Jones description of Labour ‘anti-Semitism’ demonstrates a ‘disconnect from reality which borders on hysteria’
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Michael Ellman - suspended for 'antisemitism' - the wrong sort of Jew |
I have devoted a whole
blog to ‘The AntiSemitism Crisis’
in Owen Jones book, because he played a key role in supporting a campaign
whose sole purpose was removing Corbyn.
In years to come, the
moral panic over ‘anti-Semitism’ which helped destroy the Corbyn leadership of
the Labour Party, will come to be seen for what it was. Utterly contrived and confected.
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| The Mail article which began the fake 'antisemitism' crisis |
With hindsight what is not
clear now will become obvious. Corbyn’s opposition to US imperialism, combined
with his support for the Palestinians made him unacceptable not only to the British
and American ruling elites but their racist Rottweiler, Israel.
It is no coincidence that the Daily Mail, which published the forged Zinoviev letter that led to the downfall of the first Labour government in 1924, was the paper which began Labour’s ‘anti-Semitism’ crisis.
When records at the Public
Records Office are opened in 30 years time people may learn the truth of how the
British Establishment, the Israeli state and others scrambled to Corbyn being
elected. A rogue general had already warned
that the army might mutiny if Corbyn became Prime Minister.
Freedom of
information requests in the US may provide information on the involvement of
Intelligence agencies such as the CIA and background to Mike Pompeo’s warning
that the US would take action before
Corbyn could get in power because
‘It’s too risky and too important and too hard once
it’s already happened.”
The idea that the Daily
Mail, a pro-Hitler paper during the 1930s, with its infamous ‘hurrah
for the Blackshirts’ headline, was concerned about anti-Semitism beggars
belief. It described
‘the German Jew, Karl Marx.’ as the
‘High Priest’ of socialism.
The Daily Mail waged a
campaign against the admission of Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany. On 20th
August 1938 it reported
that:
“The way stateless Jews from Germany are
pouring in from every port of this country is becoming an outrage . . .’ In
these words, Mr Herbert Metcalfe, the Old Street magistrate, yesterday referred
to the number of aliens entering the country through the ‘back door’ - a
problem to which the Daily Mail has repeatedly pointed.”
When the Sun dispensed
with Katie Hopkins in September 2015, after her Nazi-like
comment that refugees were ‘cockroaches’,
she was snapped up by the Mail, at almost exactly the same time as its ‘anti-Semitism’
campaign against Corbyn started.
Now it’s possible that the
Mail was suffering from cognitive dissonance. As a Mail spokesman explained
“Katie’s column
is a must read for people across Britain and around the globe. Even if you
don’t agree with what she says, she certainly knows how to engage and entertain
an audience.”
I suspect Hitler also had
his lighter moments.
The elephant in the room
as far as Owen Jones is concerned is the support of the far-Right for Israel
and Zionism. Donald Trump, who described
the neo-Nazis at Charlottesville as ‘fine
people’ also expressed
his admiration for ‘the good
bloodlines’ of Henry Ford, whose portrait an admiring Hitler kept in his
office.
Richard Spencer, who
organised the rally at Charlottesville, where marchers chanted
‘the Jews will not replace us,”
idolises Israel as an ethno-nationalist state. He describes
himself as a White Zionist. Tommy
Robinson too is an admirer.
When White Supremacists,
neo-Nazis and QAnon crazies invaded Capitol Hill on January 6 the Israeli flag flew
alongside the Confederate flag. The strongest
supporters of Zionism and Israel in the United States are Evangelical
Christians who believe that in order to achieve Rapture millions of Jews must die.
In the Bundestag, when a
resolution condemning BDS was passed, its strongest
supporters were the neo-Nazi Alternative for Germany who wanted to make BDS
illegal. These connections between Zionism, Israel and the far-Right are not even
mentioned by Jones.
Why does the anti-Semitic far-Right
support Zionism and the Israeli state? It’s because they make a distinction
between Israel which they love, and the Jews who they blame for ‘replacing’
them with immigrants. That was why Thomas Bowers murdered
11 Jews in a Pittsburgh synagogue.
The far-Right supports Israel
for the same reasons that they supported the apartheid state in South Africa.
Creating a white ethno-nationalist state is the stuff of racists’ wet dreams.
Israel is an Apartheid
state as Israel’s main human rights group, B’tselem, belatedly admitted after 32
years. If proof were needed then one need look no further than Israel’s supply
of COVID vaccines to Jewish settlers whilst denying
them to 5 million Palestinians. That is what Jones, Israel’s progressive
propagandist, is defending.
