The Elephant in the Room – The Stalinist Legacy of the Communist Party on Palestine Still Haunts It

Why does the Morning Star’s Communist Party of Britain harbour within its ranks an open racist & Zionist Mary Davis?

'Oh, Jeremy Corbyn - the Big Lie'

A friend of mine sent me a copy of the Communist Review (CR), journal of the Communist Party of Britain. In it was an article ‘The contested relationship between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism’ (No 108, summer 2023) by Mary Davis.

I wrote to the Editor of CR, twice, offering a reply but I had no response. I then wrote to Mary Davis challenging her to a debate. Suffice to say the good Professor did not respond either, which is no surprise since her article is indefensible.

I couldn’t find Davis’s article on the Internet. I have therefore put it on myself. It is as if the CPB didn’t want to wash their dirty linen in public!

Corbyn made capitulating under pressure and throwing his friends to the Zionist wolves into a fine art

What I did find was another article in the Morning Star The socialism of fools: anti-semitism in the Labour Party?, by Mary Davis of July 27 2019. Davis’ article accepted the anti-Semitism smears of the Labour right and the Zionists that led to the fatal undermining of Jeremy Corbyn and the left leadership of the Labour Party.

For a party that calls itself ‘Communist’ this is shocking. Is the CPB unaware that the ascent of Corbyn to the leadership was bound to set off a reaction in the British Establishment and the form their narrative took was ‘anti-Semitism’?

Despite claiming to be a Marxist Davis ran with the Zionist fable that anti-Semitism had been one unchanging phenomenon for 2000 years. She didn’t attempt to analyse the different forms anti-Semitism has taken historically, in particular the distinction between feudal and racial anti-Semitism.

Briefly feudal or Christian anti-Semitism was from below. For Marxists it represented the economic antagonism between the peasants and the Jews as the agents of within an economy based on use values. With the advent of imperialism in the late 19^th century anti-Semitism took on a racial form.

Wilhelm Marr's pamphlet ' The Way to Victory of Germanism over Judaism, 1879'

In 1879 Wilhelm Marr, who popularised the term ‘anti-Semitism’, formed the League of Anti-Semites. To him and his successors once a Jew always a Jew. Whereas the anti-Semitism of Martin Luther ended with conversion to Christianity to the Nazis a Jew was always a Jew. Which is why the phenomenon of the Christian Jew made an appearance under the Nazis. Christian by religion, Jewish by race. They too had to wear a yellow star and they too were destined to be annihilated.

It is as if the CPB has never read Abram Leon’s The Jewish Question - A Marxist Interpretation. Davis is a relic of Stalinism, which has its own history of anti-Semitism (the Doctor’s plot, Slansky trial etc.). Trotsky was Jewish as were many of the old Bolsheviks who Stalin murdered.

It is not surprising that Davis has no acquaintance with Leon’s book since Leon was a Trotskyist. In this Marxist classic Leon wrote:

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.

Davis and her co-author Phil Katz subscribe to the Zionist idea of 2000 years of unchanging anti-Semitism. The title of their article ‘The socialism of fools’’ was popularised by August Bebel, a founder of the German Social Democratic Party in a speech to their 1893 Congress.

Davis’article is shocking in that it accepts that anti-Semitism in the Labour Party was not an invention of the Zionist Right but was actually true. She argued that there was no contradiction between saying that anti-Semitism was weaponised and also saying that anti-Semitism was a problem. This is a typical Stalinist sleight of hand which Orwell described when he spoke of doublethink.

Despite Gordon Brown appealing to backward racist sentiments using a fascist slogan, he was very much opposed to 'anti-Semitism'

These fools never once asked themselves why, if anti-Semitism was a problem in the Labour Party, it was the Right in the form of Tom Watson and John Mann who were its most ardent advocates. Why Gordon Brown, who used the fascist slogan British Jobs for British Workers, was so disturbed by ‘anti-Semitism’. Why the Daily Mail etc. ran with this nonsense given their own racist record including campaigning against the admission of Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany. How it was that the BBC produced a Panorama programme ‘Is Labour Anti-Semitic’ by the racist Islamaphobe John Ware who is now writing for the Zionist journal Fathom?

