Points on Zionism

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Dear S.0, We invite readers to send us their letters, up to a usual maximum' length of 400 words.

Send to Socialist Organiser, c/o 28, Middle Lane. London N8. A FEW minor quibbles about your article 'Zionism Red in Tooth and Claw' (incidentally, wouldn't it be better for a socialist journal to avoid that particular imagery: red is not normally a colour of which socialists disapprove).

Firstly historical: there is some evidence of independent Jewish states before Israel in, for example, areas of Africa.

Coming more recently, whatever the subsequent evolution of Mapam, it is unfair to ignore the past of Left Poale Zion and Hashomer Hatzair by claiming that they were pro-imperialist, or ignoring their efforts to organise the working class across the ethnic/national divide.

On the other hand it was a mistake to omit the evidence (so amply recorded by Hannah Arendt in 'Eichmann in Jerusalem') that anti-semites were prepared to back Zionism as a policy?

June 1982 and Britain's disaffected youth, in the shape of the football fans in Spain singing 'God Save the Queen' and millions empathising with the exploits of the Paratroopers is mobilised behind the Union Jack. Socialists AS a reader of SO and a member of the Palestinian Workers' League I was thankful for your publishing our statement against the Israeli invasion of Lebanon.

It is understood that some abridgement could be made, but it was in my view unfair to omit, with other things, the whole headline: "Long live the Palestinway of getting rid of Jews from Europe. There are East European Jewish socialist refugees in Britain from before the war who who can remember Jabotinski's thugs joining with pro-Nazi gangs to attack socialists, both Jewish and goyim. Begin's own record as stemming from a movement that was prepared to cooperate openly with Nazis needs to be mentioned.

Finally would have been worth going further into the Law of Return; this truly demonstrates that there is racialism in Israel, not just against Arabs.

Arab jews

Jews from the Yemen have been refused rights to go to Israel, not because of Arab blood but because of Hamitic blood, to say nothing of the close IsraelSouth Africa axis. Afro- Americans who have embraced Judaism have been refused entry as not being racially jewish. And of course people of Jewish descent who are not religiously Jewish and have embraced • a differing religion can also be barred.

I appreciate that space was limited and to cover all such quibbles would have unduly lengthened the article.

LAURENS