200,000 Demonstrators Say No To Israeli Apartheid as a few hundred Zionist Demonstrators Welcome Neo-Nazi Tommy Robinson into their ranks
Who does the Sunday Times and the popular press accuse of anti-Semitism? The Palestinian demonstration!!
The Largest Ever Palestinian Demonstration in Britain
The demonstration last Saturday was the largest Palestinian that has ever been held in Britain. Some 200,000 people took part. The mass media looked desperately for signs of anti-Semitism. According to The Standard the rally was ‘hijacked by anti-Semitic protesters’. I have to confess that I didn’t see any sign of the stormtroopers!
Jewish Bloc on Palestinian demonstration – there were hundreds of Jews on the Palestinian demonstration – there were no Muslims or Arabs on the Zionist demonstration yet the Sunday Times accuses us of racism!!
Why this concern over ‘anti-Semitism’? The mass media are desperate to discredit supporters of the Palestinians. What was this ‘antisemitism’? Protestorswho ‘held placards displaying swastikas and references to Nazis.’ The inference from the headlines was that some of the demonstration were proudly displaying the swastika.
There is NOTHING anti-Semitic in these posters – they are not saying Hitler was right but that Hitler like the Zionists are evil
Did the placards say ‘Hitler was right’ or ‘Jews to the gas chambers’? According to The Sunday Times those placards read ‘Stop doing what Hitler did to you.’ Another read “Israel, the new Nazi state”. One placard referred to ‘Holocaust party 2’. Now these demonstrators might be accused of hyperbole or exaggeration but they were not in the slightest anti-Semitic. They were comparing the evils of Hitler to the evils of Zionism. Saying ‘Stop doing what Hitler did to you’ is what holocaust survivors have said. Is that anti-Semitic? The Murdoch Press and the Mail were desperate to find ‘anti-Semitism’.
However the next day at the Israel Genocide demonstration, racism was certainly on display. Tommy Robinson, the Islamaphobic bigot, former member of the holocaust denying BNP and associate of neo-Nazis was welcomed onto the demonstration, which was less than a thousand strong. Britain’s Jewish community had given this celebration of genocide a big no.
My letter to the Sunday Times pointing out their hypocrisy over racism
Despite the attempts of the major Zionist organisations to pretend that Robinson was not welcome it is clear from the film that the Zionist rank and file welcomed him with open arms. The Community Security Trust which stewards these demonstrations has never hesitated to manhandle anti-Zionist protestors. How come it allowed Robinson to participate?
The Jewish News exposed the problem of Zionist support for Tommy Robinson when it quoted a number of Zionists:
One pro-Israel activist, who goes under the pseudonym Nick from Enfield, and who attended the demo tweeted: “Tommy was invited … he came was polite he was supportive he was great unlike the disgusting supporters of palestinians who were chasing Jews around the streets.’
“We need all the friends we can get as Jews we are outnumbered and we welcome TR.”Another demo attendee posted: “Thanks Tommy – how times change.”
One leading Jewish community Facebook page took down discussion about Robinson’s presence at the demo.
According to the Campaign Against Antisemitism Tommy Robinson too is fighting ‘antisemitism’!!
It is clear that support for Tommy Robinson and his Islamaphobia is strong amongst British Zionists as I have said for many years.
The Twickenham Springbok Demonstration I attended as a school student
The Tectonic Plates of Zionism are Shifting
In 1969, when I took part in my first demonstration against the South African Springbok Rugby Tour, little did I realise that 25 years later we would see the first Black majority rule government.
A protest in Be’er Sheva in the Negev – right-wing thugs circulated messages calling on members to attack Arabs as the police stand by
The year 2021, a year which saw the election of a bona fide Jewish Nazi, Itamar ben-Gvir to Israel’s Knesset, may well be the beginning of the end for the Apartheid regime in Tel Aviv. Zionism has become more and more atavistic as it reverts to the most primitive and barbaric forms of colonialism.
