Make what you will of the Israeli ceasefire, but it is a humiliation for Liz Truss. The Foreign Secretary has been parroting the line of Tzipi Hotovely, who is so close to Truss that she, the Ambassador of a foreign state, appears 28 seconds into Truss's campaign video for the Leadership of the Conservative Party, and thus for the office of Prime Minister, as an example of "core Conservative principles".
And who is Hotovely? It is no wonder that her appointment as the Israeli Ambassador to the United Kingdom was opposed by Melanie Phillips. Hotovely is linked to the church-burning anti-miscegenation activists of Lehava. She wants Israel to expand into Jordan and Syria. She denies that the Palestinians exist at all, yet somehow she wants their homes to be demolished.
In 2017, she attacked American Jews in classically anti-Semitic terms as, "People that never send their children to fight for their country, most of the Jews don't have children serving as soldiers, going to the Marines, going to Afghanistan, or to Iraq." In 2019, she put out a video of Israel's Jewish critics exclaiming, "Oy vey! My German euros!"
Last May, she addressed a London rally that called for Arab villages to be burned. That was a meeting of supporters of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane, whom in 1981 the Thatcher Government had had the courage to ban from entering the United Kingdom. That ban remained in place until his assassination in his native New York in 1990.
Although Otzma Yehudit has links to them, both Kach, the party that Kahane founded, and Kahane Chai, originally a breakaway but with little in the way of division from it these days, remain illegal in Israel because they are terrorists organisations. In Britain, however, their rallies are addressed by an Israeli Ambassador whom the next Conservative Prime Minister hails as an embodiment of "core Conservative principles".
Meanwhile, the Shadow Foreign Secretary is apparently someone called David Lammy, who has said absolutely nothing about the latest Israeli bombardment of Gaza, which in this age of precision bombing has killed 15 children in order to make the point that it can.
In Hotovely's presence last November, Keir Starmer made the most racist speech to have been delivered since the War by anyone with the remotest claim to have been considered a mainstream British politician, including Enoch Powell. The choice of guest of honour to hear it also made it clear who was the terrorist sympathiser.
Yet now, and whatever practical value it may or may not turn out to have, there is at least nominally a ceasefire. To have called for that would not only have been against Lammy's and Starmer's Kahanist principles, but it would also have been a breach of the IHRA Definition that Jeremy Corbyn was foolish enough to bow down and adopt. Of course, those two facts are inseparable. As a churchgoing product of miscegenation, I would cheerfully go back to prison rather than sign that Definition. I would sooner die than make such a subscription.
For that stand and for my support for the Dalits, whereas both Truss and Starmer are closely allied to Narendra Modi and to everyone who comes with him, I have been subject to intercontinental, state-sponsored terrorism for five years and counting. That threat remains in effect, while Google regularly locates me to the ward of the man who arranged it, where I have never lived or worked.
Young people of colour are leaving the Labour Party in droves, they know which side they look more like.
ReplyDeleteThe old term "politically black", while it now looks like a product of American academia, was in fact of British origin, and it came from the streets. It may be worth bringing it back. The young men who were and would be twice as likely as their white peers to be fined for breaches of the lockdown are politically black. People's problems have all sorts of roots, but the roots of theirs at least include the fact that they are not white, or not white enough. Whatever else they may also be, that makes them politically black.
DeleteWhatever else we may also be, that makes a lot of us politically black. This is not identity politics. Our struggle is integral and even fundamental to the struggle for economic equality led by the working class, since the roots of the present economic order are in the slave trade, which, perhaps most strikingly, was what financed enclosure here in Britain.
As politically black people, we look at the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and we see which side we look more like, the side that is clearly being violently oppressed and repressed. We have been here before. Today, it is one's attitude to the Palestinian struggle that is the litmus test of one's attitude to the specific phenomenon of white violence against politically black people throughout the world, including in Britain.