Davar, he seemed to go out of his way to cause offence to Anglo-Jewry.  With what has been described as an “ignorance matched only by his own insensitivity”, he [Livingstone] alleged that the Board of Deputies of British Jews is “dominated by reactionaries and neo-fascists”.  He [Livingstone] went on: “Progressive Jews support me; only Jews who hold extreme right-wing views oppose me” ….

 What really stung Jewish members of the Labour Party was Livingstone’s claim that Jews had traditionally supported Labour “not necessarily because they were socialists, but because the Conservative party was anti-semitic.”  Nothing could have been calculated to offer greater insult to Labour’s Jewish activists …

The implication is clear: only that small number of Jews who subscribe to Livingstone’s kind of anti-Zionism can properly call themselves “progressive”; to be acceptable Jews must repudiate the cause that is central to Jewish secular life, Zionism, and must subscribe to a socialist triumphalism which asserts that Zionists are racists because they subscribe to a national liberation movement (while Palestinians who support their own are not); which identifies Israel’s leaders with the Nazi architects of the Final Solution … The list of campaign groups, sects and caucuses in which Zionists, and by extension Jews, are no longer welcome is a very long one.

 Is it really surprising, many Jews are asking, that the Jewish attachment to the labour movement is becoming tenuous?  For in almost all sections of the “progressive” Left, Jews claim they are being made to feel they are welcome only if they are at least non-Zionist, and preferable sufficiently anti-Zionist to be paraded as token Jews who dispel all suspicion of anti-semitism …’  (Emphasis added]

 Update (hat tip: Jonathan Hoffman):

 Tom Watson, the deputy Labour leader, has released an extraordinary statement about the party’s decision not to expel Ken Livingstone. He says it is “incomprehensible”. Here it is in full.

'I find it incomprehensible that our elected lay members on the disciplinary panel found Ken Livingstone guilty of such serious charges, and then concluded that he can remain a member of the Labour party.

When I read the words of chief rabbi Mirvis, who says that ‘the Labour party has failed... the Jewish community, it has failed its members and it has failed all those who believe in zero tolerance of anti-semitism’, I can’t disagree with him. I wish I could, but I can’t. I am ashamed that we have allowed Mr Livingstone to cause such distress.

It isn’t just Jewish people who feel disgusted and offended by what Mr Livingstone said and by the way he has conducted himself over this matter, and it isn’t just Jewish Labour members who feel ashamed of any indulgence of his views anywhere in the Labour party. This shames us all, and I’m deeply saddened by it.

Mr Livingstone’s unrepentant media appearances in recent days have continued to discredit the party I love. His current behaviour is still bringing the Labour party into disrepute. It is hard not to conclude that his use of inflammatory language to dismiss the fully justified outrage of the Jewish community and others will incite further distortions of the Holocaust in our public discourse.

My party is not living up to its commitment to have a zero tolerance approach to anti-semitism. I will continue the fight to ensure that it does, and I will press my colleagues to do so too.'

An MP Remembered: Jo Cox and Israel

http://www.palestinecampaign.org/statement-jo-cox/

The shocking and horrendous murder of British Labour MP Jo Cox in her Yorkshire constituency is of course a tragedy and an outrage that has caused widespread revulsion and an outpouring of grief both from those who knew the 41-year-old personally and those who did not.

It goes without saying that all decent people, irrespective of creed and political complexion, deplore the evil that took her life, and sympathise with her friends and family, not least her two small children.

As the Jewish Chronicle reports,

'Jewish communal leaders have paid tribute to Jo Cox, the Labour MP who was shot and stabbed in a shock attack in her constituency on Thursday afternoon....

Mrs Cox’s Jewish colleagues expressed sadness at the news. Luciana Berger, the Shadow Minister for Mental Health, tweeted: “Jo Cox was one of the best. A kind, wonderful, passionate, super talented colleague. My deepest condolences to Brendan and the family.”

