Mcdonnell accused Israel of ‘genocide’
Shadow chancellor under fire after ‘inaccurate and deeply offensive’ address at Left-wing rally in 2012
JOHN MCDONNELL claimed Israel was attempting a “genocide” against Palestinians and shared a platform with a woman who described Jews as the “chief financiers” of the slave trade, The Daily Telegraph can reveal. Last night the Board of Deputies of British Jews demanded that the shadow chancellor apologise as a previously unseen video emerged in which he accused the Israeli government of ethnic cleansing.
In 2012, addressing a Left-wing rally, Mr Mcdonnell said: “Nobody can speak without expressing some form of solidarity with the people of Gaza… as the children are murdered and the bombs are flying from Israel. I think it’s absolutely critical now that we use every platform we can to expose what’s going on, which is effectively an attempt at genocide against the Palestinians.”
Karen Pollock, head of the Holocaust Educational Trust, said his remarks were “not only inaccurate, but irresponsible and deeply offensive”. But Labour suggested they were “justifiable” in view of the “brutal attacks on the Palestinian men, women and children of Gaza”. A spokesman said: “John takes pride in and stands by his track record… and will always stand up for the victims of such disproportionate violence.”
A spokesman for the Board of Deputies said Mr Mcdonnell’s claims were “wrong and irresponsible”, adding that Israel “is emphatically not seeking to kill all Palestinians… we call on Mr Mcdonnell to apologise for these serious lapses of judgment.”
It comes amid an ongoing row over Labour’s failure to deal with anti-semitism, after Jeremy Corbyn’s party failed to adopt in full an internationally recognised definition of hatred toward Jews.
It has also emerged that Mr Mcdonnell ignored pleas from Labour colleagues to boycott a meeting attended by Jackie Walker, a Labour activist suspended for alleged anti-semitism. He told the meeting in Brighton on Sept 12, 2016: “My response is to be here. Simple as that.” Four months earlier, Ms Walker had been placed under investigation for referring to Jews as the “chief financiers of the sugar and slave trade”.
In a Facebook post, she wrote “millions more Africans were killed in the African Holocaust” and the “Jewish Holocaust does not allow Zionists to do what they want”. At the meeting she said those accused of anti-semitism had a noose continuously dangling over them and that the allegations were designed to “undermine Jeremy”.
Two weeks later, Ms Walker was suspended a second time, after leaked footage showed her wrongly claiming that Holocaust Memorial Day did not include non-jewish victims. Momentum, the pro-corbyn campaign group, stripped her of her vice-chairmanship. A Labour spokesman, when approached for comment, said only that Ms Walker was “not suspended from the party at that time”.
The disclosures are likely to embarrass Mr Mcdonnell, who has tried to distance himself from the row, stating that the scale of anti-semitism had “shaken us to the core”.
Sources close to Jon Lansman, Momentum’s founder, told Jewish News he had been lobbying Labour to adopt the internationally recognised definition of anti-semitism.