We often work in organisations which are so
embroiled and rightly so in their day-to-day work, that they forget where they
came from.  I am posting for others the
transcription of the speech.  Passages in Bold have been added subsequent
to the talk

PSC
was formed in 1982 but I don’t want to start there.  I think you have to give some context and the background to what happened. 

I was brought up in a very Orthodox Jewish background.  At that time the media and public opinion was
overwhelmingly pro-Zionist in the wake of the 1967 (6 Days) war.  There wasn’t a newspaper in the land which
wasn’t supporting Israel. [The Independent wasn’t yet yet existence] The only newspaper which even attempted at
some balance was the (Manchester) Guardian, originally the most pro-Zionist of all papers under CP Scott.  It was reviled, of course, as a
result.

I can remember when Jerusalem was captured by Israel in
the 1967 War, the BBC correspondent, Michael Elkins, was more enthusiastic than
anyone else.  He was in fact an Israeli
citizen.  He was ghastly and awful but
this was accepted at the time.  Most
people thought it was a very simple matter. 
The Jews wanted a little portion of somewhere to live in the Middle East
and the Arabs were intent on preventing this and refused to make peace. 

The expulsions in 1947-48, the complexities never dawned
on them.  It was fortuitous that I broke
from that. Partly because we had a school debate and I played the devil’s
advocate. The Zionist Federation wasn’t happy about a Jewish school hosting a
debate on the rights and wrongs of Zionism!. 
That began to open my eyes and then I went on a school trip to Israel,
which was heavily subsidised by the Zionist Federation in order to get Jewish
school students ‘aware of their roots’. 
The only place I liked was Jerusalem. 
They guided you around but if you had enough nous you spoke to people
independently, which I did, particularly in Bethlehem, to ordinary Palestinian
Christians to see what they felt about this benign occupation.  That was 1968-9 and I was about 15.

The other thing was that I became a socialist and a
Marxist and participated in the anti-Springbok demonstrations against the South
African rugby team.  I joined a group
which was the precursor of the SWP, called the International Socialists.  There I met one or two other Jewish
anti-Zionists.  They were few and far
between compared to today where Jewish anti-Zionism has really taken off and
become a major headache for the Zionists because it deflects the accusation of
anti-Semitism but that was the position in the 1960’s in the wake of the 6 Day
War.

It
was only in the 1970’s with the establishment of the settlements, they began in
1968 under the Israeli Labour Government
and people like Yigal Allon and Yisrael Gallili of Ahdut H’avoda (one of the
components of the Israeli  Labour
Alignment).,

The massive expansion of the settlements began under Menachem
Begin who became Israeli  Prime Minister
in 1977.  That was the climate for the
beginning of a a solidarity movement. 

I joined the British anti-Zionist Organisation which was
controlled, although I didn’t realise it at the time, by the Iraqi  Ba’athists and the and this was always a
problem for any solidarity movement, retaining one’s independence. 

But there were other
major initiatives.  One was a Labour
movement conference in Bradford, around 1981, where I met with Andrew Hornung, a
member of Socialist Organiser, a precursor of today’s overtly pro-Zionist
Alliance for Workers Liberty, which was then anti-Zionist, and decided to form
a Labour Committee on Palestine.  When SO
moved into the Zionist camp Andrew left the organisation.  At a well attended meeting at the GLC’s
County Hall, in July 1982, we ejected the organiser of the Labour Friends of
Israel, Peter Grunberger and set up the LCP as a formal organisation.  In the wake of Israel’s invasion of Lebanon,
in which 20,000 were killed and Beirut was heavily bombed, the LCP introduced
an emergency motion to the Labour Party Conference that autumn, calling for a
democratic, secular state in Palestine. 
The resolution was actually passed! I had been elected as its Chair and
Andrew as the Secretary and Ted Knight, leader of the Labour group on Lambeth
Council was Treasurer. 

