CECIL WILLIAMS - FREEDOM FIGHTER

CECIL WILLIAMS – FREEDOM FIGHTER

6 February 2017

Mark Gevisser is a South African writer and journalist. In about 1997 Gevisser made a film called “The Man Who Drove With Mandela which was issued originally on a VCR and in 1998 it was issued in DVD format.

I went to school in Johannesburg, South Africa from 1933 to 1943. The school had a primary school and a secondary school, each with their own premises on separate but related pieces of land next to each other. In those days they were called prep. (preparatory) school and high school, and I went to High school in 1939, the year the second world war started.

The school was called King Edward VII School because it was founded in the new mining town of Johannesburg in 1905 and King Edward VII was on the throne in Great Britain and South Africa was a colony of Great Britain after Great Britain had won the Anglo-Boer War of 1899 to 1902.

In 1910 the four colonies in South Africa were combined and South Africa became a dominion of Great Britain and joined other dominions like Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

Our school was very “English” in its education and teachers, and some of our teachers in High School actually came from Britain.

When I got to high school in 1939 we were divided up into different classes from what we had had in primary school, so we had different teachers for different subjects.

One of the teachers of English was, in fact, an Englishman called Cecil Williams, and it was only as time went on during the war and after the war ended in 1945 that Cecil Williams’ name became very well known in South Africa.

I was not fortunate enough to be put in a class taught English by Williams, but somehow – as happens with schoolboys – the boys knew he was homosexual and they also knew where he lived in the City. In those days homosexuals were called queer and many other names, most of which I have now forgotten, and because there are so many different words used in the late 20^th and early 21 centuries.

Williams went from school as a teacher into the Royal Navy during the war, and when he came back to South Africa after 1945 he did not go back to teaching but became a broadcaster for the South African Broadcasting Corporation and also an actor and theatre producer and he was very well known and acclaimed for his productions and acting.

In the mean time there was another side to Williams which most of us didn’t know about and even when we went to university in the mid to late 1940s, he was mostly known for his acting and broadcasting, and basically that is all we know.

Field Marshal Jan Smuts had been one of the generals during the 1899-1902 war and when that war ended he had remained close to the British in his affiliations and politics. When Britain went to war with Germany in 1939, Smuts was in opposition in the South African parliament and when a vote was taken by the South African parliament as to whether South Africa should join the war with Britain or should remain outside the war as many South Africans wanted the government to do, the government lost its majority and Smuts won enough to take over the government and thus joined the British war effort.

After the war ended in 1945, Smuts was still the prime minister, but at the election in 1948 Smuts lost power and the Nationalist party came to power, and that was more or less the beginning of official apartheid although of course it had existed since white settlement started in South Africa in 1652 when the Dutch established a colony in the Cape as a half way house to the Dutch East Indies, now called Indonesia.

At that stage in South Africa, in about 1948, the South African population consisted of about 8 million people of whom six million were black and two million were white.

The whites had the power and ruled the country and the blacks were the labourers without any political rights and were treated as third class citizens of their own country.

The next part of the story is recorded in South African History online:

Cecil Williams was born in Cornwall, England in 1906. He left for Johannesburg in 1928 and worked as an English teacher.

During World War II he switched to journalism and then became a theatre director using black and white actors.

Being gay he often got assaulted.

After the war when South African soldiers returned from Italy and other war zones, the ex-servicemen formed an organisation called the Springbok Legion  and War Veterans Action Committee – formed in 1951 - and Williams became an active member and became chairman of the Springbok Legion.

Williams worked closely with Bram Fischer ( a leading barrister at the time) in bringing the Springbok Legion and the Congress of Democrats (COD) together.

In 1953 The Springbok Legion’s offices were raided by the security police, and the Minister of Police ordered Williams and his colleague Alan Lipman to resign from any organisation they belonged to. They were banned from any gathering or meeting for two years.