Pogrom in Bat Yam – which the Israeli police allowed to happen
After having boasted for years that Israeli Arabs were equal citizens in Israel we now see the true mentality of Zionism. As Israeli Palestinians took part in demonstrations and protests against the threatened eviction of the inhabitants of Sheikh Jarrar and against the invasion by Israel’s military of Al Aqsa mosque, Jewish vigilante groups and settlers, aided by the police, began a series of pogroms in mixed cities such as Bat Yam and Lydd.
Today the Israeli Police are rounding up hundreds of Palestinians in Israel for having attacked Jews whilst conspicuously ignoring the far greater attacks by the settlers. The Times of Israel reports that 70% of those arrested are Arabs but Aida Touma-Sliman a Joint List MK estimated it was closer to 90 percent.
New York’s Huge Demonstration on Palestine
When Palestinian students at Ben Gurion University in the Negev tried to hold a demonstration against the bombing of Gaza they were first attacked by the Police and then subject to a pogrom by fellow Israeli Jewish students chanting ‘Death to the Arabs’. Many of them have fled back home in fear of their lives. Noone has been arrested.
The Colombian contingent on Palestinian demonstration was loud and enthusiastic – they too are victims of American imperialism
Electronic Intifada reports that these attacks on Palestinians were coordinated via social media groups. One Telegram user wrote
People from Holon, Bat Yam and Rishon Lezion go out to bring war. We are no longer Jews today. Today we are Nazis.
Israel is a leftover from the days of European fascism. The settlers claim a ‘god given right’ to expel Palestinians because god gave them the land. Such a claim, like fascist ideology, is irrational. Rights derive from the societies which people belong to. These people claim their ‘rights’ from a mythical past and a god whose word is unchallengeable. As Thomas Jefferson wrote, democracy and worship of the past are incompatible.
Brave demonstrators at Elbit’s Leicester factory – Palestine Solidarity Campaign refuse to support them out of political cowardice
Sometimes time appears to stand still. Nothing seems to change. At other times years pass in minutes. Today we seem to be entering the latter phase. We are living in a time of great social and political movements even if it is hard to gauge their importance at the time.
Itamar Gvir – the Judeo-Nazi who has been elected to the Israeli Knesset and is now part of the government coalition
The murder of George Floyd last year unleashed the largest political movement in the history of the USA. Over 25 million people marched for racial justice and against White Supremacy. It was inevitable that the Black Lives Matter movement and the movement for justice in Palestine would coincide. At root the causes are the same, just as they were half a century ago when the fight of the Black Panthers reflected the fight against White Supremacy in South Africa.
Jack Mendel, the Jewish News Political Correspondent speaks of non-existent antisemitism at the Palestinian rally but admits shame that neo-Nazi Robinson attended the Israeli demonstration. He should now ask why.
The connections between White Supremacy in the USA and Jewish Supremacy in Israel are particularly close. The Israeli Police have been teaching their American counterparts the finer arts of how to kill, choke and strangle for years. The majority of such training is organised by the Zionist Anti-Defamation League, which portrays itself an anti-racist group but which last year was subject to a successful boycott when it sought to train Starbucks staff. ADL previously has infiltrated and spied on the left and anti-racists going so far as to act on behalf of the South Africa secret police BOSS.
The Lies of the Sunday Times – whose Stupid Reporters Can’t Even Recognise the Difference Between Support & Opposition to Antisemitism
Despite the fulminations and tantrums of Donald Trump and his supporters, with his violent attacks on Antifa and anti-racist protestors in Portland, Washington and other cities, including the killing of at least 3 anti-fascists, Joe Biden swept to power on the coat tails of BLM. But for the death of George Floyd it is likely that Trump would be in his second term now.
