Report of Palestine action inside and outside M&S in Newcastle, 04.06.09

heres one vid and the others follow the links
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqB3XqNjXGA&feature=channel

The filmer, your videos still make me a little dizzy but great work! (If people haven't seen the films from inside M&S then I recommend them)

I thought the security might be more heavy handed but they seemed to be flumuxed by the police presence and the police evidently had orders not to escalate the situation, unlike last Saturday when some activists were arrested and charged at an anti-racist street meeting at the Monument.

At one point an elderly woman was asking me to read the leaflet out to her as she had glaucoma and couldn't see and a Marks & Spencer employee tried to whisk her away, as if I was harassing her. She was so patronising towards the elderly woman.

A highlight was when one activist started arguing with the police officer while 'dead' splayed out on the floor as to whether trespass was a civil or criminal offence and under what grounds she would be arrested. I wonder if dead or asleep people can be arrested?

Resistance is Justified while Palestine is Occupied!
Victory to the Intifada!

Last night was amazing, well done to the organisers who handled everything really well. I was proud to have been able to play a role

That police officers heart really wasn't in it, he wasn't bothered at all and was just trying it on. He was smiling the whole time he was trying to convince me that he could arrest me for one thing or another and was hoping I would believe him I think. He said he could arrest me for trespass first of all, which I reminded him was a civil matter and therefore outside of his jurisdiction, so he said he could arrest me for obstruction only as I pointed out, people were passing quite easily all around me and so there was no obstruction for which to arrest me.

He was a nice guy though so it was all fairly amicable. I wish more police officers could handle themselves as he did.

White phosphorous bought from the US raining down causing horrific wounds often resulting in agonising death
People displaced from their homes in land seizures
Innocent men, women and children massacred
Bombs raining down on schools and hospitals paid for by Britains biggest corporate sponsor of Zionism

This isnt just genocide
This is M&S sponsored genocide

What a good report and great pics. I was not there and i'm not a member of any of the groups that were involved. I haven't seen the vid yet but will do so shortly.

"What is zionism? - It means diff things to diff people, (an) almost meaningless term of abuse." Was what i read on a message board recently.

What complete and utter tosh.

Zionism is not a term of abuse (although Zionism is an abusive ideology). Zionism is a policy for establishing and developing a national homeland for Jews in Palestine; a movement of world Jewry that arose in the late 19th century with the aim of creating a Jewish only state in Palestine.

In other words one group of people (Jews), are given someone else's land (Palestinians), on behalf of a third group of people (UN) because of what a fourth group of people (white christian European NAZIS) did to the first group of people - (with God acting as the estate agent).

It really is quite simple and to try and underplay M&S's role as supporters of an apartheid, naturally racist Jewish only client statelet to a general term of abuse is offensive in and of itself.

"A state becomes apartheid when it has official policies of racial segregation involving political, legal, and economic discrimination against another race of people."

Apartheid policies against Israeli Arabs include:

Collective punishment (particularly of the Gaza Ghetto - a NAZI tactic); House demolitions and destruction of property; Removal and relocation of people or "transfer" away from their homes; mass torture and internment of family members; closures of entire villages and towns and check points.

Not having the right to buy land; no equal access to to social services and assistance despite paying the same taxes as all Jewish Israeli's; Jews only job adverts.

Some claim that the rest of the high street buy goods from Israel and that it is wrong to target M&S fir it's support of Isaelie apprtheid.

No they do not. I try and boycott any goods bought from Israel, I never knowingly buy anything from an apartheid statelet and I encourage others not to financially or academically support the rogue terrorist statelet of Israel. Why does the fact that other capitalists buy from Israel mean we can't stop buying goods from one of them? That doesn't make sense to me.

Other apologists for Israel, zionism, capitalism, imperialism and racism claim that M&S now actually have a more ethical policy than other retailers and that to attack M&S's role is simply ignorant.

Shell Oil claims to have an ethical policy, many capitalists do. Just because M&S claim to like flowers and trees and little tweety birds it does not mean that they do not support the wiping of Palestine off the map. Accusing anti-apartheid campaigners of be ignorant is offensive and lazy.

Although some people, "... whole heartedly condemn the actions of Israel not just in recent times but since the early 1960s when military hostilities against ethnic Palestinians began."

