Comparing Israel, the Holocaust and Nazi Germany

How the Zionist movement tries to have it both ways

You might think it is a no-brainer that refusing to rent Israeli state land to non-Jews was racist but in a Jewish state such logic doesn't apply

According to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of anti-Semitism,

‘Contemporary examples of antisemitism ... could, taking into account the overall context, include, but are not limited to: ....Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.’

This definition, first proposed by the Home Affairs Select Committee last year, was subsequently adopted by Theresa May and, not wanting to feel left out, Jeremy Corbyn.

The IHRA was based on the Working Definition of Anti-Semitism [WDA], which was junked in 2013 by the Europe Union's Fundamental Rights Agency, after vehement opposition to its conflation of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism.  The WDA has resurfaced, like the undead in a Dracula horror movie, in the guise of the IHRA.

I decided on a bit of graffiti on the IHRA Facebook page - this definition is backed by a host of far-Right anti-Semitic governments such as that in Poland

So if were to accuse Israeli Jews who chant ‘Death to the Arabs’ on demonstrations of being no different from Nazi demonstrators who chanted ‘death to the Jews’ 80 years ago, then according to the IHRA, this too is a clear example of ‘anti-Semitism’.

The Imperialist leadership of the Labour Party - Corbyn and McDonnell have, like Theresa May, supported the IHRA definition of 'anti-Semitism' which defines anti-Zionism as anti--Semitism 

Notwithstanding this, Zionists and supporters of Israel are allowed to claim that the Holocaust justifies Israel’s apartheid practices.  Only last week Baroness Deech sent a letter to the Jewish Chronicle concerning a new national Holocaust memorial and learning centre which it is being proposed should be built next to Parliament.  Costing £50m you might think that Deech was enthusiastic in welcoming this project?  Not  a bit of it.  What was the point of such a centre if it had nothing to say about Israel?  Deech whinged that:

“We already have in this country about 10 Holocaust memorials. None has prevented the recent rise in antisemitism and attempts to delegitimise Israel.”

Note how the purpose of learning about the Holocaust is not to prevent racism or anti-Semitism.  It is to prevent ‘delegitimisation’ i.e. criticism of Israel as a Jewish state. 

Deech wondered ‘why some students, who have studied the Holocaust at school, seem not to have made the connection between that event, and Jewish people and their state today.”  A good question.  Perhaps the reasons might lie in the fact that many people find it hard to reconcile the Nazi state’s pre-1941 discrimination against German Jews with Israel’s discrimination against Palestinians?  The good Baroness explained that “you have to improve the relationship between Holocaust education and attitudes to Jewish people and to Israel.”

Netanyahu used the meeting of the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj al Amin Husseini with Hitler in November 1941 to suggest that the Mufti had forced Hitler into the Final Solution - except that the Holocaust began in June 1941

In other words Holocaust ‘education’ should concern itself not with historical understanding of the Holocaust and why it happened but with propaganda aimed at supporting the Israeli state.  A state which has two separate legal systems – one for Jewish settlers and another for Palestinians on the West Bank.  A state which seeks to ethnically cleanse not simply Palestinians living in Jerusalem but Arabs and Bedouin within Israel itself.  According to Deech any Holocaust memorial should be modelled on Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust propaganda museum which has a picture of the Palestinian Mufti of Jerusalem prominently displayed.  As Tom Segev noted, its purpose being to ensure that ‘the visitor is left to conclude that there is much in common between the Nazis’ plan to destroy the Jews and the Arabs’ enmity to Israel.’ [The Seventh Million p.425]

The purpose of Holocaust education is not so much to foster an understanding of the iniquities of racism and the singling out of an ethnic group for blame or scapegoating but rather to help bolster support for a state based upon the same principles of ethno-religious discrimination as Nazi Germany.

The article below was originally published on February 10, 2017 by The Clarion, which describes itself as ‘an unofficial magazine by Labour Party and Momentum activists.  It would fairer to describe Clarion as the magazine and web journal of the Alliance for Workers Liberty, a Zionist ‘Trotskyist’ group and its sympathisers.  Its Editorial Board includes Rhea Wolfson of the Jewish Labour Movement, who was elected to Labour’s National Executive Committee as part of the grassroots slate of 6. 

Are Comparisons Between Israel and the Nazis Anti-Semitic?

According to Shami Chakrabarti in her Report on Racism and Anti-Semitism in the Labour Party:

In day -to-day political debate , it is always incendiary to compare the actions of Jewish people or institutions anywhere in the world to those of Hitler or the Nazis or to the perpetration of the Holocaust. Indeed such remarks can only be intended to be incendiary rather than persuasive.’

