I therefore post here an article by the veteran Israeli peace campaigner, Uri Avneri. I disagree with him on most things, e.g. a Jewish state, a 2 state solution, BDS etc. but he is, at least, unlike the Jonathan Hoffman’s of this world honest and truthful. Avneri incidentally, who used to be in the Irgun (Revisionist Zionist militia) was a member of the Knesset for Haolem Hazeh, a satirical magazine in the 1950s and 1960s in Israel.

If of course I’m wrong then the Zionist dolts will come back and tell us, word for word, exactly what the legislative and juridicial basis is for this Israeli ‘nationality’. They might indeed tell us why ‘citizenship’ is mistranslated as ‘nationality’ on an Israeli passport, which is merely evidence that the Israeli state never tells the truth if it can get away with a lie.

http://palestinechronicle.com/view_article_details.php?id=15768

Palestine Chroncile, 08:41 02/28/2010
The White Lie of Herzl
By Uri Avnery

This coming Wednesday, the Supreme Court of Israel will consider an application by a group of Israeli citizens to compel the Interior Ministry to register them as belonging to the “Israeli nation”.

Odd? Indeed.

The Israeli Interior Ministry recognizes 126 nations, but not the Israeli nation. An Israeli citizen can be registered as belonging to the Assyrian, the Tatar or the Circassian nation. But the Israeli nation? Sorry, no such thing.

According to the official doctrine, the State of Israel cannot recognize an “Israeli” nation because it is the state of the “Jewish” nation. In other words, it belongs to the Jews of Brooklyn, Budapest and Buenos Aires, even though these consider themselves as belonging to the American, Hungarian or Argentine nations.

Messy? Indeed.

This mess started 113 years ago, when the Viennese Journalist Theodor Herzl wrote his book “The State of the Jews”. (That’s the true translation. The generally used name “The Jewish State” is false and means something else.) For this purpose he had to perform an acrobatic exercise. One can say that he used a white lie.

Modern Zionism was born as a direct response to modern anti-Semitism. Not by accident, the term “Zionismus” came into being some 20 years after the term “Antisemitismus” was invented in Germany. They are twins.

In Europe and the Americas another modern term was flourishing: Nationalism. Peoples which had been living together for centuries under dynasties of Emperors and Kings wanted to belong to nation-states of their own. In Argentina, the USA, France and other countries, “national” revolutions took place. The idea infected almost all peoples, big, small and tiny, from Peru to Lithuania, from Colombia to Serbia. They felt a need to belong to the place and the people where they lived and died.

All these national movements were necessarily anti-Semitic, some more, some less, because the very existence of the Jewish Diaspora ran counter to their basic perceptions. A Diaspora without a homeland, dispersed over dozens of countries, could not be reconciled with the idea of a homeland-rooted nation seeking uniformity.

Herzl understood that the new reality was inherently dangerous for the Jews. In the beginning he cherished the idea of complete assimilation: all the Jews would be baptized and disappear in the new nations. As a professional writer for the theater, he even devised the scenario: all Viennese Jews would march together to St. Stephen’s cathedral and be baptized en masse.

When he realized that this scenario was a bit far-fetched, Herzl passed from the idea of individual assimilation to what may be called collective assimilation: if there is no place for the Jews in the new nations, then they should define themselves as a nation like all the others, rooted in a homeland of their own and living in a state of their own. This idea was called Zionism.

But there was a problem: a Jewish nation did not exist. The Jews were not a nation but a religious-ethnic community.

A nation exists on one level of human society, a religious-ethnic community on another. A “nation” is an entity living together in one country with a common political will. A “community” is a religious entity based on a common faith, which can live in different countries. A German, for example, can be Catholic or Protestant; a Catholic can be German or French.

These two types of entity have two different means of survival, much as different species in nature. When a lion is in danger, it fights, it attacks. For that purpose, nature has equipped it with teeth and claws. When a gazelle is in danger, it runs. Nature has given it quick legs. Every method is good, if it is effective. (If it were not effective, the species would not have survived to this day.)