In 1954, after the formation of the Congress of Democrats (COD) and the newly revived South African Communist Party (SACP), because these organisations were banned by the Nationalist Party government, they operated underground with freedom fighters which included Rusty Bernstein, Ruth First (later murdered in Mozambique by the South African government) Cecil Williams and Rica Hodgson.

Williams served in the first executive committee later serving as vice-chairman and he later became part of the underground unit.

In 1959 Williams was tried for treason but later acquitted.

Involvement in the activities of the banned SACP and opposition to racism led to contact with Nelson Mandela.

After the banning of the African National Congress (ANC) and the formation of Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), the military wing of the ANC, Williams became involved in underground work of MK. For instance, when Mandela returned from military training in Addis Ababa (Ethiopia, formerly Abyssinia), he was met by Williams in Bechuanaland (now Botswana) They continued to work together intil 1962 when Mandela was arrested posing as David Motsemayi – a chauffeur for Williams.

The story of how Mandela was caught got much publicity, but there was not much ever about the man he was driving that day.

Though involved in the struggle, Williams kept that part of his life separate from his personal life. Consequently few knew about his political activities and his lifestyle as a gay person.

After Mandela’s arrest, Williams left South Africa for Britain, where he lived until his death in 1979.

Mandela tells of his friendship with, and assistance from Cecil Williams in his biography LONG WALK TO FREEDOM (published by Abacus in 1995) but once Mandela was imprisoned in 1964 he possibly didn’t have the contacts or ability to find out what had happened to Cecil, as he called him in the book.

The film about the Mandela arrest with Cecil Williams is the first paragraph of this story, but what happened to Williams after he left South Africa? Did he get involved in the UK with the anti-apartheid movement in the UK?  I believe research in the UK will be richly rewarded into the later years of Cecil Williams’ life.

There are probably many facets of Williams’ life and political activities in the latter years of his life, but many of us remember some of his life in South Africa which, as far as we knew, was not political.

Cecil Williams was well known as a broadcaster on the airwaves in South Africa with the South African Broadcasting Corporation, but became more widely known as an actor, producer, director and theatre manager which must have made this a very fulfilling life.

I firmly believe Cecil Williams to have been a freedom fighter of our times and someone for whom recognition of his activities and his bravery in the context of the brutal South African apartheid and police state regime need to be recorded and acknowledged for all to know about.

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I graduated from the University of the Witwatersrand in 1951 and have been receiving alumni journals and magazines over the years.

The alumni journal is called WITSReview and an article in a recent issue was about a sculpture erected at the place Mandela was arrested by apartheid police in 1962.

Here is the article, followed by my letter to the journal a few months later:

WITSReview

March 2015 Volume 31

In 2012, an artist and anarchitect collaborated to create Release,

a sculpture honouring Nelson Mandela at the site where he was

captured in KwaZulu-Natal in 1962. Marco Cianfanelli

and Jeremy Rose regrouped in 2014 to craft falcons and

forests in a mall in Abu Dhabi.

Falcons &

Freedom

Fighters

BY DEBORAH MINORS

ARTIST: MARCO CIANFANELLI. ARCHITECT/ARTISTIC COLLABORATOR: JEREMY ROSE OF MASHABANE ROSE ARCHITECTS. 

RELEASE 2012. PAINTED LASER-CUT MILD STEEL AND STEEL TUBE CONSTRUCTION/TO BE RUSTED: WIDTH: 5.19-METRES |

HEIGHT: 9.48-METRES | LENGTH: 20.8-METRES

March 2015

Joburg-born Cianfanelli graduated with a distinction in Fine Arts from Wits in 1993.

He is an artist “constantly looking to realise art where one doesn’t expect to find it”.

A rambling road in KwaZulu-Natal’s Midlands is one such space. It was on such a road

that Nelson Mandela, operating “underground”, was driving on 5 August 1962, posing as a

chauffeur. Just outside Howick, he was flagged down by apartheid police. They’d been tipped

off about the driver’s real identity. Mandela was exposed, arrested and eventually imprisoned for 27

years. 

