Looking back - the Attack on Spare Rib Prefigured Labour’s ‘Anti-Semitism’ Crisis by nearly 40 years
On June 6 1982 Israel invaded Lebanon. An estimated 20,000 civilians
were killed and over 70,000 injured. The savagery of Israel’s attack gave birth
to Hezbollah, the Party of God, which is the only Arab force to have defeated Israel
militarily.
In 2000 the war of attrition waged by Hezbollah in southern Lebanon
forced Israel to abandon its ‘Christian’ mini state in the south of Lebanon, under
Major Saad Haddad and General Antoine Lahad
and end
its occupation of Lebanon. In 2006 Israel was forced to pull its
troops out of Lebanon after another invasion.
The Lebanon war was a pivotal moment for the Palestine solidarity
movement, in Britain and internationally. It convinced large sections of
the left, especially in the Labour Party, that Israel was no socialist oasis in
the Middle East and that its army was no citizen army but an army of genocide
and occupation. An army whose major ‘victories’ had been against the indigenous
population of the West Bank and Gaza.
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| Zionist women maintained they could be both Zionists and feminists - but only by excluding Palestinian women |
Both Tony Benn and Eric Heffer resigned
from Labour Friends of Israel. Tribune and even the New Statesman became
hostile to Zionism and Israel. It was also when I got to know Jeremy Corbyn
personally, who became an MP the following year. Corbyn spoke frequently
at meetings of the Labour
Committee on Palestine later Labour
Movement Campaign for Palestine, which I chaired.
A group of us met in the University of London Union in the spring of
1982, after an initial Israeli attack on Lebanon, to form Palestine Solidarity
Campaign.
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| The Zioness group in the USA, which maintains that you can be a feminist and a Zionist, borrowed the image of a Black woman (left) and whitened her for their poster! |
Palestine and the Women’s Movement
Nothing angered the Zionist feminists of the time more than the statement
by
Aliza Khan, the Israeli woman in Women
Speak Out Against Zionism in Spare Rib 121 of August 1982 that
‘if a woman calls herself feminist she should
consciously call herself anti-Zionist.’
It was saying that feminism and Zionism were incompatible.
This was a red rag to Israeli and Zionist feminists (who masqueraded as
representing all Jewish women). Zionist feminism was based on the idea that
women should be equal participants in the oppression of the Palestinians. They had
no quarrel with the racism of Zionism and its othering of Palestinians. Their
only disagreements were on their subordinate role in the oppression of the Palestinians.
This racism reached absurd proportions in the United States with the Zioness Group. As Electronic Intifada revealed [Fake feminist group Zioness used rapper’s image without her approval] the Zionesses produced a fiery picture of 3 Zionist Amazons. The woman in the middle of their poster with her arms folded was Black South African hip hop artist, Dope Saint Jude. Or at least she was until the Zionesses whitened her face! Zionists simply can’t help their racism.
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| DOPESAINTJUDE makes it clear she has no ties to the racist Zionesses |
The issue of Palestine and Israel had a major impact on the British women’s
movement which had largely ignored questions of racism and imperialism. Racism,
like sexism, was seen primarily as a question of personal interaction as in the
slogan ‘the ‘Personal is Political’. Institutional racism, western colonialism
and imperialism was a ‘men’s’ issue.
As Jenny Bourne wrote in Jewish
Feminism and Identity Politics:
feminism allowed us to:
conflate the political and the personal, the objective and the subjective, the
material and the metaphysical; and escape into Identity Politics. And the New Marxism
gave'it refuge. (p.4)
The personal
was held to be political rather than the political being personal. What this
meant was that every woman’s personal experience was equally valid. They could
be fascist women, Zionist women or just very rich, they were still women,
despite the fact that they participated in the oppression of Black and third
world women.
There was no
understanding of how women’s oppression is magnified by class and race For
example abortion is easily obtainable if you are well off but if you are Black
or poor then it may be impossible to obtain legally in which case you
may seek a back street abortion with all the possible risks.
The real enemy for middle class feminists was patriarchy, which men had
created, an overarching ideological framework which subsumed race and class. The
answer of western feminists was an all-encompassing sisterhood and
consciousness raising. What this left out was the fact that women can also be
the exploiters and oppressors of other women. Issues such as race and class
were seen as divisive, a threat to women’s unity.
As I showed in my recent post White Women as Slave Owners and the Myth of Sisterhood – Stephanie E.
Jones women slave owners played their full share in slavery.
Under Apartheid White women were equal participants in the oppression of Black
people. So too in Israel where Jewish women identify with Jewish men not
Palestinian women.
In all settler-colonial
societies women are part of the settler colonial population. Of course within
these societies White/Jewish women were oppressed by male settlers but
their demands were not for the liberation of all women but for their right to
equality with men in the oppression of the indigenous population. In Israel the
demand that women have an equal role with men in the army and in combat duties
is used to portray Israel as
an equal society. Women too can kill Palestinians with impunity.
 |
| Israeli feminists have fought to play an equal part in the oppression of the Palestinians - which is what the Jewish Feminist Groups were also fighting for |
Dr Idit Shafran Gittleman
of the Israeli Democracy Institute speaks of
The view that women are
drafted because the IDF is a people’s army and should therefore apply the
principle of equality to all segments of society remains unchallenged,
Israeli Palestinians are
not drafted into the IDF. The principle of equality that Gittleman speaks of is
applicable only to relations within Israeli Jewish society not to Arab Israeli women still less the Palestinians of the Territories.
