WHAT IS ZIONISM? Is it a National Liberation Movement or an Ideology & Movement of Jewish Supremacism & Settler Colonialism?

Is Zionism a Manifestation of Jewish Identity and if so What Does That Say About Being Jewish Today?

This is Zionism - Destroying Palestinian Water Wells with Concrete and making them Water Poor

Introduction

Everyone knew that Apartheid in South Africa was a system of racial domination by the White minority over the Black population. Likewise everyone knew that Unionism in Northern Ireland meant Protestant supremacy over the Catholic population, although in both cases apologists for Apartheid and Unionism suggested that it was not so much about racism as much as questions of identity and culture. [see for example Graham Walker’s Old History: Protestant Ulster in Lee's "Ireland", The Irish Review, No. 12 (Spring - Summer, 1992]

Supporters of Zionism, both the ideology and the movement, have long denied that there is any comparison between Israel and Apartheid South Africa. However the reality on the ground suggests otherwise. Every human rights group of note – Amnesty International, B’Tselem and Human Rights Watch - has produced detailed reports describing how the mechanisms of Jewish supremacy work in Israel.

The IHRA ‘definition’ of anti-Semitism, whose sole purpose was to conflate criticism of Zionism and Israel with anti-Semitism, says that to even call the establishment of a Jewish state racist is anti-Semitic. Since Israel is clearly a racist state, what the IHRA is really saying is that something can be true and still be anti-Semitic.

So what is Zionism? Is it a synonym for being Jewish? Is it a form of cultural or personal identity? And furthermore who should get to define it? Is it the Zionists or their victims?

The Chakrabarti Report

In her Report of 30 June 2016 into racism and ‘anti-Semitism’ in the Labour Party Shami Chakrabarti wrote that:

it is for all people to self-define their political beliefs and I cannot hope to do justice to the rich range of self-descriptions of both Jewishness or Zionism, even within the Labour Party, that I have heard. What I will say is that some words have been used and abused by accident and design so much as to blur, change or mutate their meaning. My advice to critics of the Israeli State and/or Government is to use the term "Zionist" advisedly, carefully and never euphemistically or as part of personal abuse.

This was a good example of the meaningless verbiage that advocates of the diversity agenda and identity politics indulge in. Should we accept without question people’s self-definition of their political beliefs? Do we accept neo-liberal assertions that they are believers in economic and political freedom rather than blood sucking vampires feeding off the NHS at the expense of health budgets?

If self definition is the end of the matter then there is no way of distinguishing between the bogus and fraudulent and the truthful. Evidence is irrelevant. Every exploiter becomes the exploited. Everything is subjective and metaphysical. As David Feldman pointed out this leads to “conceptual chaos”.

Should we accept that the Nazis were merely German patriots who were led astray? That is certainly the view of those ardent supporters of Zionism, Germany’s Alternative for Germany which is currently at 20% in the polls.

Members of the far-right Otzma Yehudit party, including party leader and National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir as well as Negev, Galilee and National Resilience Minister Yitzhak Wasserlauf hold a party meeting at the illegal West Bank settlement outpost of Evyatar, February 27, 2023. (Courtesy: Otzma Yehudit)

According to Chakrabarti’s vacuous wittering every political charlatan can hide their corruption under the badge of cultural and personal self-identity. Chakrabarti is right that anyone can self-define, but no one has the right to expect someone else to accept that self-definition.

People defining themselves as Zionists in the belief that they are merely expressing their ethnic and cultural identity are no different from someone defining themselves as a Jeddi, which thousands do. Except that the latter are harmless whereas Zionists are anything but.

Horatio Bottomley

A good example of this method was Horatio Bottomley, who hid his frauds under the badge of patriotism. The Editor of John Bull, in 1922 he was gaoled for defrauding his electors and expelled from parliament.

Chakrabarti didn’t have a clue about Zionism and saw it as a form of personal identity, part of a ‘rich range of self-descriptions.’ One wonders whether other racist ideologies could be so described? And isn’t the definition of Zionism best left to the Palestinians who have experienced it at the sharp end? Unfortunately Chakrabarti did not possess the intellectual equipment to interrogate her Zionist witnesses as to what Zionism meant in practice.

