Michael Lavalette talked to Andrew Feinstein about his long history of activism, in the struggles against racism, war, and the hope for a better world

You have been in Britain for over twenty years. People will know you from your Palestinian activism and writings about the arms industry (and the corruption of mainstream politicians). But you have a much longer and wide history in political activism. Could you tell us a little about your background?

I have a slightly unusual background in that my dad was a South African and my mum was Austrian. They met in London after the war and moved to South Africa.

My mum was seven when the Anschluss happened. She was a Jewish child in occupied Vienna and survived the Holocaust by hiding in a coal-cellar. When there was a Gestapo or SS raid in the area she lived, she was rolled up into a carpet, pushed against the wall and covered with coal. Years later, we spent time in Vienna and we saw the bullet holes in the steel doors leading down to the cellar. I always remember my mum telling me she never knew what terrified her more: the feeling of being unable to breathe, rolled in a carpet and covered by coal, or the sound of the soldiers firing at the door and the terror of being discovered.

It was difficult to hear my mum’s stories, and she was seven when this started. It was traumatic for her and it stayed with her for the rest of her life. I think about this, and her, and the horrors of the children in Gaza and what they are going through.

After the war, she met dad in London and they married and moved to South Africa. Mum knew nothing about South Africa, but when she got there, she felt that the blacks of South Africa were being treated much as the Jews of Europe had been treated. And so she got involved in the anti-apartheid struggle. She always said that ‘Never Again’ meant never again for anyone, anywhere and at any time.

When I was growing up, mum used to take us to the Townships and I gradually got involved in community organising. Less than 0.5% of white South Africans ever went to a Township during the apartheid era, so this was really unusual. But it was a great political development!

From my teens, I got very involved politically. I came into contact with ANC operatives. And I left the country in the mid-1980s to avoid military service. But once apartheid crumbled, I went back and became an ANC candidate to the regional legislature and then the national parliament. I served as an MP under Mandela, which was inspirational. 

But then I came into conflict with the ANC leadership under Thabo Mbeki. At a time when he claimed there were no resources to provide health-care support to those with HIV/Aids, he committed to a £10bn arms deal.

I was the senior ANC member of the Public Accounts Committee, the main financial oversight committee of the parliament, and so we started investigating the arms deal. We found there was a huge level of corruption.

Mbeki’s people eventually came to me with the promise of a glittering political career on condition that I dropped my investigation into arms spending and corruption. But they made it clear, if I kept up the enquiry, they would boot me out. So I resigned and came to Britain and wrote a book about the arms deal and its impact.

Initially I thought that we, in South Africa, had been a bit naive. That we were a young democracy and that we had been conned into these corrupt deals. But what I found out is that, in the arms industry, huge levels of corruption are normalised!

And from that point I became very interested in researching the arms trade, the corrupt deals that take place right across the globe, and how this undermines our democracies. And this is what I’ve written about and made documentaries about, ever since.

And after years of research, I honestly believe that, in Britain and other so-called democracies in the West, we have the best democracies that money can buy. A lot of funding of our political parties, and individuals within those parties, comes directly and indirectly from links with the arms industry. People like Tony Blair have made a fortune out of their links to the arms industry.

So the great motivators of my politics are anti-racism (given my family history and background in South Africa) and anti-militarism (given the evidence I’ve gathered about how corrupting this amoral industry is).

Given your background, did you join any political party when you came to Britain?

When I came to Britain, a few people approached me and asked to join the Labour Party, and even asked if I’d consider standing as a Labour candidate. But I’d been involved with the ANC for such a long time and my experiences were such that I didn’t want to join a party. It wasn’t until the ‘Corbyn surge’ that myself, my wife and my children all joined Labour to vote for Corbyn as leader. But I was always involved in extra-parliamentary politics.

I remember a friend in South Africa saying to me when I first arrived in Britain: ‘you must miss politics.’ And my response was that my social-movement involvement has meant I feel more involved in politics than ever. In my opinion, politics is about holding those in power to account, and you can do that from parliament, but you can also do it through activism.

I was always interested in British politics – and especially Tony Blair! Blair came to South Africa on three occasions, the purpose of which was to make sure that BAE Systems got one of the big contracts the South African government was offering to arms companies.