The majority of the
largely White British (and American) women’s movement concentrated on the
oppression of Israeli Jewish women and ignored the role of Israeli women in the
oppression of Palestinians and African
refugees where women took a leading part in pogroms in South Tel Aviv.
Spare Rib
Black
women and Women of Colour had long been unhappy with the narrowness and
parochialism of Spare
Rib, the magazine
of the women's movement. In particular they challenged the mindset that
separated off women’s oppression from all other forms of oppression and began
to challenge their White sisters to change their ways.
Spare Rib had always found it difficult dealing with
issues of racism, which it relegated to the personal. The problem being that
racism in British society is mostly manifested through state racism and is not primarily
personal. In September
1980 Spare Rib’s editorial stated that 'controversial topics have always been a
problem for SR'’. With Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982 it
became a crisis.
This was the context for
the battle that erupted in Spare Rib as a result of Israel’s invasion of
Lebanon. The
article that triggered off the crisis was ‘Women Speak Out Against
Zionism’. In the words of Bernice Hausman ‘Spare
Rib became an arena for the fight over the changing nature of feminism and
feminist politics.’
[Anti-Semitism
in Feminism: Rethinking Identity Politics]
One
of the collective Linda Bellos resigned
claiming that her sense of Jewishness (although she was also Black) was
offended by an article supporting Palestinian women. In an interview with the
Jewish Chronicle on May 30 1982 she supported the right of Jews to emigrate
to Israel even though Palestinian refugees had no such right.
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| I took this photograph in the Sabra and Shatilla camps in 1979 - most of those who are featured in it would have died at the hands of the Phalange, in a Nazi-style attack that Israel's army enabled |
The article caused an explosion of fury amongst Zionist feminists who claimed that support for the Palestinians and the Lebanese was ‘anti-Semitism’ (shades of Labour today!).
Roisin
Boyd, an Irish member of the collective, interviewed 3 women for the article –
an Israeli anti-Zionist, a Palestinian and Lebanese. Both Nidal and Randa went
out of their way to distinguish between Jews and Zionism. Nidal began the
interview by stating that ‘There is an
enormous difference between being Jewish and being Zionist.’ She explained that
the main idea behind Zionism was that Jews should gather together and form a
nation (state) because they are in danger from non-Jews. Nidal’s went on to say
‘Which is so similar to the Nazi ideology
that the Jews should not be with the Gentiles.’ Today that would fall foul
of the IHRA
definition of anti-Semitism.
About
40 letters were sent to Spare Rib in reply to the article, mostly from Zionist women,
some of which were overtly racist. The Collective decided, given the divisions amongst
them, between the White women and Women of Colour, not to print any of the
letters. The cry went up of ‘anti-Semitism’ but it had nothing to do with
discrimination against Jews but opposition to racism.
 |
Outwrite - the paper of Women of Colour was formed in response to the racism of the majority of the Spare Rib collective |
On
one side of the Spare Rib debate there were virtually all the white members of
the collective, bar Roisin Boyd and on the other side the Women of Colour. I
spoke to Roisin during the affair and she confirmed to me where her sympathies lay.
The divide in Spare Rib also led to the founding in 1982 of Outwrite a paper written by Women of Colour which lasted
until 1988. A good history of this conflict is Bernice Hausman’s Anti-Semitism
in Feminism: Rethinking Identity
Politics and
Corinne
Malpocher’s Sexuality, Race
and Zionism - Conflict and Debates in Spare Rib, 1972-1993].
The Zionist feminists responded by trying to shift the terms of the debate from imperialism, racism and Israel’s attack on the Palestinians to Jewish feminist identity and anti-semitism within the feminist movement. If you have a sense of déjà vu that’s because the same tactics were employed in the Labour Party 15 years later when Jeremy Corbyn became leader. Instead of focusing on Labour’s abysmal record on racism and imperialism, the party became embroiled in a fake campaign around Labour ‘anti-Semitism’.
In
issue 123 (September/October 1982) the London Jewish Lesbian Feminist Group
responded to the Women Speak Out on
Zionism article with an article ‘About
Anti-Semitism’. Except that it wasn’t about anti-Semitism except in the
sense that the members of the group detailed the history of their families
escape from anti-Semitism in Europe as a means of constructing their Zionist
identity as an oppressed group. It was a classic example of how the oppressor
mobilises the memory of oppression in the service of oppression.
It
is not unusual for the oppressor to use the memory of past oppression as
justification for their current role. The Boers used their experience of British
concentration camps in the Boer War as a justification for Apartheid and
many British socialists supported them.
