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Lea Tsemel - Israeli lawyer for Palestine
Morning Star editor Ben Chacko on the remarkable 'lawyer who always loses' fighting racism and apartheid in her native Israel
Lea Tsemel

ONE of the requirements the Board of Deputies (BoD) of British Jews makes of candidates for the Labour leadership is “engagement with the Jewish community via its main representative groups.”

Presumably the BoD will decide what these “main representative groups” are — a privilege it has claimed at least since 1981, when as David Rosenberg has written for this newspaper, “a range of politically independent Jewish groups, secular and religious, received funding [from the Greater London Council] for their projects.

“The BoD wrote to Livingstone insisting on its right to vet any applications by Jewish groups seeking GLC funding.” Rosenberg notes that Livingstone’s refusal was never forgiven.

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