How to challenge Labour’s friends of apartheid

Jacob Ecclestone, 1st August 2023

The author was a journalist on The Times between 1962-80; “father” of the NUJ chapel between 1975-80, when he left the paper a few weeks after Murdoch took control; elected Deputy General Secretary of the National Union of Journalists from 1980-1997; and a founder member of the Campaign for Freedom of Information in Britain almost 40 years ago.

“Those who turn a blind eye to injustice actually perpetuate injustice. If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor”

Desmond Tutu, Nobel Peace Prize winner

“What acts like apartheid, is run like apartheid and harasses like apartheid, is not a duck — it is apartheid”

Yossi Sarid, former Israeli Environment Minister

Asking questions is what human beings do, all day and every day. It is one of the most fundamental ways of advancing our knowledge. MPs do it as part of their job.  When parliament is sitting, there are hundreds of questions each week – oral questions, business questions, written questions, urgent questions, supplementary questions, and of course the pointless knockabout of Prime Minister’s Questions.

Back in February 2020, the four remaining candidates in the election to replace Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the Labour Party were invited to answer questions at a hustings organised by the Jewish Labour Movement and Labour Friends of Israel. One by one, in a remarkable demonstration of groupthink, Lisa Nandy, Emily Thornberry, Rebecca Long-Bailey and Keir Starmer all declared their heartfelt support for Zionism.

There doesn’t seem to have been a flicker of doubt or dissent – which was odd, considering that Ms Nandy was then the chair of Labour Friends of Palestine, of which Ms Thornberry had been a founder member. Ms Nandy’s reward for saying all the right things came the following day when the Jewish Labour Movement nominated her to be leader of the party.  Then, blissfully unaware of the meaning of her words, she responded with a tweet declaring: “I promise that no-one will ever again be forced to choose between standing up for what’s right and standing up for the Labour Party.”

But that, of course, is exactly what members of Labour Friends of Israel do every day. They choose to support a party which, by its failure to condemn Israeli apartheid, gives tacit support to a crime against humanity. To describe that as “standing up for what’s right” takes us into the “wonderland” described by Lewis Carrol.

In 2021 the Labour Party annual conference passed a resolution “noting” that Israel was increasingly recognised as an apartheid state. For Steve McCabe, MP for Birmingham Selly Oak and chair of Labour Friends of Israel, the resolution was “morally repugnant… propagating the apartheid smear.”

Mr McCabe is paid £86,000 a year as an MP because he was elected by men and women who cast a vote for him democratically. Strange, then, that he could not accept an equally democratic vote at the party conference. If he really believes that Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, B’Tselem and the International Criminal Court are all concocting apartheid smears, then we are back with Lewis Carroll and Humpty Dumpty: “When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean.”

Keir Starmer also responded to the conference vote by telling the Jewish Chronicle:

“Sometimes Israel falls short of those goals [of universal freedom, justice, equality and peace] and we, in the British Labour Party, will always say when we believe there are wrongs or shortcomings.”

That was reassuring – but meaningless. I can find no publicly available evidence that in the last 20 months the Labour Party has commented on any “wrongs or shortcomings” in the behaviour of the Israeli state. Presumably the Labour party believes that all is well in Israel in spite of massive demonstrations to the contrary.

So, with Rishi Sunak pondering the date of the next general election, this may be a good time to start asking Labour MPs and Labour candidates questions about British complicity in house demolitions, the torture of children and the murder of journalists – the sort of thing which goes on almost daily in Palestine though it gets little coverage in our mainstream media.

Of course, no time is a good time for Keir Starmer and the 67 MPs who are members of Labour Friends of Israel. That more than a third of all Labour MPs have no apparent qualms about supporting Israel’s systematic racial discrimination is, perhaps, an indication of the moral vacuum in today’s Labour Party.  Are these MPs even aware that the International Criminal Court is formally investigating this crime?

