Professor Moshe Machover

• WELL said John Gulliver (What’s happening to the right to free speech? December 3): namely that when you take away free speech, “you end up with a political dictatorship, and a politically lifeless body”.

And now The Morning Star has just reported that two Constituency Labour Parties have had motions ruled out of order for supporting a charity bike ride raising funds for Palestinian children.

The Labour Party’s disciplinary process has been corrupt for some time: we know, we were under investigation for helping to draft an open letter asking critical questions of the Jewish Labour Movement because they undermined the possibility of an election victory, (An affiliate organisation is saying don’t vote for the Labour Party, July 19 2019).

The Governance & Legal Unit did not tell us who complained, who was investigating, nor the nature of the complaint. Instead, even though we are Jewish, we were invited to incriminate ourselves as being anti-Semitic!

So with our friend and colleague Professor Moshe Machover, despite (or because of) being Jewish, Israeli, and left-wing, the party insinuated that he and those he associates with might be anti-Semitic.

Their “evidence”: that Professor Machover attended a protest of the JW3 because it had been advertised as hosting a fundraiser for a foreign military, (How is this recruitment fundraiser for the IDF possible? April 25 2019).

Indeed, the two people that Labour allege he may have associated with there, were not in fact present. We should know – the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network UK organised that protest.

It’s not the first time: in 2017 Professor Machover was expelled and then reinstated within weeks (people were outraged and campaigned against such an injustice) – the party had, again, got its “facts” wrong.

A few days ago he told The Electronic Intifada that party bureaucrats were conducting a “Stalinist purge of the Labour Party”.

Other Jewish people who have been expelled or suspended include: Bridget Dunne, Tony Greenstein, Jackie Walker, Naomi Winbourne-Idrissi, and many others who do not accept the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of anti-Semitism and are critical of Zionism – as are most people in the world.

We accuse the Labour Party of a purge of pro-Palestinian members, beginning with those of us who are Jewish.

MICHAEL KALMANOVITZ
SAM WEINSTEIN
International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network UK