PSC national secretary removes elected officers from posts pending ‘investigation’
The Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) has suspended four officers of its Manchester branch for statements supporting the right of Palestinians to resist Israeli occupation, according to new revelations by Electronic Intifada‘s Asa Winstanley.
The suspension came around two weeks after Manchester PSC displayed a banner supporting Palestinian resistance at a pro-Palestine march and posted an article to its website supporting Palestinian ‘freedom fighters’ in their action against Israel. Manchester is reportedly one of the group’s most active branches.
Israel has killed as many as ten thousand Gazan civilians in four weeks since the attack, around half of them children – and children are now being killed at a horrific rate of around four hundred a day, according to UNICEF.
Right-wing groups and publications attacked PSC Manchester’s support for Palestinian resistance and the criticism appears to have spooked PSC national’s leadership, as national secretary Ben Soffa emailed the Manchester officers, each individually, notifying them of their suspension and telling them that they “must therefore cease from taking actions in the name of your PSC branch whilst your membership remains suspended”, because the earlier posts may “exhibit hateful or discriminatory behaviour, or significantly undermine PSC’s ability to function as a welcoming and inclusive organisation“.
The posts are eerily reminiscent of the Labour regime’s Orwellian suspension letters telling anti-racists they are suspended or expelled because their actions supposedly compromise the party’s ‘ability to fight racism’. PSC also published a post to its website declaring the Manchester branch’s statements as ‘unacceptable’ – and then one declaring that the branch may have endorsed “deliberate killing of civilians [and] hostage taking.”
The move to disown and suspend the Manchester officers is also reminiscent of the Corbyn Labour party’s error in attempting to mollify pro-Israel groups, despite advice that complaints and criticisms were not being made in good faith and that concessions and moves to suspend members would only validate the bad-faith campaign – advice that was proven to be right by several subsequent documentaries and the findings of the Starmer-commissioned (and then ignored) Forde inquiry – as well as by Winstanley’s forensic book.
As Winstanley notes, the reality of events in Israel on 7 October may be at severe variance with the ‘atrocity propaganda’ that continues to be pushed about them, particularly when Israeli survivors of the day have told their own media that they were well treated by the Hamas fighters and that many and perhaps most deaths were caused by IDF bullets – and that doctors and bereaved families have expressed alarm at the Israeli government’s haste to bury the bodies of those killed even when they have not yet been identified:
Winstanley writes:
But what really happened on 7 October is hotly contested. Hamas itself has denied targeting civilians, and some Israeli survivors of that day have insisted that many of the civilians died at the hands of Israeli forces.
Until Israel allows an independent international investigation, we are unlikely to learn the full truth. But it may already be too late for that – Israel appears to be literally burying the evidence.
Ben Soffa still works for Labour as the party’s head of “digital organising”, despite Keir Starmer’s persistent refusal to condemn Israel’s mass killing of civilians or even to call for a ceasefire. According to Winstanley, Soffa refused to say whether Palestinians have a right to armed resistance – a right protected under international law – or to say whether, in his role with Labour, he works with Assaf Kaplan, the former Israeli cyberspy with ‘Unit 8200’, the Israeli anti-Palestinian electronic surveillance unit whose operatives reportedly marked their headsets with an ‘x’ for every Palestinian they had helped kill. Instead, Soffa responded:
That is something that I’m not going to comment on.
PSC national commented that targeting civilians is against international law but eventually conceded that it “fully recognises the rights of oppressed and occupied people to resist, including through the use of armed resistance within the framework of international law.” It did not confirm whether it accepts the Israeli government’s account of what happened on 7 October or comment on Soffa’s refusal to say whether he works with Kaplan in his Labour duties.
The above details have been shared at the invitation of the original author. Follow Asa Winstanley’s substack here.
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