Can the left survive outside the Labour Party? Is it time to form a new socialist party?

Einstein remarked that the definition of insanity is repeating the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. Is that also true of the Labour left?

The Left in the Labour Party is facing an existential crisis.  Can it survive?  Does it have a future in a party where democracy has been abolished? Where guilt-by-association is the modus operandi and where McCarthyism is the rule how can it operate other than by subterfuge?

The launch meeting of LAW - from right to left - Tony Greenstein, Moshe Machover, Jackie Walker and Ken Loach

Tomorrow Labour Against the Witchhunt, which was proscribed by Starmer’s minions on 10 July, will debate these and other questions at an All Members Meeting.

If you are a member you are welcome to participate and if you are not then you can still joinand participate.

I have submitted a strategy paper which raises these and other questions.  It is clear that Starmer is intent on purging the left from the Labour Party. Unfortunately the left is still divided into those who are considering doing something and those who believe, like Dickens' McCawber, that ‘something will come up’. The largest organisation Momentum, which can barely be called on the left, has simply refused to fight the witchhunt. It believes that by keeping its head down it can avoid being targeted.

The proscription of LAW, Labour-in-Exile-Network, Socialist Appeal and Chris Williamson’s Resist is the beginning not the end. Almost certainly next on the list is the Labour Representation Committee, whose President is John McDonnell. Already many members of its Executive, such as Pete Firmin and Graham Bash, have been expelled or given notice of auto exclusion.

Jennie Formby on Twitter today forgets that she began the ball rolling and Starmer picked it up from her

But organisations such as the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy have done their best not to fight the witchhunt, despite a number of their own members having been targeted. CLPD is particularly invidious in this respect. When Pete Willsman, its veteran representative on the NEC was suspended, the CLPD completely disowned him even though he was setup by a far-Right Israeli racist. And this happened under Corbyn and Formby not Starmer.

CLPD has effectively been dead for many years. Its heyday was in the early 1980s with the Benn for Deputy Campaign and the campaign to elect the Labour leader (prior to 1981 the leader had been elected by the Parliamentary Labour Party).

LAW fringe meeting at Liverpool Labour Conference 2018 with Chris Williamson speaking and the late Militant Councillor Terry Mulhearn

Labour Left 4 Socialism

A new organisation, Labour Left for Socialism (formerly Don’t Leave Organise) made up a number of groups, including the Bakers Union (whose President Ian Hodson is on the brink of expulsion) and the Fire Brigades Union, whose President Matt Wrack is Chair of the LRC and also a candidate for expulsion, issued a statement ‘Labour Left Rallies To Reclaim Party As Democratic Force For Socialist Transformation’.

Unfortunately this is not true. Sectarians around the CLPD and Socialist Action, the undercover group that does not declare its presence, insisted on inserting a weasel worded clause which reads:

We stand firmly against proscriptions, and stand in solidarity with every grouping that is proscribed solely for holding socialist views. 

In other words it was only prepared to support Socialist Appeal, which was that part of Militant years ago which stayed inside the Labour Party. It doesn’t therefore support LAW or LIEN which were proscribed for opposing the ‘anti-Semitism’ witchhunt. It is for that reason that LAW, although signing up to the statement, found its name left off the initial signatories.

Momentum which was part of the DLO has since walked out.  Presumably the idea of fighting anything that Starmer does is too much for those who have inherited the mantle of Lansman. It was hoped that the victory of Forward Momentum over Lansman’s Momentum Renewal meant that Momentum might revert to a more activist stance but this has not proven to be the case. If anything things have gotten worse.

As it is Momentum is haemorrhaging members and an organisation which once boasted over 40,000 members is now believed to have less than 15,000 paying members, only a fraction of whom are now active. SE National Coordinating Group member Phil Clarke recently called a Brighton & Hove Momentum Zoom meeting. There was an attendance of 33, one of whom was me! In the days when we had physical meetings we would regularly get 60-70 and sometimes over a hundred attending. Zoom meetings tend to attract more not less people and at one time Brighton had some 1,500 supporters so if Brighton is anything to go by the organisation is in serious decline.

Corbyn’s failure to confront the Fake Anti-Semitism Campaign

If Jeremy Corbyn and those around him had understood that the fake anti-Semitism was about as genuine as a 9 bob note then Labour might be in government now. Instead Corbyn and McDonnell spent their time fighting the left and appeasing the Right. This culminated in the decision to oppose Open Selection, the only means of removing the scab Right in the PLP.

It was or should have been obvious that anti-Semitism was being weaponised. Even before Corbyn was elected, in August 2015, the Daily Mail ran a story about Corbyn being associated with a holocaust denier, Paul Eisen. That story disappeared but other fake stories came and went, always without any discernible victims. Indeed one of the most remarkable things about the fake ‘anti-Semitism’ allegations is that there never were any Jewish victims.

Graham Bash - Jewish member over 50 years in the Labour Party - on the brink of expulsion - this is what Starmer's 'antisemitism' campaign has led to

At least not unless you consider those 2 Zionist harridans – Luciana Berger and Ruth Smeeth. Not forgetting of course Ella Rose, the Israeli Embassy employee who became Director of the Jewish Labour Movement and a potential Oscar winner when she starred in Panorama’s Is Labour Anti-Semitic?

Why anti-Semitism?  Because it gave a certain moral righteousness to the Labour Right that they otherwise would have lacked if they had attacked Corbyn for opposing austerity. To some extent they ran with ‘terrorism’ but ‘anti-Semitism’ made the racists of the Labour Right feel good.  After all who doesn’t want to oppose anti-Semitism?

July 10th Picket of Labour NEC which proscribed 4 organisations

If Corbyn and his advisers had had their wits about them they would have sussed out the Board of Deputies immediately.

In its 250 year history the Board has never opposed anti-Semitism. It has always urged caution. When Oswald Moseley’s British Union of Fascists began organising in the Jewish East End of London in the 1930s the Board urged that Jews turn the other cheek.

The only ‘anti-racist’ demonstration that the Board has ever organised was in March 2018 and that was against Jeremy Corbyn!  And who attended it?  Those well known anti-racists Ian Paisley of the Democratic Unionist Party and Norman Tebbit, famous for his cricket test for Indians and Pakistanis.

