Jewish Currents refuses to print any response to
Joshua Leifer’s ‘The real Corbyn Tragedy’ – finding that Corbyn should have
prostrated himself to the Board of Deputies
America’s Jewish Currents describes itself as ‘a magazine
committed to the rich tradition of thought, activism, and culture of the Jewish
left.’ When Joshua Leifer penned a 5000+
word article The Tragedy of Jeremy Corbyn offering his advice as to
where Corbyn had gone wrong I felt impelled to respond.
Leifer’s analysis can be
summed up as saying that:
i.
Yes there was a basis to the ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign,
because various tropes and remarks surfaced on social media, thus completely
redefining the meaning of racism from actions such as discrimination and
physical attacks to the froth and foam of Twitter.
ii.
That the problem in Britain was that there was
‘no left-wing Jewish
organizational infrastructure in Britain comparable to what has recently
emerged in the US…. there were few progressive Jewish voices that could
meaningfully challenge them.’
In fact Jewish Voices for Labour was specifically set
up to address this problem and the impact it had on the ‘anti-Semitism’
campaign was negligible, because it was never about Jews or anti-Semitism. They
were a metonym for the determination of the Right to oust Corbyn.
iii.
Leifer quotes Matt Seaton of the New York Review of Books as
saying that
“the fight between Corbyn
skeptics and Corbyn fans over Jews and Israel has become a ruinous proxy for
what is, in its essence, a struggle between social-democrats and socialists for
the soul of the party.”
Leifer drew no conclusions from this statement regarding
the fake ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign.
iv.
Leifer accepted that ‘The
British Jewish establishment would brook no compromise with Corbyn’. Nonetheless
he argued that:
Corbyn and the left’s
initial failure to adequately address accusations of antisemitism meant that
when he took a stand against the IHRA definition, he had no political room to
maneuver. For his protest to have had even the slimmest chance of success, he
also would have needed partners within the British Jewish
community: people with public respect and Jewish bona fides who were willing to
challenge the notion that opposition to the IHRA definition was beyond the
pale.
v.
The problem with this
is that the British Jewish Establishment in the form of the Board of Deputies
has hardwired into its constitution
support for Israel i.e to
‘Take
such appropriate action as lies within its power to advance Israel's security,
welfare and standing.’
The JLM which
Leifer refers to was specifically refounded
in 2015 in order to unseat Corbyn. It is
a right-wing anti-socialist group, the overseas wing of what is left of the Israeli
Labour Party. In fact plenty of prominent Jews opposed the IHRA, e.g. Professor
David Feldman, Sir Geoffrey Bindman, Sir Stephen Sedley and others. They too
had no effect.
vi.
Leifer however had
found the solution whereas those of us on the ground had completely missed it. If
only Corbyn had apologised to the ‘Jewish community’ when Andrew Neil, who when
Editor of the Sunday Times hired
Holocaust denier David Irving, had asked him! Leifer wrote that:
Corbyn appeared
stubbornly determined to insert his foot directly into his mouth. In a 2019
pre-election interview, the BBC’s Andrew Neil asked him if he would like to
apologize to the British Jewish community. … With only a few words—“yes, I’m sorry”—Corbyn might have been
able to avoid bad press in a crucial stretch leading up to the election.
Anyone acquainted with the
situation knows that anything Corbyn had said would have been used against
Labour and apologising would have confirmed the Labour ‘anti-Semitism’ myth. Leifer’s
brilliant conclusion? ‘
It’s
hard to avoid the conclusion that Corbyn’s maladroit media appearances led, at
least in part, to his defeat.
vii.
Leifer concluded his
article with a series of ‘what ifs’
What if,
instead of retreating into defensiveness, they had moved to reconcile sooner
with the British Jewish communal institutions where reconciliation was
possible? What if those communal institutions had faced internal opposition to
launching an all-out campaign against Corbyn?
What
if kosher pigs could fly? I wrote
to JC offering the outline of a proposed
reply. You can see the outline
of my article, which was published yesterday on Mondoweiss.