For any MP to claim friendship for a state built on the ideology of one race or ethnic group enjoying greater freedoms and rights than ‘inferior’ races, should – logically – mean opposition to our own Equalities Act of 2010. Yet how many of the Labour MPs who go on “fact-finding” tours of Israel (paid for by Israel?) would declare their support for policies of racial discrimination in Britain? Simply to ask the question illustrates the hypocrisy of these MPs.

Breaking the silence

It is time these MPs were called to account and challenged. One way to do that would be to start asking them simple but pertinent questions in the most public ways possible.

In Britain in the 1970s and 80s, the Labour Party, trade unions and the churches found the courage – albeit slowly – to campaign against apartheid in South Africa. Mrs Thatcher may have described Nelson Mandela as a terrorist, but little by little British people came to understand that we had a moral responsibility to resist a political system based on racial oppression. We campaigned against Barclays Bank for investing in apartheid, we refused to buy South African oranges, and we boycotted them in the arts and in sport. That great cricket commentator, John Arlott, refused to report on matches against South Africa.

So what is it about apartheid in Israel that so many Labour MPs do not understand?

Are they too busy with their constituency affairs? Are they simply ignorant of the suffering of the Palestinian people?  Do they just want to hang on to a well-paid job? There must be some reason why they all remain silent about Israeli apartheid.

The only way to find out is to ask them. Instead of constantly fending off accusations of antisemitism, opponents of apartheid should be proactive; we should challenge MPs and ask them to justify their support for this crime against humanity.

Sometime in the next year Britain will have a general election. When that happens, people will be urged to campaign and vote for Labour Party candidates. In many cases that candidate will be an existing MP who has shown neither conscience nor scruple about supporting a regime which keeps half its inhabitants under military rule – or in prison without charge.

To use Tom Paine’s contemptuous description, these Labour MPs are Israel’s “summer soldiers and sunshine patriots” since not one of them would put their parliamentary careers at risk by saying that they support the shooting of small children or the murder of journalists or the demolition of Palestinian homes. These MPs – including Keir Starmer – are false “friends” because none has the courage to condemn the daily injustice and brutality perpetrated by the Israeli state.

So, they say nothing, remaining silent on the issue of apartheid while mouthing cruel platitudes about the chimera of a “two-state solution”. They know that Israel has made that an impossibility by covering the West Bank with hundreds of settlements, every one of which is illegal under international law.

When it comes to the general election, Keir Starmer will have the Board of Deputies, the Jewish Labour Movement and the Community Security Trust behind him, which means little since they mostly vote Tory in any case.  He can rely on the likes of Polly Toynbee and Jonathan Freedland, and those other champions of liberty, Murdoch and Rothermere, but even together they hold sway over a dwindling number of elderly white, middle-class readers.

On the other side of the argument there are more than five million trade-union members and almost four million Muslims in Britain.  It doesn’t take much imagination to realise what could happen if there was an organised campaign to ask all candidates – but particularly existing and prospective members of Labour Friends of Israel – whether and why they support apartheid.

The trade-union movement, Amnesty International, War on Want, Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, the Green Party, the Liberal Democrats and Muslim organisations should all be thinking about how their moral and political opposition to apartheid could be translated into political pressure simply by asking questions. Would the Christian churches weigh in? Probably not.  Like Ms Nandy, the Church of England invariably hangs on to power rather than challenging it.

Here, merely as examples, are three questions which all Labour candidates should be asked – at meetings, in letters to local papers, in leaflets, on the doorstep.

1. Are you in favour of discrimination against people because of the colour of their skin or their ethnic origin?
2. Will you give a public undertaking that – if elected – you will not join Labour Friends of Israel until its apartheid political system is dismantled?
3. Do you think that it is right for the Labour Party and Labour MPs to remain silent on the torture and killing of children by the state of Israel?

NB According to the Israeli human rights organisation, B’tselem, 2,254 Palestinian children have been killed by the Israeli military since the year 2000.