Hostilities with Palestinians began as far back as the 1920's and more specifically in 1948 with the genocidal ethnic cleansing of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their towns and villages. Remember the Deir Yassin massacre where Jewish Zionist terrorists (Irgun and Lehi) butchered an entire village between 9 April and 11 April 1948. An initial estimate of 254 were murdered.

The size of that figure had a considerable impact on the conflict in creating panic and became a major cause of the 1948 Palestinian diaspora as the fear of further genocidal ethnic cleansing by Jews began to spread.

Although of course it is not just about religion and of course not all zionists are Jewish - many are bible thumping bigots from Africa, Europe and America and it these lunatics that welcome destruction in the middle east - seeing it as fulfilment of prophecy. However, it is about economics and elegating the conflict down to the level of religion is what the imperialists do in order to side step the economic arguments about capitalism, imperialism and zionism - at the same time this makes it easier to terrorise Muslim communities in England in order to turn the wider population against them, convince them that it is indeed about religion, play in to the hands of racists and terrorise the Islamic community from becoming militant.

Some support British trade union motiopns on Israel. A group like the AWL and their supporters can bang the drum for the unions in this country as much as they like - these are the same unions that are affiliated the the capitalist, imperialist, zionist and racist Labour party - A Labour party has been a zionist party since its 1944 conference called for the establishment of a Jewsish state in Palestine.

Listening to their analysis you'd think that only the employed are capable of forging a working class anti-imperialist movement; what about the unemployed, asylum seekers, refugees, students and those in the lower working-class that are not in unions or who the larger unions could not give an opportunist damn about?

The AWL in their slavish support for the old Labour myth and the unions STILL affiliated to "new" Labour don't recognise the split in the working class and the opportunist role that Labour affiliated unions play, Labour leftists and they them selves play.

What about calling for the right to return if the Palestinan diaspora? - Something i've noticed in the trade union motions i've read that has not been supported.

Israel is a rogue terrorists state that will never accept Palestinian democracy; they drowned Fatah in blood when Arafat was the elected representative of the Palestinian people. Now Hamas are being terrorised as the elected representatives of the Palestinian people as Fatah are corrupted, Israel and its allies bathe in the corpses of Palestinian children.

Targeting Hamas as some on the left do as being conservative, clerical, homophobic etc is of no use to the heroic people of Palestine. There is only one state and that is Israel, let's fight for the recognition of a Palestinian state first - In Palestine at the moment those fighting for Palestine are Hamas and their resistance fighters - legitimatley elected - as well as the Palestinian people, many of whom voted for them. Ironically this must be seen in the context that Isael and the west supported the founding of Hamas in order to split the Palestinian vote and help ferment fundementalism.

Hamas are the democratically elected government of the Palestinian people. The US, UK, EU and others simply do not recognise that fact - and neither do certain groups on the left. What right have people got - in the safety of England's cosy suburbs, thousands of miles away from the horror of a Jewish only state terror machine - to tell the people of Palestine that they got it wrong? The people of Palestine voted for Hammas because they saw Fattah for the corrupt, impotent hucksters that they are.

Hamas represent a concrete challenge to imperialism in Palestine - that is why we should be supporting them, instead of this middle class cluck-cluck, tut-tutting talking-shop from groups like the AWL.

"No" to Hamas is what the imperialists say. Saying "No" to Hamas because they are conservative, clerical, sexists and homophobic is the excuse the imperialists use; when the AWL start attacking the democratically elected representatives of the Palestinian people and their resistance fighters they sound like the BBC that insists on referring to them as "Militants" or the right wing media that suddenly develop a progressive political analysis and hijack the 'moral high ground' by belligerently parroting that the west must intervene in Afghanistan for the sake of Muslim women and referring to all the resistance fighters in Afghanistan as 'the Taliban'; they will not or do not accept that they are a resistance force, same with Iraq.

The Palestinian people voted for Hamas, they saw them as the only organised political and military option available in order to combat imperialism. The imperialist/Zionist "NO" to Hamas and its murder of the Palstinian people represents not just double standards but multiple standards; they only want Palestinian leaders that will capitulate as opportunistically as the corrupt kings and puppet presidents throughout the client regime Arab world - which is what Fatah did. Is that what the AWL want? How can an organisation with close ties to the Labour Party self righteously lecture anybody about the wrongs of Hamas?