The fact is that Zionism has never opposed anti-Semitism for the simple reason that they and the antisemites both agree that Jews do not belong in the countries they are living. As the founder of Zionism, Theodor Herzl observed in his Diaries (pp. 83/4), ‘The anti-Semites will become our most dependable friends, the anti-Semitic countries our allies,”

When the fascists attempted to march through the East End of London in October 1936 the Board of Deputies and the Jewish Chronicle told them to stay indoors!

When Moseley decided, in October 1936 to march through the East End he was opposed by thousands of Jewish and non Jewish workers. Estimates range from 100,000 upwards. They were organised by the Communist  Party, the Independent Labour Party and the Jewish Peoples Council.  The Board of Deputies (& the Labour Party) were vehemently opposed. The Board told Jews to stay indoors and keep their heads down. As Harriet Sherwood observed:

The Jewish Board of Deputies and the Labour party were against confrontation. “Jews are urgently warned to keep away from the route of the Blackshirt march and from their meetings,” said the Jewish Chronicle. “Jews who, however innocently, become involved in any possible disorders will be actively helping antisemitism and Jew-baiting. Unless you want to help the Jew-baiters, keep away.”

Of course a party of nearly 600K members would have a few anti-Semites in it.  It had a hell of a lot more Islamaphobes in it too but no one seemed to be bothered about that. It also had, statistically some paedophiles in it but no one suggested it had a paedophile problem.

There was a time that the Labour Party had an antisemitism problem.  It was a problem of the Labour Right. Herbert Morrison, Labour Home Secretary during the war and grandfather of Peter Mandelson, was both a fervent Zionist and an anti-Semite. He also did his best to keep Jewish refugees from the Nazis out of Britain.

In October 1942 Morrison received a delegation of eminent churchmen and public figures such as Eleanor Rathbone and Lord Astor, asking him for visas for 2,000 Jewish children and the elderly in Vichy France. Morrison refused. Apparently anti-Semitism ‘was just under the pavement.’ A month later the Nazis overran Vichy France and these Jews were deported to Auschwitz. Morrison was said to doubt that there was a holocaust.[i]

On 31 December 1942 Morrison made it clear that although the Home Office might take a limited number of refugees ‘he could not, however, agree that the door should be opened to the entry of uncategorised Jews.’ [ii] Morrison believed that if the Jews were allowed to remain in Britain after the war ‘they might be an explosive element in the country, especially if the economic situation deteriorated.’[iii] In other words Morrisson’s real fear was of communist Jews. 

Yet Corbyn took the accusations of anti-Semitism personally instead of seeing them for what they were, part of a deliberate state destabilisation of the Labour Party. A radical, anti-imperialist pro-Palestinian leader of the Labour Party set off alarm bells not just in MI5 but in Tel Aviv and the CIA. The ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign was the answer.

‘Anti-Semitism’ today is the false anti-racism of the Right. Donald Trump attacked the Squad, the group of 4 radical Black Congresswomen, for ‘anti-Semitism’ whilst at the same time telling them to ‘go home’ .

Yet instead of rebutting these accusations and seeing them as coming from the Zionist Jewish Labour Movement, eager to defend Israel, whose ‘sister’ party the Israeli Labor Party is now in coalition with the far-Right in Israel, Corbyn took them as genuine.

Corbyn, who had 30 years experience of pro-Palestine politics should have been aware of the fact that all Palestine solidarity activists are routinely accused of ‘anti-Semitism’ including Jewish anti-Zionists.  I doubt there is a single Palestine solidarity activist in Britain who hasn’t been accused of anti-Semitism. Yet Corbyn and McDonnell were oblivious to this.

Corbyn believed that he could appease the apartheid animal that is Zionism.  There was only one way to disarm the ‘anti-Semitism’ attacks and that was by confronting it.  It is to his eternal discredit that Corbyn took the path of least resistance, betraying those of use who were his allies.  In the Labour Leaked Report he and his office are quoted on page 306 and 333 thus:

Well we were all expelled but was trust rebuilt?  Of course not. The Zionists simply demanded more victims and Corbyn and Formby supplied them.  Formby was very proud of how many socialists she expelled. She and Corbyn were too stupid to understand that the more people you expel the more credence you give to the ‘anti-Semitism’ allegations. In essence they were running on a treadmill.  The faster they ran the faster it revolved.

Corbyn apologised and apologised.  Did it make him stronger or weaker? Well the answer is obvious. Just as I predicted the near victory in 2017 I also predicted the debacle of 2019.

Corbyn’s strongest supporter in Parliament, Chris Williamson was targeted by the Zionists and instead of supporting him Corbyn abandoned him. Ken Livingstone was abandoned for telling the truth that during the Nazi period the Zionists collaborated with and worked with the Nazis, especially in the 1933-39 period.  This is simply a matter of historical fact. The Zionists were the right-wing nationalists of the Jewish community and they agree with the Nazis that Jews did not belong in Germany or anywhere outside Palestine.

Seamus Milne & James Schneider

If Corbyn can be forgiven for not being clued up, this is not true of either of his closest advisors, ex-public school boys Seamus Milne and James Schneider. Milne in particular must have been aware of what was happening yet he stayed silent. The suspicion must be that this scion of the ruling class was not all he seemed.

Today there is no pretence that people are being expelled for ‘anti-Semitism’. But when Starmer was first elected he promised to ‘root out’ anti-Semitism. His first action was to declare, in an interview with The Times of Israel that he was a Zionist (i.e. racist) ‘without qualification’.

When I was the first Jewish person to be expelled Starmer took to Twitter to welcome my expulsion. That was the first time that I took notice of this apology for a personality. However I was expelled under Corbyn not Starmer.

Unfortunately Corbyn and Jennie Formby welcomed Starmer to their bosom despite him having been part of the chicken coup. Because Starmer used ‘anti-Semitism’ as his pretext much of the stupid Left (Momentum and CLPD) were fooled into believing everything was fine. Andrew Scattergood, co-chair of Momentum, even came out with a statement that

“the suspension of [Jeremy Corbyn] risks politicising and undermining Labour’s response to anti-semitism.” 

