• I FULLY support Camden Palestine Solidarity Campaign’s cogently-argued letter, (IHRA definition risks stifling criticism of Israel, August 9).

Having witnessed, in the wake of the 1948 war, the total destruction of three Palestinian villages in the neighbourhood of my own kibbutz, I regard it as my right, if not my duty, to take a stance against Israel’s repeated violation of international and humanitarian law. The Labour Party’s national executive committee’s Code of Conduct attempts to preserve such a right.

I fail to understand the objection of the mainstream Jewish community to the NEC Code which had adopted in full the vital core of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) definition and has successfully clarified the questionable parts of the Definition’s guidelines.

The Jewish people, who have suffered the threat of genocide at the hands of the Nazi regime, ought to support more than any other faith group the human rights of the Palestinians and of their yearning for self-determination. My own maternal grandparents, as well as close family relations, perished in the Holocaust.

In honour of their memory I have made a heartfelt plea to the worldwide Jewish community in my contribution to the book Beyond Tribal Loyalties (2012): “The nascent Israeli state appears to rise proudly out of the remnants of thriving Palestinian villages whose past existence was obliterated and expunged out of our memories.

“Words could not remove the guilt but they could break the silence, reach the individual consciousness and etch, drip by drip, on the collective consciousness which has never forgotten the Holocaust but had shut its eyes, heart, and soul to the injustice of the Palestinian Nakba [catastrophe]. How long could we continue to survive with our false consciousness which ignores for ever that of the Palestinian people?”

RUTH TENNE
Member of Jews for Justice for Palestinians
NW3