The anti-Israel activist who daubed a Warsaw ghetto wall with the words “Free Gaza and Palestine”, has withdrawn from a panel event run by Momentum at a conference in Liverpool this month.
Ewa Jasiewicz, someone who Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has described as “a very good friend”, is a British anti-Israel activist who caused outrage with her “desecration” of the site, where an estimated 92,000 Jews were murdered and 300,000 more were held before being transported to death camps.
Jasiewicz was due to speak at Momentum’s politics and arts festival, The World Transformed, which will take place in parallel with Labour’s conference in Liverpool. Other speakers will include Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell, the shadow chancellor.
The activists sprayed ‘Liberate All Ghettos’ in Hebrew, followed by ‘Free Gaza and Palestine’ in English on a wall of an original block in the ghetto. The block is across the street from the last fragment of the remaining perimeter wall of the Ghetto. They also hung Palestinian flags from the wall.
The Holocaust remembrance centre in Jerusalem, Yad Vashem, said at the time that Jasiewicz’s graffiti was “tainted with anti-Semitism”.
Community Security Trust (CST), called it an act of “arrogance and callousness” marking a “new low” in “cemetery desecration”. The entire ghetto was in effect a mass grave, they added.
The CST added Sunday: “This is exactly the kind of obsessive anti-Israel hatred and abuse of the Holocaust that is central to Labour’s problem of anti-semitism.
Jasiewicz was also expelled from Israel in 2004 after a court said her anti-Israel activist group had been “exploited, whether consciously or unconsciously, for different and dangerous goals”.
