Please send your details to me either via the comments or to [email protected]

tony greenstein

Jeremy Corbyn MP

Leader of the Labour Party

House of Commons

London SW1 1AA

Dear Jeremy,

We write as Jewish and non-Jewish members/ supporters of the
Labour Party.

We welcome the fact that you have called for a Government  inquiry into the revelations in the recent
four-part series of programmes by Al Jazeera TV.  However the programmes also raise very
serious questions for the Labour Party, not least its relationship to Labour
Friends of Israel and the Jewish Labour Movement.  We understand Free Speech on Israel has already called for a Labour Party Inquiry
into the implications for the Labour Party. 
We endorse that call.

In the second programme (7m 50s), Joan Ryan MP, the LFI Chairperson
asks Shai Masot, the Israeli Embassy’s Political Officer, who was caught trying
to ‘take down’ Government Ministers:

‘What
happened with the names that we put into the Embassy Shai?  To which Masot replies ‘Just now we’ve got the money. 
It’s more than £1m, it’s a lot of money...  it’s
not physical, it’s an approval’ to which Ryan jocularly responds ‘ I didn’t think you had it in your bag!’.

The LFI’s Parliamentary Officer, Michael Rubin, who was
filmed boasting that he was trying to take-down the democratically elected
President of the National Union of Students, Malia Bouattia, claimed to work “with the ambassador
and embassy quite a lot”.

Joan Ryan in
the third Al Jazeera programme was seen to concoct a wholly false allegation of
anti-Semitism against a Labour Party conference delegate, Jean Fitzpatrick, who
had come to ask Ms Ryan what LFI’s support for a 2 State Solution meant in
practice and what they were doing to achieve it.  Getting no answer, Jean said that LFI had a
lot of money, which is clearly true, a lot of prestige and that a friend of
hers had got a good job at Oxford University on the basis of having worked for
LFI. 

None of this
was remotely anti-Semitic yet Joan Ryan had no hesitation in transforming this
into getting a ‘big job in banking and
the City’ and an ‘anti-Semitic
attack’.  On the basis of this Jean
was suspended from the Labour Party. 
Because the conversation was recorded, the charge was dropped but this
is how false charges of ‘anti-Semitism’ have recently been concocted.

The reason for
making false accusations of anti-Semitism, such as that against Ms Fitzpatrick,
is to deter criticism of Zionism and the Israeli state.  Those who make these false claims of anti-Semitism
are deliberately jeopardising Labour’s chances of electoral victory. 

Although the
LFI purports to support a 2 State Solution it is clear, as Jean Fitzpatrick
demonstrated, that this is a smokescreen for its uncritical support for Israel’s
military occupation and settlement of the West Bank and Gaza.  At no time has LFI ever condemned or
criticised the Occupation or the Settlements.  LFI supports the 2SS  knowing that it will never happen but also
knowing that it will make them appear as reasonable and even-handed rather than
a sycophantic and uncritical supporter of Israeli expansion and racism.

Prior to your
election as Leader of the Labour Party you had never addressed a meeting of the
LFI.  At the 2016 Conference you addressed
the LFI fringe meeting for the second time. 
It is clear from the Al Jazeera revelations that LFI operates as an
emanation of the Israeli state within the Labour Party.  We saw this clearly when Shai Masot introduced
Al Jazeera’s undercover reporter, ‘Robbin Harrow’ to people as the Chair of Young
LFI, a non-existent organisation.

If you continue
to speak at LFI meetings you will be taken to be endorsing a group which favours continued settlement
expansion and which opposes their dismantlement.  You will also be
interpreted as  lending support to those who wage war on Palestinians living inside Israel.  Only last week a Bedouin village in the
Negev, Umm al-Hiran, which had been there for 60 years, its inhabitants having
been displaced from their original village further south,  was demolished by bulldozers from the Jewish
National Fund.  One resident was killed
by police gunfire. 

Despite
Palestinians occupying only 2% of the Negev, the Israeli government and the
Jewish National Fund sought, as part of the programme of Judaisation, to
demolish an Arab village in order to make way for the Jewish town of
Hiran.  This is comparable to, if not
worse than, the demolition in the
1970’s of Black ‘squatter’ camps in Soweto.

Neither LFI nor the JLM, which are always eager to accuse
supporters of the Palestinians and opponents of Zionism of ‘anti-Semitism’ have
anything to say about apartheid in Israel, both within the 1948 borders and within
the Occupied Territories.  Ha’aretz newspaper
recently warned,
in an editorial ,that with the proposed annexation of Ma’aleh Adumim, that’Israel will cease to exist as a Jewish and
democratic state, and officially become an apartheid one’.

Ha’aretz also referred, in the same editorial, to the Israeli
Labour Party ‘opposition’, of which the Jewish Labour Movement is the British wing.  Ha’aretz said that ‘It is pointless mentioning the opposition at this stage, since the
dead cannot speak’.

We would urge
you to cease giving any support to either
the Labour Friends of Israel or the Jewish Labour Movement and not to speak at any further fringe
meetings of theirs.  Both the late Tony
Benn and Eric Heffer resigned from LFI in 1982 as a result of its support for
the invasion of Lebanon.  Over the past
quarter of a century they have not changed.

Yours sincerely,

The  Tropes of Joan  Ryan MP