Even the ILP does not support a 2 state solution.  It supports segregation and a Bantustan.   Herzog
explained that ‘I want to separate from
the Palestinians. I want to keep a Jewish state with a Jewish majority. I don’t want 61 Palestinian MKs in Israel’s Knesset. I don’t want a
Palestinian prime minister in Israel.’ 
If you don’t understand why this is racist imagine someone saying they
didn’t want a Jewish Prime Minister in Britain. [Who needs
the Right when we have Isaac Herzog?]

Joan Ryan MP, formerly a junior Home Office Minister under Blair/Brown, is a pretty non-descript right-winger, with no obvious talent other than to claim vast sums of money as expenses.  She was one of those caught out changing her second homes designation as she attempted to get the tax payer to buy her another house whilst paying for repairs on her main accommodation.  As such she was an excellent choice as Chair of Labour Friends of Israel – no principles and no morals.

On 8th August Richard Burgon MP, who is one of the best Labour MPs there is, a strong supporter of Jeremy Corbyn, made the unremarkable statement that Zionism is an ‘enemy of peace’.  Yes, I hear you say, so what?  You might be forgiven for thinking that Burgon had informed people that the Earth is round or that 1+1=2. 

Any objective view of Israel, which has just bombarded the utterly defenceless people of Gaza with 50 rocket strikes in response to the launching of a firecracker, could not help but conclude that Richard Burgon was simply making a statement of the obvious.  Not so Joan Ryan.

Joan Ryan is the Chair of the Labour Friends of Israel, a group whose sole mission in life is to defend Israel right or wrong and which boasts of its relationship to the racist rednecks of the Israeli Labour Party.  Zionism she whined was a ‘Jewish national liberation movement’.  Quite who she thinks it was liberating Jews from is impossible to determine.  Possibly the laws of logic and rationality. 

To say that Zionism is a national liberation movement is like saying that Apartheid in South Africa was a liberating force or that Nazism was a German liberation movement (of course Hitler believed it was liberating the German people from a mixture of the Jews, Freemasons, Versailles etc.).  It is the rationale of the oppressor, who finds justification for their activities in some supposed oppression.  They come to believe that the people they are oppressing are in fact their oppressors.  It is a characteristic of all settler states that the settlers develop a siege mentality in which they are the subjugated.  Israeli Jews are the same in this respect as the Afrikaaners were. 

Zionism however never liberated Jewish people from anything.  On the contrary they collaborated from the very start with the Jews’ anti-Semitic oppressors.  Theodor Herzl, the founder of Political Zionism, declared in his Diaries that he saw in Zionism a ‘divine will to the good’.  Anti-Semitism was seen as a useful force for ‘educating’ Jews into leaving their homes and colonising Palestine.  This attitude never changed and in the 1930’s they adopted the same attitude to the Nazis, but this time with fatal results.

According to his official biographer, Shabtai Teveth, after Hitler came to power David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister, declared that it was imperative to ‘turn a disaster… into a productive force’ and that ‘The harsher the affliction, the greater the strength of Zionism.’  [The Burning Ground, p. 850] 

Zionism was never a national liberation movement because it never liberated anyone from anything and because the Jews were and are not a nation.  It was a nationalist as opposed to a national movement in just the same way as the Nazis were a nationalist movement.

As I explain to Ryan in my letter, Zionists have only recently called themselves a national liberation movement.  Zionism likes to capture the zeitgeist of the moment.  Today colonialism is out of fashion.  Liberation movements have inspired people who have seen the people of the colonial countries rise up and replace their oppressors, even if in most cases they have replaced the faces of the colonial oppressor with one of their own nationality.  American and European domination has continued behind the façade of self-rule.

When Zionism first began no one would have described it as a form of national liberation.  They openly called themselves colonists and appealed to the European imperial powers on that basis.  Next year we will ‘celebrate’ the 100th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration when the anti-Semitic Arthur James Balfour promised the land of the Palestinians to the Zionist movement over the heads of the indigenous population and, incidentally, against the opposition of the only Jewish member of Lloyd George’s war cabinet, Sir Edwin Montagu.  It wasn’t the Jews who wanted Zionism it was anti-Semitic Evangelical Christians.  The Balfour Declaration was an agreement between British imperialism and Zionist settler-colonialism.  To describe such a movement is grotesque but then the LFI is indeed a grotesque and nasty little group.

Expenses Scandal

Joan Ryan herself is an unremarkable person.  She is not known as a parliamentarian or speaker.  She is of the far-Right Progress faction.  She was an MP until 2010 when she was defeated at the General Election.  Unfortunately she came back in 2015 Her entry in Wikipedia is extremely revealing.  According to the Evening Standard (26.10.07.) in 2005/6 she made the second highest expense claim of any MP.  In 2006/7 she did even better, achieving first place with a total of £173, 691.  It was no wonder that her electors rejected her in 2010.

In May 2009 Ryan claimed more than £4,500 under the Additional Costs Allowance for work on a house she had designated as her second home.[Telegraph 17.5.09.]   In February 2010 Ryan was asked to repay £5,121 mortgage interest which she had corruptly claimed.  [Evening Standard 4.2.10.]

Not surprisingly Ryan found her greed somewhat embarrassing and unhelpful when she was trying to get back into Parliament.  The Independent of 9th March 2012 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.”

Ryan’s Wikipedia entry reports that to this present day ‘similar edits to hide Ryan’s record continue to be made.’ [Telegraph 26.5.15]   At least 10 attempts were made from computers inside the Houses of 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, were also been recorded in Wikipedia’s logs. The efforts were successful and all mention of expenses claims were removed and instead replaced with a paragraph about edits to Wikipedia.

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 according to the Telegraph she denied involvement, though it’s difficult to think who, apart from her Zionist friends, would be interested in cleaning up her record.

Below is the letter that I wrote to Ryan.