Public anger over how members of parliament (MPs) were abusing their expenses system has helped usher in a little transparency to British politics over the past few years. Yet the Labor Friends of Israel (LFI), a powerful group within the country’s main opposition party, is still behaving like a secret society.
Unlike a similar “friends of Israel” group belonging to the Liberal Democrats – the junior party in the ruling coalition - the LFI does not appear to have supplied any information about the sources of its finances to the UK’s Electoral Commission. This lack of disclosure could be illegal. Legislation applying to “members’ associations” of political parties stipulates that all donations above £7,500 ($11,600) must be notified to the Commission within 30 days.
Today, I asked Ben Garrett, the LFI’s head of policy and research, why his organization seems to be breaking the law. “I am not willing to comment,” he replied.
Garrett repeated that answer when I asked for basic details of the LFI’s annual budget and who its largest contributors are. When I argued that it is undemocratic for the LFI to be seeking to influence British policies on the Middle East, without providing basic details about how it is financed, he said, “I am not willing to engage with The Electronic Intifada in a discussion on these issues.”
Admittedly, the information provided by the “friends of Israel” groups for the two other large parties is quite scanty. The Conservative Friends of Israel refused to tell me a few months ago if that group is being funded by the arms industry. The answer to this question cannot be found in the information it has given to the commission, which mainly relates to visits to the Middle East by Conservative MPs. For their part, the Liberal Democrat Friends of Israel appear to be more open, naming David Alliance, a textiles entrepreneur known to grace The Sunday Times list of Britain’s richest people, as one of its key donors.
Admiring Israel’s weapons
The LFI’s secrecy is all the more disturbing, given how some of its senior figures have recently been preparing a review of Britain’s defense policy and there is strong reason to suspect that their admiration for Israel is coloring their views.
A 96-page paper called “Ideas for Future UK Defense Equipment” was published by the Labor Party in September. Its preface was jointly signed by Michael Dugher, the LFI’s vice-chairman, and Jim Murphy, the shadow defense secretary.
As part of their deliberations, both men visited Israel in June. The bill for that trip was shared by the Britain Israel Research Center (BICOM) and the UK embassy in Tel Aviv. During it, the men held consultations with two of Israel’s leading arms makers, Elbit and Rafael. Their paper lauds the pilotless drones that Elbit has provided to the British Army for the war in Afghanistan, without acknowledging that they have been tested by spying on and murdering civilians in Gaza.
A few months ago, Dugher and Murphy both tried to make political capital out of a controversy in which Liam Fox, then the UK’s defense secretary, was embroiled. Fox had to resign because his close friend Adam Werritty was posing as his adviser, despite how Werritty had never been given any such job by the British government. While Dugher and Murphy were happy to censure Fox and Werritty for their shenanigans, they did not draw attention to how some of Werritty’s trips abroad were financed by BICOM.
Strong bonds to Zionist PR firm
Their reticence on that point is easy to understand. For BICOM is known to have solid bonds with the LFI, even though the center’s chief donor, Las Vegas casino magnate Poju Zabludowicz has helped fund the Conservatives. BICOM is registered as a private company, yet performs many of the functions that an embassy normally would by, for example, arranging for journalists to interview Israeli politicians.
At least three of BICOM’s team either remain involved with the LFI or have been in the recent past. Lorna Fitzsimons, the chief executive, was active in the LFI when she was a Labor member of parliament. Dermot Kehoe, BICOM’s press officer, was the partner of David Cairns, the LFI chairman who died in May. And Luke Akehurst, BICOM’s director of campaigns, is a Labor councillor in London who uses his blog to solicit recruits for the LFI.
Akehurst is also the quasi-official stenographer for the LFI. Last month, he wrote a glowing account of a speech given to the LFI by Ed Miliband, leader of the entire Labor Party.
