Gaza Genocidal Siege is like Hitler’s Siege of Leningrad

We Need a Unified Struggle Against Imperialism: Palestine and Ukraine

(This leaflet was published by IUAFS on 11 November 2023. A PDF of it can be downloaded by clicking on the IUAFS banner image above)

The most overtly racist regime on the planet is slaughtering Palestinians like the murder machine it is. More than 10,000 are dead already, with thousands more buried under the rubble. Half are children, since half of Gaza’s population are under 18. Israel’s terror-bombing and starvation of the Palestinians, stopping all essential supplies including fuel for hospital generators, medicine, food and even drinking water, is driven by racism similar to Nazism. Netanyahu’s defence minister Gallant justified this by saying that Palestinians are ‘human animals.’ This is the politics of genocide; they would like to see the deaths of a couple of million people. Or at least the fear of this causing a mass flight of an entire ‘unwanted’ population. They are also preparing similar crimes on the West Bank, over a hundred are already dead at the hands of their bloodthirsty settlers and troops.

A huge wave of protests and rage at these crimes traverses the globe. Earlier, the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, fighting a war against US-backed Nazis in Ukraine, correctly compared the Israeli siege of Gaza with Hitler’s siege of Leningrad. Governments including Jordan, Turkey, Chile, Venezuela, Spain, Iran, Iraq and Colombia have rightly condemned it as genocide, and nine countries have broken diplomatic relations with Israel.  Biden, with Sunak’s support has moved warships into the Eastern Mediterranean to threaten Hezbollah in Lebanon, Syria and Iran – protecting Israel and threatening any nations inclined to help Gaza militarily. The United States and its allies own this genocidal slaughter.

The Zionists hope to use this butchery to induce any survivors to flee and be ethnically cleansed. Netanyahu openly stated that he wants Gazans to flee to Egypt. This is how they are attempting another Nakba in Gaza, underlining the close kinship between Zionism and Nazism. The original 1948 Nakba was a similar monstrous crime.

Sunak’s vile government defends this. It has tried motivating cops to attack the rights of Palestine Solidarity supporters to demonstrate, implying that they are supporters of Hamas. Hamas are popular among Palestinians because they are seen as incorruptible and militant fighters, but they are just one, militantly Islamic ideological trend – many other trends, some secular and leftist, support and/or are involved in the struggle. The stories in the imperialist media about “beheaded babies” and “rape” by Hamas are discredited lies. Evidence has now emerged that many if not most of the October 7 victims were slaughtered by Israeli forces, under Israel’s ‘Hannibal Directive’ which mandates that they slaughter their own troops and even civilians to prevent them being captured.

We must support the struggles of the Palestinian people for liberation no matter who leads them. The government’s attacks show that the pro-Zionists in government, neoliberal mercenaries all, have genocidal views.  Braverman suggests that carrying Palestinian flags is grounds to arrest people. She expresses racialised hatred of Palestinians – a dangerous extremist herself.  Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party was destroyed by Zionist destabilisation, much of it organised by the Israeli Embassy. The neoliberal wing worked closely with Zionism. All these parties are dominated by ‘Friends of Israel’ and critics of Zionism face witch-hunting. Including the Tories’ attempts to ban solidarity marches.

Yet there are many millions of people in this country who are familiar with the genocidal oppression of Palestinians. Racist, anti-working-class bigotry which is dragging politics to the far-right is bound up with vile attitudes to Palestinians and Muslims, just as before WWII Hitlerian Jew-hate poisoned political life.

Similar politics are behind the war in Ukraine, where the West has peddled the most incredible series of lies, about Russian’s supposedly raping women, killing babies and engaging in ‘genocide’. Almost exactly the same lies as about the Palestinians. In fact, the deaths of civilians killed by both sides since the beginning of Russia’s Special Military Operation (SMO) in February 2022, over 500 days ago, are considerably less than the more than the likely 15,000 (or more!) deaths Israel has inflicted on Gaza in just over a month.

There are considerable similarities between what Western imperialism is trying to do in Ukraine and what the Zionists are doing in Palestine. In 2014, the US spent $10 billion organising the Maidan coup that brought Nazi Banderaists to power as part of their programme of NATO expansion, aiming to get Ukraine into NATO to threaten Russia with US strategic weapons from close quarters. As part of this, the Nazi regime abolished the legal equality that previously existed between languages, and began persecuting Russian speakers, who are close to half the population, particularly centred in the Donbass region in the South Eastern half of Ukraine. In Crimea, where the majority is actually Russian, they voted to join Russia at that time.

This came to a head at the beginning of 2022 when the Nazi regime, with its US backers led by Biden, planned a much bigger offensive to re-conquer the Donbass. Russia intervened in the Donbass region to stop this ethnic cleansing and genocide taking place. Given the chance, this oppressed population voted to join Russia. Russia is not denying the right of Ukrainians to their own state, and there are no Russian troops in the Ukrainian-speaking West of Ukraine. US-UK-EU Imperialism falsely accuse Russia of annexation of Ukraine to cover up their grand-scale policy of annexation in Palestine.