Professor
Yehuda Elkana, a child survivor of Auschwitz , understood this well when he
wrote an article in Ha’aretz (2.3.88.) ‘The
Need to Forget. Elkana was Rector of the Central European University in
Budapest which was forced out of the country by Viktor Orban, the anti-Semitic friend of Netanyahu. Elkana wrote:
The very existence of democracy is endangered
when the memory of the dead participates actively in the democratic
process. Fascist regimes understood this very well and acted on it. We
understand it today, and it is no accident that many studies of Nazi Germany
deal with the political mythology of the Third Reich.
What
the Lesbian Zionists didn’t write about was contemporary anti-Semitism. That
was hardly surprising since they would have been hard pressed to find any. The
timing of the article by the Zionist feminists was more than unfortunate
because on September 16 the Israeli army presided over the Sabra
and Shatilla massacre.
The
Zionist Feminists began by saying that ‘As
Jewish feminists the focus on ‘Zionism’ seems to us in itself anti-Semitic and
hardly feminist’ before going on to say that
‘The recent upsurge in
‘anti-Zionism’ while it has actively intensified our experience of
anti-Semitism by legitimating Jew hating, also seriously threatens to make our
experience and history completely inaudible and invisible.’
What
the Zionist Feminists didn’t do was to explain why anti-Zionism legitimised ‘Jew hating’ or eradicated their own history. It was mere assertion. These
British version of the Jewish American Princesses (the spoilt, self centred
brat whose world begins and ends with herself) expected to be taken on trust. To
them mention
of the Palestinians was a threat to their ‘Jewish’ identity, forgetting that
anti-Zionism was the majority
Jewish reaction to Zionism and that it was anti-Semites like Arthur Balfour
who initially welcomed
Zionism.
Whilst
all Jews are brought up in the shadow of the holocaust, some of us are able to
generalise from our own history to encompass the struggles and experiences of
others. Feminist Zionists were not only incapable of understanding the Palestinian
experience but they resented them for raising the subject. All mention of
Palestinian and Lebanese women’s oppression at the hands of the Israel was
‘anti-Semitism’ by definition.
Sabra and Shatilla Massacre
On
September 16 1982, after the departure of the PLO from Beirut and in the wake
of the assassination (almost certainly by Syria) of the Phalangist President of
Lebanon, Bashir Gemayel, Israeli forces entered Beirut (another agreement
broken) and surrounded the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and
Shatilla. They then proceeded to allow
the Phalangist militia to enter the camps, knowing full well that they were
seeking revenge for the assassination of Gemayel.
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| The war criminal who enabled the Sabra & Shatilla massacres, Ariel Sharon (right) later went on to become Israeli Prime Minister |
For
two days the Israeli army lit up the night sky with flares in order that the
Phalange could murder with knives and guns, castrating boys and cutting off the
breasts of women. Up to 3,500 defenceless refugees were massacred. The Zionist
Lesbian Feminist article appeared shortly after the massacre. No attempt
was made to withdraw it from publication. These ‘feminists’ knew that Israel had
been in alliance with the Phalangists, named after the Spanish fascist Falange.
Their founder, Pierre Gemayel, had been an admirer
of Hitler’s Germany. These are the polluted waters that these Zionist sisters
swam in as they weaponised anti-Semitism.
Not
only did the Israeli troops fire flares to help the killers but those people,
mainly children, women and the elderly, who managed to flee to the perimeter of
the camps were turned back by Israel’s military. You can read the account
of Dr Swee Ang, a young doctor who was working in the camps’ Gaza hospital
during the massacre.
I
felt particular anguish having visited
these camps 3 years earlier. I met some of the women and children in these photographs.
Now I realised that they were almost certainly dead.
 |
In
the following issue (124) October 1982 an article ‘Women Against Zionism’,
began by saying that
‘only
the most callous and reactionary could remain unmoved by the slaughter of
thousands of Palestinians and Lebanese during the latest Israeli invasion of
Lebanon.’
The
article explained that what had happened at Sabra and Shatilla was a ‘consistent feature of Zionist history’ before
describing a similar massacre by the Irgun militia in the village of Deir
Yassin in April 1948. Hausman was wrong to suggest
that this article ‘argued
that Jews should be held accountable for Israeli imperialism.’
In
issue 126 of January 1983 the Editorial Collective announced that it had
received a large number of letters, ‘a
high percentage from Jewish feminists’ many of whom alleged anti-Semitism.
The Collective posed 11 questions, many of which went to the heart of the
problems that they were confronting:
1. How do we deal with extreme differences which
exist between feminists? How do we criticise but not discount or despise each
other?
2. How does the fact that many of the questions
we are asking which are tied up with patriarchal power, as well as imperialism
and racism, affect our involvement as women?
3. What does Zionism mean, both historically
and today?
4. Can women be anti-Zionist and fight
anti-semitism?
5. How can SR best combat
anti-semitism?
6. How can we find a way of criticising
Israel's actions in Lebanon without being anti-Semitic or fuelling
antisemitism?
7. What is a critical feminist support of
Israel?