Proving that he is little different to his predecessors Gordon Brown and Tony Blair, Miliband is more eager to placate the LFI’s hawks than follow the good example shown by his mother Marion Kozak , who has declared her support for the principled organization Jews for Justice for Palestinians. If Akehurst’s transcript is accurate, Miliband used his LFI address to malign the Palestinian-led campaign for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel by implying that it had an anti-Semitic motive.
Sara Apps from the Palestine Solidarity Campaign in London noted that the only information that the LFI seems to have provided to the Electoral Commission concerned trips that the LFI has financed, without revealing where the money for those trips originated. “According to the Electoral Commission website, LFI has spent at least £76,822 on overseas visits for Labor MPs since 2003,” she told me. “Add this to their office and employment costs, it is difficult to conceive they could survive without significant donations from funders.”
By refusing to reveal where they get their money, the Labor Friends of Israel prove that they are enemies of democracy.
●First published by The Electronic Intifada, 19 December 2011.
Showing posts with label Lorna Fitzsimons. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Lorna Fitzsimons. Show all posts
Monday, December 19, 2011
Friday, September 23, 2011
Why is there a peace center named after that thug Peres?
A rare snapshot of how the Israel lobby tries to manipulate media coverage has been provided by a blogger known as Guido Fawkes.
He has published details of an email sent earlier in September by Lorna Fitzsimons, head of the Britain Israel Communications and Research Center (BICOM). It gives details of contacts she has made with senior journalists and editors to try and cajole them into giving a pro-Zionist line.
Fitzsimons says, for example, that she briefed Jonathan Ford, an editorial writer with The Financial Times as he was preparing a leader for the paper’s 13 September edition. Ford seems to have been amenable to Zionist propaganda. The article in question listed four principles that “must underpin” the creation of a Palestinian state. One of them was that Palestinian refugees would receive a payment “for not exercising the right to return.”
That point was similar to one made by Fitzsimons in an opinion piece published by The Guardian last month; she wrote, “there cannot be a mass return of Palestinian refugees to [present-day] Israel.”
Making apartheid respectable
Another principle advocated by the FT was that a future Palestinian state would have to recognize Israel’s “existence and security.” In the absence of clearer guidance, it can only be assumed that the paper’s editorial writer wants Palestinians to accept Israel as a state where Jews have more entitlements than everyone else. And so apartheid is being given a veneer of respectability from the paper most commonly read by top-level businesspeople and politicians.
The FT is not the worst culprit in whitewashing Israel’s crimes. Its readers were reminded this week of a salient fact that is frequently overlooked: “the biggest single enlargement of the settlements took place in 1992-96, at the high-water mark of the peace process under Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, when the number of settlers grew by 50 per cent, or four times the rate of population growth inside Israel.”
One of the great travesties of modern times is that Peres, now Israel’s president, is fêted internationally as a peacemaker, despite how he has always been a grubby arms dealer. His enthusiasm for extreme violence has remained undiminished. After Israel attacked Lebanon in 2006, he penned a column celebrating how Israeli scientists were using nanotechnology to develop miniscule weapons of the future.
Free trade fantasy
Peres even has a “center for peace” called after him. And a few days ago, I received a new paper from the Aix Group, which is closely linked to that center. It recommends that a future Palestinian state should sign a free trade agreement with Israel.
Tellingly, the paper was compiled with “generous support” from the World Bank, an institution with a largely unrivalled reputation for increasing the hardship endured by the world’s poor. The idea that a free trade agreement between a future Palestinian state and Israel would bring benefits to most ordinary Palestinians belongs to the realm of fantasy. Recent history has shown repeatedly that a poor country pays a terrible price when it liberalizes its trade with a richer one. Two million farm jobs have been lost in Mexico as a result of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), primarily because its corn farmers haven’t been able to compete with imports from the US.
Peres and his acolytes tend to harp on about how they are fostering cooperation between Palestinians and Israelis. This does not lead to peace – at least if you accept Martin Luther King’s definition of peace as not being the absence of war but the presence of justice. Peres is no peacemaker; he is a thug who just happens to fit well into the suits of a statesman.