Why the Delegitimisation of Israel is a Palestinian priority
In 2010 in response to the growing success of BDS, the Reut Report was commissioned by the Reut Institute and ADL. It described ‘delegitimisation’ as an existentialist threat to the Israeli state. Point 9 of the Report stated that:
A tipping point in this context would be a paradigm shift from the Two-State Solution to the One-State Solution as the consensual framework for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Trafalgar Square – a carnival of multiracism unlike the Whites only Zionist demonstration
The Two State Solution is the Apartheid solution – Bantustanisation. Point 11 envisaged that
‘The issue of Israel’s Arab citizens may become the next ‘outstanding issue’ driving delegitimization in the event that an Israeli-Palestinian Permanent Status Agreement is secured
Electronic Intifada provides a useful analysis of the Report.
What then is meant by delegitimisation? The main fear of Zionism and the defenders of Israel is not criticism of particular policies, it is criticism which challenges the Jewish supremacist nature of the Israeli state, Zionism. The Israeli state in its settlement drive, house demolitions and ethnic cleansing has demonstrated why, despite the best hasbara, Israel is a settler colonial state.
The strategy of fighting delegitimisation found its expression in the IHRA Misdefinition of Anti-Semitism. The IHRA had no problem with ‘criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country’. What the IHRA called anti-Semitism was ‘requiring of it [Israel] a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.’ This was of course disingenuous since there are no ethno-religious democratic states.
Israel’s headlong rush to the Zionist right, which unlike the Zionist left at least has the merit of honesty, signals that Zionism is no longer concerned to hide the reality of a Jewish state. The leader of Religious Zionism group, Bezalel Smotrich spelt it out when stated that
“Arabs are citizens of Israel, for now, at least. They have representatives, MKs, for now at least.’
One of the most remarkable aspects of the war on Gaza was that Palestinian Israelis came out en masse for the first time. The attacks on Al Aqsa mosque by Israeli police struck a raw nerve. Al Aqsa and the Golden Dome are as much political as religious symbols.
What this has done is expose ‘co-existence’ in Israel for the sham it is. Israeli Palestinians have been accepted into a ‘Jewish’ state only as long as they accepted their guest status. The minute that they demand equality they are attacked with the full force of the Israeli state. Last week, for the first time since 1936 there was an Arab General Strike that encompassed the West Bank and Israel.
What is happening in Israel today is a problem for its defenders in the West. The old days when apologists for Zionist Apartheid like Emily Thornberry could proclaim that ‘Israel stands out as a beacon of freedom and democracy’ are over.
Palestine is NOT a human rights issue
The approach of many supporters of the Palestinians is to believe that it is simply a human rights issue. People like Caroline Lucas MP raise questions of Israel’s human rights abuses whilst supporting a Jewish state. We have to be clear. Our opposition to Israel is not simply about its human rights record. There are worse countries in the world when it comes to human rights such as Burma and now India.
Israel like South Africa is a state based on racial supremacy. That was what set Nazi Germany apart, long before the holocaust. The colour of your skin or your religious affiliation dictates your rights and privileges. As Albert Luthuli, the founder of the ANC said, you can change your politics but not the colour of your skin.
What Zionism fears is not a challenge to individual Israeli policies but to its existence as a Jewish Supremacist State. Any organisation claiming to support Palestine solidarity cannot avoid the Jewish nature of the Israeli state. It would be like opposing, 50 years ago, human rights abuses in South Africa whilst supporting Apartheid.
To be a supporter of the Palestinians you must also oppose Zionism, the ideology of that state. It is the myth that Zionism is an integral part of being Jewish or part of Jewish identity that we have to explode. Zionism is not an inherent part of being Jewish. The first Zionists weren’t Jewish but Christian Evangelists or Dispensationists.
2021 is the Year of Challenging the Legitimacy of the Israeli State and Zionism
In January of this year the largest Israeli human rights group, B’Tselem issued a report This is Apartheid: A regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. Allegations that Israel was an Apartheid State were once confined to the outer fringes of political debate. B’Tselem’s Report has brought this into the mainstream. As its Director, Hagai el-Ad wrote
One cannot live a single day in Israel-Palestine without the sense that this place is constantly being engineered to privilege one people, and one people only: the Jewish people.