When a nation is in danger, it stands and fights. When a religious community is in danger, it moves elsewhere. The Jews, more than any others, have perfected the art of escape. Even after the horrors of the Holocaust, the Jewish Diaspora has survived and now, two generations later, it is again flourishing.

In order to invent a Jewish nation, Herzl had to ignore this difference. He pretended that the Jewish ethnic-religious community was also a Jewish nation. In other words: contrary to all other peoples, the Jews were both a nation and a religious community; as far as Jews were concerned, the two were the same. The nation was a religion, the religion was a nation.

This was the “white lie”. There was no other way: without it, Zionism could not have come into being. The new movement took the Star of David from the synagogue, the candlestick from the Temple, the blue-and-white flag from the prayer shawl. The holy land became a homeland. Zionism filled the religious symbols with secular, national content.

The first to detect the falsification were the Orthodox Rabbis. Almost all of them damned Herzl and his Zionism in no uncertain terms. The most extreme was the Rabbi of Lubavitch, who accused Herzl of destroying Judaism. The Jews, he wrote, are united by their adherence to God’s commandments. Doctor Herzl wants to supplant this God-given bond with secular nationalism.

When Herzl originated the Zionist idea, he did not intend to found the “State of the Jews” in Palestine, but in Argentina. Even when writing his book, he devoted to the country only a few lines, under the headline “Palestine or Argentina?” However, the movement he created compelled him to divert his endeavors to the Land of Israel, and so the state came into being here.

When the State of Israel was founded and the Zionist dream realized, there was no further need for the “white lie”. After the building was finished, the scaffolding should have been removed. A real Israeli nation had come into being, there was no further need for an imaginary one.

These days Israel’s largest newspaper, Yediot Aharonot, is running a TV ad showing selected past issues. The day the State of Israel was founded, the giant headline announced: “Hebrew State!”

“Hebrew”, not “Jewish”. And not by accident: at that time, the term “Jewish state” sounded decidedly strange. In the preceding years, people in this country had got used to making a clear distinction between “Jewish” and “Hebrew”, between matters that belonged to the Diaspora and those belonging to this country: Jewish Diaspora, Jewish language (Yiddish), Jewish Stetl, Jewish religion, Jewish tradition – but Hebrew language, Hebrew agriculture, Hebrew industries, Hebrew underground organizations, Hebrew policemen.

If so, why do the words “Jewish state” appear in our Declaration of Independence? There was a simple reason for that: the UN had adopted a resolution to partition the country between an “Arab state” and a “Jewish state”. That was the legal basis of the new state. The declaration, which was drafted in haste, said therefore that we were establishing “the Jewish state (according to the UN resolution), namely the State of Israel”.

The building was finished, but the scaffolding was not taken down. On the contrary: it became the most important part of the building and dominates its facade.

Like most of us at the time, David Ben-Gurion believed that Zionism had supplanted religion and that religion had become redundant. He was quite sure that it would shrivel and disappear by itself in the new secular state. He decided that we could afford to dispense with the military service of Yeshiva bochers (Talmud school students), believing that their number would dwindle from a few hundred to almost none. The same thought caused him to allow religious schools to continue in existence. Like Herzl, who promised to “keep our Rabbis in the synagogues and our army officers in the barracks”, Ben-Gurion was certain that the state would be entirely secular.

When Herzl wrote of the “state of the Jews” he did not dream that the Jewish Diaspora would continue to exist. In his view, only the citizens of the new state would henceforth be called “Jews”, all other Jews in the world would assimilate in their various nations and disappear from view.

But the “white lie” of Herzl had results he did not dream of, as did the compromises of Ben-Gurion. Religion did not wither away in Israel, but on the contrary: it is gaining control of the state. The government of Israel does not speak of the nation-state of the Israelis who live here, but of the “nation-state of the Jews” – a state that belongs to the Jews all over the world, most of whom belong to other nations.

The religious schools are eating up the general education system and are going to overpower it, if we don’t become aware of the danger and assert our Israeli essence. Voting rights are about to be accorded to Israelis residing abroad, and this is a step towards giving the vote to all Jews around the world. And, most important: the ugly weeds growing in the national-religious field – the fanatical settlers – are pushing the state in a direction that may lead to its destruction.

