On the 6th January Tony Greenstein published a massive attack on Pete Gregson, the Chair of One Democratic Palestine, on both his blogs: https://azvsas.blogspot.com/2023/01/whilst-there-are-very-few-anti.html and https://tonygreenstein.com/2023/01/a-political-health-warning-why-palestine-solidarity-activists-should-have-nothing-to-do-with-peter-gregson/ He refused to publish most of Gregson’s rebuttals on his blogpost, telling Gregson that he must find his own way to put his defence.
So here is Gregson’s full response:
Tony,
Contrary to your assertion, I AM NOT AN ANTISEMITE, just like yourself, I am an anti-Zionist.
You misrepresent me and even contradict yourself. It feels as if you have never heard of the Campaign Against Antisemitism, the Community Security Trust, the Jewish Labour Movement, Hope not Hate (a misnomer!), Labour Against Antisemitism, the Board of Deputies of British Jews, the Jewish Leadership Council, the three Jewish newspapers, UK Lawyers for Israel, Friends of Israel, Britain Israel Communications & Research Centre (BICOM) – and of course the Israeli Government. These are the agencies that are run by Zionists who are also, interestingly run by people who call themselves Jews- and they are the people who brought down Corbyn because of his support for Palestine. But according to your twisted logic, it was the capitalists who destroyed him because he was a lefty and the Zionist Jews were just their pawns. You are oblivious to anything but your pseudo-Marxist analysis.
You published a lie about me on your blogpost. You said “Peter has to his credit expulsion from a number of organisations. I initiated the first from Labour Against the Witchhunt when he put up a petition on his website linking to an article by Holocaust denier Nick Kollerstrom who had written a ‘literature review’ on ‘The Auschwitz “Gas Chamber” Illusion’.”
This is quite untrue. This is what I actually said 4 years ago:
Also see the article “UK’s Labour Antisemitism Split” by Ian Fantom here. Ian organised the Keep Talking group that filmed my talk in the last but one update. (But I must say I think the Kollerstrom article he mentions is quite toxic).
Because you are so obsessed by guilt-by-association – you hate Fantom and you are furious that I referenced him- you persuaded 60% of your pals at Labour Against the Witch-hunt to hunt me out; this was a body you had basically set up, after all.
But you can see from the above that it’s not me that gives out links to Kollerstrom’s nonsense about Auschwitz- it’s you! Hypocrisy, truth-twisting and witch-hunting seem to be your specialty.
And I never said the Zionists supported the actual gassing of Jews. I said they supported the Holocaust by stopping any boycott of Nazi Germany, by making financial deals with the Nazis, by choosing not to warn Jews about the gas chambers, by thwarting .efforts to save Jews, by being leading lights in the Judenrat, and by saying that Jewish blood must be spilt if they were to get their hands on Palestine. This is all in your book…
The problem is that you’ve become a willing pawn for the Zionists. You live in an “antisemitic echo-chamber”, seeing antisemitism where there is none, attacking those whom you should be supporting, so keen are you to find Jew-hate. Like the Zionists, like so many “victim-obsessed” people who think themselves Jewish, not much different in that respect to David Baddiel, whom you recently (correctly) took to task. I make observations about many influential Jews in the UK, but I do not harbour any prejudice against Jews in general. You, however, see antisemitism everywhere. So you throw slurs at pro-Palestine activists because the Zionists do: they stab from the front, you stab from the back. The sad thing is that you yourself have not suffered in the storm of imagined Jew-hate that has beset this country. (Yes, you were kicked out of Labour, but not because of bogus antisemitism.) I was forced out of the Labour Party, booted out of my union, have been suspended from our local scout group, been ostracised from many causes I care about- because I have criticised Israel. And the people who have done this to me, folk like Rea Wolfson, who calls herself Jewish, were behind these attacks on my freedom of speech (I know it was Wolfson- a GMB senior officer was the source). I’ve seen good people brought low, like Chris Williamson and Corbyn, by the same Zionists that have attacked me and who have beaten our politicians, the BBC and the rest of the media into submission, all on the back of our collective Holocaust guilt.