How more stupid can you get? The whole point of the ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign was to get rid of Corbyn in the first place. With a left like this it’s no wonder that Starmer has had such an easy ride.

It probably still hasn't dawned on Scatterbrain that Jews in the Labour Party are now 5 times as likely to be expelled as non-Jews. This is the 'fight against anti-Semitism' yet Momentum stays silent.

Where to now

However we are where we are. The question is what next? The reformist left in the Labour Party, CLPD and Momentum, will be protesting their loyalty even whilst Starmer kicks them out.

However most Labour members don’t and never have accepted the fake anti-Semitism narrative. Some 120,000 at least have left the Labour Party and it is likely that another 100K or more will do so with the expulsion of Ken Loach.

It is also likely that not only will Starmer move to proscribe the LRC and CLPD and possibly even Momentum but that he will move against at least that part of the Socialist Campaign Group of MPs who have at least given some indication of standing up to Starmer.

Although it is clear that many of the SCG are running for cover, 19 of them have signed a statement opposing the expulsion of Ken Loach. Which means that nearly half of them haven’t put their names to it. I emailed my own MP, Lloyd Russell-Moyle to ask why he hadn’t signed but I received no response. Lloyd has been so busy retreating from previously held positions that he hasn’t had time to answer!

But if much of what passes for the Labour Left is pathetic and cowardly then much of the socialist or far left is suffering from myopia.

At the LAW AMM tomorrow the Communist Party of Great Britain/ Labour Party Marxists will put its own strategy paper to the meeting. Their argument is for fighting in the Labour Party because it is supported by the trade unions. And essentially that is the limit of their strategy. It is more a dogma and article of faith than a rational argument. There is absolutely no reason to believe that it is any longer possible to fight the witchhunt in the Labour Party. The present witchhunt is the worst since 1945 and quite possibly ever.

CLPD refused to defend their own representative on the NEC

Where Labour is heading under Starmer

Starmer is, as he has made clear, determined to complete what Blair started.

Starmer’s distinguishing mark has been as a liar.  He has all the charisma of a wet fish on a windy day. He stood as a unity candidate with a radical set of 10 pledges. It is hard to believe that his first pledge, Economic Justice, contained the promise that he would

‘Increase income tax for the top 5% of earners, reverse the Tories’ cuts in corporation tax and clamp down on tax avoidance, particularly of large corporations. No stepping back from our core principles.

He ended up opposing the Tory increase in corporation tax! A position that New Labour Home Secretary Alan Johnson endorsed. The same Alan Johnson who gave birth to the term ‘hostile environment’. Given that Starmer relied on a few rich donors to fund his campaign, including the Zionist owner of Qwik-Fit, Sir Trevor Chinn, it is amazing that many Momentum supporters like Paul Mason and Lansman poodle Laura Parker backed him.

Yet despite this the opposition to Starmer’s political move to the Right has been almost inaudible.

We cannot just focus on those remaining in the Labour Party

It is true that socialists inside the Labour Party cannot just be abandoned and nor is a strategy that encourages them to leave a useful one.

However thousands have left and it is clear that Starmer intends to continue the purge, destroying Labour Party democracy in the process. It is equally clear that Corbyn, having failed to regain the Labour whip by rowing back on what he said, is determined not to lead the fight against Starmer.

It is crystal clear that that the fight against the witchhunt will fail, not least because the trade unions are giving it their tacit support and there is no rule that Labour's bureaucrats are not prepared to break. What then?

My own view is that we should be thinking of setting up a Socialist Movement in parallel to the Labour Party and as the precursor to an alternative party. If members of the SCG are expelled, as seems likely, then such a party could have real weight, especially if Corbyn were to join.  Given that it is highly unlikely he will be allowed to stand as a Labour member at the next election it is to be hoped that for once he will take decisive action.

But regardless there is no doubt that the traditional allegiance of the working class to Labour is dissipating.  The Red Wall effect may not simply confined to the North. Having lost the Scottish working class it is quite possible that Labour will also start to lose other sections, starting with the Muslim vote.

Unfortunately with the disappearance of traditional class consciousness, with the atomisation of the working class, old allegiances are also dying.

The question is whether the socialist left in the Labour Party can be bold enough to take a step outside the comfort of resolutionary socialism. There is no natural law that says that the Labour Party will continue to have the allegiance of the working class.

And that will effect our attitude to the trade unions.  If I was in the Bakers Union, which is considering disaffiliation from the Labour Party I would support such a motion.  Likewise in the FBU. For too long the Labour Party has taken the unions and the working class for granted. Now that Starmer wants to make Labour a safe capitalist alternative to the Tories there are serious questions that need to be asked about the future of the socialist left in Britain. And they may not involve automatic support for Labour.

For some like the CPGB there will never be a retreat from comfortable dogma and shibboleth.  But the same does not need to be the case for all socialists facing the dilemma of what to do next.

Tony Greenstein

Israel is not only the world’s most racist state it is a nation of murderers

What is it about Israel that makes it so attractive to anti-Semites, fascists and racists such as Trump, Bolsonaro and Duterte? 

Israel is proof that any group of people, including Jews, can, given the right set of circumstances become racists and fascists.

Racism is not biologically inherited. It is a product of society not genetics. Just as Germans today have not inherited a Hitler gene, so the same is true of Israeli Jews. They have no inherited the mantle of the oppressed Jews of Europe but what Israel has done is to transform the traditional image of Jews from the oppressed to the oppressor.

Professor Ze'ev Sternhell, a child survivor of a Nazi Ghetto sees in Israel the signs of pre-Holocaust Germany

Norman Finkelstein, in a recent interview, quoted Ze’ev Sternhell, a former professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, a childhood survivor of the Nazi ghetto of Przemyśl in Poland and a world authority on fascism.

According to Sternhell fascists and anti-Semites, amongst whom I include Trump, don’t see Israel as Jewish. The Zionist dream was always to create a nation like all other nations.  They succeeded only too well.  The settler nation that they created is the most right-wing and racist of any nation on Earth.  