77%
of Labour Party members believed that the ‘anti-Semitism crisis’ was about
undermining Corbyn and defending Israel. They understood that there is no way Israel’s
supporters can defend house demolitions, child imprisonment
and torture and all the other acts of racism other than by accusing Israel’s
critics of ‘anti-Semitism’!
But for Jones Labour had,
for reasons unknown, been gripped by a spontaneous outbreak of anti-Semitism.
The fact that the entire Tory press, not normally known for its anti-racism, was
so concerned with Labour ‘anti-Semitism’ made no impression on the Guardian’s licensed
radical.
In ‘The
Antisemitism Crisis’ Jones simply ignored the way ‘anti-Semitism’ has been
weaponised by Israel’s supporters. As Shulamit Aloni, a former Israeli
Education Minister noted,
anti-Semitism is a ‘trick we use’ to
suppress criticism of Israel.
In the wake of the
holocaust support for Israel ‘became a
dominant idea among Jews.’ This is true. The victory of Zionism represented
the defeat of the fight against fascism and anti-Semitism. It was this that led
to the creation of a state based on the same principles of ethnic cleansing and
racism that motivated the Nazis. From 1933-1941 Nazi policy was to exclude not
to murder Europe’s Jews.
The real lessons from the
holocaust are ones we don’t hear at today’s state sponsored remembrance of the holocaust.
If Britain and America had accepted Jewish refugees from Germany and Nazi-occupied
Europe and the West had not supported Hitler’s regime in its earlier years, then
far fewer Jews would have died.
Herbert Morrison, Labour
Home Secretary during the war, set his face against the admission of Jewish
refugees despite public opinion supporting their entry. In October 1942 he rejected pleas to admit
2000 Jewish children from France. The Board of Deputies made no criticism of him.
Morrison was an ardent
supporter of Zionism. Another lesson might be that any people, Jews included
are capable, given the right set of circumstances of becoming racists and
fascists.
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| The Confederate flag flying on a Jerusalem house |
But these are not the
lessons that Jones wants us to draw. For him the lessons of the holocaust are racist
ones.
Jones tells that
anti-Semitism is ‘ingrained’ into
European society as a result of 2,000 years of oppression: ‘Collective trauma is absolutely central to the Jewish experience’. Of
course this trauma doesn’t apply to anti-Zionist Jews nor any other survivors
of genocide. The idea that Israeli generals are suffering from holocaust trauma
is to defile the memory of the Jewish dead of the holocaust.
This portrayal of Jews as
perpetual victims is itself anti-Semitic. Jews in Britain or the United States today
are not traumatized by the holocaust but by the alliances that Zionism is
striking up with people like Trump. There were those who used to argue that the
experience of British concentration camps in the Boer War justified Apartheid.
Every act of genocide is
unique. To suggest as Jones does that the holocaust is especially unique is a racist
narrative. Why was the death of 17
million in the slave trade any less traumatic than the death of 6 million
Jews in the holocaust? Are Black people traumatised by the 10+
million who died in the Belgian Congo? Have Palestinians not continued to
be traumatised by expulsion and massacre?
When Jackie Walker explained
in a private Facebook conversation why the holocaust should be seen in the
context of slavery and her Jewish heritage she was demonised
and lied about, not least by Jones.
It is a myth that Jews
experienced 2,000 years of persecution. It is history written backwards. Jewish
historian Salo Baron described
it as the ‘lachrymose version of
history’. Jews lived for long periods as oppressors of the peasants not the
oppressed. Zionism writes off the Jewish diaspora as a history of suffering. If
this were the case then one would have to ask why? The inevitable conclusion
would be that it had something to do with the Jews themselves. Jones version of
history is an anti-Semitic version of history.
Zionist Apologist
Jones talks of Israel’s ‘original socialist principles’ and the kibbutzim
as ‘the incubators of a new socialist
society.’ [218] The kibbutzim were racially exclusive institutions. No Arab
could be a member. They were established on land from which the Arab peasants
had been evicted. As the British Hope-Simpson Report observed:
The effect of the
Zionist colonisation policy on the Arab.— Actually
the result of the purchase of land in Palestine by the Jewish National Fund has
been that land has been extraterritorialised. It ceases to be land from which
the Arab can gain any advantage either now or at any time in the future. Not
only can he never hope to lease or to cultivate it, but, by the stringent provisions
of the lease of the Jewish National Fund, he is deprived for ever from
employment on that land. … The land is in mortmain and inalienable. It is for
this reason that Arabs discount the professions of friendship and good will on
the part of the Zionists in view of the policy which the Zionist Organisation
deliberately adopted.
