I am profoundly grateful to the many friends, comrades and countless supporters who sprang to my defence. On October 30, the Labour Party’s Governance and Legal Unit … succumbed to mounting protest within the party and beyond, and hurriedly wriggled out of the hole into which it had dug itself. It rescinded my expulsion, but it did so petulantly and with bad grace.

The background to my summary and arbitrary expulsion from the Labour Party is that the right-wingers and their Zionist allies, within the party and beyond, are losing it.

“Gaza wants to live. Its call for life will, ultimately, be honored. The Book of Gaza is a good place to connect with its vigorously human voice.”

The June 1967 six-day war was in fact three wars rolled into one. In quick succession, Israel defeated Egypt and Jordan and then, as an apparent afterthought, it turned against Syria. But appearances can be very deceptive; history unfolds in a paradoxical way.

Rashid Khalidi reviews the US-Israel relationship in connection with the 50th anniversary of the June 1967 War, including earlier steps leading to the creation of Israel — the Balfour Declaration and the 1947 UN General Assembly Resolution 181 — and then evaluates future prospects for change.

The Nakba, central to Palestinian nationhood as much as the Holocaust is for Jews and slavery is for African-Americans, is the living reminder of the profound injustice inflicted upon the Palestinians.

On the 50th anniversary of the Six-Day War Moshé Machover looks at the background and consequences.

The expansion of Jewish settlements has followed a consistent pattern for about 100 years – the replacement of Palestinians by Jews. The new U.S. president provides a historical opportunity to accelerate the process.

 In plotting a decidedly lopsided “one-state solution,” Trump and Netanyahu are following an old and exclusionary script:  once again, the future of Palestine is being decided behind the back of the Palestinians. Once again, they have been made invisible.

Zionist expansionism can rely on promising precedents: in addition to the original 1947-49 nakba, there is also the case of the Syrian Golan Heights… Israel took the simpler route of ethnically cleansing most of the Golan’s inhabitants in 1967, before annexing it officially in 1981… [A]lthough no country has formally recognised the annexation and accepted the ethnic cleansing, the world has got used to regarding the Golan Heights as part of Israel, and the line separating it from the rest of Syria is usually referred to in the media as Israel’s border with Syria.

Whereas America’s solicitous concern for Israel and its disregard for the Palestinians were once cloaked behind evenhandedness, under Trump we are set to see a more complete convergence between America’s political leadership and the most chauvinistic, religious, and right-wing government in Israel’s history. It will be this Israeli government and its new American soul mates who will call the tune in Palestine for at least the next several years.

Is there a Hebrew nation and how should it be defined? Moshé Machover proposes a strategy envisaging the defeat of Zionism

In view of its multiple anomalies, the conflict created by Zionist colonization defies appeal to precedent: there simply is none that can usefully be invoked as to its evolution and eventual resolution.

You cannot explain why Israel is continuing with a [colonization] policy that is not winning it any friends without mentioning Zionism. On the contrary, I think what we should do is not apologize… but instead go onto the offensive and be aggressive: directly attack Zionism. And you can also attack Zionism precisely because of its collusion and collaboration with anti-Semitism.

What is Zionism? What is the meaning of the claim that Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish people? Is the BDS campaign anti-Semitic? Moshé Machover in an interview with the Croatian website Slobodni Filozofski — “Zionism is what it has been from its beginning, more than 100 years ago: in its essence it is a political project, the project of colonizing Palestine by Jews and turning it into a nation-state with an overwhelming Jewish majority. Israel is both a product of this project and an instrument for its further continuation.”

Jeff Halper’s new book is a must-read, a major contribution to the subject. I cannot recommend it too highly. It is a devastatingly effective antidote to the silly ‘Israeli tail wags American dog’ theories, according to which the US slavishly supports and protects Israel, although this damages true American ‘national interests’.

Nobody can deny that the American pro-Israeli lobby has immense political influence in the United States – it is an observable fact. The question is, why is it allowed to have this influence? Is it beyond the power of the real engines of American capitalism to mobilize, if they wanted to, enough funds to counteract this lobby?