Cianfanelli’s sculpture Release, of Mandela at this capture site, was unveiled 50 years later on

4 August 2012.

The sculpture is made from 50 steel columns, each about 8-metres tall and planted on a concrete

base. The sculpture comes into focus from 35-metres and the image of Mandela emerges.

 

Viewed from the side, however, the design and arrangement of the columns create a sense of

fracture – or release. The sculpture is affected by the changing light around it, and visually shifts

throughout the day. It both exerts influence on and is part of its surroundings.

 

Silhouettes of human figures, like Release, are characteristic of Cianfanelli’s art – colossal works

in steel. He creates monumental silhouettes that juxtapose with other shapes and enable

unexpected connections in social forces to emerge.

Locating Release in the rolling Midlands landscape was thus not only accurate, but deliberate – and

required an architect.

Jeremy Rose (BArch 1988) is Principal Architect at Mashabane Rose Architects in Johannesburg. His consultancy work focuses on museums and cultural heritage site projects, and has included designing the Apartheid Museum and the Robben Island heritage site.

Cianfanelli and Rose regrouped in May 2014.

A property firm commissioned them to install a

sculpture in Yas Mall, which opened on Yas Island

in the United Arab Emirates in November 2014.

The artwork, currently untitled but referred to as

the

Swooping Falcons, is made of 140 tonnes of

steel. The

Swooping Falcons, like

Release, fluctuate

with the viewer’s perspective.

The mall doors open to a massive sculpture of

six falcons aloft 132 columns, each 18-metres

tall. “The idea is that, as you move around the

sculpture, you see different falcons from different

angles,” explains Cianfanelli. “From any position,

you will see one falcon and the others will

break apart, becoming an expression of rhythm,

movement or flight.”

Whichever way you look at it, this artistic alumni

collaboration continues to soar.

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December 2015

WITSReview Volume 33

LETTERS

The Man who drove with Mandela

Dear Editor,

Deborah Minors’ article (WR March 2015) about the sculpture Release honouring Nelson Mandela at the

site where he was captured in 1962, in what was then either Zululand or Natal, is part of the story of that

eventful trip which needs to be told in full, and probably needs a sculpture supplemented to honour the man who was with Mandela when the capture took place.

Cecil Williams had gone to fetch Mandela from a meeting in Natal and they were returning to Johannesburg.

Quoting from the DVD called The Man who Drove with Mandela, the story unfolds as follows:

“Driving a gleaming Austin Westminster, Mandela was able to travel around the country by

disguising himself as a chauffeur for an elegant, impeccably dressed white man. That man, Cecil Williams, was a leading Johannesburg theatre director and a committed anti-apartheid freedom fighter.”

In fact, Cecil Williams was so very much more than that. When WWII started on 3 September 1939, he

was teaching English at King Edward VII High School in Johannesburg.

 

He had a flat in Anstey’s Building in Joubert Street and, apart from his gay activities which some of us

at the school had heard about, he was involved with the South African Communist Party. He also broadcast

on SABC and acted in theatre. When the war started he joined the navy (he was an Englishman) and after the war his political activities increased untithe fateful day when he was in the car with Mandela, the whereabouts of whom had been revealed to the South African authorities by those in the USA who didn’t want apartheid to end.

Cecil Williams needs to be recorded historically in the South African anti-apartheid struggle, and the DVD

of this episode is well worth seeing.

Actor Corin Redgrave plays Cecil Williams in the 1998 film directed by Greta Schiller.

Mannie De Saxe (BSc Eng Mech 1951 Wits.), now living in Australia

 

ZIONISM AND ANTISEMITISM: RACIST POLITICAL TWINS

Zionism and Antisemitism: racist political twins, by J-BIG

A briefing by Jews for Boycotting Israeli Goods, written by and for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions activists, explaining how the charge of antisemitism applies to Zionism itself.
Read the briefing in full here.

