Tony Greenstein

Tony Greenstein       (activist, author, blogger)
Residence	Brighton,  UK
Alma mater	Brighton Polytechnic

Tony Greenstein is a Jewish anti-Zionist and a founding member of Palestine Solidarity Campaign and Jews for Boycotting Israeli Goods. He is a long-standing anti-fascist activist and author of "The Fight Against Fascism in Brighton and the South Coast".

Comparing Israel to Nazi Germany

On Friday 4 October 2024, Tony Greenstein was arrested after addressing about 100 people demonstrating outside the residence of Israeli Ambassador, Tzipi Hotovely. Greenstein posted on his blog:

"I was the last of the 4 speakers. I made it clear that the genocide and ethnic cleansing, the bombing of hospitals, universities, schools, tent encampments as well as the starvation blockade reminded me of nothing so much as the behaviour of Nazi Germany. I could have added that it bore a distinct resemblance to the behaviour of the British Empire in India, Kenya and many other of our colonies but since Israel claims to inherit the memory of the Jewish holocaust dead it was appropriate to confine my remarks to the holocaust.

"I also repeated the phrase that I had used at the Palestine Expo five years ago, which the Jewish Chronicle had highlighted, namely that Today most people with a streak of moral fibre would agree that I was prescient. Not so the Police. They were on the look out for any speech that their political masters considered ‘anti-Semitic’ using the bogus IHRA definition of anti-Semitism which gives as an illustration of ‘anti-Semitism’

"‘Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis’."

Publications

Tony Greenstein has written for many publications including The Guardian's "Comment is Free", the Brighton Argus and Brighton and Hove Independent, Tribune, Labour Briefing and Weekly Worker. He also contributed the section of "Zionism" to Hodder & Stoughton's "The Essentials of Philosophy & Ethics" (2006) and most recently to the "Anti-Semitism Wars" (ed. Karl Sabbagh) on the Zionist anti-Semitism campaign in the Labour Party. He is a well known blogger and is currently working on a book "Zionism During the Holocaust".

Trade Unionist

Tony Greenstein is also an active trade unionist and a member of Brighton & Hove Trades Council, UNITE and UNISON.

RIP Desmond Tutu

Archbishop Desmond Tutu slams Israeli activities towards Palestinians

The Guardian should hang its head in shame

On 27 December 2021, Tony Greenstein wrote a letter to The Guardian:

Dear Sir/Madam,

Your obituary for Desmond Tutu says more about The Guardian than it does about its subject.

Unlike The Guardian, Keir Starmer and other White Liberals, Desmond Tutu was an opponent of Apartheid in all its forms. He wasn't selective in his indignation.

In his "Apartheid in the Holy Land" nearly 20 years ago, Tutu compared "the humiliation of the Palestinians at checkpoints and roadblocks" to the experience of Black people in South Africa.

Tutu described how his host Canon Naim Ateek pointed to what was his home and said:

"Our home was over there. We were driven out of our home; it is now occupied by Israeli Jews." He noted how "the Israeli Government is placed on a pedestal (in the US), and to criticise it is to be immediately dubbed antisemitic."

Clearly such comments present a dilemma to The Guardian which spent the past six years demonising anti-racists as anti-Semitic because of their support for the Palestinians. Tutu described Israeli Apartheid as worse than that in South Africa. At least South Africa's military did not bomb the townships from the air.

Why did The Guardian refuse to mention Tutu's long and consistent campaign against Israeli Apartheid? What is more deceitful than tampering with the historical method in order to avoid confronting the truth about The Guardian's support for present day Apartheid? The article that Tutu wrote for The Guardian in 2002 would not be published today because Jonathan Freedland would term it "anti-Semitic."

Even more scandalously, a comment by Professor David Mond expressing disappointment at this politically motivated omission from Tutu's obituary was itself removed. It did not fit with your "community standards." Perhaps you would tell your readers which community it is that turns a blind eye to the ongoing racism and apartheid that Tutu spent his life fighting.

The Guardian should hang its head in shame for this petty act of censorship. What is it that makes you so afraid of publishing the truth?

Tony Greenstein

 

Documents by Tony Greenstein

Title	Document type	Publication date	Subject(s)	Description
Document:Guardian’s Zionist gatekeeper rewrites Holocaust history	Article	22 August 2024	Zionism "The Holocaust" Jonathan Freedland Adolf Eichmann Rudolf Vrba Alfréd Wetzler Rezső Kasztner	A leading protagonist in the false anti-Semitism campaign in the Labour Party between 2015 and 2019, Jonathan Freedland's choice of a non-Zionist Jewish Holocaust hero as the subject of a book is therefore curious to say the least. It appears that Freedland’s motive was in order to both justify Rudolf Vrba’s silencing by Zionism’s Holocaust historians and obscure his message that Zionism was a quisling Jewish movement during the Holocaust.
Document:Manufacturing consent on "antisemitism"	article	20 October 2016	"Antisemitism" Zionism Labour Party Home Affairs Select Committee Jeremy Corbyn Christian Zionism John Mann Ruth Smeeth Chuka Umunna	Jeremy Corbyn's Labour party is the target throughout this ill-conceived, politically tendentious and risible Home Affairs Select Committee report entitled "Antisemitism in the UK". The presumption of innocence has been abandoned by lawyer Chuka Umunna and his Tory friends.

 

Related Documents

Title	Type	Publication date	Author(s)	Description
Document:Jonathan Freedland rewrites history to hide an ugly truth about Israel	blog post	25 August 2024	Jonathan Cook	The anti-Zionist Rudolf Vrba's story exposes the ideological foundations of Israel to be fully in sympathy with ugly European ethic nationalisms that culminated in Nazism. Vrba's story explains how Israel was always capable of, and is now committing, a genocide in Gaza.
Document:We condemn the suspension of Jo Bird and the appointment of Lord Falconer	Article	4 March 2019	Admin	As Ken Loach said: “If it looks like a witch hunt and behaves like a witch hunt – it may well be just that. This is intolerable and must end now.”

Many thanks to our Patrons who cover ~2/3 of our hosting bill. Please join them if you can.