The nation seems to have lost its collective mind over Labour MP Ken Livingstone stating that Hitler supported Zionism. Specifically, he said: “Let’s remember when Hitler won his election in 1932, his policy then was that Jews should be moved to Israel. He was supporting Zionism – this before he went mad and ended up killing six million Jews”. At first when I read about this, I was shocked but not sure about what to think of his suspension from the Labour Party. However, I then went and did some research into whether Ken’s remarks had any truth behind them. Well, it turns out that he’s completely correct; Hitler did indeed support Zionism in 1933, when his government struck up a deal with German Zionist Jews to allow them to emigrate to Palestine and leave Germany. Ironically, this was partially in response to Jewish efforts to boycott the Nazi regime, somewhat mirroring the current desperate efforts of the Israeli regime and its loyal servants in the West to crush the BDS movement.

While Ken’s comments were somewhat ill-advised at a time when the Labour Party is being repeatedly smeared with accusations of anti-Semitism, it is no less despicable and abhorrent how the media, the political class and large segments of the public are clamouring to attack him in total oblivion to the facts. No one in the media seems to be pointing out that what he said is completely true; instead, he is being labelled an anti-Semite and even a “Nazi apologist”. All of this is an indication of the totalitarian culture in the UK which has been successfully whipped up by Zionist elements, in which any criticism of Israeli crimes is immediately viewed as an attack on the Jewish people as a whole. The irony of this is that it is the people accusing anti-Zionists of anti-Semitism who are in fact being anti-Semitic; they are the ones equating all Jews everywhere with the State of Israel, regardless of whether they are supportive of Israel or not. In fact, Jews have been at the forefront of the BDS campaign, recognising that Israel is an apartheid state and that its racist and criminal destruction of the Palestinian people is an extreme injustice. By equating Jews with Zionism, these people are defining what constitutes being a legitimate Jew; if a Jew is anti-Zionist, they are not a ‘real’ Jew, and therefore the Jewish community as a whole is inextricably linked with the crimes of the Israeli regime, while those Jews who oppose Israeli atrocities are ostracised and victimised.

Now is the critical time to step up the pressure on the Israeli government to end its atrocities against the Palestinian people. According to Israeli journalist and dissident Gideon Levy, the first signs of fascism are beginning to materialise in Israel. The country currently has the most right-wing, extremist government in its history, and as its attempts to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians become more and more horrific and criminal, so too the attempts in Britain and the wider Western world to whitewash Israeli atrocities and crush efforts to support the Palestinians gradually intensify. Likewise, as human beings we must also fight to combat anti-Semitism in all its forms; it is true that a minority of people who identify as pro-Palestinian are actually simply anti-Semites, but it is also true that much of the most extreme anti-Semitism comes from the Zionist movement, as Zionists continue to abuse and alienate those Jews who oppose the Israeli occupation. Justice will prevail in the end, but we cannot let ourselves be silenced.