I was not the only person to respond to Jewish
Currents.
 |
| Arielle Angel |
Donna
Nevel submitted a letter which Editor Arielle Angel, refused to print. Her
excuse? That it was the only letter they have received which was being
economical with the truth given my response. Mondoweiss published
Donna’s letter but it should not have had to.
After
waiting a week without a response I sent a follow up email and this time
Arielle did reply
saying that they simply did not have the ‘bandwidth’ to publish a full response article. Which begs
the question why publish mediocre articles if you are not prepared to have a
debate?
 |
| Peter Beinart - Editor-at-large at the Jewish Currents |
I also copied the correspondence to the JC's Editor-at-large Peter Beinart, America’s premier liberal
Zionist. Beinart famously broke with a Jewish State and supported a single
binational state last July Yavne: A
Jewish Case for Equality in Israel-Palestine.
Despite
being someone who has criticised the totalitarian mentality of the Zionist
lobby and its apologists Beinart, who is a Professor Journalism at the City University
of NY, has not deigned to respond.
In my reply to Arielle Angel I asked exactly what the JC is for:
You say that you are a paper of the Jewish Left. If
this article stands without a response and maybe more than 1 response, then you
should amend this to say that you represent the non-socialist and the
non-Marxist left.
JC says it is
of the ‘left’ but is meaningless if it is a left divorced from socialism,
anti-imperialism or solidarity with the oppressed.
Below
is my article
in Mondoweiss
The real
Corbyn ‘tragedy’ — and ‘Jewish Currents’ refusal to publish an opposing view
In a recent
article on the "tragedy" of Jeremy Corbyn, Jewish Currents overlooks the
rightwing bigoted records of those criticizing Corbyn because of his support
for Palestinian rights.
By Tony Greenstein December
22, 2020
At the end of November Joshua Leifer, an Associate
Editor of Jewish Currents [JC], wrote an article
about the “tragedy”
of Jeremy Corbyn. He did not seek the
opinions of any Jewish victims of the “antisemitism” witchhunt in the Labour
Party. As the first Jewish member of the party to be expelled I submitted a
response.
At first I was simply ignored and
after a reminder, Arielle Angel, Editor-in-chief, explained that it was a lack
of resources that prevented them publishing my reply. JC “simply do not have the bandwidth to publish
full response articles to articles we’ve published”. So I am publishing my
response here.
Who sponsored
the false ‘antisemitism’ campaign against Corbyn
The first question to ask is who
was behind the campaign to root out “antisemitism” in the Labour Party? Were
they genuinely concerned about antisemitism or defending Israel? Were the
allegations confected?
The first article exposing Corbyn
as an “antisemite” came from the Tory Daily Mail. On 7 August 2015,
even before Corbyn was elected, it published
an ‘exclusive’ revealing that Corbyn was an associate of a Holocaust denier,
Paul Eisen. It was untrue but mud sticks.
This is the same Daily Mail
which, according
to Professor Tony Kushner, “has been an anti-alien newspaper since the
1900s. There’s great continuity.” The Daily Mail is the paper
which supported Hitler and which had an infamous front page ‘Hurrah
for the Blackshirts’. Nor is this ancient
history. Despite this, Leifer quoted Dan Hodges of the Daily Mail
uncritically accusing
Labour of being a racist party. Hodges is hardly neutral, an ex-New Labourite,
right-wing and hostile.
Just three months later the Mail
employed
an ex-Sun columnist against Corbyn, Katie Hopkins who had previously
described refugees as ‘cockroaches’. The whole of the British press, from the Sun
to the neo-liberal Guardian, was mobilised in the cause of fighting
‘antisemitism’.
The Conservative Party and the
Labour Right also joined hands in opposing Labour “antisemitism”. These were
the same political forces that had supported the disastrous 2014 Immigration
Act and the official policy of creating a “hostile
environment” for immigrants that
had led to hundreds if not thousands of Black British citizens being deported
to the West Indies. Just 6 Labour MPs voted
against the Act, including the
“antisemitic” Corbyn. In fact, Labour’s Right was permeated with antisemitism.
