2024-05-17 Time: 01:45:05 (Jerusalem)
Tayseer Khaled, member of the Executive Committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization, member of the Political Bureau of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, praised the courageous and bold positions of former British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn as a brave man who pays the price for his integrity and advanced positions to the national rights of the Palestinian people.
This came in response to Labour Party’s announcement last Thursday to suspend its former leader, Jeremy Corbyn, after a government watchdog found what were called "serious failures" regarding investigations to anti-Semitism during his administration of the Labour Party. Corbyn refused to accept all conclusions of the Equality and Human Rights Committee, in a position opposing the new party leader, Keir Starmer, who came to the party leadership after the party's heavy loss in the last parliamentary elections, which took place at the end of the year 2019, and after winning the support of a number of leaders close to the former British Prime Minister, Tony Blair.
Khaled added, Jeremy Corbyn has opposed British policies in the Middle East, as he resolutely opposed the war on Iraq in 2003 and led mass demonstrations against. Corbyn also opposed the war on Afghanistan, the military intervention in Libya and the military strikes on Syria, and showed solidarity with the Palestinian people's inalienable rights to freedom, liberation, self-determination, and the refuges’ right of return.
He followed, under his leadership the party began to review its positions and policies on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the rights of the Palestinian people and the policy of the Israeli occupation, where the Labour Party adopted, in its annual conference held in 2015, a clear position supporting the recognition of the Palestinian state in the United Nations, and condemning the Israeli settlement, calling for the British Labour Party under his leadership in its annual conference held in 2019 in Brighton to support the right of return of Palestinian refugees to their homes from which they were displaced in 1948, and recommended preventing the import of Israeli settlement goods and refraining from exporting weapons to Israel and supported an investigation to Israeli violation of human rights and the use of force in killing demonstrators in the return marches in Gaza Strip
Tayseer Khaled indicated that this result was expected and that Jeremy Corbyn, the former leader of the British Labour Party, is paying the price for his integrity, after his positions in the party, supported by a large segment of the younger generations, were subjected to opposition led by the party's right-wing and its close associates to the British policy broker Tony Blair, along with the Zionist lobby in Britain and within the Labour Party itself, which expressed itself by leaving the party in response to the changes in party’s policy led by Corbyn. This affirmed at the same time that the accusation of anti-Semitism has become a scarecrow that is brought up whenever Israel and its aides and tools feel isolated at the international level, particularly among the younger generations in Europe, including the United Kingdom, who see Israel as an aggressive colonial settler state and a state of racial discrimination and ethnic cleansing.