Wilhelm Marr

Today, with the advent of Keir Starmer we can see exactly where the anti-Semitism witchhunt has led. If you are Jewish in the Labour Party today you are five times more likely to be expelled than a non-Jew. Indeed if you are Jewish and a member of a proscribed organisation you are 13 times more likely to be expelled. However this is no excuse for Davis’ reactionary verbal gymnastics. Davis asked:

‘Is the charge of anti-semitism in the Labour Party a fiction manufactured by a conspiratorial alliance between the Israeli government and anti-socialist forces seeking to discredit Jeremy Corbyn, thereby undermining the prospect of a left-led Labour government?

Davis even mimics the methodology of the Right. She caricatures opposition to the fake anti-Semitism narrative by portraying its critics as alleging that there was a ‘conspiratorial alliance’ between the Israeli government and the Labour Right. But there is no need for a conspiracy when they already agree on everything. There are very obvious contacts between the two in the form of Labour Friends of Israel and the JLM.

As I show in my recent book Frumka Plotniczki, a Zionist resistance fighter was ordered to abandon the fight in the ghettos & escape to Palestine where the real fight, against the Arabs, was taking place

Davis sought to discredit opponents of the anti-Semitism witchhunt on the grounds that Corbyn accepted that there was a problem.

The fact is that the leadership of the Labour Party itself has acknowledged that there is an anti-semitic element within its ranks.

Corbyn acknowledged that there was a problem because he never understood the attack in the first place. Since his strategy was to appease the right he was in the end forced to accept the legitimacy of their fake narrative. I said at the time to every meeting I addressed that Jackie Walker, Marc Wadwsorth, Ken Livingstone and myself were collateral damage. It was Corbyn they were after. Unfortunately Corbyn preferred to throw us under the bus but it didn’t help him because the Zionists main aim was to remove him.

Davis cited John McDonnell to prove her case but she must have known that McDonnell was the arch exponent of appeasement. When Corbyn was called an anti-Semite by Margaret Hodge McDonnell rushed to her defence saying that this shyster, who the BNP had sent a bouquet of flowers to for her Houses for Whites policy, had ‘a good heart’.

The Morning Star's Editor Ben Chako

Mary Davis is ironically an inheritor of the Stalinist tradition of anti-Semitism on the one hand and support for Zionism on the other. It is strange that the Communist Party of Britain, which claims to support the Palestinians, should carry an article repeating the hoary old Zionist smear that anti-Zionism leads to anti-Semitism. After all Ben Chako, the Editor of the Morning Star, was the guest speaker at the inaugural showing of Jeremy Corbyn –The Big Lie at Conway Hall last February.

During the witchhunt in the Labour Party the Morning Star had a generally good record in defending the left. For example they carried a poem by the late and great Kevin Higgins on my expulsion and an article ‘Like the boy who cried wolf’ by me.

The time has come for the CPB to make a choice between supporting the Palestinians, including dropping its support for the apartheid two state solution and harbouring a Zionist cuckoo. It cannot do both. It wouldn’t have given time of day to a supporter of South Africa apartheid so why does it do so in the case of Israeli apartheid?

Tony Greenstein

The Elephant in the Room is the Relationship Between Zionism and Anti-Semitism not anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism 

A Reply to Mary Davis of the Communist Party of Britain

This appears as Elephant in the room in Weekly Worker

Mary Davis’s ‘The Contested Relationship Between Anti-Zionism and Anti-Semitism’ is an exercise in obfuscation and dishonesty. As George Orwell observed political language is

largely the defence of the indefensible…. (which) can indeed be defended but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face… Thus political language has  to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness…’

Was Zionism just another form of nationalism?