To safeguard the future of Israel one has to start by removing the scaffolding from the building. In other words: burying the “white lie” of religion-equals-nation. The Israeli nation has to be recognized as the basis of the state.

If this principle is accepted, what will the future shape of Israel – within the Green Line – be like?

There are two possible models, and many variations between them.

Model A: the multi-national one. Almost all the citizens of Israel belong to one of two nations: the majority belongs to the Hebrew nation and a minority to the Palestinian-Arab nation. Each nation will enjoy autonomy in certain areas, such as culture, education and religion. Autonomy will not be territorial, but cultural (as Vladimie Ze’ev Jabotinsky proposed a hundred years ago for Czarist Russia). All will be united by Israeli citizenship and loyalty to the state. The inbuilt discrimination of the Arab minority will become a thing of the past, as well as the “demographic demon”.

Model B: the American one. The American nation is composed of all US citizens, and all US citizens constitute the American nation. An immigrant from Jamaica who acquires US citizenship automatically becomes a member of the American nation, an heir to George Washington and Abe Lincoln. All learn at school the same core program and the same history.

Which of the two models is preferable? In my view, Model B is much better. But it would depend on a dialogue between the Hebrew majority and the Arab minority. In the end, the Arab citizens will have to decide whether they prefer the status of equal partners in a general Israeli nation, or the status of a recognized, autonomous national minority in a state that acknowledges and cherishes their separate culture, side by side with the culture of the majority.

In four days, the Supreme Court will decide whether it is prepared to take the first step in this historic march.

- Uri Avnery is an Israeli peace activist and the founder of Gush Shalom peace movement. He contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com.

I didn’t see your post. I can’t accept I’m not debating fairly but I guess when you are used to Zionists intimidating, browbeating, lying (yes Jonathan Hoffman’s claim that he was subject to anti-semitic chanting) and of course all the normal shit, then of course any robust response seems unfair.

To digress. I was brought up in non-Jewish communities and schools till I was 11 when I went to the King David school in Liverpool. You know what? The first time I heard a ‘Jewish’ joke was in a summer camp of the Jewish Lads Brigade. And I was shocked. The first anti-Semitic comments I remember were from Zionists who told me it was a pity Hitler didn’t get me and that when I was circumcised they threw away the wrong bit. (Yes that’s supposed to be ‘funny’).

I didn’t say that the criteria for being an anti-fascist is to be on Redwatch. I certainly didn’t ask to be listed and I doubt all of the JSG are on it, though I’m sure a fair proportion are. But all these prominent Zionists are not on it. And the reason is that Gardener et al. are not genuine anti-fascists. How can they be when the CST has NEVER been an anti-fascist group. How could it be? It targets the left in the Jewish community and outside of it. The left has always been where anti-fascist struggle is located. In the 1930′s it was in the Communist Party, today in groups such as the SWP and independent socialists are various descriptions. The CST, UJS etc. are only anti-fascist in name.

The 43 group has long since gone. They operated in the 40s and 50s and did fine work. But they grew older and moved rapidly to the right. One who I knew, who on the Brighton & Hove Anti-Fascist Committee from AJAX, one David Spector, fingered anti-fascists to the Police for arrest at an anti-NF demo in Brighton in 1980. Why? Because we weren’t content to passively oppose an NF demo but went in to take them out. I can say this for a fact as I was arrested leading an attack on their ranks as were about 20 others.

If the CST were founded by individuals who were in the 43 group then that only illustrates what I’m saying because the CST is incapable constitutionally of operating as an anti-fascist group because that would inevitably bring it into conflict with the Police and State. And the CST are nothing if not state worshipers.

That is why they are, as you correctly say, working against leftist Jews, even on occasion left-Zionists like Mapam. That is why they participated in the attack on Dov and wasn’t it an irony – the crowd is being lectured on ‘peace’ as Dov has slabs of ice thrown in his face as he is pushed into the icy waters at Trafalgar Square. This is the Zionist peace.