Paying tribute to her human rights work, Labour MP Ivan Lewis, who is running for Manchester Mayor, tweeted: “Jo Cox changed the world for mums at risk of dying during childbirth and Syrian refugees. We pray for her family and must learn from her humanity.”....

Jeremy Newmark, chair of the Jewish Labour Movement, knew both Mrs Cox and her husband Brendan socially.

He said he had come across Mr Cox, who worked in international aid and development, on projects looking to bridge relations between Jewish community institutions and NGOs like umbrella group Crisis Action.

 Mr Newmark said: “She was a very human politician in every sense. She cared. She cared about issues and people....

UK Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis paid tribute to Mrs Cox. He said: "We're united in grief today at the terrible loss of Jo Cox. Brutally murdered as she served constituents. May her memory be for a blessing."

Jonathan Arkush, president of the Board of Deputies, the representative body of British Jews, said: “We send our condolences and prayers to all of Jo Cox's family after her senseless and tragic murder.”

Tweeted 23 June 2015

The Jewish Leadership Council tweeted: “The JLC is shocked and appalled at the senseless and tragic murder of Jo Cox MP. We send our sincere condolences to her husband and family.”

The Community Security Trust tweeted: "We are shocked and appalled at the attack on Jo Cox MP and our thoughts and prayers are with her and her family."....

In a vigil after her death, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn paid tribute to her work as a parliamentarian and human rights activist.

In a statement, Mr Corbyn said: “Jo was dedicated to getting us to live up to our promises to support the developing world and strengthen human rights.”....'

MPs have closed ranks and prime minister David Cameron has also paid tribute:

"This is absolutely tragic and dreadful news. My thoughts are with Jo's husband Brendan, their two children and their wider family. We've lost a great star, she was a great campaigning MP with huge compassion and a big heart."

Ms Cox has been recalled as a great humanitarian whose memory can best be served by embracing the causes that mattered to her and emulating her in her compassion.

Yet it has to be asked: "How compassionate was she towards Israel in its struggle against Palestinian Arab rejectionism and terror?"

Here's a tweet from 16 April 2015:

 And here's a current comment on it from someone in Pakistan, from where so many of the late MP's constituents originate:

As the Jewish Chronicle notes in the above-mentioned report:

"In the course of her career, she called for a resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and submitted a piece on the issue for Labour Friends of Palestine and the Middle East.

In her ‘Unlocking Gaza’a potential: beyond conflict and crisis’ article, she wrote: “The international community should prioritise efforts to stabilise and extend the current ceasefire, end the blockade to kickstart Gaza’s economy and allow greater freedom of movement both into and from Gaza.”

 She called on her party to: “encourage the Israeli government to open up all crossings into and out of Gaza, and urgently allow free and unfettered access to Gaza for goods.”

She also said the Labour Party should “pledge to support a Palestinian national unity government, with Hamas and Fatah ministers, operating in both Gaza and the West Bank,” adding that it should also: “Press for an end to rocket or mortar attacks into Israel. Press for accountability for human rights abuses and violations of international law committed by all sides.”

Ms Cox was sometimes spoken of as a potential Foreign Secretary.  We will of course never know, now, what that would have meant for Israel had she attained that position.

But this and the tweets I have included on this blog suggest that friends of Israel may well have felt dismayed.

"Safe Spaces for Everyone Except Jews" (video)

A disturbing look at the intimidation of Jewish students on campus in the UK:

To quote the uploader:

 Dr Alan Mendoza engages with a panel to discuss the rise of antisemitism on campus, often disguised as anti-Zionism. Alan is joined by Jonathan Neumann from Jewish Human Rights Watch, Ben Hayton from University College London and Devorah Khafi from Queen Mary University. Current Affairs | J-TV

And from Douglas Murray and the Gatestone Institute, a succinct explanation of why it's not surprisng if youngsters in the UK think "it's open season on Israel":

To quote the uploader:

Antisemitism isn’t new to the UK Labour Party, and its recent antisemitic outbursts shouldn’t surprise anyone. Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn has ordered an “independent inquiry” into the party’s antisemitism. Gatestone Institute Senior Fellow Douglas Murray explains how Labour’s antisemitism problem starts at top of the party, and why this inquiry won’t solve anything.