This was recently exposed in Canada when in unison with the stooge Zelensky, a Zionist who vows to make Ukraine a ‘big Israel’ through the expulsion or killing of Russian-speaking people, the Canadian neo-liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, was seen publicly saluting a 98-year-old veteran of Hitler’s SS. The West’s support for Zionist Israel, as well as their support for Nazi Ukraine, are really signs of the rehabilitation of fascist barbarism that is taking place in Western politics. This understanding, about the lies of imperialism about Ukraine, needs to become as widely known as the facts about Palestine and Gaza: we need a unified struggle against imperialism. In Palestine and Ukraine, one side right, one side wrong! Solidarity with the Palestinians! Solidarity with the Donbass and Crimea!

The Liaison Committee of the Fourth International, together with the comrades of ClassConscious based in Australia and the United States, and a number of our joint allies in the Marxists Speak Out Network (MSO), though not as yet MSO itself, agreed to criticially endorse the declaration of the Rome Peace Conference held on October 27-28. We endorsed with reservations, which are stated in the Open Letter which we sent to the Conference during its meeting. But despite these reservations, we agreed to endorse the declaration itself, as there is much good material in it, despite the flaws, and we consider the bringing together of such an international gathering of anti-war activists, clearly standing for the defeat of NATO and defence of the peoples of Donbass and Crimea, to be a step foward towards the creation of a new Communist International, a key part of our immediate aims.

Stop the Third World War – for a true and a just peace

The clash between Russia and Ukraine, due to the direct involvement of NATO, threatens to unleash a third world war.

The Euro-Atlanticist elites justify their direct support for the puppet regime in Kiev as “necessary to repel Russian aggression”.

Actually, the real aggressor is the US-NATO-EU coalition, which took advantage of the Soviet Union’s dissolution to economically and politically subdue all of Eastern Europe in order to encircle and defeat Russia. The final step in this strategy would be the definitive annexation of Ukraine to NATO and the European Union, and regime change in Moscow.

Only the foolish and forgetful can believe that the blockade led by the United States of America has triggered this war to defend the principles of democracy and the self-determination of peoples. The truth is that this blockade, after supporting the Euromaidan coup, financed and armed the Ukrainian army and neo-Nazi groups to hurl them against the Donbass republics and Russia itself. The truth is that the US-NATO-EU bloc uses the Ukrainian people as cannon fodder to establish its supremacy thus preventing a multipolar order based on respect for the peoples and the sovereignty of nations from coming into being. If this blockade succeeds in subduing Russia, the doors will be wide open for war against China.

Preventing the third world war is the first duty of all those who have the good of humanity at heart. It is therefore necessary to build a great/ strong international coalition for peace and brotherhood among nations.

Such an alliance must be able to set in motion the different souls fighting against militarism and imperialism in all their forms. To start this process, we invite you to join the European Peace Conference that will take place in Rome on 27 and 28 October 2023.

As signatories of this Appeal we ask for:

• the immediate halt of arms shipments to Ukraine;
• an end to the sanctions on Russia as well as the Russophobic campaign;
• the invalidation of the statement condemning Russia as a terrorist state;
• an armistice between the belligerent forces;
• a truly neutral and democratic Ukraine;
• the stop to the arms race and the dissolution of NATO.

Finally, we call upon the peoples to fight against all forms of imperialism, and nationalist chauvinism and we advocate the advent of a multipolar world based on respect for every people and all nationalities.

FOR A TRUE PEACE, FOR A JUST PEACE!

Divided We are nothing, united we can do everything.

The Palestinian prison breakout from Gaza has given rise to a new wave of bloodthirsty racist hysteria in the imperialist media. The racism is obvious when you consider one salient fact: the Hamas surprise attack on Israeli forces and parts of the nearby settler population appears to have inflicted a similar level of deaths and injuries that have been inflicted on Palestinians many times since 2007, when the Israeli organised coup against Hamas’s 2005 election by the Palestinian in a free vote, overthrew the movement in the West Bank and confined it to Gaza. To Israel, killing 1000-2000 Palestinians in periodic massacres was regularly dignified by the disgusting phrase “mowing the lawn”. And indeed, one recurrent and even well-publicised phenomenon during such atrocities as Operation Cast Lead (2009) and Operation Protective Edge (2014), which both killed thousands of Palestinians, was to see Israelis camped out on high ground overlooking the Gaza Strip, cheering and drinking in celebration of the bombs falling.

Those fulminating at the supposed ‘barbarism’ of the Hamas militants who led the breakout, from what even former British Prime Minister David Cameron acknowledged in 2010 is a “prison camp”, for alleged killing of Israelis in the vicinity of Gaza, never had any problem with this. Such phenomena are a symptom of the fact that Israel is not a normal state. Its adult population in the surrounding area is recent armed settlers who are direct beneficiaries of the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian population to Gaza. There is a considerable popular awareness that they live on land taken from the Palestinian population, and fear and loathing of that population. Hence the bloodthirsty celebrations, and the fear of revenge if there was ever a break out.