The reason why Zionism cannot be considered a national movement of the Jews was that it was not seeking to liberate territory where Jews lived nor did it fight anti-Semitism. Quite the opposite. The Zionist movement formed alliances with and befriended anti-Semites, a fact Davis ignores.

Zionism was a racial nationalist movement that sought an alliance with imperialism. Ethno-nationalism was common in Eastern Europe in the 30s/40s. There was the Iron Guard in Romania, Arrow Cross in Hungary, Hlinka Guard in Slovakia and Croatia’s Ustashe, all of which were vehemently anti-Semitic.

Zionism was supported by only a small minority of Jews before the Holocaust. If any group could be considered a Jewish national movement it was the Bund, which operated over an identifiable territory, the Pale of Settlement and which represented Yiddish speaking Jews.

Pictures of the Nakba that Davis 'forgot' to mention

The History of Zionist colonisation in Palestine.

Davis paints, with a broad brush, the history of Zionist colonisation in Palestine but amazingly fails to mention the Nakba, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948. We are given a saccharin version of history whereby the Yishuv (the Jewish community)‘sometimes, although by no means always, co-existed relatively peacefully with the indigenous Arab population.’ That is it.

The aftermath of a massacre during the Nakba - to Davis this was an example of good relations

The first Aliyah (wave of immigration) in 1882 was a traditional form of colonisation in which Arabs were employed in the colonies whilst continuing to live on the land. These were the colonies of Barons Edmond de Rothschild and, after his death in 1896, Maurice de Hirsch’s Jewish Colonisation Agency, (ICA) later the Palestinian JCA (PICA). They were not Zionist.

The second Labour Zionist aliyah (1904-14), was the beginning of Zionist settlement. The policy of Jewish Labour, (Boycott of Arab Labour), was at its heart. Jewish Labour, David HaCohen, a leader of Mapai (Israeli Labor Party) and a member of the Knesset for many years, explained that:

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 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 the Arab eggs they had bought; … to throw the fellahin [peasants] off the land – to buy dozens of dunams from an Arab is permitted, but to sell, God forbid, one Jewish dunam 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. (Ha'aretz 15.11.69)

The best analysis of Zionist colonisation was contained in the 1930 Report of Sir John Hope-Simpson, set up in the wake of the 1929 riots:

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, [JNF] 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 [ZO] deliberately adopted.

Not only did the Labour Zionists follow a policy of economic apartheid they sought to extend it to the PICA settlements.

The principle of the persistent and deliberate boycott of Arab labour… [is] confined to the Zionist colonies, but the General Federation of Jewish Labour [Histadrut] is using every effort to ensure that it shall be extended to the colonies of the P.I.C.A., and this with some considerable success. Great pressure is being brought to bear on the old P.I.C.A. colonies in the Maritime Plain and its neighbourhood—pressure which in one instance at least has compelled police intervention.

The Report quoted from the terms of the lease that the JNF issued to its Jewish tenants.

" . . . . The lessee undertakes to execute all works connected with the cultivation of the holding only with Jewish labour. Failure to comply with this duty by the employment of nonJewish labour shall render the lessee liable to the payment of a compensation of ten Palestinian pounds for each default."

The lease also provides that the holding shall never be held by any but a Jew. If the holder, being a Jew, dies, leaving as his heir a nonJew, the Fund shall obtain the right of restitution.

Davis criticises ‘the blanket identification of Zionism with racism, apartheid, colonialism and worse.’ and lectures the reader that ‘moral judgements… must not be allowed to obscure an analysis of the Zionist movement’. Unfortunately Davis is guilty of the very crime that she ascribes to others.

From its inception at the end of the 19^th century, Zionism saw itself as a colonial movement. On 11 January 1902 Theodor Herzl, its founder, described a letter he had written to Cecil Rhodes, the White supremacist leader in southern Africa.

