Derek Seidman
Truthout / November 23, 2024
Activist Haim Bresheeth, the son of Holocaust survivors and founder of the Jewish Network for Palestine, speaks out.
On November 1, author and activist Haim Bresheeth was arrested in London after giving a speech at a pro-Palestine rally outside the home of Tzipi Hotovely, the Israeli ambassador to the United Kingdom. The 79-year-old Bresheeth, a Jewish Israeli who has lived mostly in London since the 1970s, is an outspoken critic of Zionism and Israel and a supporter of Palestinian rights. He is the son of Holocaust survivors and a founder of the Jewish Network for Palestine.
In his speech, Bresheeth said Israel is unable to win against Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis. According to Bresheeth, the police told him he was being arrested under Section 12 of the Terrorism Act 2000, which forbids expressing support for proscribed organizations stated in the law. Bresheeth denies breaking any law, and, he says, was released the morning after his arrest and subsequently had his case closed without charge.
Bresheeth’s arrest joins a rising wave of persecution against pro-Palestinian protesters and journalists in the U.K. Since October 7, British authorities have used the Terrorism Act 2000 invoked during Bresheeth’s arrest to crack down on critics of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza. The law is the cornerstone of British counterterrorism legislation, and has been criticized by Amnesty International as contributing to an “ever-expanding security state in the UK” that “appears to single out Muslims,” with vague and expanding definitions of what constitutes “terrorist activity.”
Bresheeth is a filmmaker, photographer, historian and retired professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). His books include An Army Like No Other: How the Israel Defense Forces Made a Nation and The Holocaust for Beginners. Truthout spoke to Bresheeth to get his account of his arrest, the growing repression of critics of Israel in the U.K., and why, as an Israeli Jewish son of Holocaust survivors, he feels compelled to speak out against Zionism and in support of Palestine.
Derek Seidman: What’s the background behind the protest you were arrested at ?
Haim Bresheeth: In an interview after October 7, the Israeli ambassador to Britain, Tzipi Hotovely, said Israel might have to kill 600,000 civilians in Gaza, like the United States and the U.K. did in Germany at the end of the Second World War.
I am one of the founders of Jewish Network for Palestine, an anti-Zionist organization arguing for one state in Palestine with equal rights for all, and an end of apartheid and Zionism. Together with the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network, we have called for the expulsion of Hotovely from the U.K., which is not a big punishment for what she said. She should actually be in the International Criminal Court for advocating genocide.
After her comments, we started weekly protests on the other side of the road outside her residence. We protested every Friday evening for the Shabbat, and the protests gradually grew. The police then moved us to a main road that actually made the protest more visible. This has been going on for just over a year.
There are very large national demonstrations for Palestine happening every week. Tory Home Secretary Suella Braverman called them “hate marches” and asked the police to not allow them. But they were never stopped.
I’ve spoken at these demonstrations a number of times. There was no problem until about seven weeks ago, when a dear friend and a colleague from Jewish Network for Palestine, Tony Greenstein, a well-known activist in Britain, was arrested for saying something that the police called hate speech. [Note: Greenstein’s speech compared Israel’s actions in Gaza to the Nazis.]
Tony was released the next day. He is not allowed to come to the demonstration now because the bail conditions specified that. So we knew that they were on to us and that they are going to limit what we can say.
Can you discuss your arrest ?
I was arrested on Friday evening, November 1, because I said that it’s clear that, despite the fact that Israel has won wars against large and strong state armies, it seems unable to win against Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis. That is the sum total of what I said.
I was stopped by the police at the end of the demonstration and they told me that I was being arrested for hate speech. I told them I didn’t utter hate speech, nor did anyone else at the demonstration.
There were a lot of phone calls and arguments. After about 45 minutes, their story changed from hate speech to that they were moving to charge me under the Terrorism Act 2000, Section 12, which forbids expressing support for proscribed organizations. The policeman that arrested me told me that it all came from on high.
They kept me waiting under duress in a car park for a few hours. In the end, they brought me to the station.
What happened after they took you to the station ?
They took my telephone and they put me into a filthy cell. There was a plastic sheet on the floor where you’re supposed to sit or lie down. I’m 79 and I suffer from heart disease and cancer and can’t easily get up from the floor.
I asked for my medications. Somebody went to my home and collected the medications from my wife, but they didn’t give them to me when I needed to take them at 8:00 in the evening. At 1:00 am, I insisted that I needed to get my medication, and after an hour, they allowed me to take them.
So it wasn’t fun. In the end, two people from the Terror Squad interviewed me for about an hour and a half. I gave my statement that said, in very great detail, why what I’ve done is totally normal, because I’m reporting facts. You can read it in the New York Times or Haaretz. I said that I have been a peace activist all my life, and claimed that they don’t have a case.
It was clear they had nothing to charge me on. After almost two hours of questioning, I told them I’m not going to say anything anymore.
