Will Corbyn Take a Leaf Out of Zarah Sultana’s Book & Stand Up to the False Anti-Semitism Smears of the BBC & the Right-wing Media?
When the far-right Times journalist, Oliver Kamm, accused
Zarah Sultana of ‘anti-Semitism’, a term that has been drained of all meaning,
she stood up and declared that anti-Zionism was not
anti-Semitism.
Kamm’s splenetic response had been on
account of Zarah’s declaration the previous day that she was a proud anti-Zionist. It is to be welcomed
that the lesson Zarah has learnt over the past decade is that the way to
defeat the Right is to stand up to them and not back down. She is right to reject the IHRA misdefinition of anti-Semitism.
Delete and apologise, otherwise you better lawyer up.
— Zarah Sultana MP (@zarahsultana) August 18, 2025
Anti-Zionism is not Antisemitism.
The smears won’t work this time. https://t.co/xjs1MMCryr
Jeremy Corbyn on the other hand seems
to have learnt nothing. Throughout his leadership he declared that he supported the so-called Two
State Solution, which was never anything other than a cover for continued
colonisation and occupation.
Whilst such a mistake might have been
understandable in the past today it is not. The Israeli government and the Knesset
made it clear when they voted by 68-9 for a resolution rejecting a
two-state solution that Zionism is not interested in anything other than the
expulsion of the Palestinians. Not one Zionist party opposed the resolution.
The problem with Corbyn is that although he has always supported the Palestinians against Israel’s occupation and oppression he has never asked why Israel behaves in the way it does. He has never called himself an anti-Zionist. Zionism is a foreign land to him.
Instead he has accepted that a
seemingly rational and sensible solution like the two state solution could be
agreed. Except that we don’t live in a reasonable and sensible world. We live in a world dominated by Western
imperialism of which Israel is its attack dog.
Israel is a settler colonial state.
What that means quite simply is that the settlers seek to replace, not live
alongside, the indigenous population. I defy Corbyn or anyone else to point to
a single example of where settler-colonials have opted to live peacefully with
the native people.
It is true that in its early days some
Labour Zionists like Kalvarisky and Chaim Arlossoroff thought they could persuade the
Palestinians to peacefully accept colonisation but Vladimir Jabotinsky, the
founder of Revisionist Zionism, which Netanyahu adheres to, wrote in his famous essay The Iron Wall that:
My readers have a general idea of the history of colonisation in
other countries. I suggest that they consider all the precedents with which
they are acquainted, and see whether there is one solitary instance of any
colonisation being carried on with the consent of the native population. There
is no such precedent.
The native populations, civilised or uncivilised, have always
stubbornly resisted the colonists, irrespective of whether they were civilised
or savage.
This is also the answer to those
dishonest Labour Zionists who pretend that Zionism is some form of Jewish
national liberation movement rather than a colonisatory enterprise.
The slogan which became identified with Zionist
colonisation was that Palestine was ‘a
land without a people for a people without a land’. Lord Shaftesbury is
said to have coined the slogan. It expressed perfectly the attitude of the
colonists to the native people. They simply did not exist. In Australia it was
termed terra nullis.
The Zionists were warned that
Palestine was not empty, most famously by Ahad Ha'am, a Cultural Zionist, who wrote:
We tend to
believe abroad that Palestine is nowadays almost completely deserted, a
non-cultivated wilderness… But in reality this is not the case. It is difficult
to find anywhere in the country, Arab land, which lies fallow... [The Truth From the Land of Israel, 1891. Washington Report on Middle East Affairs]
Throughout the pre-state days the
Zionist movement was obsessed with the question of how they would turn the
minority Jewish population into a majority. The solution they agreed upon was
‘transfer’ or what we would now call ethnic cleansing.
The smears won’t work this time.
— Zarah Sultana MP (@zarahsultana) August 17, 2025
I say it loudly and proudly: I’m an anti-Zionist.
Print that. https://t.co/HSZAWnO4cJ
David Ben-Gurion, the first Prime
Minister of Israel and Chairman of the
Jewish Agency (the pre-State government) wrote on 5 October 1937 to his 16 year
old son Amos:
We must expel the Arabs and take their places…. And, if we have to
use force-not to dispossess the Arabs of the Negev and Transjordan, but to
guarantee our own right to settle in those places- then we have force at our
disposal.
This is one of a host of similar quotations. Zionism always had to the fore of
its mind the ‘demographic problem’, the question of how to ensure that
there was a stable Jewish majority in the state it created.
In 1948 this was achieved in the areas
i by means of the ‘transfer’ of the Palestinians to the neighbouring countries.