8. What is a critical feminist support of PLO?
9. How should European feminists support Third
World, national liberation struggles?
10. How do we define imperialism?
11. Can any of these questions be discussed usefully without referring
to the power and influence of the USA, Soviet Union, western European
countries, and to the Arab states?
However they wouldn’t be answered until an article by Israeli anti-Zionist Nira
Yuval-Davies in SR 146, September 1984. ‘Zionism,
Anti-Semitism and the Struggle Against Racism – some reflections on a painful
current debate among feminists.’ Its theme was that:
‘the
struggles against Zionism, anti-Semitism and racism are complementary, rather
than competing as has been assumed all too often.’
Nira
also argued that the Women of Colour should not simply argue from their own
experiences of oppression and the fact that they were Black, but that they
should transcend those differences. She put her finger on the central problem
with identity politics, namely the impossibility of distinguishing between
different experiences and identities if all are equally valid. Identity
politics means blurring the difference between oppressor and
oppressed.
The
identity of Zionist Jewish feminists is as valid as that of a Palestinian
woman. Nira wrote that:
Taking personal experience into account is an
organic part of feminist philosophy and practice. ... However, it is not
without its problems. If done uncritically, it can develop extreme
relativisation — there is no valid criterion from which to judge between the
different perspectives developed by women who have undergone different
personal experiences.
On the self-definition of Black
Women Nira wrote:
the definition of colour is social and historical, not
biological — this is why Turks are considered white in Britain and black in
Germany; why Asians are considered black in Britain but not in Africa. Moreover,
victims of racism can be targetted in ways other than skin colour — it can be
an accent, a way of dress or a more subtle mannerism.... But most importantly —
skin colour and other 'characteristics' are not really important in themselves
— they are just the means of identifying the objects of racist discrimination
and oppression. Fighting against racism means first of all fighting against
that discrimination and oppression rather than just the ways the victims are selected
Clearly
the events of the past year had taken their toll on the Collective. They had experienced
what a Zionist campaign can be like. The Zionist Lesbian Feminists were backed to
the hilt by the Jewish Establishment and the Jewish Chronicle.
In Issue 130 there was a pained Editorial which revealed the refusal to
print the 40 letters. It also revealed that there was no consensus on whether
to publish the letters. All of the White women (bar Roisin Boyd) favoured
printing some of them. In a curious phrase that gave ground to the Zionist
attack the Editorial stated that:
we should confront our own
anti-semitism. Part of that confrontation is recognising that anti-Zionist
coverage can conceal anti-semitism. On the other hand it does not inevitably do
so, and we feel that in the course of the last year's debate there have been
some unjustified criticisms made with the intention/effect of immobilising
support for the Palestinians.
Spare
Rib was again reducing racism to the personal: ‘confronting our own anti-Semitism’ as if people walk around with a
pocketful of anti-Semitism. It was coupled with an unthinking repetition of the
cliché that ‘anti-Zionist coverage can
conceal anti-Semitism. On the other hand it does not inevitably do so.’ The
opposite is the case. It is non-Jewish Christian Zionism that is anti-Semitic.
Anti-Semitism
is rare amongst supporters of the Palestinians precisely because it is an
anti-racist struggle whereas overt
racism is extremely common among Zionists because the whole basis of the
Zionist idea is that Jews and non-Jews cannot live together.
The
issue also included a 4 page article ‘We
Shall Return’ from Women for Palestine. Despite the agonising, Spare Rib
had in practice abandoned its previous neutrality on Zionism and the Zionist
feminists effectively gave up, founding a short-lived magazine Shifra.
In issue 132 there was more than a page
of letters in reply to the editorial in Issue 130. Most supported the
collective and were anti-Zionist such as Shelagh who wrote that the Irish liberation struggle was the same as the
Palestinian struggle. A few, including Heather Dale were pro-Zionist.
In Issue
132, July 1983, all was revealed in a hastily produced 4 page article from the
Collective inserted during the printing so that it did not even feature in the
contents page of the magazine.
Titled
‘Sisterhood....
is plain sailing’ the contributions were divided into 2 sections – one
from the White women, who signed their contributions and a separate box from
the Women of Colour. The Women of Colour’s contributions were angry and to the
point whereas those of the White women were defensive, agonised and guilt-ridden. The Women of Colour took up 2/3 of a page whereas
the White women’s stretched over 3 pages! The Women of Colour contributions
were unsigned. Excerpts included:
‘Since when has Zionism
become a feminist concept?... there has been a Black and Third World peoples’
holocaust for centuries and its still continuing... when Palestinians become an
extinct race (due to annihilation) then white women will study Palestinian
women and get PhDs.’
‘WHITE WOMEN CONTINUE TO REMAIN THE OPPRESSORS
OF WOMEN OF COLOUR.’
‘When will the collective give time to racism in
their own office before jumping every time a Zionist woman says jump?’
‘As a Black
woman I am convinced that it is pointless to explain oppression NO
AMOUNT of explanation will satisfy the racists/imperialists and their allies’
‘I am amazed that you Zionist women feel that I
have the power to silence you.’
