At
the end of June I went on a speaking tour to Scotland on behalf of Labour
Against the Witch-hunt. I recorded my speeches in Edinburgh and
Glasgow.  At the first meeting Mick
Napier from Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign spoke alongside me. Unfortunately I
didn’t record Mick’s talk although I did record his response to questions.  At the second meeting I spoke with Professor
Hillel Ticktin who is a retired Professor of Marxist Studies at Glasgow University. I did tape his speech.

The
theme of my speech was the anti-Semitism witch-hunt in the Labour Party, the
background to it, what it really aims to do and how it goes about justifying
itself.  I predicted that the fake anti-Semitism
campaign which we saw around the local elections would come back again.  

Sure
enough this week, with the publication of Labour’s Anti-Semitism Code of
Conduct, a weak
and anodyne document the campaign began again. According to the far-Right
racist editor of the Jewish Chronicle, Stephen Pollard, Labour was institutionally
anti-Semitic. Pollard started off his bilious article by comparing Jeremy
Corbyn to Hitler and the Nazis! His argument being that the Labour Party had no
right to define anti-Semitism, that was the task of Jews (by which they mean
racist and Zionist Jews not me or Jewish Voice for Labour!).

What
was the Zionists real complaint? Well Pollard was a model of honesty The problem was
that 

Precisely.  As
my speeches make clear, the only purpose in the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism
is to conflate anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism. 
By removing two or three of the Israel illustrations Labour has defeated
the whole purpose of the IHRA definition! 
Of course Corbyn and Formby are utterly stupid.  The IHRA definition can’t be amended. It’s
like believing you can water down a solution of cyanide and hoping you might
survive.  Why would you want to dilute a
poison and the IHRA is a poison.  The purpose
of the definition is-to conflate Zionism and anti-Semitism, there are no
half-way houses.  You either are pregnant
or you are not.  You can’t be half
pregnant and you can’t have a half decent IHRA.

I spent some
considerable time in my speeches analysing why the IHRA is a poisonous excrescence.
Corbyn should not have followed Theresa May in adopting this definition. If he
hadn’t been so stupid he wouldn’t have had all of these problems. The answer to
Pollard and the rest of the gutter press is to ditch the IHRA definition.  As I point out in my talks, there are much
better and much simpler definitions of anti-Semitism and Lord Bracadale in his
Report on Hate Crimes in Scotland made it clear that you cannot make criticism of a state a hate offence. That would be an outrageous infringement on freedom of speech. The Israeli state is not a protected characteristic!

I
know this will offend people but the idiocy of Corbyn and his advisers is at
least partly responsible for his political problems.  And speaking of idiots none come more readily
to mind than Jon Lansman. Perhaps the most idiotic of all the statements during
the recent bout of false anti-Semitism allegations concerning Corbyn’s mural
was Lansman’s assertion that anti-Semitism in the Labour Party was
‘unconscious’.

Anyone
who needs to resort to Freudian psychoanalysis in order to justify allegations
of anti-Semitism in the Labour Party literally needs their head examining.

At
a time when Black people from the Windrush generation have been deported,
despite being British citizens, when Mosques are regularly firebombed, to
concentrate on ‘unconscious’ anti-Semitism (i.e. it can’t be seen, heard or
felt) is proof that what is involved is a spurious and fake. 

Let
us be quite clear that the Jewish community in Britain, a community which
is being consciously used by the Right in its battle against Corbyn and the
Left, is not oppressed. Anti-Semitism today is a marginal form of prejudice. Jews
are not economically discriminated against, they don’t suffer from state racism.
Even fascists concentrate most of their attention on Muslims not Jews. Indeed they
now proclaim that they are not anti-Semitic in their desire to be seen as the
most ardent supporters of Israel.  Jews
do not die in police custody nor are they in danger of being deported back to
Poland or wherever they originated from. 
In short the whole anti-Semitism nonsense is contrived and bogus,
designed to shore up support for the genocidally racist State of Israel. And in
so far as anti-Semitism of the Jew not Israel hatred variety could return, then
Zionism is an obstacle to any fight against genuine anti-Semitism.

The
recordings did not pick up the contributions of all the questioners so I have
not transcribed any contributions (bar 1!). 
However I am putting the tapes on line here in order that people can, if
they desire, listen to the speeches including questions from the floor.

I
have also put the transcript
on line and it can be downloaded as a pdf.

Edinburgh LAW Meeting
26th June 2018

Chair: Ian Drummond

Talking
about your trial (when Mick Napier and 4 others from Scottish PSC were
prosecuted for offences of racial hatred for disrupting the Jerusalem Quartet concert)
in a way you were too modest because it was directly quoted by Lord Bracadale in
his recent Opinion (Review of Hate
Crime Legislation in Scotland see Israel
Boycott is Not Hate Crime, Scottish Government-Commissioned Report Concludes) against
adopting the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism a few of us in this room supporting
Labour Against the Witchhunt within Scottish Momentum had a pretty bruising
debate a few months ago with a motion calling for the reinstatement of Tony and
other comrades who’d been expelled and also condemning the IHRA definition,
saying it should not be taken up. There’s a lot of misunderstanding out
there.  Somebody referred to it as a
statement by a group of Holocaust survivors.

At
the time it was called the EU Monitoring Committee Working Definition of
Anti-Semitism until the EUMC got subsumed within the Fundamental Rights Agency
which dropped it like a hot potato. It’s never been accepted in law, it was
laughed out of court by Sheriff Scott (the trial of the 5 SPSC demonstrators),
by Lord Bracadale who presided over the gaoling of Tommy Sheridan and the Libya
case, the man of the law had to recommend against it and now we’ve seen Nicola
Sturgeon going the other way and hopefully we can be better than that in the
Labour Party.

I
was just finishing university at the time. I was at my last NUS Conference,
presided over by Wes Streeting, an MP now who was retiring as President of NUS.
The guillotine was coming down on support for the EUMC motion that they’d
passed a few years before. He’d already made his valedictory speech, he got up
and spoke from the floor and proposed we renew this policy in his last ever
statement at NUS Conference. I got up and mentioned the trial that Mick had
just won and said that we should not renew it and it went from what would have
been unanimous to a very tense card vote. 
They still won at that time but the NUS has moved on quite a bit since.
Without further ado, Tony Greenstein.

TG:     Thank you
comrades.  LAW was formed in October
2017. It is the only organisation which has consistently opposed the
witchhunt.  I myself was expelled in
February.  Although I was expelled as
part of the anti-Semitism witchhunt I wasn’t accused of anti-Semitism!
Ironically all those who have been expelled aren’t actually accused of
anti-Semitism because the Labour Party might face defamation proceedings. So
it’s normally the catch-all charge of bringing the party into disrepute. I was
also accused of abusing people like Louise Ellman MP. I called her the MP, not
only for Liverpool Riverside but Tel Aviv South.  That was considered to be abusive! I said she
was a supporter of the abuse of Palestinian children. I was therefore guilty of
trying to shame her. [During a debate
on 6 January 2016 on Palestinian child prisoners Ellman had intervened 3 times
to support the abuse of the Israeli army – see Time
to Deselect Louise Ellman] I argued that she had
no shame and that situation was therefore not possible. Nonetheless I was
convicted by what I called Labour’s National Kangaroo Court.

My
trials began when I was suspended in March 2016. I had a letter from John
Stolliday, the unlamented former head of the Compliance Unit, saying I was
suspended because of remarks I was alleged to have made. No indication was
given as to the nature of the remarks and it was only 2 weeks later that I got
some indication when the Daily Telegraph
and The Times ran a story that I had
been suspended as part of the anti-Semitism witchhunt in the Labour Party.  I got them to correct the allegation that I
was anti-Semitic by giving them a legal warning. Nonetheless it was clear what
the motivation for my suspension was.

When
it came to my investigation there were a number of things I was accused of. My
first offence was drawing a comparison between Israel’s marriage laws, where if
you are Jewish you can’t marry someone who is non-Jewish, and the Nuremburg
Laws of 1935, the race laws of Nazi Germany. 
This was held to be anti-Semitic until I pointed out that Hannah Arendt,
the greatest Jewish political philosopher of the last century and herself a
refugee from Nazi Germany, had made just such a point in the Eichmann Trial, Eichmann in Jerusalem. So they dropped
that one! The next accusation was accusing the Israeli government of wanting
the Holocaust survivors to die in order that they could deny them welfare
benefits.  I pointed out that this
allegation in fact was a quote from the front page of Israel’s Ha’aretz
newspaper and I assumed that they weren’t also being accused of anti-Semitism.

It
was all a bit of a nonsense but we need to put it into context.  Why has the whole anti-Semitism witch-hunt
occurred.  It really goes back to the
election of Jeremy Corbyn in the summer of 2015. If you remember, even before
Corbyn got elected, when people got wind of the fact that he might be elected,
stories started circulating that he had associated with a holocaust denier
called Paul Eisen. (Daily
Mail, Jewish
Chronicle). The reasons for this are quite
simple.  Anti-Semitism is used as a
weapon, it is instrumentalised in the Labour Party. This happens for a very
specific reason, if you think about it.

The
Right does not attack Corbyn because he stands against Austerity. Support
for  Austerity is not particularly
popular so they attack him on what they consider is his weakest position which
is the so-called anti-Semitism that he has engendered.

(7.45)
If you ask where this has come from, the whole nonsense about the Left and
Corbyn being anti-Semitic is a  testimony
to the power of the mass media and mainstream narrative. This has gained a
great deal of traction even though there is no foundation to it. If you think
about it who are the people who are pushing most strongly for the idea that
there is anti-Semitism in the Labour Party? 
It is the popular press – the
Sun, the
Daily Mail, the
Express and all the rest of them.  These are the same papers who have employed Richard
Littlejohn and Katie Hopkins, some of the vilest racists are
nonetheless completely devoted to the fight against anti-Semitism!  That should give you an indication, some
inkling of where this campaign has come from.

This
campaign has been pioneered by the representatives of the Israeli state such as
the Board of Deputies of British Jews. 
In the 1930’s the Board of Deputies, when Oswald Moseley and the British
Union of Fascists were marching through the East End of London, told Jews not
to oppose the fascists.  To stay indoors,
keep their heads down and hope they go away.

However
the Board of Deputies on March 26th held, for the first time in its
history, an ‘anti-racist’ demonstration outside the House of Commons. Some of
us, from Jewish Voice for Labour and Labour Against the Witchhunt held a
counter-demonstration. If you think about it this must be the first anti-racist
demonstration that Norman Tebbit has attended. 
If you remember Tebbit, he told the unemployed to get on their bikes.
Not only Tebbit but members of the Democratic Unionist Party in Northern Ireland,
Ian Paisley and company who are well known for their sectarian
anti-Catholicism. They too joined in with this so-called anti-racist
demonstration. Because of course this demonstration had nothing to do with
anti-racism.

When
we say that the ‘anti-Semitism’ witch-hunt in the Labour Party has nothing to
do with anti-Semitism and everything to do with Israel then we have this
mock-horror reaction from the Zionists and their supporters in the Labour
Party.  Jon Lansman, the Dictator and
Owner of Momentum and all the others who say there are ‘pockets’ of
anti-Semitism in the Labour Party. Even if it is ‘unconscious’ anti-Semitism,
which means no one knows if it exists. Adopting the psycho-analytical
techniques of Freud he is convinced that we are all suffering from this malady.
I am not a great fan of psycho-analysis.

We
don’t have to speculate on the motives of people like Jonathan Arkush. He is a
right-wing Tory and was, until recently, President of the Board of Deputies
which is a Zionist organisation which is completely unrepresentative of secular
Jewry. In his final speech he said ‘Corbyn
holds anti-Semitic views which could drive Jewish people to leave Britain if he
becomes Prime Minister.’  Arkush is
quite clear, it is Corbyn himself who is anti-Semitic.

Arkush
also wrote
an Open Letter with Jonathan Goldstein of the Jewish Leadership Council just
before the March 26th demonostration.  He was quite clear.  ‘Again and again,
Jeremy Corbyn has sided with antisemites rather than Jews. At best, this
derives from the far left’s obsessive hatred of Zionism, Zionists and Israel.’ He is making it very clear that anti-Semitism is
conflated with support for the Palestinians anti-Zionism.  He goes on to say that ‘ At worst, it
suggests a conspiratorial worldview in which mainstream Jewish communities are
believed to be a hostile entity, a class enemy.’