Jones describes the
Zionist enterprise in Palestine as ‘fundamentally
different’ from other projects of settler colonialism. Why? Because it was
founded by ‘survivors of a genocide.’ [219]
The first Zionist kibbutz Degania
was established over 30 years before the holocaust. David HaCohen, a
prominent Labour Zionist, described how
‘I had to fight
my friends on the issue of Jewish socialism, to defend the fact that I would
not accept Arabs in my Trade Union, the Histadrut; to defend preaching to
housewives that they should not buy at Arab stores; to defend the fact that we
stood guard at orchards to prevent Arab workers from getting jobs there... to
pour kerosene on Arab tomatoes; to attack Jewish housewives in the markets and
smash Arab eggs they had bought... to buy dozens of dunums from an Arab is
permitted but to sell God forbid one Jewish dunum to an Arab is prohibited; to
take Rothschild the incarnation of capitalism as a socialist and to
name him the ‘benefactor’ – to do all that was not easy.’
Racial exclusivity was in Zionism’s
DNA. The Pilgrim Fathers were also fleeing
religious persecution. The leaders of the London Underground Church were
repeatedly imprisoned and in 1593 three of them were executed. Did that justify
what followed? The massacres of Native Americans and later slavery?
Ahad Ha'am, an early
Zionist, who first visited Palestine in 1891, some 50 years before the
holocaust, described
how the Zionist settlers
deal with the
Arabs with hostility and cruelty, trespass unjustly, beat them shamefully for
no sufficient reason, and even boast about their actions. There is no one to
stop the flood and put an end to this despicable and dangerous tendency.
99% of the 2.7 million
Jews of Czarist Russia who fled
the pogroms came to Britain and the United States not Palestine.
The
‘Anti-Semitism’ Crisis
Jones begins his account with
a ‘mural’ that had been erased in 2012. It depicted 6 bankers sitting on the
backs of Black people. Corbyn had defended it on the grounds of free speech. It
wasn’t even obvious that it was anti-Semitic. Only 2 of the bankers were
Jewish. In 2018 it was raised out of the blue by Luciana Berger MP, who later
defected to the ‘funny
tinge’ party.
Jones never asks why the
mural made an appearance 6 years later. Nor does he mention the fact that
Berger was Director of
Labour Friends of Israel before entering parliament in 2010.
Jones does not mention The
Lobby, an undercover documentary by Al Jazeera which showed that the
Israeli Embassy was deeply involved in the anti-Semitism crisis. Shai Masot,
from Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs, was busy trying to bring down
politicians such as Alan Duncan, the Deputy Foreign Minister. Michael Rubin, former
Chair of Young Labour and Parliamentary Officer for LFI was coordinating his
activities with the Israeli Embassy.
The JLM was refounded
in 2015 in order to spearhead the anti-Corbyn campaign yet Laura Murray from Corbyn’s
Office held bi-monthly meetings with them as part of Corbyn’s appeasement
strategy. It was to no avail. In March 2019 when the JLM threatened to
disaffiliate Corbyn begged
them to stay saying he understood their ‘distress’.
They responded with a vote
of no confidence in him refusing
to campaign for Labour at the General Election.
Instead Jones reserves his
bile and vitriol for Jewish Voices for Labour [JVL] which probably has more
Jewish Labour Party members in it than the JLM. The JVL was ‘an active barrier to dialogue with the
wider Jewish community.’ [234]
British Jews don’t
constitute one community. What Jones is saying is that the most radical and
anti-racist Jews should be ignored in order to placate the racist majority. Jones
admits that just 22% of British Jews voted Labour, even under the Jewish Ed
Miliband.
It is as if when it came
to Apartheid in South Africa Jones was to side with the White majority and attack
the minority of Whites who opposed Apartheid as racists. The veterans of the
struggle in South Africa such as Archbishop
Desmond Tutu, Ronnie
Kasrills and Andrew
Feinstein agree. Israel is an apartheid state.
Board of
Deputies
Trying to win over a
privileged White group was more important to Jones than solidarity with oppressed
Palestinians. The Board of Deputies is the most reactionary section of British
Jewry. Support for Israel is part of its Constitution. It even welcomed
Trump to power.
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| The Board of Deputies 'anti-racist' demonstration |
Not once in its history has
the Board ever held a demonstration. Not against the British Union of Fascist or
the National Front, Yet in March 2018 it held a demonstration against Corbyn!
And who graced the demonstration with their presence? Those well known
anti-racists Norman Tebbit and Ian Paisley! The slogan of the hour was the
anti-Semitic ‘For the many not the Jew.’
What would have happened
if White expatriates from South Africa living in Britain had also numbered ¼
million? Perhaps Jones would have argued that we have to take their ‘unique trauma’ into account.
We might have been warned
not to use the term ‘Apartheid’ which simply meant separate
development. Advocates of apartheid did not argue for racial supremacy.
That was the interpretation of others. So too with Zionism.