How, then, do I happen to turn to you, since this is an out-of-the way matter for you? How indeed? Because it is something colonial, and because it presupposes understanding of a development which will take twenty or thirty years. … But you, Mr. Rhodes, are a visionary politician or a practical visionary. You have already demonstrated this. And what I want you to do is … to put the stamp of your authority on the Zionist plan…’ [1]

Today, when colonialism has gone out of fashion, the Zionist movement disavows its colonial roots but when it was in fashion the ZO had a Colonization Department.

David Ben Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister, regularly referred to the settlements as ‘colonies’. For all her bluster Davis cannot deny the fact that the Zionist movement saw itself as a settler-colonial movement. As we can see from HaCohen and Hope-Simpson, racism was integral to Zionist colonisation.

The relationship between Zionism and anti-Semitism.

Davies is at pains to infer that anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism have much in common and that the former leads to the latter. She tells us that anti-Zionism ‘‘per se’ is not anti-Semitic’ however ‘there is currently a strain of anti-Zionism… which has normalized hostility to Israel as a Zionist entity founded by Jews.’ This apparently ‘can and often does lead to anti-Semitism.’ Davis gives no examples and relies on pure assert ion.

Despite the efforts of the Zionists to redefine anti-Semitism as hostility, not to Jews but to Zionism and Israel, Davis does not once mention the IHRA.

Why does Davis argue that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitic? ‘because it singles out Israel for special treatment.’ and because ‘questioning the existence of the State of Israel ignores the motivation for its foundation as a refuge for Jews…’.

The argument about ‘singling out’ Israel for criticism echoes the complaints of supporters of Apartheid in South Africa who were keen to point to the iniquities of surrounding countries as if that was any kind of justification.

Apartheid South Africa was founded as a refuge for the Afrikaaners and the USA was a refuge for Christian dissenters. It is irrelevant why a state was founded. What matters is what it does.

Nor was Israel founded in order to save the victims of anti-Semitism from persecution. Chaim Weizmann said in 1919 that ‘Alas, Zionism can’t provide a solution for catastrophes.’ Palestine was closed to thousands of survivors of the Ukrainian pogroms in the early 1920s. Gur Alroey described how Chaim Weizmann, Israel’s first President

preferred productive immigrants over needy refugees and thought the Land of Israel needed strong, healthy immigrants, not refugees weak in body and spirit.

Rabbi Abba Hillel-Silver, President of the Zionist Organisation of America asked:

Are we again, in moments of desperation going to confuse Zionism with refugeeism which is likely to defeat Zionism?... Zionism is not a refugee movement. It is not a product of the Second World War, nor of the first. Were there no displaced Jews in Europe... Zionism would still be an imperative necessity. [Robert Silverberg, If I Forget Thee O Jerusalem, p. 335, 1972]

The Zionist movement opposed the rescue of Jews from the Nazis to any country bar Palestine. After Kristallnacht in November 1938, Britain agreed to admit 10,000 Jewish children, the Kindertransport, to England. The Zionists were furious. Ben Gurion told Mapai’s Central Committee on 9 December 1938 that

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.[2]

A week later, on 17 December 1938 Ben Gurion wrote a memo to the Zionist Executive expressing his fears that

If the Jews are faced with a choice between the refugee problem and rescuing Jews from concentration camps on the one hand, and aid for the national museum in Palestine on the other, the Jewish sense of pity will prevail and our people's entire strength will be directed at aid for the refugees in the various countries. Zionism will vanish from the agenda and indeed not only world public opinion in England and America but also from Jewish public opinion. We are risking Zionism's very existence if we allow the refugee problem to be separated from the Palestine problem.