·First published by The Electronic Intifada, 22 September 2011.
He has published details of an email sent earlier in September by Lorna Fitzsimons, head of the Britain Israel Communications and Research Center (BICOM). It gives details of contacts she has made with senior journalists and editors to try and cajole them into giving a pro-Zionist line.
Fitzsimons says, for example, that she briefed Jonathan Ford, an editorial writer with The Financial Times as he was preparing a leader for the paper’s 13 September edition. Ford seems to have been amenable to Zionist propaganda. The article in question listed four principles that “must underpin” the creation of a Palestinian state. One of them was that Palestinian refugees would receive a payment “for not exercising the right to return.”
That point was similar to one made by Fitzsimons in an opinion piece published by The Guardian last month; she wrote, “there cannot be a mass return of Palestinian refugees to [present-day] Israel.”
Making apartheid respectable
Another principle advocated by the FT was that a future Palestinian state would have to recognize Israel’s “existence and security.” In the absence of clearer guidance, it can only be assumed that the paper’s editorial writer wants Palestinians to accept Israel as a state where Jews have more entitlements than everyone else. And so apartheid is being given a veneer of respectability from the paper most commonly read by top-level businesspeople and politicians.
The FT is not the worst culprit in whitewashing Israel’s crimes. Its readers were reminded this week of a salient fact that is frequently overlooked: “the biggest single enlargement of the settlements took place in 1992-96, at the high-water mark of the peace process under Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, when the number of settlers grew by 50 per cent, or four times the rate of population growth inside Israel.”
One of the great travesties of modern times is that Peres, now Israel’s president, is fêted internationally as a peacemaker, despite how he has always been a grubby arms dealer. His enthusiasm for extreme violence has remained undiminished. After Israel attacked Lebanon in 2006, he penned a column celebrating how Israeli scientists were using nanotechnology to develop miniscule weapons of the future.
Free trade fantasy
Peres even has a “center for peace” called after him. And a few days ago, I received a new paper from the Aix Group, which is closely linked to that center. It recommends that a future Palestinian state should sign a free trade agreement with Israel.
Tellingly, the paper was compiled with “generous support” from the World Bank, an institution with a largely unrivalled reputation for increasing the hardship endured by the world’s poor. The idea that a free trade agreement between a future Palestinian state and Israel would bring benefits to most ordinary Palestinians belongs to the realm of fantasy. Recent history has shown repeatedly that a poor country pays a terrible price when it liberalizes its trade with a richer one. Two million farm jobs have been lost in Mexico as a result of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), primarily because its corn farmers haven’t been able to compete with imports from the US.
Peres and his acolytes tend to harp on about how they are fostering cooperation between Palestinians and Israelis. This does not lead to peace – at least if you accept Martin Luther King’s definition of peace as not being the absence of war but the presence of justice. Peres is no peacemaker; he is a thug who just happens to fit well into the suits of a statesman.
·First published by The Electronic Intifada, 22 September 2011.
Tuesday, August 23, 2011
Arms industry promoter latest recruit for UK Israel lobby
What is the next career move for a promoter of the arms industry? Join the Israel lobby, it seems.
Over the past few days, I have been writing about how the Britain Israel Communications and Research Center (BICOM) has indicted war criminal Michael Herzog on its staff. Herzog’s newest colleague at the center is Luke Akehurst, until recently a “defense” specialist with the public relations giant Weber Shandwick.
Enticing Akehurst to work for her is quite a coup for Lorna Fitzsimons, BICOM’s chief executive. He was named “UK consultant of the year” at the 2008 Public Affairs News Awards. The prize was in recognition for his invaluable services for several companies that arm dictators.
Libya connection
Finmeccanica, one of his clients, cultivated strong links with Muammar Gaddafi lately. While it has predicted that its revenues for 2011 will exceed €18 billion, the civil war in Libya will inevitably have repercussions. The Italian firm has a backlog of orders worth €800 million from the Gaddafi regime.
