Six million Jewish people, including my father´s whole extended family in Poland, were killed in the holocaust – this particular holocaust against Jews in Europe. It’s not the only holocaust there’s been in Europe or in the world. In many places, particularly in Africa, holocausts continue. And every holocaust is a major tragedy because every human life is valuable.

But because everywhere in the world we all know about this holocaust, and of the tradition of racism against Jewish people which enabled it . . . a kind of mystique began to be built about this holocaust against Jewish people. And when the Israeli state was formed and we saw increasingly that its purpose was to police the whole of the Middle East on behalf of US capitalism, people got very confused. They felt Jewish people who had suffered so much were entitled to a homeland of their own. Many of us who are Jewish felt that we needed an insurance policy, in the form of a state to represent us, to protect us from further holocausts.

So on the strength of the goodwill that many people felt towards people who were Jewish – Israel was enabled to get away with murder in Palestine. We will not be silent and allow our suffering as Jewish people to be used to excuse or justify or enable the suffering and genocide of other people. One holocaust cannot ever be allowed to justify another.

There is a long tradition of Jewish people being involved in radical, socialist and revolutionary movements. Again, my family is an example of that. In the 1930s, my father, a Polish immigrant to the US, was one of those who fought to form trade unions, and my US-born mother fought with others in rent strikes, and against the evictions onto the streets of other working class families like ours. That’s what I was raised in. That’s how I was taught to relate to other people: that we are all sisters and brothers and must help and protect each other and struggle together! And it is particularly offensive to people who were raised and trained in that very Jewish tradition of fighting for justice to see the state of Israel dripping with blood claiming to represent us while defiling that honourable history and wiping it from view!

It is also very hard for us when we have to deal with the anti-Semitism of those who claim to represent the Arab population.

We were told the other day on television by one of these men (it was on BBC-TV’s Question Time which was filmed in the Middle East) that it is because of the Jewish lobby in Washington that the Israeli state gets over $9 billion and plenty of other US money.

Let me tell you something. The Israeli state gets that money because it represents the United States. Because it acts for the United States. Because it defends the economic interests, the genocidal interests, of the racist government of the United States.

You can learn a lot about racism by unravelling the so-called Arab-Israeli conflict. First, it has nothing to do with religion. The closest allies of the fundamentalist Jews are the fundamentalist Christians. What they have in common is fundamentalism; in both cases using religion and morality to stir up hatred and encourage racism in order to keep people apart and at each others’ throats.

Second, Arab and Jewish people are both Semitic people, one race. What divides us is not race, but that those who rule Israel are of European origin with the traditional European racism against people who are not industrialised. This is one reason that there has been so much racism in Israel against Jewish people from the Middle East. The other is that both Arabs and Jews originating in the Middle East tend to be people of colour. These are the racist divisions among us that are exploited so Israel can conquer on behalf of the US.

And third, the Arab governments have always been on the side of the Israeli government. They sell oil; the US buys oil. Nothing to do with religion or race. Egypt receives $1.2 billion a year, the second largest recipient of US foreign aid after Israel for this service to oil multinationals. Arab governments do as little to help Palestinians as the Israeli government to help Jews. Their contribution is to attack Israel because they are Jews. Anti-Semitism doesn’t strengthen the Palestinian cause; it discredits it, driving away support. It provides an excuse for supporting Israel, and drives many Jewish people into Israeli arms in self-defence. And so Palestinians – fighting without an army, without support from any state against the third largest world military power that has five times its population – have used themselves as human bombs to prevent their slaughter by Israel from being perpetrated out of the gaze of the world.

Until very recently the people of the United States didn’t know anything about this, and about how much the State of Israel had to do with the war in Iraq; that one of its aims was to strengthen Israel’s power in the Middle East on its own behalf and on behalf of the US and its multi-nationals. At this picket at least, we know the truth.