So it’s absolutely clear where Arkush is coming
from. In case anyone has any illusions that Arkush believes that Corbyn is
anti-Semitic it is also the same Jonathan Arkush who, when Donald Trump was
elected sent him a message of congratulations! 
This is the same Donald Trump who came to power after the most
anti-Semitic campaign in recent American history.  Trump was supported wholeheartedly by the
Alt-Right which was founded by the neo-Nazi Richard Spencer . You may recall the rally called
shortly after Trump was elected where ‘Heil Trump’ was shouted by those giving
the Hitler salute.   Spencer is not only
a neo-Nazi but he declares he is a
White Zionist.

The
reason why the neo-Nazi Richard Spencer is a White Zionist is because he
admires Israel’s hostility to Muslims, Palestinians and people who are not
White. Israel as people will know has recently been trying to expel 40,000
Black African refugees a) because they are not Jewish and b) because they are
not White.  To Spencer, the alt-Right and
Steve Bannon, Trump’s former senior strategic adviser Israel is a model
ethno-nationalist state.  Indeed if you
are a racist and a neo-Nazi then I have to ask, what is there not to like about
the Israeli state?  The policies of the
Israeli state and its practices are precisely the ones that the White
Supremacist movement, throughout Europe and America most admire.

So
we have the position that we had at the local elections. If you cast your minds
back to June last year Corbyn didn’t win the General Election but he did better
than anyone, apart from my own blog (!), had imagined would be possible. He
actually gained seats and achieved the biggest swing to Labour since 1945. This
took many people by surprise. If anyone has seen the video of Stephen Kinnock,
the fly-on-the-wall documentary you will remember that when the exit poll was
announced he was literally speechless. The Right in the Labour Party had
expected that come the General Election they would be shot of Jeremy Corbyn.
They have had to recalibrate.

[15.00]
The deployment of ‘anti-Semitism’ as a weapon in the last local elections. If
you think about it we had a mural, long erased, six years ago, suddenly became
an issue one and a half months before those local elections. This was proof
that anti-Semitism existed in the Labour Party. I have to say it’s the weakness
of the left in the Labour Party and also outside it that has actually bought
into this nonsense.  Corbyn’s response
should have been that there is no anti-Semitism in the Labour Party as a
generalised phenomenon. 

A
good friend of mine, Professor Moshe Machover, when he was asked about
anti-Semitism in the Labour Party said yes, there are zebras in Norway.  You can go to a zoo in Norway and you will
undoubtedly find zebras! But there are not many of them in Norway. It’s not
their natural habitat!  You wouldn’t
normally associate zebras with Norway but yes there will be one or two. If you
have 600,000 members of the Labour Party then undoubtedly you will find one or
two anti-Semites. There always have been anti-Semites and probably always will
be but they don’t have any influence. For example I’m not aware that there has
ever been a resolution passed by the Labour Party saying that Jews are somehow
inferior to anyone else.

Anti-Semitism
in the Labour Party is a complete none issue but it is a ruling class narrative
which has been used to challenge the Palestinian narrative and to undermine the
Corbyn leadership. Nothing has chilled debate on Palestine more than the
allegations of anti-Semitism. Jon Lansman and others, Chakrabarti included,
have said you can’t even talk about Zionism anymore because that might be
interpreted as referring to Jews. Of course Zionism is the founding ideology of
the Israeli state.  It is an ideology of
Jewish supremacism. It is a settler colonial ideology. It explains why I can go
to Israel because I’m Jewish and claim citizenship yet someone who is
Palestinian, whose family came from there and who lived there for generations
has no such right. Zionism explains why 93% of Israeli land is reserved for
people who are Jewish whereas 3% of the land is occupied by Israeli
Palestinians.

You
cannot understand the structure and formation of Israel unless you understand
what Zionism is. Incidentally Ken Livingstone, who was hauled over the coals
for some of his comments, was correct. 
In the 1930’s the Zionist attitude to the rise of the Nazis was to
exploit it to use what was happening in order to build their future settler
state.  Which was why, when it came to
confronting Livingstone, he was accused of bringing the party into disrepute
not anti-Semitism. Telling the truth cannot be anti-Semitic.

What
we have though is an intimidation of people in the Labour Party. They are
afraid to raise the issue of Palestine. 
Nowhere more so than with someone like Emily Thornberry.  Although she condemned the Gaza massacres she
also says that Israel is a democratic state. We have to bury this idea that
Israel is a democratic state.  It is a
Jewish state. It is democratic for Jews and Jewish for Palestinians. You can’t
have a Jewish state and a democratic state if it is  inbuilt that Jews will always maintain their
majority, their supremacy and their rights over the non-Jewish population.  It is therefore an oxymoron to talk about a
Jewish democratic state in Israel.

One
of the main demands of the Zionists is that the Labour Party should adopt the
International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance [IHRA] definition of anti-Semitism
that Mick Napier spoke about.  I don’t
know if people are aware of this or not but it is one of the main demands in
the Open Letter from Arkush and Goldstein to Corbyn which was sent at the time
of the March 26th demonstration setting out preconditions for even
agreeing to meet with him.  Of course if
you remember after that demonstration Corbyn went to a Passover seder with
Jewdas, a Jewish group of anarchists and dissidents.  Arkush accused
Jewdas, who are Jewish, of being a ‘source of virulent anti-Semitism’ which
explains just about everything you need to understand about the nature of the
‘anti-Semitism’ campaign.

The
reaction to those comments, which were stupid even by the standards of Arkush
and the Board of Deputies, meant that they had to drop their preconditions.
Arkush said in his letter
that ‘Corbyn must ensure Labour branches
adopt the IHRA definition of antisemitism, which some hard-left activists have
lobbied against.’ So I really want to concentrate my remarks on the IHRA
as  it is clearly the main weapon of the
Zionists.

The
IHRA first saw light of day in 2003 as the EU Monitoring Committee’s Working
Definition on Anti-Semitism. Then it was junked.  It disappeared in 2013 as the EUMC’s
successor body, the Fundamental Rights Agency took it off its website. We
thought it had died a death but like the undead in a Dracula horror movie it
has miraculously come to life again.  We
have to drive the stake through its heart once again! 

The
IHRA starts off with what might seem to be an innocuous definition. ‘Anti-Semitism is a certain perception of
Jews which may be expressed as hatred towards Jews.’  Firstly anti-Semitism isn’t just a
perception.  It can be a reality, a
practice, discrimination and so on.  A
‘certain perception’ doesn’t define anything. 
It begs the question, what perception. It says that anti-Semitism ‘may be expressed as hatred towards Jews.’ Well
the question that arises is what else it may be expressed at. The answer to
that would seem to be opposition to Zionism, Israel and support for the
Palestinians. I should also add that in talking about ‘hatred’ rather than ‘hostility’
is raising the bar quite high before something is considered anti-Semitic.

The
definition of anti-Semitism in the Oxford English Dictionary [OED] is hostility
to Jews, which is a much lower hurdle. Dr Brian Klug, in a lecture
‘Echoes of Shattering Glass’ in a lecture
at the Jewish Museum in Berlin in 2014 defined anti-Semitism in 21 words:

antisemitism is a form of
hostility to Jews as Jews, where Jews are perceived as something other than
what they are.

If
you look at the IHRA definition it has 11 examples, 7 of which mention Israel.
One of them is ‘drawing comparisons
between contemporary Israeli policy with those of the Nazis.’ Now I’m not
in favour of comparing everything that Israel does to those of the Nazis.
However I think it can be quite useful on occasion.  Professor Daniel Blatman, a Holocaust
researcher at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem makes
exactly those comparisons.   But there are other comparisons. For example
last week there were demonstrations in the northern Israeli city of Afula. They
were demonstrating against the fact that a Jewish person had sold their house
to an Arab. Afula is a 100% Jewish city and in Israel this is unacceptable. In
Israel most communities and towns are Jewish only.

The
Knesset passed, a couple of years ago, the Admissions
Committees Law which stipulates that any
community of 500 or less can decide whether or not to admit someone to their
community on any grounds they so choose – so if they are an Arab they will not
be admitted. Incidentally if they are Black and Ethiopian Jews they also won’t
be admitted.

[25.00]
So the right to racially discriminate is written into Israeli law.  In Afula, which is 50,000 strong, you don’t
have Admission Committees. Therefore you have an unofficial policy which is
enforced through organisations like the Jewish National Fund.  Here you had someone selling their private
house to someone who wasn’t Jewish and you had complete uproar, including the
previous Mayor. This isn’t unique.  Three
years ago in the same city there were tenders put out for people to bid for
houses.  Half the people who won the bids
were Arabs. So again you had demonstrations in this city against the sale of
houses to Israeli Arabs. The Nazareth District Court cancelled the whole
operation because the bidding process had gone wrong and it was diluting the
racial composition of Afula.

I
could spend an hour just detailing the racist discrimination in most areas of
life in Israel.  I’ve just done a blog on
how in most Israeli hospitals if you are about to give birth, if you are
Jewish, then you are put into a separate ward from Arab women. But if you
compare those practices to Nazi Germany where also there were signs in villages
and spa resorts in particular saying ‘Jews
not Welcome’ that is apparently anti-Semitic.  That is one example of ‘anti-Semitism’.

Another
example of ‘anti-Semitism’ is holding Jews collectively responsible for the
actions of Israel.  I happen to agree. It
is anti-Semitic if you say that someone who is Jewish is responsible for what
Israel does. But then Israel calls itself a Jewish state and not only a Jewish
state but a state of the Jews. It is written into Israeli law, for example the
new Jewish
Nation State Bill that Israel represents not only
its own Jewish citizens but Jews wherever they may be found in the world.  That is part of the Jerusalem
Programme of the World Zionist Organisation.

There
is no such thing as an Israeli nationality. There’s been two court cases George Tamarin v State
of Israel in 1972 and Uzi
Ornan in 2013.  These were cases where
Israeli Jews wanted to be classified as Israeli not Jewish nationals. The
courts were quite clear. There cannot be an Israeli nationality because in
Israel, there are something like 130 nationalities but only one of them matters
– the Jewish nationality.  The reason why
is simple. In the words of Chief Judge Agranat in Tamarin ‘the desire to create
an Israeli nation separate from the Jewish nation is not a legitimate
aspiration.’ What this means is that Israel is a state of all Jews wherever
they live and it purports to represent Jews worldwide.  It’s not surprising then that some people
blame Jews for what Israel does.

Then
there is the wonderful illustration, this in a definition of anti-Semitism, denying
the Jewish people their right to self-determination for example by claiming
that the existence of the State of Israel is a racist endeavour. It’s a
complete non-sequitur for a start. It is quite possible to support the right of
Jews to self-determination but you will still say that Israel is racist.

On
the other hand denying someone the right to self-determination isn’t in itself
racist. I know I’m speaking to a Scottish audience here but it is quite
possible to say that Scottish people don’t have the right to self-determination
without being called a racist. That is a political position.  It has nothing to do with whether you are
hostile to people because they are
Scottish. This is the nonsense which has been introduced, or which they are
attempting to introduce, as a definition of anti-Semitism.

The
IHRA definition is 450 words long. You don’t need a definition of anti-Semitism
which is 450 words. You should be able to make do with about 7 words. ‘Anti-Semitism is hostility to Jews as
Jews.’  Yet the Zionist organisations
– the Jewish Labour Movement, the Labour Friends of Israel etc. are pushing for
this definition. The reason why is that it conflates support for the
Palestinians, opposition to Zionism and anti-Semitism. That really is the fight
that we have at the moment.

It’s
very good that the University College Union has rejected the IHRA and Liberty,
which was the National Council for Civil Liberties has rejected it on basic
free speech grounds.  People like Sir
Stephen Sedley, who was a judge in the Court of Appeal who is himself Jewish
has come out very strongly against the IHRA in an article Defining Anti-Semitism in
the London Review of Books. Sedley said that the problem with the IHRA, apart
from anything else, is that it is open-ended, it’s not a definition.

