Israel loses its leading British MP
Asa Winstanley, Electronic Intifada, Sep 18 2019
Ryan at AIPAC, Mar 2019. Photo: Sussex Friends of Israel
A leading Israel lobbyist in the British Parliament will step down at the next general election, expected within months. Joan Ryan, long-time chair of the Israeli embassy front group Labour Friends of Israel, announced her imminent departure on Monday. Ryan’s decision comes after months of retreat by Labour Friends of Israel, and a year long struggle to oust her by her local Labour Party. Making her announcement on Twitter, Ryan claimed that she had “always intended to serve only one more term in Parliament.” But this seems to simply be an attempt to save face. Her prospects of winning her seat back in the next election are slim after she quit Labour earlier this year.
A year ago, Ryan’s local Labour Party narrowly voted no-confidence in her. Far from announcing she would step down at the next election, Ryan refused to quit. She took to Twitter to make clear, “I will not be resigning.” She angrily denounced her opponents as “Trots,” “Stalinists” and “Communists.” A few months later, Ryan quit Labour to join a new breakaway party. The party, the Independent Group for Change, was funded by David Garrard, a major UK donor to the Israel lobby. She accused Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn of fomenting a “culture of anti-Jewish racism and hatred for Israel.” Ryan made herself unpopular with local constituents and activists for a variety of reasons. An adamant opponent of Corbyn, she tried openly to sabotage her own party’s prospects in the 2017 general election. Ryan sent letters to voters claiming:
I know from speaking to people around here that many who have previously voted Labour are thinking hard this time because, they tell me, they have more confidence in Theresa May as prime minister than they would have in Jeremy Corbyn.
Enfield Labour members lodged a complaint against her for disloyalty. Her staunch advocacy for Israel, a racist, human-rights-abusing state, also made her deeply unpopular among grassroots Labour activists. Until last month, Ryan was parliamentary chair of Labour Friends of Israel. She was replaced by Louise Ellman, another staunchly anti-Palestinian MP. However, in a statement, LFI said Ryan would continue her work with the group as its “honorary president.” Earlier this year, she represented LFI at AIPAC. Ryan received a standing ovation at the conference where she declared:
I am proud to be a Zionist. Over the past four years, Britain’s Labour Party, of which I’ve been a member for 40 years, has been transformed. Once a close friend of Israel and an unwavering ally of British Jews, it has been taken over by the far left.
She warned her American audience, “things can change quickly” and urged them to “condemn anti-semitism and anti-Zionism unequivocally.” Ryan was caught on camera in 2017’s undercover Al Jazeera documentary The Lobby discussing “names that we put into the embassy” with Israeli undercover agent Shai Masot:
Masot was expelled from the UK as a result of the film’s revelations. Masot told Ryan that he had received “more than £1m” in funding for propaganda trips to Israel. Labour Friends of Israel is known for junketing MPs to the country but, earlier this year, after renewed interest in Al Jazeera’s film, the group denied this. Labour Friends of Israel claimed the conversation between Ryan and Masot “was about a visit for young people” and had been “openly” advertised by the embassy. The 2017 film also caught Ryan red-handed fabricating anti-Semitism accusations. Since Ryan quit Labour, and with an election looming, local members have been considering her replacement.
https://twitter.com/edwardpoole1975/status/1173277646656028674
Several activists in Enfield have put their names forward as potential Labour candidates. These include housing rights and union activist Delia Mattis, a strong Corbyn supporter. Other left-wingers in the running are Ed Poole and Maria Kyriacou. However, recent reports suggest that a democratic selection process for Labour candidates may be blocked. Labour List reported last week that the process had been “paused with immediate effect.” A source in Labour’s ruling national executive told the website that they were “keen to restart selections” as soon as possible. Momentum, the Labour faction led by Jon Lansman, caused controversy earlier this month by announcing that its national coordinator Laura Parker was seeking to be the Enfield North candidate. Parker belongs to a different local Labour Party. The faction’s local affiliate, Momentum Enfield, accused Momentum’s national leadership of having Parker “parachuted into a seat over the heads of local members and activists.” Momentum leader Lansman’s reputation is that of a leading Corbyn ally. However, as The Electronic Intifada revealed this month, activists have said that Lansman had suggested privately that Corbyn be replaced as early as 2016.
Lansman wanted Corbyn removed
Asa Winstanley, Electronic Intifada, Sep 6 2019
Lansman at Labour conference 2018. Photo: Joel Goodman/Zuma
Jon Lansman, a prominent figure in the UK Labour Party, advocated that Jeremy Corbyn be removed as party leader three years ago. The revelation challenges Lansman’s reputation as a key Corbyn supporter. In 2016, Lansman told Labour activist Graham Bash that the left would be much better served if Corbyn was replaced by John McDonnell, the shadow finance minister. Bash recounted his conversation with Lansman to The Electronic Intifada. Two other veteran Labour left-wingers, who once had good relations with Lansman, told The Electronic Intifada similar stories, on condition of anonymity. One said that in 2015, Lansman had expressed to them a wish that McDonnell had contested that year’s leadership election and won instead of Corbyn. But Bash was clear that when speaking to him, Lansman had been “much more active than that,” and was pushing for Corbyn’s exit. Asked via email to comment on why he had privately advocated for Corbyn to be replaced with McDonnell, Jon Lansman replied:
This is not true. I back Jeremy 100%.