A Jewish state was founded, not in order to rescue individual Jews but in order to perpetuate the Jewish race. That was the basis of the cordial relationship between the Nazis and the Zionists during the 1930s. How else to explain the fact that the German Zionist Federation [ZVfD] pressurised the Gestapo not to allow Jews to emigrate to countries other than Palestine? The Gestapo ‘did everything in those days to promote emigration, particularly to Palestine.’[3]

When Roosevelt called the Evian Conference to discuss the plight of Europe’s Jewish refugees, the Zionists were appalled. A meeting of the Jewish Agency Executive [JAE] on June 26 1938 decided to:

belittle the [Evian] Conference as far as possible and to cause it to decide nothing…. We are particularly worried that it would move Jewish organizations to collect large sums of money for aid to Jewish refugees, and these collections could interfere with our collection efforts. [4]

Ben-Gurion at a meeting of the JAE of 26 June 1938. explained: ‘No rationalizations can turn the conference from a harmful to a useful one. What can and should be done is to limit the damage as far as possible.' [5] Menachem Ussishkin at the same meeting said that

He hoped to hear in Evian that Eretz Israel remains the main venue for Jewish emigration. All other emigration countries do not interest him… The greatest danger is that attempts will be made to find other territories for Jewish emigration.[6] (my emphasis)

The Zionist leaders welcomed the rise of the Nazis to government. It vindicated everything they had said about the impossibility of Jews living amongst non Jews. Zionist leaders saw the Hitler regime as a golden opportunity to prosper. Francis Nicosia spoke of the ‘illusory assumption’ that Zionism ‘must have been well served by a Nazi victory’. Hitler’s victory ‘could only bolster Zionist fortunes.’ Nicosia also spoke of the tendency to ‘view Zionist interests as distinct from those of the larger Jewish community in the Diaspora.’ [7]

So positive was its assessment of the situation that, as early as April 1933, the ZVfD announced its determination to take advantage of the crisis to win over the traditionally assimilationist German Jewry to Zionism [8]

Berl Katznelson, 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.’ [9] Ben-Gurion was even more optimistic. ‘The Nazis’ victory would become “a fertile force for Zionism.”’[10]

Noah Lucas, a critical Zionist historian, wrote:

‘As the European holocaust erupted, Ben-Gurion saw it as a decisive opportunity for Zionism... In conditions of peace,… Zionism could not move the masses of world Jewry. The forces unleashed by Hitler in all their horror must be harnessed to the advantage of Zionism. ... By the end of 1942… the struggle for a Jewish state became the primary concern of the movement.’  (Noah Lucas) [11]

Zionism began as a reaction to anti-Semitism, especially the pogroms that followed the assassination of Czar Alexander II in 1881. Unlike all other Jewish groups Zionism accepted the main premise of the anti-Semites, that Jews did not belong in the countries where they lived. That was why anti-Semites endorsed the Zionist movement as a way of being rid of their unwanted Jews.

Zionism believed that anti-Semitism could not be fought because it was inherent in every non-Jew. In the midst of the Dreyfus Affair, when over half of France had taken up the struggle for a Jewish officer, Herzl wrote that

In Paris... I achieved a freer attitude towards anti-Semitism, which I now began to understand historically and to pardon. Above all, I recognise the emptiness and futility of trying to 'combat' anti-Semitism. [Diaries, p.8]

The leader of the anti-Dreyfusards Edouard Drumont favourably reviewed Herzl’s pamphlet The Jewish State, in ‘Solution de la Question Juive’ in La Libre Parole on 16 January 1897. Herzl expressed his delight in his Diary.[12]

Jews viewed Zionism as a form of Jewish anti-Semitism. Davis mentions that the first Zionist Congress was held in Basel, Switzerland in 1897. What she doesn’t mention is that it was supposed to have been held in Munich but the Jewish community there protested against it holding that the authorities were condoning anti-Semitism. As Sir Samuel Montagu, a Liberal MP wrote:

Is it not... a suspicious fact that those who have no love for the Jews, and those who are pronounced anti-Semites, all seem to welcome the Zionist proposals and aspiration.? 

