Why I am standing for the post of Secretary of Palestine Solidarity Campaign

Self congratulation, timidity and caution bordering on obsequiousness is not the stuff of a solidarity campaign!

Introduction

Why you may ask, after having co-founded PSC 37 years ago, have I decided now to stand for the position of Secretary? I was a member of the Executive for the first decade of PSC’s existence. At my time of life I have better things to do and if I have any ambition left the position of Secretary of PSC is not one of them.

My reasons are that I feel a responsibility to an organisation which could do so much and yet is trapped by a cautious conservatism in its desire to become part of the political establishment. PSC is an organisation which makes a fetish of routinism but which has few response mechanisms. Every year the Executive presents much the same Annual Report to the AGM which dutifully passes it, because it is unheard of for the AGM to hold the Executive to account. Then another year passes by in which PSC is conspicuous by its absence from the political attacks which the Palestine solidarity movement is living with.

Above all I want to stimulate a debate about where the Palestine solidarity movement in this country is going. We should not be afraid of having such a discussion if we are serious about building towards the day when Israel goes the same way as apartheid South Africa. Nonetheless I have no doubt that the Executive will resent the fact that I have decided to raise these issues and stimulate a wider debate.

This is the first time in living memory that there has been a contest for an officer post, yet I am allowed only 100 words to explain my reasons why. I will be allowed 1 minute to speak from Conference floor. Ideally each candidate should be allowed 5 minutes with questions and answers. Instead we have what is in effect a beauty contest. Hence why I am presenting this manifesto.

The Zionist ‘Anti-Semitism’ Campaign

For over 3 years we have seen an unprecedented wave of attacks on the Palestine solidarity movement and BDS with false allegations of anti-Semitism being the main weapon of attack. Israel’s supporters have been joined in this enterprise by the opponents of Jeremy Corbyn. This is not just a British phenomenon but Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party has enhanced this phenomenon.

And whereas once support for Zionism and Israel was more evident on the Labour left today support for the Palestinians is found almost wholly on the left of the political spectrum. 80% of Tory MPs are members of Conservative Friends of Israel. The Lib-Dems ditched the 2 parliamentarians who supporter the Palestinians – David Ward and Jenny Tonge.

False accusations of ‘Anti-Semitism’ have become the weapon of choice for a whole range of right-wing, Islamaphobic, reactionary and even anti-Semitic politicians. The press, including the Guardian, sings the same Zionist theme tunes. We have the absurdity that non-Jews, often themselves anti-Semitic, can attack Jewish anti- Zionists as ‘anti-Semitic’ because they reject the idea of a Jewish supremacist state. A list of far-Right luminaries from Tommy Robinson, Katie Hopkins, Steve Bannon. and even the neo-Nazi founder of the alt-Right Richard Spencer, all combine Islamaphobia and anti-Semitism but are nonetheless described as ‘friends of the Jews’ by the Zionists.

Until 2015 a regular feature at PSC AGMs was the attendance of Jeremy Corbyn, who was our main parliamentary sponsor. His election as leader of the Labour Party should have been the occasion for great rejoicing. Instead Jeremy has been forced repeatedly onto the backfoot by the onslaught against him. Unlike Stop the War Coalition the voice of PSC was silent at this time as the campaign against him gathered steam.

When the attacks on anti-Zionists in the Labour Party – Jackie Walker, Ken Livingstone and myself – were at their height, PSC was nowhere to be seen. Even though the Israeli Embassy was up to its ears in what was happening, as Al Jazeera’s documentary The Lobby demonstrated, PSC chose to see, say and hear nothing.

A need for debate and reflection

In the wake of the 2005 call for BDS the Zionist movement engaged in a period of internal debate and reflection. The time is long overdue when we need to begin engaging in serious debate about where we are going and how we meet the ideological attacks upon us rather than having puffed up reports whose only purpose is self-congratulation. Is our propaganda as effective as it could be?  Is PSC for example simply concentrating on Israeli human rights abuses to the exclusion of saying anything about what its vision is for a non-racist Palestine?

I have never seen a Report to PSC Conference which said what had gone wrong or which analysed their mistakes. Everything is always rosy in the PSC garden.

Palestine solidarity is not simply a human rights but a political campaign. If all we are concerned about is human rights then what is happening in Burma and Yemen far exceeds the suffering of Palestine. Israel is different because Apartheid and settler colonialism are different. In the words of Albert Luthuli, the President of the ANC and a Nobel Peace Prize winner, you can change your politics but never the colour of your skin. That is the essence of our case against Israel.

On 9^th December and again on 31^st December (repeated in the Annual Report) PSC boasted that ‘In November we had our biggest Parliamentary Lobby Day ever’ with nearly 3000 PSC members and supporters contacting 600 MPs’ on the question of arms sales and the treatment of Palestinian children. Undoubtedly this is a good thing but if this is all we say then it will be futile. There is no point in simply concentrating on human rights abuses to the exclusion of having anything to say about the state that perpetrates those abuses. We also have to emphasise that these atrocities stem from the nature of the Israeli state itself as a Zionist and Jewish supremacist state.

Quality is more important than quantity. What is the purpose of lobbying if we don’t aim to build a core group of MP’s who support the aim of a non-racial Israel/Palestine? All but 8 Labour MPs endorsed the IHRA definition without even a free speech caveat.

We should also be having a lobby over the question of a full-scale boycott of settlement produce and sanctions on Israel itself in the wake of the Jewish Nation State Law. The cry we should be taking up is why are sanctions on Iran and Russia ok but it is anti-Semitic if Israel is the target?

