You recently wrote
an Open Letter to Kate Osamor MP.  You objected
to Kate retweeting a tweet from BDS South Africa.  You claimed that BDS is ‘morally wrong’ because it seeks to ‘demonise and delegitimize the world’s only Jewish state.’  There is a lot to unpack there.

Firstly the idea that religious states are a good thing disappeared
with the French Revolution and Emancipation.  A state
should embrace all its citizens not just those of one religion.  Although Britain for example is still nominally a Protestant state
this does not privilege the rights of citizens of a particular religion over another. In Israel being Jewish entitles you to far greater privileges than non-Jews. A Jewish state cannot help but be a racist state, since it was established via settler colonialism.

The tweet that Joan Ryan took exception to

The tactic of Boycott – from Captain Boycott
in Ireland, the Boycott of Slave grown sugar in the West Indies, the Jewish Boycott
of Nazi Germany (which the Zionists opposed) and the Boycott of Apartheid South
Africa – has always been a weapon in the hands of the oppressed. 

Israel has not only maintained a military occupation
of the West Bank and Gaza for 50 years (and today incidentally enforces a Boycott of Gaza) but it has treated the Arabs of Israel as
a fifth column, guests in someone else’s country. Only this week Israel’s
Defence Minister Avigdor Lieberman called for a boycott of the Wadi Ara area of Israel’s Arab citizens:

“don’t go in there—don’t enter their
restaurants or their businesses, don’t get your cars fixed there. The residents
of Wadi Ara must understand that they’re unwanted and that they’re not part of
us.”

I don’t recall you writing an
open letter to Benjamin Netanyahu demanding Lieberman’s dismissal or the Israeli
Labour Party protesting, as would have happened in any democratic country.

Joan Ryan claimed the most expenses of any MP in 2006-7 having been runner up in 2005-6.  During the expenses scandal she was forced to disgorge over £5,000

As you will be aware it is those in
the ANC who fought Apartheid who have been the greatest supporters of BDS. On November 28th Mandla Mandela, the
grandson of Nelson Mandela, after visiting the West Bank was reported
as saying that “Israel is the worst
apartheid regime… Palestinians are being subjected to the worst version of
apartheid.” Archbishop Desmond Tutu, one of the heroes of the
anti-apartheid struggle and a Nobel Peace Prize winner was quoted
in the Jerusalem Post as saying:

“I have
witnessed the systemic humiliation of Palestinian men, women and children by
members of the Israeli security forces, their humiliation is familiar to all
black South Africans who were corralled and harassed and insulted and assaulted
by the security forces of the apartheid government.”

Only this week a video captured Israeli soldiers
attempting to kidnap three 5 year old Palestinian children.  This wasn’t an isolated incident.  We had the Btselem video
of a child of 8 being dragged from his home in Hebron earlier this year. In response to this and other criticisms,
Btselem has been demonised in Israel and its funding threatened.

Instead of LFI criticising these examples of child abuse, which are in themselves war crimes, we had the disgusting spectacle of Louise Ellman, an LFI Vice-Chair intervening in the House of Commons debate on 16th January 2016 in support of the Israeli military’s actions.

You refer to the support of your ‘sister party, the Israeli Labour Party’ [ILP]for a 2 State Solution
[2SS].  This is disingenuous.  Only this week Avi Gabbay, the new leader of
the ILP came out in support of Donald Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.
This is the final death blow to the 2SS.  Gabbay also made
it clear that under an Israeli Labour government all the main settlement
blocks will remain in place.  You cannot
have a Palestinian state alongside the settlements.

The ILP’s support for a Palestinian state
is the political equivalent of the 3 card trick.  At least, when Tsipi Hotoveli, Israel’s
Deputy Foreign Minister says
that “This land is ours. All of it is
ours’ she is being honest. Labour Zionism has always been dishonest – talking peace whilst waging war.

What members of the Labour Party find disturbing is
that LFI acts as the arm of the Israeli state within the Labour Party.  No other state in the world has such
influence inside our party. 

You say you support a 2SS yet not once have you ever condemned Israel’s military occupation, its
theft of Palestinian water and land resources, its administrative detention, checkpoints,
abuse and torture
of Palestinian children.  As the Al
Jazeera programme The
Lobby showed earlier this year, the LFI is a well-funded group with a £1m
slush fund.