Zionism was a counter-revolutionary movement. After the Kishinev pogrom in April 1903 Herzl journeyed to see Czarist Interior Minister von Plehve who had organised the pogroms. Herzl asked Plehve: ‘Help me to reach land sooner and the revolt will end. And so will the defection to the Socialists.’[13] Plehve approved the publication of a Zionist daily, Der Fraind. Uniquely Zionism was a legal political movement in Russia. Herzl promised that the revolutionaries would stop their struggle in return for a charter for Palestine in 15 years. The Bund were outraged.[14]

Davies makes great play of the ‘Marxist’ Zionist Poalei Zion [PZ] omitting to mention that its founder, Ber Borochov, was expelled from the Russian Social Democrats in 1901 for Zionism. Socialist Zionism only began because mainstream Zionism held no attractions for Jewish workers.

In Poland Left PZ effectively abandoned Zionism. In Palestine PZ moved to the right as the rhythms of colonisation and conflict with the Arabs took over.

Davis argues that PZ ‘advocated a harmonious relationship between Jew and Arab in Palestine.’ Either she knows nothing about Zionist colonisation or she is lying. PZ and Ahdut Ha'avodah eschewed unity between Jewish and Arab workers.

Does Zionism have a Left and a Right?

Davis argues that Zionism ‘was never a monolithic movement with a settled ideology.’ Rather it was ‘fractured from its early days and remains so until the present time.’

Although it is true that the Zionist movement was divided into different groups it is not true that there wasn’t a common ideology. All wings agreed that Jews formed a nation worldwide and there was also unanimity, with the exception of the tiny Brit Shalom, that their goal was the establishment of a Jewish state.

Whereas the Revisionists sought to achieve this goal at once, Ben Gurion realised that the Yishuv had to build up its strength numerically before they could realistically achieve statehood. There was an unspoken consensus among all wings that the achievement of a Jewish state would involve the transfer of the Arabs.

The Revisionists wanted to jettison Zionism’s imperialist partners, the British, before the Yishuv was ready whereas Ben Gurion realised that until they reached a critical mass the British presence was indispensible. The differences were not ones of principle but tactics.

The Histadrut, the Zionist trade union, which Golda Meir described as a ‘great colonizing agency’, was formed in 1920. The class struggle was seen as weakening the settler enterprise. In April 1924 the Palestine Communist Party adopted an anti-Zionist, anti-imperialist outlook. It was expelled from Histadrut.[15]

The Labour Zionist slogan was ‘From class to nation’. The class struggle was to be waged, not against the employer but the Arabs. It was Labour Zionism which built the State of Israel. The Nakba was carried out primarily by the Labour Zionist militias, Haganah and Palmach, not the Revisionists.

What is a ‘Jewish State’? Is such a state inherently racist?

What does a Jewish State mean? Davis ignores this question. Being Jewish in such a state is a national/racial not a religious category. In Israel you can be registered as of no religion but Jewish in terms of nationality.

The Jewish Nation State Law 2018, which Davis references, states that in Israel only Jews have the right of national self-determination. Arabs are guests, they are not part of the national collective. Israel is unique in having no single nationality.

To this day, Israel’s Palestinian citizens face having their villages demolished in order to make way for Jewish towns. In July 2023 the residents of Ras Jrabah in the Negev were given until March 2024 to destroy their homes and leave their village to make way for the expansion of a nearby Israeli city. Half of all Israel’s Arab villages are ‘unrecognised’. They are on state land, which is a ‘Jewish’ state. Such villages have no piped water, electricity or even ballot boxes in elections. This is internal colonisation.

As Netanyahu remarked, “Israel is not a state of all its citizens. … Israel is the nation state of the Jewish people – and only it.’ Ethno-religious states are a throwback to the days of feudalism. It was the bourgeois revolution in France which established the idea that a nation includes all the people living within its territory, not just those of a particular religion.

Davis sees opposition to a Jewish state as anti-Semitic. If so then it was also racist to oppose the apartheid state in South Africa.

6.      How Anti-Semitism was Weaponised in order to Undermine Corbyn and the Labour Left

It is astounding that someone who calls themselves a communist cannot see how anti-Semitism was weaponised by the right to defeat the Corbyn project. Jeremy Corbyn has allowed vile anti-Semitism to fester and grow screamed the Daily Express. The same paper that campaigned against the admission of Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany was to the fore in opposing Labour ‘anti-Semitism’.