ZIONISM

It is not enough to be supporters of Palestinian rights if we are not also opponents of the state that took away those rights. ZIONISM is the official ideology of the Israeli state. It says that when the choice in Israel is between a Jew and a non-Jew then the former has priority. That was the meaning of the Jewish Nation State Law. Discrimination is carried out in the name of the Zionist ideals. Yet Zionism is a word that PSC Executive avoids like the plague. If you go through the whole agenda for the forthcoming PSC AGM, the word is used 4 times – twice in the resolutions and twice in my own 100 words! PSC Executive recoil from describing Israel as it is – Israel Apartheid is a consequence of Zionism. Zionism began from the basis of ‘a land without a people for a people without a land.’ Israel is a Jewish supremacist state just as South Africa was a White Supremacist state and Northern Ireland was a Protestant Supremacist statelet. The Zionists don’t like the term ‘Zionist’.  They say it is a word of abuse.  We should say, ‘yes, Zionism is abusive.’

Without understanding Zionism you cannot understand why Israel does what it does. It is the fact that Israel is a state, not of its own inhabitants but the mythical Jewish People that makes it racist.

Partners

But if PSC Executive are loathe to use the word Zionism, despite there being a World Zionist Organisation and a Zionist Union, they are more than happy to use the word partner.  It occurs no less than 33 times in the Reports. Not once are we told what this partnership entails and whether these are alliances of convenience or genuine partnerships.

I am reminded of Sir Roy Welensky, the Prime Minister of Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) who described his ‘partnership between the Whites and Africans as being between the rider and his horse.

We are told that one of the ‘partners’ is Jewish Voice for Labour. If that is so why did PSC not support the counter-demonstration to the Zionist ‘Enough is Enough’ demonstration on March 26^th outside Parliament when the false anti-Semitism campaign was in full swing? A demonstration attended by Norman Tebbit and Ian Paisley. JVL, supported by Labour Against the Witchhunt called a counter demonstration but PSC was nowhere to be seen.

PSC claims that it worked ‘with partners to secure the passing of a motion at Liberty’s AGM condemning the IHRA.’  This is not true.  One individual in JVL was responsible for this motion passing and if it were true why has there been no follow-up with these self same partners to ensure that Liberty’s Executive acts on this motion? Liberty has done absolutely nothing about this policy at a time when the IHRA has been used to attack our freedom of speech.

As for the trade union ‘partners’.  Has PSC ever, even once, raised with them the idea that they should oppose the IHRA. In the words of Sir Stephen Sedley, the Jewish former Court of Appeal judge, the IHRA terms anti-Semitic all except anodyne criticism of Israel as anti-Semitic.

The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of anti-Semitism

There has been a concerted attack this year on any criticism of Israel that questions its fundamentally racist nature. The IHRA has been adopted, not only by the Labour Party National Executive but by over 150 local Councils.  At a national level the voice of PSC has been almost wholly absent and it is simply dishonest to pretend otherwise.

When JVL and LAW called a large demonstration outside the Labour Party National Executive Committee meeting on September 4^th where was PSC? There were around 300 people on the demonstration and a variety of Momentum and trade union banners but there wasn’t even one PSC banner. Nationally PSC made no attempts to mobilise support for the lobby. It is as if the IHRA was irrelevant.

The IHRA conflates support for the Palestinians with anti-Semitism. Calling Israel a racist state has already led to workers and trade unionists being victimised yet PSC has remained silent.

Most major trade unions are affiliated to PSC.  What attempts did PSC make with UNISON and UNITE to persuade them not to support the IHRA? UNISON’s Dave Prentis has gone out of his way to be friendly to the Jewish Labour Movement. They have a great deal of influence in the Labour Party yet virtually all of them supported the IHRA.

There is no evidence that PSC even raised the IHRA with the trade unions. It is of course good that UNISON has given support to the campaign over child prisoners and pensions but what use is this if UNISON also gives support to a Zionist campaign that alleges opposition to Israel as a Jewish state is anti-Semitic?

The IHRA is part of an international effort to restrict Palestine solidarity.  In the USA it takes the form of direct attacks on those who support BDS. In France BDS has been all but outlawed. We ignore it at our peril.

Israeli Apartheid

It is good that PSC calls Israel an Apartheid state but if we are serious we need to respond to the Zionist argument that Israel is the world’s only Jewish state. We should be clear that we are opposed, in principle, to any religious state especially those which define ethnicity and nationality in terms of religion because from this flows rights and privileges which are accorded to members of that ethnicity. This is what makes Israel different from Iran and Saudi Arabia and for that matter Britain which is also nominally a Christian state.

We should be explicit - Jews are members of all nations. They are not a separate nationality. This is an anti-Semitic and racist idea. One Jewish state is one too many. A Jewish settler-colonial state i cannot be other than an ethno-nationalist i.e. apartheid state.

What is PSC For?

We have to balance actions and campaigns with politics. I say that as someone who has always been an activist. Support for Israel in the West is primarily political, in a way that it wasn’t with South Africa. South Africa had greater resources in terms of mineral wealth than Israel. Israel is more economically vulnerable.

My first actions as a political activist were with the Boycott of the South African Springbok Rugby team in 1970. We didn’t though face a significant pro-Apartheid lobby in Britain. Ministers didn’t fall over themselves to laud South Africa as the ‘only democracy in Africa.’ Israel does possess a powerful lobby. Crucial to destroying support for Israel is destroying the myth that Israel is a democratic state.

We should also recognise where our strengths and weaknesses lie. The majority of British people support the Palestinians. The majority of the elites support Zionism. We should proceed on that basis.

What are we fighting for?