Shami Chakrabarti knew nothing about Zionism or the background to comparisons between Zionism and the Nazi era.  What has been compared is not the treatment of the Palestinians to the Holocaust, because clearly Israel isn’t attempting to exterminate millions of Palestinians, (though there are powerful elements, especially amongst religious Zionists who would like to see their physical elimination) but three things:

i.              The ideological congruence between Nazi attitudes to the Jews from 1933 onwards to the Jews and Zionist attitudes to Palestinians as manifested in Israeli Apartheid today.

ii.             The fact that sections of the Zionist community in Israel have adopted a genocidal attitude towards the Palestinians.  For example in 2010 Rabbis Yitzhak Shapira and Yosef Elitzur wrote a book ‘Torat Hameleh’  [The King’s Torah] which explained that:

The prohibition 'Thou Shalt Not Murder' applies only "to a Jew who kills a Jew," write Rabbis Yitzhak Shapira and Yosef Elitzur of the West Bank settlement of Yitzhar. Non-Jews are "uncompassionate by nature" and attacks on them "curb their evil inclination," while babies and children of Israel's enemies may be killed since "it is clear that they will grow to harm us."

iii.            The repeated comparison by Zionists of the Palestinians with the Nazis and those who perpetrated the Holocaust.  This has been most evident in the portrayal of the Mufti of Jerusalem, who was a Nazi collaborator and war criminal, as representative of the Palestinians.  In his address to the World Zionist Congress in 2015, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu laid the blame for the Holocaust at the feet of the Mufti not Hitler (see Rewriting the Holocaust – Jacobin). 

The Zionist suggestion that the Mufti of Jerusalem was representative of the Palestinians and that opposition to Zionism is therefore motivated by anti-Semitism, is an example of the hypocrisy of Zionism.  The Mufti was never elected by the Palestinians.  It was the ardently Zionist British High Commissioner Herbert Samuel who appointed Haj al Amin Husseini as Grand Mufti in 1920 despite him coming fourth in the elections for the position, However this kind of double standard is perfectly acceptable to the Deeches of this world.

As the article below explains, the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism is worse than idiocy.  It is based on a combination of ignorance and malevolence.  The 31 governments which agreed to this definition include the states of Hungary, Poland, Croatia and the Baltic republics, all of which have manifested differing degrees of anti-Semitism and racism towards refugees.  Like most such governments they combine anti-Semitism and support for Zionism.

The IHRA definition of anti-Semitism is designed to suppress free speech and close down debate.  In Israel the use of the Holocaust as a metaphor and an insult are legion, precisely because the Holocaust has helped shape, in the distorted context of settler colonialism, Israel’s Jewish self-identity.

For example on March 10^th in Ha’aretz Carolina Landsmann described how a new piece of legislation from Israel’s Knesset, a bill which sought to ban the Muslim call to prayer on the grounds of ‘noise’, brought to mind what the Zionist historian, David Bankier had said when describing how ‘Nazi propaganda deliberately fostered a sense of collective guilt among the Germans. Starting in 1942, the Nazis provided hints about what was happening to the Jews so that the Germans would feel they had crossed the bounds of morality along with their leaders.’

 What we have is a situation where the Holocaust is repeatedly used to justify Zionist crimes against the Palestinians but any attempt to reverse the equation and show how the depiction and scapegoating of the Palestinian minority of Israel bears a similarity to the treatment of the Jews of Germany is ‘anti-Semitic’.

These are the double standards of Zionism and its Tory apologists – unfortunately Jeremy Corbyn has also signed up to this Establishment hypocrisy.

Tony Greenstein

Palestine, Israel, Zionism and the Holocaust – a reply to Michael Chessum

By Tony Greenstein, Brighton Momentum activist

 (This is a reply to Michael Chessum’s explanation of why he voted to remove Jackie Walker as vice chair of the Momentum steering committee. It does not reflect the view of the Clarion editors or most of our contributors, but we publish it in the interests of debate on the left.)

When Israel's Supreme Court ruled that the JNF could no longer bar non-Jews from state lands, it issued the above statement on its web site - its survey showed that 70% of Israeli Jews oppose allocating state and JNF land to non-Jews and 80% of Jews prefer a Jewish to a democratic state of all of its citizens 

The JNF has an openly racist constitution - it is for the benefit of Jews only (it has now changed this to the people of Israel, but still defines its purposes as Jewish in nature)

The JNF's priorities - benefiting the 'Land of Israel' not the State of Israel.  The Land of Israel (Eretz Yisrael) is code for a Greater Israel whose borders extend into Jordan, Iraq and Lebanon.

