“…we understand the injustice which underpins these protests… this Windrush Day, I want the message to go out, loud and clear: The Jewish community in Britain will be an ally to our black neighbours. We will make our own spaces more welcoming to black Jews and Jews of colour. We will stand with you in opposing racism.”
The author of these words condemned the “cold-blooded, racist murder of George Floyd” 
as well as the “systemic and widespread racism” the Windrush generation have faced. She was absolutely on point in saying: “The recent protests that started in America were born out of the fact that there is clear and systemic racism against black people.” She recognised the Black Lives Matter movement as “a response to racism, which saw black people being the particular targets of regular police brutality.”
This writer uneqivocally condemned those who say “all lives matter”, saying that it “detracts from black people’s concerns, and belittles their call for equality.” And she went considerably further, noting that many proponents of the “all lives matter” are “flirting or fully engaged with far-right ideology”.
I completely agree.
And that surprises me. Because up to now I have been very much at odds with the author of these words: Marie Van der Zyl, President of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, (in an article for the Jewish Chronicle). She wrote this, despite spending so much of 2018 and 2019 lambasting one of the politicians who for decades has long been at the forefront of challenging systemic racism and police brutality in Britain, who strongly condemned the injustices meted out to the Windrush Generation and warned of the alarming growth in the strength of racists and fascists in Europe and America. That politician was Jeremy Corbyn.
She still managed to include one specious dig at Jeremy Corbyn, but it was incidental to the thrust of her argument.
Since becoming Board President, Van der Zyl has constantly praised the Tory Party, especially its former leader Theresa May, the architect with David Cameron of the Hostile Environment which continues to cause so much suffering, including deportation to destitution and early death of Caribbean-born British citizens. Before deportation, those Windrush victims were often placed first in inhumane and humiliating detention centres, alongside wider groups of migrants many of whom fled to this country from persecution and torture.
Van der Zyl and Johnson
During that time Van der Zyl and her closest colleagues barely raised a whimper about the Tories’ open links and support through their (pre-Brexit) European alliance, the “Conservatives and Reformists Group”, for Islamophobic, antisemitic, anti-Roma and anti-refugee parties. These same Conservative MEPs’ joined with the most Far-Right parties in the European Parliament when they shamefully lent support to Orban in Hungary against attempted censure by the EU: Orban had used classic antisemitic conspiracy propaganda about George Soros as a key plank in his last election campaign. The Board expressed no criticism when, then Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson, warmly congratulated Orban on his election.
If we have indeed witnessed a major change of heart from Van der Zyl, and a significant change of positioning from the majority within the Board of Deputies, I absolutely welcome it, and urge progressive Jewish groups to do so too. We should build on it to strengthen the widest possible support across the Jewish community for the demands of Black Lives Matter, to challenge structural racism here – and elsewhere. I also welcome Van der Zyl’s serious commitment to addressing discrimination towards Jews of colour.
Back in the 1980s there were very sharp conflicts between the Jewish Socialists’ Group and the Board of Deputies. This was rooted in our insistence that our community should consciously regard itself as an ethnic minority (not simply a religious minority) and should identify itself much more openly and forthrightly with the struggles at that time of Caribbean and Asian minorities, and the small but growing numbers from other migrant and refugee communities, against harassment by fascists, and also against the daily racism and discrimination they suffered from employers, the mainstream press, and from several arms of the state. In that period, and since then, the Board of Deputies has been very protective of its close and uncritical relationship with the Police and the Home Office, to the dismay of activists within other minority groups. If that is going to change to a more challenging relationship, that is good and long overdue.
Van der Zyl’s reference to systemic racism in America is also significant, given that her predecessor as Board President, Jonathan Arkush, gave such a fawning and disgraceful welcome “on behalf of British Jews”, to that friend of white supremacism, Donald Trump, on his election victory in 2016.
So far so good. The range of Jewish individuals and groups who have been engaged with grassroots anti-racist campaigning, anti-deportation work, regardless of the Board’s indifference and disdain, definitely have something to work with. We don’t have to abandon our longstanding criticism, mistrust and frustrations regarding the Board of Deputies to recongnise this as a very positive development.
But I want to come back to Van der Zyl’s comments about those who are “flirting or fully engaged with far-right ideology”. Because, just two days before her welcome statements in the Jewish Chronicle, she was quoted making these remarks about the imminent appointment of a new Israeli ambassador to Britain
“We will be delighted to work with the next Israeli ambassador to sustain and advance the relationship between Israel and the UK Jewish community … We will give her whatever support and advice we can to achieve these ends.”
That appointee-in-waiting, Tzipi Hotovely, has gone well beyond the flirting or
Tzipi Hotovely
innocently fumbling stage with Far-Right ideology. She has been in a deep and meaningful relationship with it for several years, making openly racist statements about the Palestinian people (whose existence she denies), expressed her desire that the Israeli flag should fly over Al Aqsa mosque, and she is completely at one with the racist and fascist ideas of the most hard-line setters in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (which she calls Judea and Samaria.) In 2011 as chair of the Knesset Womens’ empowerment Committee, Hotovely, invited the notorious far right activist Benzi Gupstein to the Knesset. Several members of Gupstein’s Far Right group have been convicted for arson and other racist crimes, including assaults on Palestinian and African men suspected of “sullying the purity” of Jewish woman in his group’s words. Hotovely, herself, has condemned what she calls “miscegenation… when Jewish women marry Muslims”.
Marie Van der Zyl still has an opportunity to withdraw those comments and replace them with a statement about Hotovely’s appointment that would match her much braver, more principled words about challenging systemic racism in America and Britain. I hope she does.
Last Sunday, slave trader Edward Colston’s statue in Bristol was daubed with paint, pulled to the ground, jumped on by joyful protesters, rolled along to the harbour and dumped in the River Avon. The events caused quite a splash. As Colston sunk ignominiously to the bottom, what rose to the surface was a long overdue national debate about statues that grace or rather disgrace our towns and cities, and reinforce a dominant history.
I actually prefer monuments to collective struggle such as the colourful and moving Cable Street mural, where you can almost hear the figures shouting and screaming, or the artistic monument to Spanish Civil War volunteers in Jubilee Gardens, both of which celebrate those who challenged fascism. Or the mural on the bridge on Dudden Hill Lane round the corner to the Grunwick Film processing factory in Willesden, where a strike committee headed by Jayaben Desai led a courageous battle by mainly female Asian workers in the late 1970s against super-exploitative and inhumane employers.
rebel notes 
