ISRAELI police stormed the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem today, firing stun grenades at Palestinians inside who responded by throwing stones and firecrackers.
Outside the mosque’s gate, police dispersed crowds of young men with stun grenades and rubber bullets.
People arrested and later released from the compound said police had burst in and attacked worshippers, using truncheons, rifles and even chairs to strike men, women and children, with video footage appearing to confirm their accounts.
The Al Jazeera ‘Labour Files’ documentary series exposed afresh the rampant racism and war on democracy of the Labour right, both to sabotage the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn and to purge the left from the party under Keir Starmer.
Now a new episode sees Martin Forde – the barrister Starmer reluctantly commissioned to investigate the report’s allegations and whose findings have been ignored by the Labour right and their media allies ever since – respond to the programme’s evidence and conclusions:
Watch and share widely.
The Labour Files – The Forde Response I Al Jazeera Investigations
“There’s a great danger that Israel will turn into a dictatorship,” warned one protester.
Ongoing protests against the far-right Israeli government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyhu were larger than ever on Saturday night as an estimated 200,000 people or more took to the streets in Tel Aviv and other cities to denounce judicial reforms they warn put the nation on a path towards dictatorship.
For over two months, weekly protests—mostly on the weekends but increasingly during the workweek as well—large demonstrations have taken place in response to Netanyahu and his coalition government pushing a judicial takeover that critics say would curtail democracy.
Haaretzreported Saturday’s turnout as a record since the movement started in early January.
“There’s a great danger that Israel will turn into a dictatorship,” Ophir Kubitsky, a 68-year-old high school teacher at the demonstration, toldReuters. “We came here to demonstrate over and over again until we win.”
An incredible photo.
Downtown Tel Aviv is flooded with Israelis protesting the government’s judicial reform package. pic.twitter.com/DntI4k16hV
The demonstrations in Tel Aviv and other locations “began peacefully,” reports Reuters. “However, footage released by police later showed protesters breaking down barriers in Tel Aviv and igniting fires as they blocked roads. Police sprayed water cannons at the protesters.”
While Israeli liberals increasingly register fear and discomfort over the direction of its government’s growing autocratic tendencies, Palestinian rights advocates have noted that the right-wing slide is a direct and predictable continuation of a system that denies its Palestinian citizens full rights under the law while overseeing a brutal and repressive apartheid regime.
As American-Palestinian scholar Yousef Munayyer recently wrote in a column about the protest movement for +972 Magazine:
As tens of thousands of Israelis protest the reforms that Netanyahu’s government seeks to ram through in hopes of “saving the essence” of Israeli democracy, they are largely avoiding a confrontation with the foundational problem, namely that the essence of the Israeli system is to put settler colonialism ahead of any liberal principles around democracy, equality, or human rights.
A key question for many concerned not only about Israel’s increasingly autocratic and right-wing lurch, but its ever-worsening treatment of the Palestinians living under hostile military occupation is this: “Does this loose group oppose the settler-colonial system that these legal reforms would further enable, or does it simply seek a return to the settler-colonial system, but without Netanyahu at its head?”
Munayyer believes all evidence thus far indicates the latter is the unfortunate answer, which is why Palestinians are noticeably absent from celebrating the display of dissent and opposition in Tel Aviv and elsewhere.
“For all Palestinians, including those with Israeli citizenship, there is little urgency to try to ‘save’ Israeli democracy, primarily because for them it has never existed,” Munayyer concluded. “Not only is a political system that is constructed to be democratic toward some, but not all, not a democracy, it is also not going to seem worth saving to those it disadvantages.”
Noting that communities like Huwara are often targeted by Israeli settlers, Amnesty’s regional director urged Israel “to remove all settlements, which are war crimes under international law, and to dismantle its system of apartheid against Palestinians.”
United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk on Friday called out Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich for saying that Huwara, a Palestinian village in the West Bank, “needs to be wiped out” and “the state of Israel should do it.”
Smotrich’s comment Wednesday came after Israeli settlers on Sunday rampaged through Huwara, killing a 37-year-old Palestinian man—mass violence that came just hours after a Palestinian gunman murdered a pair of Israeli brothers, who were 19 and 21.