Akehurst also represented GKN, which supplied water cannons to Indonesia in the 1990s, unperturbed about how its then military ruler Suharto was overseeing an occupation in East Timor, that involved one of the twentieth century’s worst cases of genocide. Serco, another client of his, manages Britain’s Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE) as part of a consortium that bands it together with the world’s number one weapons maker Lockheed Martin.
It is fitting that Akehurst, a Labor Party elected representative for Hackney council in London, has joined BICOM. For the largest donor to that center Poju Zabludowicz inherited a vast fortune through his father’s involvement in the arms industry. Shlomo Zabludowicz set up a firm called Soltam, which is today owned by the top Israeli weapons manufacturer Elbit.
In 2009, TheObserver reported that Poju Zabludowicz gave BICOM (which he chairs) nearly £1 million in 2007 alone. A subsequent TV documentary about Britain’s pro-Israel lobby showed how he has invested in a shopping centre in the illegal Israeli settlement of Ma’ale Adumim and other Israeli business activities in the occupied West Bank.
Blood money
According to The Sunday Times, Zabludowicz is placed at number 31 on the list of Britain’s richest residents.
Even though Fitzsimons and Akehurst hail from a Labor background, Zabludowicz is a generous contributor to the rival Conservatives, led by Prime Minister David Cameron. It is de rigueur for that party’s members of parliament to join the Conservative Friends of Israel (CFOI) and take part in its trips to the Middle East. One such junket – in February this year – included a visit to Elbit’s headquarters. A briefing note prepared by the CFOI underscored how Elbit “provides the British armed forces with the unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that play such a crucial role in intelligence-collection.” The MPs weren’t reminded that such warplanes were used to kill and maim women and children in Gaza during Israel’s Operation Cast Lead in late 2008 and early 2009.
I would like to congratulate Luke Akehurst on his new appointment and suggest that he studies his payslips carefully. If he does, he will see they are stained with the blood of innocent Palestinians.
·First published by The Electronic Intifada (www.electronicintifada.net), 23 August 2011.
Over the past few days, I have been writing about how the Britain Israel Communications and Research Center (BICOM) has indicted war criminal Michael Herzog on its staff. Herzog’s newest colleague at the center is Luke Akehurst, until recently a “defense” specialist with the public relations giant Weber Shandwick.
Enticing Akehurst to work for her is quite a coup for Lorna Fitzsimons, BICOM’s chief executive. He was named “UK consultant of the year” at the 2008 Public Affairs News Awards. The prize was in recognition for his invaluable services for several companies that arm dictators.
Libya connection
Finmeccanica, one of his clients, cultivated strong links with Muammar Gaddafi lately. While it has predicted that its revenues for 2011 will exceed €18 billion, the civil war in Libya will inevitably have repercussions. The Italian firm has a backlog of orders worth €800 million from the Gaddafi regime.
Akehurst also represented GKN, which supplied water cannons to Indonesia in the 1990s, unperturbed about how its then military ruler Suharto was overseeing an occupation in East Timor, that involved one of the twentieth century’s worst cases of genocide. Serco, another client of his, manages Britain’s Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE) as part of a consortium that bands it together with the world’s number one weapons maker Lockheed Martin.
It is fitting that Akehurst, a Labor Party elected representative for Hackney council in London, has joined BICOM. For the largest donor to that center Poju Zabludowicz inherited a vast fortune through his father’s involvement in the arms industry. Shlomo Zabludowicz set up a firm called Soltam, which is today owned by the top Israeli weapons manufacturer Elbit.
In 2009, TheObserver reported that Poju Zabludowicz gave BICOM (which he chairs) nearly £1 million in 2007 alone. A subsequent TV documentary about Britain’s pro-Israel lobby showed how he has invested in a shopping centre in the illegal Israeli settlement of Ma’ale Adumim and other Israeli business activities in the occupied West Bank.
