• YOUR correspondent Mike Katz and the Jewish Labour Movement are cock-a-hoop about the recapture of the leadership of the Labour Party by politicians supporting Israel, (‘Jewish members no longer feel unwanted in the Labour Party’, October 14).

But at the time of their greatest achievement they have seen their greatest fear enacted on the Labour conference floor.

In a historic decision the party declared, with full support of all the unions, that Israel is practising the crime of apartheid as defined by the United Nations and called for sanction on Israel.

The party’s message to Palestinians, in Jerusalem, Gaza and the West Bank, we support your resistance with the same enthusiasm we supported the struggle in South Africa.

This is precisely what the revised International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of anti-Semitism, which declared that Palestinian anti-Zionism is in effect anti-Semitic, was meant to prevent – calling out Israel as a “racist state”.

The party has now adopted the position of B’Tselem, the major human rights organisation in Israel, and Human Rights Watch that “the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea is governed by a single regime that works to maintain Jewish supremacy”.

Hard for Jewish people with ties to Israel to hear, but the truth is sometimes very painful.

But many Jews in Britain are appalled by what they see Israel has become, even while maintaining strong bonds of affection for it.

To these, Palestinian civil society holds out a hand of friendship as do we in the Labour Party and the Palestine solidarity movement and ask them to question their treasured beliefs.

So, to your correspondent and the JLM, some of whose members are in the Labour Party, we ask, do you support our party’s policy of ending “Jewish supremacy” in Israel / Palestine?

For the human rights organisations, and now for Labour, we all have to name the crime before we can work to a solution. Join us.

PAUL O’BRIEN
Address supplied