One difference between South Africa and Palestine is that the former possessed a unified national liberation movement. The Palestinians don’t. The PLO is a shell. There is no one organisation we can take a lead from. We have to listen to grassroots Palestinians who tell us that the two state dream is dead (if it ever was alive).

The growing international support for one-state in Israel/Palestine has passed PSC by. It has become obvious that Israel has no intention, if it ever did, of relinquishing control over the Occupied Territories. The Occupation is there to stay. Those who perpetuate the illusion of a two state solution are effectively condoning the continuance of apartheid.

It is extremely welcome that the new American-Palestinian Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, has come out in support of a one-state solution. Is it too much to ask that PSC now has the same courage?

Our role as a solidarity organisation is to convince people that we have a vision. It is not enough simply to oppose what Israel does. What do we want to see is a question that people ask of us.

If Rashida can do it so can PSC

It is time for PSC to stop using the weakness of the Palestinians as an excuse to say nothing, a lamppost to lean on and say loud and clear that we support a single, unitary, democratic state in the whole of Palestine. 2 States is dead.

Today it is the Zionists who support the two state solution. Why? Because they know it will never happen. 2 States means a Palestinian Bantustan. Labour Friends of Israel proudly proclaim that they support an two state solution. If we believe that Israel is an Apartheid state why would we want it to continue?

Israel is NOT a democratic state – that should be our message

In the bulletin sent out on 9^th December headed ‘An incredible month for the Palestinian solidarity movement.’ there was a photograph of a PSC meeting in the House of Commons with Emily Thornberry, Shadow Foreign Secretary addressing the meeting. This is the same Emily Thornberry who is quoted as stating that

‘People who believe Israel does not have the right to exist should be drummed out of the Labour Party.’

Far from challenging Thornberry to disavow her support for Labour Friends of Israel PSC uncritically gives her a platform. In an interview with The Standard she boasted that “I joined Labour Friends of Israel when I became an MP in 2005. I support the Palestinians’ right to have a state and I support the state of Israel.’

Emily Thornberry supports both the oppressor and the oppressed. At the UK Israel Conference 2017’ organised by the main Israel lobby group in this country, BICOM Thornberry gushed:

‘Let me start by thanking BICOM and the Jewish News for inviting me to today’s historic event and once again for giving me the opportunity to emphasise the Labour Party’s long-standing, unstinting and unequivocal support for the State of Israel’ ‘and continued

 ‘even today despite the challenges that we must address in respect of relations and rights of the Palestinian people modern Israel stands out as a beacon of freedom, equality and democracy... in a region where oppression, discrimination and inequality are too often the norm.’

Electronic Intifada described her speech thus:

The UK Labour Party’s shadow foreign minister Emily Thornberry gave a speech last month that could have been written by a pro-Israel lobbyist.

In a groveling address in front of the Israeli ambassador at the Labour Friends of Israel annual dinner, Thornberry attacked BDS, the Palestinian-led boycott divestment and sanctions campaign.

She claimed BDS was “bigotry against the Israeli nation [that] has never been justified.” She said that “boycott of its products, its culture or its academics” was akin to “hatred of the nation and its people.

Instead of appeasing our enemies perhaps PSC could organise a lobby of parliament on the theme ‘it’s time to Boycott the State of Israel’.

The Palestinian Authority – A Quisling Authority

When the Apartheid regime in South Africa sponsored the Inkatha Freedom Party, under Mangosuthu Buthelezi , in order to portray the anti-Apartheid struggle as riven by Black on Black violence, the Anti-Apartheid Movement denounced this apartheid stooge.

Abbas's security forces prevent demonstrations in Ramallah

In Palestine today we have what Electronic Intifada has described as a Vichy regime. The PA openly collaborates with Israeli security forces, something which Mahmoud Abbas has described as ‘sacred’. The PA is an enemy of the Palestinian people yet PSC has never uttered even one word of criticism. On the contrary it maintains close relations with the Palestinian ‘Embassy’ in London. It is no accident that whilst Trump has withdrawn all funding from UNRWA and Palestinian education he has ring-fenced money for the PA’s security forces. Why are we silent? Is the torture of Palestinians by Abbas’s collaborators more acceptable than their torture by Israel’s Shin Bet?

Debate on Oslo Accords in London Labour Briefing October 1993 (date on article is wrong)

In 1993 I published an article on the Oslo Accords. Virtually everything I wrote in the article has come true.  The faces of Israeli police have been replaced by Palestinians. The PA’s primary role is suppressing the Palestinian struggle.  PSC’s purpose is to support the Palestinian struggle, regardless of whether their enemy comes in the guise of a Zionist or a Palestinian.

The need for a Strategy for the Palestinian solidarity movement

Anyone reading the latest Report from PSC Executive to Annual Conference 2019 would think that the movement goes onwards and upwards.  All we need to do is to work a little harder.

There is no sense that the struggle for Palestine liberation is, above all, a political one. Every victory, be it against HSBC or Veolia is of course welcome but the road is going to be a long and hard one. PSC should also stop trying to claim credit for victories like HSBC when it is clear that  War on Want did the original research that laid the basis for our triumph.

We need to soberly assess our strengths and weaknesses and also our opponents’ strengths and weak points. Self-congratulation and pretending that everything is right are the hall marks of a political sect not a genuine solidarity organisation.

PSC should be encouraging its branches to have programmes of internal political education. Most peoples’ knowledge of the history of Zionism and for example Mandate Palestine under the British is poor. Apart from anything else it would be the most effective means of dealing with tropes about ‘Rothschild Zionism’ and other anti-Semitic nonsense that people come out with. For example how many people know that the origins of Zionism are Christian not Jewish? A series of educational fact sheets would not go amiss.