After a racist Labour MP Phil Woolas was removed from Parliament by the High
Court in 2010 for election offences, which included running a campaign aimed at
stirring
up racial strife by “making the white
folk angry” he was defended
by Tom Watson, who “lost sleep” over “poor Phil.” Watson later became Corbyn’s
unfriendly deputy leader and led the ‘antisemitism’ witchhunt.
Historically it was the Right of
the Labour Party which was antisemitic. The Board of Deputies of British Jews,
which claims to be the representative body of British Jewry (although in fact
it represents at best 40% of British Jews), raised no objection when Sidney
Webb (1859-1947), Colonial Secretary, founder of the Fabians and New Statesman,
remarked that there were ‘“no Jews in the British Labour party” and that while
“French, German, Russian Socialism is Jew-ridden…We, thank heaven, are free”,
adding that was probably the case because there was “no money in it”. (Paul
Kelemen, “The British Left and Zionism: The History of a Divorce”, Manchester
University Press 2012)
Herbert Morrison, Home Secretary
during World War 2, adamantly refused to admit Jewish refugees. Hundreds if not
thousands died as a result.
We see this today with Labour
leader Keir Starmer. He has expressed his determination to “root out the
poison” of antisemitism from the Labour Party. Yet Sir Keir, was unable
to challenge a racist caller on the talk show station LBC, who stated that
White people would be in a minority by 2066 and asked why Britain can’t be like
Israel which
“has a state law that they are the
only people in that country to have self-determination. Well why can’t I as a
white British female have that same right?”
Perhaps it was the comparison with
Israel that threw Keir!
Not once did Joshua Leifer ask
simple questions as to why, if the Board of Deputies was concerned with Labour
“antisemitism,” it had said nothing about Boris Johnson’s genuinely
antisemitic and racist 2004 novel
“72 Virgins” or about the fact that the Tories sat
in the European Parliament in a
“conservative and reformist” bloc with fascists and antisemites such as Roberts
Ziles and Michal Kaminsky. When the Leader of the House of Commons, Jacob Rees
Mogg, spoke
last year of the “Illuminati who are
taking the powers to themselves,” in reference to two Jewish fellow MPs, there
was no comment on this patently antisemitic reference.
John Bercow, the recently retired
Jewish Speaker of the House of Commons, was asked in an interview if Corbyn was
an antisemite. His response was that he had known Corbyn for 22 years and there
wasn’t a ‘whiff’ of antisemitism
about him. Bercow also recalled
how he remembered an MP saying:
“If
I had my way, Berkoff, people like you wouldn’t be allowed in this place.”
On inquiring whether his antagonist meant being lower-class or
Jewish?’ the response was ‘Both’!
The idea that the Conservative
Party, the party of Empire, is opposed to racism, including antisemitism,
lies in the realm of fantasy. Yet Leifer asked no questions as to the bona
fides of Corbyn’s right-wing antagonists.
Almost as soon as the
‘antisemitism’ controversy raised its head I had my doubts. Was
antisemitism spontaneously arising in the Labour Party because of Corbyn’s
election or were we seeing the state destabilisation of Labour?
My answer came on March 18th
when I was suspended. All the allegations that were put to me later were about
Israel. Did I compare Israel’s marriage laws to those of Nazi Germany? My
answer was yes, but so did Hannah Arendt, a refugee from Nazi Germany! Did I
say that Israel was hoping that Holocaust survivors would die in order they
could save on their welfare benefits? Yes I did but so did Ha’aretz!
It takes little imagination to
guess at the reaction to Corbyn’s election – from the CIA HQ at Langley
Virginia, to MI5 to Israel. Corbyn was a veteran anti-imperialist, anti-nuclear
and hostile to NATO. He was now leader of the second party of government in the
US’s closest ally in Europe. Al Jazeera’s The Lobby gave
us a snapshot of what was happening when we saw Israeli Embassy operative Shai
Masot being deeply involved in Labour’s ‘antisemitism’ crisis.
