Israel was compared to the Nazis during a Labour conference fringe event, it has been reported.
The
session today also featured activists calling for the Jewish Labour
Movement and Labour Friends of Israel to be “kicked out” of Labour.
According
to the site, which filmed the event run by the Free Speech on Israel
group, the Jewish chair of the session had attempted to ban conference
delegates from tweeting about the session or taking photographs.
One
speaker had complained that the JLM had been handed the Del Singh award
for effective campaigning, while another had called for Israel to be
treated the same way apartheid South Africa had been by the
international community.
The event featured a number of anti-Zionist Jewish Labour activists,
including Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi and Tony Greenstein, who was suspended
by the party last year. Mr Greenstein has previously written that Ken
Livingstone, the former Mayor of London, “got it right over Hitler and
Zionism”.
Jennifer Gerber, LFI director, said the comments made at
the meeting were “beyond disgraceful”. She called for the Labour
leadership to “swiftly condemn those who seek to bully pro-Israel and
Jewish members out of the party”.
Jeremy Newmark, JLM chair, said the event had seen “a thinly-veiled call to purge Jews from the Labour Party.
“It is a stark example of why party conference must vote decidedly tomorrow to pass JLM’s rule change on antisemitism.
“The
group whose meeting provided an arena for this hate speech was allowed
to advertise it in official party literature. That is far from the
zero-tolerance on antisemitism that the leadership have promised.”
Earlier,
Ms Wimborne-Idrissi, who is a member of the Waltham Forest branch of
the hard-left Momentum group and a vice-chair of Chingford and Woodford
Green Labour Party, spoke at the conference.
She was loudly
cheered after telling delegates: “We Brits need to take responsibility
for the ongoing Palestinian tragedy dating from Balfour’s pledge. We
call for an end to Israel’s blockade on Gaza, an end to occupation and
the settlements, and endorsement of a Palestinian state. This is the
very least we should be doing.
“I say this as a Jew, as an anti-racist…and comrades, I am not an antisemite.”