Blood money
According to The Sunday Times, Zabludowicz is placed at number 31 on the list of Britain’s richest residents.
Even though Fitzsimons and Akehurst hail from a Labor background, Zabludowicz is a generous contributor to the rival Conservatives, led by Prime Minister David Cameron. It is de rigueur for that party’s members of parliament to join the Conservative Friends of Israel (CFOI) and take part in its trips to the Middle East. One such junket – in February this year – included a visit to Elbit’s headquarters. A briefing note prepared by the CFOI underscored how Elbit “provides the British armed forces with the unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that play such a crucial role in intelligence-collection.” The MPs weren’t reminded that such warplanes were used to kill and maim women and children in Gaza during Israel’s Operation Cast Lead in late 2008 and early 2009.
I would like to congratulate Luke Akehurst on his new appointment and suggest that he studies his payslips carefully. If he does, he will see they are stained with the blood of innocent Palestinians.
·First published by The Electronic Intifada (www.electronicintifada.net), 23 August 2011.
Friday, August 19, 2011
Fake flexibility from London's Israel lobby
Predictably, the European Union responded quickly to yesterday’s violence in Southern Israel. "I condemn unreservedly all such acts of terror," the bloc’s foreign policy chief Catherine Asthon said.
Will Ashton be issuing another statement today to denounce the Israeli military in similarly strong terms for murdering an infant in Gaza a few hours later? Or for ending a teenager’s life in the early hours of this morning? I’m sure that she won’t. The most we can expect is that she will call for "restraint" (that weasel word which diplomats have rendered meaningless through overuse).
And did she post something on her website expressing revulsion at how Israeli troops shot dead Sa'd al-Majdalwai, a 17 year old with a mental disability, also in Gaza earlier this week? Of course, she didn’t. Why? Because he was too low down in the hierarchy of victims to get noticed. And because the European Union applies different standards to the Israeli forces of occupation and the Palestinians who resist them. Violence by Israel is "regrettable" (or, in most cases, elicits no comment); violence by Palestinians is always categorized as "terrorism".
A phony plea for understanding
Ashton may try to appear balanced -- she has repeatedly criticized the expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank -- but, in reality, there is little to distinguish her from former colleagues in the British parliament such as Lorna Fitzsimons. Who, you might ask? Fitzsimons was an elected representative of the Tony Blair-led Labor Party in Westminster between 1997 and 2005. After losing her seat, she took up a job running a propaganda outfit called the Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre (BICOM).
Fitzsimons had an opinion piece published by The Guardian in London this week, in which she sought to come across all reasonable. Purporting to be a big fan of mutual understanding, she patted her own back for organizing a "roundtable discussion" recently, where representatives of Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud and the Palestinian party Fatah chatted amiably. She proceeded to illustrate how she has no interest in understanding the concerns of Palestinians by insisting "there cannot be a mass return of Palestinian refugees to [present-day] Israel."
War criminal in London
BICOM’s team includes a "senior visiting fellow" named Michael Herzog. He is a retired brigadier-general from the Israeli army. During Operation Cast Lead, that relentless three-week assault on Gaza’s civilians in late 2008 and early 2009, Herzog was chief of staff to Ehud Barak, Israel’s defense minister. As he was involved in planning that operation and advising on strategy, Herzog must be held accountable for the war crimes committed in its execution. Next time he pops into BICOM’s London offices for a cup of tea and some blue-sky thinking, the police should be alerted and be ready to arrest him.
Herzog has at least done one good thing: he has proven that BICOM’s declared belief that Israel should display "considerable flexibility" (as Fitzsimons wrote in her Guardian article) amounts to waffle. In a new briefing paper for the center, Herzog contends that any future Palestinian state would have to be non-militarized but that Israel would maintain a long-term military presence along the Jordan River.
So while the Palestinians could have nothing more destructive in their arsenal than pea-shooters, the West Bank would remain surrounded by one of the world’s most powerful armies. That, it appears, is what the Israel lobby means by flexibility.