The
facts can be true, yet the narrative can be false
Are there antisemites in the
Labour Party? Of course there will be a few. Any party of ½ million is
bound to have them. Does that mean that Labour or any other political party was
overrun by them? Of course not. Yet Leifer, instead of probing beneath
the surface, declares that ‘If people are
exposing a valid problem, you have to deal with it’.
But there wasn’t a problem. Leifer
mentioned the infamous mural, erased in 2012, that the right-wing former
Director of Labour Friends of Israel
Luciana Berger made an issue of before the 2018 local elections. It depicted
six bankers, two of whom were Jewish. They had fat, not hooked noses.
Corbyn had opposed their erasure on free speech grounds. Opinions differ as to
whether the mural was antisemitic but the real issue was why this had been
raised 6 years later. No one had considered the matter important in 2012.
It was clear that sections of the
press and others were researching everything that Corbyn had ever said and
putting the worst possible interpretation on it. This was in contrast to
ignoring the openly racist record of Prime Minister Boris Johnson who in 2002 spoke
about “picanninies” and Black people
having “watermelon” smiles.’
Nearly half of Conservative Party
members oppose
having a Muslim Prime Minister. Yet these bigoted attitudes were never
problematic. Why? Because it was not antisemitism that was the real issue in
Labour, but defence of Israel.
What antisemitism there is in the
Labour Party is confined to social media; and much of that, such as
Rothschild/banker conspiracy theories, are a way in which people try to explain
what they see as the extraordinary power of the Israel lobby to bend
politicians to their will. This is a power that Israeli politicians like
Prime Ministers Benjamin Netanyahu and Ehud Olmert have openly boasted
of. Israel calls itself a Jewish state and it’s unsurprising that
lacking an understanding of how imperialism works, people can ascribe
American responsiveness to Israel’s demands as the bowing to Jewish power
rather than the interplay between an imperialist power and its watchdog in the
region. In my own experience, people who talk of the Rothschilds don’t even
realise that they are Jewish.
Antisemitism is not what some
idiot writes on social media bearing in mind that one person can post a million
tweets. Antisemitism is what people do to Jewish people not what they tweet
about. No one died from a tweet.
Who were the
victims of the antisemitism witchhunt?
Leifer failed to ask basic
questions such as, who were the targets of the ‘antisemitism’
witchhunt? Not only was I expelled but so was Jackie Walker, a Black Jewish
women who was utterly demonised. Jackie was active in the fight against the
National Front and the far-Right UKIP.
Another person expelled was Marc
Wadsworth, who criticised
former Israel
lobbyist Ruth Smeeth for her assisting the
Tory Daily Telegraph. Wadsworth didn’t even know Smeeth was Jewish
when he criticised her at the launch of the Chakrabarti Report in June 2016
into racism in the Labour Party. In the campaign against Police racism over the
murder of Stephen Lawrence, which led to the Government MacPherson Inquiry that
found the Metropolitan Police institutionally racist, Wadsworth introduced
the Lawrence family to Nelson Mandela and put the campaign on the map. Then
Marc was expelled because of the lies of an Israel lobbyist turned MP. Yet in Jewish
Currents, Leifer stayed silent or oblivious of this context.
I spent most of my youth involved
in anti-fascist work as first Secretary of the Anti-Nazi League in Brighton and
then served on the Executive of Anti-Fascist Action. The Board of Deputies
spent most of their time attacking us, not the fascists, because we were
anti-Zionist!
The Board of
Deputies has never opposed antisemitism
The Board of Deputies and the Jewish
Chronicle, which led the ‘antisemitism’ attacks on Corbyn, have never
campaigned against genuine antisemitism. In 1936 when Moseley’s British Union
of Fascists attempted to march through the East End of London the Board of
Deputies and the Jewish Chronicle told
Jews to keep away. Thousands of Jews and non-Jews ignored them in what
became known as the Battle of Cable Street. After the war the 43 Group of
Jewish ex-serviceman took the battle to the resurgent Union Movement and
literally smashed them off the streets. The Board vehemently opposed
them. In the 1970s and 1980s it was the same story.