He did not address the specifics of Bash’s account that were put to him. He did not reply when asked in a follow-up if he was denying that the phone call with Bash ever took place. Asked about the 2016 conversation, a Labour spox said Jeremy Corbyn had had no knowledge of it before now. A spox for McDonnell declined to comment. Active in the campaign to elect Corbyn as head of the UK’s main opposition party, Lansman later became chair of Momentum, the left-wing group established amid the wave of popular support for Corbyn. Lansman now sits on Labour’s ruling national executive. Bash is an executive member of the Labour Representation Committee, a left-wing group that boasts shadow finance minister John McDonnell as president. Bash said of his 2016 discussion with Lansman:
I felt this talk was extremely dangerous.
Bash asked Lansman if he’d spoken to John McDonnell about taking over as leader. Bash recounted Lansman’s reply:
John told me to fuck off.
Bash said he’d politely told Lansman to follow McDonnell’s advice. Bash said that he was only speaking out now because Lansman “has supported the witch-hunt of many on the left.” Lansman is hostile toward Jewish Voice for Labour, which defends Palestinian rights.
In an email exchange with the group, Lansman wrote:
Neither the vast majority of individual members of JVL nor the organization itself can be said to be part of the Jewish community.
He also suggested that Jewish Voice for Labour was “part of the problem,” implying that the group was anti-Semitic. Lansman has an ambivalent attitude towards Israel and Zionism. While he has made some comments critical of Israel, he has spoken with disdain about anti-Zionist Jews, failed to defend Corbyn from “Labour anti-Semitism crisis” smears and repeatedly called for prominent Labour figures falsely accused of anti-Semitism to step down, or be expelled. Lansman has suggested that it is anti-Semitic for the left to even use the term “Zionism” unless praising the ideology. A source in Westminster told The Electronic Intifada that Corbyn is privately so angry with Lansman that he is no longer welcome in the party leader’s office. A Labour spox denied this, saying Lansman had visited the office “regularly” as recently as the summer. Lansman also denied it saying:
I’ve been to the leader’s office more than once this week.
Corporate media outlets hostile to Corbyn have for years attempted to stoke talk of divisions between the Labour leader and John McDonnell, probably Corbyn’s closest political ally. Because of that, Bash says, he had not revealed Lansman’s words to “anyone other than the closest comrades” until now. Bash recalled that his phone conversation with Lansman took place in 2016, months after Corbyn was elected leader in 2015, but well before the coup attempt against his leadership in Jun 2016. On Jun 24 that year, right-wing Labour MPs led by Labour Friends of Israel supporter Margaret Hodge launched an attempt to replace Corbyn as leader. The attempted ouster led to a leadership challenge by right-wing Labour MP Owen Smith. The challenge failed. Corbyn won the leadership election with an increased majority of member votes that September. Hodge’s plan had been in the works since at least May of that year. Lansman appears to have been thinking along similar lines around the same time. Outrage among right-wing Labour MPs against Corbyn that summer often focused on Brexit. Hodge was more interested in helping manufacture an anti-Semitism “crisis” against Corbyn, some press reports indicate. Bash recalls:
Lansman didn’t raise any specific problem he had with Corbyn, but he saidJeremy wasn’t being specific enough, clear enough, sharp enough, and that he didn’t think that he was very effective.
Accounts of how Corbyn was first successfully elected leader in Sep 2015 often mention how McDonnell and Lansman took turns standing outside Labour’s offices in Parliament to pressure MPs to nominate Corbyn. Hardly any Labour MPs supported Corbyn’s socialist, internationalist politics. But grassroots pressure persuaded just enough of them to “lend” Corbyn their votes, on the basis that it would be a more balanced leadership election, giving the membership the widest possible options. Corbyn has long opposed injustice in Palestine. He has worked closely with such groups as the Palestine Solidarity Campaign and the Palestinian Return Centre, which calls for Palestinian refugees to be allowed to return to lands from which they were expelled in 1948. At the start of the summer of 2015, few expected Corbyn to win. He was initially running to make a political point and push Labour’s left into the debate over party policy. One source previously close to Lansman told The Electronic Intifada that Lansman wanted to use the election campaign as a “stepping stone” to reinvigorate the Labour left, even if Corbyn lost. By the spring of 2016, his supposed ally was having doubts about Corbyn as leader. It became clear during the coup attempt led by Margaret Hodge that summer that the Labour membership, which overwhelmingly backed Corbyn, would not stand for it. Despite Lansman’s private misgivings, Momentum strongly supported Corbyn during the failed coup.
Niqnaq 