Some apparent evidence that seems to suggest that the political Hamas cadre were at pains not to ill-treat the prisoners that they took. Amid the fog of war, it has already come to light that many of the claims made by Israel are false; like the grotesque one about ‘beheaded babies’ that Biden lied that he had seen photographs of, but now the Israeli military say they don’t have any evidence. Many more of these claims are likely to be shown up as false. The claim of a massacre at a ‘rave’ that was taking place near to the Gaza fence at the time of the breakout also looks very suspicious – such lies go around the world but then it turns out there is no actual evidence for them. Apparently in one case a picture of suffering, injured children was posted online with the claim that they were Israeli children, only to emerge later that the image was of Palestinian children (!!). The same kind of lying and falsification has been legion over Ukraine.

Their purpose is to whip up and enhance racist hysteria. There is no concern for human life in this hysteria, but rather the demonisation of the ‘other’: Arabs and Muslims. That is the purpose of the fatuous comparisons with 9/11 that are being bandied around. the truth is that the Palestinian people have suffered many ‘9/11s’ at the hands of Zionism since 1948, and arguably since Britain issued the Balfour Declaration in 1917, promising their homeland to a third-party, racist colonial movement.

Now we see an attempt by the ruling class to extend the criminalisation of dissent that we have already seen over Ukraine, to the issue of Palestine. This now extends to criminalisation of support for the Palestinians per se – though they will have problems with that, as the Palestinians have literally millions of sympathisers in Britain today.  The racist sociopath Home Secretary Braverman is blatantly inciting the cops to arrest people for carrying Palestinian flags, on the supposed ground that the display of the flag is some sort of ‘harassment’ of Jews. This is blatant, and premeditated racist harassment and thuggery by the government and cops. a reflection in reality of the genocidal politics of Zionists in all the major bourgeois and pro-capitalist political parties. They have no problem with a genocide of the population of Gaza. This has already led to the arrest of one young Asian man in Manchester simply for carrying a Palestinian flag, prime facie a racist arrest in itself.

The Labour Party itself is led by vicious racists, with Keir Starmer as the bigot-in-chief. He was put into office as the result of a prolonged dirty-tricks scam campaign against Labour’s former left-wing leader, Jeremy Corbyn, led by the Zionist lobby, which the Blairite right-wing eagerly followed after they previously failed to discredit Corbyn with more conventional reactionary smears than the ‘anti-Semitism’ scam they finally settled on. But what is very visible now is the racist nature of that scam, as encapsulated in the genocidal politics of Keir Starmer himself. This culminated in Starmer’s endorsement, in an interview with LBC’s right-wing ‘shock jock’ Nick Ferrari (11 October) of the plan by the Israeli Defence Minister fascistic Likud thug Yoav Gallant, for a complete siege of Gaza. Evidently modelled on Hitler’s siege of Leningrad, the civilian population are being, as we speak, deprived of all fuel, food and water, with mass starvation and dying of thirst, patients dying from lack of power for hospital care, etc. This atrocity is as premeditatedly murderous as Auschwitz. But Starmer endorsed it, and said that Israel has the right to do it.

This is what was always behind the Zionist witchhunt in Labour; the drive to transform Labour from the ‘broad church’ the social-democratic left fatuously wanted, into a bourgeois body run from above by neoliberals and neoconservatives, funded by corporate donations. The completion of the Blair project. The Ukraine war has been a watershed in the transformation of Labour into something capable of rivalling the Tories for extreme reaction, as both main parties united to defend the West funding Nazis in Ukraine. Only a few weeks ago this was given substantial exposure, on an international level, as Zelensky, in cahoots with Canada’s Liberal president Justin Trudeau, a figure who Starmer would no doubt want to emulate, led two standing ovations for a 98-year old SS Veteran in the Canadian Parliament. This was a major international political scandal that did a lot to expose the real nature of the imperialist proxy war in Ukraine. But Starmer’s Labour Party is unfazed about supporting genocidal Nazis who want to slaughter Russians. And he has now dotted the I’s and crosses the T’s on support for Zionists aiming at genocide and/or ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. That was the truly sinister objective of the ‘anti-Semitism’ scam in Labour under Corbyn, it is now clear.

By Leon Collis

This is a short opinion piece based on personal experience and conversations with comrades: Much has been in the bourgeois media recently about proposed changes to disability benefits. We really should stop calling them benefits: They are social security entitlements!

There are two main social security allowances many disabled people are entitled to claim: Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) and Personal Independence Payment (PIP). ESA is for people who are unable to work or have limited capacity to work due to their disability. PIP is for disabled people who have care and transport needs.

Under the last Labour government, the ruling class decided that too many disabled people were claiming the social security allowances of: Incapacity Benefit (ESA’s forerunner) and Disability Living allowance (DLA) (PIP’s forerunner)

The ruling class decided that in order get around this problem as they saw it, they would scrap those particular allowances and replace them with new ones.  Hence the introduction of ESA and PIP.

These new social security entitlements go beyond filling in a claimant form: they require a full on physical assessment.  What’s more, the assessment process is run by the private sector.  The ruling class issue these companies with targets to deny a certain number claimants access to these allowances. Many of which are overturned on appeal. The government deny the existence of these targets. To make matters worse, many disabled people are constantly having to undergo reassessment despite no change in their condition.

Imagine the fear that one feels every time one gets a letter from the DWP.  This is because at first glance, its not possible to know whether it is just an annual rate change or a letter informing you that you are about to be reassessed.  Where you get a new form as if you are a new claimant.