The movement for freedom, justice and equality for Palestinians opposes Israel’s occupation, colonisation of Arab lands and its apartheid system. The campaign for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) targets the Israeli state, institutions and companies complicit in Israel’s crimes. 1
BDS has become an effective means for people of diverse backgrounds to express their humanitarian, anti-racist impulses in solidarity with Palestine. Recognising the power of BDS, Israel’s defenders have regularly accused the movement of antisemitism. They use this favourite weapon to intimidate and silence critics of Israel, including Jewish anti-Zionists, who are dismissed as ‘self-hating Jews’.

This briefing has been written by and for BDS activists to explain how the charge of antisemitism applies to Zionism itself. Indeed, they are racist political twins. Understanding their mutual dependence will help strengthen the BDS movement and inform our strategy. Antisemitism portrayed as eternal Zionism historically argued that antisemitism was inherent in non-Jews and thus would always persist. According to Leo Pinsker, founder of the 19th century Hovevei Zion (Lovers of Zion), ‘Judeophobia is a mental disease. As a mental disease it is hereditary, and as a disease transmitted for two thousand years it is incurable.’ 2

On this basis, antisemitism couldn’t be eliminated, so opposing it was futile. Founder of political Zionism, Theodor Herzl, wrote in his 1895 diary: ‘In Paris… I recognized the emptiness and futility of trying to “combat” anti-Semitism.’ 3 He also wrote that ‘the antiSemites will be our most dependable friends, anti-Semitic countries our allies’4 , i.e. by stimulating Jewish immigration to Palestine.

 According to Jacob Klatzkin, editor during 1909-1911 of Die Welt, the official Zionist newspaper: ‘We are… naturally foreigners. We are an alien nation in your midst and we want to remain one.’ 5

Early Zionists accepted stereotypes commonplace at the time: that Jews, especially Eastern European Jews, were backward. They were seen as having become degenerate because they lacked a homeland, so settling Palestine would uplift and cleanse them. For example Pinhas Rosenbluth, later Israel’s Justice Minister, wrote that Palestine was ‘an institute for the fumigation of Jewish vermin’.6 Seeing Jews as ‘human dust’, Zionists sought to redeem them through aliyah – i.e. ‘ascent’ to the ancient Land of Israel (Eretz Yisrael).7 Zionists agreed with European antisemites that Jews didn’t belong and should be assisted or even pressurised to leave Europe.

But most Jews rejected this notion. In 1897 the first Zionist Congress had to be moved to Basel in Switzerland from Munich, because Jews there regarded Zionism as antisemitic and feared it would undermine their civil rights in Germany. 8

Antisemitic support for a Jewish State Zionism has always depended on support from antisemitic elites. Even before Jewish Zionist organisations developed, political Zionism was promoted by 19th -century European imperialists such as Lords Palmerston and Shaftesbury, Benjamin Disraeli and Napoleon III’s Secretary Ernest Laharanne. Many Christians believed Jewish immigration to Palestine would bring about the Second Coming of Christ, as in Biblical prophecy.

More pragmatically, they saw a future Jewish homeland as a British imperial outpost – ‘a “little loyal Jewish Ulster” in a sea of potentially hostile Arabism’, according to the first military governor of Jerusalem. 9 Such political motives explain the famous ‘Balfour Declaration’ of 1917, when UK Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour (a Christian Zionist) favoured ‘the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people’. Everyone else was classified as belonging to ‘non-Jewish communities’. The only opposition in Cabinet came from its sole Jewish member, Edwin Montagu, who warned that the plan would lead to discrimination against non-Jews in Palestine and against Jews elsewhere. 10

As Prime Minister a decade earlier, Balfour had promoted the 1905 Aliens Act, designed to block immigration of Jewish refugees from Czarist pogroms in Russia. He wanted them to go to Palestine instead. He warned against ‘the undoubted evils that had fallen upon the country [Britain] from an immigration that was largely Jewish’.11 Undermining an anti-Nazi boycott Zionists have often argued that only their own state can protect Jews from antisemitic attack. During the early stages of the Third Reich, moreover, the Nazis and Zionist organisations shared an outlook on Jewish separation.12 By attempting to separate Jews from the rest of humanity, the Zionists made destructive choices.