Of course, while groups like the AWL are affiliated to the Labour Party, they play in to the hands of the fascists BNP that tell the white working-class that Labour has deserted them in favour of the middle class and/or asylum seekers/refugees and economic migrants. While groups like the AWL spin the old/new labour myth they fail to point out Labours historic role in protecting British imperialism and it's opportunistic role within the working class - dividing the English working class with the international working class by simultaneously waging war on lower working-class people in this country and those abroad. The Labour Party is a thoroughly racist party and it is they, not the BNP that are waging war on asylum seekers, refugees and economic migrants. With the lies and myths constantly perpetuated by racist gutter snipe middle class journalism at the behest of the privileged silver tongued Labour politicians they choose to support, a division can be created between working class people in England and the working-class internationally - which is precisely what these ruling classes want; they do not want a politically aware and unified working class opposition to their thievery, profiteering and plunderous looting of the very countries from which many asylum seekers are attempting to escape. If this were to happen then by doing so working class people in this country would begin to recognise that the same economic system and the same state that is waging war on the working class internationally is the same one that is attacking them. Working class English people and many working class asylum seekers, refugees and economic migrants have the same needs; decent schools for their children, clean hospitals, affordable housing etc. Labour are absolutely complicit in attacking the working-class at home and internationally and so are groups like the AWL as long as they spin old/new labour myths.

In August 2008 two members left the AWL. Their resignations were part of a wave of discussion triggered by an article by Sean Matgamna which argued that, "The harsh truth is that there is good reason for Israel to make a precipitate strike at Iranian nuclear capacity" from an Israeli ruling-class point of view..." The AWL National Committee has expressed that is "against" albeit not "opposed" to such an attack. WHAT KIND OF WEASEL WORDED MEALY MOUTHED TOSH IS THAT? "Against" but not "opposed"?

Let's not have anymore blabber about the targetting of M&S being tactically inept. It is a ZIONIST company, " Aiding the economic development of Israel is one of our main objectives" Said lord Sieff, Long time Chairman of M&S. M&S is not just interested in trading with for profit like other companies, it is, and has always been an unequivical supporter of Zionism and by explaining that in response to slander about being anti-semetic - when engaging with people - the message can be communicated clearly - not by running away from the argument because some might accuse you of being anti-semetic or because ant-semites might jump on the bandwagon, (I wouild have thought they'd have their own bandwagon anyway).

Some on the left trumpet the role of the so-called Israeli "refusniks" because it is good to recognise that there are Israeli's that refuse to fly helicopter gunships and murder Palestinians - let's not have anymore piffle about forging links with the Israeli working class - a working class than benefit from Israel's war crimes. What do these people want the Palestinians to do, sit around and wait for the Israeli working class to get its act together? Don't be so insulting.

The British ruling class, its multinational companies and its Labour government support Israel because Britian is an imperialist country. Britain depends on the exploitation of other countries for its massive wealth. Israel plays a crucial role in maintaining this exploitation, by acting as the attack-dog of Britain and the US in their attempts to dominate the middle east. It is the duty of all of us in Britain to stand alongside the Palestinian people in their heroic opposition to imperialism.

Resistance is not terrorism.

I'm not a member of PR and i know they don't support Cuba but i have to agree with their analysis below which was recently posted on indymedia. The thread is here:

 https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/regions/sheffield/2009/01/418996.html?c=on#c213204

AWL: Two states, one grand illusion

The Workers’ Liberty group is notorious on the Britsh left for its support for Zionism. It seeks to marry the right of the Palestinians to their own state with the right of Israel to exist within “secure borders”.

Like most of the Zionist left in Israel they start not from the Palestinians’ need for peace with justice but from Israel’s need to have peace with security. Their latest pamphlet thus argues for a “two states” solution to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. [1]

It says this is the “only solution that takes account of the rights of both sides in the conflict, and therefore it is the only rational, just and progressive solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.”

The authors support “an independent Palestinian state side-by-side with Israel”, and emphatically defend the right of Israel to exist in areas where the Israeli Jews are a majority.

There is an immediate problem with this argument. The Israelis created a majority Jewish population in Palestine by forcibly expelling Palestinian Arabs in 1947-49 and denying them and their families the right to return to the territory of their origin.