Why should some dim-witted middle class kid from Golders Green or a Jewish American Princess, who believes she is suffering holocaust trauma, be endowed with an insight into Zionism that the villagers of Masafer Yatta are denied? Who has the greater experience of Zionism in practice? The spoilt Jewish brat or the bereaved relatives of the children murdered in Jenin?

Yet illusions in Zionism persist. Neil Caplan in an article Talking Zionism, Doing Zionism, Studying Zionism, wrote that

Zionism is also a multi-faceted ideology that evolved into the modern State of Israel and has also produced a voluminous historiography.

This is historic nonsense. Zionism did not ‘evolve’. The State of Israel came about as a result of the the planned ethnic cleansing of three-quarters of a million Palestinians. Nor was there anything multi-faceted about it. All wings of Zionism, ‘left’ and ‘right’, agreed that the goal was a Jewish State which inevitably meant the expulsion of the Palestinians. Yet thousands of people believed this nonsense.

Nor is it simply bourgeois ideologues who believe that Zionism is a movement with a left and a right. Many otherwise good socialists also do so. Gilbert Achcar, who leads what remains of the Fourth International in Britain, criticised the equation of Zionism and racism for its

totalizing nature. There is Zionism and there is “Zionism”... we can hardly treat all Zionists ... as birds of the same racist feather. [The Arabs and the Holocaust (p.274)].

According to Jonathan Shamir in Zionism: the history of a contested word:

Anti-Zionism is a negative ideology, and is therefore contingent on the definition of its positive counterpart. The word Zionism, however, is so ambiguous and varied in its meaning and so imbued with emotion, so firmly tied to identity, that invoking it stifles any productive conversation.

Could you expect a Holocaust survivor who found succour in Israel to disavow Zionism entirely? Could you expect a Palestinian expelled from their home and prevented from ever entering it again to be anything but an anti-Zionist?

To move forward, we need to abandon these terms when it comes to discussing Israel-Palestine.

What this verbal flatulence means is that Palestinians should abandon their opposition to Zionism in order to satisfy the tender consciences of liberal Zionists like Shamir.

So the question persists. What is Zionism? I hope that I can at least provide the outlines of an answer and explain why Zionism is irredeemably racist and colonist.

What is Zionism?

Zionism began as a reaction of Jewish intellectuals and the petit-bourgeoisie to anti-Semitism and in particular the Odessa pogroms of 1881 after the assassination of Czar Alexander II. A section of Jewish society despaired of ever achieving equality with non-Jews and yet they feared the working class. 

Zionism was a reaction which accepted the framework of debate that the anti-Semites set, namely that Jews did not belong in non-Jewish society. This led to the setting up of the first Zionist organisation, The Lovers of Zion in 1882.

Why did Zionism believe that Jews did not belong in non-Jewish society?

Firstly they held that anti-Semitism was inherent in the non-Jew. Anti-Semitism could not be fought and if it couldn’t be fought then the only option left was escape. Leon Pinsker of Hovvei Zion (Lovers of Zion) expressed this best:

Judeophobia is then a mental disease, and as a mental disease it is hereditary, and having been inherited for 2,000 years, it is incurable. 

 Theodor Herzl

Why fight something which was incurable? Fifteen years later, during the battle to exonerate Captain Dreyfus, Herzl expressed similar ideas:

In Paris... I achieved a freer attitude towards anti-Semitism, which I now began to understand historically and to pardon. Above all, I recognise the emptiness and futility of trying to 'combat' anti-Semitism.

Secondly, because Jews were ‘exiled’ 2,000 years ago from their homeland, they lacked an attachment to the soil of the country they lived in. As a result they had developed anti-social qualities. It was only by re-establishing a Jewish state that Jews could take their proper place in the world.

Intrinsic to the Zionist idea was that Jews, wherever they lived, formed a single Jewish nation. In essence this was a belief in a Jewish race. How could Jews who lived across the globe and who spoke a variety of difference languages, be members of the same nation? As Moses Hess, an early Zionist, wrote:

The Germans hate the religion of the Jews less than their race…  The Jewish race is a primary race which… accommodates itself to all conditions and retains its integrity. The Jewish type has always remained indelibly the same throughout the centuries.

 

According to David Ben Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister and the pivotal figure in post-Herzlian Zionism, ‘exile’ (Galut) had been ‘a prolonged interlude in the history of Israel’. The diaspora represented a historical void.