Zionists also advocate for
separation (Hafrada) from the Palestinians. The
Israeli Labour Party supports a two state solution on the basis that Jews and
Arabs can’t live together.
In supporting a two state
solution Jones is arguing for a policy of apartheid, dressed up as separate
development. The ideology of separate but equal has a long lineage. It was first
approved by the
US Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson
in 1896.
The decision in Plessy was overturned
in the landmark civil rights case of Brown
v Board of Education in 1954 where it was held that if a facility was
separate it was unequal.
Despite accepting that the
JLM ‘was undoubtedly overwhelmingly
hostile to the Labour leadership’ this master of the empty phrase complains
that Corbyn was ‘less interested in other
perspectives.’
The JLM represents the
Israeli state inside Labour. Poalei Zion’s [PZ] affiliated to the Labour Party
in 1920 because Labour was a party of colonialism and Empire. PZ had little
support among British Jews.
IHRA
Definition of Anti-Semitism
The proof that the JLM and
the Zionists concerns were about Israel not anti-Semitism was the campaign to force
Labour to adopt the IHRA
definition of ‘anti-Semitism’. As Stephen Sedley, the Jewish former Court
of Appeal Judge wrote
the IHRA ‘fails the first test of any
definition: it is indefinite.’
The IHRA has been slammed as ‘bewilderingly imprecise.’ and ‘not fit for purpose’ by academics and legal scholars. Its 11 examples of ‘anti-Semitism’ include 7 references to Israel.Truthfully describing Israel as a racist state is now deemed anti-Semitic.
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| According to Owen Jones logic, these demonstrations against Trump are anti-Semitic! |
Yet Jones says of the IHRA
that ‘the definition itself was
uncontroversial’ [236]. ‘Almost all’
the 11 examples ‘were equally
uncontroversial’. Palestinian opposition is simply disregarded by Jones, if
he is even aware of it. The opposition of the UCU, the lecturers union is also ignored.
Opposition to the way the IHRA is being used to target individuals includes
the principal drafter of the IHRA, Kenneth Stern but to Jones all this is ‘uncontroversial’.
Jones is oblivious to the company
he is keeping. Donald Trump was an enthusiastic supporter of the IHRA, signing
an Executive Order in 2019 imposing the IHRA on colleges. Jones also confuses
Budapest with Bucharest where the IHRA Definition was first adopted!
Comparing
Zionism and Israel to the Nazis
One of the IHRA examples
of ‘anti-Semitism’ was ‘Drawing
comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.’ To Jones that
is ‘as offensive as it is manifestly
untrue.’
Why shouldn’t the Israeli
mobs who chant
‘death to the Arabs’ not be compared
to those in Germany and Poland who chanted ‘death
to the Jews’? How is the principle behind Israeli ethnic cleansing any
different from that of Nazi Germany?
In Israel making such
comparisons is commonplace.
The Times of Israel described how demonstrators called
the Police ‘“Nazis” and “kapos,” as ‘Holocaust
imagery’ was
used to describe police violence. Clearly these Israeli demonstrators weren’t
traumatised!
Israelis such as Yair
Golan, former Deputy Chief of Staff to Professors Ze’ev
Sternhell, a child survivor of Premszyl ghetto and Yehuda
Elkana, a child survivor of Auschwitz, all made comparisons between Israel
and Nazi Germany. According to Jones their only purpose being ‘to bait Jews with the memory of their most
murderous persecutors.’ Jones disregards the far more common Zionist comparisons
between Palestinians and Nazis when for example Menachem Begin compared Yasir
Arafat to Hitler in his bunker.
Jews aren’t quite as
traumatised as Jones, trapped by his identity politics, believes. The whole
point of comparing Israeli policies with Nazi Germany is to make Israelis and Zionists
think about what they are doing. Jones, the supporter of settler colonialism
doesn’t get it.
Jones is simply ignorant about
the the Nazi holocaust which took place from 1941 to 1945. The Nazis were in power for 12 years. Up till
1941 their policy was expulsion i.e. ethnic cleansing, not extermination. What
has Israel’s consistent policy towards the Palestinians been from 1948 onwards
till today? Ethnic
cleansing.
What Jones’ identity
politics do is to essentialise Jews as permanent victims of oppression. Their ‘trauma’
being justification for any atrocity. Jones is employing quack political
psychology. It is easier than understanding the specific dynamic of Israeli
society, Zionism and the changing nature of Jewish identity. It is not merely
racist. It demonstrates how shallow and vacuous Jones’ soundbite politics are.
‘Anti-Semitism
has always existed on the left’ [213]
One of the things I like
about Owen Jones is his ability to given an opinion about things he knows nothing
about. He is certain that ‘Anti-Semitism
has always existed on the left.’