We need to be able to have an intelligent discussion about Zionist power in the UK. In 2011 Jeremy Newmark implored, in the “Big Tent for Israel” event, for Jews and anybody supporting Israel (ie Zionists) to join trade unions and their local political party to mobilise. Then, as soon as Corbyn was elected leader in 2015, Newmark rebadged a virtually redundant Paole Zion, an affiliate body to the Labour Party from the Party’s early years, into the Jewish Labour Movement and set about recruiting Jews and others who supported Israel. This group was then able to command the debate from virtually inside the Party.
Many JLM members secured posts in Labour HQ and in the trade unions. Zionist activists then set about convincing major bodies that Jews were at risk and that the only way they could be protected was by adopting the IHRA definition of antisemitism. From 2015 to 2018, they largely succeeded. This was achieved through cultivating a hysteria in the media that Jews felt vulnerable without it; Rhea Wolfson in the Scotsman July 2018, for example. Wolfson served on Labour’s NEC and she and Jon Lansman were key in getting Labour to adopt the IHRA definition. (more on this here)
Did you never notice that up until 2012 the BBC and the rest of the mainstream media were increasingly pro-Palestinian, a trend that has since been sharply reversed? Did you watch “The Promise”, broadcast by C4 in Feb 2011, a series about a young woman who goes to present-day Israel and Palestine, determined to find out about her soldier grandfather’s involvement in the final years of Palestine under the British mandate? Can you imagine such a TV series being made now? No- of course not. Jeremy Newmark introduces his 2011 “Big Tent for Israel” event by explaining of the urgent need to stop criticisms of Israel- that Jews throughout the UK needed to come to the defence of their homeland. And he has spectacularly succeeded in this- with a great deal of help from the Israeli Embassy, as the The Lobby, proves.
Are you aware that 38% of the BBC Board are now declared pro-Israel or pro-Zionists? The BBC’s political editor was in place at exactly the right time to do the maximum damage. Corbyn was repeatedly skewered by Laura Kuensberg, one of the Glasgow Zionists; she brought him down with help from fellow Zionist, Jonathan Freedland at the Guardian. Kuensberg and other Zionists, calling themselves Jews, rose to their positions of influence in the 6 years following the “Big Tent for Israel”. Why on earth would a toff like Rhea Wolfson want to work in a trade union like the GMB, yet she was there at the top in 2018? What on earth was a property magnate like Lansman doing running Momentum? These are the people that drove Labour to adopt the IHRA Definition- and they weren’t doing it because they loved the Establishment. They were doing it because they loved Israel. And they call themselves Jews, too.
You claim I think Jews act as one homogenous mass. I don’t. But 70% of those calling themselves Jews in the UK support Israel. And Israel supports these people. The Lobby makes clear who was directing the attacks on British politicians who were deemed pro-Palestinian. It wasn’t MI5- it was the Israeli Embassy, in league with the Zionists agencies I listed earlier. The fact of the “Big Tent for Israel” event undermines everything you say. Over the past 10 years there has been a massively successful campaign to entrench Zionism in Westminster- we now have 80% of the Tories and 40% of Labour MPs who are Friends of Israel.
Your abuse of the word antisemitism has, alongside the Zionists, made the term increasingly meaningless. You don’t accept the OED definition “hostility to or prejudice against Jewish people”. You now use it against me because I accuse Zionists of supporting the Nazis- yet you know that the Haavara Agreement showed Nazis and Zionists working together very well. The Zionists did nothing to avert the Holocaust and declared that “only through the bloodshed of Jews will we get the land, because when the victors will divide the land after the war, then they will give us [the Zionists] the land in return for Jewish bloodshed, and that is what we want.” In my book, this counts as quiet support for the Holocaust. They were content to see Jews gassed if they were not heading towards Palestine.