This is the first of the Gatestone Institute's video series, produced with the aid of The Rebel.media

Marvellous Melanie on British Leftist Antisemitism

Nobody tells it better than Ms Melanie Phillips.  A must-watch (or listen-to) video.

Nearly an hour's worth of footage, but this wonderful woman is worth every minute.

To quote the uploader:

 British Columnist for The Times, Melanie Phillips, critiques attempts
by the Left to equate Antisemitism with Islamophobia, distorting the
truth about Islamism in the process. JBS exclusive coverage of an
ISGAP program from the ISGAP Center in NYC.

"The Supporters of Israel Have The Whole Political Class Now Dancing To Their Tune"

Well, they're certainly deep in it, Jeremy Corbyn and the gang.

(Update: See this!!!  hat tip: Ian G)

And of course Corbyn's troops are rallying.  (I've even seen one, albeit inconsequential, Livingstone apologist linking to an item in the deranged arsenal of the notoriously antisemitic, Holocaust-denying California-based  "Institute for Historical Review" in an attempt to support Red Ken's disgraceful remarks about Hitler, though I won't give it oxygen by linking to it.)

Here's a familiar demagogue, from whom my header is a quotation:

As comic relief, a pertinent video!

Meanwhile, if the following whets your appetite, please go here to see the rest.

A Benn, Not A Bennite: "Fascists hold our values in contempt ... they have to be defeated" (video)

"We must now confront this evil; it is time for us to do our bit in Syria." The thorn in Jeremy Corbyn's flesh, the late Anthony Wedgwood Benn's son Hilary, Britain's shadow foreign minister  makes a splendid speech that would no doubt have his father spinning in his grave, and which has the Corbynistas gnashing their teeth and wailing:

 More here   Hat tip: Brian G.

Hilary Benn is the man who seems set eventually to depose the horrendous Corbyn, and thus, incidentally, make the extreme lefties who joined Labour merely to vote Corbyn in as leader quit the party in droves.

Social media is awash with their anguish!

Some dirty deeds reported here

By a committed anti-Israel activist (recruited only recently to Labour Party membership) in reaction to Benn's speech:

By the (anti-Israel) Stop the War Coalition:

A sarcastic piece by the (famously anti-Israel) children's author and poet Michael Rosen, of Goldsmith's College, London University:

 More on Hilary Benn's views on defence here

And although he's clearly not a Netanyahu supporter, Hilary Benn seems much friendlier to Israel than the leftist ratbags in his party; consider his speech in November to Labour Friends of Israel, another source of fury for the Corbynistas.

Corbynistas At The Seaside (video)

Our old friend Sandra and other anti-Israel activists, some wearing fashionable Corbynistic "Jez we can" badges, rant outside the Labour Party's autumn conference headquarters in Brighton regarding the party's employment of guards from security firm G4S, which evidently also provides security for representatives of the Zionist Entity, and demanding that the new leader give G4S its marching orders.  Joining in the action is Labour MEP Julie Ward.

Thanks as usual, Seymour old chap!

Maureen's Message To Miliband

www.telegraph.co.uk

What a great lady British actress Maureen Lipman is.  Known for her gifts as an actress and writer, the widow of much-acclaimed playwright Jack Rosenthal well deserves her epithet "a British national treasure".

While a bevy of other star thespians, including Miriam Margolyes, Juliet Stephenson, Emma Thompson, and Harriet Walter, to note only examples from the pro-cultural boycott distaff side of Britain's theatreland, are among Israel's trenchant critics, Ms Lipman outdazzles them all with her steadfast support of the beleaguered, traduced, and heroic little country.