New legislation has been introduced that means that those of us who are in the full support group of ESA will now be expected to seek work or face sanctions.  Disabled people in the support group of ESA until now had not been expected to work due to the nature of their disability or illness.

Some of us prematurely breathed a sigh of relief on hearing that the Work Capability Assessment (WCA) will be scrapped (this is the physical assessment for claiming ESA).  However, that is not until 2026/27.

So the government is obviously attempting another push to strip disabled people of their entitlements before the scrapping of the WCA. There has long been talk of merging the assessment process for PIP and ESA.  Currently they are two different assessments.

The ruling class always introduce these changes under the guise of helping disabled people.  In reality, it is a wealth transfer!

These constant changes lead to more ableism: Actions, attitudes and use of language that constitute prejudice towards disabled people. For example: The ruling class have long been pushing the idea that there is someone out there who is faking their disability.

Another example: In the environmental movement the rush to ban cars from our towns and cities fails to take into account that many disabled people do not feel able to use public transport for various reasons. This is a form of exclusion.

Finally, not introducing hybrid meetings (In-person and online participants) where people cannot get to an in-person meeting because of disability or illness is also a form of exclusion and therefore a form of ableism.

This is the leaflet that the Consistent Democrats will distribute on tomorrow’s Gaza Solidarity demonstration in London (click on top image to access .PDF)

Communist Fight #14 is now available. This issue contains extensive coverage of two crucial issues of our time: Zionism; and the nature of Russia and China, and of the nature of the new Cold War that evidently flows from imperialist antagonism to them.

The lead article is a comprehensive exposition of the newly formulated position of the LCFI on the nature of Russia and China. We consider them both to be bourgeois states, the products of counterrevolution in the early 1990s, but with one huge problem for their capitalism. The vast majority of their productive forces, military power and administrative apparatus are not the product of capitalism at all. They are the products of social regimes that for decades represented an (incomplete and stunted) transition to a higher mode of production: socialism.  This circumstance leads us to note that these states are not trusted by the imperialist bourgeoisie at all. Their bourgeois nature is not clearly sustainable, is fragile, and capable of reversion. Some elements of reversion have already happened, which the imperialists hate. For us, this is the underlying reason for NATO expansion and the current Cold War most clearly expressed over Ukraine. They are deformed bourgeois states, deformed by many decades of post-capitalist economic growth and development, and fundamentally incompatible with concrete form of capitalism that dominates the world today, imperialism. The implications of this for the revolutionary movement are explored at some length.

We also have considerable coverage of Zionism. The back page article is a short piece denouncing the bloody and genocidal attack on Gaza in the aftermath of the armed prison break from Gaza on 7th October. Then we have two extensive articles challenging witchhunting of the most outspoken and militant anti-Zionists by elements on the left who evidence forms of Jewish identity politics. Though these comrades abhor open Zionism, they have elements in common with the latter that lead them to try to suppress some debates about the most contentious aspects of Zionism, which for them touches on difficult questions that they consider only those who defend their type of identity politics can be allowed to touch upon.

In particular, Zionism’s bourgeois-imperialist international dimension and its imperialist nature in itself. Anti-Zionists like Pete Gregson and David Miller, who have touched, even inadvertently on these, have been ananthematised as ‘anti-Semitic’ by elements on the left who reject getting to grips with this. We consider that in order to fully tackle and overcome softness on Zionism on the left, all these questions must be addressed. Our article defending David Miller, and the open letter we initiated defending Peter Gregson, address these questions in depth and are therefore important for this issue.

We also have an article by a disabled comrade analysing and criticising the government’s latest attacks on disabled people’s rights. And we have a short piece on this government’s attack on democratic rights which inevitably centres on Gaza.

This is the leafet that the Consistent Democrats distributed on the 14th October Gaza mass demonstration in London (click on top image to access .PDF)

Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, the armed uprising of Palestinians in Gaza against Israeli rule, has taken Israel by surprise. The break-out from Gaza, the world’s biggest prison camp, accompanied by a fusillade of thousands of missiles from the Izz al-Din al-Qassem Brigades, the Hamas military wing, and the seizure back of important colonised land including Sderot and Askelon, which used to be Arab-inhabited territory until the indigenous people were put to flight by Zionist terrorists in 1948.

This bold Palestinian military uprising is yet another expression of the decline of the imperialist world system in the crisis of the Zionist regime, an ingredient that integrates and deepens the decadence of the system, as well as the crisis of French rule in Africa, challenged and defeated by the military uprisings in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger, following the defeat that imperialism has suffered in Ukraine.

This is a breathtaking event – the oppressed turning the tables on the oppressor after many decades of slow genocide. It is excellent from the point of view of genuine communists, as tribunes of the oppressed, that the boot is on the other foot and Israel’s armed colonists are now running scared of the people they oppressed, and whose homeland and homes they stole, for decades. Such is the genocidal brutality of the Israeli indiscriminate terror against the Palestinian civilian population in Gaza, that the actions of Hamas militants in taking both military and civilian prisoners to Gaza, actually has a humanitarian element to it. Given the ‘master race’ psychology of Israel, the belief that Palestinian life is worthless whereas Jewish life is infinitely precious, this would seem a valid incentive for Israel not to simply carpet bomb Gaza as they have done repeatedly since Hamas came to power in 2005, most notoriously in the massacres of Operation Cast Lead (2009) and Operation Protective Edge (2014).