Woody Allen - the archetypal Jew of the diaspora

Israel is the only state, bar Liberia, where Donald Trump is more popular than unpopular. Whereas Jews were historically seen as weak, intellectuals, cosmopolitan, erudite, artists, seditious and on the Left, Israel is seen as a warrior state, a military fortress. The archetypal Jew was a Woody Allen, Franz Kafka, Einstein and Marc Chagall. To Hitler the archetypal Jew was Karl Marx. The archetypal Israeli Jew is a racist bigot who revels in murder.

Geert Wilders, the Dutch Fascist leader speaking in Tel Aviv in 2010. Unlike Rashid  Tlaib and Ilhan Omar he was not banned from Israel

Israel according to Dutch fascist leader Geert Wilders is the front-line in the battle to defend Western civilisation. It is admired by every fascist or far-Right leader on the planet – from Brazil’s Bolsonaro to the Philipine’s Hitler loving President Duterte.

In Britain it is the English Defence League and Tommy Robinson’s Football Lads Alliance who parade with Israeli flags. Tommy Robinson and Katie Hopkins both admire Israel and the way it combats ‘Islam’.  Katie Hopkins understands this when she justifies the bomb attack against refugee supporting Jews at Pittsburgh whilst at the same time proclaiming her undying devotion to the Israeli state.

Netanyahu with his friend, Viktor Orban, the anti-Semitic ruler of Hungary

Don’t blame Trump, Hopkins wrote in respect of the Pittsburgh shooting. Rather, “Look to the Chief Rabbi and his support for mass migration across the Med[iterranean],” she wrote. “There you will find your truths.”

As Finkelstein says Israel isn’t merely an alt-Right state but an alt-Right country. It isn’t simply a question of a far-Right government but a far-Right citizenry. ‘Israel has no left.  Israel has no centre’.  It has a Right, far-Right and further Right still.

Israel’s attractions to the alt-Right is that it is an ethno-nationalist state. Which is why the neo-Nazi founder of the alt-Right Richard Spencer described himself as a White Zionist and supported Israel’s Jewish Nation State Law.

Israel represents the kind of state, an ethno-nationalist state, that Spencer, Trump and Bannon are trying to build in the United States. Israel provides the model.  It is trying to deport thousands of refugees because they aren’t from the majority ethnic group in Israel and therefore threaten Israel’s Jewish identity.

Finkelstein described Israel as a nation of murderers and he’s not far wrong.  When you have a demonstration in Tel Aviv in the middle of the attack on Gaza in 2014 which chanted ‘there’s no school in Gaza tomorrow, there are no children left’ i.e. boasting about the number of children murdered by Israel, then you realise that this is not a normal nation but a settler colonial state with all that entails. See Far-right Israelis celebrate Gaza kids’ deaths

Efraim Zuroff

The article below is by a Zionist, Efraim Zuroff, from the Simon Wiesenthall Centre.  Even he finds it difficult to stomach the open alliance between Israel and the far-Right and anti-Semitic regimes in Europe today.

Israel’s shameful policy on Holocaust issues in Eastern Europe

Bibi, when you visit countries that no longer have Jews, maybe don't praise the first line they give you about how much they've fought anti-Semitism since the war

Times of Israel Aug 27, 2019,

Prime Minister Netanyahu’s trip to Ukraine early last week is yet another opportunity to assess Israel’s relations with the post-Communist new democracies of Eastern Europe, and especially those with a Holocaust past of participation in the systematic mass murder of Jews. In this respect, Ukraine in recent years has been one of the worst offenders in terms of distorting the history of the Holocaust, and glorifying individuals who collaborated with the Nazis in implementing the Final Solution. 

Thousands of Ukrainian nationalists hold a torchlight procession across Kiev in honor of Stepan Bandera, a World War II anti-Soviet insurgent, on January 1, 2015 (photo credit: AFP/Genya Savilov)

The deterioration of the situation is directly linked to local politics and the conflict with Russia over the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the ongoing insurgency in Eastern Ukraine. Thus, for example, in May 2015, the Ukrainian Parliament passed a package of laws, one of which outlaws criticism of those who fought for Ukrainian statehood in the 20th century, despite the fact that it is indisputable that militias established in 1941 by the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), one of the most important movements that sought to achieve statehood, were active participants in the wave of anti-Jewish violence which swept Western Ukraine during the weeks following the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. In fact, according to Swedish Holocaust historian Per Rudling, the most recent research on the involvement of the OUN in these actions, indicates that they participated in the murder of at least “thousands, perhaps even as many as tens of thousands, of Jews.” 

Netanhahu at Yad Vashem - Israel's Holocaust Propaganda Museum

This is only one small, but highly indicative, detail of the numerous steps taken by Ukrainian institutions and historians to whitewash the large-scale participation of their nationals in Holocaust crimes. The country is full of memorials and statues to Ukrainian Nazi collaborators and torchlight parades to honor the leaders of the OUN and UPA (Ukrainian Insurgent Army, which developed out of the OUN) are a common occurrence. Streets are named for OUN leader Stefan Bandera, whose birthday was recently declared a national holiday. In addition, quite a few Holocaust memorials have been defaced or vandalized in recent years, and not a single perpetrator of such crimes, or any other anti-Semitic acts, has ever been prosecuted, let alone convicted and punished, since Ukraine achieved independence with the fall of the Soviet Union.

The question is how should Israel respond, if at all, to these steps and to what extent should the rampant Holocaust distortion affect Israeli-Ukrainian relations? Unlike the situation in other post-Communist new democracies, where, for the most part, our ambassadors have refrained from getting involved in historical issues, our new ambassador in Kyiv, Joel Lion, has criticized initiatives to honor Holocaust perpetrators on at least three occasions, and has done so in at least one case with the Polish ambassador, since the “hero” in question was also involved in murdering Poles.

