JVL rejects false allegations of antisemitism against the Greens
Jewish Voice for Liberation stands in solidarity with the Green Party against false allegations of antisemitism.
Those who wish to maintain their power in British politics and the media want, once again, to weaponise antisemitism against a progressive leader; this time against Zack Polanski, and the Green Party that he leads.
We agree that there has been a rise in antisemitism and abhor and unequivocally condemn the attacks in Manchester, Golders Green and Kenton. There is no excuse and no justification for such attacks.
We see little analysis of who the perpetrators of these ghastly physical acts of antisemitism are, what stimulates them and what motivates them. Some commentators note that there is a rise in antisemitism when Israel is attacking Gaza but they fail to consider why that should be. Zack Polanski is, as JVL always has been, emphatic in separating Jews from responsibility for the actions of the Israeli State and, like us, has condemned the genocide, settler violence, war crimes and apartheid that Israel is committing against the Palestinians. This aggression has now spread to southern Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Iran. He also, correctly, criticises Jewish Establishment bodies and the mainstream media for constantly and falsely asserting that British Jews as a whole support Israel, not least because this leaves British Jews vulnerable to blame for Israel’s barbarism. Even by 2022 less than two-thirds of British Jews were willing to identify as Zionist, a proportion that carnage in Gaza has decreased further.
The attacks on Zack Polanski are part of a chorus of opposition to Palestinian solidarity being deployed to divert attention from the destruction that Israel is wreaking on the Middle East and through repercussions, on much of the world. In the absence of any rational explanations of the rise in antisemitism in the UK, politicians and MSM commentators immediately jump to the pro-Palestinian movement and its most visible expression – protest marches.
These marches are against the actions of the Israeli government, its ministers, its oppression of Palestinians, its settler colonialism, its war crimes, the genocide – not towards Jews. Yet they have been labelled and libelled as “hate marches” and “breeding grounds for antisemitism”.
Zack Polanski has, rightly, supported and often attends the marches, proudly proclaiming his Jewishness, as do members of the Jewish Bloc and the Holocaust survivors and descendants who are present on every march, always in many hundreds, often in thousands.
The description of the marchers by Conservative and Labour politicians, right wing media pundits and even the Metropolitan Police chief paint a picture that is unrecognisable to the hundreds of thousands of individuals and families from every faith, no faith and a multitude of nationalities who have participated in these peaceful and heartfelt protests. We agree with senior Rabbi Herschel Gluck when he says: “It is certainly not the marches that caused the tragic stabbings on Wednesday in Golders Green,” And sadly we have to agree with his comment about the push to place a moratorium on pro-Palestinian protests:
“They are just using the situation for their own ends and not really caring for the Jewish community. They are using the conflict to create more conflict.”[1]
We realise that there are posts on social media that some Jews will, understandably, find hurtful. Most are expressions of understandable anger at Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the failure of our Government to move beyond reluctant words of disapproval towards any meaningful sanctions such as ending trade privileges which might affect Israel’s actions. It is deeply regrettable that some of their posts have, perhaps by not being knowledgeable about the history of British antisemitism, used images that can be linked to harmful fallacies of pervasive Jewish influence However, it is clearly anger that drives these posts and not hatred of Jews.. Education is the correct way to address this.
There is anger towards Zionism as a political ideology – the actually existing Zionism that we are witnessing that now means extreme ethno-nationalism and dehumanisation of the Palestinian people.
JVL has more than ten years’ experience of antisemitism being weaponised in the interests of the Establishment; not in the interests of Jewish people, certainly not in the interests of Palestinians or of international law. We will continue to oppose both antisemitism and the weaponisation of antisemitism. We stand in solidarity with those members of the Green Party, including its Jewish leader, when they are subject to attacks similar to those levied against Labour while led by Jeremy Corbyn,
This must stop, so that the vital fight against antisemitism, anti-Black racism and Islamophobia and for justice and peace for Palestinians and others under attack by Israel can be prioritised.
Labour losses to the Greens on 7th May, we suspect, will be misrepresented as further evidence of rising antisemitism, rather than a sign of people desperately wanting progress and hope.
At last – the official and considered JVL comment on recent dreadful events.I am relieved that JVL is speaking for Jews like me. Thank you. Could you send this piece to Jonathan Freedland who has noticed its absence (see Guardian, Saturday May 2nd.)
Thankyou for this article, it is awful when people use antisemitism as a weapon to push their own agendas,I wonder if those that do this have any conscience,to attack those that want to stand up against injustice and want to expose the truth exposes a certain weakness.
This article makes me think that I would be right to vote Green on the East Sussex council elections on 7th May. Thank you.
Thank you for – as ever – your voice of sanity.
I note that none of the mainstream (and certainly none of the rightwing) News Media have mentioned that the attacker’s first victim that day was a Muslim.
The consistent omission of a Muslim from the hysterical accounts of ‘Antisemitic terror’ carried out by a man with a record of mental illness can hardly be a coincidence.
Rather, it shows that this grim incident of one more disturbed person turning to violence is being used as the basis of a narrative.
Moreover, it’s very disturbing that, whilst one Political leader is regularly congratulated for encouraging the murder of refugees in dinghies (if it’s not murder, why the call for gunships?), another Political leader’s disappointment in violence from our much-advertised ‘British Bobbies’ is being interpreted as ‘Sympathising with terrorists’.