I think if you talk about ‘common lineage, kinship, peoplehood between Jews, wherever they live, whatever languages they speak, simply because they adhere to a common religion, you are making a race out of religion. And what is the focus of that race? Israel. In the words of the Jerusalem Programme it is ‘The Unity of the Jewish people and the centrality of Israel in Jewish life’ and what is it based on – well common lineage (think about that one, it is a biological definition of a people/race). As for kinship, when there is no kin, it is the word Thatcher was fond of using ‘our stock’ i.e. white in her case.

So when you ask why is the CST biased towards the right and Israel, and biased against the left, it is because they start off from support for Israel, that is the CST’s raison d’etre. It can be no other.

The Bundists did not promote some mystical unity of the Jewish volk worldwide. They asserted a Jewish nationality and nationalism within the Jews of the Pale. It is doubtful they even knew there were Jews in the Arab countries. They were speaking specifically of a Jewish people that shared the same territory and spoke the same language (Yiddish). Have you ever wondered why the Zionists hated Yiddish so? Ben Gurion absolutely detested it because it reminded him of the Bund and diaspora nationalism.

By the way I don’t define myself as a Trotskyist. What I do say is that when there were 2 major currents to the left of Labour, one Stalinist and the other Trotskyite, I identify with the latter not the former. Trotsky was right in wishing that Jews organise under the same banner as everyone else. Where I have my doubts is as to whether or not this was on conflict with autonomy of the oppressed Jewish workers. But the Bund were not separatists. They worked with Polish socialists in particular and of course Russian ones too. The attacks on them by the Stalinists and the execution of people like Alter were monstrous and of course one aligned with the enemy of Stalinism, which worldwide was Trotskyism.

But don’t give any quarter to the Zionists. When the youth of the Warsaw Ghetto, including Zionists, wished to resist the Nazi occupiers they had to turn to the Bund (and the CP to a lesser extent) because the Zionists being separatists had not built links to those who had arms, however few they themselves had.

People like Mark Gardener sicken me, really they do, with their false allegations of anti-Semitism, when you and I know that if every anti-Semitism reared its ugly head they would be off like a shot, telling us to go to Israel. Because that was one of my first experiences of the Zionist attitude to anti-Semitism 30+ years ago when, a naive young member of the ANL, I asked the authorities at Ralli Hall, the Jewish Youth centre in Hove, to put up a poster. Their shaliach refused, saying, if you want to fight anti-Semitism go to Israel, i.e. run away from it.

But unlike Gardener, who works with the Police (remember – the ones who tried to batter the 100,000+ marchers at Cable street in 1936 and who tried to do likewise with the NF and BNP, I have written a tribute to one of the unsung heroes of the anti-fascist movement. Unlike Gardener he wasn’t on £100,000 a year. None of us were. But as Chief Steward of Anti-Fascist Action’s Steward Group, he and his fellows battered the fash into submission.

Although I was an Executive member of AFA at the time, when the ZIonist Searchlight tried to destabilise it, I can’t recall meeting Dave Hann. Indeed I only met him 3 weeks before his untimely death at the age of 48, last August, to give an interview for a book he was writing and which his partner, Louise, will finish. Louise, another anti-racist activist, was on the streets of Saltdean, helping organise and steward a large public meeting in Saltdean, Brighton, after the house of ex-Guantanamo inmate Omar Deghayes was attacked. This was 3 days after Dave’s untimely death.

People like Dave Hann are the real heroes. People like Gardener and the ludicrous Hoffman, who invent tales of their own ‘persecution’ are just the scum that floats to the surface. Dave earned his living as a builder and plasterer, an ordinary working class kind of guy who saw the link between socialism and fighting the fascists. Not for them the pretence and deception of Zionists who lie and deceive in the cause.

It is no wonder that today, the ideological inheritors of the Moselyite flag, the BNP, have been described by the Board of Deputies own spokesperson, Ruth Smeed, as the most pro-Zionist of all parties!

Tony, I’ve got to say I don’t think you’re debating fairly.

“Indeed why is it that genuine anti-fascists are targetted by the fascists on sites like Red Watch whereas people like MG are unknown to them?”