After all this, they said they were not charging me today, and that they were passing my case to the Crown Prosecution Service. They tried to keep my phone, but I told them they couldn’t. I have daily cancer treatments and the only way I am told when to come is by this telephone. If you take my telephone, I said, you might as well leave me here to die. They gave me the telephone.
At first light, I arrived home. A few days later, my solicitor contacted me and said they got a “No Further Action” decision. In other words, they closed the case without any charge. So they admitted that they didn’t have anything.
Why do you think they targeted you ?
Ever since October 7, I have published articles and done dozens of interviews on what’s happening. I have spoken at numerous locations, both in Europe and in Britain.
I’m an Israeli Jew. It’s well known that both my parents survived Auschwitz. Like Tony Greenstein, I’m a “problem.” We’re both anti-Zionist Jews who are active for Palestinians’ rights and against Zionism’s crimes. It’s difficult to criticize us as antisemites, because we’ve written books on antisemitism and written about the Holocaust profusely.
This is just a way of frightening, intimidating, silencing and criminalizing us in the pro-Palestine camp. This is happening everywhere in the EU and it’s happening in Britain. Germany and Britain are the worst places.
In Britain, the police broke into the home of journalist Sarah Wilkinson and turned it upside down. Her electronic devices were taken. Another journalist, Richard Medhurst, was stopped in Heathrow Airport and all his stuff was taken. There are others. So this is now becoming a method.
Can you talk about your background more ?
My parents survived the train to Auschwitz in which a third of the people died. People who were already starving in the ghettos were put on the train, and many of them died from suffocation, starvation and weakness. My parents survived this trip and survived eight months in Auschwitz.
Both of them were then death marched from Auschwitz. There was a first march of the men to Mauthausen in Austria, and to a specific terrifying subcamp of Mauthausen called Gusen II, which the Nazis themselves called the “hell of hells.”
Gusen II was made of very long tunnels that the Nazis had panelled into the mouth of Mauthausen. They built a production line deep into that mountain for Messerschmidt plane parts. There were narrow tunnels for providing and taking out the parts. These tunnels were too small for horses, and so they instead used humans as animals of burden, pushing and pulling the trolleys the half-kilometer through the tunnels to where the production was.
My father worked in there from January 21 until May 8, 1945, the last day of the war. He was freed by the Americans. He weighed 32 kilos (around 70 pounds) when he was freed. My mother was marched to Bergen-Belsen. She had typhoid, and she was saved by a British doctor after the liberation.
My parents found their way to Italy, where they married, and I was born in a refugee camp in Rome. This is my background. I come from destruction, death, genocide.
My parents were not Zionist. They talked to me and my sister about their history because they never wanted this to happen to anyone else. Not just to Jews, but to anyone. For them, never again meant never again for anyone.
Can you elaborate more about your anti-Zionist commitments ?
When I came to Britain in the early 1970s, I joined the Israeli anti-Zionist organization called Matzpen. It had a big branch in London of people who exiled from Israel because they did not want to partake in Zionist activities.
I used to know all the other anti-Zionists Jews in Britain. Now there are tens of thousands, if not more. They were produced by Israel, because Israel is carrying out its crimes in our name, and we don’t agree to that. We are fighting for the rights of the Palestinians, to return the refugees, to have a peaceful society in Palestine for Jews, Muslims and Christians.
Zionism replaced the religion, the tradition, the values, the cosmopolitanism, that Jews held for 2,000 years. They were scientists, authors, musicians and workers, but they were not involved in genocide, apart from the genocide enacted against them.
In Britain, we had Islamophobic race riots this year where white working-class people attacked mosques, schools, private homes and community clubs that were Muslim. Muslims are the largest minority in Europe, and like the Jews in the 20th century, they are suffering enormous hatred.
As a Jew, as an Israeli, as a human being, I will not agree to that. I’m doing what I can against it, and Palestine is part of that.
Can you discuss the situation in Britain a bit more ?
Prime Minister Keir Starmer has said he supports Zionism “without qualification.” He’s been chucking Jews out of the Labour Party. I was a member of the Labour Party, and so were all my friends. They were chucked out because they were supposedly antisemites. In fact, I self-referred myself to the Labour Party’s Compliance Unit for “antisemitism” just to show the absurdity of it all. I resigned in 2021 after I heard that my friend Ken Loach was expelled from the party.
I was an officer in the Israeli army and fought in totally unnecessary wars. Most of my early research is about antisemitism. But now I’m told that I’m an antisemite when I just say what is written in the papers.
What we have now, and what you will probably have under Trump, is an even worse system of Zionist values, which claim that to support genocide is okay, but to speak out against genocide is against the law.
This is unacceptable and immoral. And it’s un-Jewish. It’s against the values of Judaism of 2,000 years. There is nothing in Judaism that justifies what is happening in Gaza. This is a travesty of history.
Derek Seidman is a writer, researcher and historian living in Buffalo, New York