When Nazi Germany introduced antisemitic laws and promoted physical attacks on Jews, the Jewish diaspora in other countries organised an effective campaign for an international boycott. Mass rallies were held in many cities all over the world. In the USA and several European countries, large shops cancelled orders for German goods and found alternative sources. The Nazi regime’s accomplice to beat the boycott was the World Zionist Organisation (WZO). Under the Transfer (Haavara) Agreement of March 1933, the WZO actively opposed the boycott in exchange for the Nazis permitting some well-off Jews and their wealth to be transported to Palestine.

This transfer amounted to at least $30m worth of German goods, thus making Hitler a significant economic sponsor of the Zionist project. The Agreement would ‘pierce a stake through the heart of the Jewish-led anti-Nazi boycott’, according to historian Edwin Black.13 Members of the World Jewish Congress sought to continue the boycott, but the WJC leadership soon joined the WZO in undermining it. Zionism gains from antisemitism in Poland In the mid-1930s Poland’s government also moved against the country’s Jews by enacting laws modelled on the Nuremberg Race Laws of Nazi Germany. For example, new laws restricted the kosher slaughtering of cattle and excluded Jews from specific professions. The Polish regime also negotiated with France to establish a ‘Jewish colony’ in Madagascar where Polish Jews could be sent.14

These developments and the antisemitism of the Catholic Church strengthened the Polish Zionist movement. Betar, a right-wing Revisionist Zionist movement opposed to trade unions, worked with antisemites in the Polish military from 1930 onwards. High-ranking army officers secretly trained Betar recruits, most of whom immigrated to Palestine by the end of the decade to join Zionist military forces there.

Nevertheless Zionism in Poland faced strong opposition from the Bund, a Jewish-secular socialist party, which had a stronger following than any other Jewish party in Poland. From the Holocaust to the ‘New Jew’ Zionism was a minority political force among European Jews until six million were killed by the Nazis.

The Holocaust strengthened Zionist efforts to gain international support for a Jewish state in Palestine. Most Jewish refugees sought escape to Western Europe or the USA but were blocked by immigration controls – supported by Zionist organisations – and so migrated instead to Palestine. Zionist colonisation depended on racist institutions which still operate today. The Jewish Agency promotes Jewish immigration to Israel. The Jewish National Fund (JNF) still allocates Israeli land only to Jews.15 The Histadrut – often mistakenly called a ‘trade union’ – has been in reality a business promoting ‘Hebrew-only labour’.16

The Israeli ‘Law of Return’ offered citizenship to all Jews, wherever they live in the world. Zionist militias attacked Palestinian civilians during the 1940s until the 1948 declaration of independence for Israel. In 1947-48 this terror campaign led to the expulsion of more than 700,000 Palestinians from their homes. Several massacres panicked Palestinians to flee their homeland. An official ‘state of emergency’ prevented refugees from exercising their right of return, thus violating international law to this day. Zionist settlement did not stop at taking over indigenous people’s land. Rather than exploit their labour, Zionism sought to expel or eliminate them, as earlier European settlers had done in the Americas, Australia and New Zealand.

Zionism sought to replace the indigenous population with colonial-settlers as the ‘New Jew’. This doubly racist project maligned the Bund’s working-class solidarity as backward and sought to replace immigrants’ Yiddish culture with a literally fabricated one. Israeli author Amos Oz explains: ‘Even new lullabies and new “ancient legends” were synthesised by eager writers’, e.g. glorifying the settlers’ land appropriation through agricultural labour (compare the two posters).17 Jewish futures: class solidarity versus colonial settlement Socialist Jew of the Bund youth organisation: ‘Join the Tsukunft’ (Future)18 New Jew of settler-colonialism: ‘Towards a new life in the Promised Land’

As the ideology underpinning Jewish settlement in Palestine, Zionism was embraced by many Jews as a route to a socialist Utopia based on collective labour and idealistic kibbutz communities. In practice they faced a choice: either break with Zionism or accept its racist, colonial nature. 19 Racist Right-wing politics As in the 1930s, Zionism and racist Right-wing politics have continued to converge. The US political scene features an alliance between Jewish Zionists and the far more numerous fundamentalist Christian Zionists. Today many of the 40 million Christian Evangelists there believe that a Jewish ‘return’ to Palestine will bring the Second Coming, Armageddon and then the Rapture, when the Righteous will be saved. Everyone who does not accept this prophecy, including Jews, will be sent to hell. Since 9/11 Christian Zionists have also seen Israel as a front-line defence against the so-called ‘Islamic threat’.