Three-quarters of a million Palestinians were expelled. In 1967 Israel
conquered the West Bank and Gaza but much to their regret they did not succeed
in expelling more than 300,000 Palestinians.
Over two million Palestinians remained
which today has grown to 5 million. A temporary solution was to institute
military rule over the Palestinians, depriving them of all democratic rights
whilst according those same rights to the Jewish settlers. However this Apartheid
was always envisaged as a temporary solution.
The Israeli Labor Party and Meretz
envisaged a Palestinian Bantustan dressed up as the two state solution but Netanyahu
and the settlers refused to accept any kind of Palestinian state. To them there
was only one solution – either complete subjugation and no democratic rights or
transfer/expulsion. Oslo was about a Bantustan.
Today in Gaza we are seeing these
plans coming to fruition. Ethnic cleansing coupled with genocide. Just as in
Nazi Germany where Hitler first sought to expel the Jews before turning to
genocide.
Israel is a settler-colonial state. It
will never agree to a Palestinian state and those who foster such illusions are
helping to maintain Israel as a Jewish Supremacist state. Israel is an
expansionist state and that is why, alone in the world, it has never defined
its borders. Today it is in occupation of parts of Lebanon, Syria and well as
Palestine.
The original aim of the Zionists was
to achieve Eretz Yisrael, the Biblical
Land of Israel. The borders of the Land of Israel stretch from the River Litani
in Lebanon to the Euphrates in Iraq and the Nile in Egypt. In other words there
is plenty more room for expansion.
Of course Israel, the attack dog of
the West, can only conquer more territory with the permission of its
imperialist sponsors but as we know they are reluctant to hold their rottweiler
back.
There are some things that Corbyn
should understand. A Jewish state, like any ethno-religious state is a racist
state. This was true of the Christian ethnic states in Eastern Europe –
Romania, Slovakia, Croatia - which were the most enthusiastic partners of
Hitler in the Holocaust. It is also true of Israel. Israel cannot be reformed.
It must be replaced by a unitary democratic secular state.
That is what anti-Zionism means.
Anyone who supports a two state solution is not an anti-Zionist. Objectively
they are doing the work of the Zionists. Anyone who is sincere about putting an
end to ethnic cleansing and genocide must be clear. Israel is a failed state.
Israel has no more ‘right to exist’ than Apartheid South Africa or the Nazi
state.
Corbyn must abandon his support for
the two state solution . It is a neo-colonial solution. The reason that Labour
Friends of Israel pretends to support it is because they know it will never
happen. It is a slogan designed to confuse the Palestine solidarity movement. When
you are faced with a genocidal apartheid state, a Zionist state, then you cannot be neutral as Archbishop Desmond Tutu said in
the face of injustice. That is to take the side of the oppressor. It is long
past time when Corbyn declared he was an an anti-Zionist.
Your Party will face many difficulties
in the years ahead. If it is to succeed it must have a united leadership agreed
upon common principles. One of those must be its attitude to Apartheid Israel.
It has to be an anti-Zionist party. Yes we will be accused of ‘anti-Semitism’
but it will be easier to rebut if we are clear about our principles.
If the McCarthyists and racists accuse
us of anti-Semitism let them. We can tell them that the original Zionists were
Christians not Jews. That Zionism is a Christian invention. That when Zionism
first came on the scene most Jews saw it as a form of Jewish anti-Semitism. It
was Hitler who did more than most to create the Israeli state. We are clear
when we say that it is not anti-Semitic to support equality between Jews and
Palestinians in Palestine just as we supported equality between Black and White
in South Africa.
If Jeremy Corbyn is not prepared to
abandon Zionism and the Israeli state then it is best that the leadership of
Your Party passes to the young and dynamic Zara Sultana.
Those of Corbyn’s advisors who failed
to stand up to the anti-Semitism smear merchants – Karie Murphy and James
Schneider in particular – should also not be in the leadership unless they are
prepared to come clean about their own past role.
Schneider is married to Sophie Nazemi, Starmer’s press secretary.
Are we seriously to believe that the married couple don’t discuss politics
together? Schneider should be kept as far away as possible from the leadership
team.
We need clear red water between the
future and the disastrous period 2015-19 when Corbyn supported Jon Lansman
turning Momentum from a campaigning organisation into a one-man dictatorship
that ended up echoing the Zionist Jewish Labour Movement’s ‘anti-Semitism’
smears. It was no surprise when Lansman joined them.
If we don’t get things right now then
the present honeymoon period will not last.