PSC has barely if at all grown in the past decade. It was 5,000 a decade ago. We are told that growth in membership for the past year has been 31% which would be impressive if we had been told the membership figures a year ago!

We could begin by assessing our own strength.  In most branches national PSC members constitute a minority. It would be useful to know the membership of each branch and for that matter how many branches are genuinely active.

Branch development should be at the forefront of PSC’s activities. There should be a branch membership officer. PSC should be more than the sum of its branches.  At the moment the opposite is true.

Civil Liberties for Palestinian supporters are under attack

In the past year or so there have been frequent attacks and disruptions of Palestine meetings. Speakers such as Tom Suarez and Jackie Walker have had meetings either disrupted or banned altogether. There is a concerted campaign, led by the Board of Deputies and the CAA to try and close down our activities. We even had a group of about 30 or so Zionists halting the Balfour Day march last year.

We should launch a national campaign around free speech on Palestine specifically designed to halt the attempts to close down meetings on Palestine/ Zionism under the pretext of ‘anti-Semitism’. We should approach other organisations such as the Quakers and Liberty to highlight the Zionist attempt to suppress Free Speech on Palestine. We could do worse than having a printed leaflet ready for groups and branches facing attempts to prevent them holding meetings.

PSC has so far done nothing about the group of Zionist fascists who I’ve named and shamed on my blog. This should end. We should be devising a strategy to put an end to these disruptions. We should consider forming a stewards group in London to prevent physical attacks on meetings and we should also be working with groups like the Islamic Human Rights Commission whose own Al Quds demonstration has come under attack by a combination of far-Right Zionists and Tommy Robinson supporters this year.

We should give critical support to this demonstration and rebut the suggestion that Hamas or Hizbollah are terrorists. The political use of the ‘terrorist’ label should be opposed. Terrorism means the use of violence against civilian targets and there is none more guilty of terrorism than Israel.

We should also work with and encourage groups of activists like Inminds.  PSC should stop being sectarian.

PSC Executive

The Executive needs a shakeup. It resembles a clique, a self-perpetuating group of friends. We need to open up the Executive to activists in the branches. The Constitution makes provision for 5 Regional representatives but the Executive has ignored this provision. Their election should be a priority in the coming year.

Tony Greenstein

How Leftist Intellectuals Take Fright when Zionism Wages a War on ‘anti-Semitism’

Richard Seymour and Labour’s Antisemitism Affair –straddling both sides of the fence

Jacobin is not a site that most people on the left in Britain will be familiar with. It is however a major left-wing journal in the United States.  I once contributed Rewriting the Holocaust for Jacobin, in the wake of Netanyahu's speech to the 2015 World Zionist Congress when he described how Hitler was persuaded to adopt the Final Solution by the Mufti of Jerusalem.

Richard Seymour is undoubtedly a gifted and capable writer.  He was, until the 2013 rape crisis, a member of the Socialist Workers Party when he led the resistance on his Leninology blog to the attempts by the leadership and Alex Callinicos to cover up what had happened.  Since then he has drifted politically, writing a couple of books, becoming immersed in intersectionality and flirting with Left Unity.  Seymour’s latest article in Jacobin suggests he is wandering aimlessly across the left, dragged in the undertow of conflicting political currents without neither ballast or firm conviction.

Seymour is mired in the swamp of identity politics and this is causing him to lose his political bearings. After all a Jewish identity based around Israel and Zionism, suitably dressed up as a concern with anti-Semitism, is equally as valid as a Palestinian identity based on ethnic cleansing. If Jews can claim that they are oppressed because of hostility to Israel who is going to countermand this? When class and race are removed from the equation who is to decide who is oppressed and who is the oppressor? Everything is subjective and personal. All identities are equally valid, albeit some are more equal than others.  By what criteria can one say that an identity based on Zionism is reactionary if one does not have an analysis based on class and imperialism?

Seymour’s latest article Labour’s Antisemitism Affair on Labour’s media manufactured anti-Semitism crisis proves the maxim that those who leave the SWP invariably drift to the right.  In Seymour’s case this involves a wholesale abandonment of class politics in favour of subjectivism and a crude empiricism.

Seymour’s article is a deep disappointment as he tries to bridge the gap between the two sides of what he calls Labour’s Anti-Semitism Affair.  Seymour’s purpose is blindingly obvious.  He wants to find something innovative to say.  He wants to put new wine into old bottles and thus he imagines he’s being daring and brave in seeking to break the mould of the politics of anti-Semitism.  Like those who have tried this feat of political acrobacy before him, he ends up satisfying no one. It is a tilt to the Right and an abandonment of the Left.  It stands in marked contrast to the subsequent article Corbyn Under Fire in Jacobin by Daniel Finn.

One of the hallmarks of socialist or left-wing writers is their commitment to the overthrow of the system we live under.  They employ their talents on our behalf not just their own. There should be no room to doubt where they stand on the major issues of the day.  They are against the mainstream.  People such as John Pilger, Naomi Klein, Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein and Tariq Ali have demonstrated their commitment under fire.  However the Left is also plagued by opportunists and turncoats, fair weather friends and erstwhile socialists like Owen Jones, the Guardian’s resident leftist and friend of the Israeli Labour Party/JLM. Others, like Nick Cohen, simply jack-knifed to the right.  American neo-conservatism is littered with the bodies of ex-leftists such as Nathan Glazer, James Burnham and Irving Kristol. See The Neoconservative Counterrevolution

Gilad Atzmon, the anti-semitic jazz player who the SWP was associated with through the years when Richard Seymour was a member

I would have expected Richard Seymour to have put into some kind of context, in the course of his 5000+ word article, from where and why he thought that Labour’s ‘anti-Semitism’ crisis arose. Or was the ‘anti-Semitism’ controversy a spontaneous eruption when the prospect of a Corbyn leadership of the Labour Party materialised?  A narrative of ‘anti-Semitism’ that is espoused by every right-wing newspaper in Britain – from the Daily Mail and Sun to the Guardian surely demands some explanation as to its origins? 

