Police believed to have used anti-terror laws against academic in his seventies
Jewish Israeli historian Prof Haim Bresheeth has been arrested tonight during the weekly anti-genocide protest outside the Camden residence of far-right Israeli ambassador Tzipi Hotovely.
Prof Bresheeth, a well-known academic and left-wing activist, was taken into custody in Charing Cross police station. Friends and comrades, who believe police used anti-terror legislation as their pretext for the arrest, say they have been unable to contact him or check on his welfare.
Bresheeth described himself, in a letter addressing his persecution by the Labour party during the antisemitism smear campaign, as:
an academic, author and filmmaker, an ex-Israeli Jew who has been active for over five decades as a socialist, anti-Zionist and anti-racist activist. My parents were Polish Jews, survivors of Auschwitz and other camps. They ended forced onto death marches to the Third Reich after the Auschwitz camp was vacated by the SS in Mid-January 1945. My mother was freed by the British forces in Bergen-Belsen, and my father was freed by the US forces in Mauthausen. I was born in a Displaced Persons Camp in Italy, and arrived in Israel as a baby, during June 1948, as no European country would then accept Holocaust survivors.
I served in the Israeli Army (IDF) as a junior infantry officer, and took part in two wars, in 1967 and 1973, after which I turned into a committed pacifist. I came to study in Britain in 1972, and a short while afterwards I have learnt much about Zionism which I did not while in Israel, thus becoming an ardent supporter of Palestinian rights, and an anti-Zionist activist. I was an active supporter of the Anti-Apartheid Movement as a Labour member in the 1970s and acted against racist organisations throughout my life. My films, books and articles reflect the same political views outlined here; these include a popular book on the Holocaust (Introduction to the Holocaust, with Stuart Hood, 1994, 2001 2014), among others, a BBC documentary film (State of Danger, with Jenny Morgan, BBC2, March 1988) about the first Intifada, and a forthcoming volume on the Israeli Army (An Army Like No Other, May 2020) . I have re-joined the Labour Party after decades, when Jeremy Corbyn was elected to the leadership, as I regained hope in promoting a progressive agenda for the party, after years of Blairism.
Skwawkbox has contacted the Met Police for a welfare check on Prof Bresheeth and to try to obtain the supposed reasons for the arrest. Updates will follow when available.
Update: Prof Bresheeth was released without charge this morning (2 Nov). The Met Police has not yet responded to Skwawkbox’s query about the reason for his arrest.
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Off topic:
From Turn Left:
Labour Keeps Awful Tory Welfare Policies
Meanwhile the luxurious upper class welfare state flourishes with over 1,000 tax handouts for the rich & big business with the latter getting over £93b a year & tax avoidance by the rich is £40b a year.
There are 3,000 civil servants pursuing benefit fraud and 350 chasing tax avoidance by the rich.
The Tories & now Right Wing Labour set neighbour v neighbour re welfare to distract from upper class welfare state luxury and sadly some fall for it as the rich are distant from most peoples lives.
Labour lacks the bottle to counter the dominant right wing narrative on welfare, reinforced by the right wing media, and also lacks the political acumen to.
We need decent social security for all, see The Social Security Commission, and should enable Disabled people to have enough to live on and to live fulfilling lives which doesn’t necessarily mean employment.
The main two parties are all the same & we need a new Left Party which puts diverse working class people first and what benefits Disabled people benefits all.
Re. Haim Bresheeth-Zabner, he is an extremely influential Jewish anti-Zionist, who – for that reason – is a target for aggressive Zionists, the majority of whom are neither observant-Jews nor Jewish at all.
That the British state promotes and protects Zionism, a racist, anti-democratic ideology, is shameful, wicked, and hardly surprising given the economic benefits we obtained from our own system of global Settler-Colonialism in history.
Here is versobooks’ introduction to Bresheeth-Zabner’s best-known work. It’s well-worth reading as a short overview. The 14 Reviews on the site are useful reading too. https://www.versobooks.com/products/950-an-army-like-no-other
I have just looked up his book “An army like no other” and it sounds fascinating:
“the Israel Defence Forces (IDF), was established in 1948 by David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, who believed that ‘the whole nation is the army’. In his mind, the IDF was to be an army like no other. It was the instrument that might transform a diverse population into a new people… [and became] the nursery of its social, economic and political ruling class…
the army is embedded in all aspects of daily life and identity… the central ideological, political and financial institution of Israeli society”
It’s ironic Dave, I remember my great grannie praising Ben-Gurion for supposedly being an committed socialist who worked with labour groups and unions to help form Mapai, “the workers party of the land of Israel”. Fine socialist Albert Einstein was reportedly asked by Ben-Gurion to be the second President of Israel. I think that’s what duped my grannie into thinking DBG was really a good socialist (like Alert Einstein). Ben Gurion was a Starmer-like con-man and was, reportedly “relieved” when Einstein said no.