JVL Introduction Readers will recall that Moshe Machover was briefly expelled from the Labour Party in autumn 2017 under the old, discredited Iain Nichol regime. He has just been suspended….
JVL Introduction
Readers will recall that Moshe Machover was briefly expelled from the Labour Party in autumn 2017 under the old, discredited Iain Nichol regime.
He has just been suspended under rules and procedures which are as patently unjust today as they were then.
Machover has decided to ignore the confidentiality rules which are used to gag those accused and to put all information relevant to his suspension into the public domain.
You will find it below.
[This introduction has been corrected: when published earlier today, it claimed that Machover had been suspended again. As he points out, first time round was a straight expulsion, not a suspension…]
Dear Friend,
Attached herewith you will find a letter in PDF format, “Notice of administrative suspension from membership of the Labour Party”. Also attached is a Covering letter from the LP Governance and Legal Unit. The authors of both documents hide in the hood of anonymity.
The covering letter says, “The Labour Party’s investigation process operates confidentially. That is vital to ensure fairness to you and the complainant, and to protect the rights of all concerned under the Data Protection Act 2018. We must therefore ask you to ensure that you keep all information and correspondence relating to this investigation private, and that you do not share it with third parties or the media (including social media).”
I disobey the anonymous inquisitors’ instruction, because I believe that these matters are best discussed in public, in the open, not in the secrecy that they desire. I publish, and let them be damned. I am not going to dignify their letter with a direct response, but allow readers of this open letter to make their own judgment.
I will only make here some brief remarks relating to the said attached documents.
1. The documents do not disclose any details of the complainant(s), and I waive my own right to anonymity. However, I have lightly redacted the Notice of Suspension in order to protect the privacy of a couple of individuals’ names and their identifying details. Most names that appear in this document are mentioned within texts that are in the public domain, and hence are already publicly known. However, there are two individuals named on p. 3 of this document that are not mentioned within such a text. They are individuals with whom the inquisitors apparently wish to insinuate that I am associated, and guilty by virtue of this association. One of them, whose name is redacted as xxxx, is known to me as a political adversary, against whose views I have publicly polemicised. The other, whose name is redacted as yyyy, is totally unknown to me; I had never heard of him before reading this document. I disclaim any association with either of them.
2. The long list of 48 inquisitorial questions and insinuations that take up pp. 3–7 of the Notice of Suspension do not contain any specific explicit direct accusation. They are phrased so as to prompt me to incriminate myself, or try to defend myself against what I appear to be implicitly accused of. I refuse to play this game. I literally have no case to answer.
3. This list is followed by ten items of so-called “evidence”. The first two items are intended to suggest an association with xxxx and yyyy. This suggestion is false. The remaining eight items are texts that I have published or co-signed, or quotations form what I said in public. I stand by these utterances. In fact I urge you to read them carefully and make up your mind whether any of them are false or otherwise illegitimate. You may disagree with some of the views I have expressed, but I claim that in pronouncing them I have made legitimate use of my freedom of speech, which includes the right to express controversial views.
* * *
I Joined the Labour Party in 2016, when it opened its doors to socialists – who are, by definition, anti-imperialists. I regret I am now among the numerous victims of a purge driven by right-wing heresy hunters, bureaucratic enemies of free speech . But at least I can use this occasion to promote the views I have been advocating for many years; in particular, socialist opposition to the Zionist project of colonisation and the Jewish-supremacist regime of the Israeli settler state. For a start, I urge you to read my three articles referred to in Item 7 of the Notice of Suspension. Two of them are available online:
* ‘Messianic Zionism: The ass and the red heifer’ (Monthly Review, February 2020).
* ‘Weaponising “anti-Semitism”’ (Weekly Worker 23 April 2020).
The third article, ‘An immoral dilemma: The trap of Zionist propaganda’ (Journal of Palestine Studies Vol. XLVII, No. 4, Summer 2018 ) can be downlaoded from the link here.
If you wish to pursue these ideas further, you can find many of my articles archived in
The Israeli Occupation Archive and the archive of the Weekly Worker.
I dare to hope that as a growing number of people are exposed to views challenging the lies of the mainstream media and Israeli hasbarah, resistance to oppression and support for the oppressed will gain force.
In solidarity,
Moshé Machover