However unknown to me and others, Knight was an operative in the Labour Party for the Workers Revolutionary Party
of Vanessa Redgrave fame, working behind a paper called the Labour Herald, which Livingstone helped front, and it was funded by various Arab regimes.  The LCP was a useful trophy to display to its
funders to demonstrate its political prowess. 
At its founding conference in November, some 100 WRP delegates, most of
whom didn’t even know why they were there, trooped in to vote accordingly and
we left to form the Labour Movement Campaign on Palestine.  We got a good story about what happened
published in the Diary column of The Guardian (Knight of a 100 Introductions).

The LMCP organised
with the early PSC a Labour Movement Conference on Palestine at the Greater
London Council’s County Hall.  At the
latter, many of the luminaries of the Labour Left spoke – Jeremy Corbyn MP,
Peter Tatchell, Richard Balfe MEP (now a member of the Tory party!).  On the day of the Conference the Zionists
tried to sabotage the Conference by sending out fake letters in my name with a
badly forged signature, cancelling the conference!  However the ploy failed.

But remember the context. 
In the Labour Party for example the most ardent supporters of Israel
were on the Labour Left, the Tribunite Left. 
Tony Benn and Eric Heffer.  Stalwarts
of the Left were members of Labour Friends of Israel.  One of the things that has developed as a
result of the 1982 invasion of Lebanon was that the Left began to reject Israel
with few exceptions (Jo Richarson MP).  The
old Ian Mikardo wing disappeared or died out. 
People on the Left supported the Palestinians whereas those on the
Right, the New Labourites, made it an article of faith to support Israel. 

That wasn’t always the case.  In Liverpool I remember, with my school,
attending a debate where the only pro-Arab or Palestinian speakers were either
from the Labour Right, people like Christopher Mayhew MP or the Guardian
journalist, the late Michael Adams.  He
was the first journalist I can remember who was not pro-Zionist.  One of the Guardian’s correspondents and was
rather shabbily treated from what I recall. 
He was the first journalist to speak out against Israel’s ‘benign
occupation’.

I can only describe the background to the growth of a
solidarity movement from my own perspective. 
I came down to Brighton in 1974 to Brighton Polytechnic and there was
established by General Union of Palestinian Students a quite thriving Palestine
society.  It was the days of very
low-cost fees when you would pay £100-150 to get on a degree course, which now
cost thousands of pounds.  So there were
a lot of Palestinian students on Engineering and Science courses.  There built up an alliance between overseas
students and the White left whereby a sleepy, reactionary and backward student
union was captured by the far-left.  I
was elected as Vice-President of the Student Union, two years in succession.  In Xmas 1977 I moved the first ever motion at
the National Union of Students Conference supporting a democratic, secular
state in Palestine.  It didn’t win of
course, but it set down a marker for things to come.  In the student movement, in the 1970’s,
Palestinian organisation and opinion in Britain was taking root via GUPS.

It wasn’t like now where Fateh are wrapped up in the
Palestinian Authority.  I remember two of
the activists.  Hannah, a bespectacled
Ph. D student who went back to Jerusalem who was aligned with the Palestinian
Communist Party and there was someone I called Brother Joseph, who I saw for
the first time in a decade at the first Gaza demonstration in London, who was a
member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and firmly on the
left of the movement.  Unfortunately he
is very ill now and going blind.  These
were some of the unspoken about heroes of the beginnings of the solidarity
movement in this country and at Brighton Polytechnic, which was more active on
Palestine than Sussex University, where there was also a Palestinian Society. 

There was a burning need for a national solidarity
movement which was given the necessary impetus by the 1982 invasion of
Lebanon.  People don’t recall but there
was a precursor to the invasion where Israel went in and the United States under
Reagan (!) forced it to withdraw.  Then
it went back in for a major invasion, using the pretext of the attempted
assassination of the Israeli Ambassador to London, Shlomo Argov.  In fact the attack was by Abu Nidal, a renegade
PLO member living in Iraq and controlled by the Ba’athists.  It was nothing to do with the official PLO but
any excuse was sufficient for Israel to go into Lebanon, as we have seen in the
attack on Gaza.  The carnage it caused
was a catalyst for the solidarity movement in this country and world wide.  The image of Israel as a peaceful state,
beleaguered on all sides, was shattered.  