All my life I’ve been told the proud boast ‘Our police are always polite and never armed, unlike nasty foreign ones’ and, whilst I’ve found this to be often false, it does remain an ideal which all our Media likes to repeat.
Suddenly to expect the police to abide by the law makes one a possible ;’Terrorist’.
This is a very abrupt inversion of the usual story given by our Media, our police and our politics.
Worse – as so often where ‘Terrorism’ is reported, we’re in the grip of a strange delusion – the repeated statement that the police were ‘running towards danger, all too aware this man may have a bomb’… but there’s no indication the man was shouting of having a bomb, he’d only used a knife and he had no backpack and they’d seen he had no ‘bomb belt’.
The narrative ‘they had to subdue him in case he had a bomb’ fits nothing present in the video. If kicking an unconscious …
[cut to our limit of 300 words – admin]
@Simon Short
While you make some interesting points you also verge on denialism
This is wilful denialism
He attacked a friend, why we don’t know, there is no reason to believe he picked his friend because he was a Muslim
He then got on the tube, not to any station but to the one most associated with London’s Jews and chose two visibly Jewish men.
What in his disturbed brain caused him to do that again we don’t know but the most likely explanation is that his psychosis had absorbed antisemitism
Thank you so much for speaking out with the truth.
It is a pity that this statement did not also mention other people besides Zack Polanski. Mark Adderley, a well know film producer and myself, have been suspended under 4.8 of the Constitution which is a fast track to expulsion procedure.
Some 22 (at least) Council candidates have been suspended as a result of the anti-Semitism smears, three-quarters of them Black and Muslim.
Unfortunately Zack Polanski has said nothing about the abuse and misuse of disciplinary procedures.
The old Green establishment has not gone away. Those who supported the IHRA, which is being explicitly used against Mark, are still alive and kicking in the Green Party Council and other parts of the Green Party, including its MPs.
Green Party policy is clearly better than that of the other 3 parties (Your Party having all but disappeared) but to a large extent it remains a paper policy. E.g. there have been no calls for the Police to prosecute British citizens who have served in the IDF for being ancillary to genocide as per the International Criminal Courts Act .
There is a battle in the Green Party over the Zionism is Racism motion that was filibustered and the Zionists and their allies in the maintream press and BBC are not lying down.
This article is another welcome challenge to the weaponising of false claims of antisemitism to undermine our democracy and fundamental rights to freedom of speech.
Perhaps you could have mentioned that whilst these marches are organised to stop the horrific and expanding Israeli war crimes and genocide, they also demand that Starmer’s Government ceases its shameful enabling of such killing, maiming and displacement of so many innocent Palestinians. This could explain the true political motivation is to discredit, smear and silence the very decent marchers, including so many Jewish friends, who simply manifest to advocate a respect for British values, for international law, and an end to the appalling suffering being inflicted illegally on so many innocent Palestinian men, women and children.
Support for Palestine and its people is support against an unjust, racist history rooted in British Imperialism of the 19th and first half of the 20th century and the cruel repression that was transferred to the leaders of the Israel that was born. One could say that the parentage of Israel is not just Zionist obsessiveness but also British imperialism. It is a struggle for justice and the restoration of rights to a people- Palestinian people.
Thank you for the clarity of this statement.
We live in interesting times.
1. Tony Greenstein rightly condemns Zack Polanski for the suspensions and pending expulsions.
2. I assume that Tony will still vote Green.
I agree with him on both counts.
Furthermore, Polanski needs to stop apologising for everything. It is a fast track to ignominious oblivion.
A key point is that the marches are not just about Israel but also about the UK and other western governments’ complicity with Israel. That’s why we go to Downing Street and the US embassy.
As for Green candidates, my test is always are they hostile to Jews as Jews. Intemperate language about a genocide doesn’t mean people are antisemites. I would be surprised if any are.
It would be more justifiable to call Israeli military attacks in Gaza, Lebanon and Iran a ‘breeding ground for antisemitism’, than to give that label to marches in support of Palestinian rights.
How do Israeli government actions give rise to antisemitism? That question has not really been addressed in the article, but I think it is down to a logical fallacy that many people make. This bad logic starts with the premise ‘Israeli government actions are criminal’ and then goes on to draw the false conclusion: ‘Jewish people as a whole are criminal’. But even if this logic is false, it is not surprising that some people make that mistake.
The fallacy lies in tacitly assuming an unstated minor premise of the syllogism: ‘Jewish people as a whole are complicit on all actions of the Israeli government’. And this is clearly false, as anyone with any familiarity with liberal or progressive Jewish opinion will realize. But the minor premise, or something very like it, has been a consistent message from the State of Israel practically since its foundation, and arguably, well before that. This is the message that the state of Israel not only deserves and requires the support and loyalty of the Jewish diaspora, but that it actually enjoys such unconditional support. So ironically, it is their naive belief in one of the core ideas of Israeli propaganda that has led from Israeli government brutality directly to an increase in antisemitic attitudes. It is another example of how one lie can generate another, even more toxic lie.
Antisemitism has always been used for gaining power. When it rises in a society its the result of competition for resources & the neglect of authority to emphasise the need for equality. Or worse: the attempt by authority to blame the vulnerable: scapegoating.