The
White women’s contributions began with Roisin Boyd, who was the only White woman who
understood what the Women of Colour were saying. As a leading member of the National Front, the Ulster Loyalist Steven Brady once explained to me, Catholics are the Blacks of Northern Ireland!
‘As an Irish woman I feel
angry that English and American feminists can so easily dismiss my experiences
and those of thousands of other women, relegating us to the outer edges of the
women’s movement in Britain.’
Roisin
was the only one who supported the Women of Colour’s demand not to print the racist
letters. Sue O’Sullivan accepted that
‘some white Jewish
feminists are ignoring their own racism in their refusal to discuss white
racism. Still, some of the letters should have been published.’
What
did it mean to ignore one’s own racism? Once again there was a confusion of personal
racism with the support of white Jewish feminists for the Israeli state. Their
personal racism was immaterial.
Jan
Parker who I had known, from memory she had belonged to the International
Marxist Group, spoke about her identity as a lesbian ‘having been forged in the crucibles of ‘difference’. But difference
was not the same as oppression. Jan wrote that Spare Rib had been experiencing
‘a withdrawal of support from the women’s
movement’ accompanied by Zionist threats to their lives.’
Louise
Williamson described herself as a socialist-feminist who saw Israel as ‘essentially imperialist’ and spoke of the
‘growing
voice of Jewish feminists, who stand in various relationships to Israel, which
they might want to discuss with other women.’
There was a mixed reaction to Sisterhood
is Plain Sailing. In SR 134
there were 3
pages of letters. The letter from Faversham Womens Group was explicitly racist. Referring to the Inquest for Colin Roach, who died after being shot
in the foyer of Hackney Police station, they wrote ‘We want news about women, not about men.’ These feminists
presumably did not think that the death of a Black man had any relevance to women.
In 1985 Cynthia Jarrett was murdered by the
Police and in 1993 Joy Gardiner was also murdered by
the Police.
What the issue of Palestine and Zionism had done was to bring the latent
racism in the women’s movement to the surface.
It had always been there and people like Andrea Dworkin had been its public face. But
there were other, supportive letters such as from Penny Pattenden
‘if
we give imperialism a platform in what is meant to be a magazine for all women
then we are in effect saying to Women of Colour you must compromise, you must
put away your bad feelings because we whites need to show how tolerant we are,
how fair, even to the forces of reaction.’
Magda Devas, a Jewish woman wrote that ‘Jews identifying with Jews does not have to take place in the
oppressive context of Israel.’
There
is no doubt that the Israel lobby and the Embassy, were supporting the Jewish
Feminists alongside the Jewish Chronicle.
The
issue of race and imperialism divided and nearly destroyed Spare Rib. Arguably it helped lead to its demise in 1993.
An editorial in the September 1983 Issue (134) detailed the threats that
had been made by the Zionists against the Women of Color.
We
have had numerous attacks on us while working at SR. We were addressed
on the phone: 'Hitler', 'Foreigners go home'; pro-Zionist slogans were daubed
on walls outside and a brick was thrown into the office next door.’
Curiously this abuse included a journalist from the Jewish Chronicle who
‘refused to speak with the Women of
Colour. She only wanted to speak with white British born women working at Spare
Rib.' Scratch a Zionist and you can usually find
racism near the surface!
It was not until November 1987 that “Jewish Feminism and the Search for Identity”
by Jenny Bourne of the Institute
of Race Relations appeared, based on her
pamphlet “Homelands of the Mind: Jewish Feminism and
Identity Politics”. Bourne analysed Jewish women’s responses to
anti-Zionist feminism and located that response in identity politics, which had
increasingly become the dominant paradigm within feminism:
The politics of equal oppressions, in sum, is
ahistorical in that it equates oppressions across the board without relating
each to its specific history, and so severs racial and sexual oppression from
class exploitation, divorces the black experience from the Third World
experience, dismembers racism from imperialism, and attempts, by some magic alchemy
of the soul, to transmute the political terrain of the material world into
homelands of the mind.
Jewish feminism arose as a reaction to
anti-imperialist feminism and opposition to the Zionism and the invasion of
Lebanon. It had no independent existence or material roots because anti-Semitism was not
a form of state racism in Britain. The identity of the Jewish feminists was
inextricably bound up with the Israeli state which is why Jewish Feminism chose
as their targets Black and Palestinian women. It was this that led to the picket of a Zionist Feminist meeting by Women
for Palestine in April 1983. As Hausman wrote:
‘the international conflict posed by Israel’s
imperialism was transformed by Jewish feminists into an identity crisis for
feminism.’
Jewish feminists responded to this perceived
attack on their identity by labelling it ‘anti-Semitic’ in order to avoid having
to defend Israel’s Lebanon invasion and having to acknowledge their own complicity
with Israeli racism. Hausman argued that
‘Identity politics can survive as a politically
progressive and useful positioning as long as we understand “identity” to
signify a constructed positioning of the self within a specific historical
conjuncture, and not an essentialized concept of the self that must survive at
all costs.’