Yes yes, just because the whole of the Jewish Socialist Group is on redwatch doesn’t mean being listed is the criteria for being a “genuine anti-fascist”. Plenty, if not the vast majority, of antifascists have attempted to conceal their identity in order to better fight the far right. Unless one suffers from some kind of martyr syndrome (…) its much easier to get them when they don’e know who you are. The 43 Group worked like that, burning all their documents as soon as they capped Mosley’s knees, and you know it.

Some of the 43 Group, the CST are justifiably often happen to admit, founded the CST. It’s no surprise that, basically, the CST share very simmilar politics to them.

The question remains, though, why? Why is there still a culture in the CST of actively working against leftist Jews? Take a look at the video clip from Dov Neumann’s post:

http://www.jewdas.org/2010/01/reclaiming-chanukah-wit-direct-action/

Why did the CST quite litteraly lean on the shoulder of a man who threw a block of ice at Dov, and why did they use crowd members to help bring Dov to the pavement? Both of these are cases of assault: far more serious crimes than Dov being a nudnik.

Why has the CST (you Mark Gardner) actively been teaching university students how to lie and wriggle out of criticism of Israel, if it is meant to be neutral?

Basically, why is the CST so biased towards the right and towards Israel, and against the left, that’s what I’d like to know. Why not simply change your name to ZCST? (I’m sure you can guess what the Z stands for)

This line that you, Tony, have picked up on, Marks statement about the “common lineage, kinship and peoplehood between that Jews around the world share and hold is a fundamental part of their identity” does not necessarily need to revolve around the state of Israel. Bundists, who were anti-zionists too, held a concept of ‘diaspora nationalism’ which revolved around being Jews as both a distinct people and of common heritage to humankind. It can be an identity of difference, or as is now common within the Yiddish world to call it, a ‘civilisation’. So I defend Mark on that point and could point the spotlight on you: is this not more a problem of being a follower of Trotsky, who wished Jews to be organised under the same banner as everyone else – Bolshevism – rather than by their own Jewish peers – the Bund – ?

This is really just another example of nitpicking by the professional hasbara (propaganda) merchants. I don’t doubt MG finds it pointless to continue since he has also failed to answer why he jumped to the conclusion that the heckling of Jonathan Hoffman on December 4 was anti-Semitic, given the large numbers of jewish people present who disagreed with this assertion. Or does MG automatically take the word of Zionist activists for granted.

Oh and why Mark do your thugs prevent Jewish dissidents attending Zionist and other Jewish meetings such as film festivals. That is the real measure of someone like you. A latter day MacCarthyist seeking to impose order and ideological acceptability in the community to the extent that some years ago your organisation even excluded, by mistake, Mapam from such a meeting. For that you apologised (though not to the Jewish Socialists Group). Why do you see that as part of defence against ‘anti-Semitism’.

Lets see if the community macher actually answers a question for once rather than nitpicking around what he said.

Tony Greenstein continued, “This could be Alfred Rosenberg talking of the blood links between the German Volk and the soil of Greater Germany.”

Now he writes, “So no apologies to MG who incidentally I have never said is a Nazi or implied that.”

Extraordinary, and utterly pointless to continue.

Similar groups in the USA include Camera and Campus Watch, both of which have been involved in campaigns to deny Palestinian lecturers such as Joseph Massad (& of course Norman Finkelstein) tenure in universities. They put people in lectures who then come out with the normal distorted and hysterical accounts of ‘anti-Semitic’ bias etc.

So the idea that Sela is owed an apology for not knowing her own nationality, and incidentally saying that Arab Israelis serve in the army and that they enjoy full equality with Israeli Jews, is absurd. These are 3 lies by themselves.

I accept most of what Micah says, which is the only thoughtful contribution to this debate. I agree that it would be entirely reasonable for most Israelis not to know that they are not Israeli nationals but Jewish nationals with Israeli citizenship. But Hadar Sela is part of a nasty little pressure group that wishes to continue the media blindness of the past 60 years in respect of the vicious discrimination that non-Jews in Israel experience.