·First published by The Electronic Intifada (www.electronicintifada.net), 19 August 2011.
Will Ashton be issuing another statement today to denounce the Israeli military in similarly strong terms for murdering an infant in Gaza a few hours later? Or for ending a teenager’s life in the early hours of this morning? I’m sure that she won’t. The most we can expect is that she will call for "restraint" (that weasel word which diplomats have rendered meaningless through overuse).
And did she post something on her website expressing revulsion at how Israeli troops shot dead Sa'd al-Majdalwai, a 17 year old with a mental disability, also in Gaza earlier this week? Of course, she didn’t. Why? Because he was too low down in the hierarchy of victims to get noticed. And because the European Union applies different standards to the Israeli forces of occupation and the Palestinians who resist them. Violence by Israel is "regrettable" (or, in most cases, elicits no comment); violence by Palestinians is always categorized as "terrorism".
A phony plea for understanding
Ashton may try to appear balanced -- she has repeatedly criticized the expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank -- but, in reality, there is little to distinguish her from former colleagues in the British parliament such as Lorna Fitzsimons. Who, you might ask? Fitzsimons was an elected representative of the Tony Blair-led Labor Party in Westminster between 1997 and 2005. After losing her seat, she took up a job running a propaganda outfit called the Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre (BICOM).
Fitzsimons had an opinion piece published by The Guardian in London this week, in which she sought to come across all reasonable. Purporting to be a big fan of mutual understanding, she patted her own back for organizing a "roundtable discussion" recently, where representatives of Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud and the Palestinian party Fatah chatted amiably. She proceeded to illustrate how she has no interest in understanding the concerns of Palestinians by insisting "there cannot be a mass return of Palestinian refugees to [present-day] Israel."
War criminal in London
BICOM’s team includes a "senior visiting fellow" named Michael Herzog. He is a retired brigadier-general from the Israeli army. During Operation Cast Lead, that relentless three-week assault on Gaza’s civilians in late 2008 and early 2009, Herzog was chief of staff to Ehud Barak, Israel’s defense minister. As he was involved in planning that operation and advising on strategy, Herzog must be held accountable for the war crimes committed in its execution. Next time he pops into BICOM’s London offices for a cup of tea and some blue-sky thinking, the police should be alerted and be ready to arrest him.
Herzog has at least done one good thing: he has proven that BICOM’s declared belief that Israel should display "considerable flexibility" (as Fitzsimons wrote in her Guardian article) amounts to waffle. In a new briefing paper for the center, Herzog contends that any future Palestinian state would have to be non-militarized but that Israel would maintain a long-term military presence along the Jordan River.
So while the Palestinians could have nothing more destructive in their arsenal than pea-shooters, the West Bank would remain surrounded by one of the world’s most powerful armies. That, it appears, is what the Israel lobby means by flexibility.
·First published by The Electronic Intifada (www.electronicintifada.net), 19 August 2011.
Thursday, March 31, 2011
War criminal? Welcome to Britain
I never wanted to be a policeman, so it’s still a novelty when a friend greets me with the question “Did you arrest anyone lately?”. Without owning a pair of handcuffs, I have tried to bring two political figures to justice. In February 2011, I invited Avigdor Lieberman to accompany me to a police station, where I had hoped the Israeli foreign minister would be charged with the crime of apartheid. One year earlier, I placed my hand on Tony Blair’s arm and accused him of starting an illegal war against Iraq.
By attempting to put these men under citizen’s arrest, I was following a tradition dating back to medieval Britain, where ordinary people were asked to help apprehend law-breakers by sheriffs. To no surprise, neither attempt was successful: security guards quickly intervened to protect Lieberman and Blair. Yet both drew attention to how scoundrels can masquerade as statesmen.
