When I first went to Palestine as a young reporter in the 1960s, I stayed on a kibbutz. The people I met were hard-working, spirited and called themselves socialists. I liked them. One evening at dinner, I asked about the silhouettes of people in the far distance, beyond our perimeter. “Arabs”, they said, “nomads”. The words were almost spat out. […]
What is Zionism? This is the question that millions of people across the United Kingdom will undoubtedly have been asking themselves over recent days in light of the political crisis and media firestorm that’s been whipped up over allegations that the Jeremy Corbyn-led Labour Party has a problem with antisemitism. It is a crisis that has seen Labour MP Naz Shah suspended by the party, along with former mayor of London and Labour Party veteran Ken Livingstone – the former over Facebook comments that came to light, the latter over comments made in an interview he gave defending Shah during which he brought up the existence of the Haavara Agreement between the Nazis and Zionists in Germany to arrange the transfer of Jews from Germany to Palestine.
Netanyahu’s outrageous speech effectively lets Hitler off the hook with the aim of putting the blame for the suffering of the Jews and Hitler’s Final Solution on the shoulders of the Palestinian people so as to self-justify his continued obliteration of them.
