Articles
Kaufman's comments are beyond the pale
27 April 2010
Last month a British political figure claimed that a section of the Conservative party was owned by ‘right wing Jewish millionaires.’ At first glance this defamatory comment would appear to have come straight from the BNP’s political lexicon. Instead it was mouthed by Sir Gerald Kaufman, veteran Labour politician and avowed anti racist, at a meeting of the Friends of Al Aqsa.
At the same meeting another Labour MP, Martin Linton, declared: “There are long tentacles of Israel in this country who are funding election campaigns.” Unlike Mr. Linton, Kaufman has refused to apologise for his remarks or claim they were taken out of context. His willingness to offend the Jewish community is sadly par for the course. Surveying the last decade, one finds that Kaufman has used every tactic imaginable to delegitimise the Jewish state. He has openly compared Israeli actions to those of the Nazis and likened the situation of Palestinians to those of black people in apartheid South Africa.
For recent Israeli leaders, Kaufman has expressed only the harshest comments. In 2002 he described Ariel Sharon as a ‘right wing thug,’ ‘a blustering bully’ and a ‘war criminal.’
He claimed that Sharon’s ‘repulsive government’ had used ‘methods of barbarism’ against the Palestinians which had ‘stained the Star of David.’ During Operation Cast Lead he offered Parliament this rhetorical question: ‘Is it not an incontrovertible fact that Olmert, Livni and Barak are mass-murderers and war criminals?’
In the aftermath of Israel’s counter terror operations in the West Bank in 2002, Kaufman denounced Israel as ‘an international pariah.’ As a former supporter of Israel who once had an ‘infatuation’ with the country, he now claimed to be disillusioned with its changed image. He argued that Israel was being portrayed by photographs of its soldiers ‘smirking over the corpse of a Palestinian they had just killed’.
But this standard was only selectively applied. He did not condemn Britain or the United States as pariah states despite the human rights abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay.
Despite admitting that Palestinian suicide bombing was ‘undoubtedly horrible terrorism’ carried out by ‘mass murderers’ he suggested that Israel was to blame for its own suffering. He told fellow MPs: ‘We need to ask how we would feel if we had been occupied for 35 years by a foreign power that denied us the most elementary human rights.’
The notion that Palestinian terrorism was Israel’s own fault was reiterated in 2006 when he described Hamas’ electoral victory in Gaza as the ‘inevitable outcome of everything Sharon did as prime minister.’
What was missing here was any sense of context. The second intifada came directly after the Palestinians were offered a two state solution while Hamas’ victory in Gaza owed far more to the Palestinian Authority’s endemic corruption.
Kaufman’s vitriol reached new heights during Operation Cast Lead when he directly compared Israel’s actions in Gaza to those of Nazi Germany. Citing the murder of his grandmother at the hands of the Nazis in WW2, he told MPs: ‘My grandmother did not die to provide cover for Israeli soldiers murdering Palestinian grandmothers in Gaza.’ He declared that Israel’s Government was ‘ruthlessly and cynically’ exploiting ‘guilt among gentiles over the slaughter of Jews in the Holocaust as justification for their murder of Palestinians.’
This claim is frequently made by supporters of the extreme right, often in countries where attempts are made to compensate Holocaust victims. But when it comes to making calumnies against Israel, the far left and far right often converge.
In order to deal with this ‘recalcitrant’ nation, Kaufman has suggested a simple remedy. In an article for The Guardian in 2004 he wrote: ‘Economic sanctions and an arms ban against Israel are the only way of breaking the impasse,’ adding for good measure that the sanctions policy ‘brought down apartheid South Africa.’
In a more recent article in the Spectator, he even suggested that it would be ‘poetic justice’ for Israel to be invaded by outside powers as punishment for its ‘illegal’ invasion of Lebanon in 1982. The apartheid analogy, a favourite with those who demonise the Jewish state, is wholly false.
In apartheid South Africa, black people could not vote and were denied a full range of citizenship rights. Israeli Arabs, by contrast, have always been full citizens of Israel and can vote accordingly. The military restrictions imposed on the West Bank’s Palestinians have come about for reasons of security, not race or religion.
Kaufman derides his critics as ‘fanatical right-wing Jewish chauvinists.’ But given his appalling track record, he has surely put himself beyond the pale. In light of his most recent comment about the alleged machinations of ‘Jewish millionaires’, the Labour leadership should have removed the whip from him with immediate effect. What does it say about Mr. Brown’s government that it has not?
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