In your self-righteous ranting, you attack campaigners like myself as antisemites – but I don’t show “hostility to or prejudice against Jewish people”- I merely observe that most of those who call themselves Jews in the UK are wealthy, influential and they support Israel. I am prejudiced against Zionists – who consider themselves Jews, but not because they are Jews. And you are too. But you wouldn’t call yourself antisemitic, would you? You think you are above the mudslinging because you think yourself Jewish. You reserve that slander against people like me, who don’t declare themselves Jewish.
I have to disagree with you as well on the Zionist project. It was imperialist and colonial at the outset, but these days it is primarily a Jewish project. If we reflect on the parallels with South Africa, it quickly becomes clear as to why attempts to mount an effective campaign against Israel have so consistently failed. Zionists declare Jews to be a race- and they declare that those who’ve emigrated there since 1917 belong there- that they were “returning to their roots”. This is what makes it so difficult to change the status quo, with we anti-apartheid campaigners being branded as antisemites.
Israel calls itself the Jewish state and people in the UK have largely accepted this. That is why BDS efforts are undermined and any move by local authorities to support BDS is soon to be made illegal, as it will be deemed antisemitic. So matters as to whether Israel really is the Jewish state are fundamental to any question of Palestine liberation.
Rabbi Weiss shares my view that Israel is not the Jewish state. He comes from the religious perspective (that they cannot be Jewish for they have ignored the Torah’s ruling on Aliyah) – but I am declaring this from the genetic perspective too- the “Jewish” occupants of the Knesset are more European than Jew.
[BTW- you say you are going to write to Rabbi Weiss and ask him to dissociate himself from me. But he has read your attack on his organisation at Tony Greenstein’s Blog: The Idiots and Fools of Neturei Karta (azvsas.blogspot.com), so I’m not sure he’ll listen]
The Ashkenazis in Israel, who comprise around 50% of the population but generally mostly in power, originally hail from Khazakstan, and are fundamentally Europeans- it is they who have given Israel its European flavour, so much so that the EU virtually accepts Israel as a member state. They do this whilst claiming they are of the land, that Jews were given the land by God- sadly, this is an argument that has been generally accepted. In order to fight this, we need to underline their tenuous claim to a Jewish heritage- to their rights to occupy the land. If we do not, we will never win. As far as the dictionary definition of Jews applies, their claim is weak. The dictionary says a Jew is “a member of the people and cultural community whose traditional religion is Judaism and who trace their origins through the ancient Hebrew people of Israel to Abraham.”. But present-day Israelis have rejected the key Judaic precept that there can be no return to “Israel” until the Messiah comes. So their claim to be true followers of Judaism are false. And genetically, they cannot trace their origins to the ancient Hebrew people either; the Ashkenazis rule the roost and they are Europeans, not Hebrews. They ignore key Judaic teachings, with the religious right there just picking out the bits of the Torah they like, that they think justify their occupation. Their claim that God gave them the land is entirely bogus. The true descendants of the ancient Hebrews are the Palestinians, who mostly converted to Islam in the 7th Century- something you yourself have observed.
You have become part of the problem, Tony, because you have lost sight of what antisemitism is. I have no problem with Jews, as you well know. However, I do have a problem with Zionists who call themselves Jews- who have done everything possible to cancel my life. And now you have joined them. Can you not see what you are doing with your obsessive attacks on fellow campaigners? Folk like me and Williamson have lost so much for complaining about bogus antisemitism. At the hands of people who would do anything to protect their racist colony. You do nothing but harm to the Palestinian cause with your pointless attacks. The only people you are helping are the Israelis. It’s time you woke up and realised that.
Yours sincerely,
Pete
[This letter was reprinted in Redress: Open letter to Tony Greenstein, obsessive hunter of pro-Palestinian activists – Redress Information & Analysis (redressonline.com)]
More on Tony Greenstein, Zionism & the Holocaust at Zionism, Imperialism and the Nazi Holocaust – Consistent Democrats – LCFI (consistent-democrats.org)