But
of course in the Labour Party people are intimidated. Momentum has not taken up
the question of anti-Semitism. I make a prediction.  I don’t have a crystal ball but the
anti-Semitism nonsense is going to be rerun again possibly at Labour Party
conference and probably before the next local elections. It’s something which
will run and run. The reason why is quite simple. When Corbyn was elected I
imagine it induced panic, not only in the Israeli Embassy but also the American
Embassy.  Someone who was anti-NATO,
opposed the war in Iraq, was seen as hostile to Western imperialist interests
and was likely to become leader of the second major party in America’s closes
ally in Europe. I have no hesitation in saying that this campaign is driven by
political interests abroad, not least in the United States. If you think about
it the USA invests hundreds of millions of dollars in its intelligence agencies
to destabilise countries with whose politics they disagree. They have a record
of this throughout Latin America but also in Europe, Cointelpro.
There was a whole programme in the post-war period to finance and subsidise
Atlantacist and pro-American organisations. That is what we are seeing now.

In
20-30 years some young journalist, maybe on the Guardian, if it still exists, or
a researcher will discover via a freedom of information request files in the
American embassy which show quite conclusively where and how this campaign was
planned. I have no doubt that it did not arise spontaneously. [32:40]

Response to Questions
from the audience

TG:     The first
question was about my record in the Labour Party. Well I was a member 20 odd
years ago and I was suspended under the Neil Kinnock witchhunt in 1992-3. In
fact the whole of Brighton Labour Party was suspended. Primarily because the
Party disagreed with the councillors over things like prosecuting people who
failed to pay the poll tax. They suspended the party and I was the editor of
something called the Friends of Brighton Labour Party. I was hauled up before a
panel, it wasn’t the National Constitutional Committee and Larry Whitty, who
was then General Secretary, came down to Brighton specially to prosecute my
case. There were about 30 of us so I was quite honoured. Sure enough. I was
suspended for one year which was really quite a mild punishment. Others got
expelled if they were in Militant. I joined the party after my one year suspension.
I was living in Woodingdean, which is on the outskirts of Brighton. I got a
local Labour newsletter through telling me about the campaign against the local
gypsies who were occupying Happy Valley Park. I immediately wrote them a letter
and told them I was resigning because I didn’t want to be part of a party that
was engaging in racist attacks on Roma. Incidentally speaking of that, John
Mann  MP, who is one of the main
proponents of the anti-Semitism witchhunt, is himself a vehement racist when it
comes to Roma and Gypsies. [see John
Mann MP’s opposition to ‘anti-Semitism’ doesn’t extend to Gypsies and
Travellers] These people have no objection to
racism, which is why we have the right-wing tabloid press, who on the one hand
demonise anyone who is Muslim or Black or refugees but on the other hand are so
concerned about anti-Semitism.

The
Daily Mail, which campaigned against Jewish refugees in the 1930’s is
resolutely opposed to anti-Semitism today. What advice do I give?  The advice I always give. To stand and fight
and not accept the narrative of our opponents that this has nothing to do with
anti-Semitism.  After all those of us who
fought and opposed the fascists and National Front were also accused of racism.
They had a campaign for Rights for Whites. We were anti-White.  That is what the Apartheid regime in South
Africa said. None of this is new but it didn’t gain any credence or traction at
that time. Today ‘anti-Semitism’ is pushed even though it has nothing to do
with anti-Semitism.

The
third question is about responding to the media. We don’t control the media of
course. I think one of the lessons from the general election last year is that
despite the attacks of the media on Jeremy Corbyn we still did remarkably well.
People were turned off by the vehemence of the attack. Instead of bowing down
to people like Jonathan Arkush and the Jewish Labour Movement who attack Corbyn
and Palestinian supporters as ‘anti-Semites’ stand up to them. Call them
out.  Say that ‘you’re not really concerned about anti-Semitism, it’s about Zionism.’

Zionism
came about because, unlike every other Jewish current, it accepted the
arguments of the anti-Semites. They said anti-Semitism was inevitable, you
couldn’t fight it. That’s why their political programme was to set up a Jewish
state in Palestine. As A B Yehoshua,
a prominent left-Zionist novelist who holds to something called the ‘Negation
of the Diaspora’. One of the founding principles of Zionism was its contempt
for Jews who lived outside Palestine. They believed that Jews deserved the
anti-Semitism they experienced because they had developed asocial characteristics
as a result of not living on national land. It was very much blood and soil
nationalism.

Yehoshua,
in a lecture to the Union of Jewish Students (Jewish Chronicle 22.1.82) thought
he would tell it to them straight because some of the Zionists actually do
believe that we are anti-Semitic.  He
said ‘‘Anti-Zionism is not the product of the non-Jews. On the contrary, the
Gentiles have always encouraged Zionism, hoping that it would help rid them of
the Jews in their midst. Even today, in a perverse way, a real anti-Semite must
be a Zionist.’ That’s right.  If someone
goes up to me in a pub and says you don’t belong here, you should go to Israel,
they are either an anti-Semite or a Zionist or both.

Mick Napier: On the whole
issue of BDS I have 2 passports. Palestinians usually have none. In the same
week that the Canadian government passed legislation criminalising BDS dockers
in Vancouver turned away an Israeli ship in support of the Palestinian call for
Boycott.

The
BDS call is a response to decades and decades of lobbying the authorities.  It’s because they delivered nothing that BDS
is a call to take action by dockers, by campaigners of every stripe. Things are
reaching such an extreme that, as Tony said, we have been forbidden from saying
things which are manifestly true. Of course governments lie.  Anyone who denies that proposition is off
their head but there are degrees of lying. When you see a couple of week ago
snipers crumpling Palestinians to the ground, medical workers, people who
already had both legs removed after a previous smash up and you hear Theresa
May’s government say and by the way, the Tories since the last massacre have
increased arms sales to Israel by a factor of 10. We now sell Israel sniper
rifle parts to massacre people demonstrating for their rights, you hear Theresa
May’s Ministers say Britain has the strongest legislative protection governing
the use of arms that we sell in the whole world. It’s not possible for these
sniper rifle parts to be used by snipers in Israel to kill the Palestinians.
It’s manifestly nonsense, a lie and the glaring nature of the lie works in our
favour.

I
went to a marvellous series a couple of week ago called The World Against
Apartheid. The BBC showed it. a 7 part series from the USA. You see that the
struggle against Apartheid in some parts of the world, not just those who ran
on the pitch in Murrayfield, you see that in some parts of the world like in
New Zealand, it was semi-insurrectionary. It was a mass popular movement
against that hostile government. The hostile government backed the Apartheid
Rugby Tour and a massive section of the population was quite prepared to take
very militant, determined action tearing down fences in order to bring that
tour to a shuddering halt.

So
the fact that we see a growth of reaction, we see institutions moving to a
pro-Israel direction, doesn’t surprise me. The BDS movement doesn’t draw its
strength from winning them over but from resisting them and learning the
lessons of the anti-Apartheid struggle. I think the tremendous developments in
America and elsewhere on the BDS front give great cause for hope.

The
most Jewish university in America, the elite Barnard
College in New York, has just had an
overwhelming vote for BDS. So we are winning, we are many and they are few.
They organise and we need to organise much better. In terms of the media of
course we cannot control what goes into these sewer rags like the Sun and The
Mail. People will be subject to those lies to a degree and to a greater degree
if they are isolated and watching the TV and newspapers on their own. They will
be prey to the lies. The more we are organised and come together and mutually
criticise these lies then the greater the freedom and the greater we can resist
the media.  We have to make our own media
as well but we have to come together, organise and discuss. [46.02]

[57:30]
Ian Drummond: The speaker will come
back in a second. There’s just one thing I would like to say. Most of the
people who’ve been kicked out of the Labour Party over this or been suspended
are actually Jewish like Tony or Black like Marc Wadsworth and it’s Black or
Jewish anti-racists who have been targeted by this anti-racist witchhunt.

Mick Napier: I’m old enough
to have been involved in the campaign against the war in Vietnam. Three million
people were killed. The Americans invaded because Eisenhower said that if they
had elections Ho Chi Minh was going to win. Therefore 3 million had to die to
prevent elections.  We were told at that
time that Vietnam had invaded Vietnam and America was intervening to protect
the Vietnamese from the Vietnamese. When you say it like that it sounds pretty
mad and it is mad but that was the argument which was being carried to justify
genocide. There’s never any escape from it. The arguments which will be used to
crush the people of Kenya or Vietnam or Palestine will be bonkers. If you
reflect on them for a moment they will not hold any water.  There’s no escaping that.  I think the strategy when you are accused of
being an anti-Semite is to be bloody angry and to go on attack. To
counter-attack. Not to sit down and say ‘well let’s discuss if I am an
anti-Semite or not’. Tony alluded to some of the darkness of the anti-Semitism
of Zionism.  Lets just take one
example.  We could be here a week. The
boulevard that runs around the Knesset is called Arthur Ruppin Boulevard. This
is not a guy who was ranting in a pub, this was a major figure in Zionist
history.  He was a romantic German blood
and soil nationalist. They kicked him out but he carried all the filth with
him. This is where I lower my voice in case anyone thinks this is a BNP
meeting.

Arthur
Ruppin was a major figure in Zionist land colonisation. He wrote and he said
that the ancient Jews were Aryans.  We
were corrupted by an infusion of Semitic genes that predisposed them to money
lending and other degenerate behaviours and they could only overcome this
Semitic genetic corruption by moving to Palestine and becoming hewers of wood
and farmers and plumbers and good knows what. This racist filth saturates many
strands of Zionism from the very beginning. I don’t think we should be
defensive.  We should go on the attack
and we should say how on earth can the apartheid structures of Israel not be
the product of an ever racist ideology and that’s what Zionism is. And if we
stand our ground those people who are hurling the invective with no basis
whatsoever, I don’t want to say that the truth always wins, it doesn’t, but if
you stand your ground it’s a hell of an asset. So let’s go on the attack. It’s
a very dangerous time. I was chilled to the bone a few days ago when the new
fascist Interior Minister and Deputy Prime Minister in Italy, Matteo Salvini, said
they were going to cleanse Italy of Roma, street by street. That is Nazi talk.
These are dangerous times. Italy’s
deputy PM Salvini called for ‘mass cleansing, street by street, quarter by
quarter’, newly resurfaced footage reveals. These people
are not always but very largely drawn to Israel as Tony pointed out earlier
because they are attracted to a state which slaughters large numbers of
brown-skinned people and non-Jews. So the lines are drawn, there is a major
fight is coming up, the future of civilisation is hanging in there, we lost it
in the 30’s and something is happening which is redrawing the lines. But when
those lines are redrawn those who support human rights, those who support the
Palestinian struggle for freedom and democracy will find themselves with
progressive forces. Those who support Israel are going to be the like of those
cleaning the streets of Italy street by street of Roma and they are dark, dark,
fascist forces.  I am absolutely
confident that when we do fight we are going to win.

Ian Drummond         It was Matteo
Salvini who tried to lobby the Argentinian football team against their boycott
of Israel.

[1.03:07]          Tony
Greenstein When Mick raised the figure of Arthur Ruppin, who was a major
figure in Zionist history, who was known as the Father of Land Settlement and
also the Father of Israeli Sociology I thought he was going to mention the
incident where he went over to Nazi Germany in the summer of 1933 and he
visited Hans
Günther who
was Professor of Social Anthropology and Racial Sciences of Jenna University. He
had been put in Jenna University in May 1930 by Wilhelm Frick, who was the
first Nazi State Minister (of Education) in Thuringia, Germany. Gunther was the
ideological mentor of Heinrich Himmler, who as Head of the SS was the personal
responsible for the implementation of the Final Solution.

According
to Ruppin’s diaries, they both got on famously and largely agreed in their
discussions about Aryans, Jews and the racial sciences. This meeting is omitted
I believe by Alex Bein from the English and Hebrew translations of the diaries
but included in the German version.

The
fact is that Gunther and Ruppin were at one over the Jewish Question. They both
accepted that there were too many Jews in Germany. I realise that I will be
accused of anti-Semitism for saying this but since the topic has come up, I
should mention David Ben Gurion, the first Prime Minister of Israel who was the
key figure in the history of Zionism. The Zionist attitude before the world was
quite simple. If the Jews were going to go anywhere, if they were to leave
Germany, then they should only go to Palestine. It would be useless, worse than
useless, for them to go to any other place because they would simply recreate
the Jewish Question in those countries. After Krystallnacht, the Nazi pogrom
against the Jews in November 1938, Britain agreed to take 10,000 children, the Kindertransport, although they wouldn’t
take their parents, who mostly died
in the Final Solution. But the Zionist movement was not happy about this at
all. Ben Gurion, in a speech to the Central Committee of the Israeli Labour
Party, Mapai, said:

Were I to know that
the rescue of all German Jewish children could be achieved by their transfer to
England and of only half their number by transfer to Palestine, I would opt for
the latter, because our concern is not only the personal interests of these
children, but the historic interests of the Jewish people.” which can be
found in Shabtai Teveth’s biography of Ben Gurion, The Burning Ground.