Introduction

The present split in Momentum can be traced back to the night of the 3rd October when Jon Lansman moved to remove Jackie Walker from her post as Vice-Chair of Momentum. The pretext for this were comments that she had been secretly recorded making at a Jewish Labour Movement ‘training session’ on anti-Semitism at the last Labour Party conference. It is clear, in hindsight, that Jackie had been the victim of a political ‘sting’ by the Jewish Labour Movement, which is the emanation of the Israeli state inside the Labour Party.

None of the comments Jackie made were in the least anti-Semitic but a climate was created in which anything she said about anti-Semitism or the Holocaust would be twisted by the JLM into an allegation of ‘anti-Semitism’.

We saw how this was done in the third programme of Al Jazeera’s ‘The Lobby’ when Joan Ryan MP, Chair of Labour Friends of Israel concocted an ‘anti-Semitic’ incident at their stall when questioned by Jean Fitzpatrick as to what their ‘support’ for 2 States in Israel/Palestine meant in practice. In practice, as she found out, not a lot. It is mere rhetoric designed to cover up for their support for the existing status quo and the military occupation of the Palestinian territories.

Jackie’s ‘anti-Semitic’ statements that led to her removal as Momentum Vice-Chair were:

1. ‘wouldn’t it be wonderful if Holocaust Day were shared by all people who had experienced genocide’.

2. ‘I haven’t heard any definition of anti-Semitism that I could work with’

It is difficult to understand how either statement could be said to be anti-Semitic. They are expressions of opinion. Whether or not they are true is immaterial. It was as if Jackie had been urging a Pharaonic cull of the Jewish first born. The sincerity of her main antagonist, the JLM, can be judged by its silence over Israeli Labour Party leader Isaac Herzog’s effusive welcome for the election of Donald Trump and the anti-Semites he has brought in his wake in the form of Steve Bannon and the Alt-Right.(1)

Of course the Zionist lobby and their friends in the media have an unerring ability to create a synthetic symphony of outrage about ‘anti-Semitism’ out of nothing. All the newspapers – from the Tory tabloids to the Guardian were eager to damn Jackie. Instead of defending her, Jon Lansman threw her to the wolves. Stephen Pollard of the Zionist Jewish Chronicle reported that Lansman had ‘reached the end of his tether”. Lansman informed the Independent that “I spoke to Jeremy Newmark of the Jewish Labour Movement this morning, he’s very upset and I can understand that – I work closely with Jeremy…’

I can certainly believe that Lansman works very closely with Newmark, a man who works closely with the Israeli Ambassador Mark Regev, whose previous job as spokesperson for Benjamin Netanyahu included justifying the murder of hundreds of children and two thousand civilians in Gaza two years ago.

One would have expected, as a matter of course, that Jill Mountford of the AWL and Mike Chessum, who is politically close to them, to have opposed Jackie’s removal as Momentum Vice Chair, even if they didn’t agree with her comments. In agreeing to the Lansman witch-hunt back in October, they opened the door to Lansman’s support for the witch-hunt of the AWL and his coup in Momentum itself. You cannot be on both sides of a witch-hunt.

Despite their protestations it is obvious that both Chessum and Mountford voted to remove Jackie Walker as Momentum’s Vice Chair because they deemed her remarks anti-Semitic. There is no other conclusion. All the stuff about ‘losing confidence’ is a mere circumlocution.

The Holocaust and Israel

The Holocaust has played a formative role in the creation of Israel’s own self image and its ideological legitimation. Is Chessum unaware of the role the ship the Exodus played in 1946 in opening the gates of Palestine and its use of Jewish refugees from displaced person’s camps to open the gates of Palestine to Jewish settler immigration?

Holocaust imagery pervades Israeli political dialogue.(2) The Holocaust has played a key role in the justification for a Jewish ethno-supremacist state. Where else is there a state, which defines itself on the basis of an imagined ethnicity of part of its population (Jewish) rather than on all those who reside there? A fictive nation (Jewish) that crosses every national boundary and language?

We often hear that Israel is the only Jewish state in the world. True but of course irrelevant. Britain is a Christian state but all its citizens, Christian and non-Christian are equal. In Israel being Jewish means that you possess privileges that non-Jews do not have and this is justified by reference to the trauma of the Holocaust.