These settlers live on land and even homes directly taken from previous Palestinian inhabitants, and driven into exile by murderous Zionists using methods purloined wholesale from Nazi Germany. Israel has for decades wanted to treat the inhabitants of the Gaza Strip in a similar way that Adolf Hitler treated the inhabitants of the Warsaw Ghetto in WWII. But however murderous their intentions, Israel does not have the power to simply exterminate Palestinians in that manner.

Attempts to do so provoke intense rage and solidarity from not just Palestinians, but from the Arab masses and other sympathetic populations in the region. It would risk Israel’s tame allies in the regions crumbling before the masses. Hezbollah in Lebanon has stated, in response to the Netanyahu/Ben Gvir far right coalition statement that Israel is now ‘at war’ (when was it ever not so?) that an attack by Israeli ground troops on Gaza will mean that Hezbollah will enter the war, perhaps with a similar military operation to the one waged by the Izz al-Din al-Qassem Brigades in the South.

Both Hamas and Hezbollah now appear to have access to newer missile technology, and drones, much of it the result of Iranian innovations in the field, which appears to have somewhat shifted the military balance of forces in the region. Such is the efficiency of some of this Iranian military technology that Russian forces have made use of Iranian drones in the Ukraine war. Hezbollah has plenty of this materiel, and Hamas appears to have at least home-manufactured supplies of similar design, even though undoubtedly not fabricated in Iran. This played an important role in the Saif Al Quds war of 2021, when Hamas fought the Israelis to a standstill in a retaliatory offensive for Israeli attacks on the Al Aqsa Mosque in East Jerusalem, Islam’s third most-holy shrine, which Jewish-Zionist extremists want to destroy and replace with their ‘Third Temple’.

The 2021 conflict was the most significant victory of Arab forces ever over Israel, and has laid the basis for this conflict, that has Israel once again in something of a mess, militarily, having somewhat overreached itself under this far right coalition of Netanhayu with Kahanists and other Jewish settler extremists, whose best-known figure is the Jewish Power leader and National Security minister, Ben Gvir. The accelerated persecution of Palestinians in the West Bank, attempting to drive Palestinian populations there into a similar state of constant military attack as endured by Gaza Palestinians, has tended to drive Palestinians closer together and to broaden sympathy for Hamas. When moderately free elections were last held in 2005 in the West Bank and Gaza as an occupied entity, Hamas convincingly won the elections as they were seen by the masses and incorruptible and not able to be coopted by Israel, unlike the puppet Palestinian authority under Abbas and Fatah.

This act of fighting back has predictably led to outrage from the imperialist politicians of the West, who scream about the supposed ‘terrorism’ of an oppressed people fighting against ethnic cleansing and persecution. The swine were recently exposed in Canada for what they really are when in unison with their far right Ukrainian stooge Zelensky, a Zionist who vows to make Ukraine a ‘big Israel’ (through a similar ethnic cleansing of the Russian-speaking people of the Donbass), the Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, a thoroughly mainstream (neo)-liberal figure who something of an archetype of Western hypocrisy, was seen publicly saluting a 98-year old veteran of Hitler’s SS. The West’s support for Zionist Israel, as well as their support for Nazi Ukraine, are really signs of the rehabilitation of fascist barbarism that is taking place in Western bourgeois politics as their system slides toward a final crisis.

 Israel appears to have major problems in this conflict, that once again it has provoked by its ceaseless persecution of the Palestinian people, aimed at a slow genocide, to make Palestinians lives unliveable, so they will either leave or die out. It’s good that Israel has major problems. Its cohesion needs to be destroyed, its ability to wage war against the Arab masses needs to be crippled, to give the Palestinian people the military and political space to wage a struggle for full equality and the full right to return for all the Palestinian people. That must point toward the creation of a multi-ethnic workers state of Palestine through the means of permanent revolution, a rearmed workers movement leading the national struggle to victory. That requires solidarity, and the unequivocal taking of sides with the oppressed in this conflict and those to come. In this conflict we therefore say: One side right, one side wrong! Victory to the Palestinians!

Dear Tony,

We condemn the statement (https://azvsas.blogspot.com/2023/09/why-palestine-solidarity-movement.html) you initiated calling for the ostracism of Peter Gregson from the Palestinian Solidarity movement for supposed ‘anti-Semitism’. We note that this accusation is false: the only definitions of anti-Semitism that count are the ones in authoritative dictionaries, such as the Oxford Dictionary which defines anti-Semitism as “Hostility to or prejudice against Jewish people”, or Merriam-Webster which defines it as “hostility toward or discrimination against Jews as a religious, ethnic, or racial group.”

It is clear that no such hostility is present in the political activities of Pete Gregson. Nowhere does he advocate hostility or discrimination against Jews. We don’t know what definition of anti-Semitism you are using, but it certainly is not any of these. And these are the only ones that the labour movement should recognise.