Jewish Zionists have exploited this support, even when combined with blatant antisemitism. According to Pastor John Hagee, President of the Southern Baptist Convention, ‘Adolph Hitler was a “hunter”, sent by God, who was tasked with expediting God’s will of having the Jews re-establish a state of Israel.’20

Nevertheless Hagee’s support for Israel has been welcomed by the Anti-Defamation League, which is meant to oppose antisemitism.21 Likewise Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, ‘The good news is that Israel is not alone – it has your support’, when addressing a rally of Hagee’s one million-strong Christians United for Israel. 22 As in the USA, European racist groups combine antisemitism with support for Zionism.23

Throughout Europe most major racist parties are antisemitic, Islamophobic and pro-Zionist. English Defence League members express antisemitic views, while also flying the Israeli flag. Support for Israel also comes from Robert Zines, MEP of Latvia’s Freedom & Fatherland Party, who joins the annual march in memory of SS veterans who guarded extermination camps.24 Similarly in Poland, the Law and Justice Party is a home for proIsrael antisemites. 25 Michal Kaminski MEP strongly supports Israel while also defending ‘the good name of Jedwabne’ – a town where hundreds of Jews were burned alive in a synagogue in 1941.26 Racist equation: Zionist = Jewish Western support for Israel is based on much more than collusion with antisemitism. Israel has demonstrated its utility in suppressing Arab nationalist aspirations for democratic control of the Middle East and its natural resources, especially since the 1967 war.

Israeli counter-insurgency methods have been used widely by Western military forces, e.g. in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Israeli military has turned the Middle East into a laboratory for surveillance, control and armament systems to be extended globally. 27 Imperialist domination closely links the Western powers to the Israeli colonial-settler state. Palestinians regularly face Western demands ‘to recognise Israel as a Jewish state’, thus conflating a people with a state.

This conflation has been encouraged by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), whose supporters have described it as ‘the Jewish lobby’.28 A similar conflation was also promoted by the now-defunct EU Monitoring Centre (EUMC) on Racism and Xenophobia.29 According to its so-called ‘working definition of antisemitism’, it could be antisemitic to deny ‘the Jewish people their right to self-determination, for example by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavour’. 30 Since this definition was rejected by the UK’s Universities and Colleges Union (UCU), Zionists have campaigned for universities to de-recognise the union.

This demonstrates once again that it is Zionists, not their critics, who continue to equate their colonial-settler project with all Jews. By claiming to be ‘the State of the Jews’, Israel implicates all Jews in Israel’s wars, occupation, land thefts, expulsions and other crimes. Mirroring that equation, some misguided supporters of the Palestinians have attributed their oppression to an international Jewish conspiracy, to ‘Jewish power’, to ‘a Jewish spirit’, etc. The extreme-Right journalist Israel Shamir promotes those elements of traditional European antisemitism, ostensibly to support the Palestinians. These explanations obscure the source of Palestinian oppression. They perversely accept Zionist claims to represent all Jews and ‘Jewish values’.

Leading Palestinian commentators and activists reject such “support” as damaging the Palestinian cause. Ali Abunimah, Joseph Massad, Omar Barghouti and Rafeef Ziadeh were among dozens who denounced those who blame ‘Jewish’ characteristics for the oppression of Palestinians. 31 As the Palestinian BDS National Committee has argued, ‘equating Israel and world Jewry… is itself antisemitic’. 32

The equation stereotypes Jews, threatens their civil rights and undermines their national identity in countries where they live. It originated from antisemites who saw Jews as an alien people not belonging in Europe and needing their own homeland. This equation is contradicted by the many people of Jewish origin who actively support Palestinian national rights and play central roles in the BDS campaign.

