Proudly Jewish Lawmaker––One of Israel’s Biggest Critics in Congress
JVL Introduction
Are we mistaken or are Jewish MPs in Britain simply more cowed than their equivalent in the States? And not simply our Jewish MPs…
Democratic Rep. Andy Levin isn’t exactly a firebrand, simply a Jewish activist, sympathetic to Israel but taking his human rights commitments seriously.
So he thought again when nearly 200 leading Israeli intellectuals urging the International Criminal Court not to accept Israel’s internal investigations but to hold Israel to account.
“I realized these esteemed voices in Israeli society are talking about accountability for human rights abuses, yet Rep. Omar is demonized when she tries to do it,” he says.
Why is the number of Labour MPs in particular, willing to hold Israel to account – just like any other purportedly democratic state – so tiny?
Or has Keir Starmer’s fury with Stephen Kinnock last October for saying that Israel’s actions were”tantamount to profiting from the proceeds of crime”, cowed so many of them into undignified silence?
This article was originally published by Ha'aretz on Tue 22 Jun 2021. Read the original here.
Why This Proudly Jewish Lawmaker Is One of Israel’s Biggest Critics in Congress
Democratic Rep. Andy Levin tells Haaretz how his Reconstructionist Judaism informs his work as a congressman, even when it comes to criticizing Israeli policy
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‘studying the history of antisemitism in the Black Power movement at Yale.’ Is there really a course with that title/subject? I think we can guess the chances of there being, say, a course on anti Arab racism in the Zionist movement at that establishment.
Zionists are already furious at our impudence – not just democrats’ and socialists’ but JEWISH socialists’ and democrats’ – in criticizing the nature of the Israeli state. This will redouble in the UK as what they thought was a secure and unassailable guarantor of Israel’s geopolitical dominance of the middle east and its ideological and political dominance of the “West” starts to wobble – a little bit, but a strategic little bit.
It isn’t that long ago that we sadly lost the voice of Gerald Kaufman MP whose contribution to the debate central to this article was second to none.
His condemnation of those who chose to ignore the obscenity of the Zionist pursuance of an Israeli State, where all those who supported it were first class citizens and everyone else no matter what their ethnicity or religious belief were to be considered second class citizens or even less than human, was couched in a manner that his arguments were incapable of being denied and not one other Jewish MP really tried to do so.
His videoed speeches on You Tube are readily available and I recommend them to anyone who missed them.
The comment column on You Tube beneath his contributions were full of probably the most objectionable anti-semitic statements to be found anywhere in the UK but complaints eventually saw many of these removed. However one which remained for a long time was the one which claimed that he was ‘a stain on face of the Jewish Community in the UK’.
It would be interesting to know what people like Kier Starmer thought of Gerald and his conversion from supporter of Israel to one of its most trenchant critics of its denial of basic human rights and it development as an Apartheid State based on its Nation State Law.