In
other words, what mattered most was the building of a Jewish racial state not
the actual rescue and safety of the Jewish children themselves.

You
mentioned, Jonathan, how do we combat this ideology. Let me say first of all
that my own experience is that for most people in Britain it is quite easy to
make a distinction between hatred of Jews, i.e. anti-Semitism and hatred of
what Israel does and Zionism. It’s not a difficult concept. The idea that
anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism are one and the same thing is a ruling class
narrative. It is a narrative of the yellow press and their journalists. For
most people it’s not difficult to draw that distinction. I’m not as pessimistic
as most people are that we can win that debate.

Of
course in the Labour Party the right-wing have adopted the ‘anti-Semitism
narrative’ not because they are anti-racist, quite the contrary. Because that
is the best way of supporting the alliance with the United States. The main
threat to that is Jeremy Corbyn. The tragedy is that instead of Corbyn and
Momentum resisting that narrative, that anti-Semitism is a phenomenon in the
Labour Party, they have gone along with it.

Momentum,
which is led by Jon Lansman, who is himself a Zionist and a racist, is like one
of those Mountain Trolls in Harry Potter’s Philosopher’s Stone. It is an
enormous creature but unfortunately it doesn’t have very much of a brain. That
is like Momentum. It has 40,000 members but it has no brain. It lumbers around
from crisis to crisis, led by Lansman, who is the personal owner of Momentum
Ltd. It has no internal democracy and therefore cannot change its policies
because there is no forum or means with which to do so.

By
accepting the ‘anti-Semitism narrative’ Momentum has accepted the attack of the
Labour Right on Corbyn. It’s a battle he can never win because they are going
to come back time and time again on the same theme that Labour is anti-Semitic.
Corbyn will plead and promise to be the most militant fighter against a
non-existent anti-Semitism yet he won’t be able to deliver because it’s not
possible to deliver on something that doesn’t exist.

Corbyn
said Labour has ‘pockets’ of anti-Semitism. So the Zionists held up a banner in
their ‘anti-racist’ demonstration saying the pocket is Jeremy Corbyn. He can’t
win on this and that’s why you have to stand up and say ‘no, we don’t accept
this nonsense’.

The
important thing at the moment is to build Labour Against the Witchhunt in
Scotland and campaign on those politics. We have to reject the allegations of
anti-Semitism.  As Alex Sayle said:
‘most of the people who have been
suspended from the Labour Party seem to have been Jewish.’

It’s
not people who are anti-Semitic who are being expelled.  Yes of course people make clumsy or silly
remarks from time to time but one of the reasons that people sometimes do indulge
in what is seen as anti-Semitic rhetoric or blame Jews rather than Zionists is
precisely because Zionist organisations in this country do their best to
associate British Jews with the massacres and war crimes in Gaza and all the
other horrors that Israel is involved in. It’s not surprising that some people
are fooled by that and do blame Jews. 
But that’s not anti-Semitism in the historically understood, traditional
sense. It’s simply loose language that occurs as a consequence of deliberate
political mystification. People are fooled into believing Israel is a Jewish
state whereas there is nothing specifically Jewish about it.

How
do we campaign? I think we should campaign on the real things. For example the
Jewish National Fund which owns 13% and controls 93% of Israeli land. The JNF
has a constitution which says that it can only lease or rent land. This came under
challenge in 2000 when the High Court ruled in Kadaan, that it was no longer permissible to rent or refuse to sell
land to Jews only. This led to the Jewish Chronicle in 2008 staging a debate
“Is it racist to set aside Israeli land for Jews only?”.I think
that’s a no brainer! Clearly within the Zionist movement it isn’t.

In
fact the Knesset, following Kadaan, then went on to pass legislation allowing
Jews to continue discriminating against non-Jews when it came to the sale or
renting of land.

I
could give dozens of examples of racism, for example ‘Israel bans novel on
Arab-Jewish romance in schools because it threatens Jewish identity.’
A novel Borderland by Israeli
novelist Dorit Rabinyan described a romance between Jewish and Arab teenagers.
It was banned from the high school English syllabus because it undermined the
whole idea of Jewish identity.

Mixed
marriages in Israel are frowned upon. My parents were always opposed to me
marrying someone who is not Jewish. That was on religious grounds but in Israel
it is considered a form of national
treason. So very few people in Israel marry
someone of another religion and you can’t do it in Israel. That was why the
book was banned. It undermined the purity of the race.

The
best way to undermine this nonsense is by pointing out the hypocrisy of the
racists and Zionists who support these things. 
Labour Friends of Israel did itself no favours when it came out and blamed
the Palestinians who were murdered in Gaza for their own deaths.                      

We
also have to expose the hypocrites on the Labour left. The Labour left has
become differentiated now. What was the pro-Corbyn movement has splintered
between those who go along with the narrative of the Right and those like
ourselves who oppose it.

We
have to be quite clear that those who support the anti-Semitism attacks of the
JLM/LFI are therefore supporting the Right in practice.  That is why today Momentum nationally is so politically
useless. [1.13.22]

Mick Napier:

[1:26:16]
I just want to point out what we haven’t talked about, viz. that there is no
witchhunt inside the SNP. The SNP has been cowed into silence and they know
that. They are a much more disciplined and Stalinist organisation than the
Labour Party. As a Scottish Palestine solidarity campaign some of our members
are in the Labour Party, I was in the Labour Party, for two days in 1964, when
Harold Wilson was elected and then the rot set in then. We come to different
trajectories to the same challenges we face today. We can work as a Palestine
solidarity campaign, which is not aligned with any political party at all and
never will be in order to work with activists inside the Labour Party and
inside the SNP as well.

A
few years ago I spoke to Edinburgh South CLP and at Leith CLP and the majority
of the people in the room were in agreement. We are willing to have speakers
come to speak to political groups in order to carry this argument against false
anti-Semitism.

There
is a bright new sun that has arisen that is quite small but Jews Against
Zionism have made their presence felt in Scotland over the last few weeks by
challenging the narrative from the Zionist leaders of the Jewish community and
there are excellent speakers in Jews Against Zionism that you can invite to
come and speak to your branches and party as well. They are by and large
socialist and can carry the argument. But the rot has set in. We saw a terrible
situation here in Scotland where the march against racism last March organised
by anti-racists in Scotland and so frightened were the organisers that they
allowed Israeli flags to be flown there and they allowed a virulently racist
organisation The Scottish Confederation of Friends of Israel to turn up with
the intention of participating in that march. 
And when you spoke to the people who had organised it, they were
terrified.  The phrase that crops up time
and time again ‘we are afraid to be seen to be anti-Semitic.’

To
use the passive voice.  Seen by whom? And
I agree with Tony when you carry the argument to ordinary people it’s not
difficult to win it. You can easily win it. And if anyone’s tempted by gloom
look at the opinion polls. Over many many years, they haven’t even changed
dramatically. Public opinion in this country and right across Europe is very
hostile to the State of Israel. It tends to be very suspicious of what Israel
is up to and tends to be very open to support the Palestinians.

The
Jews have got it wrong. It is the Catholics who were chosen.  I was told that at school by all the
teachers! But I think that every religious denomination is taught that they are
chosen and the rest are all ready for eternal damnation.

Friends
it’s a very dangerous time.  If we look
at the situation in Palestine against the background of the carnage in the
Middle East, the devastation of Iraq, the devastation of Libya, the dismantling
of several states, the atrocious genocidal violence that has been visited upon
the people of Yemen, with British weapon supplied to the Saudis, and when you
look at Europe you see, once again the rise of the extreme Right. You have to
see these things as a whole. The issue of Palestine remains a litmus test.
Those people who support what is happening against the people of Palestine will
tend to be the enemies of freedom, the enemies of socialism and they will align
with the right-wing. It’s a contradictory process but as things develop you
will find that Palestine is a litmus test. When you argue for Palestinian
freedom, when you argue against the apartheid structures of the State of
Israel, when you argue against the inherent virulent racism of Zionism, then
you can carry a process of political education into politicala parties, Labour
and I hope the SNP although that has got a much better carapace

Tony Greenstein:      The best form
of defence is attack. When they accuse us of anti-Semitism we should point out
a few home truths. I was at a demonsration a couple of weeks, ago, the Al
Quds  demonstration, it was the day after
15,000 supporters of the Football Lads Alliance had been demonstrating in
London and a few hundred of these fascists came to support the Zionist
counter-demonstration to Al Quds.

There
is a growing alliance between sections of the Zionist movement in this country
and the far-Right. So for example Tommy Robinson, who’s been sentenced to 13
months in prison for contempt of court, they had a solidarity demonstration
with him outside the British Embassy in Tel Aviv. Tommy Robinson might no like
Muslims, he might not like Jews very much but he certainly loves Israel. In
America where there is the second largest Jewish community in the world, which
is different from the British Jewish community in that most of them are not
Orthodox Jews, so there is a large cleavage between them and Israel.  Amongst the most ardent advocates for BDS in
America are young Jewish students. When Donald Trump was elected he was
welcomed effusively in Israel by the Zionist movement, because he has moved the
US Embassy  to Jerusalem which he has
recognised as Israel’s capital, he has made no secret of his hostility to the
Palestinians, you had the main Jewish newspaper Forward with articles like
this, The
Disturbing Alliance Between Zionists and Anti-Semites
 by Susan Schneider or How
Steve Bannon and Breitbart News can be pro-Israel and anti-Semitic at the same
time
by Naomi Zeveloff. There is no doubt that the alt-Right in
America is anti-Semitic. Yet the Zionist Organisation of America invited as its
guests of honour not only Steve Bannon, who is anti-Semitic but someone who is
even worse, Sebastian Gorka who was also an adviser to Trump.  Gorka was a member
of Vitenzi Rend which is a Hungarian neo-Nazi
group which was formed by Admiral Horthy in the second world war. Horthy was
the pro-Nazi ruler who presided over the deportation of nearly half a million
Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz   

You
see this throughout Europe where you have far-Right governments which almost
invariably are enthusiastic supporters of Israel. Viktor Orban, the Prime
Minister of Hungary, who I don’t think anyone needs any introduction to, has
erected a fortress around Hungary and now made it a criminal offence to give
aid, succour or food to refugees. He’s a strong supporter of Netanyahu and
vice-versa. [It has just been announced
that Netanyahu has just invited Orban to pay a state visit to Israel in July].

Orban
however doesn’t like George Soros, the former Hungarian Jewish billionaire, who
he portray and attacks as a traditional Jewish financier and manipulator but
then neither does Netanyahu because he financed some Israeli human rights
organisations. The Polish government has just passed a law criminalising
mention of Polish complicity in the Holocaust. Or the Austrian Freedom Party
under Heinz Christian Strache which began life as a neo-Nazi party and still
contains many such creatures and which is now in government, is also
pro-Israel. Or Geert Wilders in The Netherlands, head of the Freedom Party,
which is the second major party in their parliament. Wilders is ardently
pro-Israel but he is a fascist and he came to London to speak at the Free Tommy
Robinson rally.

The
reality in the world today is that if people are anti-Semitic and fascist then
they will almost certainly be pro-Zionist. There is no dichotomy at all.  You mentioned about philo-semitism which is
where you are supposedly pro-Jewish. The best example was Owen Smith. You
remember when he challenged Jeremy Corbyn for the leadership. When asked in a
debate sponsored by the Jewish Labour Movement, what he  most admired about Jews, he said
that Jews are very good at business. (laughter) Well this is the typical
stereotype of Jews! They are good at business. 
It is an anti-Semitic stereotype or trope. Philo-semitism and
anti-Semitism are really two sides of the same coin – you attribute certain
characteristics to Jews but you believe they are positive rather than negative.

Zionism
began from an acceptance that what anti-Semites said about Jews was basically
correct. That because of their asocial characteristics, which the Zionists
accepted, they did not belong in non-Jewish society. That’s why you had people
like Ruppin and Pinhas Rosenbluth, the first Israeli Justice Minister, who said
that Palestine was an ‘Institute for the
fumigation of Jewish vermin.’ Often when you listen to something said about
Jews it could either be by an anti-Semite or a Zionist. You really wouldn’t
know unless you had further information.

