Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer sacked Rebecca Long-Bailey in June

• DAVID Stebbing repeats the official account that Rebecca Long-Bailey was guilty of retweeting an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory without examining what that really means, (Sabby Sagall does not appreciate what a conspiracy theory is, July 16).

In the original tweet, actor Maxine Peake referred to Israel’s well-documented role in helping to train and militarise other countries’ police forces with so-called “counter-terrorism” measures.

As Israeli journalists and scholars have observed, Israel has turned the occupied territories into laboratories in which it can refine oppressive systems of control which other states can use for repression against sections of their own population.

Peake was right that Israeli police regularly use the neck-on-knee choke-hold on Palestinians; also that Israeli experts had a training session with Minneapolis police in 2012.

However, we don’t know whether or not the US police learned the technique on that occasion. Clearly the US police don’t need instruction in racist policing.

But given the well-documented close collaboration between the US and Israeli police forces, such a connection is plausible or at least not impossible.

If an assertion is plausible it cannot, logically, constitute a conspiracy theory. Had RLB retweeted that “Jewish bankers caused the 2008 financial crash” or “Jews have greatly exaggerated the Holocaust”, such statements would clearly have been anti-Semitic and it would have been right to sack her.

Also, Israel is not “a Jew”, nor the representative of the Jews collectively, except in the minds of anti-Semites and hardened Zionists. So Peake’s claim cannot be “anti-Semitic”.

There has been a rise in real anti-Semitism in recent years. Focusing on false anti-Semitism is a diversion from, and therefore weakens, the fight against real anti-Semitism.Rebecca Long-Bailey should be reinstated forthwith.

SABBY SAGALL
Chair, Camden Palestine Solidarity Campaign
– personal capacity