The Left, albeit not the soggy reformism which Jones espouses, has always
fought anti-Semitism. Jones gives us the names of two 19th century
anarchists – Proudhon and Bakunin – and projects forward to today. It’s like
saying that because Germans once voted for the Nazis Germans will remain Nazis
forever. Jones informs us that
‘Despite his own Jewish heritage, Karl Marx was not immune from expressing then
pervasive anti-Semitic attitudes.’
Jones cites Marx’s essay On the Jewish Question which stated that
money is the jealous god of Israel.’
Marx’s essay was, as Jones admits, critiquing the Jewish religion not Jews. In
fact Marx was debating with Bruno Bauer, a radical Hegelian, who was arguing
that Jews should not be emancipated because of their religion. Marx argued that
emancipation was not a religious but a social question.
Marx employed the term Judentum which was then the equivalent
of ‘The Spirit of Capitalism’ and
that was how Jews were then seen. If Marx’s essay was anti-Semitic then that
was because it was largely based on the essay ‘On the essence of money’ in 1843 by Moses
Hess, the first Zionist.
What Jones has done is to transplant ‘woke’ society of the 21st
century back to the early 19th century. That shows how shallow Jones
is not how anti-Semitic Marx was. In 1898 the socialist Zionist Nachman Syrkin wrote
that:
The mission of the Jews was
to spread the monotheist idea when in reality it has been degraded to the
search for financial gain.’
Bernard Lazarre, who would
later launch the campaign to free Dreyfus, wrote in 1890 distinguishing between
Israelites and Jews, adding ‘the latter
being a species of swindlers’. The identification of Jews with money was
commonplace at the time.
What marks the Left from the Right is that the Left has always fought
anti-Semitism. Lenin’s speech on ‘Anti-Jewish Pogroms’ read
Shame on accursed tsarism
which tortured and persecuted the Jews. Shame on those who foment hatred
towards the Jews, who foment hatred towards other nations.
Whilst
Revisionist Zionist Vladimir Jabotinsky was making
a pact with Slavinsky, the representative of Simon Petliura, the Ukrainian
nationalist who had the blood of 100,000 Jews under his belt, the Bolsheviks
were outlawing anti-Semitism and shooting pogromists.
In Socialism and the Jews,(p.94) Professor Robert Wistrich of Tel Aviv
University, an ardent Zionist, wrote that in Germany
‘‘opposition
to anti-Semitism had become a badge of honor for the workers movement.’
Ian Kershaw, in ‘Popular Opinion and Dissent in Nazi Germany’ wrote of his
‘admiration for the courageous minority – overwhelmingly communist
workers – who fought uncompromisingly against the Nazis… is boundless…the vast proportion of them workers’ were
put in ‘protective custody’
Jones, in order to justify his support for Zionism slanders and defames those who gave their
lives opposing fascim & anti-Semitism.
John Hobson – Imperialism, Finance Capital & Jews [214]
Jones refers to another contrived controversy. Corbyn’s Introduction to
John Hobson’s 1901 ‘Study of Imperialism’. Hobson wrote a few lines equating
finance capital with Jews. Hobson’s analysis was of the role of finance capital
in imperialism. His views on Jews were completely irrelevant to his analysis.
As Geoffrey Alderman wrote:
‘In a text running to almost 400 pages there
are merely a dozen or so lines which we would call anti-Semitic. There was
absolutely no need for Corbyn to have drawn attention to them in his foreword.’
This affair was created by Times Associate
Editor Danny Finkelstein, a far right associate of Douglas Murray and the
Gatestone Society? For Jones though this proved that ‘there has never been a real reckoning with the anti-Semitism of
Britain’s past’.
Jews
as white [216]
Jones was worried that if
Jews
‘are
judged no longer to suffer systemic racism and to have become defined as
‘white’ then anti-Semitism can come to seem as less problematic than, for example,
anti-black racism and Islamaphobia.’
There was a time when Jews
were the victims of state racism and police violence in Britain but no longer. There
is no offence of driving whilst being Jewish. Jews aren’t deported for being Jewish.
Jews suffer very few physical attacks because they are Jewish. Jews are
economically more privileged than the average non-Jewish white person. How do
they suffer systemic racism?
Anti-Semitism is a
marginal prejudice in Britain. What conclusions you draw from that politically
is another matter but Jones isn’t able to think logically. He is embedded in the
fog of identity politics.
William
Rubinstein, former President of the Jewish Historical Society wrote in his book
‘The Left, Right and the Jews’ about
“the rise of Western Jewry to unparalleled
affluence and high status (which) has
led to the near-disappearance of a Jewish proletariat of any size; indeed, the
Jews may become the first ethnic group in history without a working class of
any size."
