'Sharon Is 'War
Criminal'
By Ken Livingstone
04 March , 2005
The
Guardian
Racism
is a uniquely reactionary ideology, used to justify the greatest crimes
in history - the slave trade, the extermination of all original inhabitants
of the Caribbean, the elimination of every native inhabitant of Tasmania,
apartheid. The Holocaust was the ultimate, "industrialised"
expression of racist barbarity.
Racism serves as
the cutting edge of the most reactionary movements. An ideology that
starts by declaring one human being inferior to another is the slope
whose end is at Auschwitz. That is why I detest racism.
No serious commentator
has argued that my comments to an Evening Standard reporter outside
City Hall last month were anti-semitic. So I am glad that Henry Grunwald,
president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, accepted on these
pages that "Ken is sincere when he states that he regards the Holocaust
as the worst crime of the last century".
The contribution
of Jewish people to human civilisation and culture is unexcelled and
extraordinary. You only have to think of giants such as Einstein, Freud
and Marx to realise that human civilisation would be unrecognisably
diminished without the achievements of the Jewish people. The same goes
for the Jewish contribution to London today.
As mayor, I have
pressed for police action over anti-semitic attacks at the highest level,
and my administration has backed a series of initiatives of importance
to the Jewish community, including hosting the Anne Frank exhibition
at City Hall and measures to ensure the go-ahead for the north London
eruv.
Throughout the 1970s,
I worked happily with the Board of Deputies in campaigns against the
National Front. Problems began when, as leader of the Greater London
Council, I rejected the board's request that I should fund only Jewish
organisations that it approved of. The Board of Deputies was unhappy
that I funded Jewish organisations campaigning for gay rights and others
that disagreed with policies of the Israeli governmen.
Relations with the
board took a dramatic turn for the worse when I opposed Israel's illegal
invasion of Lebanon, culminating in the massacres at the Palestinian
camps of Sabra and Shatila. The board also opposed my involvement in
the successful campaign in 1982 to convince the Labour party to recognise
the PLO as the legitimate voice of the Palestinian people.
The fundamental
issue on which we differ, as Henry Grunwald knows, is not anti-semitism
- which my administration has fought tooth and nail - but the policies
of successive Israeli governments.
To avoid manufactured
misunderstandings, the policies of Israeli governments are not analogous
to Nazism. They do not aim at the systematic extermination of the Palestinian
people, in the way Nazism sought the annihilation of the Jews.
Israel's expansion
has included ethnic cleansing. Palestinians who had lived in that land
for centuries were driven out by systematic violence and terror aimed
at ethnically cleansing what became a large part of the Israeli state.
The methods of groups like the Irgun and the Stern gang were the same
as those of the Bosnian Serb leader Karadzic: to drive out people by
terror.
Today the Israeli
government continues seizures of Palestinian land for settlements, military
incursions into surrounding countries and denial of the right of Palestinians
expelled by terror to return. Ariel Sharon, Israel's prime minister,
is a war criminal who should be in prison, not in office. Israel's own
Kahan commission found that Sharon shared responsibility for the Sabra
and Shatila massacres.
Sharon continues
to organise terror. More than three times as many Palestinians as Israelis
have been killed in the present conflict. There are more than 7,000
Palestinians in Israel's jails.
To obscure these
truths, those around Israel's present government have resorted to demonisation.
Initial targets were Palestinians, and have now become Muslims. Take
the Middle East Media Research Institute, run by a former colonel in
Israeli military intelligence, which poses as a source of objective
information but in reality selectively translates material from Arabic
and presents Muslims and Arabs in the worst possible light.
Today the Israeli
government is helping to promote a wholly distorted picture of racism
and religious discrimination in Europe, implying that the most serious
upsurge of hatred and discrimination is against Jews.
All racist and anti-semitic
attacks must be stamped out. However, the reality is that the great
bulk of racist attacks in Europe today are on black people, Asians and
Muslims - and they are the primary targets of the extreme right. For
20 years Israeli governments have attempted to portray anyone who forcefully
criticises the policies of Israel as anti-semitic. The truth is the
opposite: the same universal human values that recognise the Holocaust
as the greatest racist crime of the 20th century require condemnation
of the policies of successive Israeli governments - not on the absurd
grounds that they are Nazi or equivalent to the Holocaust, but because
ethnic cleansing, discrimination and terror are immoral.
They are also fuelling
anger and violence across the world. For a mayor of London not to speak
out against such injustice would not only be wrong - but would also
ignore the threat it poses to the security of all Londoners.
· Ken Livingstone
is the London mayor