Idith Zertal, one of Israel’s revisionist historians(3), wrote about how ‘there has not been a war in Israel, from 1948 till… October 2000, that has not been perceived, defined and conceptualised in terms of the Holocaust…. Auschwitz is not a past event but a threatening present and a constant option.’(4) The Holocaust has been consciously utilised in order to defend its actions against the Palestinians and to ward off criticism.

Examples of how the Holocaust has been used are legion. Menachem Begin, Prime Minister during Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon and siege of Beirut, compared Yassir Arafat to Hitler in his bunker. According to Begin the alternative to Israel’s genocidal war was ‘Auschwitz’. Israeli Labour’s Foreign Minister, Abba Eban told the UN that “I do not exaggerate when I say that it [the June 1967 map] has for us something of a memory of Auschwitz.” The Green Line between Israel and the West Bank is referred to in Israel as the ‘Auschwitz border’. Netanyahu told the 2015 World Zionist Congress that it was the Palestinian Grand Mufti who was responsible for Hitler’s Final Solution. Netanyahu has repeatedly compared Iran to Nazi Germany.

As Tom Segev, a critical Israeli historian explained, the only image of a Palestinian in Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust museum ‘(is) a photo featured prominently on a wall depicting the Mufti sieg heiling a group of Nazi storm troopers’. Its purpose being to ensure that ‘the visitor is left to conclude that there is much in common between the Nazis’ plan to destroy the Jews and the Arabs’ enmity to Israel.’(5) Effigies of Israeli Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin, were dressed in Nazi uniform by his political opponents as a prelude to his assassination.

As Zertal persuasively argues, the Israeli state has effectively nationalised the memory of the Holocaust and in the process ‘it directly excluded the direct bearers of this memory – some quarter of a million Holocaust survivors who had immigrated to Israel.’(6) This is why you have the terrible phenomenon of Israel, a rich and prosperous state, bristling with state of the art weaponry including nuclear weapons, condemning the actual survivors of the Holocaust to live out their life in penury as it keeps them in dire poverty despite having received reparations to provide them with a comfortable old age.(7)

Zionism has defined the Holocaust as something exclusive and unique to the Jews because of its ideological usefulness in Israel’s propaganda wars. Elie Wiesel held that to compare the Holocaust with the sufferings of others was a “betrayal of Jewish history”.(8) In a debate with Sybil Milton, the Senior Resident Historian at the US Holocaust Museum, Yehuda Bauer, Professor of Holocaust Studies at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem argued that the Nazis only attempted to annihilate one people, the Jews: “Roma were not Jews, therefore there was no need to murder all of them.”(9) To this day the US Holocaust Museum refuses to include the Roma victims of the Holocaust.

If you go to the Holocaust Memorial Day site and click on Holocaust you will be taken to a page that says ‘Between 1941 and 1945, the Nazis attempted to annihilate all of Europe’s Jews.’ There is no mention that the Holocaust began in 1939 with the extermination of the Disabled, the T4 Euthanasia program. The Roma and Gypsies are not mentioned either. If you click Nazi Persecution you will come to a page which begins ‘Singling out Jews for complete annihilation in the Holocaust was not the full extent of Nazi persecution.’ Although it goes on to mention other groups, they do this in the context of the ‘persecution of disabled people and gay people’. They do not mention that they too were exterminated. There is no mention of the extermination of 10 million Africans in the Belgian Congo or the estimated 14 million Africans in the slave trade.

This is why when Jackie Walker made criticisms of how the Holocaust is presented and used or how anti-Semitism is defined it has a direct bearing on how, in this country, Israel’s propaganda war is conducted.

Notes

1. See Open Letter from Jewish Members of the Labour Party to Jeremy Newmark and the Jewish Labour Movement

2. See e.g. Playing the Holocaust Card; Calling your political rival a Nazi is a time-hallowed tradition in Israel

3. That group of historians in the 1980’s onwards who began to challenge the foundational myths of Israel, most notably about the flight of the refugees in 1948. Until then it had been the consensus that they had voluntarily left at the urging of the Arab leaders whereas it is now accepted that they left forcibly and as a result of massacres

4. Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood, p.4, Idith Zertal, Cambridge University Press, 2011.

5. Tom Segev, The Seventh Million, p.425,Hill and Wang, 1991, USA

6. Zertal, p.5

7. See for example Israel is Waiting for Its Holocaust Survivors to Die, Ha’aretz 6.2.13. Ironically my quoting of this article formed part of my investigation hearing as the Labour Party Compliance Unit assumed that this must be some wicked invention by anti-Zionists seeking to libel the Israeli state.

