Israeli Editor Says Pro-Israel Activism In UK Has Moved “Out Of The Shadows”

IAK: Israeli editor David Horovitz says that UK Labor Party leader Jeremy Corbyn is a “racist and an antisemite” because of Corbyn’s support for Palestinian rights. Horovitz writes that the Jewish community, which had previously kept a low profile, is now publicly mobilizing against Corbyn: “It has moved out of the shadows and into the glare.”

Prominent Israeli editor David Horovitz writes in the Times of Israel that opposition to UK Labor Party leader Jeremy Corbyn over his actions in support of Palestinian rights has caused Britain’s Jewish community to become publicly active as never before.

Horovitz, founding editor of the Times of Israel, writes that in the past Jewish Britons kept a low profile and were far less public in their support of Israel than American groups.
In the U.S, Horovitz says, pro-Israel groups would publicly demonstrate their power:  “At the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC’s annual conference in Washington, DC, a gala dinner would be held for all the thousands of participants that began with an extraordinary display of political muscle: the roll call.
“At center stage in the vast hall of the convention center in the US capital, two or three AIPAC bigwigs would excitedly read out hundreds of names — of the senior administration figures, the members of Congress, the ambassadors, and the other notables who were in attendance — and the crowd would clap and cheer.”
Horovitz writes: “The process would go on for ages; there were so many such importantly titled people to be name-checked and applauded for having turned out to show their commitment to US ties with Israel.”
Horovitz says that having grown up in Britain, he was shocked by AIPAC’S “ostentatious demonstration of political clout.”
Things were very different in the UK, he writes. Even though “many Jews have reached positions of prominence in Britain, and many prominent Britons have dedicated their energies to Jewish and Israeli causes,” they didn’t make that fact obvious.
Horovitz explains that in the 1980s, “even with the philo-Semitic, staunchly pro-Israel Margaret Thatcher as prime minister, and the chief rabbi Immanuel Jakobovits as a key unofficial adviser, British Jewry’s ongoing insistence on trying not to draw attention to itself still held sway.”

Margaret Thatcher with Lord . The Jewish Chronicle reports that the Chief Rabbi taught her “why the bond between Jews of the diaspora and the state of Israel is so vital to our future. And he nurtured a friendship that brought great pride and benefit to our community.”

“This was exemplified,” Horovitz reports, “by the extent to which the various ministers in Thatcher’s governments who happened to be Jewish — Keith Joseph, Leon Brittan, Malcolm Rifkind and Nigel Lawson, to name four of the most prominent — downplayed their Jewishness.
Today, Horovitz writes, “all that has changed.”
According to Horovitz, “The Anglo-Jewish community is deliberately making headlines like seldom, if ever, before. It is organizing marches and demonstrations. It is holding gatherings outside parliament. Its leaders are giving dramatic interviews. Its newspapers are issuing warnings and demands. It has moved out of the shadows and into the glare.”
The reason?
Because of the actions Labor Party leader Jeremy Corbyn has taken in support of Palestinian human rights. That makes him, in Horovitz’s view, “a racist and an anti-Semite.”

Jeremy Corbyn leading a 2014 demonstration against the Israeli

war on Gaza that killed hundreds of children.

(Photo: RonF, via Flickr, file)

In a long article entitled Corbyn, who sought Israel’s demise, is an anti-Semite. Labour must kick him out, Horovitz blasts Corbyn and the Labor Party in general.
Horovitz calls Corbyn’s 1980s sponsorship of a conference by the Labour Movement Campaign for Palestine “horrifying” (a founder of the group was Jewish). The conference, which called Zionism racist, was held not long after one of Israel’s several invasions of Lebanon, which killed thousands of civilians and maimed untold more.

Israeli invasion of Lebanon, 1982. A report at the time stated: “Millions of people around the world did not have to take anyone’s word for it that West Beirut was being made to suffer. For more than two months, after the Israeli encirclement of the city on June 13, they could watch it happen on their television screens. What they saw was sometimes enough to make some of them turn off their sets in anguish: babies with burnt-off limbs; children dying of starvation and thirst: and mothers weeping in front of demolished apartment buildings where their children were buried under the rubble…”

Horovitz condemns Corbyn for opposing such actions and for being associated with groups who support equal rights for all regardless of race, ethnicity, religion or location.
Horovitz is also outraged that Corbyn has failed to fully go along with the new, Israel-centric definition of antisemitism that is being inserted in governments and entities around the world.
More than 80 groups in England have just issued a statement against the definition, saying that it would be used to suppress information on Palestine. A statement by 40 Jewish groups around the world noted that even a key figure in crafting the definition warned that it could “encourage punishments of legitimate expressions of political opinion.”
After repeating a long series of such alleged offenses claimed against Corbyn (many of which have been misrepresented), Horovitz concludes: “Jeremy Corbyn, and Labour with him at its helm, are a threat to British Jews.”
Many British Jews disagree.

Jewish Britons hold a protest in solidarity with Gaza,

Parliament Square, London, May 16, 2018.

 

 

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