Identity
politics by definition looks back not forwards.
 |
A Reply to Erica Burman
The reason why what
happened at Spare Rib nearly 40 years
ago is relevant today is because of an article ‘Reading
“That’s Funny…” now: and why it’s different from then’ on JVL’s blog by Erica Burman. In 1982 Erica was at the centre of
the Zionist feminist onslaught, including producing the Zionist feminist
magazine Shifra.
Erica
has now declared herself an anti-Zionist but for all the wrong reasons! In her
devotion to identity politics she now sees anti-Zionist Jews as victims of
anti-Semitism (which they are to some extent) and she makes the comparison between Jewish anti-Zionists today with
the Zionist feminists of 1982. Erica comprehensively distorts what happened in
1982. An anti-Zionism based on a selective memory is not anti-Zionism.
That’s Funny, You don’t look
Antisemitic [TFYDLA]
Erica
was editor and co-publisher of a booklet by Steve Cohen ‘That’s
Funny, You don’t look Antisemitic.’ which has been consistently used by
those like John Mann to expose ‘antisemitism’ on the left. It has since been
reprinted by David Hirsh’s anti-BDS group Engage. Hirsh recently
called
for JVL to be expelled from the Labour Party.
Erica never explains why and how Steve’s pamphlet came to
become the bible of the Zionists other than to claim that meanings change over
time. Steve had given
them permission to reprint it.
I should declare an interest. For nearly 20 years Steve and
I had a polemical debate about Zionism and anti-Semitism in the pages of left
wing papers such as Big Flame and The Leveller. Steve was a member of the Jewish Socialist Group but as a
result of the ruction caused by his pamphlet he left the JSG, at least for a
time.
TFYDLA argued that anti-Semitism was a
constant in the labour movement and that the opposition of the British trade
unions to Jewish immigration in 19th century and 20th
centuries was because of their anti-Semitism.
I would argue that it was not so much anti-Semitism as a backward
political culture of the British labour movement, which rested on the crumbs of imperialism, that saw migrant labour
as a threat. Steve played down the growing rapprochement between Jewish workers
and non-Jewish workers and dismissed the reversal of its position by Manchester
Trades Council which opposed anti-Alienist legislation from 1903 onwards.
Steve’s explanation was
that instead of renouncing anti-Semitism these workers ‘concealed it behind
a newly discovered economic identification with Jewish workers.’ Steve
failed to understand how the interplay between workers' struggles and that of migrants
can lead to the overcoming of their own political backwardness, such as racism.
Racism is not fixed. Workers’ unity is the best antidote to racism.
It was as if anti-Semitism was a virus that once caught can
never be cured. Steve reified anti-Semitism failing to understand the process
by which workers throw off the racist ideas.
Steve’s pamphlet described the anti-Semitism of some of the
founders of the British labour movement like Henry Hyndman of the
Social
Democratic Federation. It told us nothing new. In the 19th
century Jews were considered synonymous with capitalism owing to their
historical role as money lenders. To therefore claim as Steve did that
‘anti-Semitism
as an ideology has nothing to do with the behaviour of even one single Jew… It
is a view of the world based on myths and fantasies’
begs the question, where did anti-Semitism come from? According
to the Zionist fable Jews suffered from 2,000 years of continuous persecution.
As Abram Leon, the Belgian Trotskyite who died in Auschwitz and to whom TFYDLA is
dedicated, put it:
‘Zionism transposes modern
anti-Semitism to all of history and saves itself the trouble of studying the
various forms of anti-Semitism and their evolution.’ [The Jewish Question – A Marxist
Interpretation]
The memory of Jews role under feudalism was weaponised in
the 19th and 20th centuries by German nationalists and
the Nazis continued to peddle these ideas long after they had any material
basis.
What Steve didn’t mention was that when the Tories
campaigned in the 1900 General Election around support for anti-Alienist
legislation, they were supported by the English Zionist Federation who even supported
their candidate in Whitechapel, David Hope-Kydd, who
‘cleverly
coupled his desire for an aliens’ immigration bill with heart-rending support
for the infant Zionist movement’ referring to Jewish immigrants as ‘the very scum of the unhealthiest of the
Continental nations.’ (Geoffrey Alderman, The Jewish
Community in British Politics).
Steve mentioned the proto-fascist British Brothers League
without mentioning their support for Zionism. Chaim Weizmann, the Zionist leader
and Israel’s first President defended in his autobiography Trial
& Error, the leader of the BBL, William Evans-Gordon, MP for Stepney:
‘our people were rather hard on him. The Aliens Bill in England and the movement which grew around it were natural phenomenon which might have been foreseen... Sir William Evans-Gordon had no particular anti-Jewish prejudices... He acted as he thought, according to his best lights and in the most kindly way, in the interests of his country… he was sincerely ready to encourage any settlement of Jews almost anywhere in the British Empire, but he failed to see why the ghettos of London or Leeds or Whitechapel should be made into a branch of the ghettos of Warsaw and Pinsk. (my emphasis) (pp. 90-91)
Steve
does not deserve to be remembered by what was a weak and ill-thought out book
even if it did serve the purposes of Zionist feminism in 1982 and the Zionists
around Engage.