I have a simple question, which no Zionist has been able to answer. Perhaps our current crop will do better. And Mark Gardener, being a ‘professional’ anti anti-Semite, on £100,000+ to fight ‘anti-semitism’ will surely be able to answer this question. If Jews in Britain experienced the same treatment as Arabs in Israel, would you term it anti-Semitism or would you be happy with the state of affairs?

If 90%+ Jews in Britain didn’t serve in the army [assuming we had national service], because it was a Christian nation and service in the army, as was the case in Hungary before the Holocaust, was reserved for Christian nationals, and if welfare benefits and other entitlements were contingent upon that service, would that be anti-Semitic? If British Rail (and its privatised successors) announced that from henceforth one of the requirements for being a guard or driving a train was that service in the army, knowing full well that Jews couldn’t qualify, would that be anti-Semitic? I say this because only last year Israel Rail tried to sack 100+ Arab employees and only an international campaign forced them to back off. If a Jewish toddler in Hendon was accepted then refused a kindergarten place because other parents objected to her, not being a Christian, would that be anti-Semitic? And if the Jews in Britain lived in villages primarily, half of which were ‘unrecognised’, unlike Christian villages which are always recognised, and therefore not only had no access to services like sewerage and electricity often, but were in constant threat of their homes being demolished, would that be anti-Semitic. And if instead of the Judaisation of Jerusalem, the Negev and Galilee we had the Christianisation of Golders Green, Edgware and Whitechapel (if this was circa 1930′s) would that be anti-Semitic?

I don’t suppose Mark Gardener is willing to answer these questions because it would demonstrate his hypocrisy and selectivity, but maybe some of the other members of the chorus can.

Mark Gardener protests too much. The article in question, the Jerusalem Post, was one where MG was insinuating that the ‘impact’ of Shlomo Sand’s excellent book caused anti-Semitism or could cause it. Another example of the use and abuse of anti-Semitism. I don’t quite understand what MG is complaining of. That the so-called ‘The sense of common lineage, kinship and peoplehood that Jews around the world share and hold is a fundamental part of their identity” that he spoke of has nothing to do with the Land of israel? But the Jerusalem Programme of the WZO specifically talks about Israel being part of that identity and it is clear that that is the sense in which it is meant.

So no apologies to MG who incidentally I have never said is a Nazi or implied that. All I have said is that the arguments that he and other Zionists use have a rather disgraceful heritage and that Nazis too used such arguments. If MG wants to be coy about it then we can discuss the commonality between Nazism and Zionism ideologically. He might even explain the attempts to whitewash someone like Arthur Ruppin, a firm believer in the racial sciences and one of the key figures in the development of the Israeli state, who visited Himmler’s ideological mentor, Prof. Hans Guenther of Jenna University in 1933 and spoke warmly in his own diary about their conversation. And Ruppin was not exception. From Herzl onwards, anti-Semitism was seen as having a divine will to good in it as it kept Jews apart and therefore preserved them. I heard this too often from e.g. my rabbi father not to know that this is the real Zionist attitude to anti-Semitism.

But since Mark Gardener of the Zionist Community Security Trust is around, maybe he would tell us how using his goons in the CST to prevent anti-Zionists and non-Zionists attend Zionist and Jewish communal meetings has anything to do with fighting anti-Semitism? And since MG is sensitive to charges of presiding over fiddled statistics maybe he could tell us whether or not the ‘anti-Semitic’ incident that was reported in the Jewish Chronicle concerning a pro-Boycott meeting at SOAS on December 4, when Hoffman was allegedly subjected to taunts of ‘Jew’ and ‘Jewish’ when he stood up to speak has been recorded by the CST as yet another anti-Semitic incident?

MG was quoted as saying that:
”CST spokesman Mark Gardner said: “Mr Hoffman merely repeated what the South African Human Rights Commission had said about Bongani Masuku’s alleged incitement of antisemitism. For daring to raise this he was jeered with outright hatred.

“The UCU’s attitude to antisemitism is disgusting, and those who collaborate with it should be ashamed of themselves.”