8. Wiesel, Against Silence, p.146, Schocken Books, 1988

9. The History Teacher, Vol. 25, No. 4., August 1992 pp. 513-521

The Government's new definition of ‘anti-Semitism’ is an attempt to criminalise support for the Palestinians and opposition to Zionism

Jeremy Corbyn’s acceptance of this Tory definition of ‘anti-Semitism’ is shameful and must be reversed

Tzipi Hotoveli is a virulent racist who believes it is a crime for Jews and non-Jews to have sexual relations or marry.  This is what the Nazis also believed in yet Theresa May is happy to be photographed with her. 

On Monday the Guardian reported that the government was going to ‘formally adopt a definition of what constitutes antisemitism, which includes over-sweeping condemnation of Israel.’  According to Theresa May this would ‘help efforts to combat hate crime against Jews.’

Britain would ‘become one of the first countries to use this definition of antisemitism’ and the intention was to “ensure that culprits will not be able to get away with being antisemitic because the term is ill-defined, or because different organisations or bodies have different interpretations of it”.

Theresa May is happy to keep company with Tzipi Hotoveli, Israel's Deputy Foreign Minister, a religious nut-case

The idea that because there is no agreed definition of anti-Semitism that people will get away with arson at a synagogue or attacking someone who is Jewish is ludicrous.  Jewish self defence against the pogromists in Czarist Russia did not depend on an academic definition of anti-Semitism!

Sajid Javid, Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government issued a statement saying it was ‘legally non-binding’ and should be seen in the light of the Home Affairs Select Committee Report on anti-Semitism, which recommended that ‘For the purposes of criminal or disciplinary investigations, use of the words ‘Zionist’ or ‘Zio’ in an accusatory or abusive context should be considered inflammatory and potentially antisemitic.’  In other words, if you equate Zionism and racism in the same breath you could be guilty of a ‘hate crime’. 

Tzipi Hotoveli, Theresa May's friend invites Lehava, a fascist group into the Knesset and  secures them a grant to prevent mixed marriages

Although this definition will be ‘legally non-binding’ it will be part of the operational policy of the Police and other statutory bodies and it will begin to take on the force of a legally accepted definition.  The road to hell is paved with good intentions except that neither May nor Javid have any good intentions.  

Having being attacked himself as 'anti-Semitic' it is baffling that Corbyn refuses to call out May's abuse of anti-Semitism as a weapon against the Palestinians

Corbyn retreats again from facing up to the Zionists

What is staggering, stupefying, unbelievable is that Jeremy Corbyn simply accepted this new definition without demur.  It is as if he has learnt no lessons from the past year.  Simply repeating 'I condemn anti-Semitism' just encourages those who accuse anti-Zionists of 'anti-Semitism'.  Corbyn should know since he himself has been called it enough.

If Corbyn were to combined condemnations of anti-Semitism with a condemnation of those who make bogus accusations of anti-Semitism against supporters of the Palestinians then he would call the bluff of those who will never be satisfied by his protestations.

If Corbyn or his team thinks he is going to avoid accusations of anti-Semitism in the Labour Party by signing up to this bogus definition of anti-Semitism then he should think again.  Theresa May used the introduction of this new, Orwellian definition of anti-Semitism to attack Corbyn for the increase in anti-Semitism:

“It is disgusting that these twisted views are being found in British politics,” May said, adding that “of course, I am talking mainly about the Labour Party and their hard-left allies.” 

What was Corbyn’s feeble response?  ‘A spokesman for Corbyn said in a statement that he fully supports the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism.’ 

If Corbyn had called out May for her opportunism, if he had attacked her for using the issue of anti-Semitism for narrow party political purposes and for a defence of the indefensible racist Zionist policies of Israel, Corbyn would have gained respect rather than contempt.  This feebleness by Corbyn just makes a rod for his own back.  It encourages May and the Right to continue to attack him rather than putting them on the defensive.  It bodes ill for other areas of policy that Labour is ambiguous on.

What is this definition?  Well the first part of it reads:

“Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.”