As it turned out, BAE Systems didn’t even get shortlisted for the contract they wanted. That was despite paying £110m in ‘sweeteners’! When I looked into it, Blair, BAE Systems and the British state were chasing six or seven other contracts and offering similar ‘sweeteners’ (amounting to over £1bn) to governments across the globe. This was deeply corrupting to political institutions and it was clear that some individuals – including Blair – were benefitting personally. So I was quite cynical about British politics, until the Corbyn surge which offered such hope for real change.

Given your history of researching and writing about the drivers to war and the arms industry, what are your thoughts on the war in Ukraine?

I’ve done a lot of research on Ukraine because it was effectively the arms factory of the former Soviet Union. If you are researching the global arms trade, you cannot avoid Ukraine. There are huge amounts of weapons produced in the country. And their arms-production sector is deeply, deeply corrupt. But they are also a key hub for selling on arms to all manner of countries and networks – including those directly involved in conflict (which technically, in terms of international law, the arms industry is not meant to do).

Zelenskyy has personally banked a fortune out of various arm deals going through Ukraine. In the Western media, and Western political circles, the world is portrayed in a straight ‘good vs. evil’ dichotomy: Putin is the devil incarnate and Zelenskyy the heroic defender of Western democratic values. But neither of these is correct. I like and defend neither of them.

So for me, the Russian invasion was wrong, but I do believe there were provocations. I think both those things can sit side by side. The Russian attacks on Ukrainian civilians have been awful, but the Western response has been dreadful. I don’t believe the West has any real interest in Ukraine. They are using it as a proxy.

But also they need wars, or the threat of wars, to ‘justify’ the continued spending of billions and billions of US dollars, and British Sterling on the arms industry. They always need enemies – real and imagined – to justify their spending.

Look at the recent targeting of China as the latest ‘enemy’ and the agreement between the US, Australia and the UK to ‘police’ the seas to ‘protect’ Australia. But China is Australia’s biggest trading partner and China holds vast amounts of US debt. But the power of the industrial-military complex is such that they need to promote conflict, or potential conflicts to justify increased ‘defence’ and military spending. All the while, of course, making our world less safe.

So to go back to Ukraine, I don’t think the West has any real interest in the country. I think they want Putin as a bogeyman to justify their militarism.

You know, Blair was a friend to Putin. At the time he wasn’t bothered about Putin’s corruption or his attacks on journalists, he was quite happy to work with him.

German politicians were happy to work with Putin, happy to be on the board of Russia gas companies – all the while knowing exactly what Putin was about.

It is perfectly possible that Trump is going to come in and push for a settlement. And then they are going to have to do what should have been done years ago: negotiate over the disputed territories and negotiate a settlement between Russia and Ukraine.

So what do you think of the transfer from Biden to Trump?

We all know what to expect from Trump, but we shouldn’t get sentimental in any way for Biden. We need to start by recognising that the Biden family has huge personal investments in Ukraine and in the arms industry. Trump has huge material interests in Russia. These are two corrupt, criminal families passing power from one to the other! Now this sounds like the plot of a poor mafia novel! But it is a reflection of the deep levels of corruption within US politics.

Biden was known as the senator of Delaware. Delaware is home to vast numbers of corporations who don’t pay tax to the US state. And Biden built his political career as being their representative!

In my opinion, politicians should be the most moral people, committed to doing public service, aware of the pitfalls that come with power. But when I look at the world, the reality is that we are being served by people who lack morality and who are out to promote their own material interests as much as any public duty.

What are your views on the on-going genocide in Gaza?

First, I think it’s important to say (and here I draw on my South African experience) that Israel is a European settler-colonial project, just like South Africa was. Israel is premised and based on racist notions of white supremacy just as apartheid South Africa was. I find it appalling that, in the twenty-first century, all the Western countries have fallen in line with this racist endeavour. But I do think this is a reflection of wider political trends in Europe and the US which are based on rabid ethno-nationalism.

I remember an image from four years ago in Washington when Trump’s supporters stormed Capitol Hill, there was a man holding the flag of Israel next to another who had an image of the gates of Auschwitz with the slogan ‘6 million wasn’t enough’. This madness is a reflection of the realignment of the far right and the rabid Islamophobia which holds them together.

The West has made it clear that there are no red lines for Israel. It can do whatever it likes. My fear is that Trump will want the situation resolved very quickly and, given his relationship to Israel and Netanyahu, this will, in effect be the green light for Israel to launch the most dreadful killing spree, ethnically cleansing Gaza, the West Bank, parts of Lebanon and parts of Syria to create a ‘Greater Israel’.