Rubinstein’s conclusion
was that the change in Jews' status
has rendered obsolete... the
type of anti-Semitism which has its basis in fears of the swamping of the
native population" and it has made "Marxism,
and other radical doctrines, irrelevant to the socio-economic bases of Western
Jewry, and increasingly unattractive to most Jews.
Alderman, the historian of the Jewish
community, wrote in ‘The Jewish Community and British Politics’ that by 1961,
over 40 percent of Anglo-Jewry was located in the
upper two social classes, whereas these categories accounted for less than 20
percent of the general population.
Naz Shah and the Map of Israel [223]
In 2016 at the start of
the fake ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign it was ‘discovered’ that in 2014, during Israel’s
genocidal bombardment of Gaza, that Naz Shah, not yet an MP, had indulged in
political satire, namely a meme that involved transferring Israel to the United
States.
Naz
Shah was forced to apologise to the ‘Jewish
community’ (i.e. the Israel lobby). Ken Livingstone got suspended for defending
her and Corbyn went along with all this before he himself was suspended.
Jones
describes Naz Shah’s public humiliation as ‘a
model in rehabilitation.’ When I was
interviewed about this by Vanessa Feltz on BBC London Radio her clinching
argument was that Naz Shah had apologised. I pointed out that so too had the
victims of Stalin’s purges. Many innocent people have been coerced into apologising.
Ken Livingstone, Hitler and Zionism [223]
For
Jones what Livingstone said is another example of ‘anti-Semitism’. In hearing
that Livingstone had spoken about Hitler’s support for Zionism Corbyn said ‘What the fuck has he said’ and demanded
Livingstone’s suspension. If this is true then it is another example of
Corbyn’s unerring ability to stab himself in the back. No more loyal supporter
was there of Corbyn than Livingstone.
What
Livingstone was referring to was the trade agreement (Ha’avara) between the
Nazi state and the Zionist Organisation, in 1933. At the time world Jewry had
launched an international Boycott of Nazi Germany. Making an agreement with the
Zionists was seen by the Nazis as a way of destroying the Boycott.
This
was undoubtedly collaboration with the Nazi state. Even the late Elie Wiesel,
an ardent Zionist but also a survivor of Auschwitz, said
in a review of Tom Segev’s The Seventh
Million that
‘Surely, Jewish Palestine... needed money to finance
its development, but this brazen pragmatism went against the political
philosophy of a majority of world Jewry. There developed a growing perception
that instead of supporting and strengthening the boycott, Palestine was, in
fact, sabotaging it.’
The suspension of Livingstone for referring to a
period of history that the Zionist movement finds embarrassing meant that
something can be both true and anti-Semitic! 98% of German Jews in 1933 were not
Zionists. Zionists were known as the volkish
Jews. Volk being a term used by the nationalist Right as a term for the
German race.
The Zionist leaders in Palestine and Germany welcomed the rise of the Nazis. Berl
Katznelson, a founder of Mapai, the Israeli Labour Party and David Ben Gurion’s
effective deputy, saw the rise of Hitler as “an
opportunity to build and flourish like none we have ever had or ever will
have”. [Francis Nicosia, Zionism and Anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany,
p.91]. Ben Gurion, the first Prime Minister of Israel was even more optimistic.
‘The Nazis victory would become “a
fertile force for Zionism.” [Segev, The 7th Million p.18]
Whenever Israel is criticised the holocaust is brought
into play. But during the holocaust it was a different story. The Zionists played
it down. They had one objective - to create a Jewish state. The survival of
Europe’s 10 million Jews was of no concern. The Zionists fought against any
country offering asylum to Jewish refugees.
Although the USA was
operating a strict immigration quota Alaska was exempt. It was, you might
think, an ideal opportunity to save thousands of European Jews. Not a bit of
it.
When
US Interior Secretary Harold Ickes raised the idea of admitting 10,000 Jewish
refugees a year to Alaska, this was taken up by a group in Poalei Zion in May
1940. They were ‘reprimanded by Berl
Locker from the Zionist Executive, who wrote
“How can you, Poalei Zion members, be propagandizing for Jewish settlement in Alaska? As Zionists, you must surely know that this is simply not done!”
Shabtai
Beit-Zvi wrote that
‘Of no avail was the argument that they did not intend to send to Alaska people who could be settled in Eretz-Israel….’ [Post-Ugandan Zionism on Trial, 1991, Zahala, Tel Aviv].
Stephen
Wise, the American Zionist leader, rejected the idea that Alaska could admit Jewish
refugees. His pretext was that the territory was “too cold” for Europeans.