BDS – against Zionism and antisemitism Understanding Zionism and antisemitism as racist political twins – sometimes even partners in crime – underpins the Palestinian call for BDS. Its anti-racist aims – freedom from occupation, justice for refugees denied their right of return, and equality for the Palestinian citizens of Israel – are best served by targeting Israel as a racist state aligned with the political-economic interests of the Western powers.

Published January 2013 (with expanded notes March 2013) by Jews for Boycotting Israeli Goods (J-BIG) http://jews4big.wordpress.com, jews4big@gmail.com We are UK-resident Jews who support the Palestinian call for a boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaign to hold Israel to account for decades of breaching international law.

J-BIG is part of the Boycott Israel Network,

www.boycottisraelnetwork.net

Further reading on Zionism and antisemitism

Gilbert Achcar, Arabs and the Holocaust, Saqi, 2010.
Edwin Black, The Transfer Agreement: The Dramatic Story of the Pact between the Third Reich and Jewish Palestine, Macmillan, 1984.
Lenni Brenner, Zionism in the Age of the Dictators, Croom Helm, 1983
Norman Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry, Verso, 2003.
David Landy, Jewish Identity and Palestinian Rights, Zed, 2011.
Antony Lerman, The Making and Unmaking of a Zionist, Pluto, 2011.
Francis Nicosia, The Third Reich and the Palestine Question, I.B. Taurus, 1985.
Akiva Orr, The unJewish State: The Politics of Jewish Identity in Israel. Ithaca Press, 1983, http://www.akiorrbooks.com/files/The_Un_Jewish_State.pdf
Akiva Orr, Israel: Politics, Myths and Identity Crises, Pluto, 1994, http://www.akiorrbooks.com/files/israel_myths.pdf
Yakov Rabkin, A Threat from Within: A History of Jewish Opposition to Zionism, Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.
John Rose, The Myths of Zionism, Pluto, 2005.
Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People, Verso, 2010.
Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Land of Israel: From Holy Land to Homeland, Verso, 2013.
Nathan Weinstock, Zionism: The False Messiah, Inklinks, 1979.
Ben White, Israeli Apartheid: A Beginner’s Guide, 2012.