“As Jews who support freedom and dignity for all people, no exceptions, we will not just sit in horror as the state of Israel carries out ethnic cleansing in our names.”
Hundreds of Jewish New Yorkers rallied and marched on the home of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer on Sunday to protest his embrace of far-right Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu amid growing violence against Palestinians—violence that demonstrators said is enabled by the U.S. government’s unwavering military and diplomatic support.
“As Jews who support freedom and dignity for all people, no exceptions, we will not just sit in horror as the state of Israel carries out ethnic cleansing in our names,” said Jewish Voice for Peace member Jay Saper. “We are calling for an end to all U.S. military funding to Israel now.”
Corbyn was judged to have interfered in antisemitism cases, with the implication that his office tried to stop antisemites from being expelled. The truth was the opposite, as the EHRC quietly conceded. His team “interfered” only in the sense that they tried to speed up the handling of disciplinary cases his right-wing opponents in the party bureaucracy stalled in a bid to fuel the antisemitism smears.
Starmer is interfering in disciplinary cases too – and doing so openly and proudly, including overturning a decision in late 2020 by his National Executive Committee to reinstate Corbyn as an MP. But this time the EHRC seems unconcerned.
The EHRC has given Starmer its official stamp of anti-racism approval even as his officials drive out Jewish members in unprecedented numbers. These are Jews whose mistreatment no one in public life seemingly cares about – because they back Corbyn.
Last week, hot on the heels of that stamp of approval, and mocking the idea that Starmer’s party is interested in tackling racism, Labour barred its local constituency parties from affiliating with a range of progressive groups.
Those included Jewish Voice for Labour, which represents Jews highly critical of Israel’s oppression of Palestinians, and the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, the main UK organisation representing Palestinian interests, as well as Somalis for Labour, Sikhs for Labour and the All African Women’s Group.
The Equalities watchdog’s “special measures” on Labour are also apparently not needed even though prominent Black party members, such as former shadow home secretary Diane Abbott, also a Corbyn ally, complain that Starmer’s Labour has done nothing to address anti-Black racism exposed in the recent Forde Report.
The truth is that Starmer and the establishment media will not be satisfied until they have driven a stake through the heart of Corbynism, and its genuine commitment to anti-racism and a more egalitarian approach to the economy. That is why they have never sounded more desperate to vilify him and his supporters.
Email to CLPs warns them that any existing affiliations with groups campaigning for abortion rights, minority human rights, disarmament and a fully public NHS are cancelled
Image thanks to The Skwawkbox
The Labour party has banned local parties (CLPs) from affiliating with an array of groups supporting the human rights of ethnic minorities or campaigning for a public NHS, in yet another Stalinist move to limit members’ freedom of expression.
And local parties are being notified by email that any affiliations they already have in place are unilaterally cancelled – and that if a right-wing group is affiliated with the party nationally, they haveno say over whether that group affiliates with them locally.
One such email reads:
Organisations that are nationally affiliated to the party are eligible to affiliate to any CLP provided they pay the appropriate fee and the CLP cannot debate or decide on their affiliations.
…The following affiliations are therefore no longer valid and the CLP may not renew its affiliation without approval from the NEC. To do so would breach party rules. These are:
Palestine Solidarity Campaign, Labour Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, Stop the War Coalition, Republic, London Irish Abortion Rights Campaign, Jewish Voice for Labour, Somalis for Labour, Sikhs for Labour, All African Women’s Group, Health Campaigns Together, The Campaign against Climate Change Trades Union, Peace & Justice Project.
Yes, you read that right: a group campaigning for peace, human rights, women’s rights, disarmament and to protect the environment are not welcome in Keir Starmer’s Labour party and party member groups risk disciplinary action if they try to associate with them.
And of course, given recent appalling comments by the leadership and its agents, Jews who believe in the human rights of Palestinians are particularly unwelcome – and indeed are being disproportionately targeted by the regime in a campaign of blatant (but ignored by the media) antisemitism and discrimination.