At the end of April Human Rights Watch issued a 231 page report which was even more damning – A Threshold Crossed: Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution. This time the mass media could not ignore the story. I understand a third report along the same lines is due to be issued by Amnesty International.
The game is up for Zionism and its bastard child, Israel. For as long as the Israeli Labour Party was in charge of the Israeli state it was able to hide Israel’s apartheid character. The kibbutzim were even seen as a radical social experiment rather than ethnic cleansers. But the advent of Likud dictated that politics and Israeli reality would sooner or later come into line.
The first shock to Israel’s left wing supporters was the Lebanon invasion in 1982 when Tony Benn and Eric Heffer resigned from Labour Friends of Israel. Today Netanyahu has personally acted as the midwife to the election of Religious Zionism, a Judeo-Nazi party. The illusion that Israel is a democracy has disappeared. Only Keir Starmer and the Tories still cling to it.
Israel’s Fightback
No one of sound mind can today pretend that Israel is a democratic state. Even John McDonell, who went along with the fake ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign inside the Labour Party, now supports BDS and calls Israel an apartheid state. The campaign against Corbyn temporarily rehabilitated the Israeli state but the recent attacks on worshippers in Al Aqsa mosque and the proposed ethnic cleansing of Sheikh Jarrar and then the blitzkrieg on Gaza have undone all of that.
We are at a turning point
Jonathan Freedland has fronted the fake ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign for the past 5 years, turning the Guardian into a Zionist rag. He has been their Zionist gatekeeper. Freedland, an archetypal liberal Zionist has recently been fretting about the state of affairs in Israel. In his Jewish Chronicle column he objected to the nomination of an open racist, former Israeli General Effi Eitam, as the next Chair of Yad Vashem, Israel’s holocaust propaganda museum.
Eitam is on record as supporting the completion of Israel’s ethnic cleansing of its Palestinian population. He also presided over the beating to death of a Palestinian prisoner. As such you would have thought he was eminently suitable to chair Yad Vashem, which has welcomed all manner of fascists and anti-Semites through its doors. Freedland wrote, quoting a petition against Eitam that:
appointing Eitam, given his history of “hateful rhetoric,” would make Yad Vashem an object of “mockery and a disgrace.” It would be an act of reckless self-harm, turning an institution that currently enjoys deep international respect into a prime target for protest and boycott.
Freedland has also been worrying recently that the fiction of Israeli Jewish-Arab coexistence is dead. People often forget that settler colonial states are usually ruled by stupid and brutal politicians whose only answer to a crisis is repression. That was true in South Africa and it is true in Israel today. That is why the situation is not going to return to what Freedland terms ‘normal’. Today’s politicians in Israel are as thick as their Afrikaaner counterparts were.
Freedland, who dishonestly ran the Guardian campaign attacking Corbyn for Labour ‘anti-Semitism’ because anti-Zionism challenged the pro-Israel identity of most British Jews, has now, it would appear woken up to the monster he has been defending. In what for him was an unusually perceptive article, he noted that Israel should take note: the weight of opinion is turning against it. Therein lies the problem.
Despite the use of the IHRA to outlaw the idea that Israel is an Apartheid State, it is fast becoming an accepted truth. The recent Gaza attack by Israel was, in his view, a ‘strategic disaster’. The demands of Black Lives Matter have crossed over to the Palestine solidarity movement with placards proclaiming that Palestine Lives Matter and Palestine Can’t Breathe.
Freedland is a ‘liberal’ Zionist who is prepared to put up with any iniquity on behalf of his beloved ‘Jewish’ State. The only problem is that others aren’t. As he sees it the writing is already on the wall for Israel. It cannot continue along the path to the far-right because it won’t survive another attempt to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians.
You can’t stop colonisation half-way. Its either all or nothing. Sheikh Jarrar is part of the Master Plan to ‘Judaise’ Jerusalem. That is how Israel has always behaved. Zionism without ethnic cleansing is like trying to play cricket without a ball!
