Marion Woolfson

Miriam Woolfson known as 'Marion' (11 February 1923 to 29 September2012, nee Cohen) was a prominent Scottish anti-Zionist.

She was the daughter of Rueben Robert Cohen (1890?-11 April 1961, at 72) a company director in Edinburgh and Esther Golda Cohen (Death certificate says Esther Olga Pass, whereas death certificate of her husband says 'Golda'; nee Pass) (-1948 at 53). Her parents were married in 1922 in George Square, Glasgow.

Marion Cohen as she was then, married Myer Henry Woolfson in 1942 in Newington, Edinburgh. Myer Henry appeared in the 1911 Census at age 0 years in Newington, Midlothian (and died in Govan in 1962 at the age of 51), along with his mother Rosie Woolfson (age 23, nee Oppenheim) and his father William Hillman Woolfson (27). William was born in Latvia in 1884.

Anti-Zionism

Marion Woolfson features in an extended passage in Publish it not... The Middle East cover up by Christopher Mayhew and Michael Adams (Longman, London, 1975):

The Zionists reserve their most bitter and relentless attacks, not for people like Michael Adams and myself, but for critics of Israel who are themselves Jewish. These brave people play a role of particular value and importance in the Arab-Israeli conflict, not least because they serve as a striking reminder to the Arabs that their enemy is not the Jewish people but a political movement, Zionism, which many courageous and thoughtful Jews strenuously oppose.

Among the most distinguished Jewish critics of Zionism is Mrs Marion Woolfson, a professional journalist, who developed her convictions after some articles she had written after a visit to Israel were rejected as "too critical" by the newspaper which had commissioned them.

Mrs Woolfson subsequently explained her standpoint as follows:

"As no British newspaper would publish what I had written on Israel, I eventually began to write letters to the papers instead. These were published in The Times, The Guardian, The Sunday Times, The New Statesman, Tribune and The Spectator, among other publications. It became more and more difficult for me to get work in journalism.

"When I offered to write an article on an Arab country for a national British newspaper for which I had worked in the past, I was told that 'I was too well-known for my pro-Arab sympathies and nothing I wrote would be believed.'

"I was bombarded with highly emotional, illogical and often threatening or obscene letters and telephone calls (mostly anonymous) from Zionists. I was called a 'Jew-baiter', a 'Nazi' and an 'anti-Semite' as well as many unprintable epithets. After a particularly bad spate of hysterical telephone calls, usually in the early hours of the morning, I was advised by the police to have my calls intercepted by the GPO. Finally, my telephone number was changed and made ex directory,

"When I receive an invitation to dinner from someone who is not involved in the Middle East, I ask who the other guests are to be because, in the past, at dinner parties where there happened to be one or two Jewish guests, I have been so violently berated and insulted that I have had to walk out. I have been attacked in Jewish shops and told to take my custom elsewhere. I have been attacked in both the editorial and readers' letters columns of the Jewish Chronicle. I was referred to in one article as 'a self-hater' and 'a self-proclaimed Jewish pro-Arabist'.

"Although, now, I still receive letters from the lunatic fringe, I no longer hear from Zionist officials as I used to when my views first became known. At the beginning, I received 'reasoned' letters and telephone calls suggesting that I was an unfortunate, misguided creature who was being 'used' by the wily Arabs for propaganda purposes 'because they find your Jewish surname useful. In 1970, a national newspaper agreed to publish something I had written on Zionist activities in Britain. A Zionist official heard about this and telephoned me, demanding that I withdraw the story. I refused and he called me 'nothing but a publicity-seeker'. He also said I would be sorry for what I had done. When I said that, despite his veiled threats, the piece would appear, he answered: 'We'll see about that.' It never appeared and, although, at the time, I was unable to get a satisfactory explanation from the newspaper, some time afterwards a member of the staff of the paper told me about the pressures to which the paper had been subjected.

"Some letter-writers have suggested that I cannot possibly be Jewish and hold the views I do and, therefore, I must be a'goy' who married a Jew. Just for the record, I should like to state that I was born of Jewish parents. I have frequently been called 'a traitor'. One man wrote to me and said it was his duty 'to stop a Jewess from. damaging the cause of Israel.'

"I have been told that I am going to be pushed in front of a bus and, after my telephone number was changed, a friend received a telephone call purporting to be from the Jewish Defence League, announcing that I was about to be killed. Once, a swastika was painted on the gate of my house."

In the battle for truth about the Middle East, the real heroes and heroines are the small band of anti-Zionist Jewish people who speak up for their beliefs in western countries and, most courageously, in Israel itself-colleagues of Mrs Woolfson like Dr Elmer Berger,

Dr Norton Mezvinsky, Mr Moshe Menuhin, Mr Mick Ashley, Dr Israel Shahak, Professor Maxime Rodinson and many others. But everyone who criticises Israel publicly, whether Jew or Gentile, must expect to pay some penalty, even in the more relaxed climate of today. The debate about the Middle East is not like, say, the debate about the Common Market, which has been conducted in Britain in an atmosphere of comparative politeness and tranquillity; and as subsequent chapters will show, the path of truth about the Middle East has proved too narrow and stony for large numbers of people in British public life, especially in politics, the media and the churches.