Now, writing in the conservative intellectual monthly Standpoint, she tells Labour leader "Red Ed" Milibank, who placed a three-line whip on his members during the recent Commons debate and vote on whether Britain should recognise a Palestinian state, why she's abandoning, at least for the foreseeable future, her decades-long attachment to the Labour Party.

www.telegraph.co.uk

She writes in part:

'Just when ... anti-Semitism ... is mounting savagely...  Just when the virulence against a country defending itself, against 4,000 rockets and 32 tunnels inside its borders, as it has every right to do under the Geneva Convention, had been swept aside by the real pestilence of IS, in steps Mr Miliband to demand that the government recognise the state of Palestine alongside the state of Israel.  

.... Many people on the Left and the Right would like to see a two-state solution if it means peace and mutual respect. I am one of them. Any future Palestinian state will be entirely free of Jews, of course. Yet the Jewish state is labelled "apartheid" with 1.7 million Arabs in residence and represented in parliament.

(1) It is a historical fact that the Arab states refused such an offer in 1937, 1948, 2000 and 2008. They have yet to accept Israel's right to exist and their constitutions and broadcasts to this day extol its destruction. 

(2) How can you recognise a state until its borders are decided?

(3) If you recognise a state you can officially arm that state. Already billions of pounds have been allotted to rebuild Gaza. Ha! Rebuild the tunnels and reequip the arsenal. Oh, how the propaganda has worked on these clever, concerned people again and again and again. If Hamas and Fatah cared one iota for the Palestinians, might they not have built schools and hospitals and streets for their people the first time the billions poured in and were converted into weaponry and hotel suites in Paris and citizens were used as human shields?...

....May I remind you that no one is tunnelling into Dover or sending rockets into Coventry, yet we seem to have every right to bomb the living daylights out of Iraq. Again. Conclusion: one law for the Israelis, another law for the rest of the world. ....'

Read the entire piece here

Ah, The Old "Secular Democratic State" Trick: British Labour's heinous Mr Hain goes back to where he once belonged

As Daily Telegraph columnist Brendan O'Neill succinctly expressed it, in the context of an article regarding Scarlett Johansson, Oxfam, and SodaStream:

'There is nothing remotely progressive in this campaign to boycott everything Israeli, with its double standards about various nations’ behaviour and its shrill rhetoric about everything that comes from Israel being covered in Palestinian blood. This movement is not designed to have any kind of positive impact in the Middle East but rather is about making certain Western activists feel righteous and pure through allowing them to advertise how Israeli-free their lives are. It’s illiberal, because it effectively demands the censoring of Israeli academics and performers; it’s hypocritical, because it is led by people who are only too happy to use iPhones made in undemocratic China and to vote for the Labour Party, which, er, bombed the hell out of Middle Eastern countries for the best part of 10 years; and it has unfortunate ugly echoes of earlier campaigns to boycott Jewish shops and produce. So three cheers for Ms Johansson for taking a very public stand against this right-on pressure to treat Israel as the most evil nation on Earth.'

Hain leaves Downing Street in 1969 (Guardian photo)

Long before Omar Bargouti dreamed up the BDS Movement, and when Arafat's brand "Palestinian" was of fairly new mintage, but catching on fast among the leftwing cognoscenti, there was a bovver boy on the British political scene.  His name was Peter Hain; he craved the limelight; and he got it, for his antics ensured that he was often in the headlines.

 As I wrote quite some time ago:

'During the 1970s, before defecting to Labour and eventually becoming an MP and a minister under Blair and Brown as well as a member of Red Ed Miliband’s present team, the anti-Israel serpent in the still-pro-Israel British Liberal Party’s bosom was Peter Hain. A South African-born anti-apartheid activist with a penchant for publicity, he was chairman of the Young Liberals, and combined campaigning against white rule in South Africa with a parallel crusade against Israel’s very existence. Decades before the idea caught on in sections of the Israel-demonising left, Hain had made the replacement of Israel by a “Secular Democratic State of Palestine” the leitmotif of his frequent inveighing against the Jewish State.