What worries Freedland is that the ground is moving underneath the feet of the Zionists. In the United States, a bastion of bipartisan support for Israel, things are changing. He writes that
‘No less striking than Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez branding Israel an “apartheid state” was this week’s move by longtime pro-Israel Democrats in Congress to delay the transfer of an arms package to Israel.
It is this which explains the new willingness of the Guardian to carry articles that it wouldn’t have a year ago. Chris McGreal, who authored two long pieces in the Guardian Worlds apart and Brothers in arms – Israel’s secret pact with Pretoria, both of which outraged the Zionists 15 years ago has now come back to remind people that Boycotts and sanctions helped rid South Africa of apartheid – is Israel next in line? There is also Nesrine Malik’s article 2 days ago. Whether this represents a genuine change by the Guardian or it is simply adapting to a changing political climate remains to be seen.
Ha’aretz, the liberal Zionist Israeli paper is also worried that Israel is becoming a new Yugoslavia. The New York Times, long seen as the bastion of Zionism is also slowly changing. First they got rid of Bari Weiss, the Opinion Editor and Zionist gatekeeper and then four days ago they finally printed a piece Life Under Occupation: The Misery at the Heart of the Conflict which describes what life is like for Palestinians under occupation.
Liberal Zionists face the choice of either digging in, like Freedland, or moving to the left like Peter Beinart, who has disowned a Jewish State. As Rabbi Meir Kahane, the Jewish Nazi explained years ago, Israel can either be a Jewish state or a Democratic state. It cannot be both. And that is the dilemma that faces liberal Zionists.
For Freedland a Jewish State must survive at any price, even at the cost of apartheid. For Beinart this is unacceptable. It is our job in the solidarity movement to widen these fissures not help our opponents as Palestine Solidarity Campaign does.
Tony Greenstein
Below are more pictures of the huge London demonstration
Whilst I agree with pretty much all of this, the allowance of a comparison to Hitler and the Nazis is unacceptable to anyone with even a cursory knowledge of those people and of the situation today in apartheid Israel. To claim that it’s fine to state, “Israel is the new Nazi state” and that “Netanyahu is the new Hitler” because
(a) it’s just politics, harmless hyperbole and
(b) didn’t George Bush II call Saddam the new Hitler?
doesn’t justify it in the slightest.
Israel, while being deeply undemocratic, apartheid, routinely oppressive, illegally armed with nuclear weapons and murderous to Palestinian people, is not Germany 1933-45. There are no death camps (and the OT are not concentration camps, another bit of harmful ‘hyperbole’). Israel is not taking over the Middle East for living space. It is not applying euthanasia to mentally ill and disabled people. There are no Einsatzgruppen roaming the OT slaughtering by the thousand those it considers subhuman. Israel is not conducting involuntary medical experiments on Palestinian children without anaesthetic. The comparison would be risible were it not so serious and so obviously distressing to Jewish, gay, Romany and other people who lived through it or whose families were killed. That also gives support to Zionists who claim Palestinians and their activist supporters are extremists who have no knowledge or understanding of the Holocaust which is a step along the road to denial.
And just because George Bush II did something doesn’t give anyone else moral cover.
Supporters of Palestine must also acknowledge honestly the deep and continuing inadequacies of Hamas, an organisation that seems firmly attached to homophobia, misogyny, violence as the only solution and a vision of an Islamic theocracy similar to Iran’s. Its ideal society is neither socialist nor egalitarian. Its rocket attacks which are unguided bombs in civilian areas are minor by comparison to Israel’s but not without casualties including children. Hamas knows very well that Israel will respond with massive force. Is that a moral position – to provoke Israel into killing huge numbers of their own people? I’m not convinced. How democratic is Hamas, anyway? Is there majority support within the OT for its rocket attacks? I don’t know. Do you?
I entirely disagree.
FIrst to those who are currently under attack and seeing their children killed Israel seems like Nazi Germany.
Secondly they are placards not theses.
