By Asa Winstanley: Three years after he managed to reverse an unjust expulsion from the UK’s Labour Party, Moshé Machover has been purged again.
The veteran Israeli anti-Zionist and socialist revealed to The Electronic Intifada on Thursday that he has now been suspended.
Machover is refusing to engage with Labour’s disciplinary process, describing a 20-page letter from the party as a series of “inquisitorial questions,” “full of lies” and “full of shit.”
In the letter, emailed to him on Tuesday, party bureaucrats gave him less than a week to respond to what Machover calls an inquisition of his political views.
“I refuse to play this game,” Machover said in an email to his supporters on Thursday. “I literally have no case to answer.”
He also released the letter, most of which you can read below.
He told The Electronic Intifada on Thursday that party bureaucrats
were conducting a “Stalinist purge of the Labour Party” and that he was
asking supporters only for “condemnation and exposure” of the purge.
Criminalization of solidarity
The list of Labour’s “allegations” against Machover is long and convoluted. But it includes the fact that he attended a Palestine solidarity demonstration against an Israeli film festival in London last year.
Labour’s suspension letter implied that Machover’s attendance of this Palestine solidarity demonstration last year may have been “anti-Semitism.”
The festival has a whole series of open links to the Israeli government – including the indirect sponsorship of the Israeli culture ministry, via the Israeli government’s Israel Film Fund.
But one film shown there in particular last year was used to raise money for the Garin Tzabar organization, which says it provides financial and logistical support for “those who wish to join the IDF [Israeli army] as lone soldiers.”
The admission of the financial link to Garin Tzabar seem to have been removed from the festival’s website. But a screenshot has been preserved on pro-Israel activist Jonathan Hoffman’s blog.
Machover’s suspension is only the latest sign of the recent upsurge in the Labour Party’s war against supporters of Palestinian human rights.
Machover is an anti-Zionist Israeli, who was effectively exiled to London decades ago. The retired University of London professor helped to found the small dissident socialist group Matzpen, the first known anti-Zionist group led by Israeli Jews outside of the orthodox religious community.
Ongoing purge
Since right-wing leader Keir Starmer took over Labour in April, there has been a steady stream of suspensions, expulsions and investigations targeting party members.
Starmer has accepted donations from at least one key Israel lobby donor and has made appeasing the Israel lobby his top priority – on the pretext of ending an alleged “crisis” of anti-Semitism.
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