Steve,
a barrister by training, was a dedicated and committed anti-racist campaigner. Steve
began his political life in the International
Marxist Group however he became enmeshed in identity politics. You can read
his obituary by Jenny Bourne, Dave Landau as well as my
own appreciation. Steve was distancing himself from TFYDLA
by
the end of his life. He told me that he had made a mistake in letting Engage use it. Books such as Noone is Illegal and Deportation is
Freedom should be his legacy.
I
first met Steve in 2000 at the Barbed Wire Europe
Conference in Oxford. I was shocked by his appearance.
Steve had contracted polio from which he was to die in 2009. From that moment on we became friends, exchanging emails frequently. We me up again in Liverpool
around 2007 at a conference called to campaign against immigration controls and
it was there that Steve told me that he regretted his decision to let Engage get hold of the rights to TFYDLA. We also discussed whether or not Jews had a
duty to speak out on Zionism. He had previously declared that it was
anti-Semitic to expect any Jew to comment on Israel and Zionism whereas my
opinion was that given Israel claims all Jews as its nationals there was a duty
for Jews to declare that Israel did not speak in our name. He had no answer.
Steve’s
views on Zionism and Israel were in flux. When he died I went up in July 2009 to
a memorial meeting in Manchester. I hadn’t intended to speak but I was so
incensed by the way that Engage had
tried to hijack it with copies of his pamphlet on every seat, that I spoke,
explaining that Steve was no Zionist. His view on a Jewish state was that it
was inevitably racist.
Erica
argued
that ‘it
is completely wrongheaded’ for Zionists to use
the pamphlet today when the context is not the same as it was in 1984 and that the
debates about Zionism and anti-Semitism and ‘how
the left engages with, or indeed exhibits either or even both of these, are
quite different.’ But are they? The allegations of ‘anti-Semitism’ that the
Zionist Feminists alleged against Women for Palestine bear a marked similarity
to today’s weaponisation of anti-Semitism.
Erica explains that the decision to publish Steve’s pamphlet
was predicated on the fact that
‘Libby
Lawson and I… were among those dozens of Jewish feminists whose letters of
protest were refused publication. We were silenced because Spare Rib
demanded that Jewish feminists declare their position on Israel and espouse
anti-Zionist credentials..’
That
is simply untrue. Reinventing the past is a Zionist stratagem. The letters were
rejected because they were racist and Zionist. Erica fails to grant agency to Black
women in asserting themselves against privileged White Jewish feminists. Erica
says that:
‘Jewish
feminists demanded the publication of That’s Funny… because it helped
unravel how the then dominant political narrative – including feminist and left
narratives – conflated Jews and Israel:’
It wasn’t those who wrote Women Speak Out
Against Zionism’ who conflated Jews
and Israel but their Zionist opponents. The IHRA is but the latest example of this.
Through reinventing what happened with Spare Rib
Erica concludes that the attacks on anti-Zionists today are similar to the ‘suffering’
of Jewish feminists in 1982 writing that:
the context now is exactly
the opposite. Then, our political voice was rendered conditional on adopting an
anti-Zionist position, an enforced and conditional predication that, we argued,
was antisemitic in its presumptions … Now, in contrast, it seems that
anti-Zionist Jews are especially in the firing (or expulsion) line, and deemed
especially culpable precisely as Jews.
It’s
true that anti-Zionist Jews today are under attack, but it’s primarily because
of their politics not their identity. Erica asserts that
‘What
is also common to both contexts is that we were (in the eyes of various
parties) the ‘wrong’ kind of Jews!’
No one was called the ‘wrong
kind of Jew’ in 1982. It was Zionists that Black feminists objected to not
the fact that some of them were Jewish. Clearly racists should have been
unacceptable in any movement that fought oppression. Erica alleged that
‘Steve
was always clear – and we (Libby and I, Steve’s co-editors) agreed – that the
antisemitism in the women’s movement came from the left.’
If this was what Steve believed then he was wrong. But I
don’t believe that he did accept that Black women, the victims of imperialism,
were the cause of anti-Semitism.
Erica argued that Engage’s misuse of Steve’s pamphlet is because
he
‘convinced
himself that the text would speak for itself however it was framed by right
wing Zionist reactionaries or left-leaning philosemitic apologists.’
This is not the whole story. The fact is that the text lent
itself to such misuse. That is why it is sad that Steve is remembered for TFYDLA rather
than his writings and campaigns around immigration and the impetus he gave to
the idea that Noone is Illegal.
Erica says she moved from a non-Zionist to an anti-Zionist
position as a result of the massacre at Sabra and Chatilla although she talks
of
‘Israeli military’s support (through failing
to intervene) for the Phalangists’ massacre of Palestinians at the Sabra and
Chatilla camp had been exposed.’
Israel did not ‘fail to intervene’. It was actively
complicit. It lit up the sky with flares so the fascists could kill more easily.
