There are liberals and those on the right who think it’s okay to fight antisemitism by encouraging Islamophobia and certainly anti-Palestinianism. You don’t fight racism with racism. We need to decolonize our understanding of antisemitism as a matter of urgency. And that means ditching the IHRA definition of antisemitism.
You wouldn’t know it from reading media reports, but the recent Equalities and Human Rights Commission report on the UK Labour Party found there was no case to be made that Labour suffered from “institutional antisemitism”.
A British Trade Union Congress motion urging members “to join the international campaign to stop annexation and end apartheid” could encourage unions worldwide to play a major role in the international Palestine solidarity movement as they did against Apartheid in South Africa.
Activists in the Apartheid Off Campus student network discuss the state of BDS in the United Kingdom, and organizing in the time of COVID-19.
The only variety of Zionism still on offer is the ethno-nationalist creed of Benjamin Netanyahu and the many politicians in Israel who sit to his right in the Knesset. And with annexation, we are about to begin the final phase of the Palestinian people’s long and tortured dispossession.
The UK Supreme Court delivered the Palestine Solidarity Campaign a major victory last month, after it reversed a ban that prohibited local governments from supporting the BDS movement.
The British government archives has refused to declassify a file about the activities of the Nazi-sympathizing Mufti of Jerusalem in 1941 in Iraq, in the time preceding British takeover of the country. Government censors told author Tom Suarez the contents of the 78-year-old file could aid “those determined to undermine the security of the country.”
UK Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn called for Britain to cease arms sales to Israel following a UN report that the Israeli army’s actions against Palestinian protesters in Gaza’s Great March of Return could amount to war crimes. “The UK government must unequivocally condemn the killings and freeze arms sales to Israel,” Corbyn tweeted Friday.
The denial of representative government and democracy to the Arab Palestinians was the founding facilitation of British rule in Palestine and subsequently one of the key building blocs in the creation of Israel and the eventual ethnic cleansing of Palestine.