‘No-one is swallowing the asylum seeker lie anymore, the game’s up’ wrote Carole Malone. We had the Sun and Mail, fresh from employing neo-Nazi Katie Hopkins as a columnist, protesting their shock at Labour ‘anti-Semitism’. Is Mary Davis really unable to join the dots?

Tom Watson and the Labour Right, who had made demonisation of Muslims and asylum seekers into a fine art, protested their abhorrence at Labour ‘anti-Semitism’. Gordon Brown, whose slogan ‘British Jobs for British Workers’ was coined by fascist groups such as the BNP and National Front, fulminated against the ‘stain’ of Labour ‘anti-Semitism’.

If there was one thing that destroyed the Corbyn Project it was the inability of the Labour left to fight back against false accusations of anti-Semitism. Yet what conclusion does Davis draw?

It is an undoubted fact that the conflation of anti-Zionism and antisemitism, has been and still is, a constant theme of left discourse.

It is as if Davis no longer recognises the meaning of words. The equation of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism is a Zionist not left theme. Mary Davis is the CPB’s Humpty Dumpty:

“When I use a word,… it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’ ‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’ ‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.”

Boris Johnson, whose racist utterances are notorious  and whose 2004 book 72 Virgins was replete with racist and anti-Semitic stereotypes, was also concerned about Labour anti-Semitism. Nor does Davis point out the hypocrisy of Labour MPs who attacked Corbyn’s ‘anti-Semitism’ but supported Theresa May’s ‘hostile environment’ Immigration Act 2014?

Davis signals that there was no smoke without fire. She uses weasel words, talking about ‘persistent allegations of anti-Semitism in the Labour Party’. John Mann and Watson were certainly persistent but they also backed the racist Labour MP Phil Woolas in 2010 when the High Court removed him from Parliament. Woolas had fought an election campaign based on ‘making the White folk angry.’

Davis treats the EHRC ‘investigation’ of Labour anti-semitism as if the EHRC was some a human rights group rather than an instrument of the British state. The same EHRC has refused to investigate Tory Islamaphobia and whose Board is stuffed with right-wing appointees. The Commissioner who conducted the Inquiry, Alisdair Henderson, was later found out to have been tweeting in support of fascist philosopher Roger Scruton and making derogatory comments about feminism.

Davis cannot bring herself to mention the expulsion of Jewish members of the party such that Jews in the Labour Party face a five times greater chance of being expelled than non-Jews.

Does Israel have a vibrant left

Davies says that ‘vibrant oppositional forces exist in Israel’. What she doesn’t do is explain how today Labour Zionism is an endangered species. Having formed every government from 1949 to 1977 the Israeli Labour Party has not formed a government since 1999. Mapam/Meretz, who were once the second largest party in the Knesset, has no elected members.

Israel is a society where the phrase ‘leftist’ is a term of abuse, where racism amongst the young is rampant and where a plurality of Jews support the expulsion of Palestinian Israelis. On every count Israeli Palestinians are discriminated against by the State. What remains of the left in Israel is extremely weak.

In the demonstrations over Netanyahu’s judicial reforms, the Anti Occupation Block has been regularly attacked by other demonstrators. The demonstrations are primarily a protest within the Jewish collective from which Palestinian Israelis are absent. When it comes to the army’s attack on Palestinians in Jenin and elsewhere there is Zionist unanimity.

Davies mentions Israeli human rights organisation B’tselem but omits to mention that last year it concluded that Israel was an apartheid state and that a ‘regime of Jewish supremacy’ extends ‘from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This is apartheid.’

Today we have the phenomenon of the Jewish neo-Nazi Otzmah Yehudit being part of the third largest block in the Knesset yet Davies has nothing to say about this or the continuing ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians in the West Bank. Of course in the protests some Israeli Jews will become radicalised and begin to understand that you can’t maintain a military dictatorship in the Occupied Territories and a Jewish democracy in Israel. In South Africa repression of the Black population led to democracy for White people being eroded. So too in Israel.