If you were in the slightest bit sincere
in your call for a 2SS, you would call for an end to the Occupation. Instead
you put the blame on the quisling Palestinian Authority, which acts as Israel’s
security arm, for ‘anti-Semitic incitement’
ignoring the racist statements
of Israeli Ministers like Deputy Defence Minister Eli Dahan about the Palestinians: “To me, they are like animals, they
aren’t human.”  Dahan went on to explain that “A Jew always has a much higher soul than a
gentile, even if he is a homosexual,”

Even the right-wing Jerusalem Post called for
Dahan to go, but LFI and the ILP remained
silent.  Like all supporters of
colonialism you put the blame onto the oppressed.

Your support for a 2 State Solution is deceitful and
dishonest. You are fully aware that the real purpose of the 2SS slogan is to
provide a pretext for the continual denial of democratic rights to Palestinians
living under military occupation. To
grant equality to these 5 million Palestinians would mean an end to Israel as a
Jewish supremacist state.  To annex the Territories
outright would mean an open declaration that Israel is an Apartheid State.  It is far better to maintain the present
status quo and with it the fiction of a 2SS. 
You are therefore deliberately complicit in the present occupation.

The time has come for the Labour Party to abandon its support
for the world’s only apartheid state.  It
is Israel’s colonisatory project not Palestinian resistance that is at the
heart of the problem today.  Support for Israel
is part and parcel of support for US imperialism in the Middle East.  That is why Israel is the largest recipient
of US aid in the world.

Jean Fitzpatrick was the victim of an attempt by Ryan at the 2016 Labour Party conference to paint her as antisemitic

For too long Labour’s Zionists have used the bogey of ‘anti-Semitism’ as a weapon against supporters
of the Palestinians, including Jewish anti-Zionists such as myself and Jackie
Walker. You yourself were captured by Al
Jazeera faking an incident of anti-Semitism at Labour’s 2016 Conference. 

In the General Election you sent
letters to your constituents attacking Jeremy Corbyn and saying that people
had more trust in Theresa May.  Such is
your loyalty to Labour’s elected leadership.

The time has come for the Labour Party in Britain to
break its links with LFI and the apologists for Israeli Apartheid, yourself
included.

Yours
sincerely,

Tony Greenstein

Vice Chair –
Labour Against the Witchhunt

Joan Ryan’s Open Letter to Kate Osamor

Background to Joan Ryan – Israel’s Devoted Servant

Joan Ryan is a devoted
servant of the Israeli state.  She is
also, by any measure, one of the most self-seeking and greedy MPs.  

In October 2007, the Evening Standard reported
that Joan Ryan claimed £173,691 in expenses for the 2006/2007 tax year the
highest for any MP.  In 2005/6 she had
only managed second place in the competition to see who could claim the most
parliamentary expenses.  Ryan was by all
accounts delighted to have won the coveted ‘Snout in the Trough Award of the
Year.’

In February 2010, as a result of the
Parliamentary expenses scandal,
Ryan had to repay
£5,121 mortgage interest.  However this all pales into comparison
compared to the £1 million slush fund that the Israeli Embassy agent Shai Masot
arranged to be paid for her and which was captured in the Al Jazeera programme The
Lobby.

Wikipedia reports that:

In 2012, The
Independent reported that “[a]t least 10 attempts have been made
from computers in Parliament to remove information about [Ryan’s] expenses
claims and a further 20 efforts to delete the information, some from her
constituency of Enfield North, have also been recorded in Wikipedia’s
logs.”[15]

During the 2015 general election, The Daily Telegraph returned to this issue.
In Ryan’s case, the entire expenses section was deleted, including information
on repairs and decorations on her home paid for out of her MP’s expenses; the
edits were made while Ryan was not an MP, and she denied involvement.[16]

Ryan was also caught on camera making a false allegation of anti-Semitism
against a Labour Party member, Jean Fitzpatrick, at the 2016 Labour Party Conference.  When put under pressure to explain exactly
what Labour Friends of Israel were doing to achieve their supposed objective of
a 2 state solution [2SS] Ryan preferred to concoct an allegation of anti-Semitism.

In August 2016 Richard Burgon MP, the Shadow Justice Minister,
described Zionism as an enemy of peace. 
Joan Ryan leapt into action to defend the world’s only apartheid state.  In response I penned an Open
Letter.  In the past week Kate Osamor
MP, who is both a member of the Shadow Cabinet and a member of Labour’s
National Executive Committee has tweeted her support for the campaign for Boycott
Divestment and Sanctions.  Once again Ryan
has issued an Open Letter.  I have
therefore decided to write once again to Ryan, not in the hope that she will
enter into a dialogue – Zionists rarely like to exchange views – but because Ryan’s
poisonous and racist views should not go unchallenged.

See Letter here