As Uri Avnery said, if someone puts a poisonous snake in a baby’s cradle then
they cannot proclaim their innocence when the baby dies.
Erica describes Steve’s self description as an anti-Zionist
Zionist as
‘wilfully
provocative, designed to provoke critical reflection on the part of those who
would presume to be, or to know what was, Zionist or anti-Zionist.’
This is also untrue. I told Steve that it was like
describing himself as an anti-racist racist! Steve saw Zionism initially, in
its reaction to anti-Semitism in the diaspora as an anti-racist movement and
only later as racist in the colonial context.
Steve came to this conclusion because he didn’t understand
that even from its inception, Zionism had allied with anti-Semites such as Edouard
Drumont and the counter-revolution in Russia. Zionism was seen by Jews as a
Jewish form of anti-Semitism.
Erica also mentions that the Beyond the Pale Collective,
which published Steve’s pamphlet also published Gill Seidel’s book on Holocaust
Denial. Seidel’s book, which was explicitly Zionist, defended the Zionist trade
agreement with the Nazis on the spurious grounds that it was intended as a
means of rescuing German Jews. The book added nothing to our understanding of
the holocaust/
What
Steve wrote about the campaign that resulted in the Aliens Act of 1905 was
neither accurate nor original. A far better work is William Fishman’s East End Jewish Radicals 1875-1914. If Steve was correct about the
anti-Semitism of the British working class then it would be difficult to
understand why thousands of non-Jewish workers joined, on October 4 1936, Jewish workers, against the advice of the Board of Deputies and the Zionists, to
stop the march of Moseley’s British Union of Fascists through the East End.
Steve did not explain it. He simply ignored it. Fishman described how:
‘We were all side by side. I
was moved to tears to see bearded Jews and Irish Catholic dockers standing up
to stop Mosley. I shall never forget that for as long as I live, how
working-class people could stand together to oppose the evil of racism.’
Fishman
was an acclaimed historian. Steve was not. Steve was an expert on British
immigration legislation. He understood little of the conditions facing Jewish immigrant
workers in Britain and he grasped randomly at nuggets of information. E.g. he
doesn’t mention that the best friend of the Zionists was the same Arthur
Balfour who piloted the Aliens Act 1905 through Parliament. Erica is right to
say that
‘A
text is not, as Steve mistakenly thought, timeless in its meaning – a meaning
controlled by the intentions of the authors. The fact is that, as Derrida says,
meaning is conditioned by lines of force’
Where she is wrong is to suggest that
‘those
lines of force are different now from what they were 36 years ago. Steve’s
analysis was exactly the opposite of current cynical assertions of the
priority, and thereby weaponisation, of antisemitism.’
The attempts to weaponise anti-Semitism then are no
different from those today. Except that then they were unsuccessful. I remember
being an invited speaker at a Union General Meeting at Sussex University. Some
900 students crammed into Mandela Hall, one of the largest meetings ever.
When it was proposed that I should be a guest speaker the
Union of Jewish Students in the form of Nigel Savage (a sabbatical who was
later no confidenced!) objected. I was an anti-Semite. The students found it difficult
to accept the concept of a Jewish anti-Semite and the UJS motion was overwhelmingly defeated. The motion supporting a
democratic, secular state was overwhelmingly supported.
Savage had tried to involve NUS with tales
of my ‘anti-Semitism.’ In one letter he declared that I should be top of the
list of ‘enemies of the NUS and the
University of Sussex!’ I spoke at numerous student meetings. At all of them
UJS tried and failed to bar me speaking on the grounds of anti-Semitism including
their stronghold at the LSE. Their only achievement was to ensure that instead
of a meeting of 20 people that I spoke to audiences of 100+! But anti-Semitism
was certainly weaponised by the Zionists then as now.
Steve’s
book mentions the anti-Semitism of some early British socialists. The first
time I came across people like Robert Blatchford and his British Socialist
Party was when the National Front issued leaflets quoting him. However
Blatchford and Hyndman are in the past. It is Brexit and anti-Black racism that
is the problem now.
Steve
(and Erica) was wrong to say that Jews don’t have a responsibility to call out
Zionism when it tries to speak in their name. Erica may today call herself an
anti-Zionist but that does not mean that she is one! When she says that:
What is common to both
cases, and is equally objectionable, is the demand that Jews uphold a specific,
deemed ‘correct’, position because they are Jews, or in order
to legitimately call themselves Jewish. This demand is antisemitic.
That
is not the problem today. Rather anti-Zionist Jews are not recognised by
creatures like Starmer as Jewish. We are invisible. But if someone is accused
of a crime is it wrong to expect that they deny it? When Israel claims to speak
on behalf of all Jews it is incumbent on Jews to dissociate themselves from
such a claim. It is not anti-Semitic to expect Jewish people to say ‘not in my name’.
My main
objection to what Erica wrote is that, for an academic she has committed the
cardinal sin of omitting any evidence that doesn’t support her case! Nowhere
does she mention that the ‘anti-Semites’ that she and her White Feminist Zionist
friends confronted were the primary victims of racism in this country, Black
people.
Tony Greenstein
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