KNESSET member Ofer Cassif testified to “the takeover of fascism in Israel” in a fraternal address to the Communist Party of Britain’s 58th Congress at the weekend.

The Communist Party of Israel MP, who has been suspended from Israel’s parliament for 10 months of the last two years because of his public denunciations of the Gaza genocide, described how Jewish settlers “in a chilling imitation of other Nazis” set fire to a mosque last week in the West Bank.

The same day, settlers invaded another West Bank village, strew vegetation on the Palestinian graves in the cemetery and grazed their sheep on them to humiliate the locals, he recounted.

Fascist thugs broke into lectures to disperse students listening to professors who had called out Israeli war crimes, while left-wing meetings, including one last week by Mr Cassif’s colleague Ayman Odeh of the Hadash coalition, are physically attacked while the police turn a blind eye.

“The genocide we’ve been witnessing in Gaza, the ethnic cleansing that has been going on in the West Bank and fascism within Israel itself are all connected,” Mr Cassif stressed.

But resistance to these currents did exist in Israel and needed to be publicised.

Mr Cassif also mounted a passionate defence of the campaign for Palestinian sovereignty as a separate state alongside Israel.

“The Palestinians have no time to wait for one state,” he argued. “Those who support a one-state solution actually deny the Palestinian people… their national self-determination.”

Motions which would have ended the Communist Party of Britain’s longstanding support for a two-state solution with a sovereign Palestine established on the internationally recognised 1967 borders were later rejected by congress in a separate debate.