Mick Hartley

Daniel Sugarman at Jewish News catalogues the increasingly febrile state of play within the pro-Palestinian movement, and particularly the Palestine Solidarity Campaign. Hard-core antisemite David Miller, long-time friend of Iran and Hezbollah, appears to be gaining more influence, and now even Jeremy Corbyn is branded as a lily-livered friend of the Zionists.

Perhaps the clearest example of the cracks emerging within the wider pro-Palestine movement have become apparent in the targeting of the most high-profile pro-Palestinian politician in Britain (and longtime patron of the PSC) Jeremy Corbyn.

Recently, Corbyn has been questioned at events organised by Your Party, the new political grouping created to coalesce around the former leader, by activists demanding to know if he is a Zionist. Corbyn and his entourage have seemed confused by the questions – and understandably so. This is a man whose support for the Palestinian cause is decades old, who once referred to both Hamas and Hezbollah as his “friends” (prior to the full proscription of both groups) and described how “Zionists… clearly have two problems. One is they don’t want to study history, and secondly, having lived in this country for a very long time, probably all their lives, they don’t understand English irony either.” The very idea is ludicrous….

But the questions aimed at Corbyn did not come out of nowhere. In July, David Miller tweeted: “Jeremy Corbyn is a liberal, a Zionist, and a coward who — despite being buoyed by the most popular mass political movement in recent British history — threw it all away to the Zionist movement rather than stand and fight, betraying all his comrades and ensuring certain defeat. He is the last man in the land fit to lead a new socialist party. No lessons have been learned.”

There are historical parallels to this hyper-leftism and in-fighting currently overtaking the movement, as Sugarman points out.

It seems clear many anti-Zionists know very little about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – and what they do know will ultimately have been sourced from grotesquely one-sided works by writers such as Ilan Pappe, Avi Shlaim and Rashid Khalidi. I imagine relatively few of them, particularly among the younger generation, know much about the Abu Nidal organisation; not in terms of the terror attacks it carried out internationally in support of the Palestinian cause, but specifically how it brought itself to destruction. So, as a public service, I thought it might be helpful to provide that information.

The Abu Nidal organisation, named after the nom de guerre of its founder, Sabri Khalil al-Banna (“Abu Nidal” means “father of struggle”), split from the PLO in the 1970, over the position as to whether there should be any compromise whatsoever with Israel. The ANO maintained that there could be no solution other than a struggle to the death. It was subsequently responsible for the murders of hundreds of civilians around the world, in dozens of terror attacks.

But what the ANO would ultimately become better known for was the murder of hundreds of its own Palestinian members, accused of being traitors. As Abu Nidal’s paranoia grew, members of the group would regularly be tortured, including via the melting of plastic onto skin, frying their genitals, and whipping them until unconsciousness before ‘reviving’ them by rubbing salt into their wounds.

When the prison cells grew too full to house all the organisation’s members accused of treachery, newly suspected traitors would be buried alive, with nothing but a steel pipe connecting them to above to enable them to breathe. If (or rather when) Abu Nidal had determined their guilt to his own satisfaction, death would simply come by a bullet shot down that breathing tube.

Eventually, the organisation collapsed under the weight of its own paranoia.

It is up to the wider pro-Palestinian movement in Britain whether they decide that such a path – in terms of rhetoric, rather than torture and death – is something they particularly want to pursue. Zionists like me will certainly not mourn the movement’s inevitable self-destruction if they do.