JonLansmanOnLabourAndIsrael

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I think this is very good.

Historical Background

Some very useful historical background from JonLansman on LabourParty positions at the birth of Israel : https://labourlist.org/2023/07/labour-has-a-long-and-complex-history-with-both-zionism-and-anti-zionism/

The state of Israel was born ... not because the Zionist movement won their argument with the US and Britain – both the US State Department and Britain’s Labour government remained actively opposed to it. It happened because of support of Stalin and the Soviet Union as meticulously explained in a recent book by Jeffrey Herf, Israel’s Moment: International Support and Opposition to Establishing the Jewish State, 1945-1949.
The truth is that the relationship between the Labour Party and Zionism was never ... simple and clear cut ... Antagonism to the Labour Government’s policy on Israel/Palestine was widespread within the party in that period because it was seen as insufficiently supportive of the Zionist cause – exemplified by the title of a 1946 pamphlet by Michael Foot and Richard Crossman – A Palestine Munich? – hardly a flattering comparison of the Attlee government with that of Chamberlain!
Back then, it was the left that supported Zionism more than the right: not just the Labour left but also the Communist Party, which then had a Jewish section as well as a Jewish MP. The Labour left remained pro-Zionist until the 1980s: Tony Benn, for example, recorded in his diary on 30 June 1980 that he was against PLO recognition “not because I am anti-Palestinian but because the annihilation of Israel is the PLO objective.”
His view like Labour attitudes began gradually to change with the invasion of Lebanon in 1982 with the election of Revisionist Zionists and former terrorists, Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, as Prime Ministers of Israel. They turned an illegal occupation into creeping annexation, undermining or destroying everything positive that the Israeli Labour Party created.
At the last Israeli election, Meretz, our more left-wing Israeli sister party, lost its representation in the Knesset. Ha’avodah, the Israeli Labor Party, has just 4 but realistically cannot be expected to retain any at the next election unless it reaches and agreement with Meretz and perhaps also with Hadash, the Israeli Communist Party, whose Joint List is supported mainly by Palestinian citizens of Israel.
The Labour movement that created the Israeli state and dominated its politics has all but disappeared. The is no peace process nor any prospect of another Labour government anytime soon. Israel now has its first government that includes fascists but not its last. Annexation is now openly and brutally pursued and the current movement for “Democracy” in Israel is concerned exclusively with Jewish rights, not those of Palestinians, whether or not they are Israeli citizens.