Boycott Israel?

The debate as to whether boycotting Israel is a good tactic in support of the Palestinians

Make solidarity without antisemitism

Many students at UK universities have rightly responded to the escalation of violence in Israel-Palestine by mobilising in support of the Palestinians. In some places there are campaigns to get universities to stop investing in companies that financially back Israeli military industries. We hope Palestinian solidarity campaigning continues beyond the ceasefire, and that university divestment campaigns succeed. At the same time we continue to criticise the blanket boycott policies which dominate on campuses (including academic boycotts), with their implicit backing for a “one state” outcome in...

Tories plan new curbs on local councils

Johnson is likely to be the enemy of a democratic settlement in Israel-Palestine, shifting the UK further towards the Trump government’s anti-Palestinian position. Although Johnson himself displayed little interest in the conflict as foreign secretary, his ideological lieutenant Priti Patel was forced to resign her international development post in 2017 after breaking diplomatic protocol in efforts to channel aid money towards the Israeli military. She defended herself by insisting that Johnson had been told about her activities. The Tories’ proposals, apparently another bit of inspiration...

Robert Fine and the critique of antisemitism

Robert Fine, who died on 9 June 2018, was a socialist writer unafraid to stand up to much of the left’s received wisdom on the questions of Israel, Palestine, and antisemitism. He opposed the “absolute anti-Zionist” standpoint that one should unreservedly object to (a) Israel’s very existence, rather than the oppressive practices of the Israeli state, and (b) any feelings of Jewish communal or national identification with Israel, even when such feelings are accompanied with harsh condemnation of the Israeli government or genuine horror at the Palestinians’ suffering. Fine opposed the blanket...

Israelophobia is Stalinist regression

Barry Finger reviews Paul Kelemen’s book The British Left and Zionism: History of a Divorce (Manchester University Press, 2012) This volume, which joins the herd of independent minds in churning the same old depleted groupthink, purports to challenge the claim that changes over the decades in the left’s appraisal of Zionism and the Palestinian cause stem from antisemitism. Whose claim? Even the people Kelemen whom has a go at would most probably argue the opposite: pro-Palestinian sympathies do not stem from antisemitism. However, antisemitism often finds a greenhouse atmosphere in pro...

Revisiting Uri Avnery

More debate on the right of return here. There is a real dispute in our camp over how socialists orient to the “right of return". It derives from comrades who view that purported right through the lens of the Israeli peace movement and those who peer through the other end of the telescope, that of the BDS anti-peace movement. Those, such as myself – and perhaps Daniel Randall, though I wouldn’t presume to speak for him – have been educated and informed on this subject by the literature of Gush Shalom, for many decades the most militant wing of the Israeli anti-occupation movement. Its...

The return of old formulas

More debate on the right of return here. There are about 13 million Palestinians across the world. They do not have a state of their own. They are disadvantaged in all the countries where they are mainly concentrated, though in different ways from country to country. About 2.9 million live in the West Bank, mostly in over 160 patches of land where the Palestinian Authority has limited autonomous powers of administration (mostly to hand out foreign aid money and jobs), but which are hemmed in and dominated by a surrounding Israeli military presence. About 2 million are in Gaza, which is...

Momentum says: read Steve Cohen’s book!

Momentum’s official Twitter account, followed by 120,000 people, has tweeted a link to the online text of That’s Funny, You Don’t Look Antisemitic , a 1984 book by Jewish socialist Steve Cohen analysing left antisemitism. Momentum’s tweet is extremely welcome. A political-educational campaign to confront left antisemitism is urgently needed within the Labour Party, and Cohen’s book is one of the best and most accessible texts on the topic. A drive by Momentum groups to organise reading groups or workshops around the text would be an excellent initiative. Steve Cohen, who died in 2009, was a...

Jews and Arabs standing together

Above: Activists from the Standing Together movement. As part of an ongoing series of interviews with leftist activists in Israel/Palestine, Daniel Randall of Workers’ Liberty spoke to Hannah Pollin-Galay, an activist in Standing Together, a cross-party movement organising Jews and Arabs against occupation and in favour of social and economic equality. By profession, Pollin-Galay is a Yiddish and Holocaust researcher at Tel Aviv University. DR: What is the shape of the movement against the “Nation State Law”? Does it offer hope for a renewed movement, uniting Israeli-Jews and Arabs, against...

Uniting Jewish and Arab workers in Israel/Palestine

Yacov Ben Efrat and Assaf Adiv are leading members of the Organisation for Democratic Action (ODA-Da’am), a socialist organisation active in Israel, which produces the magazine Challenge . They are also founder members of the Workers’ Advice Centre (WAC-Ma’an), a trade union centre which organises both Jewish and Arab workers, including Palestinian workers in the occupied territories. They corresponded with Daniel Randall of Workers’ Liberty about the class struggle in Israel/Palestine. The interview was facilitated by Roni Ben Efrat of ODA. For more information on ODA, visit their Facebook...

Labour and Israel-Palestine

Over the past decade the situation for the Palestinians has gone from bad to worse. Continued occupation, continued settlement expansion in the West Bank, no end to the conflict, the US moving their embassy to Jerusalem (undermining the widely held view that Jerusalem should be shared as a city after a settlement between Israelis and Palestinians) and now Trump has pledged to withdraw all US funding for the UN’s refugee agency for Palestinians UNWRA, while also closing down the PLO’s offices in Washington DC. But the election of a Labour government in Britain could be some small boost for the...

This website uses cookies, you can find out more and set your preferences here.
By continuing to use this website, you agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms & Conditions.