I find it wholly dishonest that when describing the fabricated anti-Semitism controversy at Oxford University Labour Club in January 2016, Seymour referred to the central villain, the Chair of the Club, Alex Chalmers, as “a former intern at the pro-Israel group BICOM.”

I wrote an article for Jacobin nearly 2 years ago

Chalmer’s resignation as Chair sparked the crisis and led to the Royall Report which in turn led to the Chakrabarti Report. The information about his links to BICOM was discovered by Asa Winstanley, a researcher and writers for Electronic Intifada, whose articles How Israel lobby manufactured UK Labour Party’s anti-Semitism crisis and Instigator of anti-Semitism scam kicked out of Labour are indispensable to anyone seeking to make sense of what was happening.  Yet although purloining the fruits of Asa’s investigative work, Seymour deigned to give him credit. The Guardian and other papers get frequent references but the writings of a journalist on our side is simply ignored.

As people will know, I was one of the major casualties of this crisis.  I was suspended on March 18^th 2016 and expelled on February 18^th 2018.  I have detailed the various stages of my suspension from my Investigation Hearing to my successful application for an Injunction against the Labour Party on my blog.  I have tried to put what has happened to me into a wider context, for example detailing the suspension of people like Jackie Walker.

I find it difficult to empathise with so-called intellectuals who divorce themselves from that which they write about.  People who prize themselves on their detachment from the struggle and who adopt an aloof and condescending attitude to those who are involved in political battles are destined not to hang around for too long.  People like Richard Seymour believe themselves equipped to offer their advice from on high without ever getting their hands dirty.

Gary Spedding

I don't doubt that Seymour can sometimes write interesting and insightful articles but he can also be extremely arrogant. Although he has escaped from their clutches Seymour has nonetheless retained the mentality and psychology of the SWP where everything is subordinate to building the party. Perhaps having kept aloof from left sectarian politics I find myself irritated at the cynicism of a group from which I was expelled at the tender age of 19.  To repeat all its mistakes over and over again, without ever learning from those mistakes and to operate in the same way as you have always done, with front organisations which garner less and less support, merely proves Einstein's maxim that the definition of insanity is repeating the same thing over and over again and hoping for a different result. 

There is no attempt in Richard’s article to explain the origins of Labour’s 'antisemitism' campaign.  It apparently appeared as if by magic.  The idea of a deliberately co-ordinated plan to destabilise Labour doesn't even seem to have occurred to Seymour.  The possibility of state interference and involvement completely escapes him. Seymour begins with the minutae of the latest incidents of 'anti-semitism' from Jewdas, to the famous mural by Mear One, which he automatically assumes is antisemitic, to Christine Shawcroft. Seymour concludes that 'There is, clearly, a problem somewhere. Unfortunately, the way in which allegations of antisemitism have been used for party-political purposes, has tended to obscure the need to address it.'

An article in Haaretz by Gary Spedding supporting the bogus anti-semitism campaign

This is the key defect of Seymour’s article.  He accepts that ‘There is, clearly, a problem somewhere.’

Seymour’s article provides justification for the statement by Momentum that was issued in the wake of the latest episode of ‘anti-Semitism’. It bears the imprint of Jon Lansman, a left Zionist who is the head of Momentum.  Lansman has consistently refused to mobilise Momentum in the fight against the witch-hunt in the Labour Party still less to counter the activities of the Jewish Labour Movement, the Israeli state’s representatives inside Labour.  The statement reads:

Momentum’s NCG believes that accusations of antisemitism should not and cannot be dismissed simply as right wing smears nor as the result of conspiracies. Current examples of antisemitism within the Labour Party are not only a problem of a few, extreme ‘bad apples’ but also of unconscious bias which manifests itself in varied, nuanced and subtle ways and is more widespread in the Labour Party than many of us had understood even a few months ago.

It is possible to accept that antisemitism is a problem in parts of the left and needs to be loudly denounced whilst also accepting that some of Jeremy Corbyn’s political opponents are opportunistically using this issue as a way to undermine his leadership.

There is nothing in the above statement that Seymour could disagree with. 

It does not seem to have occurred to Seymour that the election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the second major party in the US’s closest ally in Europe, someone who was both anti-Nato and anti-US imperialism, could not but help provoke panic in the security establishment.  If the CIA and all the other spooks at the US Embassy were not discussing what to do when Corbyn appeared to be winning the Labour leadership contest they weren't doing their job. 

Perhaps Seymour believes that whilst the CIA has no compunction in destabilising governments and parties in Latin America they wouldn’t do such a thing in Britain?  Maybe he hasn’t heard of Operation Gladio. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to Seymour that the Labour Party is being destabilised via the United State’s chosen friend Israel.  It is as if the Al Jazeera undercover programmes The Lobby had not been shown and Shai Masot, the Israeli agent had never existed.

Seymour takes certain facts and ignores others, for example the attack on Corbyn even before he became leader as a holocaust denier.  He lacks any perspective, making empiricism into a fine art.  Indeed the ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign is all our fault.  ‘If you walk straight into the constantly whirring propellers of a hostile media with eyes wide shut, then what is the use of complaining about the “Israel Lobby”?’  So the false anti-Semitism campaign has nothing to do with the media or those who own them. The blame lies rather with the victims of the press.