Netanyahu pays tribute to the Ukrainian regime which is rehabilitating Stefan Bandera and other Nazi collaborators

In retrospect, we are now in a position to assess current Israeli policy regarding Holocaust distortion, following Prime Minister Netanyahu’s state visit to Kyiv. Sad to say, but it strongly reminded me of his trip this past September to Lithuania, another prime offender when it comes to Holocaust-related issues. In fact, for many years, Lithuania was the country most active in initiating the cardinal tenets of Holocaust distortion, i.e., minimizing or hiding the participation of locals in Nazi crimes, promoting the canard of equivalency between Nazi and Communist crimes, glorifying anti-Soviet heroes despite their role in the Shoah, and lobbying for a joint memorial day for all the victims of totalitarian regimes, which would make International Holocaust Remembrance Day superfluous. Instead of drawing attention to these problematic policies, Netanyahu praised his hosts for the manner in which they sought to commemorate the Shoah, and, for good measure, he also lauded their (relatively nonexistent or at best minimal) efforts to fight anti-Semitism.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, left, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, right, stand at Babi Yar ravine where Nazi troops murdered tens of thousands of Jews during WWII, in Kyiv, Ukraine, August 19, 2019. (AP Photo/Zoya Shu)

This modus operandi was exactly replicated in Kyiv, which in recent years has by far surpassed Vilnius in its blatant Holocaust distortion and brazen systematic attempts to totally falsify the historical narrative of World War II and the Holocaust. Thus, for example, at Babi Yar, the site of the biggest Holocaust massacre, Netanyahu thanked the Ukrainian government for its efforts to preserve the memory of the Holocaust, and mentioned their (nonexistent) “efforts in the war against anti-Semitism.” The grotesque irony of these comments was noted by Israeli journalist Sam Sokol writing in The Times of Israel. In his analysis of the visit, he pointed out that Babi Yar can serve as an excellent illustration of Ukrainian Holocaust distortion, as the Ukrainians seek to commemorate OUN members there alongside Shoah victims.

If anyone is looking for a silver lining in this sad story, at least Netanyahu did not agree to recognize the Holodomor as a genocide (which it wasn’t) and he mentioned “Nazi collaborators,” several times, although the Ukrainians, like the Lithuanians, might attempt to claim that the term also includes members of the Judenrat and/or the Jewish police in local ghettos.

In short, Israeli policy on Holocaust-related issues in post-Communist Eastern Europe remains flawed and shameful, but it remains to be seen, exactly how it can be improved, a subject which I hope to address in a coming op-ed.

About the Author

Dr. Efraim Zuroff is the chief Nazi-hunter of the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the director of the Center's Israel Office and Eastern European Affairs.

See also

Netanyahu’s praise of Kyiv’s Holocaust remembrance only tells part of the story

Rights Groups Demand Israel Stop Arming neo-Nazis in Ukraine Ukraine demonstrates that given the choice between Jews and the Jewish state Zionism prefers the latter

Hannah Arendt – a Jewish Pariah and Daughter of the Diaspora

Arendt was the German-Jewish Refugee whose Universalism Overcame her Zionism

Hannah Arendt was an enigma. She rejected any materialist or class analysis in favour of a philosophical and metaphysical discourse. Originally a Zionist, Arendt escaped the shackles and straitjacket of authoritarian nationalism. Zionism demands obedience to the Jewish volk, above all from its intellectuals, which is one reason why it has produced so few. Nationalism and worship of the state are not conducive to freedom of thought or innovative ideas.

Arendt was the child of left-wing parents. In the 1930’s she became a Zionist as she saw in the rise of Nazism the defeat of universalism and assimilation. Arendt fled from Berlin in 1933 to Paris after having spent 8 days in the custody of the Gestapo. However, as with many other Jewish refugees, the Nazis caught up with her and in 1941 she escaped again from Gurs internment camp and made her way, with her husband Heinrich Blucher, to the United States. For the Zionists, this fact alone ‘only contributed to the dismissal of her work as having no real worth.’

Arendt’s most famous work, the The Origins of Totalitarianism was published in 1951 in McCarthy’s America. It is as its title suggests an analysis of what she called ‘totalitarianism’, the kind of a state that Orwell described in 1984.  She summed it up in the Introduction:

‘Anti-Semitism (not merely hatred of the Jews), imperialism (not merely conquest), totalitarianism (not merely dictatorship) one after another, one more brutally than the other have demonstrated that human dignity needs a new guarantee.’

As a refugee she noted that when a person is driven away from one country, he is expelled from all countries “which means he is actually expelled from humanity”. Refugees are literally outlaws, beyond the protection of the law.

It is ironic that Israel alone of Western states refuses to accept any refugees on the grounds that they would undermine Israel’s (Jewish) national identity. Hostility to refugees in Israel is higher than in any other western state. Despite claiming it is a ‘Jewish’ state the injunction in Leviticus 19:33-34 is ignored:

You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God”

refugees stranded at the Greek border 2016

Arendt is without doubt the greatest Jewish political philosopher of the 20^th century. It is little surprise that despite having being converted to Zionism under the influence of Kurt Blumenfeld of the German Zionist Federation and having worked for Youth Aliya in Paris in 1935 she became a bête noir for the Zionist movement after having published in 1963 Eichmann in Jerusalem – The Banality of Evil, about the 1961 Eichmann trial in Israel.

BACKGROUND

Gabriel Piterberg in The Returns of Zionism describes how in 2001 Yad Vashem and Jerusalem’s Hebrew University organised a conference to mark the 40^th anniversary of the Eichmann Trial. The keynote address was by Anita Shapira, the ‘princess of Zionism’ To her all Jewish history began and continued in Israel. The intervening 2,000 years of diaspora Jewry were a void. Shapira evinces what Piterberg calls ‘the hegemonic depth of Zionist ideology.’

Elizabeth Varnhagen

We can see this ideological hegemony and totalitarian thought in the fake ‘anti-Semitism’ onslaught today on Corbyn’s Labour Party whereby any fundamental critique of Israeli ‘democracy’ is deemed anti-Semitic under the IHRA. The IHRA has been adopted by all major British political parties, local authorities and the Police and Judicial College, despite excoriating criticism by legal scholars such as  Geoffrey Robertson QC, Hugh Tomlinson QC and the Jewish former Court of Appeal Judge Sir Stephen Sedley. No amount of reasoned argument or logic can withstand the unanimity of bourgeois support for Zionism.

In contrast the most outrageous anti-Palestinian racism is excused by police state journalists like the Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland as a product of ‘Jewish identity’ which is therefore immune to criticism. ‘Jewish identity’ is used as a shield to protect Israel yet anyone who associates Jews with Israel’s crimes is under the IHRA ‘anti-Semitic’. A case of having your Zionist cake and eating it!