Thus, reported the Jewish Chronicle (5 September 1975), “Calls for the destruction of Israel as a state and for British Government recognition of the Palestine Liberation Organisation were made by more than 1500 pro-Arab supporters who marched from Speakers’ corner to Downing Street on Sunday while the Jewish rally was in progress.” Flanked by some 500 police officers, marchers included Communists, Marxists, Young Socialists, Young Liberals, as well as hundreds of Palestinians, Surians, Iraqis and other Arabs. Hain called on “radicals on the left-wing in Britain” to fight for the Palestinian cause.

 He was even mean-minded enough to oppose the migration of Soviet Refuseniks to Israel.' [Emphasis added]

Hain's Israel-demonising past is not as well-known as it should be

Few individuals younger than myself (I was living and working in London at the time) will have memories of Hain's outrageous contentions, and how deeply wounding his much-flaunted Israel-baiting was to members of the Anglo-Jewish community.

Hain's stance dismayed the Liberal Party's leadership and its old guard (we're talking of a time when to be Liberal with a large L still meant to be a classical liberal with a small l, in the tradition of the old Manchester Guardian – stalwartly pro-Zionist under editor C. P. Scott, long before it evolved into today's wretched London-based Guardian rag – and the then elder statesman of the Liberal Party Jo Grimond).

By the time the ambitious Mr Hain had morphed into a Labour Party Cabinet member, he had fallen silent on the issue, toeing the party line as he was bound to do.  He was even tipped as a future British Prime Minister. (Shudder.)

This week, the heinous Mr Hain has been at it again, albeit in a more cautious manner than his no-room-for-argument enfant terrible manner of yore. To quote from an online Welsh source yesterday, evidently utilising a press release circulated by Hain:

'Peter Hain will make a major speech tonight [Thursday] in which he will warn that the long-term goal of a two-state peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians may no longer be achievable and claim that a one-state solution is now “back on the agenda”.

The former Welsh Secretary and Middle East minister at the Foreign Office will not endorse calls for the creation of a binational state but will ask: “Instead of living in constant fear of the enemy within as well as without, might it be more fruitful for Israel to seek a settlement legislating for the rights of Palestinians and Arab-Israelis within a new common state to end the conflict?”

In a public lecture at Swansea University, the Neath MP will state that he has favoured a two-state solution but is “increasingly unsure about whether it’s still achievable” because “the land earmarked for a viable Palestinian state has been remorselessly occupied by Israeli settlers.”

Claiming that support is growing for a single state, he will say: “Palestinians on both sides are now questioning the two-state strategy to an even greater degree. Negotiations have so far failed, as has a reliance on the US to deliver Israeli cooperation.

“The two-state option was itself originally conceived as a compromise and one likely to be particularly painful for the Palestinian refugee community.  All of which explains why in academic and activist circles the one-state option is back on the agenda.  

“There are now a number of different campaigns for the creation of a single democratic, secular state for Jews and Arabs, made up of Israel, Gaza and the West Bank.”

Mr Hain, who as Northern Ireland Secretary played a key role in bringing Ian Paisley’s DUP and Sinn Fein together in the Stormont executive, will argue: “[If] Israel’s relentless expansion into Palestinian territories cannot be stopped then we must face one of two possible outcomes.

"The first is that all Palestinian presence in the West Bank and East Jerusalem remains in a permanent and ever-more formalized ‘Bantustan status’, islands of minimal self-governance with the continued denial of basic rights, facing ongoing pressure, perpetual insecurity and possible future physical removal.

"The second is that they are absorbed into a common Israeli-Palestinian state with the opportunity for pluralism and human rights advancement.

“Is that solution now the only one capable of stopping the cycle of violence and preserving Israel’s potential to become a force for unity and peace, instead of a beleaguered source of division and a target for attack?

"And if the window for the two-state solution is indeed closing, then should the EU, the US and the UK make it plain to Israel that a one-state alternative may be the only one available to ensure its security?”

He will ask what type of state would be “politically feasible and deliverable,” stating: “Could a federal or con-federal state provide a way forward, with common security, a unified economy, common civil rights and guarantees of religious freedom for Jews and Muslims, but considerable political autonomy for the territories within it of ‘Israel’ and ‘Palestine’?  How then might Israeli and Palestinian security forces be integrated?