Seymour’s factual grasp leaves a lot to be desired.  When talking about Ken Livingstone’s remark that Hitler supported Zionism, Seymour says of Ha'avara, the Transfer Agreement between the Jewish Agency in Palestine and the Nazi state, that: ‘Hitler was not “supporting” Zionism so much as using every expedient to expel Jews from Germany.’

This is simply not true.  The Nazi government made it clear that they did support the German Zionist movement vs  their non-Zionist German counterparts. David Cesarani wrote describing how ‘The efforts of the Gestapo are oriented to promoting Zionism as much as possible and lending support to its efforts to further emigration.” (my emphasis) [The Final Solution (p.96)] Lucy Dawidowicz, another Zionist historian described how, on 28^th January 1935, Reinhardt Heydrich issued a directive stating that

‘the activity of the Zionist-oriented youth organizations ... prior to their emigration to Palestine lies in the interest of the National Socialist state’s leadership.’ These organisations therefore ‘are not to be treated with that strictness that it is necessary to apply to the members of the so-called German-Jewish organizations (assimilationists)’.  [Lucy Dawidowicz, War Against the Jews, pp.118]

Francis Nicosia writes of how Berl Katznelson, a founder of the Israeli Labour Party Mapai and editor of its paper Davar saw the rise of Hitler as “an opportunity to build and flourish like none we have ever had or ever will have”.  [Zionism and Anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany, p.91, CUP, 2008.]  Ben Gurion’s attitude to the Holocaust is best described by his official biographer, Shabtai Teveth: ‘If there was a line in Ben-Gurion’s mind between the beneficial disaster and an all-destroying 

catastrophe, it must have been a very fine one.’ [The Burning Ground 1886-1948, p.851, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1987].

Ha'avara was not set up in order to help Jews emigrate from Germany.  The Jews it helped were amongst the richest, those who could take £1,000 capital out (which enabled them to enter Palestine without an immigration certificate).  They could have left anyway. Ha'avara’s purpose, from the Nazi’s point of view was to undermine the International Jewish Boycott of Nazi Germany which was destroying the German export economy. From the point of view of the Zionist Organisation, Ha'avara was the sole way of bringing into Palestine the maximum amount of German Jewish capital. [Jewish Chronicle, 13^th December 1935] According to Edwin Black [Ha’avara – The Transfer Agreement, Brookline Books, 1999, pp. 257-8), Ha'avara’s main purpose was ‘saving the wealth’ of German Jewry and ‘rescuing the capital from Nazi Germany.’  The Jews themselves were a secondary matter.

Baruch Vladech, Chair of the American Jewish Labour Committee and Editor of the Yiddish Daily Forward, described Ha'avara’s purpose as 'not to rescue the Jews from Germany but to strengthen various institutions in Palestine.' He observed that whilst

the whole organized labor movement and the progressive world are waging a fight against Hitler through the boycott. The Transfer Agreement scabs on that fight.’[Lenni Brenner, pp. 92-93, 51 Documents: Zionist Collaboration with the Nazis’, Barricade Books, 1972].

Seymour's criticisms of Jackie Walker, the Black-Jewish activist who was Vice-Chair of Momentum, are even more off beam.  By attending the ‘training session’ of the Jewish Labour Movement on anti-Semitism, she was waging a ‘factional war’.  Seymour describes her comment that Holocaust Day was not “open to all people who experienced a holocaust.” as wrong. It wasn’t, the African & Belgian Congo holocausts are absent. The extermination of the Disabled and Roma are classified under ‘Persecution’ rather than ‘Holocaust’ on the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust.

Seymour describes Jackie’s behaviour as ‘tendentious’ and that ‘she was splitting hairs, belittling antisemitism’. Seymour describes his ignorance of the subject. Jackie was challenging the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of anti-Semitism which conflates anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism. The IHRA is at the centre of the debate over false allegations of ‘anti-Semitism’.  If Seymour is so unaware of the ramifications of the IHRA then he should read the criticism of it in London Review of Books May 2017 by former Court of Appeal Judge Sir Stephen Sedley. [Defining Anti-Semitism].

Seymour concludes by saying that ‘Walker’s tactical misadventure inadvertently damaged her own cause’ implying that it was her own fault that ‘she was drummed out of the Momentum leadership.’  What kind of socialist blames the defeat of workers on their own mistakes as a means of making a rhetorical point? It is noteworthy that Seymour has nothing to say about the Momentum leadership.

Seymour says that precisely 56 individuals have been suspended because of allegations of anti-Semitism citing Thomas Jones’ Labour and Anti-Semitism. The only problem with this is that this article was written in May 2016.  We are nearly two years down the road and the numbers are far greater.  We had thousands of suspensions in the summer of 2016 during the leadership election, many of which were based on ‘anti-Semitism’.

Seymour is right when he says that Israel has become a ‘totem issue...a displacement for other issues.’ and that this is one of the reasons for the false anti-Semitism campaign.  It is because Israel has become symbolic of the divide between right and left that we have to confront Labour’s role in supporting the world’s only apartheid state not allow ourselves to be bogged down in refuting the false allegations of anti-Semitism.  Unfortunately Seymour proposes the opposite course, namely that we should take serious that which he describes as a displacement issue.

In the section on Jewish Anti-Zionists Seymour writes that the reaction  to what he calls anti antisemitism ‘has many sources, and some of it, as Momentum suggests, might be rooted in shades and variations of unconscious antisemitism. ' Momentum’s own statement speaks of an ‘unconscious bias which manifests itself in varied, nuanced and subtle ways and is more widespread... than many of us had understood.’

