Thread by @AsaWinstanley

Here's @OwenJones84, yet again, fuelling Labour's McCarthyist purge of socialists and Palestine solidarity activists.

Owen Jones is a willing lackey of the Israel lobby. Thread: 🧵👇

Owen Jones -- as usual -- wants to have it both ways. He claims not to "support" expulsion of @KenLoachSixteen, yet in the same breath implies expulsion was correct -- because a play he directed in 1987 expressed Forbidden Criticism of Zionism (Israel's racist official ideology).

Owen Jones even has the chutzpah to imply @KenLoachSixteen -- who was a socialist when Jones was still in nappies -- is not really even "someone on the left"!

Owen Jones' manages to combine disgusting McCarthyism with pathetic hand wringing about a fictionalised play -- based on well-documented historical facts -- supposedly being "distressing to Jewish people".

But this is an anti-Jewish conflation: what he really means is "distressing to Israel and Zionists".

Jim Allen and @KenLoachSixteen's 1987 play "Perdition" was based on a real-life 1954 event in Israel, the Gruenwald-Katzsner libel trial.

Gruenwald -- a Hungarian refugee who had lost 50 family members in the Holocaust -- had accused Labor Zionist leader Rezso Katzner of what he described as "collaboration with the Nazis".

The court found Gruenwald not guilty of libel. And what the hearings uncovered was shocking:

After the 1944 Nazi invasion of Hungary, the Labor Zionist leadership worked with the Nazis to keep calm in the Jewish community, assuring them they would be safe.

This was a lie, and the majority were expelled and exterminated in the death camps -- almost 500,000 people.

In exchange, Kazsner and the Zionist leadership made an agreement with pro-Zionist SS officer and key Holocaust perpetrator Adolf Eichmann to allow him to escape to the settler-colony in Palestine along with his friends, family and what he termed "the true Jewry".

The Gruenwald-Katzsner libel trial verdict was overturned by Israel's high court in 1958 -- but only after Katzsner was assassinated by a Shin Bet agent in 1957.

You can read all about this in Lenni Brenner's book "Zionism in the Age of the Dictators" (see images).

Or see Tom Segev's "The Seventh Million" for a pro-Labor-Zionist account. There is also Ben Hecht's "Perfidy" (a rare book, but there is a PDF online).

Hecht was a right-wing Zionist so also has his own biases, but his book includes extensive transcripts from the trial.

As is well known, Brenner is an anti-Zionist and Trotskyist.