Peter Gregson was a Labour Party member of several decades duration until he became a victim of the anti-left witch-hunt in the context of the Corbyn movement. His views are entirely within the framework of a legitimate discussion of the role of ethnic bigotry and ethnocentric political programmes in the hostile right-wing activities that destroyed the Corbyn movement. No stone must be left unturned, no question must be forbidden from being discussed, in analysing that.

You say it is ‘bizarre’ for Peter to say that “The people who foisted the IHRA definition upon us were the Jews in the UK who support Israel” (emphasis added). It is clear from the words highlighted that Peter was talking about Zionist Jews, not Jews irrespective of politics. Given the role of highly vocal Zionist Jewish organisations in bringing down Jeremy Corbyn in large measure because of his criticisms of Zionism in the first instance, this is a question that the entire labour movement has a class interest in free discussion of.

We must not accept any restrictions on discussion of this issue among labour movement activists. The role of Israeli-funded forces in seeking to purge not only the Labour Party, but also the Conservative Party, of critics of Zionism, was recorded on film by Al Jazeera in The Lobby.

As Norman Finkelstein wrote in 2018 in his famous essay Corbyn Mania:

“The three richest Brits are Jewish. Jews comprise only .5 percent of the population but fully 20 percent of the 100 richest Brits.  Relative both to the general population and to other ethno-religious groups, British Jews are in the aggregate disproportionately wealthy, educated, and professionally successful. These data track closely with the picture elsewhere. Jews comprise only 2 percent of the US population but fully 30 percent of the 100 richest Americans, while Jews enjoy the highest household income among religious groups. Jews comprise less than .2 percent of the world’s population but, of the world’s 200 richest people, fully 20 percent are Jewish. Jews are incomparably organized as they have created a plethora of interlocking, overlapping, and mutually reinforcing communal and defence organizations that operate in both the domestic and international arenas. In many countries, not least the US and the UK, Jews occupy strategic positions in the entertainment industry, the arts, publishing, journals of opinion, the academy, the legal profession, and government. “Jews are represented in Britain in numbers that are many times their proportion of the population,” British-Israeli journalist Anshel Pfeffer notes, ‘in both Houses of Parliament, on the Sunday Times Rich List, in media, academia, professions, and just about every walk of public life.’  The wonder would be if these raw data didn’t translate into outsized Jewish political power. The Israel-based Jewish People Policy Planning Institute rhapsodizes that ‘The Jewish People today is at a historical zenith of wealth creation’ and ‘has never been as powerful as now.’ It is certainly legitimate to query the amplitude of this political power and whether it has been exaggerated, but it cannot be right to deny (or suppress) critical socioeconomic facts.”

It is very clear that Pete Gregson was referring to exactly the same phenomena that Norman Finkelstein was referring to in this essay. Not only cannot it be right to “deny (or suppress)” these “critical socioeconomic facts”, but it is a basic right of all members of the workers movement to discuss them without restriction. Attempts to restrict debate on this should be regarded as an attack on all members of the labour movement, whether of Jewish origin or otherwise. Participants in such debates also do not have to be completely correct in their arguments and suppositions either: without such differing views there would be only a stilted debate. Your letter is an attack on that labour movement democracy which is in the class interests of all workers, Jewish, Palestinian, or whoever, who are fighting against Zionism.

Then there is the attack on Peter for raising the question of the involvement of the Rothschild family in the creation of Zionism. You quote Peter as saying:

“‘Right from the outset, rich Jewish bankers such as Lord Rothschild backed Zionism. It is unlikely we would have Israel now were it not for his influence.’”

And you come back with:

“The suggestion that Israel owes its existence to ‘rich Jewish bankers’ is a classic anti-Semitic stereotype. It is also untrue. The Rothschilds were a house divided with the majority of the British family opposed to Zionism. For example the President of the anti-Zionist League of British Jews, formed in the wake of the Balfour Declaration, was Sir Lionel Rothschild, a Tory MP.

“The Jewish bourgeoisie were overwhelmingly opposed to Zionism. The only member of the Lloyd George cabinet who opposed the Balfour Declaration was its only Jewish member, Sir Edwin Montagu.”

This statement that “The Jewish bourgeoisie were overwhelmingly opposed to Zionism” is one-sided and overstated. According to the current Lord Rothschild, writing in the Jewish Chronicle in 2017, the Balfour Declaration was addressed to his great Uncle, Lord Walter Rothschild, not least because:

“…Walter had been deeply involved in the Zionist movement. He had been introduced to Chaim Weizmann and the cause through his formidable Hungarian sister-in-law Rozika, a convinced Zionist, who had married his younger brother Charles.

Walter’s commitment to Zionism was fired by his very first meeting with Weizmann. He became convinced that the future of the Jews lay in Zionism and dedicated himself to the cause. After the Declaration Weizmann wrote to him: ‘May I offer you our heartiest thanks in making this possible — I am sure that when the history of this time will be written it will be justifiably said that the name of the greatest House in Jewry was associated with the granting of the Magna Carta of Jewish liberties….’

The current Lord Rothschild goes on:

“…from another side of my family Baron Edmond de Rothschild played a significant if very different role in the years prior to the Declaration.