Arendt committed what for her Zionist detractors was a cardinal sin. She sought to draw universal lessons from the Holocaust that were neither nationalist nor racist. ‘Shapira charges Arendt with trying to ‘understand’ Nazism and the Judaeocide from a universalist position.’  [Piterberg, 149] That was why, until 1999, Eichmann in Jerusalem was not published in Israel. As Boaz Evron put it

‘this book came to me as a fresh wind of sobriety and sensibility amongst the hysterical storm blown all around by the propaganda agencies of the Ben Gurion regime.’

Arendt was

‘in Shapira’s absurd judgment, incapable of sensing the Jewish experience because she was from ‘there’ as if ‘there’ was not where the Holocaust had occurred.’

Not only did Shapira condemn Arendt’s universalism but her refusal to accept Zionist colonisation and ownership of the Holocaust. A Holocaust which the Jewish Agency had ignored whilst it was happening but which they utilised politically and ideologically.

Arendt’s essay ‘The Jew as a Pariah’ was savaged in a review in the magazine of the American Right, Commentary. Rather than praising Jewish nationalism, Arendt praises Jewish dissidents as she focuses on 4 particular pariahs – Heinrich Heine, Bernard Lazarre, Charlie Chaplin and Franz Kafka – each brilliant in their own way. But as Ron Feldman notes sniffily regarding Chaplin ‘strangely enough, one did not have to be Jewish to be a Jewish pariah.’

Rahel Varnhagen's Literary Salon in Berlin

But of course the quintessential pariah was Arendt herself. As Lyndsey Stonebridge notes in her essay The Shape of Totalitarianism and the Meaning of Exile: Three Lessons from Hannah Arendt Arendt was a self-proclaimed pariah, a term she borrowed from Bernard Lazare. She considered her closest soulmate Rahel Varnhagen, a pariah to parvenu of the late 17^th, early 18^th century who ran a famous literary salon in Berlin. An important figure in Germany’s Romantic movement she converted to Christianity in 1814 in order to escape the social restrictions that were placed on Jews. She was the outsider who sought acceptance which is one reason why Amos Elon [The Pity of It All: A History of the Jews in Germany, 1743-1933] falsely accused her of hating her Jewish background.

Conversion was Varnhagen’s only escape. Arendt said of her that

‘Rahel had remained a Jew and a pariah. Only because she clung to both conditions did she find a place in the history of European humanity.’

For Zionism, what is and was more important was her rejection of racial exclusivism in favour of Jewish assimilation.

In 1938, Arendt completed her biography Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess although it wasn’t published until 1957. As Piterberg notes, it took 20 years to write. For Arendt ‘a decent human existence is possible only on the fringes of society, where one then runs the risks of starving or being stoned to death.’  Arendt cherished Varnhagen as her "closest friend, though she had been dead for some hundred years".

Arendt followed a similar trajectory to Einstein. From Zionist to non-Zionist. She signed a famous letter on 2^nd December 1948 on the occasion of Menachem Begin’s visit to the United States.

Among the most disturbing political phenomena of our times is the emergence in the newly created state of Israel of the "Freedom Party" (Tnuat Haherut), a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties.

In October 1944 Arendt wrote an essay Zionism Reconsidered. Judith Butler observed

‘Paradoxically, and perhaps shrewdly, the terms in which Arendt criticised Fascism came to inform her criticisms of Zionism, though she did not and would not conflate the two.’

Although Zionism is not a fascist ideology (although it has a remarkable number of fascist adherents) it shares a number of common features with fascism such as the premium placed on loyalty to the state and the prioritisation of the needs of the state over those of the individual.

During the Holocaust this was expressed as the need to build the Jewish state taking priority over the saving of the Jews in Europe.  Shabtai Teveth, his official biographer, quotes Ben Gurion as saying that where there was

a conflict of interest between saving individual Jews and the good of the Zionist enterprise, we shall say that the enterprise comes first.

In ‘Zionism Reconsidered’ Arendt noted that the American Zionist conference in 1944 had demanded a Jewish Commonwealth in the whole of Palestine without once mentioning the Palestinians, describing this as a victory for the Revisionist programme. Her conclusion was that this ‘obviously leaves them the choice between voluntary emigration or second class citizenship.’  In fact there was a third choice, which in 1948 came to pass – transfer or ethnic cleansing, which she notes was discussed in a wide variety of Zionist circles.

The critical problem for Arendt was both political and humanitarian:

the solution of the Jewish question merely produced a new category of refugees, the Arabs, thereby increasing the number of stateless and rightless by another 700,000 to 800,000 people.

As Butler noted

she calls ‘absurd’ the idea of setting up a Jewish state in a ‘sphere of interest’ of the superpowers. Such a state would suffer under the ‘delusion of nationhood’: ‘Only folly could dictate a policy which trusts a distant imperial power for protection, while alienating the goodwill of neighbours.’

Zionism rested on‘an open acceptance of anti-Semitism as a “fact.” The Zionist labour movement had created, with the chalutz and kibbutz ‘a new type of Jew’ but this didn’t prevent the Zionist Organisation ‘against the natural impulses of the whole Jewish people’ doing business with Hitler in order to ‘trade German goods against the wealth of German Jewry.’

Arendt noted that the ‘socialist’ Zionists ‘failed to level a single critique of Jewish bourgeoisie outside of Palestine, or to attack the role of Jewish finance.’

Arendt had great difficulty in coming to terms with the nation state.  To her the only solution to national conflicts was either complete assimilation or emigration. The possibility of national autonomy, cultural pluralism and multi-culturalism were absent.

Arendt castigated the ‘Zionist doctrine of eternal anti-Semitism’. Quoting Herzl she noted that because Zionism ‘concluded that without anti-Semitism the Jewish people would not have survived’ it was opposed to any attempt to liquidate anti-Semitism.

Astutely Arendt observed that for all their strictures against assimilation the Zionists ‘were the only ones who sincerely wanted assimilation, namely, ‘normalization’ of the (Jewish) people.’ Theirs was a collective assimilation in a Jewish state. The irony is that because of the circumstances of its creation, under the protection of the British Empire, Zionism had created a ‘Jewish’ state which is anything but normal, not least because it is an ethno-nationalist state.