As the Editor of the Searchlight
anti-fascist magazine, Maurice Ludmer wrote:
“In
the face of mounting attacks against the Jewish community both
ideologically and physically, we have the amazing sight of the Jewish
Board of Deputies launching an attack on the Anti Nazi League with all the
fervour of Kamikaze pilots… It was as though they were watching a time
capsule rerunof the 1930’s, in the form of a flickering old movie, with a
grim determination to repeat every mistake of that era. ” (Issue
41, November 1978)
The first time that the Board held
an ‘anti-racist’ demonstration
was against Corbyn outside Parliament in March 2018. Who took part? Arch
Tory racist Norman Tebbit, proponent of the racist ‘cricket test’
(the idea that immigrants who support the Indian/Pakistani
cricket teams weren’t really British) and sectarian bigot, Ulster Unionist MP
Ian Paisley! Even the Zionist placards were antisemitic!
Antisemitism was
weaponised
‘Antisemitism’ was the chosen
weapon of attack on the Labour left. It played to their weak spot,
identity politics. It was easier to attack Corbyn over ‘antisemitism’ than
austerity or his anti-nuclear politics. The fact that so
many Jews are being suspended
today over supposed antisemitism attitudes because of their criticism of Israel
proves that this is not about antisemitism. According to Jewish Voices
for Labour, at least 25 Jewish members were investigated for ‘antisemitism’,
and many of them suspended, in recent years, with no coverage of the purge in
the mainstream media.
The British
Jewish Community is not the American Jewish Community
Leifer operated under the belief
that the Jewish community in Britain and the United States are
comparable. They are not. American Jewry is not centrally directed by
Zionist bodies like in Britain. I am the son of an Orthodox Rabbi. I knew
the Jewish community and modern Orthodoxy pretty well. Former Chief Rabbi
Joseph Hertz visited my house. It is a deeply conservative and racist community
(anti-Arab/Muslim). There is no comparison with the American Jewish community
which is largely Reform/Conservative. The British Jewish community is far more
insular. It is a community which has for the last 50 years voted Tory by overwhelming
majorities. Even under Labour’s first Jewish leader Ed Miliband, it voted by more
than 3-1 for the Tories. The days of the
Jewish workers in the East End joining and voting
Communist are long gone.
Leifer mentions a letter from 60
rabbis attacking Corbyn. What he doesn’t mention is the
letter signed by 29 Ultra Orthodox
rabbis dissociating themselves from the Board’s attacks saying they did not
represent the Ultra Orthodox community, which is the fastest growing part of
the British Jewish community.
Would Jewish
groups like If Not Now or JVP have helped?
Leifer argues that if there had
been similar Jewish groups in Britain to America’s If Not Now or Jewish Voice
for Peace then things might have been different. I don’t believe so.
American Jewry is more liberal. This was why Jewish Voices for Labour was
formed in Britain. But they were ignored during the antisemitism controversy
because the campaign was not about either Jews or antisemitism. The proof of
this lies in the fact that the Board of the Deputies and the Zionist Jewish
Labour Movement focused on the IHRA (International Holocaust Remembrance
Alliance) definition of antisemitism, which conflates antisemitism and
anti-Zionism. It is the same IHRA that the antisemitic Trump and the
equally antisemitic Viktor Orban of Hungary have taken to heart.
The EHRC report
on Labour ‘Antisemitism’
Leifer quotes uncritically the
recent report
of the Equality and Human Rights Commission that concluded that “there were unlawful acts of harassment and
discrimination for which the Labour Party is responsible” and identified “serious failings in leadership and an
inadequate process for handling antisemitism complaints.”