The Government's new definition of anti-Semitism is based on this old, discredited 'working definition' that the EU junked

This is a rewording of the discredited EUMC’s Working Definition on Anti-Semitism which was junked by its successor body, the Fundamental Rights Agency, in 2013.  EU body disowns antisemitism ‘definition’ endorsed at NUS conference  

EUMC is the Undead of Anti-Racism

Despite being rejected by the University Colleges Union, NUS, anti-racists and the European Union’s Fundamental Rights Agency, the European Union Monitoring Committee’s Working Definition of Anti-Semitism resurfaces in different guises like the Undead of Dracula

The EUMC was junked because it had become embroiled in controversy.  Draw up by an openly Zionist group, the American Jewish Committee, it consciously sought, not to combat anti-Semitism, but to redefine opposition and hostility to Israel, the ‘Jewish’ state as anti-Semitism.  The EUMC Working Definition is like Dracula and the Undead.  However many times a stake is driven through its heart, it seems to revive, because US imperialism and its satraps have a vested stake in it.  Anti-Semitism is the 'anti-racism' that justifies imperialist barbarism.  That is why those who most oppose the 'new' anti-Semitism, like the Zionist Organisation of America, AIPAC and our own Board of Deputies, President, Jonathan Arkush, are so effusive in welcoming Donald Trump and his Breibart allies into government in the USA.

The IHRA definition of anti-Semitism followed on naturally from what was called the ‘new anti-Semitism’.  Ideologues such as the former Canadian Minister Irwin Cotler believed that Israel was the ‘new Jew’ and that opposition to Israel had nothing to do with the fact that it was a barbaric, racist state, the world’s only settler colonial and Apartheid state.    

The argument that Israel is attacked because it is a ‘Jewish’ state is fundamentally flawed.  It rests on the assumption that if Israel had been a Christian state which had occupied the West Bank and introduced different set of laws for the occupied Palestinians and for the Christian settlers, then no one would have objected!  If a Christian Israel had demolished ‘unrecognised’ Arab villages like Umm al-Hiran, a Bedouin village in the Negev, in order to make way for a Christian settler town, then no one would have objected.  If two weeks ago born-again Christian Prime Minister of Israel , Benjamin Netanyahu, had blamed Israeli Arab terrorists for the fires that had spread out of control in Israel and threatened to revoke the citizenship of all those found guilty, then no one would have objected to this racist pillorying of a minority community.

Even the introduction to the IHRA definition is unsatisfactory.  There is no need to include discrimination against a non-Jew in a definition of anti-Jewish hatred.  What is called ‘associative’ discrimination, which is when someone wrongly believes that a person is Jewish and therefore discriminates against them, may be appropriate in employment law but it serves no purpose in a definition which is aimed at defining what anti-Semitism is.  For example in Israel a year ago, an Israeli Jew stabbed another Jew mistakenly believing him to be an Arab!  That is associative discrimination.

The inclusion of Jewish property is also unnecessary since hostility to Jews will cover this e.g. an arson attack at a synagogue.  But the destruction of property belong to a Jew will not always be anti-Semitic, it depends on the circumstances.  The inclusion of Jewish communal organisations is even more absurd.  The Board of Deputies for example should be attacked for its support for the attack on Gaza.  Yet a definition such as this is likely to catch in the net quite genuine political criticism. 

Brian Klug is a Philosophy lecturer at Oxford University and an expert in anti-Semitism as well as being Jewish.  His article in Patterns of Prejudice [Vol. 37, No. 2, June 2003, Routledge The collective Jew: Israel and the new antisemitism is well worth reading.  In it he defines anti-Semitism much more simply.  It is ‘a form of hostility towards Jews as Jews, in which Jews are perceived as something other than what they are.’ The ‘Jew’ towards whom the antisemite feels hostile is not a real Jew at all. In short anti-Semitism can be defined as ‘hostility to Jews’.

Brian Klug goes on to argue, quite persuasively, that anti-Semitism is not just hostility to Jews but also envy and even admiration of them, sometimes called philo-semitism.  We saw an example of this in the summer when Owen Smith MP, the hapless anti-Corbyn candidate was asked what he admired most about the Jews and he said their ‘entrepreneurial skills’ which is a classic anti-Semitic trope! 

But if your intention is not to define anti-Semitism but to redefine it in order to outlaw and criminalise criticism of Israel and to provide an ideological comfort blanket for British foreign policy in the Middle East, then it makes sense to dress it up as opposition to racism.  There were those who said our opposition to the Iraq war was a form of anti-Americanism and that opposition to Apartheid in South Africa was anti-White prejudice.  These arguments never got very far because they were so transparent.