The Baron had been deeply involved in the resettling of Jews in Palestine following the dreadful pogroms of the 1880s in Russia. He was moved to support the early settlers by a number of factors, such as the increasing antisemitism and violence in the Pale of Settlement which made a refuge for Jews from pogroms and persecution imperative. But he was looking for more than a refuge. Above all he was inspired by the vision of the rebirth of the Jewish spirit in its ancient land. As he would later write to the early pioneers of Rishon LeZion: ‘I did not come to your aid because of your poverty and suffering for to be sure there were many other similar cases of distress in the world. I did it because I saw in you the realisers of the renaissance of Israel and of that ideal so dear to us all, the sacred goal of the return of Israel to its ancestral homeland.’”

https://www.thejc.com/news/features/a-family-that-helped-build-a-new-nation-1.448063

There is at least some truth in the view the Rothschild family was “a house divided” over the project of Zionism, and that others in the Rothschild family, including as you point out, the Tory MP Sir Lionel Nathan Rothschild, were strongly opposed to Zionism. However, the anti-Zionist ‘League of British Jews’ that he founded proved ephemeral, it wound up in 1929 just as the implications of the Zionist colonisation of Palestine were becoming obvious with the first major Arab uprising. It can hardly be considered of major importance. Unlike the provenance of the Balfour Declaration, which echoes to this day, it is at best a footnote in history.

It is certainly true that in the early period of the Zionist movement the Jewish bourgeoisie were divided about it, not least about whether the project itself was viable or feasible, but it is also true that the overwhelming majority of those who were sceptical or hostile to it were later won over, and bourgeois opponents marginalised and defeated. The Rothschilds in the early 20^th Century were certainly important in getting Zionism off the ground and the Balfour Declaration, addressed to their main figure in Britain just as British troops under Allenby were poised to take Palestine from the Ottomans, making it a viable proposition therefore, is certainly of high importance.

This is an important historical question on which, again, free debate in the labour movement is of paramount importance. The workers movement should not tolerate restrictions on freedom of debate on historical questions involving Zionism. Arming ourselves politically against any repetition of the destruction of the Corbyn movement is too important for that.

You denounce Peter Gregson for in 2019 linking to an article by Ian Fantom whose primary topic was about splits in the Labour Party. It also contained an extensive discussion of the diaries of Theodore Herzl. And the article also contained a link to an article by one Nick Kollerstrom which contained material casting doubt on the Nazi holocaust. In his petition, Pete Gregson condemned Kollerstrom’s article as ‘toxic’. He did not link to it. What is remarkable is that whereas Pete Gregson did not link to this article, but mentioned it and condemned it, in your rush to denounce Pete in an earlier article denouncing him for this, you linked your website directly to the very same article! Of course, you will say that you linked to it in order to condemn it. Fine! But Peter condemned it as ‘toxic’ without linking to it! This is strange, in fact downright weird, ‘logic’ on your part to denounce Peter for this (see this Consistent Democrats article from January on this for full details including screenshots proving this  https://www.consistent-democrats.org/uncategorized/hands-off-peter-gregson-for-workers-democracy-and-free-debate-not-bundist-heresy-hunts/).

You also denounce Peter for making the following allegation about Zionist involvement in shepherding Jews to the gas chambers in Hungary:

“…until 1940 most Jews refused to move to Israel on religious grounds. These were the people that Hitler gassed. With Zionist support. Proof? Over the period 1942-44, Rabbi Weissmandl of Hungary made a deal with Adolf Eichmann whereby the Germans would ‘sell’ the Jews to him”

But Peter was not accusing this (non-Zionist) Rabbi of being involved in the extermination. Very much the opposite … he says that this Rabbi tried to put together a scheme to buy the freedom of Hungarian and Slovakian Jews from the Nazis. There were over 720,000 Jews in Hungary at that time, including tens of thousands who had fled from Slovakia, and another 100,000 or more Christian ex-Jewish converts. Weissmandl became an impassioned anti-Zionist because Zionists refused to help with the scheme. This Slovakian Rabbi apparently tried to do this and was rebuffed by Zionist leaders in Hungary. See (https://www.geni.com/people/R-Chaim-Michoel-Dov-Weissmandl-Rosh-Yeshiva-Nytra/6000000004681147394) for an account of this. Quite how it is ‘anti-Semitic’ to mention this defies belief. It seems that anger at Peter’s association with the orthodox Jewish group Naturei Karta, who rightly hold up Rabbi Weissmandl as a laudable figure, is leading you to smear him in a crude manner.

You made the same accusation that Peter cites, against the leading Zionist in Hungary, Rudolph Kasztner, who knowing full well that Jews who were deported to Auschwitz were being gassed, systematically hid this from the bulk of Hungarian Jews, and indeed made deals with the Nazis, with Adolf Eichmann as his chief interlocutor, to allow a small minority of wealthy Zionist Jews to emigrate to Palestine in exchange for offering no resistance to the deportation (to gas chambers) of the majority. He clearly worked with the Zionist leadership in Palestine and its agents in doing this.