What
is LAW doing? Well LAW will be holding a national conference in the autumn. So
I hope people come to it.  And yes we are
planning for at least one fringe meeting at Labour Party conference. In
addition Jackie Walker is likely to be coming up for a hearing for the National
Kangaroo Committee. I don’t think there is any doubt that when she does come up
she will be expelled. Obviously we will be planning a speaking tour for Jackie
and other events. Jackie will no doubt be wanting to come and speak to meetings
in Scotland.

The
witchhunt is not going to go away. This is one of the main weapons of the Right
in the party.  We have to take it to the
left, people in the Campaign for Socialism and Momentum and say that if you
accept the witch hunt then you really are accepting the narrative of those who
oppose Corbyn.  Let’s be under no doubt
the election results last year were a great disappointment to the Right. The
Right had looked forward to seeing the end of Corbyn. They still have not
become reconciled to him. That is why it is so disastrous that Corbyn has followed
an appeasement strategy approach to the Right rather than going all out to
deselect as many of the bastards as possible.

I
have little doubt that if Corbyn is in the position to for a government, maybe
with SNP support, 50-60 of the Labour Right will probably say that they will
not support him under any circumstances. People like Joan Ryan, Louise Ellman,
the MP for Hove Peter Kyle, would rather see the Conservatives in power than
Jeremy Corbyn. That is something that Lansman, who is particular stupid and
thick, does not get. These people will not be bought off.

The
only way you can win is by defeating them politically. Momentum is not doing
very well in terms of selection of parliamentary candidates precisely because
it’s embarked on this appeasement strategy coupled with its complete lack of
internal democracy.

Finally
as regards the 2 states solution which Corbyn 
espouses. You are right.  2 states
will never come about because Zionism does not claim sovereignty over part of
Palestine. It claims sovereignty over all of Palestine. So the idea that it is
going to grant Palestinian self-determination or any form of Palestinian state
is for the birds. Our demand should be Palestine today is one state, a Greater
Israel in which the Israeli Palestinians have limited democratic rights and the
other 5 million or so have no democratic rights whatsoever and live under a
permanent military occupation. So our demands are simple. One person, one vote
and a state of all its citizens when Balad, the National Democratic League,
which has 3 members of the Knesset, put a bill forward to that effect, they
refused to even discuss it because the idea of one unitary democratic state is
completely incompatible with a Jewish state. [see Jerusalem Post, 4 June 2018, [see
Knesset
refuses to put bill rejecting Jewish, democratic Israel to a vote].

2
States is a diversion. It plays into the hands of the Zionists. As long as you
hold out the mirage of 2 states then Israel has the pretext for not granting
any form of democratic rights to the 5-6 million Palestinians under occupation.
That’s why Labour Friends of Israel support a 2 state solution. They know it
will never come about and that’s why it’s equally wrong for Corbyn, stupid
beyond measure, for him to adopt that. There should be one state, one
democratic state as in South Africa. So thank you very much. [1.40.10.]

Glasgow LAW Meeting 27th
June 2018

Professor Hillel Ticktin:

Ideological
developments since the war make a kind of peculiar formation. The absurdity of
calling an anti-Zionist an anti-Semite even if they are Jew has to be
explained. It’s so nuts to be able to say anything like that there must be some
explanation as to what lies behind it. On the exact formation I’m not going to
speak. I’m just trying to explain what would be both the objective and
ideological background which has formed over the last 70 years, since the war.
Britain is in a peculiar position even among major capitalist powers. Obviously
Brexit itself shows that but it’s more than that. The fact is that Britain was
the imperial overlord until the end of the second world war. The British ruling
class had decided and agreed with the American ruling class in a conference in
1922/3 that would conceded to the United States. At that time in the Soviet
Union they were debating as to whether there would be a war between Britain and
the United States. In fact they came to terms and Britain conceded the fact that
they would be inferior and would take orders from the United States. That is
what it boiled down to.

And
indeed after the war that is what happened. The British Empire became, in
effect, a part of the American Empire. But what that also meant was as we know
the British Empire in that process either went over to the American sphere of
influence or it effectively disintegrated and ceased to be, as in the case of
Burma which seceded completely. Now the overall effect of that was the flow of
money to Britain of course was more limited in other words the British
exploitation of the world overall was more limited.  Consequently the standard of living in
Britain itself was less than it would have been if they had continued to have
the same empire or imperial forms that had existed before.

That
has been the process ever since with the disintegration of the empire. Although
the colonies virtually ceased to exist by the end of the 60’s if they were
there till then and the Dominions weren’t entirely self-governing. I remember
how well that even in 1949 the Sterling Area where money earned by the South
Africa economy had to remain in Britain.

Now
that has been gradually going away and is part of the reason for the relative,
not the absolute, decline of Britain itself.  But of course, at a certain point, it becomes
absolute, more important. At this point we see it in that for the first time we
actually have a greater outflow of rent, dividends etc. from Britain than an
inflow from outside.  In other words
formerly you had an inflow into Britain, now you have in effect there is more
leaving than coming in.

This
has only happened in the relatively recent period and is in large part the
result of the overall global crisis. Let us say it has speeded up the process.
It is partly a reflection also of the fact that a large proportion today of
British investments is in the United States itself. We can see that in the USA
the reverse is true. That is to say that today we have a peculiar position that
although there is more foreign investment in the USA than US investments in
other countries there is a bigger flow into the US than out of it.  In other words the United States is living
off the rest of the world. [5:31}

That
isn’t happening to Britain anymore. It’s in a much more difficult position than
it has been for a very long time.  In one
sense you could say, it goes back a 100 years or more. In other words Britain
has a crisis which is additional to the overall global crisis. It’s something
which is clear if you read the newspapers because they mention this sort of
thing but they don’t put it in the context in which I’ve just put it.

Now
the second point I’d make is what sort of policy has the bourgeoisie followed
in this country. After the war they effectively conceded with the Labour Party
and Conservative Party governments adopting a reformist policy. Even when the
Labour Party lost in 1951 the same remained true, they had a progressive
housing policy etc.  If you remember
MacMillan was Prime Minister from 1957 to 1964. In the 1980’s MacMillan stood
up in the House of Lords and denounced Thatcher precisely for the reasons you
might say.  He said ‘for god’s sake these
people fought in the War.’

The
Tory was split in other words but the Thatcher element was crucial. In other
words a section of the ruling class took a hard line, effectively saying ‘we’ve
lost the Empire, we’re going into the EU and that’s going to help us but that’s
not enough.’  We can’t continue with a
policy of concessions and of nationalisation. We have to undo it. We have to
reverse the entire policy. Which is what they’ve done.

The
peculiarity in that was that the Labour Party accepted it.  After 1984 when Michael Foot was effectively
thrown out and Kinnock became leader the Labour Party shifted almost violently
to the right. When Blair came in he himself had shifted from being an assistant
to Tony Benn to being somebody on the right, going even further right without
any stopping him.

So
the Labour Party shifted really violently to the right although it wasn’t that
left-wing even under Foot. The point is if you put it in other terms whereas
previous governments before Thatcher came in had adopted a Keynesian policy.
Now of course Keynes wasn’t left-wing but if you read Keyne’s work you are
never sure where on earth he is. He was obviously with the bourgeoisie and
helped the bourgeoisie in 1945 formulate a reformist policy.

Now
one of the central tenets of that policy and one that has been denounced ever
since and which the Cameron government consistently denounced and the present
on continues to denounce, that is there is no such thing as a magical money
tree.  That sort of stuff.

[9.26]
Now that statement is absolute rubbish. It’s got nothing to do with reality.
What Thatcher did was to talk of Dickens and Micawber. You can only spend what
you’ve got. If you spend £20.06 you are ruined. The amazing thing is that the
Labour Party never denounced the Tory policy in those terms. If you listened to
Miliband you couldn’t believe the way the guy was conceding. It’s simply
nonsense.  It’s not a question of a kind
of sudden discovery of economics, it’s an obvious point that if you have the
resources and you have unemployment, a downturn, a crisis then the obvious
thing to do is to pour money into it. What on earth is money there for? All
that it is is a means of exchange. Obviously you can pour money, as much as you
can and you won’t get any inflation, there’s no problem. You can print as much
as you like to get it going.

Now
that’s so obvious you would think they would pick it up and agree with it, but
they don’t.  So obviously the reason they
don’t doesn’t have to do with reality and it’s no fantastic invention of Keynes
either as it is obviously true. So when Cameron came in and reversed in effect
the Labour Party’s line under Gordon Brown, who amazingly took a line slightly
to the left of his own cabinet on this, Cameron then adopted this policy of
austerity and that led the world effectively into a permanent policy of
austerity, which is simply a means of control.

 This has two consequences. Britain had the
most right-wing government since Castlereagh. That’s when Byron and Shelley
wrote

Interjection by the
Chair!  ‘I
met Murder on the way, he had a mask
like Castereagh’ [The
Mask of Anarchy]

HT:     Exactly. I say
Cameron and Castlereagh had the same policy. The policy they adopted was
vicious. He didn’t have to adopt the policy. There was no fundamental reason in
the Conservative rule book that you have to do it. They did it as a means of
control. They knew what they were doing. 
They were afraid. Now the interesting thing is that the Labour Party
under Blair had more or less followed the policy without saying so.  When the crash came Brown had taken a step
aside. But the Cameron government restored the actual position but under
completely different circumstances making the actual position in Britain
perilous.

Now
I began by pointing out the troubles in the British economy itself. The crisis
of course has made it very much worse. The government didn’t have to go that
way. Another example of their what amounts to lying is talking about the huge
government debt.  True technically the
government has a debt of 85-86% of GDP but one third of it is owned to the Bank
of England. Now who owns the Bank?  Is it
owned by the United States? No its owned by Britain, by the government. So how
can you owe yourself anything? So Britain owns 1/3 of its debt. In other words
the real debt is about 50% of GDP. Which is very good compared to the position
of other countries.

[14.00]
That’s because of what I described before. The fact is that if you have unused
resources and Britain does have a lot, a lot of 
people are unemployed to put it mildly although officially that’s not
true. When the crisis took place there were bricks piled up. They were ruined
afterwards. If they had used them they could have built but if you leave them
lying around they case to exist.  That’s
more or less what’s been going on.  The
policy of austerity and the policy of control has meant large scale
unemployment.

First
obviously and then less obviously so today they are proud of the fact that
there are very low levels of unemployment. Technically that’s true but it
depends on how you count it. If you are employed half the time and you want to
work full-time, if you are on zero hours contracts and some 2 million people
are, if you are one of the 6-7 million people who technically own their own firms
and are working for very low levels of pay and are exploiting themselves, then
one has to say that what one has is a real level of unemployment compared to
what would happen if there were really full employment. Very high levels of
unemployment. Again as the Institute of Fiscal Studies pointed out that wages
will only reach the levels of 2007 in 2022. Now they always underestimate how
bad it is so the position for the majority of the population is worse than it
was in 2007 and there doesn’t seem to be any solution to this.

So
it’s not at all surprising that people would lash out to try to find an
alternative. What’s happened is that not just in Britain but particularly in
Britain you’ve got this attempt to find a scapegoat somewhere or other. That
has been traditionally the way in which the Right acts. I’m not saying that
David Cameron was looking for a scapegoat but nonetheless he didn’t stand out
against it. They automatically get a scapegoat. A section of the Right begins
to operate in that manner.

They
do two things under these circumstances. It allows them to continue to rule.
One is to find a reason for austerity but another is to whip up support for
some kind of attack on whosoever. That can take 2 forms.  One form is to find a scapegoat. You then can
have a scapegoating ethos which can fall anyway and you don’t need to confine
yourself to just one scapegoat.  You can
have two scapegoats. There’s nothing to say that there is a quota.

The
second is to go for war. Since 1914 the capitalist class has used war as a
means of staying in power.  In fact, if
you think about it, the world has been in a war-like atmosphere since 1914. In
1914 the war took place precisely because the capitalist system was in a crisis.
It was predicted and it happened. People often say, oh well it was talked about
but nobody knew whether  it would take
place and there was no reason why it necessarily had to take place. Read the
history of the time. Germany was preparing for war, the British ruling class
knew this why was it that from the 1890’s Britain insisted
on having a fleet twice the size of the next two fleets?  Obviously because of the possibility of war.
War was going to come. That was obvious to many people at the time.

