End British Support of Apartheid
We found that Israel’s cruel policies of segregation, dispossession and exclusion across all territories under its control clearly amount to apartheid. The international community has an obligation to act.
Agnes Callemard, Director General, Amnesty International
In a recent indie podcast covering the news of Amnesty International’s diagnosis of the State of Israel as apartheid, according to international legal definitions, and an excellent analysis of the hypocrisy of centrist pundits over the business of political smears, one rule for Starmer another for Corbyn, Michael Walker of Novara Media quietly laments the destruction of the latter, and admits that he tries to look forward, rather than obsess over the past.
I find myself, five years on from the heyday of Jeremy Corbyn and Momentum, obsessing over the past, and wondering whether we have already seen the end of the UK or GB or whatever it is to be called. It’s not a Kingdom, it is not United, and it is not Great. Perhaps all that is left is the British tradition of bashing it.
The destruction of Jeremy Corbyn in 2016–17 was nothing less than the destruction by the British Establishment, of the possibility of a progressive, inclusive, sustainable, responsible and hopeful political direction for the country. Corbyn’s manifesto, encompassing social inclusion, sustainable housing, proper response to climate change, cessation of selling arms to oppressive regimes and so on was a masterpiece. The Momentum movement captured the imagination of hundreds of thousands of young people who — following the criminal actions of Tony Blair, followed by the inevitable dreary return of the Tories — had lost all hope in British politics.
Thanks to the twisted lies against Corbyn — an onslaught that caught this essentially gentle, pacifist man entirely by surprise — that hope was snuffed out.
Rather than progressive, sustainable, inclusive Britain, forging a peaceful and just path beyond the rotten tail end of empire, rather than a Britain that might have lead the way on climate change, on responsible, realistic, sensible foreign policy, rather than a Britain that might have been a light to the world again, an inspiration of how to decamp from a long and dirty history of “punching above its weight” into a mature, gentle, dare I say it, even spiritual exemplar of a nation… Rather than that we Got Brexit Done, installed another Etonian sociopath into our highest office, flirted with Trump under the illusion that the Special Relationship would see Cheshire cheeses being sold in Walmart, and rolled over to the global apartheid techno-military mafia aka the State of Israel.
The lynch pin of the unprecedented smear campaign was Corbyn’s long standing support for the most famously oppressed people in the world, who have somehow endured decades of humiliation, the Palestinians.
There are so many images of heavily armed IDF soldiers beating up women, children and old men, so many images of the infamous separation wall with its Banksy murals, so many images of barbed wire checkpoints, so many hopeless deaths, abuses, forced possession of homes, bulldozing of schools and hospitals that we have become numb. Maybe we wonder how on earth there can be anything left of the Palestinians. Maybe we wonder why the Israelis don’t finish them off and be done with it.
Many have stood up over the years. Countless Palestinians, obviously, and countless activists, NGO workers and ordinary people who simply could not sit back and watch what was happening. Like Rachel Corrie, from Washington USA, who was mown down by an Israeli bulldozer in 2003. She was protesting illegal Israeli destruction of Palestinian homes. 12 years later, Israel’s Supreme Court ruled that Corrie’s death was her own fault.
But all that is happening over there, in the Middle East. Apart from the elite shopping malls of Dubai and Qatar, apart from the strange anomaly of Mecca, marooned as it is in the medieval mafia state of Saudi Arabia, the Middle East is a blasted Mordor. Iraq, Yemen, Syria, Lebanon… the more poetic among us might think of Ozymandias’s head lying in the sand, ‘nothing else remains.’
Soon it may well be so. If Israel and its allies have their way. Every American president, on being sworn in, must declare himself to be a “true friend of Israel.” Boris Johnson declared to the Israel lobby group Conservative Friends of Israel in 2021 that Israel had the right to defend itself ‘without equivocation’ against Iran. Michael Gove, speaking to the same organisation, described the Middle East’s only apartheid state as a ‘light to the land’ and thanked it for its bringing together of so many conservative luminaries, thinkers, doers and ‘people of great stature’ at its annual gathering in 2017.
Is it not rather worrying, that an apartheid regime, in flagrant defiance of international law since its very inception, has such influence over UK Politics as to make or break entire political movements?
Michael Walker, Owen Jones and many other leftist commentators have pointed out at great length the double standards applied to this sinsiter establishment’s friends and foes. Corbyn was bashed as a terrorist sympathiser for laying a wreath at the Hamman Chott cemetery in Tunis, in a ceremony to mourn the murder of Palestinian activists.
Tony Blair, co-architect of the destruction of Afghanistan and Iraq and former Middle East Peace Envoy, now Knight of the Royal Order of the Garter, laid a wreath at the funeral of former Israeli PM Ariel Sharon, convicted architect of the Sabra and Shatila massacre in 1982, in which 3500 civilians, trapped in a refugee camp in Lebanon, surrounded by invading Israel Defence Force troops, were murdered. Blair wore a yarmulk and called Sharon a ‘giant of this land’ as he stood shoulder to shoulder with his family, a few kilometers from the giant’s old stomping ground, Gaza.
The late Archbishop Desmond Tutu, an anti apartheid and human rights champion of the stature of Nelson Mandela himself, famously described his ‘shock’ at what he saw in Israel. If anything, it was ‘worse’ than what he had seen in South Africa. Tutu was immediately smeared by one of the brasher voices of the Israel lobby, Alan Dershowitz, the Harvard law professor who defended Jeffrey Epstein, and is himself accused of sexual abuse by one of Epstein’s accusers.
Unlike Whoopi Goldberg, who tried to broaden discussion of the Nazi Holocaust on Holocaust Memorial Day by talking about it in humanistic terms, it is unlikely this piece will gain much notice. And yet it seems, the tide is turning. Amnesty International’s report on the sorry state of the State of Israel is as visible in its absence from legacy media reporting as is its presence on alternative and indie platforms.
Britain’s relationship with the techno military apartheid abomination that is Israel, is increasingly sorely visible, from its crucial role in drawing up the boundaries in 1948, to its ongoing sale of arms used in the oppression of civilians, to its interest in Israeli spyware as an instrument of control if not oppression of its own civilians.
As is the general way of the world these days, everything is coming to light. Those who continue to stand as Friends of Israel in that light will be seen, as Desmond Tutu put it, to stand with the oppressor.
It is a well known dynamic that the oppressed become the oppressor. Oppressed and oppressor are two sides of the same shadow frequency that courses through the veins of humanity. It is one of our core wounds.
The human spirit naturally rises up in support of the underdog. Where there is injustice or wrongdoing, there is a natural desire for redemption. You could say, the course of human destiny is one of redemption.
For the Biblical Chosen Race, there is no redemption in oppression, no redemption in the bulldozer, no redemption in participating in if not operating a global network of shadow frequencies, with its ties from Epstein to Mandelson to Johnson to Patel. There is nothing other than shadow in being a Friend of Israel. We must continue to shine light on those shadows, and carry the hope of those wonderfully resonant words of Jeremy Corbyn, Another world is possible, if we come together.