Racism if it is unconscious it’s not worth the candle.  At a time when the government is stripping Black people who came here in the Windrush of their citizenship rights, when we face the continuing issue of Black deaths in custody at the hands of a racist police force and the incarceration of refugees, to talk about an invisible or ‘unconscious’ racism that is deployed on behalf of White privileged people is obscene and racist in itself.

Momentum’s statement calls for ‘unconscious bias training... awareness trainings’.  As Virou Srilangarajah wrote in an obituary for the legendary anti-racist writer and activist, Ambalavaner Sivanandan, who died earlier this year, ‘racism awareness training’, removed state and institutional responsibility for racism, instead turning it into a ‘natural’ social phenomenon independent of material conditions, a ‘white disease’. 

Racial awareness training, which Chakrabarti opposed but which the Labour Party has ignored, is based on the idea that racism exists inside one’s head not in society.  It reaches its apotheosis in the absurdity of the Jewish Labour Movement, the ‘sister party’ of the racist Israeli Labour Party, a party that supports the segregation of Jew and Arab and which Netanyahu’s deportation of 40,000 Black African refugees from Israel, running training sessions on ‘anti-Semitism’. You might as well have the Yorkshire Ripper give a lecture on violence against women.  This is the nonsense that Seymour is subscribing to.

If what Seymour (and Lansman) argue is correct, the false allegations of ‘anti-Semitism’ have nothing to do with labelling all criticism of Zionism as ‘anti-Semitic’. They have nothing to do with the Right’s use of the issue as a means of attacking Corbyn on other issues, it’s all down to the unconscious mind.  I just hope that if Seymour decides to abandon writing for a career that he doesn’t choose psycho analysis or psychiatry as his chosen profession. Freud undoubtedly has a lot to answer for but surely not the vacuity of Richard Seymour. 

There is, of course, a simpler explanation. Momentum has resolutely avoided opposing the anti-Semitism witchhunt.  This nonsense about 'unconscious antisemitism' is intended to explain why there are so few genuine examples of anti-semitism to be found.

Seymour’s description of Jewish Voice for Labour, Free Speech on Israel and Jewdas as anti-Zionist is simply wrong.  None of the groups say that they are anti-Zionist.  Although Seymour is right about the decline of left-wing Zionism I fail to understand his analogy with Wallace baiting Truman.  Seymour describes he doesn't analyse.

Seymour’s section The Limits of Anti-Anti-Antisemitism  suggests that anti-Zionists in the Labour Party are posturing as being politically tough.  He tells us that ' it is not helpful for the Left to adopt this attitude, or the performative political “toughness” that often comes with it. Defensiveness has to give way to reflexivity.' This demonstrates the superficiality of  this article and also how far removed Seymour is from that which he writes about. We are in a midst of a war, waged by the Right using anti-Semitism as a weapon and all Seymour can suggest is that we should be 'reflexive'.

What Seymour really means is that we should accept that there is some factual basis to the allegations of anti-Semitism. Seymour uncritically quotes from a survey by the far-Right Zionist Campaign Against Antisemitism without asking any deeper questions such as whether the survey was flawed, whether it was designed to produce certain outcomes or indeed anything about the CAA itself. 

In the CAA’s survey people are asked different questions relating to Jews (for example do Jews chase money) and because nearly half of the population answer positively to one of the questions they conclude that we are in the middle of a wave of anti-Semitism and that nearly half of the British people are anti-Semitic. Seymour goes along with this. 

Dave Rich, the Deputy Director of the Zionist Community Security Trust, with whom I agree on virtually nothing, observed that

‘This latest poll showed something else that is interesting... that people who believe antisemitic things about Jews rarely think of themselves as antisemitic.... It is as if antisemitic ideas circulate in society and influence the stereotypes people believe about Jews, but this does not affect how people imagine they relate to actual, living Jews who they know or might meet.... Even people who believe there is a global Jewish conspiracy or deny the Holocaust are affronted by the notion they might be antisemitic.

The normally restrained Institute for Jewish Policy Research found that the CAA’s “barometer” report was “littered with flaws” and the group’s work “may even be rather irresponsible.”  The IJPR criticized the way that the Campaign Against Antisemitism had used data to make the

“rather sensationalist claim that almost half of all British adults harbor some sort of anti-Semitic view… a far more accurate and honest read” of the data would “highlight the fact that between 75 percent and 90 percent of people in Britain either do not hold anti-Semitic views or have no particular view of Jews either way, and only about 4 percent to 5 percent of people can be characterized as clearly anti-Semitic.”

The CAA also claimed that more than half of British Jews felt that anti-Semitism echoed that of the 1930s. Anshel Pfeffer witheringly observed in Ha’aretz that if the CAA “actually believe that, then it’s hard to take anything they say about contemporary anti-Semitism in their home country seriously.” Pfeffer noted, regarding the statement that Jews talk about the Holocaust too much in order to gain sympathy  “too many Jews … are often too quick to bring up the Holocaust in order to make a point. … Holding that opinion doesn’t necessarily make you an anti-Semite.” 

According to the respected Pew Research Centre’s 2016 Global Survey of Attitudes just 7% of British people are anti-Semitic.  Compare this to 28% in the case of Islamaphobia and a 45% in the case of anti-Roma racism. 