Notes

1 http://www.bdsmovement.net/call#.TqsNhnPajNM
2 Leo Pinsker, Autoemanzipation: ein Mahnrufan seine Stammesgenossen, von einem russischen Juden, Berlin, 1882, pp.4-5; http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Zionism/pinsker.html; for bringing together many sources cited here, thanks to Tony Greenstein’s blog, azvsas.blogspot.com
3 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodor_Herzl; the Zionist spelling of ‘anti-Semitism’ has an essentialist meaning, so it is used here only for direct quotes (otherwise ‘antisemitism’).
4 The Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl, edited by Raphael Patai, translated by Harry Zohn, New York, 1960, page 19.
5 Jacob Klatzkin, Krisis und Entscheidung im Judentum: Probleme des modernen Judentums, 2d edition, Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag, 1921, p.118; cited in Klaus Herrmann, ‘Historical perspectives on political Zionism and antisemitism’, in Zionism & Racism, 1977, p.204 http://www.eaford.org/publications/1/ZIONISM%20&%20RACISM.pdf
6 Joachim Doron, ‘Classic Zionism and modern anti-semitism: parallels and influences’ (1883-1914), Studies in Zionism 8, Autumn 1983.
7 Aki Orr, The unJewish State. Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Land of Israel. Les Levidow, ‘Zionist antisemitism’, http://www.iahushua.com/Zion/zionrac12.html
8 Nathan Weinstock, Zionism – A False Messiah, Inklinks.
9 Memoirs of Sir Ronald Storrs, 1937, p.364
10 http://www.zionism-israel.com/hdoc/Montagu_balfour.htm
11 Jason Tomes, Balfour and Foreign Policy: The International Thought of a Conservative Statesman, Cambridge University Press, 1997, p.201; Michael Joseph Cohen, Churchill and the Jews, 1900-1948, Frank Cass, 2003, p.19.
12 Francis Nicosia, The Third Reich and the Palestinian Question, Taurus, 1985.
13 Edwin Black, The Transfer Agreement. Lenni Brenner, Zionism in the Age of the Dictators.
14http://www.worldfuturefund.org/wffmaster/Reading/Total/Polish%20Antisemitism.htm
15 http://www.jnews.org.uk/commentary/background-paper-the-controversial-laknd-policies-of-the-jewishnational-fund
16 http://azvsas.blogspot.com/2009/03/histadrut-israels-racist-trade-union.html
17 Haim Bresheeth, Self and Other in Zionism: Palestine and Israel in recent Hebrew literature, in Khamsin, 14/15. Palestine: Profile of an Occupation, London, Zed Books, 1989, pp.120-52.
18 http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Tsukunft
19 Antony Lerman, The Making and Unmaking of a Zionist.
20 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/05/21/mccain-backer-hagee-said_n_102892.html
21 http://www.adl.org/PresRele/HolNa_52/5299_52.htm, June 2008
22 http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/waiting-for-the-messiah-netanyahu-addresses-evangelicalchristian-gathering-in-jerusalem-1.419432
23 http://english.al-akhbar.com/content/europe%E2%80%99s-islamophobes-and-israel-right-alliance
24 http://azvsas.blogspot.com/2009/10/conservatives-anti-semitic-fascist.html, http://electronicintifada.net/content/israels-anti-semitic-friends/8516
25 http://electronicintifada.net/content/bad-romance-poland-and-israels-love-story/9266
26 http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/oct/29/conservatives-europe-miliband-hague-kaminski
27 Steve Graham, ‘Settler colonial securitism: Israeli surveillance and control regimes at airports and megaevents’, http://campacc.org.uk/uploads/images/Steve%20Graham.pdf Israel’s Worldwide Role in Repression, https://israelglobalrepression.wordpress.com/download/ NeoConOpticon: The EU Security-Industrial Complex, TNI, http://www.statewatch.org/analyses/neoconopticon-report.pdf
28 Chuck Hagel and the Ghost of AIPAC Past, http://www.lobelog.com/chuck-hagel-and-the-ghost-of-aipac-past/
29 UCU resolution on EUMC working definition of anti-semitism, http://www.ucu.org.uk/index.cfm?articleid=5540#70; Richard Kuper, Any critic of six-year-old definition of antisemitism attacked as antisemitic, http://jfjfp.com/?p=23479; Antony Lerman, http://antonylerman.com/2011/06/02/the-farcical-attack-on-the-ucu-for-voting-against-use-ofthe-eumc-working-definition-of-antisemitism/
30 http://www.european-forum-on-antisemitism.org/working-definition-of-antisemitism/english/
31 http://uspcn.org/2012/03/13/granting-no-quarter-a-call-for-the-disavowal-of-the-racism-and-antisemitism-ofgilad-atzmon/
32 http://www.bdsmovement.net/2011/die-linke-protecting-7427#.TqsUsnajNM

BEGGING LETTERS - HOW TO - OR NOT TO WIN PENSIONER FRIENDS AND LOSE DONATIONS

I am 90 years old and my partner is 90 years old.

We have been giving donations to organisations over the years as and when we have been able to.

We live on age pensions and have a very modest lifestyle. We don't own a car and don't go out very much.Our entertainment consists of DVDs, going with a friend in his car to Preston Market once a week to do our weekly shopping and often as well on a Saturday to buy groceries which are heavy to drag along to catch the bus when the friend is not available.

Lately I have been getting begging letters from organisations mainly in Sydney who got my name and address from where? from a donation once given to some organisation and then all organisations decided he is an easy touch.

Well I have had enough.

From today, in this blog, I am going to list all those organisations from who(m?) i get these begging letters, starting with:

1) Time for Hope Collection