Ben Gurion and the Zionist movement held that until Emancipation in the 19^th century, Jews knew that the countries where they lived were only a temporary exile, and it did not even occur to them that they were a part of the peoples among whom they lived. That this is patent nonsense is borne out by the fact that it took a long fight by the Jewish bourgeoisie before they achieved emancipation in the UK and elsewhere.

The Zionist left, Poale Zion, which called itself Marxist, subscribed to the idea that Jewish diaspora society could never be ‘normal’ until a Jewish Palestine was created. Its founder Ber Borochov, had been expelled from the Russian Social Democratic Party in 1901 for his Zionism.

Borochov had a theory that the social structure of the Jews in the West resembled an inverted pyramid. There were too many rich Jews at the top and too few Jewish workers at the bottom.

The creation of a Jewish State, which was what marked out Zionism, would rectify this problem. In order to form such a state the Zionist movement sought an alliance with an imperialist power. Without an alliance with Britain or another power, Zionism would have been just one more harmless messianic movement.

Everything else is post-hoc justification. The myth has grown up that Zionism sought to create a Jewish state as a refuge for Jews living under persecution. That their goal was in essence humanitarian, even if their methods were not.

It needs emphasising that the original Labour Zionist pioneers saw themselves as an elite and held the diaspora in contempt. They were creating a new society and dispensing with the old.

Zionism realised from the start that without anti-Semitism there was no Zionism. The Zionism movement needed the ‘push’ of anti-Semitism. As Herzl wrote in his Diaries,

The anti-Semites will become our most dependable friends, the antisemitic countries our allies.

David Ben-Gurion

Zionism was not simply an escape from an anti-Semitism that couldn’t be fought. The Zionist pioneers saw themselves as elitists, the ‘new Jew’. Arthur Ruppin, the most important figure in Palestinian Zionism after Ben Gurion, was an ardent believer in the racial sciences and eugenics. This is not surprising since the claims of Zionism to Palestine are at root a form of biological racism. Zionism believes that European Jews were descended from the Hebrews tribes.

Chaim Weizmann, the President of the Zionist Organisation, said in 1919 that ‘Alas, Zionism can’t provide a solution for catastrophes.’ The ZO ensured that Palestine was closed to thousands of survivors of the Ukrainian pogroms. Professor Gur Alroey described how

‘Weizmann preferred productive immigrants over needy refugees and thought the Land of Israel needed strong, healthy immigrants, not refugees weak in body and spirit.’ [Ha’aretz 3.12.21]

Ben Gurion, the Chairman of the Jewish Agency, the pre-state government-in-waiting, explained that the purpose of Zionism was first and foremost to establish a state that would perpetuate the Jewish nation/race. Saving Jews as individuals was secondary.

The Kindertransport of children 1938-1940

When, after Kristallnacht, the British government agreed to allow 10,000 Jewish children into Britain, (Kindertransport) the Zionists were furious. Ben Gurion, in a speech to Mapai’s Central Committee on 9 December 1938 explained why:

If I knew that it would be possible to save all the children in Germany by bringing them over to England, and only half of them by transporting them to Eretz Yisrael, then I would opt for the second alternative. For we must weigh not only the life of these children, but also the history of the People of Israel. Yoav Gelber, ‘Zionist policy and the Fate of European Jewry,’ Yad Vashem Studies (1939-42) p. 199.

People are horrified by the desire of Ben Gurion to save half the children as long as they went to Palestine, in preference to saving all of them in the diaspora. The final sentence, counterposing the life of the children to the history of the Jews, is often ignored. Ben Gurion’s reason for opposing the emigration of Jews to anywhere but Palestine was his view of the ‘history of the People’. Jewish history meant, above all, a Jewish state.