The EHRC is hardly a reliable
source. The EHRC is a state-appointed, state-funded body that has refused to
investigate Tory Party Islamophobia. It has an abysmal record on racism
and has recently come in for criticism
by the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights. Until recently it didn’t
have a single Black or Muslim Commissioner. Leifer might have mentioned the
author of the report. The Anti-Semitism Report on Labour was produced by
Alasdair Henderson, a supporter
of fascist Roger Scruton and Douglas Murray, whose book “The Strange Death of
Europe” articulates the White Replacement Theory. The EHRC is held in contempt
by Black people yet Leifer said nothing about this miserable record.
Leifer quotes Britain’s Chief
Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis who issued
a statement attacking Corbyn during the General Election over Labour
‘antisemitism’. Leifer failed to tell his readers that Mirvis trained at a
yeshiva on a West Bank settlement, Alon Shvut. Mirvis joined
in and encouraged others to march, in
Jerusalem’s annual March of the Flags, when thousands of settler youth parade
through Palestinian neighborhoods in East Jerusalem chanting ‘Death to the
Arabs’. Mirvis marched despite appeals
in the Times of Israel and Ha’aretz.
Leifer gives as examples of Labour
‘antisemitism’ former London Mayor Ken Livingstone’s assertion that the Nazis
supported Zionism in the 1930’s. Even were this untrue it wouldn’t be
antisemitic. But a Zionist historian, Professor Francis Nicosia, has
spoken of the ‘illusory assumption’
of German Zionism that Zionism “must have
been well served by a Nazi victory.” Another Zionist historian, David
Cesarani wrote in his book “Final Solution” that “The efforts of the Gestapo are oriented to promoting Zionism as much as
possible and lending support to its efforts to promote emigration.” It may
be inconvenient today to remember Zionism’s record during the Nazi period, but
to tell the truth is never antisemitic.
The IHRA
definition of antisemitism
It should be obvious that the IHRA
definition of ‘antisemitism’ is about Zionism not antisemitism. What has
comparing Israel to pre-war Germany got to do with antisemitism? Was the late
Professor Ze’ev Sternhell, a child survivor of the Holocaust, also antisemitic
for making
such a comparison? Was Knesset member and former deputy chief of staff Yair
Golan antisemitic when he made
the same comparison?
Leifer quotes uncritically the
assertion of the Zionist Board of Deputies that ‘Jeremy Corbyn, simply had no right to argue with Jewish organizations
over the definition of antisemitism’. Why not? No one has a monopoly
on the definition of racism.
Not once did Leifer ask why
British Jews and Zionist groups had the right to define antisemitism in terms
that rule out the Palestinian expression of their experience of racism.
Nor did Leifer ask, Why the need
for a definition. The Oxford English Dictionary defines
antisemitism as ‘hostility to or
prejudice against Jews.’ Why the need for a 500+ WORD definition?
My dad took part in the Battle of Cable Street. He didn’t need a definition of
antisemitism! Even the principal drafter of the IHRA, Kenneth Stern, has
condemned the definition’s weaponisation
and chilling of
free speech, yet Leifer was seemingly oblivious to the motives behind the
Zionist demands to accept the IHRA.
Should Corbyn
have ‘apologised’ to the Jewish community?
Quite amazingly Leifer suggests
that during the election Corbyn should have apologised for Labour’s ‘antisemitism’
to the Jewish community when asked to do so by BBC interviewer Andrew Neil. The
proper response would have been ‘Apologise?
What for?’ However, by that time Corbyn too had accepted the false
narrative of ‘antisemitism’ and the more people he expelled the more ‘proof’
there was that Labour had an ‘antisemitism’ problem.
That was the real tragedy of
Corbyn, not that he put up some resistance to the narrative.