The first time that I heard of an activist trying to arrest a politician was about 10 years ago when Peter Tatchell confronted Robert Mugabe over the torture of homosexuals in Zimbabwe. While the likelihood of the tactic actually leading to a prosecution is miniscule, it can have a significant impact on public opinion. I am especially pleased that my action against Lieberman led to Israel behind described as an apartheid state in many publications. It is seldom that the words “Israel” and “apartheid” can be read in the same sentence in the mainstream press.
Some Palestine solidarity campaigners have suggested to me lately that an attempt should be made to arrest representatives of the Israeli state every time they travel abroad. It is an idea that I support, not least because the West’s leaders regularly accommodate Israel’s inhumanity.
Nick Clegg’s opportunism offers a nauseating case in point. While in opposition, Clegg wrote an opinion piece for The Guardian in January 2009, urging the then Labour government to “condemn unambiguously Israel’s tactics” against the people of Gaza and to impose an embargo on weapons sales to Israel. Yet in November 2010, Clegg gave a speech to the Liberal Democrat Friends of Israel (a group within his party), during which he spoke approvingly of the current government’s efforts to amend Britain’s law on universal jurisdiction, which is supposed to allow human rights abusers be tried in Britain regardless of where their crimes were committed. Amendments to the law were vital, Clegg (now deputy prime minister) said, to “avoid accusations based on poorly justified grounds against visitors to the UK.”
There was no doubt that the visitors Clegg had in mind were Israeli politicians, concerned about being arrested if they set foot on British soil. Less than two years earlier, Clegg was arguing that those politicians should be condemned unambiguously. Now he believes they should be free to go shopping in Harrods.
Apartheid has been treated as an offence against humanity by the United Nations since 1973. The UN’s convention against apartheid refers to the domination of one racial group over another. Even before that definition was approved, the racist nature of Israel was underscored by Henrik Verwoerd, South Africa’s prime minister in the 1960s. “The Jews took Israel from the Arabs after the Arabs had lived there for a thousand years,” he said. “Israel, like South Africa, is an apartheid state.”
Since joining the ruling coalition in 2009, Lieberman and his party Yisrael Beitenu (Israel Our Home) have made Israeli apartheid even harsher than it had previously been. In late March this year, for example, a “citizenship” bill sponsored by the party passed into law. Clearly directed against the 1.4 million-strong Palestinian minority living inside Israel, it would allow anyone convicted of treason or terrorism to be stripped of their elementary rights. The law is so broad that it can only be interpreted as a bid to snuff out dissent in a country unceasingly depicted by its propagandists as the Middle East’s only democracy.
While the evidence illustrating that Israel is an apartheid state is abundant, our governments refuse to even utter the word apartheid. Absurdly, the European Union deems anyone who calls out Israel as a racist endeavour to be an anti-Semite. The EU’s working definition of anti-Semitism says that describing Israel as racist amounts to anti-Semitism. It is no coincidence that the definition was drawn up in consultation with several Zionist lobby groups, who deliberately conflate criticism of the state of Israel with hatred of Jews in order to scare people of conscience into silence.
Lorna Fitzsimons, a former Labour MP who now runs a lobby outfit called the Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre (BICOM), said during 2010: “Public opinion does not influence foreign policy in Britain. Foreign policy is an elite issue.”
Fitzsimons is wrong to be smug. A campaign against boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS), coupled with mass public awareness, helped isolate South Africa during the apartheid era and to eventually put an end to white minority rule. There is no reason why BDS cannot also bring down Israeli apartheid as it is designed to put economic pressure on those institutions and companies that profit from the pain of the Palestinians. Once they realise that the occupation of Palestine is bad for business, Israel and its supporters will have to sit up and take notice.
·First published by Ceasefire Magazine (www.ceasefiremagazine.co.uk), 30 March 2011
By attempting to put these men under citizen’s arrest, I was following a tradition dating back to medieval Britain, where ordinary people were asked to help apprehend law-breakers by sheriffs. To no surprise, neither attempt was successful: security guards quickly intervened to protect Lieberman and Blair. Yet both drew attention to how scoundrels can masquerade as statesmen.