You
will remember in 1907 that Lenin and Luxembourg moved a resolution in the
Socialist International calling on the left, the trade unions to go on a
General Strike in the event of war. In other words seven years before the war
they were demanding they should not go to war. The point is that war-like
atmosphere has been essential to capitalism in its crisis phase. That is true
today. We’ve just seen Theresa May trying to invent a war with Russia.  Ok one could say that there was a reason to
be critical of Russia and of course there is. The nature of that society is
awful, that is absolutely true. But that doesn’t mean to say that it’s just
about to attack Britain.

Russia
today is not the Soviet Union. It’s a weak power, a very weak power. The only
thing it does have is an atomic bomb but what on earth is it going to do. If it
drops the atomic bomb anywhere else it is itself then finished. It would be a
stupid act. So the idea that one has to a means of defence against Russia is
just unbelievable. There is no reason not to denounce Russia but regardless to say
it is a power one has to build up more and more arms for is just stupid.

[20:20]
The point being that what we are witnessing is the build up of an atmosphere of
mistrust, an attempt at a war-like atmosphere that seems to have failed up to
now.  The final point I want to make is
about ideology. The ideologies that have been involved really have been what
Marxists term a false consciousness. There was no reason for war  – there was no reason even for the Cold War.
Both sides wanted a Cold War but there was no real reason for it.  If you think about it the Soviet Union was a
Stalinist country which didn’t want to invade any other country. When Zhkov
wanted to march to the Atlantic Ocean Stalin stopped him. The Soviet Union was
itself relatively weak.  They could
easily done a deal with them but they didn’t want to do a deal.

So
there wasn’t a reality to the Cold War which apparently they were broadcasting.
It wasn’t real in that sense.  I’m not
the only person saying that by the way. 
Lord ??? said the same thing. It’s clearly obvious. One doesn’t have to
like it to realise that it wasn’t that strong. 
You could say that they were worried that the Soviet Union would cause a
revolution in Britain. How could they be worried? How many members of the
Communist Party were there here? A trivial number. Who really supported
it?  Almost nobody. Very few people did.  It’s true that in France and Italy it was
somewhat different.

But
Stalin had signed a document saying they were not going to have an uprising and
they didn’t.  The Italian Communist Party
probably could have taken power. But they didn’t. The French party maybe also
could have taken power but they didn’t. Of course the western politicians and
theoreticians knew all of this. What I’m saying is that if you look at the
background it was largely ideological. It was a conscious means of control. If
you read the actual literature of various people who were right-wing who were
sensible or honest then you will see that that is implied in what is being
said.

The
point I’m trying to make here is that to a large degree the propaganda or
statements that are coming out from governments and for that matter from the
Right as a whole have simply been untrue to a very large degree. To a large
degree it is even a fantasy. So it’s not surprising that they could invent
another fantasy as a means of control. That is a belief, somehow or another,
that people who are anti-Zionist are automatically anti-Semites. It is a
fantastic step and a complete nonsense. But that they could do it is not
surprising. If you get this kind of peculiar atmosphere where black is white
and white is black.  Thank you.

[24:20] Tony
Greenstein:      I’m
here to represent  Labour Against the
Witch-hunt. I myself was expelled from the Labour Party earlier this year. I
was originally suspended in March 2016 when the head of the Compliance Unit
John Stolliday wrote to me and said that I was suspended because of remarks I
was alleged to have made. He gave no indication as to what those remarks were.
….. When it came to an investigation meeting, which was held towards the end
of May 2016 there were a whole series of what you might call ideological
talking points. …..

I
also said that Israel’s marriage laws bore a remarkable similarity to the
Nuremburg Laws of Nazi Germany of 1935. For those who are students of history
they were the race laws. They stripped German Jews of citizenship and treated
them as aliens in their own country and one of the consequences of that was
that a Jew could not marry a non-Jew or an Aryan. As Hannah Arendt, perhaps the
greatest Jewish political philosopher of the last century wrote in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem she noted how the
prosecution in the Eichmann trial in 1961, Eichmann was the person who
organised and implemented the Final Solution, whereby 3 million Jews died in
the extermination camps and up to another 3 million at the hands of the killing
squads (Einsatzgruppen) and in other
ways.  She noted the irony that the
Prosecutor, Gideon Hausner, had denounced the Nuremburg Laws, this lethal
instrument which led to the deprivation of all political and civil liberties
and then to the deportation and murder of German Jewry. She noted the irony
that he denounced the Nuremburg Laws which did not allow Jews and non-Jews to
marry and yet in Israel itself it was impossible for someone who is Jewish to
marry a non-Jew because in Israel there is no civil marriage.

That
is a question of race not religion. Only today or yesterday the new Chair of
the Jewish Agency, which is one of the main apartheid institutions in Israel,
Isaac Herzog, bemoaned the terrible rate of marriage among American Jews. Over
50% of young American Jews are what they call marrying out, that is marrying
someone because they love them rather than because they are of the right ethnic
category. In Israel, where being Jewish is a question of whether you belong to
the superior or inferior race, intermarriage is something which cannot be
tolerated and is a social taboo.  I was
suspended for all of these ideological reasons.

Yet
when I was investigated there was no rebuttal to what I was saying. You can
read the transcript
on my blog. For two years I remained suspended until I was expelled in February
of this year.

My
expulsion is unimportant. What was important is that as a result of Labour
under Ed Miliband supporting the austerity programme of the Tory/Lib-Dem
Coalition there was a mass reaction after the 2015 General Election which led
to the election of Jeremy Corbyn. If you remember Jeremy Corbyn couldn’t even
get enough nominations within the PLP he had to go around getting members of
the Right to give him a nomination in order that the Left would have a voice.
No one believed he would be anything other than a token candidate and it was
expected someone else could win.  Andy
Burnham was the favourite.

Miraculously
not only the Labour Party membership but the new Registered Supporters
supported Corbyn. If you remember there was a brainwave by Ed Miliband and
those around him, that they would stop the unions having a block vote in the
Labour Party leadership elections, in future it would be one person one vote.
Not only one person one vote but emulating the Democratic Party in America
where just about anyone can vote in a primary, you could become a registered
supporter. That, it was thought, would permanently dilute the influence of the
left. How badly they miscalculated!

Thousands
of people, including myself, became and about 7 out of 10 voted to support
Corbyn. As did incidentally the existing membership of the Labour Party.  But almost as soon as Corbyn came in you
suddenly found that there was an outbreak of anti-Semitism such as we’d never
before seen in the Labour Party! ……. Gerald Kaufman, a Jewish MP, who
strongly supported the Palestinians, he’s now dead, he was deemed anti-Semitic.
There was a whole fake affair at Oxford University where the Chair, Alex
Chalmers, resigned. We later found
out that he was a former intern at the
British Israel Communications & Research Centre (BICOM)
– the main Israeli propaganda organisation in Britain.

It
continued with Ken Livingstone who made the comment that Hitler had supported
Zionism. It wasn’t completely accurate, we don’t know what Hitler thought as an
individual, but basically it was true, that the Nazis and the Zionists
collaborated and worked together. The Zionists were a political movement who
wanted to establish a Jewish state in Palestine. That was their overriding
goal, not the safety of existing Jewish communities. And so, when the vast
majority of Jews supported the Boycott of Nazi Germany, that is you didn’t buy
anything made in Germany, a Boycott which was remarkably successful in reducing
German trade in the first part of 1933, it was the Zionist movement, together
with the Jewish bourgeoisie, which set its face against that Boycott. The
Jewish Agency concluded Ha’avara, a trade agreement with Nazi Germany.

So
what Ken said was basically accurate but he was called anti-Semitic. Now Ken
may have been right or wrong but he certainly wasn’t anti-Semitic. This
‘anti-Semitism’ campaign is a remarkable thing. It ebbs and it flows.  You remember the last local elections in May
where we found out that Corbyn had supported a mural which was later erased, 6
years previously, a mural with 6 bankers dining on top of sweated Black labour.
In my view it wasn’t anti-Semitic but the main thing was this was hauled out of
the depths of some vault and made into a completely false issue as a stick with
which to beat Corbyn and the Labour leadership. That was done primarily by the
Board of Deputies of British Jews headed by a right-wing Tory Jonathan
Arkush…. The Board
of Deputies is an old and venerable
institution.  It was established by
George III in 1760. It is a very tame, loyal, bourgeois institution. My father
was involved, like most Jews in the East End of London in the Battle Against
Cable Street when the British Union of Fascists attempted to march through the
East End. It was stopped Jewish and non-Jewish workers, including Catholic
dockers.  The Board of Deputies advice in
the Jewish Chronicle to Jews was to stay at home and off the streets.  They ignored that advice. On March 26th
2018 the Board of Deputies for the first time ever they called what they said
was an anti-racist demonstration. All the right-wing Labour MPs, Wes Streeting,
John Mann etc. attended….  Another
attendee was Norman Tebbit. Yes that’s right he had a cricket test.  He said these people who come from Pakistan
and India although they are British legally the way to tell if they are really
loyal to this country is to ask who do they support when it comes to the Indian
team playing against Britain. If they support India it means that they are not
really British….

This
is not unusual. When we Donald Trump today supporting the Israeli state and
moving the Israeli Embassy to Jerusalem who is his main backer in the United
States? It’s not the Jewish community, which is extremely worried by Trump and
his anti-Semitic backers like Steve Bannon. ….

Zionism
grew up in the late 19th century in reaction to the pogroms in
Czarist Russia. But it was a reaction of a very different kind to most Jewish
political currents. Most Jews joined the Bund or the Communist Party. The
Zionists were different. They adopted the framework of the anti-Semites. They
said that they agreed that Jews do not belong in non-Jewish society. They
accepted that Jews needed their own state.

The
founder of Political Zionism was Theodor Herzl. He wrote a pamphlet the Jewish
State. He wrote it, at the time of the Dreyfus Affair in France, when the old
clericalist and monarchist elements, backed by the army were in conflict with
the republicans. The Dreyfus Affair consisted of the framing of a Jewish
officer, Captain Dreyfus, for treason. Herzl wrote at this time in his Diaries
(page 6):

In
Paris… I achieved a freer attitude towards anti-Semitism, which I now began
to understand historically and to pardon. Above all, I recognise the emptiness
and futility of trying to ‘combat’ anti-Semitism.

You
can go through Herzl’s diaries, all 4 volumes of them and there are similar
comments.  He talks about anti-Semitism
being the ‘divine will to good’. The idea grew up among the Zionists that if a
Jewish State was the main objective then obviously anti-Semitism was of benefit
because it encouraged Jews to emigrate. Without that they would stay where they
were and there would be no Jewish state.

That’s
why the whole anti-Semitism campaign in the Labour Party is fake and
false.  The right-wing who use
anti-Semitism, shout and scream when they are told that they are not really
concerned about anti-Semitism it’s about something else. They say, ‘of course not, you should not accuse Jews
of faking anti-Semitism’.  Of course
it’s only some Jews.  Other Jews such as
myself do not count of course…..

When
we see the anti-Semitic witch-hunt, which is primarily using anti-Semitism as a
stick to beat people. For example the other day I was contacted by a woman,
Marianne Tellier who had compared the Department of Work and Pensions and their
policies in respect of claimants, she said they should adopt the slogan Arbeit Macht Frei, Work Makes You
Free.  If you remember the concentration
camps had this slogan across the entrances. I saw it at both Auschwitz and
Sachsenhausen camps when I visited them. 
That is the slogan in essence of the Tories. Their justification for
Universal Credit is that that puts people in work and that frees them from
poverty, apparently. She has been suspended on the basis of making that
comparison.

The
main thing I’m saying is that the witchhunt has nothing to do with
anti-Semitism. It has everything to do with destabilising, undermining and
eventually removing Jeremy Corbyn. We saw that in the way that the
anti-Semitism campaign burst into flame in March. Not only because of the local
elections but also because of the replacement of Iain McNicol. You remember the
hated General Secretary of the Labour Party was replaced by Jennie Formby and
then Christine Shawcroft became Chair of the Disputes Committee. That’s when
the Zionists moved into action. That’s when the anti-Semitism witchhunt started
up again. I have no doubt that we will see in the months ahead, that at
particular times, maybe at Labour Party conference, almost certainly the next
local elections and whenever they think it is opportune, the false
anti-Semitism narrative will rear its head.

