• THE letter from Camden Palestine Solidarity Campaign, (We are proud to fight against apartheid, January 21), highlighted the well-respected Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem’s report, boldly entitled A regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This is apartheid.

Earlier in January, 60 Israeli high school students (known as “Shministim”) very publicly announced their refusal to serve in a military that enforces “violent military rule… through policies of apartheid”.

They stated, “Justice requires reform in the form of the end of the occupation, the end of the siege on Gaza, and recognition of the right of return for Palestinian refugees”.

And further revelations last week that Sir Keir Starmer’s office has hired a former Israeli intelligence officer to help manage its social media.

He was an officer in Unit 8200, its cyberwarfare branch, which The Electronic Intifada reports, “specialises in spying, hacking and encryption. It carries out blackmail, mass surveillance and systematic discrimination against Palestinians”.

Why have the mainstream press not reported this appointment?

Sir Keir Starmer is on record saying, “I support Zionism without qualification”.

He is not the only Camden resident to be so publicly Zionist: the new Israeli ambassador Tzipi Hotovely, a well-known supporter of the Israeli settler movement, is on record as saying, “This land [including the occupied Palestinian territories] is ours. All of it is ours. We did not come here to apologise for that”.

As of July 2020, around a quarter of the Parliamentary Labour Party and a third of the shadow cabinet were members of Labour Friends of Israel (LFI).

In 2014, 80 per cent of all Tory MPs were members of Conservative Friends of Israel (CFI) and in 2009 at least half of the Tory shadow cabinet were members.

This tells us that close to half of all MPs are in organisations that support what is generally now considered an apartheid state. Of course, Palestinian people have always known that.

The strength of the Palestinian-led boycott movement has emboldened all of us around the world, including B’Tselem and the Shministim, to take a principled stand against racism in all its forms.

They have clarified that friends of Israel are in fact friends of an apartheid state. Is it anti-Semitic to campaign against Israeli imperialism and apartheid?

SELMA JAMES
MICHAEL KALMANOVITZ
SAM WEINSTEIN
International Jewish
Anti-Zionist Network UK