The first time that I heard of an activist trying to arrest a politician was about 10 years ago when Peter Tatchell confronted Robert Mugabe over the torture of homosexuals in Zimbabwe. While the likelihood of the tactic actually leading to a prosecution is miniscule, it can have a significant impact on public opinion. I am especially pleased that my action against Lieberman led to Israel behind described as an apartheid state in many publications. It is seldom that the words “Israel” and “apartheid” can be read in the same sentence in the mainstream press.
Some Palestine solidarity campaigners have suggested to me lately that an attempt should be made to arrest representatives of the Israeli state every time they travel abroad. It is an idea that I support, not least because the West’s leaders regularly accommodate Israel’s inhumanity.
Nick Clegg’s opportunism offers a nauseating case in point. While in opposition, Clegg wrote an opinion piece for The Guardian in January 2009, urging the then Labour government to “condemn unambiguously Israel’s tactics” against the people of Gaza and to impose an embargo on weapons sales to Israel. Yet in November 2010, Clegg gave a speech to the Liberal Democrat Friends of Israel (a group within his party), during which he spoke approvingly of the current government’s efforts to amend Britain’s law on universal jurisdiction, which is supposed to allow human rights abusers be tried in Britain regardless of where their crimes were committed. Amendments to the law were vital, Clegg (now deputy prime minister) said, to “avoid accusations based on poorly justified grounds against visitors to the UK.”
There was no doubt that the visitors Clegg had in mind were Israeli politicians, concerned about being arrested if they set foot on British soil. Less than two years earlier, Clegg was arguing that those politicians should be condemned unambiguously. Now he believes they should be free to go shopping in Harrods.
Apartheid has been treated as an offence against humanity by the United Nations since 1973. The UN’s convention against apartheid refers to the domination of one racial group over another. Even before that definition was approved, the racist nature of Israel was underscored by Henrik Verwoerd, South Africa’s prime minister in the 1960s. “The Jews took Israel from the Arabs after the Arabs had lived there for a thousand years,” he said. “Israel, like South Africa, is an apartheid state.”
Since joining the ruling coalition in 2009, Lieberman and his party Yisrael Beitenu (Israel Our Home) have made Israeli apartheid even harsher than it had previously been. In late March this year, for example, a “citizenship” bill sponsored by the party passed into law. Clearly directed against the 1.4 million-strong Palestinian minority living inside Israel, it would allow anyone convicted of treason or terrorism to be stripped of their elementary rights. The law is so broad that it can only be interpreted as a bid to snuff out dissent in a country unceasingly depicted by its propagandists as the Middle East’s only democracy.
While the evidence illustrating that Israel is an apartheid state is abundant, our governments refuse to even utter the word apartheid. Absurdly, the European Union deems anyone who calls out Israel as a racist endeavour to be an anti-Semite. The EU’s working definition of anti-Semitism says that describing Israel as racist amounts to anti-Semitism. It is no coincidence that the definition was drawn up in consultation with several Zionist lobby groups, who deliberately conflate criticism of the state of Israel with hatred of Jews in order to scare people of conscience into silence.
Lorna Fitzsimons, a former Labour MP who now runs a lobby outfit called the Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre (BICOM), said during 2010: “Public opinion does not influence foreign policy in Britain. Foreign policy is an elite issue.”
Fitzsimons is wrong to be smug. A campaign against boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS), coupled with mass public awareness, helped isolate South Africa during the apartheid era and to eventually put an end to white minority rule. There is no reason why BDS cannot also bring down Israeli apartheid as it is designed to put economic pressure on those institutions and companies that profit from the pain of the Palestinians. Once they realise that the occupation of Palestine is bad for business, Israel and its supporters will have to sit up and take notice.
·First published by Ceasefire Magazine (www.ceasefiremagazine.co.uk), 30 March 2011
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