Welcome back to Sputnik. The Right
Honorable Sir Gerald Kaufman, PCM MP,
has been in Parliament nearly 50 years,
but before that was a brilliant
journalist and an assistant in Downing
Street to the Labour Prime Minister
Harold Wilson. If Labour hadn't been out
of power so long, he would have been
foreign secretary. And what a difference
to the world that would have made.
Gerald Kaufman's relatives were murdered
in the Holocaust and he grew up an
ardent supporter of the state of Israel.
Now he is the clearest, most
authoritative voice against the crimes
committed by that state and for justice
for their victims. Last week in
parliament, he said it was time for
international sanctions against Israel
and spoke of the sea of misery in the
Gaza Strip. It's a privilege to have him
with us on the spotnick today. Sir
Gerald, your speeches always travel far.
They have such authority and such
clarity, but none more than the speech
you made on Gaza last week. You're no
stranger to Gaza. You've seen at
firsthand that sea of misery. Tell our
viewers about it.
I led a delegation
of
60
parliamentarians from 13 European
parliaments to Gaza not long ago.
It was a year after the attack by the
Israelis which failed as all Israeli
attacks now do though with huge loss of
life called co operation cast le a year
afterwards the smoke from the white
phosphorous bombardment by Israel was
still fuming away. People say rightly
that the Syrians use chemical weapons.
Nobody condemns the Israelis for using
chemical weapons. Well, I do. The uh
massive military destruction is of
course compounded by the economic
misery. The blockade means that no
meaningful economic activity can take
place there. the tunnels through which
some means of life uh were passing have
been destroyed uh on the Egyptian side
and I think you were describing in
parliament the condition of life of
those Palestinians who have survived
these military attacks. Tell us scarcely
any food is allowed to be brought in.
So everybody but particularly the young
people and the children are
undernourished which affects them so
much that it will go on to future
generations. They have hardly any fresh
water just for a few hours every five
days. So they're diseased in that way.
They have no fuel of their own which
means apart from anything else that a
great deal of the transport now is by
horse or donkey. There's hardly any
electric electrical power. Indeed, on a
recent summer, because there wasn't
enough electricity for air conditioning
in nearby Tel a Viv, they cut off the
electricity in the Gaza Strip and Qatar
had to intervene and see what it could
do, which wasn't enough. No building
materials are brought in so that the
schools that the Israelis destroyed in
some cases with children in them cannot
be rebuilt. Medical facilities are at
their minimum. If any other country on
earth was doing what the Israelis have
been doing to
1.7 million Palestinians in Gaza, there
will be United Nations resolutions.
There will be calls for an intervention.
There will be sanctions. But the
Israelis literally get away with murder.
I'll come back to sanctions in a minute.
Now, you're Jewish. Your family uh
suffered. Some perished in the
Holocaust, the greatest of all crimes,
uh which took place in the 20th century,
perhaps the greatest of all crimes ever.
And you grew up a supporter uh of the
state of Israel. What changed your mind?
As you say, George, I grew up a
supporter of the state of Israel. I I
was brought up as a Zionist. I went to
Israel again and again and again on
holiday. I had family there. I had
friends there. But as I traveled
around, because it's a small area, I
would see not just Israelis in Israel
living in huge comfort, subsidized by
the
Americans. I would see settlers in the
illegal settlements living in huge
comfort. And minutes away I will go to a
Palestinian township or village and see
sewage flowing through the streets.
And if you have any sense of justice at
all and as a Jewish child I was brought
up with a sense of justice. The
disparity is
unacceptable. And it's got worse. It's
got worse and worse and worse the whole
time. And the Israelis live in comfort.
I've gone through Tel a Viv and see them
sitting at their pavement cafes
complacently enjoying themselves while
hardly any distance away. The G people
in the Gaza Strip are living in total
misery. But don't let's forget the
people on the West Bank. They're living
in misery as well. Now, of course, it is
routine uh for Israeli propagandists to
pray in aid the suffering of the Jewish
people in the Holocaust. You reject that
as a cover, don't you? I reject it with
utter contempt and anger.
Most of my parents families because my
parents came here as
refugees. Most of my parents'
families were murdered in the
Holocaust. When the Germans came to the
town from which my mother came in
Poland, Stashoff, they lined up all the
Jews to march to the railway station to
be put in cattle wagons. But for those
who were not well enough to march, they
killed them on the spot. And they killed
my grandmother, who was ill in bed by
shooting her in her bed. My grandmother
did not die to provide cover for
Israelis murdering Palestinian
grandmothers. Well, it's hard to put it
any more uh powerfully than than that.
Uh let's turn to what can be done about
it. Uh there is of course a civil
movement of boycott and fight for
divestment and even individual sanction.
Uh but you went further in your speech
in parliament last week. You say it's
time for international official
governmental sanctions against Israel.
How would that work? The Israelis have a
very high first world standard of
living. That stand of living depends
partly on huge financial subsidies by
the United States under the supine
spineless Barack Obama and every
politician pretty well in the United
States yields to the Jewish pressure
groups and that's why they didn't do
anything about it even if they wanted to
do something about it.
The European Union is
inactive. The British government is
inactive. The prime
minister, David
Cameron,
described the Gaza Strip as a prison
camp. But it so happened that he said
that when he was visiting a Muslim
country, Turkey, and wanted to
ingratiate himself with his
hosts. Hardly anything is done, which is
why lots of people, including me, take
part in boycots. But the boycotts, while
important, are insufficiently effective.
What we need and what I press for and
will go on pressing for is
governments, the United Nations, the
European Union, the United States, our
own country to impose economic sanctions
so that the Israelis can feel what
international opinion means. There's no
point in condemning them. There's
certainly no point in appealing to their
better nature because they don't have a
better nation. You've got to make them
suffer cuz that's the only way they will
feel anything. And economic sanctions
would erode this huge first world
standard of living which they enjoy on
borrowed money. What you described
earlier was an apartheite system. I'm
one of the few people on the left who
was ever in apartheite South Africa. I
was there underground for the African
National Congress. And the situation you
described of the settlers living in
great comfort whilst the indigenous uh
uh owners of the land live in utter
misery. uh a partite was broken between
the hammer of the struggle of the
African people and the anvil of
international solidarity including
sanctions and uh boycott. Do you think
uh that such a move is going to have an
effect and if so when?
I too when I was shadow foreign
secretary visited South Africa under
partaid
uh as the guest of the South African
Council of Churches and I was followed
everywhere by South African secret
police that there is a huge difference
between the aparate that the Israelis
are inflicting on the Palestinians and
the loathsome and odious
apartate that existed in South Africa.
There were distances, considerable
distances between Johannesburg, Cape
Town, Durban and the South African uh
the African uh
townships in
Palestine. It's minutes minutes between
the settlements or between Israel behind
the 67 borders and the hell that they've
created in Gaza and on the West Bank. So
it's worse. It's worse even than the
foul actions of the South African
aparted
government. You've got to make these
people feel it. I'm not optimistic, but
I'm realistic. Nobody ever
expected the Soviet Union to collapse in
the way that it did, but it happened.
Nobody ever expected a part in South
Africa to collapse in the way that it
did, but it happened. The Israelis are
stupid to imagine that just because
they've got the fourth largest arms
forces in the world, they can go on like
this. I learned Greek at school and
there was there's a phrase in the
historian
youthidities which says panta ray and
that means everything flows. The
Israelis are barmy complacent and
self-defeating to imagine that they can
go on forever as they're going now. So
John Kaufman a privilege to talk to you.
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