“These are fundamental, difficult and complex questions – but, if successfully answered, could a common state solution more easily resolve the deadlock than the two-state solution I and many others have long-favoured?

“I remain uncertain.  But I ask because I do not see how either the Israelis or the Palestinians can secure their legitimate objectives by perpetuating for still more decades their unsustainable and unstable predicament, with a two-state solution slipping away while violence and terrorism lurks constantly.”....'

Given the fact that he has advocacy of a single state lurking in his past, Hain's approach to this question this time smacks of testing the waters, or to state it more accurately, testing the reaction of Labour Party members.  The question, though, is why?  Since he's about to turn 63, it is presumably not through ambition to ride to the party's leadership on the coat tails of anti-Zionism that's impelled Hain to make such a speech. Or is it?  (He made an unsuccessful bid for the leadership a few years ago.) Are the speech's connotations more sinister than would seem at first glance?  Has Hain changed his spots? Time alone will tell.

The Guardian journalist Jonathan Freedland, writing yesterday on the Jewish Chronicle website, is evidently unaware that Hain has form on the issue, that he used when young to make strident, hurtful, unambiguous calls for the dismantling of Israel and its replacement by a "secular democratic state".

Freedland is in my opinion a tad too jejune when he observes:

'If you want to know what a politician really thinks, wait till he or she leaves office. It’s when politicians no longer have to court votes, or worry about party discipline, that they finally speak their true mind.

Plenty will say that explains this week’s intervention by the former Northern Ireland Secretary Peter Hain. On Thursday, he was due to give a public lecture at Swansea University, departing from the position he has held for the past two decades and which represents the consensus of the international community: that the best answer to the conflict between

Israelis and Palestinians in two states, living side by side.

Now, Hain wonders if the moment for a two-state solution has passed and if it is time instead to look at a different scenario: what he calls a “common state” shared by the two peoples – in other words, a one-state solution.

“Ah,” many JC readers will say. “So, when Hain was in government, he was just paying lip service to Israel’s right to exist as a secure, independent state. All along, he actually believed in the old pro-Palestinian demand for a single state, in which the Zionist dream of Jewish self-determination would be swallowed up and forgotten. He’s no friend of ours after all.”

Such a view will be temptingly simple but unfair. Hain is clear in setting out his own credentials as a former Middle East minister under Tony Blair, one who worked closely with both Israeli and Palestinian leaders. He also underlines his understanding of what Israel is up against: the “unremitting hostility” of its neighbours, the state of “siege” the country has had to endure since its birth. He is explicit, too, that his past support for two states was sincere, that he believed it to be “the best plan for peace and the fairest outcome.”

But, now, reluctantly, Hain has concluded that time has all but run out for the two-state solution. He offers the familiar reasons: the serial failure of past negotiations; the Hamas-Fatah split; and, above all, the fact that “the land earmarked for a viable Palestinian state has been remorselessly occupied by Israeli settlers.” As others have put it, it’s hard for two people to agree to split a pizza when one is gobbling up slice after slice as they talk.

Doubtless many will dispute Hain’s conclusions, finding him premature in pronouncing two states near-dead. But whether he’s too pessimistic is not really the point. He is a mainstream political figure — with experience, in Belfast, of a bitter conflict also once deemed intractable — beginning to look seriously at an idea previously deemed beyond the pale. [My emphasis]

In that sense, his words are a warning...'

Whether Hain is up to his old "secular democratic state" trick for some agenda of his own, and indeed how far he will take it, remains, for the moment, immaterial.  For the present Labour Party leadership has disowned his views.

Reports The Guardian:

'The Labour leadership has slapped down the former cabinet minister Peter Hain after he raised the possibility of a one-state solution in the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians....

Labour criticised Hain, who served as Middle East minister between 1999 and 2001, after the New Statesman published extracts from a prepared speech in which he raises the possibility of a "common Israeli-Palestinian state"....