Mick Napier writes:

Marion Woolfson, Honorary President of Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign until her death two years ago today, was the author of several important books. Prophets in Babylon: Jews in the Arab World refuted the oft-asserted Zionist myth that the ancient Jewish communities in Arab countries were extinguished by anti-semitic ethnic cleansing and that this in turn justified the mass expulsion of Palestinians from Palestine to make way for the setting up of the Jewish State in 1948. Once labelled "the most dangerous anti-Zionist in Britain" by an Israeli daily, Marion publicly denounced Israeli barbarity towards the Palestinian people when doing so incurred a personal cost; national newspapers whose columns had previously been open to her, increasingly refused to answer her letters or return her calls. She was beaten at the door of her London home by an unknown asssailant, almost certainly an act of Zionist thuggery of a type becoming familiar. A number of her Palestinian friends were assassinated by the Israelis, including the novelist Ghassan Kanafani.

Once she became aware of the virulent racism visited upon the Palestinians under Israeli control, Marion was not someone to take half measures. She was a consistent supporter of human rights for all, including the Palestinian people, and was prepared to follow that commitment wherever it took her. She was shunned by most of her Jewish family solely on the grounds of her support for the rights of the Palestinian people and her opposition to the ethnic cleansing of a foreign state, Israel. I delivered a eulogy at her funeral in Edinburgh two years ago to a handful of mourners - one of her two daughters stayed away and only three family members attended. Many who had admired her work over the years had lost contact as she became increasingly frail and then housebound.

Marion rejected with contempt the all too frequent dishonest accusations of 'anti-semitism from Zionists: "Anyone who stands up for Palestinians is automatically accused of being 'anti-Semitic'. I am Jewish and proud to be Honorary President of the Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign, an anti-racist group that opposes Israeli apartheid."

In 2012 Mick Napier wrote:

Marion's grandparents were penniless Jewish refugees who fled the massacres of Jews in Tsarist Russia, but Marion's father was wealthy and a pillar of Edinburgh society by the time she was born. Marion was very proud of her father, who was a member of the Board of Deputies of British Jews before it succumbed to Zionism, and a man who during the thirties insisted against others who wanted to help only Jewish refugees that a project he sponsored should help all those fleeing Nazi Germany.

Marion was a foreign correspondent for several major UK papers and the author of several works, including The Story of a Palestinian, a biography of Nablus Mayor, Bassam Shaka, and a 1980 work on Jews in the Arab countries, Prophets in Babylon. This work is again timely reading when Netanyahu is trying to exploit the emigration of Jews from Arab countries, which Zionism successfully worked to achieve, in order to deny the rights of Palestinian that Israeli militias drove from their homes and lands.

Her small pamphlet on the racism and criminality of the JNF-KKL, the Jewish National Fund, exposed the scandal of this body being granted tax-exempt charitable status in the UK to enable it to carry out its activities in the Israeli programme of ethic cleansing of the Palestinian people.

Many of her Palestinian friends were assassinated, including poet Ghassan Kanafani, and Marion's was one of relatively few Jewish voices in Britain for many years painstakingly telling stories of atrocious Israeli crimes at considerable personal and professional cost to herself. Marion described several times over the years her personal epiphany when she was a young woman on a visit to Israel and commented casually during a guided tour on the 'beautiful patterns' on the traditional Palestinian dress of a passing woman. The racist contempt and hatred this evoked from her Israeli guide set Marion on a political and personal journey that led one Israeli daily to call her 'the most dangerous anti-Zionist in Britain'.

That journey was filled with much sadness and loss, mixed with great courage and fortitude in the face of professional shunning, a violent beating in her home by a Zionist thug, and final vindication at the end of her life as Israeli crimes have aroused the anger of millions around the world, not excluding Britain and her native Scotland. Marion was happy to be told that there was now strong competition for her title of 'most dangerous anti-Zionist' but we are all in the debt of those, the living and the dead, who fought at great personal cost against the Zionist programme to ethnically cleanse Palestine.

Letters to the press

2001

Referring to the attack on USS Liberty, you ask, "Why was no one ever told?" (The cover-up, G2, Au-gust 8). A full account of this atrocity, written by Anthony Pearson, a British journalist, who covered the 1967 war and worked for the Guardian, the Times and Paris Match, was published in Penthouse in May 1976. Attempts to have the material published in UK newspapers failed. Several editors admitted they were afraid of being accused of "anti-semitism" - a most potent form of blackmail then and now.

The full story, entitled 'The Liberty cover-up', also appeared, on June 15 1976, in Voice, a London-based journal on Middle Eastern affairs, owned by the late Claud Morris. He had been editor of a flourishing Welsh newspaper and owner of a printing company, but was forced out of business when, as a result of printing Free Palestine, his press was destroyed by arsonists. Mr Morris also published Middle East International, and the Jewish Chronicle reported on October 22, 1971 that Jewish advertisers had withdrawn their advertising from his newspaper and Mr Morris had "lost a number of his senior staff".

In 1972, the Sunday Times published a carefully researched report on the torture of Palestinians in Israeli prisons and the then editor, Harold Evans, was subjected to accusations of "anti-semitism". It is surely time for the media to resist the blackmail of Israel's supporters and print the truth as the Guardian has so courageously done.

Marion Woolfson, Edinburgh.

Obituaries

On Saturday, September 29, 2012, at the Western General Hospital, Edinburgh, Miriam (Marion) (nee Cohen), aged 89, much loved mother of Rosalind and Esther, respected friend, journalist, traveller and redoubtable campaigner.