Myself,
Jackie Walker, Marc Wadsworth are just collateral damage. The target is Corbyn
and the Left, whether he realises it or not. 
Thank you.

Replying to Questions:

TG:     I think the
first thing to say about anti-Semitism is that if the Right wanted to attack
Corbyn for the real reasons, his position on the alliance with America, if you
remember Hilary Benn’s speech in the House of Commons during the vote on
whether to bomb Syria, they are not particularly attractive methods of
attack.  Trident even. Still less
austerity, so anti-Semitism seems to ally with what is perceived to be the
historical anti-racist roots of the Labour Party for example its opposition to
Apartheid. Israel is a Jewish state and the association of Jews with the
Holocaust etc. I wrote over 20 years ago saying that anti-Semitism was the
false anti-racism of the Right. That the Right has effectively used
anti-Semitism and the language of anti-racism against those who attack privilege
and wealth in society. In reality it is a method of defending American foreign
policy in its alliance with Israel. Israel is the armed racist rottweiller of
US foreign policy. It’s not totally subordinate.  Israel has its own measure of independence
but nonetheless the two work very closely together.

As
regards the JVL. Yes Jewish Voices for Labour and Free Speech on Israel have
supported me but they are relatively weak of course. The main so-called Jewish
organisation in the Labour Party is the Jewish Labour Movement, ex Poale Zion.
One of the demands of Arkush was that Corbyn and the Labour Party doesn’t
recognise fringe Jewish groups.

You
remember when Corbyn went to the Passover seder with Jewdas. Arkush again
accused them of ‘virulent anti-Semitism’.
Apparently some of them aren’t even Jewish. It’s quite clear in their minds
that anti-Semitism as hostility to Israel and Zionism go hand in hand.  I should say that the majority of people in
the Labour Party don’t buy into the anti-Semitism narrative.  This is a ruling class narrative. If you ask
most people on the street what anti-Semitism is they will tell you.  It’s someone who doesn’t like Jews very much.
There’s nothing magical or mysterious about it. 
That’s what all forms of racism are. Islamaphobia or anti-Muslim racism
is someone who doesn’t like Muslims very much. This IHRA definition is a way of
controlling speech. Clamping down on free speech. It’s about opposition to the
United States and its favourite satellite in the Middle East. It’s got nothing
to do with anti-racism as such.

As
for Private Eye. Yes I’ve written to them and threatened them with a defamation
action. Whether I go ahead or not remains to be seen. They accused me of
‘relentless harassment’ of a right-wing councillor in Brighton. Perish the
thought. It’s not true and she has been forced to stand down anyway. At the
moment my priority is a libel action against the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism
which is a much nastier Zionist organisation which has been defaming large numbers
of anti-Zionists, most of them Jewish. So there’s a limit to the number of
actions I can take on! Private Eye used to be seen, in the days when I read it
in the early 1970’s as a radical magazine which came out with a lot of good
stories on people like John Poulson, a corrupt associate of the then Home
Secretary Reginald Maudling, which had Paul Foot writing for it, today it is a
right-wing rag. The person who wrote that goes by the name of rat biter, which
is Nick Cohen who is a journalist on The Observer who is obsessed by Islam and
who was a supporter of the Iraq war.

The
third question was why does Jeremy Corbyn not take on the anti-Semitism
nonsense. I think he feels very uncomfortable with it. You remember at the end
of March when he was being accused of this anti-Semitism stuff he said to
Arkush and the Board of Deputies  meet me
and we’ll talk about it. They came back and said we won’t meet you without a
series of preconditions. Then Arkush overstepped himself and accused
Jewdas of being a ‘source of virulent
anti-Semitism’. He was widely ridiculed for that stupid statement. He did
sit down with Corbyn and one of his main demands was that for the IHRA to be
adopted by Labour in full and for the witchhunt to be put in control of the
Zionists.

It
was  absurd. Corbyn should subcontract
out to his political enemies control of the witchhunt, especially in the light
of Jennie Formby’s succession. Which Corbyn didn’t agree with. The problem with
Corbyn are that his instincts are in the right place but he’s not theoretical
or ideological. He’s not a Marxist in any sense.  He doesn’t. The other problem is that he and
John McDonnell have a strategy, which of course Jon Lansman is a part of, which
is of rapprochement with and appeasement of the Right. Therefore to come out
against the anti-Semitism smears means confronting the right wing in the
Parliamentary Labour Party and he’s unwilling to do that because his base of
support is probably 50 MPs.

Unless
you are going to engage in a consistent programme of deselection and
reselection of the Labour Right, which is what you should do, then you have a
problem.  Unfortunately going along with
the anti-Semitism nonsense is part of that strategy. That’s why he doesn’t do
what is obvious to us which is that this is the political equivalent of fake
news.

People
like Jackie Walker, Marc Wadsworth are collateral damage. The main target of
this witch-hunt is Jeremy Corbyn and the left. People like Luciana Berger MP
are quite clear that the sooner Corbyn goes the better. They had hoped after
the General Election, they’d all counted on the fact that Corbyn was going to
suffer this defeat.  Nick Cohen in the
Observer was withering. He said
‘Will there be 150, 125, 100
Labour MPs by the end of the flaying? My advice is to think of a number then
halve it.’ …. Iain
McNicol, so I understand, he’d actually cancelled the passes of Corbyn and his
aides on election night because the coup was supposed to go into operation so
they couldn’t actually get in the Labour Party headquarters in Southside. This
was one of the things they got McNicol on in the end, the fact that he had
tried to mount a coup against Corbyn. The Right had been prepared for the day
after, when what they thought would be a repetition of Michael Foot in 1983.
They thought that the Manifesto which Corbyn had stood on, which was leaked by
the Right but not to much good effect, the papers made things like rail
nationalisation the headlines, which most people thought was a good idea. So
the Right got it absolutely wrong as they did with Owen Smith. They haven’t played
their cards well.

Anti-Semitism
has been one of the key, underlying narratives of the Right and that’s why
people need to be vigilant. It’s not about Jews, it’s about the Palestinians.
It’s about the racist, apartheid society in Israel…. So for example in the
city of Safed the Chief Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu, son of the Sephardic Chief Rabbi
of Israel, had issued an edict forbidding Jews renting a flat or apartment to
an Arab. Eliyahu is a state official.  If
an Arab had said this then they would have been locked up. Hundreds of rabbis
joined in and said they supported Eliyahu. I an continue to give you hundreds
of examples of the endemic racism in Israeli society.

One
of our best retorts to the Zionists is to say what you are really defending is
the State of Israel.  We know why you are
doing that.

Hillel Ticktin:

The
question of Corbyn is somewhat more complex. If you listened to him today in
Parliament supporting big business you would wonder whether he was somewhere
near the right, the business right. At Prime Minister’s question time May
replied to him by saying in effect, that you would be far more credible if you
didn’t denounce capitalism. He’s obviously caught in this situation that if you
are going to fight on Brexit you have to talk about what is here and now and
you can’t talk of a socialist solution now. You then end up supporting the
least worst solution, which is what he is trying to do.

Incidentally
I invited Corbyn to speak a Critique conference about 20 years ago and he
refused.  I also happened to walk into a
conference at the same time as Tony Benn and showed him a copy of Critique and
he did his best to ignore me. So I think it is pretty clear that these guys are
not on the far left. Nonetheless I agree with everything that has been said. I
also think that if Corbyn were elected, in other words if the Labour Party was
elected with a Corbyn like Cabinet the ruling class think that would be
dangerous. Not that he in himself would be dangerous but given the situation
that I outlined the crisis in Britain within a global capitalist crisis he
might be forced to move to the left and further left.

(audience member) it would raise
expectations in the working class.

HT:     it is quite
likely to happen, in other words it is entirely possible and the ruling class
knows that and understands it. The ruling class isn’t stupid in all of this
although the government appears to be. You notice the way the government is
fighting itself.

The
Financial Times had an article discussing the Foreign Minister who had this
wonderful slogan ‘Fuck Business’. He
actually said that. The comment in the Financial Times was ‘never was the Brexit manifesto more
succinct.’ Boris Johnson’s impromptu aside. As slogans go it has
everything. The point is that is the government. Theresa May is clearly not a
strong leader. She also doesn’t understand what she is doing. Her role as we
now see as Home Secretary was appalling. You really could compare her to some
of the worst people in history the way she ran policy towards people coming to
Britain.

The
government is clearly split but it’s more than that. The ruling class as a
whole is split. It doesn’t have a global enemy. As long as Stalinism was there
it was extremely useful to the ruling class and they knew it and they used it
for all they could to keep themselves together. And they did keep together. And
they did have a ruling class line. And it did work and it’s not there now. They
have no open enemy.

I
was asked a question about what happened after 1979 effectively. There is no
great difference between the policy of austerity and Margaret Thatcher’s
policy. It is a continuation of the same policy but more strongly. Undoubtedly
in the 1970’s, not just in Britain, but globally the ruling class was worried
that it was losing power. It was. In Germany there were mass strikes. There
were mass strikes here and elsewhere in the world. It did look as if they
couldn’t hold the fort. Remember they had conceded in Britain. A large
percentage of industry was actually nationalised. The Economist wrote an
article which said it didn’t see what wasn’t nationalised. The ruling class
took a clear decision that enough was enough. The concessions that they had
made after 1945 had to end. They ended.

As
we know, 3 million lost their jobs between the period 1979-83. Blair continued
that exact policy. More people lost their jobs under Blair than under Thatcher.
That’s the nature of the Labour Party which the Right in the Labour Party would
continue if they could. That’s its ideology in effect.

So
Corbyn is different in that respect and the ruling class is worried about him.
Austerity is for control, it is. Marxist understanding of control within
capitalism is given by the fetishisation of commodity production. In other
words the worker has to sell his or her labour power in order to survive. The
market rules in the sale of labour power. There is no alternative to that. If
you nationalise firms and the conditions of work then become slightly easier
with pensions and so forth you are changing those conditions. The conditions of
control. It becomes easier for people to work in their jobs so they won’t
necessarily obey orders in quite the same way as when they know they will be
dismissed if they don’t obey orders. You can no longer control the working
class in the same way.

They’ve
clearly changed the relations today. In Britain today only 6 million people are
actually in unions. So if you can no longer control workers in the original way
as it were, if you can’t control them in the particular forms, with a memory of
the war and going back to mass unemployment, depression and so forth and the
possibility of maybe another war, perhaps fascism, if that is no longer there
why shouldn’t they strike? Why should they obey orders?  Once you interfere with, and of course they
had to interfere after the war, once they started to introduce measures to
protect labour under Lloyd George in particular after 1906, they were
interfering with the mode of control over labour power of the workforce. The
whole point about Thatcher’s changes was to restore control by capital itself.
But under Cameron, under conditions where you really had extensive
unemployment  where considerable parts of
the labour force were on zero hours contracts or god knows what contract,
workers could not organise in the same way as before. The possibility that they
had for the future was effectively doomed. It meant the control was much greater.

One
can see what the effect is, even in voting as a result.  One can see what the overall effect has been
there in standing where we are.  They’ve
changed even Education. Gove’s reforms in Education are appalling. I have to
say that when I came to this country I couldn’t believe the teaching of
history. That seems to get progressively worse. I couldn’t believe when I came
in 1965. Imagineit  in South Africa I was
doing History. It was far more left-wing than what people were taught here. We
discussed the French Revolution, the Revolution in America, discussed
revolution, the meaning of it. You just don’t get it here.

When
I came to the History Department in Glasgow University it was the most
reactionary department in the University. Unbelievable. In Cape Town University
the engineers were the most reactionary. But in History there’s an ideological
control. They needed to reinforce the ideological control which is what they
are trying to do. The whole point of muddling up, fetishising the budget and
not telling the truth about it is as a means of control.

If
people believe that there is no money, that they can’t be given higher salaries
then they’ll go to work and not strike for it. They won’t have the ideological
tools to fight the government. They’ve been quite successful in doing that. I’m
not suggesting that everyone believes it but it’s been relatively successful. I
wouldn’t have believed that they got as far as they did under Cameron.

What’s
now happening is that the ruling class has recognised they’ve gone as far as
they can go. It can’t continue like this even if some people believe that they
should vote for the Conservative Party or that capitalism will last forever and
that they must worship their superiors. Probably the majority do not.

