Palestine, Zionism, Apartheid Israel, and UK Government attacks on BDS

"UK Minister of Justice Michael Gove opposes a welcome to refugees fleeing war and seeking sanctuary here and he fights against Palestinian refugees who do not want to come to Europe but desire to return to Palestine from which they were ethnically cleansed."

The Zionist programme of occupation, colonisation, Apartheid and dispossession of the Palestinian people continues. Periodic massacres of scores, hundreds and sometimes thousands of Palestinians has been Israeli policy towards Palestinians in the territories conquered and occupied by Israel in 1967 and earlier in 1948.

The commitment of political Zionism to removing Jews from Europe creates common ground between Zionists and the worst anti-Semites. Zionism’s founder, Herzl, believed “The anti-Semites will become our most dependable friends, the anti-Semitic countries our allies." Zionism incorporated many of the anti-Semites’ racist views of European Jews. This working alliance with anti-Semites included Balfour, Churchill, extreme xenophobes in Europe today.

The self-proclaimed Jewish State of Israel is based on past successes, ongoing campaigns, and plans for future ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.  This state is based on Jewish privilege over Palestinians from birth to death in legal, political, economic, residential, and employment fields. Opposition to a racist state is a duty, as is solidarity with the struggle of the Palestinian people for their freedom against that racist state.

Most people are horrified by the cruelty and violence of Israel’s programme to eliminate as many Palestinians as possible and replace them with Jewish immigrants from around the world. Scottish Minister Humza Yousaf joined the Scottish Government’s voice to many around the world in condemning “the depth of inhumanity” of Israel’s massacre of Palestinians in 2014.

We reject the idea of collective guilt and distinguish on principle between the crimes of the Apartheid State of Israel, and the citizens of that State (as we hope others make the same distinction for UK citizens). Jewish communities in Scotland or elsewhere are not responsible for Israel’s crimes against humanity.

Under bombs, bulldozers, mass imprisonment for resistance, Palestinian civil society issued a call in 2005 for BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) to force Israel to concede Palestinian human rights. Worldwide support for that call is seriously worrying the regime in Israel and its supporters around the world, whose considered strategy is to attack BDS as anti-semitic. This idea is being pushed ever more shrilly by pro-Israel elements around the world, usually the same groups who support every Israeli crime against the Palestinian people. Tony Blair for example, Chair of the so-called European Council on Tolerance and Reconciliation (ECTR), is one of those who agrees with Cameron on the need to criminalise those who answer the Palestinian call for practical solidarity, i.e. BDS.

At a conference in Berlin this week, Michael Gove, UK Minister of Justice has attacked those who answer the Palestinian call for BDS as anti-Jewish and called for “solidarity with the Jewish people - and in solidarity with their right to national self-determination."

Addressing the same conference Bundestag President Norbert Lammert smeared arriving refugees as anti-semitic and declared that their integration will involve “accepting Israel’s right to exist.” It is Gove and Lammert who are being racist and anti-semitic in claiming that Jews form a separate nation from the people they live amongst, that all the Jews of the world have a right to “national self-determination”.

Gove and Lammert demand that refugees – and all of us – accept the right of Israel to continue to dispossess and massacre Palestinians. They both oppose the rights of Palestinians to freedom from occupation, for an end to siege and massacre, second class citizenship inside Israel. They demand we accept a state based on Jewish supremacy and the denial of the rights of Palestinian refugees to return.

UK Minister of Justice Michael Gove opposes a welcome to refugees fleeing war and seeking sanctuary here and he fights against Palestinian refugees who do not want to come to Europe but desire to return to Palestine from which they were ethnically cleansed.

The racists are those who support and arm a sectarian state based on the denial of the human rights of Palestinians, and who talk of Jewish citizens of Scotland being a separate nation, not those who argue for universal human rights and political equality in a state where religion is no business of the government.
Racism – including anti-Semitism – is a crime. Anti-Zionism is a duty.

Mick Napier
18 March 2016
West Calder