abughoush
06.03.05, 10:18
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This is about Israel, not anti-semitism
Not to speak out against this injustice would not only be wrong. It would
ignore the threat it poses to us all
Ken Livingstone
Friday March 4, 2005
The Guardian
Racism is a uniquely reactionary ideology, used to justify the greatest
crimes in history - the slave trade, the extermination of all original
inhabitants of the Caribbean, the elimination of every native inhabitant of
Tasmania, apartheid. The Holocaust was the ultimate, "industrialised"
expression of racist barbarity.
Racism serves as the cutting edge of the most reactionary movements. An
ideology that starts by declaring one human being inferior to another is the
slope whose end is at Auschwitz. That is why I detest racism.
No serious commentator has argued that my comments to an Evening Standard
reporter outside City Hall last month were anti-semitic. So I am glad that
Henry Grunwald, president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, accepted
on these pages that "Ken is sincere when he states that he regards the
Holocaust as the worst crime of the last century".
The contribution of Jewish people to human civilisation and culture is
unexcelled and extraordinary. You only have to think of giants such as
Einstein, Freud and Marx to realise that human civilisation would be
unrecognisably diminished without the achievements of the Jewish people. The
same goes for the Jewish contribution to London today.
As mayor, I have pressed for police action over anti-semitic attacks at the
highest level, and my administration has backed a series of initiatives of
importance to the Jewish community, including hosting the Anne Frank
exhibition at City Hall and measures to ensure the go-ahead for the north
London eruv.
Throughout the 1970s, I worked happily with the Board of Deputies in
campaigns against the National Front. Problems began when, as leader of the
Greater London Council, I rejected the board's request that I should fund
only Jewish organisations that it approved of. The Board of Deputies was
unhappy that I funded Jewish organisations campaigning for gay rights and
others that disagreed with policies of the Israeli governmen.
Relations with the board took a dramatic turn for the worse when I opposed
Israel's illegal invasion of Lebanon, culminating in the massacres at the
Palestinian camps of Sabra and Shatila. The board also opposed my involvement
in the successful campaign in 1982 to convince the Labour party to recognise
the PLO as the legitimate voice of the Palestinian people.
The fundamental issue on which we differ, as Henry Grunwald knows, is not
anti-semitism - which my administration has fought tooth and nail - but the
policies of successive Israeli governments.
To avoid manufactured misunderstandings, the policies of Israeli governments
are not analogous to Nazism. They do not aim at the systematic extermination
of the Palestinian people, in the way Nazism sought the annihilation of the
Jews.
Israel's expansion has included ethnic cleansing. Palestinians who had lived
in that land for centuries were driven out by systematic violence and terror
aimed at ethnically cleansing what became a large part of the Israeli state.
The methods of groups like the Irgun and the Stern gang were the same as
those of the Bosnian Serb leader Karadzic: to drive out people by terror.
Today the Israeli government continues seizures of Palestinian land for
settlements, military incursions into surrounding countries and denial of the
right of Palestinians expelled by terror to return. Ariel Sharon, Israel's
prime minister, is a war criminal who should be in prison, not in office.
Israel's own Kahan commission found that Sharon shared responsibility for the
Sabra and Shatila massacres.
Sharon continues to organise terror. More than three times as many
Palestinians as Israelis have been killed in the present conflict. There are
more than 7,000 Palestinians in Israel's jails.
To obscure these truths, those around Israel's present government have
resorted to demonisation. Initial targets were Palestinians, and have now
become Muslims. Take the Middle East Media Research Institute, run by a
former colonel in Israeli military intelligence, which poses as a source of
objective information but in reality selectively translates material from
Arabic and presents Muslims and Arabs in the worst possible light.
Today the Israeli government is helping to promote a wholly distorted picture
of racism and religious discrimination in Europe, implying that the most
serious upsurge of hatred and discrimination is against Jews.
All racist and anti-semitic attacks must be stamped out. However, the reality
is that the great bulk of racist attacks in Europe today are on black people,
Asians and Muslims - and they are the primary targets of the extreme right.
For 20 years Israeli governments have attempted to portray anyone who
forcefully criticises the policies of Israel as anti-semitic. The truth is
the opposite: the same universal human values that recognise the Holocaust as
the greatest racist crime of the 20th century require condemnation of the
policies of successive Israeli governments - not on the absurd grounds that
they are Nazi or equivalent to the Holocaust, but because ethnic cleansing,
discrimination and terror are immoral.
They are also fuelling anger and violence across the world. For a mayor of
London not to speak out against such injustice would not only be wrong - but
would also ignore the threat it poses to the security of all Londoners.
· Ken Livingstone is the London mayor
