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From Socialist Worker, No. 128, 26 June 1969, pp. 2–3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Socialist Worker reported last week that ‘an IS member was assaulted by Zionists’ outside the Theatre Royal the previous Sunday, when Israeli premier Mrs Golda Meir addressed a Zionist rally. But you did not say how or why.
In fact, one comrade had blood streaming from the mouth after a vicious blow on the jaw. A woman was kicked. I myself was surrounded :and physically threatened by Zionists.
Why? Simply for daring to distribute a leaflet putting Ten Questions to Mrs Golda Meir. The leaflet was produced by anti-Zionist, Jewish Israeli socialists.
But the only answer the Zionists had to questions about the rotten racialist basis of their society was the answer of the thug. Only the fascists could match their response.
The intimidation was systematic – no leafleter proceeded unhampered. it was the most frightening demonstration I have attended in a long time.
As at Romford the following day, where the police gratuitously attacked the anti-fascists while protecting a fascist meeting, the police in Drury Lane sided with the Zionist extremists.
I was frogmarched by a policeman away from the crowd. He did not protect my right to leaflet. It was I, not the Zionists who seized my pile of leaflets and slung them to the ground, who was the ‘troublemaker’.
The press reported none of this. They will not risk the advertising of the big pro-Israeli capitalists to expose this violence, any more than they generally report the much greater brutality of the Israeli regime to the Palestinians.
As Harold Wilson and Golda Meir congratulate each other at the so-called ‘Socialist International’ at Eastbourne, it is clear that official social-democracy has also chosen sides. But the respectable covers for Zionist atrocities and thuggery extend much further left than this to the sentimental left around Tribune.
They cannot distinguish between the Jews who were victims of the most extreme racial violence in Europe and the Zionists who are perpetrating racial violence in the Middle East today.
As the Israeli repression of the Arab population becomes more severe we may well find the Zionist extremists in Britain resolving more to the Mosleyite tactics they enjoyed on Sunday, June 15. To stop this we must break the hold of the Zionists on public opinion – especially the Jewish working class and intelligentsia who have up to now provided an important part of the socialist movement in Britain.
Zionism can lead them not only into the ideological embrace of Israel’s western allies, but also into a contempt for the slender ‘democratic rights’ that exist in this country.
That is the lesson of Sunday. It heavily underlines the need to expand the work of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign.
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Martin Shaw, |
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Last updated on 16 January 2021