Arendt’s criticism of Zionism’s attitude to the Jewish diaspora are astute. Zionism ‘cuts off Jewish history from European history and even from the rest of mankind’.

Arendt is particularly cutting in her description of leftist Zionists ‘who simply added official Zionism to their socialism’ whilst fighting the employment of Arab labour ‘under the pretense of class-struggle against Arab labour.’

Arendt accused Zionism of being inspired by German nationalism which viewed people biologically not politically. In the process

‘Zionists ended by making the Jewish national emancipation dependent upon the material interests of another nation.’ ‘The erection of a Jewish State within an imperial sphere of interest may look like a very nice solution to some Zionists...’

The ‘relationship between the proposed new State and the Diaspora’ is one which disturbed her. Arendt put her finger on another problem of Zionism. Its claim that Jews form a separate nation, even whilst the majority continue to live outside Israel in other countries. Inevitably this posed ‘the old question of double loyalty’ which is precisely what has happened.  [see Hannah Arendt would agree with Ilhan Omar] In her essay ‘To Save the Jewish Homeland’ Arendt foresaw the time when Israel’s relations with world Jewry

would become problematical, since their defense interests might clash at any moment with those of other countries where large number of Jews lived.

Dual loyalty is inherent in Zionism.

Arendt argues that Herzl’s Zionism was ‘inspired from German sources – as opposed to the French variety.’ In other words a German nationalism which was exclusive and volkish, based on blood relations and kith and kin whereas French nationalism had been inclusive, based on all those residing within France.

Arendt noted the Zionist and Herzl view that the Jewish people were surrounded by a ‘world of enemies’ remarking that ‘if’ the whole world is ultimately against us, we are lost.’ She finishes her essay by warning of the parallels with Sabbatai Zevi, the false messiah of the 17^th century.

Arendt’s attitude to the onset of anti-Semitism was that

If one is attacked as a Jew one must defend oneself as a Jew. Not as a German, not as a world citizen, not as an upholder of the Rights of Man.

Eichmann in Jerusalem – The Banality of Evil

What aroused the ire of the Zionist movement to white fury was Arendt’s book Eichmann in Jerusalem. She famously coined the slogan ‘the banality of evil’ which Zionist historians like David Cesarani have written books about without once understanding what it meant! She portrayed Eichmann as a desk bound bureaucrat and some took this to mean that he was simply doing a job that he had no strong feelings about either way. Cesarani went out of his way to prove what none of us doubted – that Eichmann was an anti-Semite.

However his anti-Semitism was political not personal. He was not some political Lord Voldemort, breathing fire. Rather he was someone who could only talk in clichés, lacking all original thought. In fact a most unremarkable man who nonetheless had perpetrated monstrous crimes.

Lyndsey Stonebridge observed it wasn’t Eichmann who she got wrong, but a young black woman named Elizabeth Eckford who was depicted amidst screaming white women in a famous 1957 photograph from Little Rock, Arkansas as she entered an all-White schools.

Arendt argued that Eckford should not be carrying such a political burden at her age and that education was a social and largely private matter. Ralph Ellison replied that all black children in the south carried a political burden from the day they were born whether they or their parents liked it or not. Arendt shut up.

The Judgment of the Eichmann trial dovetailed with Zionism’s political requirements when it found that ‘it has not been proved before us that the accused knew that the Gypsies were being transported to destruction’. Thus no genocide charge except that against the Jews was upheld. Hannah Arendt remarked that

‘This was difficult to understand, for, apart from the fact that the extermination of Gypsies was common knowledge, Eichmann had admitted during the police examination that he knew of it.’ It had been an order from Himmler.

The trial verdict did not see the extermination of millions of people as a crime against humanity. Rather it was a crime against the Jewish people. The Holocaust was not seen as ‘a Fascist attack on human diversity’ but a specific and exclusive attack on the Jewish people.

Arendt pointed to the hypocrisy of the Prosecutor Gideon Hausner:

‘Israeli citizens, religious and non-religious seem agreed upon the desirability of having a law which prohibits intermarriage… there certainly was something breathtaking in the naiveté with which the prosecution denounced the infamous Nuremberg Laws of 1935, which had prohibited intermarriage and sexual intercourse between Jews and Germans.’

Kasztner was the leader of Hungarian Zionism during the war. He was accused after the war by Hungarian survivors of the deportations to Auschwitz of having collaborated with Eichmann in return for a train carrying 1,684 of the Jewish and Zionist elite out of Hungary. The verdict of the trial judge Benjamin Halevi was that Kasztner had sold his soul to the devil. Although the decision was overturned on legal and political technicalities by the Supreme Court the damage had been done.

The Eichmann trial was staged primarily to undo the damage caused by the Kasztner Affair. In the words of Israeli historian Tom Segev [The 7^th Million, p.328, see Noah Lucas, The Modern History of Israel, p. 414] it was meant to ‘expunge the historical guilt that had been attached to the Mapai leadership since the Kasztner trial.’  The Kasztner trial dominated the Israel of 1954-58 and caused the fall of the 1955 Sharrett government.

Witnesses who were likely to raise the issues that had surrounded the Kasztner trial were carefully excluded from giving evidence e.g. Kasztner’s friend Andre Biss.

What Arendt did was to write a book which threatened to undo this careful stage management. Her first sin was to attack the Jewish leadership in Nazi occupied Europe. She wrote:

‘Wherever Jews lived, there were recognized Jewish leaders, and this leadership, almost without exception, cooperated in one way or another, for one reason or another, with the Nazis. The whole truth was that if the Jewish people had really been unorganized and leaderless, there would have been chaos and plenty of misery but the total number of victims would hardly have been between four and half and six million people.’

As Lucien Sternberg observed, ‘Arendt’s argument caused an outcry among Zionist holocaust historians but it could not be refuted.’ [Not as a Lamb - Jews Against Hitler, Gordon & Cremones, University Press, Glasgow p.109]

Arendt was accused of being incapable of understanding the complexity of the situation. Despite the participation of the Judenrat in rounding up Jews for deportation, Israel Gutman of Yad Vashem and Rozett opined that ‘‘The Judenrat reinforced the Jews’ power of endurance in their struggle for survival,’

Hausner was foremost among those who defended the Judenrat. He attacked Raul Hilberg, the preeminent Holocaust historian because Hannah Arendt ‘in her vicious and compassionless attitude to the Judenrat’ drew upon his work.’