Over the last sixteen months, the entire edifice of the international legal system that was put in place after the Holocaust and World War Two has been destroyed. And it has been destroyed by the West in order to allow Netanyahu to do what he has done in Gaza: to perpetrate the first ever live-streamed genocide.

When Starmer complains about Putin’s atrocities in Ukraine, people laugh at him! Because he has refused to talk about the horrors of Gaza and has actually supported Israel’s genocide. In my opinion, it is absolutely essential that we seek some form of accountability and justice for what has happened. But I don’t think we will get that through our existing politicians in the West.

The movement we have built has been astonishing and within it we have hope that we can challenge those who have facilitated the horror taking place in Gaza.

One of the key slogans of the movement has been to ‘stop arming Israel’. What do we say to workers in the arms industry?

We have seen an extraordinary movement in support of Palestine, not just in Britain but across the world. And we shouldn’t underestimate what we have achieved in the face of the opposition of our governments (both Tory and Labour).

We should be proud of our movement. It offers a sliver of light and hope in this terrible situation.

I think our movement has to intensify. We need to throw our efforts into BDS, as the Israeli economy is on its knees. We need to protest more, and stand against the attempts to erode our civil liberties, to criminalise us and our right to protest and to ‘peaceful assembly’.

We need to raise the demand for a complete arms ban on Israel. You know if the US, UK and Germany stopped selling Israel arms and stopped repairing their aircraft, I estimate that within four or five days, Israel’s slaughter in Gaza would come to an end because they would run out of the ordinance – the bombs, the rockets, the weapons, the ammunition and the spare parts – they need to keep killing Palestinians.

There have been key moments in our history when workers involved in the arms industry have refused to work on weapons of destruction. For example, in the 1970s, workers in East Kilbride, just outside of Glasgow, refused to work on the engines of the aircraft being used by Pinochet’s dictatorship. During the 1970s and 1980s there were active trade-union boycotts of South Africa. Dockers in Britain have, in the past, refused to load weapons destined for oppressive regimes – most famously dockers in London refused to load a ship, The Jolly George, destined to arm the counter-revolutionary ‘White army’ attacking revolutionary Russia in 1920.

These are all important parts of our history and we need to try to rebuild these levels of solidarity. We should be asking our trade-union leaders: what can you do? To be honest, too many of them have gone missing over the last sixteen months, but they need to speak up and step up. But we should also be looking at shop-floor level, what can we do to raise Palestine solidarity in the workplace? In the arms industry, we need to ask workers: do you really want your skilled work used to destroy lives, to kill children? These are highly skilled workers whose skills could be used for far better outcomes that weapons of mass destruction.

Workers need to be encouraged to take these issues into their own hands. If the trade-union leaders won’t take steps to boycott Israeli arms production, then we need to encourage workers themselves to take this step.

You stood in the general election against Keir Starmer. What are your views on the possibilities of establishing a left-of-Labour electoral alternative?

My MP is a record breaker! It took Gordon Brown over 1000 days and Boris Johnson 770 days for their popularity to drop below 30%, Starmer managed that in just seventy days! What an achievement for Starmer! But the tragedy is that this hasn’t come as a surprise to any of us.

Look at the turn out at the election, it was dreadful. There is a disconnect between people and mainstream politics. And look at what Starmer’s government has done. They have increased arms spending whilst cutting benefits to families and cold-weather payments to the elderly. They are privatising our health system and abandoning social care to a three-year ‘wait and see’ review. They misled the WASPI women.

Our movement shows great solidarity with the Palestinians, but I also think it reflects how fed up people are with our government and the main political parties. Where we were able to galvanise people and link our movement into broader social questions at the election, we did remarkably well. Not just winning five seats, but the excellent results we got elsewhere. There are lots of young people really concerned about Palestine, about climate catastrophe, about civil liberties and about a range of social issues.

So what do we do? I think the ‘independent movement’ offers hope. We got five people elected. We had great campaigns. We galvanised people to work together for change. It was an important first step. Now we need to work in our movements, in our communities and in our unions to pull people together.

We need to listen to people. Reflect their demands. Offer them real solutions. And in the process, we need to build a national electoral movement or alliance that can challenge the government, in the interests of working-class people and, in the process, close down the space that the populist right are trying to fill.

It won’t be easy, but we have a chance!