You yourself, in your major work, relate that Kasztner “received a copy of the [Auschwitz] Protocols [a detailed account of the Auschwitz extermination process by two escapees] at the end of April [1944]. The Protocols were also sent to the Zionist liaison office in Istanbul, as well as to Nathan Shwalb [a leading Zionist in Switzerland]”. You then note that “Schwalb was ‘reluctant to publicise the news about Auschwitz’” and conclude “This reluctance probably stemmed from his desire not to upset Kasztner’s negotiations with the SS.” (Greenstein, Zionism During the Holocaust, pp199-200).

Then you write about the involvement of the Zionist top layers both in this, and in covering it up, in connection with the Kasztner libel trial in Israel in 1954, where some truth about this criminality was aired for the first time:

“Why did the Israeli state insist on a libel action on behalf of Kasztner? Clearly it believed that it could bury the rumours of collaboration between the JA [Jewish Agency] and the Nazis….

“Instead of exonerating Kasztner the trial achieved the exact opposite. Kastner effectively became the defendant. Kastner’s boasting of a special relationship with the SS and his stay as a guest of the Gestapo in Vienna was seen as particularly ‘repulsive’.

“Hungarian holocaust survivors testified that if they had known the truth about the Holocaust then they would have tried to escape… It was estimated that 4000-5000 Jews escaped across the Romanian border in any event.”

“Kasztner and his associates actively dissuaded the Jews of Kolozsvar from escaping. Joseph Katz, a lawyer from Nodvarod, four miles from the Romanian border, testified that its Jews knew nothing of Auschwitz.”

p206-7

You then wrote of the verdict against Kasztner in the trial and quote the judge that Kasztner had “sold his soul to the devil”. “It was a damning verdict, not just on Kasztner but the Jewish Agency” you wrote, noting that the decision of the Israeli state to appeal caused the fall of Moshe Shertok’s government in 1955. Kasztner was then murdered, in circumstances that do suggest a state attempt to erase the question, given that Shin Bet withdrew his personal protection even though a government-funded appeal was in train. When the appeal came to court, in 1957, you concluded that:

“If Kasztner were convicted, then the Zionist leadership itself stood condemned.”

p213

And when the court overturned the charge of collaboration, you noted that the “judgement was overturned on legal and political grounds”, and then cited the wife of one of the Auschwitz escapers and author of the Auschwitz Protocols, Rudolf Vrba:

“What Kasztner did was unbelievable because people had the right to have this information… Rudolph was very bitter about the fact than Kasztner was regarded as a hero in Israel while he and Wetzler [the other escaper and co-author of the Protocols] went unrecognised”.

p214

All this is sufficient to more than substantiate Peter Gregson’s statement that Jews from Hungary were gassed “with Zionist support”. That’s what the collaboration of Kasztner, and the Zionist Agency, implicating the leadership of the Yishuv [the proto-Zionist state in colonised Palestine before 1948], amounted to. That’s what your evidence in your large book points to. It seems that you are flinching from the logic of your own argumentation and throwing abuse at Peter, who is more consistent.

There is a lot more of a case for labour movement activists to campaign against supporters of the dubious, pro-Nazi Ukraine Solidarity Campaign, than against Pete Gregson. It is especically strange to be accepting signatories supposedly denouncing ‘anti-Semitism’ from people like Roland Rance and Pete Firmin who support this campaign. USC supports the West’s proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, which is being waged on the ground by Nazi militias that are terrorising Russians and Roma, and the population generally, and following in the footsteps of those who fought for Hitler in the Second World War. The scandal in Canada, where Zelensky’s visit to the parliament led to a standing ovation to a 98-year old Ukranian who fought in the SS, just shows what a disgrace this campaign is.

On these grounds the undersigned condemn your open letter as an attack on workers democracy and working-class politics, and call on its signatories, including yourself, to withdraw.

Fraternally

Mark Andresen (Marxist activist, Torquay)

Muhammad Basirul Haq Sinha (Bangladesh)

Anna Brogan (Black Activist and Marxist, London)

John Burr (Thailand)

Ngungu Chileshi

Paul Collins (Marxist activist, Oxford)

Mara Costello

Diana Isserlis (Marxist activitist, Bristol)

Jon de Rennes (Thailand)

Ian Donovan (Marxist activist, London)

Jane Elliot (Palestine solidarity activist, Glasgow)

Ian Fantom (Halifax)

Nick Fisher

Jim Greenhow (Highlands and Islands)

Henry Herskovitz (Anti-Israel Peace Activitist)

Jackie Jarvis (a non-prejudiced, free Palestine supporter)

Victor Logan (South East London Direct Action Network)

Gareth Murphy (Socialist activist, London)

Georgia Murray (Marxist-Leninist, Ireland)

Kevin O’Connor (Socialist Labour Party, London – personal capacity)

Michelle Thresher (Portsmouth, Supporting and in Solidarity with Palestine)

Dr Joseph O’Neill (Interfaith for Palestine)

George Rendall (Democratic Socialist, Edinburgh)

Stephen Richards (Socialist)

Jurgen Wolf (Workers Party – personal capacity)

Mick Wright (Palestine solidarity activist, Glasgow)

M. R. A. Zaviour

If you would like to add your name to the list of signatories of this open letter

send an email to le*******@***il.com with your name and how you want to be described