At the same time, under the Law of Return, Jewish people of any nationality are entitled to Israeli citizenship upon arrival in Israel, even if they have never been there before.

This racist citizenship law is fundamental to the maintenance of a Jewish majority population in Palestine. If the Palestinians were allowed to return, then under any democratic system they would understandably and justifiably vote against being consigned to the status of second-class citizens and therefore against the state defining itself as specifically Jewish.

This historical reality has to be the starting point for any socialist response to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. Israel’s mistreatment of the Palestinians is not simply the product of a bad policy pursued by reactionary right-wing governments. It arose directly as a result of the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine.

The only way Israel could create a Jewish majority population on its territory was to drive out millions of Palestinian people, prevent them from returning, strip them of land ownership, and wage a series of bloody wars against any Palestinians that resisted.

It is the continuation of this policy that leads to the forcible settlement of Palestinian land on the west Bank today, complete with bulldozings of Palestinian homes, discrimination in access to water supplies and a regime of permanent military repression.

This is not some bloody aberration but the logical and necessary extension of the principles that underlay the foundation of the Israeli state.

The only just solution must encompass equal citizenship rights for Jews and Arabs and the right of the Palestinian refugees to return to their land of origin. This means a state in which Jews and Arabs are equal, not a state that defines itself specifically as “Jewish” or “Arab”.

The continued existence of an Israeli-Jewish state, even alongside a Palestinian state, would depend on the maintenance of racist citizenship laws and the exclusion of millions of Palestinians from the territory. Far from providing the basis for a lasting peace, this could only condemn the region to further cycles of repression and war.

As if to prove the point, the workers’ Liberty pamphlet quickly finds that support for a Jewish state in Palestine requires it to defend Israel’s racist citizenship policy. The author of most of the articles in the pamphlet, Sean Matgamna, accepts that the return of the Palestinians would challenge the foundations of Israel’s Jewish identity - so he rejects the right of return. In the pamphlet’s introduction, written on 19 October this year, he describes the demand for the Palestinians’ right to return to Israel as “collective resettlement in the territory now occupied by the Israeli Jews, most of whom were born there”.

In a subsequent article, “The Origins of the Conflict” he explicitly rejects the Palestinians’ right to return: “The ‘right to return’ in its straightforward sense is the demand that the events of the 20th century in Palestine be undone, that the film of history be rolled backwards. It is inconceivable that the Israelis will voluntarily agree to this. The demand that it should is at best the demand that the Jewish state should cease to conceive of itself as a Jewish state – not just get out of the west Bank and Gaza, and cease discriminatory or chauvinist practices, but cease to be the state of the distinct Israeli-Jewish nation. It is no more realistic than the call that the British, French, German or Irish states should cease to be British, French, German or Irish, a call quite distinct from the justified one that they should let in far more refugees and migrants. The ‘right of return’ therefore, in practice, comes down to the ‘demand’ for the conquest and destruction of Israel.”

This is an extraordinary passage to have been written by anyone claiming to be a democrat, let alone a socialist.

In the first place, Matgamna admits here that the democratic right of the Palestinians to return to the territory they lived in fifty years ago stands in contradiction to the existence of a Jewish state in Palestine. How then can he expect a lasting peace on this basis? How can there be a “rational, just and progressive” solution or a lasting peace if millions of Palestinians are excluded? This argument merely proves that the whole idea of a two-state “solution” is utopian and reactionary.

Also clear from this passage is that workers’ Liberty actually prefer the rights of one group over the other - the “right” of the Israeli-Jewish people to preserve a majority secured through war, land seizures and racist laws takes precedence over the right of over three million refugees living in squalor in Lebanon, Jordan west Bank and Gaza to return.

The reason given for this is that every nation, like France, Germany, Ireland etc, has the right to national self-determination and that this must encompass the right to a state of its own. The pamphlet says that to refuse this right to the Israeli Jews is to single them out as having lesser rights than other nations. It says, “the hidden assumption is that the Israeli Jewish nation is an illegitimate nation, and therefore does not have the same rights as other nations.”

This is a dangerous and dishonest argument. Of course there are no “illegitimate nations” - the very idea could only be raised by a national chauvinist or racist. But there is a difference between a nation and a nation-state, and the state of Israel was created in very specific circumstances - the driving out of millions of Palestinians and the conquest of their land. Revolutionary socialists are not proposing to invert that crime and drive out the Israeli Jews, just to allow the Palestinians to return.

