Israel is a “racist endeavour”: just another day at the Labour Party Conference
Prof. Moshe Machover, the Labour activist and Holocaust revisionist who was expelled from the Party before being readmitted, was seen distributing pamphlets at Labour Party Conference comparing Israel to the Nazis, claiming that it is a “well established fact” that “Israel is a racist state”, describing the Jewish State a “racist endeavour” and calling for the “de-Zionisation of Israel”.
The statements are a clear breach of the International Definition of Antisemitism, which lists as examples of antisemitism the claim that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavour and the drawing of comparisons between contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.
Prof. Machover has a history, like Ken Livingstone (with whom he publicly sympathises), of seeking to distort the history of the Jews under Adolf Hitler in order to characterise Zionists as cooperative partners of Nazism and imply that the Nazis were well disposed towards Zionists at the time.
Elsewhere at Labour Party Conference, Mayor of London Sadiq Khan was confronted by two Labour members questioning why he had attended a Jewish Labour Movement event, castigating him for fraternising with “Zionists” and “Israeli Zionists” who only sought to destabilise Labour and undermine Mr Corbyn. They suggested that he should have attended the Jewish Voice for Labour event instead, at which point Mr Khan reportedly ended the conversation amid accusations that he was being aggressive and rude.
Meanwhile, it emerged that in 2002 Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn had put his name to a far-left document called the “Cairo Declaration” that accused Israel of implementing apartheid and carrying out a genocide, called for a boycott of the Jewish State and appeared to back violence.
This followed the revelation that Mr Corbyn spoke at a 2009 march in Birmingham where Israel was likened to the Nazis, a breach of the International Definition of Antisemitism. Banners depicted the Star of David as a swastika and showed messages saying “History repeats itself – stop the genocide”, while Gaza was likened to a concentration camp and Israel was accused of being “thirsty for blood” and “child killers”, an allusion to the centuries-old blood libel against the Jews.
On 28th May, the Equality and Human Rights Commission launched a full statutory investigation following a formal referral and detailed legal representations from Campaign Against Antisemitism, which is the complainant.
In recent months, twelve MPs and three peers have resigned from the Labour Party over antisemitism, along with a large number of MEPs, councillors and members.
Over 55,000 people have now signed our petition denouncing Jeremy Corbyn as an antisemite and declaring him “unfit to hold any public office.”