Ariel Sharon had achieved quite a bit during the invasion
of Lebanon, including complete revulsion for what Israel had done.  It was after the initial false start that a
group of people, it must have been about 15 or 16 people, came together at the
University of London Union in Malet Street. 
Besides myself there was Jeremy Landau, Helen Stollar, who I met at the
most recent Brighton demonstration and is ill now.  There was Roland Rance of Jews Against
Zionism, Moshe Machover and Haim Skotario of Matzpen – the Socialist
Organisation in Israel.  Moshe’s article The Class Nature of Israel which New
Left Review published around 1968 and the International Socialists published as
a pamphlet later is, even now, extremely worth reading, even after more than 30
years.  Machover was a brilliant speaker
on Zionism and is, despite his age, still active. 

There were a number of others, most of whom I can’t
remember, Over half the meeting was Jewish! 
There were people like John Gee, the future Chair of Palestine
Solidarity Campaign.  There were a number
of Palestinians and one very vociferous, outspoken and articulate member of the
Lebanese National Movement.  Because
Israel had ensured, via Assad’s Syria, that the Left did not win the civil war.
The aim was to ensure the victory of the fascist Phalange, in order to prevent
the unification of the Lebanese nation. 

In 1979, along with a group of others, we visited
Lebanon.  The Embassy in Britain was
controlled by the Phalange and they refused us visas.  So we went to Syria first and after a couple
of days, we were taken off by the PLO in a jeep across the border, without any
visas of course.  We were taken by this
mountain of a guy.  It was very difficult
as you go up on the hills above Damascus and see the city shimmering in the
night.  It was a wonderful scene.  It was semi-desert and there were traditional
villages and families by the roadside, with tents and lanterns, selling
fruit.  We were taken to Beirut where we
stayed at a hotel called Triomphe, which the PLO controlled.  Three years later the Israelis bombed. 

It was tragic.  We
visited the refugee camps of Bourj-al-Barajneh, Sabra and Shatilla.  The people we saw were lambs to the slaughter
three years later, as the Israeli troops lit up the night sky with flares as
their fascist friends in the Phalange butchered them, after the PLO fighters
had left Beirut under an American sponsored agreement. 

I can remember, with another member of our delegation,
crossing the frontier to Christian (East) Beirut from West Beirut, to see Tel
al Zataar, a refugee camp, where some 2,000 Palestinians were massacred in
August 1976.  This was a consequence of
the Syrian invasion of Lebanon, which the USA and Israel had given the green
light to, in order to help the Phalange which was in danger of being defeated
by the leftist Lebanese National Movement, which included the Druze of the
Bekaa Valley.  You saw the destroyed
buildings with massive gaping holes where the shells had pierced.  That was a precursor to the Sabra and Shatilla
massacres.  We were arrested on the way
back, for not having visas, by the Lebanese army, which was few in number and
dug in behind sand bags in the strip dividing Beirut.  We told them we were guests of the Syrian
government and were released pretty quickly! 

Back in London, PSC was formed three years later, in
1982, and they were small beginnings.  We
met I think every 2 weeks in Oxford House, a trade union and community centre
in Bethnal Green and I would estimate that after a year we only had a couple of
hundred members.  If we organised a
demonstration we‘d be lucky if we got more than a couple of thousand people.  When we look back to the monster
demonstration on 9th August 2014 we can see the major advances in
PSC since that time. 

Growth in PSC was
slow but steady.  PSC took over, two offices
in a shabby building, which housed other voluntary and campaigning groups, in
the backstreets of London near Finsbury Park Tube Station and after about a
year we began employing a part-time worker. 
I can remember that one of the workers was Anne Gray, who is still
active on the Left and in PSC.

We publicised ourselves
at the various GLC festivals on the South Bank of the Thames, anti-racist
festivals and similar gatherings.  PSC
also worked with the Labour Movement Campaign for Palestine and held public
meetings and displays. Slowly but surely PSC gained name recognition.  In particular PSC organised, in Camden Town
Hall, a major conference on Anti-Arab racism, funded to the tune of about
£2,000 by the GLC (which Thatcher abolished and was headed, in his radical
days, by Ken Livingstone).  This produced
a major outcry from the Zionist Establishment and the Jewish Chronicle famously
wrote that there was enough Arab money within a stone throw of Marble Arch.