Israel certainly is engaged in lebensraum ie the search for living space, i.e. colonial expansion.
It’s not just George Bush. Its Begin, Netanyahu and a whole host of other Zionist leaders who have repeatedly compared the Palestinians to Nazis. As Edith Zertal, an Israel professor wrote, there hasn’t been one war Israel has fought which hasn’t been in the name of Auschwitz.
There are also many comparisons to be made between Israel today and Nazi Germany 1933-39.
There were no death camps in Germany or elsewhere before 1941 (Chelmno was the first in December 41).
Ideologically there are too many comparisons to be made. What is the differene between Jews being barred from sections of German cities and Palestinian Israelis being barred from large parts of the country? What is the difference between ‘death to the Arabs’ and ‘death to the Jews’?
Some of this may be hyperbole but it is understandable and its most definitely not antisemitic
tony
I’ll take your points:
“Israel seems like Nazi Germany” to people who never experienced it and, I suspect, have little knowledge or understanding of the reality. How well are WWII and the Nazi period taught in OT schools? Just because life in the OT is awful because Israel is oppressive and racist does not lead to a conclusion that Nazi-level atrocities are being carried out. They are not. How can you claim otherwise? You and some other activists are playing the Zionists’ favourite tune. It’s genuinely offensive to Jewish people of any political persuasion.
“Israel certainly is engaged in lebensraum”. No, it isn’t. It has one area of land which it stole from the Palestinian people in 1948’s Nakba and in which it is doing its utmost to rid itself of those people – although not to the same degree of extremity as Germany did to its Jewish population. But I’ve get to hear about Israel’s plans to conquer Egypt and Syria like Germany did with Western Europe, nor of its notions for death camps.
“Begin, Netanyahu and a whole host of other Zionist leaders who have repeatedly compared the Palestinians to Nazis” is not the argument I was opposing. It’s some anti-Zionists who are claiming that Israel’s activities and leaders are akin to Nazis. I’m not sure where you’re going with this.
“What is the difference between ‘death to the Arabs’ and ‘death to the Jews’?” Umm… how serious are the people making the calls? If we regard those calls as equally serious then your argument seems to be that both Palestinian protestors and Zionist thugs are Nazis. But ‘death to the Jews’ is an antisemitic trope that has been the cry during pogroms for a very long time. I’m not sure that there have been quite the same number of anti-Arab pogroms across the world. Perhaps you could enlighten me.
As for death camps, what difference does it make that the first Nazi concentration camp set up specifically to kill its inmates was in 1941? The Nazis’ methods were plain from 1933 onwards with Dachau and their gradual programme to exterminate the mentally ill and disabled. Nothing like even that programme, nothing whatsoever, is evident in Israel. And I mentioned the Einsatzgruppen. The IDF, murderous and racist as it is, has never committed the kinds of atrocities that occurred in Eastern Europe from 1941-45.
I’ve not claimed that any of the protestors I’m concerned about in my arguments are antisemitic. That’s not my point here. It’s that attempting to make apartheid, Zionist Israel to be a proto-Nazi state is both way over the top and a strategy that Israel loves. Yes, Palestinians are barred from some parts of the country in the same way that Jews were in Germany. But that was also true for other ethnic and class groups in apartheid South Africa, the southern US states and no doubt in many other places. Were slave-owners Nazis? Discrimination has been practised throughout human history by many societies which were also not Nazi.
Israel is a dreadful stain on world history but Nazi it is not.
This is nonsense. I have not said Nazi Germany is identical to but that comparisons can be drawn between it and Israel. That is still my point.
Since you don’t believe me I assume that you also believe the late Professor Zeev Sternhell, a child survivor of the Nazi ghetto of Premszyl was also wrong when he wrote in Haaretz ‘In Israel, Growing Fascism and a Racism Akin to Early Nazism ‘ https://tinyurl.com/a7jhtetu
The mobs in Bat Yam who nearly killed a Palestinian taxi driver were shouting ‘death to the Arabs’ I think they were very serious.