Redemption of the land

Zionism sought to ‘redeem’ the land of Palestine. Zionist propagandists argue that ‘redemption’ of the land simply meant bringing back land into productive use. Another Zionist myth. Most land in Palestine was already in use. In Zionist mythology they were ‘making the desert bloom.’ Ahad Ha'am, the principal figure in Cultural Zionism wrote in Truth from Eretz Yisrael in 1891, at the time of the First Aliyah (wave of emigration) that:

From abroad, we are accustomed to believe that Eretz Israel is presently almost totally desolate, an uncultivated desert and that anyone wishing to buy land there can come and buy all he wants. But in truth this is not so. In the entire land it is it is hard to find tillable land that is not already tilled. Only sandy fields or stony hills, suitable at best for planting trees or vines and even that after considerable work in clearing and preparing them – only these remain unworked, because the Arabs don’t like to exert themselves today for a distant future. [Alan Dowty, Much ado about Little – Ahad Ha’am’s “Truth from Eretz Yisrael,” Zionism and the Arabs, Israel Studies, Vol. 5, No. 2 (Fall, 2000)

So what did Zionist redemption of the land really mean? Israeli historian Jacob Talmon referred to

‘extremely nationalistic and certain religious persons… who state that the Holocaust was a necessary stage in the Jewish historical drama, as a type of suffering prior to redemption. The price of  redemption’

The Zionist leaders conceived the destruction of European Jewry as a ‘final apocalyptic vindication of Zionism.’ [Yechiam Weitz, Jewish Refugees and Zionist Policy during the Holocaust, p. 351]

This messianism resembled the Evangelical belief that Jews must die in order to achieve salvation through Rapture. Zionism was a form of political Messianism, hence its description of its colonisatory project as one of ‘Jewish Redemption’. [Days of Redemption, Allan Arkush, Jewish Review of Books, Spring 2022],

Arkush quoted Nahum Sokolow, President of the Zionist Organisation as explaining that

“Zionism is the direct heir to the biblical promise and to Jewish messianic expectations.”

Ben Gurion wrote that one of the three principal tasks of Zionism was

Deepening the attachment to the Messianic vision of redemption that is the vision of Jewish and human redemption held by prophets of Israel.

Redemption was not merely a religious or messianic idea but a practical programme of colonisation. Ben Gurion, at a meeting of Yishuv’s Vad Leumi, 5 May 1936. argued that:

If we want Hebrew redemption 100%, then we must have a 100% Hebrew settlement, a 100% Hebrew farm, and a 100% Hebrew port.

David Hacohen, a leader of Mapai and a member of the Knesset from 1949 till 1969, with a break of two years, recalled in Ha’aretz, 15 November, 1962, what the doctrine of “Hebrew Labor” meant:

I remember being one of the first of our comrades [of Ahdut Ha’avodah] to go to London after the First World War…. There I became a socialist….[in Palestine] I had to fight my friends on the issue of Jewish socialism, to defend the fact that I would not accept Arabs in my trade union, the Histadrut; to defend preaching to housewives that they not buy at Arab stores; to prevent Arab workers from getting jobs there…. To pour kerosene on Arab tomatoes; to attack Jewish housewives in the markets and smash the Arab eggs they had bought; to praise to the skies the Kereen Kayemet [Jewish National Fund] that sent Hankin to Beirut to buy land from absentee effendi [landlords] and to throw the fellahin [peasants] off the land — to buy dozens of dunams — from an Arab is permitted, but to sell, God forbid, one Jewish dunam to an Arab is prohibited. (my emphasis)

The 1930 Hope-Simpson Report, set up in the wake of the 1929 riots found that:

Actually the result of the purchase of land in Palestine by the Jewish National Fund has been that land has been extraterritorialised. It ceases to be land from which the Arab can gain any advantage either now or at any time in the future. Not only can he never hope to lease or to cultivate it, but, by the stringent provisions of the lease of the Jewish National Fund, he is deprived for ever from employment on that land. Nor can anyone help him by purchasing the land and restoring it to common use. The land is in mortmain and inalienable. It is for this reason that Arabs discount the professions of friendship and good will on the part of the Zionists in view of the policy which the Zionist Organisation deliberately adopted.

Zionism today doesn’t refer to itself as a colonising movement. It purports to be a national movement of the Jews, even a national liberation movement but its founders were very clear that it was a colonizing movement. On January 11 1902 Herzl wrote to Cecil Rhodes after whom Rhodesia was named, asking:

“How, then, do I happen to turn to you since this is an out-of-the-way matter for you? How indeed? Because it is something colonial… I want you ... to put the stamp of your authority on the Zionist plan…’

Baron Maurice de Hirsch founded the Jewish Colonisation Authority [ICA] in 1891 to settle European Jews in Argentina. After his death in 1896 the ICA began funding colonisation in Palestine. In 1923 it changed its name to Palestine Jewish Colonisation Authority. [PICA] Because it didn’t subscribe to a policy of Jewish Labour, which meant a Boycott of Arab Labour, it came under continual attack from the Labour Zionists and Histadrut.