Instead of starting from this legitimate democratic national right of the Palestinian people, workers’ Liberty starts from the idea that the right to a nation-state is an abstract good, one to supported in all situations. By contrast, revolutionary socialists support the right of self-determination only where it is not exercised at the expense of the rights of another nation.

The “right” of white South Africans to a state did not take precedence over the right of the majority black population to vote. why should the right of the Israeli Jews to a state take precedence over the rights of millions of Palestinians?

Even the example about Britain, France, Germany or Ireland used by Matgamna backfires. France is not Israel. But if “France” had been created 50 years ago by the dispossession and driving out of millions of its original inhabitants who were of a different nationality, if those original inhabitants still lived just beyond its borders in refugee camps, if those people were in permanent rebellion and insurrection demanding their rights, then socialists in “France” and elsewhere would certainly advocate their right to return.

And if some of the “French” settler majority complained that this would violate their “right” to a nation-state, revolutionaries would expose this argument as a justification for racism and colonial conquest, not as some expression of “French” democracy.

Just how far workers Liberty is prepared to pursue this argument is revealed in a breath-taking passage in an article entitled, without apparent irony, “Unravelling the Issues”. Here the demand for the right to return of the Palestinians is presented to the pamphlets mainly British readers in the following terms:

“...the real equivalent would be if many tens of millions of people, almost as many as the population of Britain, just across the Channel, were claiming a collective right to ‘repossess’ Britain.” This example is obviously supposed to frighten us out of sup- porting the Palestinians’ rights by placing the reader in the posi- tion of Israelis who view the Palestinians with hatred and fear? It tries to appeal to the reader’s sense of national insecurity - a despicable thing for any socialist writer to do. Above all, it shows how shallow the writer’s sense of internationalism really is. For what if it were a valid comparison?

If Britain had forcibly expelled and dispossessed “tens of millions” fifty years ago, and they were living in refugee camps just across the channel, then revolutionary socialists emphatically would support their right to return, and if that meant this island could no longer describe itself as a “British” state, we wouldn’t care.

Genuine internationalism means supporting an end to all oppression on the grounds of nationality, not declaring that recent national and colonial conquests should be treated as final accomplished historical facts just so the victors can maintain their supremacist nation-states.

Workers Liberty’s “killer argument” in support of the two states solution is that the largest Palestinian organisation, the PLO, also supports it. This is true - but it is a result of the PLO leadership’s fatal policy of compromise with Israel and their abandonment of the historic rights of their own people.

The PLO under Yasser Arafat has persistently accommodated to Israel, handing over the names and addresses of Palestinian radicals to the Israelis even during their campaign of assignations, allowing the Israelis to wriggle out of every one of their obligations under successive peace treaties, demanding an end to Palestinian resistance in favour of continued talks that yield nothing and utilising their position within the Palestine National Authority to demobilise mass resistance while the leaders enrich themselves and persecute their opponents.

A Palestinian state existing alongside Israel would be like the PNA today - a powerless Bantustan, leaving all the real control and might in the hands of Israel. That is why the task of revolutionary socialists is not to devise ever more “Marxist” excuses for Israeli domination of the region, but to fight for a genuine, lasting solution.

This is not, despite workers Liberty’s insinuations, a policy of “driving the Jews into the sea”, but a socialist republic with no single religious or national allegiance, one in which Arabs and Jews live together as equal citizens. The only force that can bring it into being is the working class, peasantry and urban poor of the Middle east.

The longer the Palestinian left equivocates on this issue, the more likely it will be that the PLO’s failings will drive the heroic youth of the Intifada into the arms of the Islamists like Hamas, who do indeed propose the reactionary solution of driving out the Jews.

As Karl Marx said, a nation which oppresses another can never itself be free. For as long as there is a racist and discriminatory Jewish state in the Middle east, the consequences will be disastrous for the Palestinians and the Jews alike.


[1] Two Nations, Two States – Socialists and Israel/Palestine, a workers’ Liberty pamphlet, October 2001.


April 2002

permanentrevolution (repost)

...I don't agree with, "...Hamas, who do indeed propose the reactionary solution of driving out the Jews."

There is evidence that contradicts this. However, I don't have the links at the moment. If anyone is interested, let me know and i'll post them.