Two States is an Apartheid Solution

Davies harks back to 1947 and Stalin’s decision to support the establishment of Israel as a ‘Jewish state’ which resulted in the expulsion of ¾ million Palestinians.

If there is one thing that the past half century teaches us it is that Israel has no intention to create a Palestinian state. The Oslo Accords replaced the faces of Israeli soldiers with Palestinian faces. Palestinians now recognise that the ONLY solution is the creation, like in South Africa, of a unitary state which guarantees equal rights for all. Only racists and Zionists oppose such an outcome.

A two state solution would leave an apartheid Israeli state in place together with a repressive bantustan in the West Bank. The 700,000 settlers aren’t going anywhere and there is no appetite or desire within Israel to remove them. The Israeli Communist Party is wrong to cling to this ‘solution’ which would be an invitation to Ben Gvir to expel Israeli Palestinians into such a state.

Davis began her article by telling us how many times Zion occurs in the Bible as if this proved anything. Zionism has always been a political not religious movement. Yes Jews prayed for a return to the Holy Land but as Bernard Lazarre, an early Zionist noted, what this prayer was really saying was that they wished to be free.

When 2.5 million Russian Jews emigrated from Czarist Russia between the mid-19^th century and 1914, some 99% went to the USA and Britain. A mere trickle of Zionist activists, most of whom returned, went to Palestine. Whenever Jews have been given the chance, they have chosen to go anywhere but Palestine.

Mary Davis article is one long apologia for Zionism. Its mistakes are too many to count. It is tendentious and is based on an imperialist imposed, partition.

Israel today reflects the anti-Semitism that Jews once experienced. Instead of ‘death to the Jews’ we have ‘death to the Arabs’ chantged. This is the state Mary Davis wants to keep. Her article is the exact opposite of international solidarity.

Davis turns a blind eye to the fact that Zionism has always been supported by anti-Semites, from Trump and Richard Spencer to Tommy Robinson.

Israel has excellent relations with anti-Semitic regimes in Eastern Europe from Hungary’s Orban to Poland’s Morawiecki. At the end of August a meeting took place between Israel’s Ambassador in Romania, Reuven Azar, with the holocaust denying Alliance for the Union of Romanians leader George Simion. This is the Zionism that Mary Davis denies.

Tony Greenstein

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[1]           Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl, p. 1194, Ralph Patai (ed), 1960.

[2]           Yoav Gelber, ‘Zionist policy and the Fate of European Jewry,’ Yad Vashem Studies (1939-42) p. 199; see also Tom Segev, The Seventh Million, p. 28; Teveth p. 855; Gabriel Piterberg p. 99.

[3]           Francis Nicosia, The Third Reich and the Palestine Question, p. 57.

[4]           Boas Evron, Jewish State or Israeli Nation, fn 3, p. 260 quoting letter by Georg Landauer to Stephen Wise, 13.2.38. This shocking letter was written at the behest of Chaim Weizmann.

[5]           Ibid.

[6]           Ibid.

[7]           Nicosia, The Yishuv and the Holocaust, p. 534.

[8]           Nicosia, ZANG, p.146.

[9]           Ibid., p. 91. Segev, The Seventh Million, p. 18 attributes this quote to a report by Moshé Beilinson, a cofounder of Davar, to Katznelson.

[10]         Segev, The Seventh Million, p. 18.

[11]         Lucas, pp. 187/8, A Modern History of Israel, Weidenfield & Nicholson, 1975.

[12]         Stewart, Herzl, p. 251.

[13]      Herzl, Complete Diaries, p. 1526

[14]      Henry Tobias, p. 252.

[15]      Mario Offenburg, Kommunismus in Palaestina Nation und Kalassein der anti-Kolonialen Revolution Meisenheim am Glan 1975 (PhD Thesis, West Berlin, 1975) p.187. Khamsin No 7, pp. 4l-5l.