Critics will argue that creating a one-state solution would mark the end of the state of Israel, which was founded as a Jewish state. The declaration of the establishment of the state of Israel on 14 May 1948, signed by the founding prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, said: "We … hereby declare the establishment of a Jewish state in Eretz-Israel, to be known as the state of Israel."

Labour said: "Peter Hain does not speak for Labour on foreign affairs and his views on the Middle East peace process do not represent Labour party policy. Labour is fully committed to a two-state solution with a viable Palestinian state living side by side with Israel, and we support the ongoing work of the US secretary of state, John Kerry, to help restart negotiations towards achieving this goal."....'

(For the speech and Labour's reaction to it see also here)

It will be interesting to see how Hain will handle the issue, and what impact he will have on his party, when he's no longer MP for Neath but, as he presumably will be, a Labour life peer in the House of Lords.

So Ed Miliband’s Jewish. Big Deal – so was Karl Marx!

Anybody who imagines that Ed Miliband’s Jewishness presages a warm touchy-feely attitude towards Israel is inevitably bound for disappointment. The Miliband brothers were raised by parents who to all intents and purposes appear to fit Isaac Deutscher’s blueprint of the politically radical “non-Jewish Jew”. Karl Marx was one such. So was Rosa Luxemburg. (You get the picture.)

Ralph Miliband, Ed and David's father, was a prominent Marxist economist and intellectual. Knowing that, and being fully aware that his mother, Marion Kozak, is a longstanding member of the organisation Jews for Justice for Palestinians, which has made some dodgy moves in its time (not least organising the latest seaborne attempt to break the Gaza blockade), I for one did not expect that Ed would prove any more sympathetic to Israel than did big brother David when he was Foreign Secretary.  And since Ed owes his extraordinary projection into the Labour Party’s top job to his buddies the trades union leaders (most Labour MPs voted for David) I’m not surprised that he seems even harsher towards Israel than David did. After all, many of the unions are hell-bent on boycotting Israel these days.

So when I read what the man widely dubbed "Red Ed" has been saying about Israel in a speech to the party faithful and in a radio interview I just shrugged my shoulders and muttered “So what else is new?”

What did Ed tell those audiences? That he’s an atheist. Yep. Figures. It fits the mould. That faith schools are “fantastic”. Ha! Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he? (Wink, wink.) That when asked whether he supports the Palestinians’ so-called right of return he gave a non-commital answer: “It depends which parts of the land and which borders and I’m not going to prejudge that.” Par for the course. That he added: “ It’s important we do what we can to facilitate peace in the Middle East. I think what we need to work towards is a two-state solution and a two-state solution must involve Israel and the Palestinians getting together and reaching an agreement, I’m not going to pre-judge what that agreement should be.” No surprises there either. And that he declared “I will always defend the right of Israel to exist in peace and security. But Israel must accept and recognize in its actions the Palestinian right to statehood. That is why the attack on the Gaza Flotilla was so wrong. And that is why the Gaza blockade must be lifted and we must strain every sinew to work to make that happen." None there either – though his failure to acknowledge the Qassam rocket attacks that Israel has had to endure from Hamastan is an ominous twist.

Not to worry too much. At least, not yet. For there’s one consolation in all this – that the uncharismatic nasal-voiced Ed faces an uphill and probably impossible struggle in his quest for the keys of Number Ten Downing Street.

In the meantime, those who make much of the fact that he is the Labour Party’s “first Jewish leader” and like to keep a tally of such things will have to console themselves with the fact that Labour Prime Minister James Callaghan had a paternal Jewish grandmother, a Miss Bernstein. That the philosemitic George Lansbury, who led the Labour Party between the wars, had a Jewish daughter-in-law, Minnie Glassman (whom I mentioned in one of my earliest posts). That Hugh Gaitskell, who led the party from 1955-63, had a Jewish wife, Dora Creditor, who became a life peer, and was – I’m happy to say – strongly pro-Israel. And that Gaitskell’s colourful, oft-inebriated deputy, George Brown, was – although he ran off with his secretary after 45 years of marriage – also wed to a Jewish wife, Sophie Levene.