It was picketed by
Herut, the dominant party of the Likud coalition in Israel and the ‘Marxist’ Zionists
Mapam.  We let a few of the latter in (we
had heavy security) given the campaign against the Conference.

I objected vehemently
to this racist statement (substitute ‘Jewish’ for ‘Arab’ and see why) and after
the Jewish Chronicle refused to carry a letter from me I submitted a complaint
to the Press Council (the precursor of the Press Complaints Commission).  Much to the Editor, Geoffrey D Paul’s
surprise (his main defence was that my letter was too long and ‘boring’) and
also my surprise, the PC upheld my complaint and the Jewish Chronicle was forced
to print the adjudication, though it also printed an angry self-righteous
defence.

Brighton PSC’s successful picket of the Sodastream shop – Sodastream is now in deep financial crisis There have of course been setbacks amongst the Palestinians, notably the 1993 Oslo Accords.  This had a knock-on effect on PSC which held an Emergency General Meeting and voted by 2-1 to support the Accords.  Later the Chair of PSC, who chaired the meeting, with Uri Davies from Israel at his side, told me how wrong he had been.  But regrets after the Accords had been agreed were worthless.

A number of us resigned from the organisation because, as
I wrote in National Labour Briefing (in a debate with Julia Bard of the Jewish
Socialists Organisation) this was the biggest setback to the Palestinian since
the Nakba.  It was a historic defeat.  Everything I wrote then has, unfortunately,
turned out to be correct.  All that has
happened is that the faces of the Israeli military have been replaced by that
of Palestinians, trained by the Americans and supplying every ounce of
Intelligence that the Israelis require. 
It is a major obstacle on the road to liberation, to which the
Palestinians have to find their own answer. 

I rejoined the organisation locally in the early 2000’s
at the suggestion of the then Chair Frances Clarke-Lowes (who ironically I
played a major part in having expelled nationally and locally for holocaust
denial).  I had taken part in a
demonstration from Palmeira Square to Brighton on Palestine, as a result of one
of many Israeli attacks on the Palestinians and Lebanese.

But I returned in earnest in 2005 when a friend I knew
from the Left, Sue Blackwell, a lecturer at Birmingham University, spearheaded
the first major BDS campaign in the Association of University Teachers, later
the University College Union.  AUT held a
national conference in Eastbourne and she nagged me to go over and leaflet it,
which I did, as did other Brighton PSC members (Zoe I remember) and the
resolution passed narrowly. That caused an uproar, Tony Blair condemned it as
did most establishment worthies.  But UCU
held on, despite its leadership (the Left later captured the Executive) and we
saw the culmination of Zionist lawfare tactics with the bringing of a case last
year at an employment tribunal by Ronnie Fraser, a minor academic, alleging
racial discrimination against UCU. 

In reality Fraser was just a front man and the eminence grise behind the case was none
other than Anthony Julius, an ardent Zionist and former lawyer to Princess
Diana, who trousered some £2m from the charitable trust set up in her name
after she had died.  Julius, whose
speciality is clearly not employment law, was out of his depth in trying to
argue that being a Zionist is a ‘protected characteristic’ (protected
characteristics for example age, sexual orientation, gender, race etc. are the
grounds upon which you can sue for discrimination and harassment).  The problem, as the Tribunal noted, was that
many Jews are also opposed to Zionism and the Tribunal held that the litigation
was “an impermissible attempt to achieve a political end by litigious means”.  For a damning indictment of Zionist tactics and a defence of the Tribunal, from
a Zionist lawyer see ‘Why the Ronnie
Fraser case against the UCU was a legal and public relations disaster’ .


After the successful motion to the AUT Conference in
2005, a group of us were invited for Sunday lunch to Stephen and Professor
Hilary Rose where the academic boycott group BRICUP was discussed and tactics
planned.  Also in attendance was Betty
Hunter, the then General Secretary of PSC who asked me why I didn’t rejoin
PSC.  I mentioned Oslo and she said that
today that was irrelevant, everyone opposed it now and as a result I felt it
was churlish not to rejoin.