Tony Greenstein | 21 May 2017 | Post Views:

Once again Corbyn
Backs Down as Zionist Lobby Continues to Attack him
The article
below by Asa Winstanley makes it clear that the draft Labour manifesto was
altered as a result of  pressure from the Labour Friends of Israel, which is nothing more than a front for the Israeli Labour Party, and the Jewish Labour Movement, an extension of the Israeli Labour Party inside our Labour Party.  

A statement that the expansion of settlements on the West Bank was ‘wrong
and illegal’
was taken out at the last minute.  Likewise a statement
that ‘that Labour “cannot accept the continued humanitarian crisis in the
Occupied Palestinian Territories”
was also removed.
The humanitarian crisis in Gaza includes hunger, people dying for lack of medicines, water that is 90% unfit to be drunk and an  inability to rebuild after Israel’s last attack because Israel refuses to allow building materials in (in conjunction with the Egypian police state under Sisis with whom Israel works).  Couple this with electricity for 3-4 hours a day, 80% unemployment, Israel regularly shooting and killing Gaza fishermen because Israel doesn’t like Palestinians in Gaza having independent access to food resources, and you have a humanitarian catastrophe.  Corbyn’s gutlessness in not facing that snake Tom Watson down and insisting that Israel is at fault is despicable.
The equation of Israel’s continuous military violence with Palestinian attempts to fight back is an example of how far Corbyn has capitulated to Watson and co
The idea that ‘rockets’ from Gaza, which are little more than car exhausts and which haven’t in any case been fired now for some 2 years, equates to the FI-5 fighter planes of Israel and the one ton bombs they drop on civilian areas is to equate the violence of the Yugoslav resistance with that of the Nazis.
The reason why the initial policy statements were dropped?  These statements were unbalanced.  Presumably a condemnation of Apartheid in South
Africa would also have been ‘unbalanced’ as far as the White Supremacists were
concerned.  How can you be neutral between
an occupier and the occupied?  The idea of ‘equivalence’ between an occupier and an occupied people, who are subject to the full force of military repression is obscene.
Showing the typical Zionist ingratitude, Jeremy Newmark of the racist Jewish Labour Movement makes it clear that he doesn’t and won’t support Corbyn as Prime Minister – fortunately Newmark is in an unwinnable 
Israel maintains
a military and settler colonial occupation of the West Bank.  3 million Palestinians have no civil or
political rights.  They are governed by
an entirely different set of laws and regulations to Jewish settlers, Military
Law as opposed to Israel’s civil law, is usually known as Apartheid.  When one takes into account that Israel’s Palestinians
are also treated as a guest population, segregated and the subject of violence
and discrimination, in Israel on sufferance, then the removal of even the
reference to the continued humanitarian crisis, especially in Gaza is a
disgrace.
Corbyn spent
30+ years in the Palestine solidarity movement. 
His capitulation to the Zionist lobby is sad.  The same lobby which, in the case of the Jewish
Labour Movement voted 92-4% to support Owen Smith last summer.  The Chair of the JLM Jeremy Newmark has made
it clear that in the event of him being elected, fortunately very unlikely, he
would not support Jeremy Corbyn alongside a number of right-wingers such as
Hove’s Peter Kyle and John Woodcock.
The Zionists would have Labour be even handed between a military occupation and the rights of those who live under occupation
The Israeli state isn’t the cuddly and warm Jewish state that its propagandists over here put over.  Israel is the state that forged the closest alliance with Apartheid South Africa.  It is the state that supplied, armed and trained the Guatemalan military who murdered up to 200,000 Mayan Indians.  In other words Israel is a pariah state led by war criminals.
Unfortunately
there is no Palestine solidarity group inside the Labour Party to counter the Israeli
Embassy’s groups – Labour Friends of Israel and Jewish Labour Movement.
Tony
Greenstein
Israel lobby claims “win”
over Labour manifesto changes
Status message
Your comment
has been queued for review by site administrators and will be published after
approval.

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn launching the party’s 2017 manifesto. (Labour
Party
)
A section about Palestine in the UK Labour Party’s new manifesto was significantly altered after
intervention from the Israel lobby.
The main opposition party published a list of pledges this week ahead of
a general election on 8 June.
A draft of the manifesto was leaked to the press last week.
Reference in the draft to “expansion of Israeli settlements on the
Palestinian West Bank” being “wrong and illegal” was removed from the final document.
A second line stating that Labour “cannot accept the continued
humanitarian crisis in the Occupied Palestinian Territories” was also removed.
According to London newspaper The Times,
the changes were made after Jeremy Newmark, chair of pro-Israel group the Jewish Labour Movement, complained about the
draft being an “unbalanced, partisan” text.
The final document demanded both “an end to the [Israeli] blockade” of
Gaza, its “occupation and settlements” and an “end to [Palestinian] rocket and
terror attacks.” By doing so, it created a false equation between the violence
of Israel, a highly militarized state, and the resistance tactics used by some
Palestinian groups in response to Israeli oppression.
Palestinian state
But Labour’s commitment to recognizing a Palestinian state was
also made more explicit in the final version.
The draft had only said a Labour government would “support Palestinian
recognition at the UN.” The final version commits the party to “immediately
recognize the state of Palestine” if it wins the election.
Labour Friends of Israel, a pressure group within
the party, has described the changes as a “difficult win,”
according to The Jewish Chronicle.
Jeremy Newmark did not reply to request for comment.
Newmark is a long-standing leader in the UK’s Israel lobby,
and has a history of working closely with the Israeli government
against the Palestine solidarity movement.
He is standing as Labour’s candidate for a north London
seat in Parliament.
The final version of the manifesto’s section on Palestine seems to have
been essentially reverted to the pledges Labour made before the 2015 general
election. The two wordings are almost identical, apart from the references to
Palestinian “terror attacks” and the “state of Palestine.”
The manifesto now says that “there can be no military solution to this
conflict and all sides must avoid taking action that would make peace harder to
achieve.”

Radical?
The 2017 Labour manifesto has been hailed as radical and is proving to be popular with voters.
Although Labour is still trailing the ruling Conservative Party in
opinion polls, its ratings have been surging after unvealing a
series of policy proposals.
Supposedly “radical” Labour policies such as building 100,000 social-rent homes a year and
slightly increasing tax for those with an annual salary exceeding
£80,000 ($104,000) were once polical consensus, carried out by Labour and
Conservative governments alike.
It is only because politics in the UK swung so far right under Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives in the 1980s,
and later under Tony Blair’s New Labour, that current leader Jeremy Corbyn’s modest social democratic program
can be portrayed by a hostile media as a dangerous and
“radical” document which would take the UK “back to the 1970s.”
But when it comes to Palestine, the manifesto seems to reflect
long-failed conventional “wisdom.”
And it proposes no sanction that would hold Israel to account for
its human rights violations against Palestinians. Even the draft version
contained no such proposal.
When it comes to foreign policy, Corbyn’s “radicalism” remains very much
constrained by the Labour Party’s right-wing, pro-Israel remnants. 

Posted in

Tony Greenstein

Leave a Comment





This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.