A life against apartheid
JVL Introduction
Jonathan Rosenhead, a founder member and activist in Jewish Voice for Labour, looks over his life as a political activist with Eli Machover of Vashti.
Rosenhead grew up in liberal Jewish environment in which Zionism was “part of the family’s DNA”.
He has been involved in various campaigning activities throughout his life including anti-apartheid, issues around social responsibility in science and, more recently issues around antisemitism, academic freedom and boycott in Israel-Palestine.
It was as an anti-apartheid activist from the mid-sixties that he was drawn into direct action as a political strategy – which is how he was fitted up by the police under false charges in 1972 for a conviction which has, fifty years later, finally been quashed.
Not so the spurious charge of “undermining Labour’s ability to combat racism” which still hangs over him…
Our thanks to the Pickle for permission to repost.
This article was originally published by the Pickle on Fri 31 Mar 2023. Read the original here.
A life against apartheid
In this week’s Pickle, Eli Machover meets Professor Rosenhead to trace the thread of anti-racism through his life, and reflect on what the struggle against South African apartheid can teach us today▼
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I share Jonathan’s gloomy prognosis, however the future is certainly not fixed and the Worlds shifting political structure might come to our aid, I sense a spirit of cooperation springing from the South perhaps leaving the divisive concepts of the West floundering. In this sense Starmer and company are on the wrong side of history.
I completely agree with Jonathan Rosenhead when he said it may be impossible for the left to regroup because there are so many competing ideologies. When there are some on the left who look at Putin’s Russia and think it is some sort of bastion of Socialism and that Putin was provoked into his unforgivable act of war against Ukraine it does not bode well for left unity.
Looking at Jack T’s remark about “is unforgivable act of war” I wonder, since when has it been wrong to defend yourself, let us not forget the Russian perspective, that it was an existential threat.
John Noble, even Putin did not believe tiny Ukraine was ever going to attack Russia, and therefore it was never going to be an existential threat. Putin conjured up the Ukraine ‘threat’ pretext and tried to muddy it with references to NATO, because he never accepted that Ukraine was an independent country in the first place and wanted it back under his control.
Jack T, an examination of the history would reveal the truth, why would the US employ Ukraine as a proxy if they did not consider that the years between 2014 and 2022 had not been put to good use building up Europe’s largest army ready to break up Russia into regions, couple this with the most stringent sanctions and success would be assured, only it has failed, Russia has strengthened it’s relationship with China and together they are forging the enabling of BRICS and thus the de-dollarisation of world trade. The US and EU have made a monumental error playing the last chip leaving us without defence and with an unknown economic future.