His real
reasons were spelt out in a private letter to Supreme Court Justice Felix
Frankfurter (19.10.39). It would ‘make(s)
a wrong and hurtful impression to have it appear that Jews are taking over some
part of the country for settlement.’ [Rafael Medoff,
‘Conflicts between American Jewish leaders and
dissidents responding to news of the holocaust’ p. 445 Journal of Genocide
Research, 2003] This was from someone who had no problems with the
colonisation of Palestine.
In the official biography of Ben Gurion by Shabtai
Teveth [The Burning Ground p.855] Ben-Gurion is quoted as warning
that:
‘Zionism… is not primarily engaged in saving
individuals. If along the way it saves a few thousand, tens of thousands or
hundreds of thousands of individuals, so much the better.’ But in the event of
a conflict of interest between saving individual Jews and the good of the
Zionist enterprise, we shall say the enterprise comes first.’
When the British agreed, after Kristalnacht to admitting
10,000 German Jewish children into Britain, the Zionists were outraged. Ben
Gurion wrote to the Executive of Mapai, the Israeli Labour Party on 9.12.38. explaining
his position:
‘If I knew that
it would be possible to save all the children in Germany by bringing them over
to England, and only half of them by transporting them to Eretz Yisrael, then I
would opt for the second alternative. For we must weigh not only the life of
these children, but also the history of the People of Israel.’. [Teveth, p.855].
 |
| The all-white parliamentary lynch mob who accompanied Smeeth to Marc Wadsworth's expulsion hearing |
Marc Wadsworth and the lies of Ruth Smeeth [225]
At the Chakrabarti press
conference long-standing Black anti-racist activist Marc Wadsworth criticised
Ruth Smeeth, a right-wing Jewish MP for her dealings with the Telegraph. The video of the incident is
clear. Smeeth got up after being criticised, shouting ‘how dare you’ and stormed off. Jones repeats the lie of Smeeth and the mass media that ‘Smeeth herself left the room in tears.’
Jones simply recycles the
media’s lies. Smeeth is a former Director of Bicom,
the main Israel Lobby group in Britain. Jones gave full support to the
expulsion of a Black anti-racist activist who introduced the Stephen Lawence
family to Nelson Mandela.
Jones and Genuine Anti-Semitism
Jones refers to a few anti-Semitic
comments by Labour members, such as ‘Jews
are shit’ and claims that Jews run the world and are behind every war. No
one defends these comments but they are no worse than some of the racist
vitriol directed at Jackie Walker, a Black-Jewish woman, whose expulsion Jones
supported.
I don’t know what the
context of the above comments are but I can imagine. When some people hear of
the atrocities committed by Israel in
the name of Jews then they react in an anti-Semitic way.
These comments, vile as
they are, are insignificant compared to Starmer’s silence over Israel’s refusal
to provide vaccines to the Palestinians under occupation.
Jewish Voices for Labour and the Jewish Labour Movement
Jones believes that ‘there needed to be a better strategy to
engage with the Jewish Labour Movement’ without explaining why Corbyn
should have engaged with a group whose sole objective was to destroy him.
Jewish Zionists in the
Labour Party have always been a minority. Most Labour Jews were socialists not
Zionists. In the last major study of The Attitudes of British Jewry
to Israel in 2015, 59% of Jews declared they were Zionists,
31% said they weren’t.
Dying on the wrong hill – the IHRA [238/240]
Despite the fact that the
IHRA definition of ‘anti-Semitism’ has become the principal weapon of Zionism
in its fight against the Palestinian Jones described Corbyn’s opposition to
adopting it in whole as dying ‘on the
wrong hill.’
He says complying with the
Zionist demands would have prevented ‘lots
of avoidable outrage.’ What he means is abandoning the Palestinians was
preferable to standing up to the Zionist lobby.
My dad was one of
thousands of Jews who ignored the Board of Deputies advice to stay at home. He
took part in the Battle of Cable Street
in 1936. He didn’t need a definition of anti-Semitism in order to understand
what anti-Semitism was. As Supreme Court Judge Potter Stewart said of
obscenity ‘I recognise it when I see it.’
Jones’ only calculation is what is easiest to do, not what is right to do.
By adopting the IHRA the
floodgates were opened to a massive increase in false accusations of
anti-Semitism.
Rebuilding trust? [246]
Jones quotes Laura Murray, Corbyn’s Stakehold Manager that the JLM ‘expressed frustration that these cases have
taken such a long time to be heard.” with respect to the expulsions of Jackie
Walker, Livingstone, Wadsworth and myself. Well we were expelled and what
happened? They demanded more expulsions. When Jennie Formby took over from
McNicol she increased the expulsions. Did the Board of Deputies express their
thanks? No they had Corbyn on the ropes
and set the Chief Rabbi on him at the general election! Every expulsion merely
proved that Labour was anti-Semitic. Jones belief that appeasing Zionists was
the way out of the crisis is irrational.