The problem was that one could not explain how the Nazis had achieved their objectives so efficiently without taking the behaviour of the victims, including the Jewish Councils into account.

When Israeli Professor Jacob Talman criticised Hannah Arendt, for mentioning Zionist collaboration with the Nazis, Rudolph Vrba,  the Jewish escapee from Auschwitz, then residing in London asked:

‘Did the Judenrat (or the Judenverrat) in Hungary tell their Jews what was awaiting them? No, they remained silent and for this silence some of their leaders – for example Dr R Kasztner – bartered their own lives and the lives of 1684 other ‘prominent’ Jews directly from Eichmann.’

The Zionist movement exploded with fury when Arendt wrote ‘Eichmann in Jerusalem – The Banality of Evil.’ It threatened to undo all that had been achieved by the Eichmann Bill. Arendt’s crime was to highlight what the Eichmann Trial had been designed to avoid.  Their attacks bear a familiar ring:  Arendt wrote:

… the campaign, conducted with all the well-known means of image-making and opinion-manipulation, got much more attention than the controversy…. (it was) as though the pieces written against the book (and more frequently against its author) came “out of a mimeographing machine” (Mary McCarthy)… the clamor centered on the “image” of a book which was never written, and touched upon subjects that often had not only not been mentioned by me but had never occurred to me before.”

Rabbi Joachim Prinz, a German Zionist who had welcomed the rise of Hitler as vindicating Zionism, accused Arendt of having described Eichmann as a ‘sweet and misguided man.’ One French weekly went so far as to ask whether Arendt was a Nazi.

Amos Elon wrote, in an Introduction to her book, that

No book within living memory had elicited similar passions. A kind of excommunication seemed to have been imposed on the author by the Jewish establishment in America.

Arendt was stunned by the uproar. She spoke of the ‘smear campaign’ being conducted ‘on the lowest level’ based on the claim that she had said ‘the exact opposite of what I did in fact write.’ What Arendt had to say about the way her book was viciously caricatured has a familiar ring to those claims of ‘anti-Semitism’ in the Labour Party. In a letter to her friend, Mary McCarthy, Arendt complained ‘what a risky business to tell the truth on a factual level without theoretical and scholarly embroidery.’ Shooting the messenger rather than responding to the message has always remained the quintessential Zionist modus operandi.  Apparently Arendt had claimed that ‘the Jews had murdered themselves’ and why had she told ‘such a monstrously implausible lie? Out of “self-hatred” of course.’

The Eichmann Trial was a political show trial. It focused solely on the Jewish dead and failed to place the Holocaust in any kind of historical context. Its purpose was not to understand but to rewrite history. People have concentrated on the Appeal Court’s decision to find Eichmann guilty and the imposition of the death sentence whilst ignoring its decision that ‘the Appellant had received no ‘superior orders’ at all. He was his own superior.’ Israel’s Supreme Court had exculpated Himmler and even Hitler.

A movie The Specialist was made. It reflected Arendt’s thesis on the banality of evil. Eichmann, whose enthusiasm for the annihilation of the Jews was never doubted, had nonetheless been a bureaucratic cog in the wheel.

‘The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely to think from the standpoint of somebody else.’

Raul Hilberg reached the same conclusion.

‘The bureaucracy had taken over. It is the bureaucratic destruction process that in its step-by-step manner finally led to the annihilation of five million victims.’

Eichmann was an ardent Zionist. Baron von Mildenstein, the first head of the SS’s Jewish Department, had required Eichmann to read Herzl’s Der Judenstaat ‘which converted. Eichmann promptly and forever to Zionism... as late as 1939 he seems to have protested against desecrators of Herzl’s grave in Vienna.’

At the Eichmann trial, the most glaring omission from the picture painted was any witness to the co-operation between the Nazis and the Jewish authorities and the Zionists. This prevented the question being asked ‘Why did you cooperate in the destruction of your own people’. When Pinhas Freudiger, the Chief Rabbi of Hungary testified, this caused the only significant interruption as Hungarian survivors called him a collaborator and ‘accused him of abandoning his position as a leader of the Orthodox Community.’

Perhaps the best example of the ideological confrontation between Zionism, with its belief in the negation of the disapora and the voice of the Jewish diaspora, is the correspondence between Arendt and Gershom Scholem, the Professor of Mysticism. 

On June 23^rd 1963 Scholem wrote to Arendt, having read Eichmann in Jerusalem.

In the Jewish tradition there is a concept Ahabath Israel: ‘Love of the Jewish people…”  In you, dear Hannah, as in so many intellectuals who came from the German Left, I find little trace of this….’

Arendt’s reply demonstrated that Scholem was at heart a Jewish chauvinist. 

‘I am not one of the “intellectuals who come from the German Left.’… It is a fact of which I am in no way particularly proud and which I am somewhat reluctant to emphasize – especially since the McCarthy era in this country.  I came late to an understanding of Marx’s importance… let me begin… with what you call “love of the Jewish people.”… (Incidentally, I would be very grateful if you could tell me since when this concept has played a role in Judaism)… You are quite right – I am not moved by any “love” of this sort, and for two reasons.  I have never in my life “loved” any people or collective… I indeed love “only” my friends and the only kind of love I know of and believe in is the love of persons.  Secondly, this “love of the Jews” would appear to me, since I am myself Jewish, as something rather suspect…. I do not “love” the Jews, nor do I “believe” in them; I merely belong to them as a matter of course, beyond dispute or argument…. But I can admit to you something beyond that, namely, that wrong done by my own people naturally grieves me more than wrong done by other peoples.’

It was in truth a devastating reply.

See      Hannah Arendt would agree with Ilhan Omar, Philip Weiss

Why Hannah Arendt is the Philosopher for Now, Lyndsey Stonebridge

Hannah Arendt: Human, Citizen, Jew

Tony Greenstein