The problem with Seymour is that he is still faithful to the SWP notion that all forms of racism are equal, even when anti-Semitism is a marginal prejudice that doesn't involve power relations within capitalist society, state racism or economic discrimination.  Instead of researching the subject, Seymour reaches for Google Search and takes what the CAA says at face value without any attempt to find out what their motives might be.

It would also appear that Seymour has adopted or rather swallowed the concept of ‘left anti-Semitism’ that is normally associated with the pro-imperialist Alliance for Workers Liberty.  He describes the self-publicising narcissist Gary Spedding as a ‘Jewish left-winger’ citing his article in Ha’aretz We in the Palestinian Solidarity Movement Have a Problem With anti-Semitism. Whatever else Spedding is, he is certainly not Jewish (nor is he left-wing) although that doesn't prevent him telling Jews just what is and is not antisemitic.

Spedding bases his experience of ‘anti-Semitism’ on being told at a Palestine solidarity meeting that the term ‘anti-Semitism’ applies equally to Arabs, since they too are anti-Semites.  This is a common fallacy which is quite easily corrected.  Words and phrases take on a certain meanings over time.  There are no such things as ‘Semites’, which are the product of Wilhelm Marr’s attempt to racialise anti-Jewish hatred in 1879. 

An example of the Palestine solidarity movement's very own Walter Mitthy

Spedding is not a Palestine solidarity activist. His claim to having spent 10 years fighting anti-Semitism in the Palestine solidarity movement is a lie. When the fight against the influence of Gilad Atzmon and Israel Shamir were at their height Spedding was nowhere to be seen. It was people like Ali Abunimah, the editor of Electronic Intifada, whom Spedding has gratuitously abused, who dealt a lethal blow to Shamir and Atzmon with the issuing of a declaration Granting No Quarter: A Call for the Disavowal of the Racism and Antisemitism of Gilad Atzmon, signed by over 20 prominent Palestinians and Arabs which destroyed Atzmon’s reputation.  It was at my urging that JVL expelled Spedding.

Another example of ‘anti-Semitism’ that Seymour asserts is Annie Kehune of Jewdas who ‘writes of being “fed up of having to follow ‘I’m Jewish’ with ‘but I’m not a Zionist’ in left-wing circles.  It may well annoy Annie but unfortunately the leadership of the British Jewish community claim that all Jews support Israel and its actions against the Palestinians. It is no surprise therefore that people associate being Jewish with being a Zionist.  I see nothing wrong with Jewish people making their position clear just as one would have expected White opponents of Apartheid in South Africa to have made their views clear.

Spedding gave support 2 years ago to the false and bogus claims of Angela Eagle, who was then trying to be the Right's candidate against Corbyn, that she had been subject to homophobic abuse in her party.  Wallasey CLP was suspended because of these lies.  It is no secret that Spedding peddled these lies but it is some what surprising that Richard Seymour considers him an ally

Seymour quite unbelievably concludes by arguing that 'However, while every claim has to be evaluated carefully, a precondition for that is that they should be taken seriously in and of themselves, and not merely and a priori as a manifestation of the “Israel Lobby.” Why, when these allegations are made maliciously, should we take them seriously?  If allegations of anti-Semitism are made to deflect from support for the Palestinians then they should be seen for what they are.  So when Jonathan Arkush of the Board of Deputies claims that Jewdas are a “source of virulent antisemitism” and goes on to claim that their members “are not all Jewish” should we investigate such matters?  Perhaps we should take a blood test just in order that the matter can be resolved conclusively!

Like most SWP exiles Seymour is trying to find a progressive space between the politics he once espoused and their right-wing critics today.  He doesn't even like talk of the Israel Lobby and would prefer if we would simply turn a blind eye to the activities of the JLM and Labour Friends of Israel. 

Seymour ends in true SWP fashion that 'At a time when nascent far-right movements are surfacing, with antisemitic tendencies linked to state power in Hungary and the United States, the Left has a particular responsibility to lead on this issue.'  Yes indeed and who is it, in the USA and in Hungary, who is hand in hand with these anti-semites if not the Zionist movement?  I can only presume that Seymour in his ivory tower is unaware that the founder of the alt-Right himself, the neo-Nazi Richard Spencer has declared himself a White Zionist. Or that Jonathan Arkush, one of the main players in the false ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign welcomed Donald Trump’s election with all its anti-Semitic dog whistles?

The last thing we should do is to be diverted into every alleyway that the Zionists want us to go down.  What Seymour is really proposing is that the Zionists be allowed to set the agenda.

Seymour is isolated from the movement he writes about which is why he thinks Spedding is representative. Yes of course antisemitic nonsense should be countered. However it endangers not a single Jew because racism against Jews is a matter of prejudice, not of life and death.  As I wrote over a decade ago, opposition to anti-Semitism has become the "anti-racism" of the political right.’  No one has died from a tweet or social media post.

The irony is that it was the SWP itself, when Seymour was a member, which was allied with Gilad Atzmon. In June 2005 Jews Against Zionism picketed a meeting of the SWP at Bookmarks where Atzmon was giving a talk on Otto Weininger. I wrote Blind eye to anti-semitism attacking the SWP’s support for Atzmon. Although Richard was not happy about their position he wasn’t exactly outspoken either and tellingly he chose to remain a member of the SWP. It is not for Richard Seymour to now lecture us on the evils of anti-Semitism.

I was surprised that Jacobin had published Seymour’s article but reassured that the current editor Bhaskar has responded to me that he completely disagreed with the thrust of the article.  The previous editor, Max Ajl told me that he would never have published ‘such a Shoddy piece!’  I still find it puzzling why Jacobin thought it worthy of publication when there are so many right-wing sites would have welcomed what they would consider a repentant sinner!

Tony Greenstein