Egregious prejudice [248]
Jones mentions the
introduction of the fast-track expulsions of ‘egregious cases’. ALL ‘anti-Semitism’
expulsions and suspensions now take place under the fast-track procedures. Even
Corbyn was dealt with under the same procedure.
Cranks and Jones [250]
Jones believes that those
opposed to Labour adopting the fake ‘anti-Semitism’ allegations, that is
supporters of the Palestinians and anti-Zionists were ‘cranks’. By Karie Murphy’s own admission Labour had dropped all anti-racist
work with Black and Muslim groups and instead concentrated on appeasing racists.
The real cranks were those who believed that the Board’s concerns were about anti-Semitism.
But when you are a mainstream
journalist posing as a socialist then terms like ‘crank’ are a useful substitute for asking simple questions such as
why the Right were concerned with ‘anti-Semitism’.
Chris Williamson [251-3]
If the ‘cranks’ had a king
according to Jones, it was the socialist Labour MP Chris Williamson. There
follows what can only be described as litany of lies. This is ‘journalism’
according to Jones.
Chris’s crimes included
meeting Miko Peled, son of an Israeli General and hiring a House of Commons
room to show Jackie Walker’ film Witchhunt. The film
was an expose of the fake anti-Semitism campaign. The Zionists did not like it
and when it was scheduled to be shown at the Labour Conference in 2018 someone phoned
a bomb threat to the place where it showing. Jones has nothing to say about
these Zionist attacks on free speech.
Derek Hatton [254]
No sooner had he rejoined the Labour Party than Derek Hatton was
suspended. During Israel’s attack on Gaza in 2014 2,200 Palestinians were
murdered by Israel including 551 children, Hatton said
Jewish people with any sense
of humanity need to start speaking out against the ruthless murdering being
carried out by Israel.’
Seamus Milne called this ‘classic anti-Semitism’. If this is true
then this demonstrates that the rot ran deep in Corbyn’s office.
Israel calls itself the
Jewish State. The Board of Deputies organised demonstrations in support of the attack
on Gaza in the name of Jews. How can it be anti-Semitic to say that Jews should
speak up and dissociate themselves from what was taking place in their name?
Upset to Jewish communities [255]
According to Jones the
fake ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign ‘caused
genuine upset to a Jewish community whose history left them with every reason
to fear bigotry directed at them.’ You see here how Jones interweaves the
memory of the holocaust (‘whose history’) into the debate.
The Satanic Verses upset many Muslims. Would Jones therefore have
supported the threats against Salman Rushdie? Opposition to what Israel does
may upset many Jews. So what? Killing Palestinians also upsets people.
Of course the
false ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign caused upset to the Jewish community. The
constant bombardment of false news articles in the Jewish Chronicle and the
press saying that Corbyn was an ‘existentialist
threat’ to British Jewry undoubtedly worried Jews.
The far-Right Campaign Against Anti-Semitism produced
a survey
showing that over half Britain’s Jews felt the situation in Britain resembled
that in the 1930s. It was widely covered in the press yet its findings were
junk. The Institute of Jewish Policy Research produced damning criticisms:
Unfortunately, due to quite basic methodological flaws
and weaknesses, there is absolutely no way the researchers or any readers of
the report can really know.
IJPR described it as verging into ‘irresponsible territory – it is an
incendiary finding, and there is simply no way to ascertain whether or not it
is accurate.’ They said that the very inclusion of such a question
‘was a dubious
decision in and of itself, and raises issues about the organisers’ pre-existing
hypotheses and assumptions.... the
CAA survey falls short both in terms of its methodology and its analysis.’
Anshel
Pfeffer, a mainstream Zionist columnist for Ha'aretz wrote:
If
the majority of British Jews and the authors of the CAA report actually believe
that, then it’s hard to take anything they say about contemporary anti-Semitism
in their home country seriously. If they honestly think that the situation in
Britain today echoes the 1930s when Jews were still banned from a wide variety
of clubs and associations, when a popular fascist party, supported by members
of the nobility and popular newspapers, were marching in support of Hitler,
when large parts of the British establishment were appeasing Nazi Germany and
the government was resolutely opposed to allowing Jewish refugees of Nazism in
to Britain, finally relenting in 1938 to allow 10,000 children to arrive.... then
not only are they woefully ignorant of recent Jewish history but have little
concept of what real anti-Semitism is beyond the type they see online.... To
compare today’s Britain, for all its faults, with the Jews’ situation in 1930s
exhibits a disconnect from reality which borders on hysteria.
A ‘disconnect from reality which borders on hysteria’ is probably the
best description of Owen Jones book.
Tony Greenstein
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