The last thing you would expect to read about a by-election campaign being held in a constituency in North East England, is that the Israel-Palestine conflict was a major issue there. But that is exactly how it was. All I, personally, could remember about Batley and Spen, the constituency in question, was that a previous Member of Parliament, Jo Cox, was murdered by a terrorist, not for any views she might have had on the Middle East, but because she was a liberal thinker who had campaigned against Brexit. It was only when I read that one of the contestants for the seat was somebody called George Galloway, that I understood.
The name took me back several decades to a time when I was not a visitor to the land of my birth, but to when I was running an organization called BIPAC, the Britain/Israel Public Affairs Committee, effectively the Jewish community funded public relations office for Israel. At that time, we were notified by a citizen of Dundee, Scotland’s fourth largest city, that the Palestinian flag was seen flying over the town hall. Further inquiries revealed that there was a plan afoot to twin Dundee with the Palestinian city of Nablus, and that one of the main instigators of the idea was the general secretary of the Dundee Labour Party, George Galloway.
The concept of twinning between cities was conceived in the aftermath of the Second World War to foster peace and co-operation and the encouragement of commercial and cultural links between towns with common interests. On the face of it, Dundee and Nablus did not fit the bill, though it has to be admitted, the relationship, politically inspired or not, has survived. And so has whatever motivated George Galloway in the early 1980s.
He never made any secret of his hatred of the State of Israel, defining it, whenever challenged, as anti-Zionist not antisemitic. For much of his political career, first as general secretary of War on Want, then as Member of Parliament for one of the Glasgow constituencies, he represented the Labour Party, until he was thrown out of it in 2003 for calling on British troops to disobey orders during the Iraqi war, when he claimed friendship with Saddam Hussein. He then formed his own party, ironically named Respect, standing against Labour incumbents in one constituency after the other and always on an anti-Zionist ticket. He informed an Al Jazeera interviewer [2005] that British news media were controlled by Zionists and readers of the Socialist Worker [2006] that he ‘glorified’ the Hezbollah national resistance movement. In 2009 he received a Palestinian passport from another ‘friend’, Ismail Haniyeh, the leader of Hamas.
In 2012, he won the by-election as the Respect candidate in Bradford West, a constituency with many Muslim voters, which he then declared was an Israel-free zone. “We don’t want any Israeli goods, we don’t want any Israeli services, we don’t want any Israeli academics coming to the university or the college, we don’t even want any Israeli tourists. We reject this illegal, barbarous, savage state that calls itself Israel.” So, the then-Israeli ambassador in London accepted an invitation to visit the city and was labeled by its MP as “a mouthpiece for murder.”
Galloway then turns up this year as the candidate for the Workers Party of Britain in Batley and Spen to fight the Labour candidate, Kim Leadbeater, the sister of the murdered former MP. And how does he plan to beat her? By persuading the many local Muslim, traditionally Labour supporters, that a vote for her is a vote for, “the Zionist Labour leader,” Sir Keir Starmer, whose wife happens to be Jewish. Journalists who followed the campaign, as well as voters across the parties, complained of the divisiveness of his rhetoric and the “very nasty” atmosphere it created. The fact that the Workers Party candidate was contesting a seat which had been represented by a woman who had been murdered for her liberal views, was an irony not lost on some Batley and Spen voters. The courage shown by Kim Leadbeater in taking up the cudgel left by her sister, was put to the test throughout the campaign. Spat upon by those for whom LGBT issues are anathema, chased through the streets by Galloway’s coterie of followers, abused and vilified, she had to be provided with police protection during what observers described as the ugliest campaign in living memory. Kim Leadbeater’s family were fearful for her life as she persisted in maintaining her visibility, knocking on more doors than seemed possible and maintaining in her speeches the need for tolerance and unity.
Meanwhile, Galloway was keeping up his onslaught on the Muslim community by telling them that a vote for Labour was not only a vote for Zionism, but also a vote for gay rights and restrictions on their civil and religious liberties with such force that some confessed to journalists that they were afraid not to vote for him. It was said that the word he used most frequently in his speeches was “Palestine.” It cost him at least some votes. Constituents quoted by an article in the Observer newspaper made the point. “The thing I couldn’t understand about Galloway,’said one, “was why he was coming here and talking about Palestine. It’s just not relevant to people here….people have been using the election to come here and cause chaos and division. Why?” I know why. Hate is a sick and powerful motivator. Look around the world and consider how many political leaders are driven by hate. But it doesn’t always win. Kim Leadbeater became the new Labour MP for Batley and Spen.■
The writer is an author, former journalist and former head of the British Desk at the Jerusalem Foundation.