Corbyn’s failure was to refuse to
go on to the offensive. When Neil, a former editor of the Murdoch Sunday
Times, asked Corbyn to apologise Corbyn should have asked Neil why he was
so concerned by antisemitism when he had employed
a Holocaust denier, David Irving, to interpret the Goebbels Diaries! Neil as
Chairman of the Spectator also agreed to keeping the openly antisemitic Taki
Theodoracopulos on as a columnist. (Taki openly praised
the Greek Nazi party Golden Dawn and described himself as a “soi-disant
anti-Semite”.) Corbyn had an easy
response but he was incapable of punching a paper bag. His reformist politics
were the problem, not his inability to apologise.
Leifer correctly criticises Corbyn
for having ‘no real strategy for pursuing
a boldly anti-imperialist, pro-Palestine politics or skillfully parrying the
inevitable attacks from his opponents” but the criticism is rich coming
from him. His only suggestion for how Corbyn should have parried is to ask ‘What if, instead of retreating into
defensiveness, they had moved to reconcile sooner with the British Jewish
communal institutions’
He can’t be serious. The answer to
his suggestion lies in section 3(d) of the Board of Deputies Constitution which
states
that the Board shall
‘Take
such appropriate action as lies within its power to advance Israel’s security,
welfare and standing.’
The Board of Deputies is an
Israel, right or wrong, group. An organisation that tweets
its support of the Israeli military when its snipers are mowing down children,
is hardly likely to be won over to pro-Palestinian politics!
Appeasement is not a useful
strategy. Labour’s
Leaked Report makes it clear that
Corbyn sincerely believed that if he offered Jackie Walker, Marc Wadsworth, Ken
Livingstone and myself up as sacrificial lambs, the Board would be appeased. On
page 306 it tells how
Jeremy
Corbyn himself and members of his staff team requested to [the Governance and
Legal Unit] that particular antisemitism cases be dealt with. In 2017 LOTO
[Leader of the Opposition] staff chased for action on high-profile antisemitism
cases Ken Livingstone, Tony Greenstein, Jackie Walker and Marc Wadsworth,
stressing that these cases were of great concern to Jewish stakeholders and
that resolving them was essential to “rebuilding trust between the Labour Party
and the Jewish community”.
Well we were expelled but was
trust reestablished? Of course not. They simply demanded more victims
like the one honourable MP Chris Williamson. You have to fight a wild animal
and Corbyn was not prepared to do that. That was the problem which the ever
clever Leifer wasn’t able to discern.
Corbyn’s period as leadership and
his demise was indeed a tragedy, one which is now resulting in mass expulsions
from the Labour Party. It is or should be crystal clear that the
‘antisemitism’ campaign was never about antisemitism and always about the
threat that a party led by a socialist represented.
In 20-30 years some enterprising
young journalist will no doubt use the Freedom of Information Act to uncover
the names and details of who was at the centre of the anti-Corbyn campaign,
orchestrating the different parts.
As for Jewish Currents, it
describes
itself as ‘a magazine committed to the rich tradition of thought, activism, and
culture of the Jewish left.’ I was left wondering what it means to say that
you stand in the tradition of the Jewish left? It seems for many on the
passive left this comprises a mixture of romantic kitsch and schmaltzy
memories.
The traditions of the Jewish left
– the Bund, the Communists, Socialists and Anarchists –can be summed up in one
word – solidarity. An injury to one is an injury to all. It was in solidarity with
the murdered millions of Jews of Poland that Shmuel Zygielbojm, the Bund
representative in the Polish Government-in-exile, committed suicide in London
in 1943. This was at the same time as his Zionist counterpart Ignacy
Schwarzbart, was playing down the extent of the Holocaust.
The state-sponsored attack against
Jeremy Corbyn and the movement that he led is a litmus test of whether or not
you are a socialist. Joshua Leifer’s article was an attack on all those who
have been victims of the Right’s heresy hunt, not least the Palestinians. I
therefore wrote back to the editor suggesting that if Arielle Angel was going
to refuse a reply to Leifer’s article then it would be more honest for JC to
declare that it represented the non-socialist and non-Marxist left. It seems
that to JC being on the ‘left’ is a lifestyle statement.
I have also sent an Open
Letter to Peter Beinart.