This was the incident which was recorded and because there was, for once, proof that the Zionists were lying through their teeth, the BBC totally changed their report of the incident. http://azvsas.blogspot.com/2009/12/bbcs-humiliating-climbdown-after.html

The reality is that MG is part of the very lucrative industry that manufactures ‘anti-Semitism’ in order to cover for Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians. His opposition to ‘anti-Semitism’ has nothing to do with what Jews experienced in Britain in the 1930′s when the very same newspapers which supported Oswald Moseley and Hitler, the Mail and Express, are today the most pro-Zionist. Indeed he has been rather silent over the fact that the most pro-Zionist party in Britain is the British National Party. The fact is that anti-Semites today are more likely than ever to support the anti-Islamic racism of Zionism.

The most recent article on my blog is to someone who was a dedicated anti-racist and anti-fascist, neither of which MG is. Someone whose opposition to fascism and racism didn’t depend on whether support or opposition to Zionism and Israel was involved. Dave Hann who died in September aged 48 was someone who had led the Stewards Group in Anti-Fascist Action’s Northern Network, risking life and limb to ensure that the BNP and C18 bootboys were confronted and defeated. He and those with him didn’t get £100,000+ salaries to be professional ‘anti-anti-Semites’. But Dave Hann, like most of those involved in the battle against the fascists in the 1980′s and ’90′s opposed racism whereever it came from, including Zionism. MG is selective and has nothing to say about the racist practices of Zionism.

But he is not the ‘head’ of CST. Merely its spokesperson. In fact the only public face of CST, which doesn’t even list its trustees. Maybe MG can tell us who is the ‘head’ of this outfit and why they don’t print their list of trustees? Indeed why is it that genuine anti-fascists are targetted by the fascists on sites like Red Watch whereas people like MG are unknown to them?

Re Micah’s point about there being an Israeli nation even if there is no such thing legally. This is another debate. My own view is that Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs form one, joint nation but Israeli Jews, as an oppressor group, aren’t a full nation. Much like South African whites. I have had quite long exchanges and a public debate with anti-Zionists who would agree with Micah such as the Israeli socialist Moshe Machover. I’ll leave that debate for another occasion!
http://azvsas.blogspot.com/2010/01/dave-hann-appreciation.html

This is what Tony Greenstein writes about me, above:

Now when Nick Griffin tried to explain that his racism is really a wish to trace our lineage back to the original white inhabitants of these islands some 17,000 years ago, as the Ice Age was ending, , people mocked him. But Hoffman and Gardener are saying exactly the same thing. Gardener talks of a ‘common lineage, kinship and peoplehood between the Jewish people and the Land of Israel.’ This could be Alfred Rosenberg talking of the blood links between the German Volk and the soil of Greater Germany. It is utterly reactionary and racist nonsense but it underpins the ‘historic’ claims that Zionism made for settling Palestine.

Note Tony Greenstein’s quotation marks: Gardener talks of a ‘common lineage, kinship and peoplehood between the Jewish people and the Land of Israel.’

This is what I actually wrote: “The sense of common lineage, kinship and peoplehood that Jews around the world share and hold is a fundamental part of their identity”

So, where I wrote “that Jews around the world share and hold is a fundamental part of their identity”. Tony Greenstein (or whoever’s lies he has lifted) has changed it to “between the Jewish people and the Land of Israel.’ My quote has been perverted in order to allege that I am some kind of Nazi.

(My original sentence in its immediate context: “The sense of common lineage, kinship and peoplehood that Jews around the world share and hold is a fundamental part of their identity, as perversely demonstrated by the splenetic accusations of ‘self-hater’ that are hurled by some Jews at others who do not toe the majority line. To deny this aspect of Jewish identity – perhaps more accurately to demand that for political reasons it be rejected – is surely to deny or reject something that is essential to our perception of Jewishness itself.”)

(If anybody wants to check, there are two place to do so. First, the above paragraph is in the Jerusalem Post article that Tony Greenstein is mis-quoting from: http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1258027296653&pagename=JPArticle%2FShowFull.

Second, all my quotes in that Jerusalem Post article are actually extracted from this longer article that I wrote for CST blog: http://thecst.org.uk/blog/?p=876.)

(Also, I am not the head of CST, I am the spokesperson).