In the case of Israel however, there are much more powerful and determined forces seeking to outlaw any criticism of Israel that challenges the state itself.  Yes you can criticise individual policies but it is verboten to criticise the Jewish state itself.

The IHRA definition does this by saying that ‘Contemporary examples of anti-Semitism... could, taking into account the overall context, include, but are not limited to’ the examples listed below. 

1.             Accusing Jewish citizens of being more loyal to Israel, or to the alleged priorities of Jews worldwide, than to the interests of their own nations.

But this is what Zionism does all the time.  It would be amusing if it were not so serious.  Ha’aretz, a liberal Israeli paper reported in an article:  Israel Asks U.S. Jews, Israelis: Where Do Your Loyalties Lie? that:

it's strange that representatives of Israel’s immigrant absorption and foreign ministries have just distributed a questionnaire to tens of thousands of Israelis living in the United States and Jewish Americans, which includes problematic questions on exactly these issues, and asks them to indicate where their allegiance would lie in the case of a crisis between the two countries....

One question in the survey asked specifically which side the respondents would support publicly if there was a crisis in the relationship between the United States and Israel.

Israel proclaims itself as a Jewish state, a state of the Jewish people throughout the world not just Israeli Jews.  The Jerusalem Program of the World Zionist Organisation speaks of ‘the centrality of the State of Israel and Jerusalem, its capital, in the life of the nation.’ The Jewish nation means all Jews wherever they live.  Dual loyalty is part of the Zionist’s DNA. 

2.             ‘Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination (e.g. by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavour).’

This is a non-sequitur.  Saying that the existence of the State of Israel is racist is not a consequence of a denial of Jewish self-determination.  The argument that Jews or anyone has a ‘right of self-determination’ is founded on the idea that they are a nation.  It used to be the anti-Semites who claimed that Jews were a nation.  When Theodor Herzl, founder of Political Zionism set out to establish a Jewish state, he freely conceded that:

It might more reasonably be objected that I am giving a handle to Anti-Semitism when I saw we are a people – one people; that I am hindering the assimilation of Jews where it is about to be consummated and endangering it where it is an accomplished fact.’ [The Jewish State, H Pordes, London 1972, p. 17]

3.             ‘Applying double standards by requiring of it a behaviour not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.’ 

This of course assumes that Israel is a ‘democratic nation’.  The definition therefore depends on whether you accept Israel is a democratic state, which is a politically contentious issue.  It is a strange basis on which to rest a neutral definition of anti-Semitism.  In any case the definition is flawed in itself, since it refers to ‘any other democratic nation’.  There is no Israeli nationality.  In the case of Tamarin v State of Israel 1972 and Uzzi Ornan v State of Israel 2013, the Israeli Supreme Court made it crystal clear that there was no Israeli nation.  Judge Agranat ruled in the former that:

‘the desire to create an Israeli nation separate from the Jewish nation is not a legitimate aspiration. A division of the population into Israeli and Jewish nations would … negate the foundation on which the State of Israel was established.... There is no Israeli nation separate from the Jewish People. The Jewish People is composed not only of those residing in Israel but also of Diaspora Jewry.” [see O. Kraines, The Impossible Dilemma: Who Is a Jew in the State of Israel? (Bloch Publishing Company, 1976), p.67.  Supreme Court Rejects Citizens' Request to Change Nationality From 'Jewish' to 'Israeli', Revital Hovel , Ha’aretz 3.10.13]. 

This is the root of Zionist and Israeli racism.  Israel is not a state of its own citizens but a state of its Jewish citizens and Jewish nationality is not confined to Israeli Jews.

4.              ‘Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.’ 

This is the most ludicrous and hypocritical of all.  There are numerous examples of where Israelis have identified with the Nazis when engaging in the repression of the Palestinians. 

For example Israeli soldiers called some of their companions 'Our Nazis' meaning those who like to beat. [Hotam, 24 June 1988, Sara Ben Hillef] They identified themselves with the Nazis and the Palestinians with their Jewish victims: [Israeli Soldiers Called Themselves the Mengele Unit’],  Al Hamishmar 24 July 1989, Ha'aretz 27^th July 1989 and 24^th July 1989 and Hadashot 25 July 1989]. Ha’aretz described how groups of soldiers who “were called the Auschwitz 10” and “Demjanjuks’ had plotted to kill Arabs.” [Ha’aretz, 1.10.10. The Mengele Squad, see also Tom Segev, The Seventh Million, p. 408, Hill & Wang].