One
way out appeared to be Brexit. It was a fetishised way of trying to change
things. The ruling class  understood it.
That is what Johnson is saying now. Johnson obviously supports business. But
what he is doing is something like fascism would have said. He is saying we’ll
stand up for the small person. We’ll fight business and get you a deal kind of
thing. That is where he is. He is prepared to go far in destroying part of the
controls of the capitalist system. We can see that the government today is
making concessions of a kind which I usually associate with the far-Right.
Making concessions which appear to be left-wing but are not left-wing. It’s in
those circumstances that you have a Labour Party which has to decide where it
is going.

What
one section of the ruling class wants is for the right-wing of the Labour Party
to join with the left-wing of the Conservative Party. That is quite clear.
We’ve seen the left-wing of the Conservative Party acting, it’s too the left of
the right-wing of the Labour Party. Several times there’s been attempts to
merge them. That’s its logic for one section. Another section is quite clearly
taking a very strong line and that’s more associated with the United States.
That’s where Liam Fox is. Liam Fox is associated with various right-wing groups
in the United States. He seems to be a complete idiot. He’s useful to them in
that position.

The
third group clearly want to make concessions. There’s probably more groups than
that. We have in other words a series of different groupings within the ruling
class who haven’t yet worked out how they can maintain power in those
conditions. What I described in the beginning was the way the economy of
Britain has changed for the worse and what the alternatives would be for the
ruling class itself. So it’s split in that way. It doesn’t have an enemy to
unite it yet although it does see the working class acting as its enemy but it
doesn’t actually see it in action.

I
don’t think it’s a more intelligent wing doesn’t understand Corbyn. It
understands him perfectly well. It understands that if he comes in he’s not
going to do anything great for the working class. It’ll be a shift to the left
up to a point. It’s only if he is forced to go further that he will go further.
They understand that perfectly well, which is why they are not going to mount a
revolution against him. They understand and probably think that they will
control him and might control him but they are worried that they can’t control
him and that’s how I understand it.

On
the question of Israel, the Jews and so forth. There is a real problem in that
there’s no question of the oppression of Israel over the Palestinians but there
is no solution provided. The obvious statement that one has to make is that in
one territory there should be equal rights for all. That’s clearly not going to
happen. The only solution is in fact socialism. We cannot immediately imagine
any force which is going to do anything else. That’s an enormous problem. I
don’t see any way out of it. One always has to oppose the oppression of one by
the other. That doesn’t end the question. The question remains all throughout.
There’s no question that the Israeli government is right-wing and Zionism in
itself is right-wing and the section which was an claimed to be left-wing has
virtually ceased to exist. That is also true.

Tony Greenstein        It’s worse than
that. The Zionist left historically were the worst racists. There was never a
left-wing as we understand the term. They were never socialists.

Hillel-Ticktin              In the Warsaw Ghetto….

Tony Greenstein        In the Warsaw
Ghetto they weren’t in reality Zionists. 
They had abandoned Zionism, the Hashomer Hatzair. But I’m talking about
the Labour Zionists in Palestine. If you read Professor Zeev Sternhell’s book
(The Founding Myths of Israel) on the Zionist labour movement in Palestine.
Stermhell is a Holocaust survivor who was at the Hebrew University, who was
also the victim of a right-wing Zionist terrorist attack he has done the most
comprehensive study of the Zionist labour movement in Palestine.

His
conclusion is that it was never ever socialist. Indeed the formation of Mapai,
the Israeli Labour Party, was on the basis of opposition to socialism.

Hillel Ticktin              well Mapai yes
but I’m talking about Hashomer Hatzair.

Tony Greenstein        we can debate about them too! let me give you
an example

Hillel Ticktin: I’m not arguing
with you. I’m not supporting Zionism I’m just saying that…  Even a kibbutz isn’t left-wing. So there’s
nothing there in that sense.

Tony Greenstein        Well the
kibbutz came about as an institution because it was the most effective method
of colonisation. It was, from the start, Jewish only. It never had an Arab
member.  I think there’s been one Arab
member in its whole history. It was funded by the bourgeois Zionists as the
most effective method.  It was collective
colonialism. But these are apart from the myths of socialist Zionism and there
were many myths.

Hillel Ticktin              Ok why did they learn  Marxism in their home countries which were
not Israel?

Tony Greenstein        Well there was
a divergence. The World Union of Poale Zion split in I think 1919. There was a
divergence between diaspora Zionism and Palestinian Zionism. Certainly in the
diaspora, this is an interesting debate. Within diaspora Zionism there was
always a contradiction within socialist Zionism between the socialism, which
means universalism working with non-Jews and workers like the Bund did in
Poland, it was never Zionist and the idea that Jews had more in common with
each other and their main goal was to establish a state in Palestine. In Poland
that reached a peak when again around 1920 Poale Zion split into a left Poale
Zion and a right Poale Zion. And the right Poale Zion virtually disappeared. It
was useless because it didn’t relate to the Jewish working class. The main
problem in Poland was anti-Semitism. It was a viciously anti-Semitic country.
So left Poale Zion, which overlapped with Hashomer Hatzair certainly fought in
the Warsaw Ghetto but Mordechai Anielwicz who commanded the Warsaw Ghetto
Resistance said basically we wasted our time doing political Zionist work for
2-3 years when we should have been building the resistance.

Hillel-Ticktin              I agree and it
is obviously, I am anti-Zionist but the point is that you have to look at it
and see what was there. They were contradictory and clearly shouldn’t have had
Zionism or nationalism of any kind. Clearly that is true. The problem is,
though, the present day. I can’t see any solution except socialism.

Question and
contributions from the audience

Hillel-Ticktin              I will sum up
but I want to reply to her (Fiona).
It’s very important what she said. I understand everything you said and in
principle I would agree but I am a socialist and I don’t see socialism in 100
years time or even in 20 years time. I see it much quicker than that. If we
take the line that you take then we are plodding on and hoping for the best. We
may or may not succeed in that struggle. But it’s a fact that it’s not a lie
towards the Palestinians at the present time at all. So all we’ll be doing and
it may be a lot that we are doing, we’ll be bringing the attention of the world
to the oppression of the Palestinians but they will continue to be oppressed.
We don’t want that. We want the regime to be overthrown. I’m saying this
because of the history of South Africa. I opposed the Boycott of South Africa
because I knew it would lead to a government which is bourgeois democratic
aligned with the West.  And the result
has been a disaster. It’s a disaster today South Africa for the ordinary
person. That’s the problem. We don’t want it to be worse. We want it to be a
high standard of living for ordinary Palestinians. Higher than it is in Israel
today. But how do we get there? What you are describing is a process, I don’t
know if it will ever happen in a world that is not socialist.

Fiona              I’m a socialist
but for Palestinians I don’t think it’s for us to say. Ultimately yes socialism
for everyone is what we want. But I think that Palestinians would appreciate an
end to the Occupation, an end to the ethnic cleansing.

Tony Greenstein        One of the main
differences between South Africa, which was a settler state and Israel is that
in South Africa the settler colonials exploited the indigenous labour whereas
in Israel they want to exclude it from the territory altogether. That was what
Labour Zionism was about so there is a qualitative difference in the political
economy of the two states. However the question which was raised is how you
overthrow Zionism. I don’t think it is sufficient to say socialism because that
is posing socialism in the abstract. How concretely are you going to overthrow
Zionism? Now it’s clear to me that the Jewish working class in Israel is not an
agent for revolutionary change because it’s been bought off. It sees its
identity as being bound up with Zionism, i.e. Jewish supremacy. Just as the
White working class in South Africa was not a revolutionary class. The problem
is that the Palestinians do not fulfil the same role as the Black working class
in South Africa. So it seems clear to me that the only way that Zionism going
to be overthrown is in a regional context.

Israel
is there to safeguard the interests of imperialism in the Arab East.  America doesn’t give it $4-5 billion a year
because it feels generous and soft-hearted. It does it because Israel forms
alliances with the most reactionary Arab regimes, it destabilises those who
aren’t willing to do the West’s bidding. 
Its done that for the last 70 years so any struggle to overthrow Zionism
inevitably means the overthrow of the Arab regimes by Arab working class. I
don’t see it can possibly take place in any other context. I don’t have a
crystal ball, I don’t know when that’s going to happen, I don’t think it is
going to happen quickly but who knows? Revolutionary change can sometimes be
very quick.

On
one or two other things on the history of left of Labour Zionism I can only
recommend the article I wrote recently for Weekly
Worker and my blog
and it’s also on the Mondoweiss
site. Unfortunately I don’t have time to go into it further.

Someone
mentioned Mort Klein, who is the head of the Zionist Organisation of America. I
can remind for those who don’t remember When Trump came into power an
invitation was extended, as it was last year, to Steve Bannon and Sebastian Gorka
who is a neo-Nazi who was in the Trump organisation, to attend the ZOA’s annual
gala dinner which is held in November every year, as distinguished guests and
speakers. (see above)

People
have to shed their blinkers about Israel, especially in the Labour Party.
Increasingly American Jews are divorcing from Israel. I think that is a
historic tendency. You will see the Jewish diaspora moving apart from the
Israeli state and what is a settler nation. Zionism as the founding ideology of
Israel is a form of Jewish supremacy. It is based upon the idea of racial
superiority. Although it has been disguised historically that is the reality of
what it stands for. Jews right or wrong.

The
final think I will say is this is a meeting of Labour Against the Witchhunt. I
think it is important when there is a political battle in the Labour Party and
also outside it in the trade unions that LAW, which is the only organisation on
the left which is fighting the witchhunt, that people do help to build it. I
hope that as a result of my tour that we will see LAW branches formed and that
you will also go into the universities. There is work to be done and as Fiona
said, at the end of the day our support is for the Palestinians.

It
is interesting that in the last few weeks, when the attacks on Gaza were
happening Labour Friends of Israel came out with a statement which blamed the
Palestinians for having engineered their own deaths.  There was a mass reaction in the Labour Party
to that. So the Zionists don’t have the sway. People dissociated themselves
from them. That is their weak point and that is when they come out with 2
states, which is a call for 2 racist, apartheid states.

Partition
has always been a weapon of imperialism, it has been an imperialist solution
throughout the world and that is what they argue for. I don’t think we should
be downhearted.  I say that because
Jackie Walker will also be coming up shortly to fight expulsion. We have a
battle on and obviously there are large forces raised against us but I’m
confident that in the end we will win that battle. Thank you comrades.

Hillel Ticktin              In relation to
the overall question to a degree we disagree. As a revolutionary socialist, as
a Marxist I don’t believe that I have to wait another lifetime. I may have
myself 3-4 years or something, presumably it won’t be in my lifetime, but I
would expect it to be soon. Remember the Revolution was in 1917. It has taken
place. We are not living in the same epoch as before 1917. We are living in a
transitional epoch.

We
are not living in simple capitalism anymore. The alternative really is a
continued decline of capitalism with periods which are better and some periods
which are catastrophic. We can hope they will not be catastrophuic again. This
is a period when we have to fight for socialism now not tomorrow.  When we are struggling for anything we are struggling
first and foremost for socialism. Not socialism step by step, a view which was
overthrown in 1917, that is what we stand for. And the people wherever they are
in Venezuela, the Palestinian lands, or wherever else have a right to a life
wherever they are, and they have a right to it now. We must struggle for
socialism today. Our aim is not step by step socialism. You can’t get socialism
that way. You have to overthrow the system.

The
system cannot be overthrown in one country. We’ve learnt that time and time
again. It has to be in the developed countries in the first instance and that
will be the basis for overthrowing the forms of oppression that exist including
the forms of oppression in the Palestinian lands. There is no other way that it
can be done.

Of
course we have totry and  alleviate the
conditions of people, wherever they live, but we are not in power, it is
extremely difficult. We must expect what has happened will happen again.
Unfortunately we are not in power and we don’t have the arms to do it. Not that
we want to take up arms in itself. What is happening in the Labour Party is
part of the struggle and it may appear to be a relatively small thing but it’s
not. Because what is happening in Britain is crucial for the world as a whole.

Unfortunately
if the same thing happens as in South Africa it won’t have that much
impact.  It will have an impact but in
Britain it is one of the most crucial capitalist countries. What happens here
will effect the world as a whole including the areas of the Middle East, most
particularly the Middle East in fact. So we have to fight here and now and it
will help people in other areas of the world. We cannot do it any other way. To
have a real success it must be a success in which there is an overthrow of nationalism
in general and Zionism in particular. It has to be a universal success
otherwise it cannot be a success at all. 
Thank you.