Many comparisons of Israel’s actions to the Nazis between 1933 and 1939 are extremely valid and have nothing to do with anti-Semitism.  Is it seriously claimed that when Jewish mobs in Tel Aviv chant ‘death to the Arabs’ that this is not similar to what took place in the Europe of the 1930’s?  Or when the Chief Rabbi of Safed, Shmuel Eliyahu, supported by dozens of Jewish rabbis, forbids the renting of Jewish flats and apartments to Arabs that this doesn’t smack of the Third  Reich?

Labour Prime Minister David Ben Gurion responded to a call for his resignation by an Israeli professor by asking ‘Is he not aware that the Mufti [a leader of the Palestinian before the war] was a counselor and a partner in the extermination schemes and that in all  Arab countries the popularity of Hitler rose during World War II?’ [Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood, Idith Zertal, p.101 CUP, 2011].  Netanyahu accused the Palestinians of having been partners with the Nazis in the Final Solution.  These claims were false but the Palestinians and Arab leaders have repeatedly been called ‘new Nazis’ by Zionist leaders.

5.             ‘Holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel.’ 

I agree with this but it is Zionist organisations in Britain which regularly claim that Israel’s actions are undertaken on behalf of all Jews.   Running through this definition is an institutionalized form of ruling class hypocrisy. See for example The Board of Deputies of British Jews is condoning genocide in Gaza. They don’t represent us.

The key question is why the focus on anti-Semitism and not Islamaphobia and anti-Muslim racism?  In 2015 Tell Mama reported that  Incidents of anti-Muslim abuse were up by 326% in 2015.  They spoke of an ‘exponential growth’ in anti-Muslim hate crimes.  Even the Daily ‘Hate’ Mail recognised that anti-Muslim hate crimes have doubled in London between 2013 and 2015.

Yet we don’t have a new definition of Islamophobia nor any statements of concern shown by Theresa May or lapdog Sajid Javid at the real incidents of anti-Muslim racism which have resulted in death, serious injury, firebombing of mosques etc.

The level of anti-Semitic incidents is trivial and mainly confined either to social media or verbal attacks on Jews because of the actions of Israel.  In Antisemitic Incidents Report 2015, the Community Security Trust’s recorded the third-highest annual total, 924, of antisemitic hate incidents in the UK during 2015. This was a 22 per cent fall from 2014’s record high of 1,179 incidents, which had been caused by antisemitic reactions to the conflict in Israel and Gaza during July 2014 (316 incidents) and August 2014 (228 incidents).  The CST noted that ‘the second-highest annual total of 931 incidents came in 2009, also a year when there was a major conflict in Israel and Gaza.’    

The 924 antisemitic incidents in 2015 included 86 violent antisemitic assaults, an increase of 6 per cent from 2014 and the highest number of violent incidents since 2011. This is the only antisemitic incident category that increased in 2015. Four of these violent incidents were classified by CST as ‘Extreme Violence’, meaning they involved potential grievous bodily harm (GBH) or threat to life.

In the Antisemitic Incident Report January-June 2016 it was stated that in the first six months of 2016 there was an 11 per cent increase in antisemitic hate incidents, 557, compared to the same period in 2015, 500.  However if one looks beyond the bare statistics one finds that there were 41 violent antisemitic assaults in the first six months of 2016, ‘a 13 per cent fall from the 47 violent assaults recorded in the first half of 2015’ and none of these 41 ‘were serious enough to be classified as Extreme Violence.’  In other words the 2016 anti-Semitic incidents were a distinct improvement on 2015 yet the government, like the Home Affairs Select Committee has used an alleged increase in anti-Semitic incidents in order to justify adopting a bogus new definition of ‘anti-Semitism’ which conflates anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism.

If we want to get some form of perspective for the approximately 1,000 anti-Semitic incidents, most of them either verbal abuse or abuse on social media, then one can look at the Report ‘Hate Crime, England and Wales, 2015/16’ by Hannah Corcoran and Kevin Smith, in which it states that the number of hate crime offences in 2015/16 were:

·        49,419 (79%) race hate crimes;

·        ·7,194 (12%) sexual orientation hate crimes;

·        · 4,400 (7%) religious hate crimes;

·        3,629 (6%) disability hate crimes; and

·        858 (1%) transgender hate crimes.

In other words, not only are anti-Semitic hate crimes less serious than other hate crimes, but they constitute at most 2% of the total yet they command 90%+ of the political attention that hate crimes receive.  The only explanation for this is that anti-Semitism is being used to justify British foreign policy that is related to Israel.

Tony Greenstein