The Zionist idea of redemption of the land meant redeeming it from the Palestinian Arabs. The Jewish National Fund, founded, in 1901, had a policy laid down in its constitution that land once purchased could never be sold back or let to Arabs. Its leases stipulated that Arabs could not even be employed on the land.

There are those who believed that Zionism was a form of scaffolding that would be abandoned once a Jewish State was established. One such is Avraham Burg, a former Chair of the Jewish Agency and knesset member of the Israeli Labor Party, who saw Zionism as

a kind of scaffolding that was supposed to enable the Jewish people to move from [exile]to sovereignty." In the past 150 years, that mission was accomplished, he says. Now it's about time to remove the scaffolding. [The man who would tear down 'scaffolding' of Zionism, 9.12.08]

Zionism is not about to change its spots. The Israeli state was never going to be normalised after the ethnic cleansing of 1948. Once it set out down along that road it would continue, until we reach the present Israeli government, with their open desire to transfer all Palestinians in the West Bank into Jordan.

Jewish Settlement

Clause7 of the Jewish Nation State Law of 2018 stipulates that

The State views the development of Jewish settlement as a national value, and shall act to encourage and promote its establishment and consolidation.

This is a basic, quasi-constitutional law. Clause 1(c) states that:

The realization of the right to national self-determination in the State of Israel is exclusive to the Jewish People

Jewish Settlement means Jewish only settlement. So Be’er Sheva Magistrate’s Court accepted the Israel Land Authority’s claims requiring the residents of the unrecognized Bedouin village of Ras Jrabah to evacuate by March 2024. Why? In order that Israel could build a new Jewish neighbourhood for the city of Dimona. [Ha’aretz, July 28, 2023] There has never been an eviction of an illegal Jewish settlement for the reason that no Jewish settlement is illegal whereas half of the Arab villages in Israel are ‘unrecognised’.

When people think of Israeli settler-colonialism they think in terms of the West Bank but there has also been a continual process of internal colonisation within the borders of pre-1967 Israel. It goes by the name ‘Judaisation’, which is the ‘thinning out’ of the Arab populations of the Galilee, Negev and East Jerusalem. It is no different in principle to the Nazis’ Aryanisation of German towns. These plans went under the name of the Prawer Plan and the Koenig Memorandum.

Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel's Jewish Nazi Police & Security Minister

Judaisation did not originate with the Judeo-Nazi Ben-Gvir. It was the brain child of Mapai and it came in the form of the Koenig Memorandum. The Koenig Memorandum first became public in September 1976 when it was printed in Al Hamishmar, paper of the then leftist Zionist party, Mapam.

Israel Koenig, the Report’s author was a senior member of Mapai and District Commissioner for Northern Israel in charge of Israel’s Arab citizens who, for the first 18 years lived under military rule.

A month ago the Knesset approved an amendment to the Admissions Committee Law 2011. The original law gave the right of Jewish communities of up to 400 families to set up admissions committees which could exclude people based on their perceived ‘social suitability’. In practice this meant that no Palestinian Israeli could be accepted. The amendment increases the number of families to 700.

The amendment passed the Knesset by 42-11 with a number of the ‘Opposition’ voting for it. Just 2 members of the Israeli Labor Party voted against it. The original law was passed in 2011 in order to circumvent a Supreme Court ruling in 2000 (Kadan) that prevented the Israeli Lands Authority from selling to Jews only.

The Medal the Nazis Struck to Commemorate the visit of the Head of the Gestapo Jewish Desk, Baron von Mildenstein, to the Kibbutzim of the Labour Zionists in 1933 

Ben-Gvir, Netanyahu and ‘Zionist Values’

Ben-Gvir and Netanyahu set the cat amongst the Zionist pigeons when they proposed a resolution in the Knesset advocating that ‘Zionist values’ must inform Government policy.

One indication of what these values are is Ben-Gvir’s statement that:

“We are losing the Negev and the Galilee. This resolution will enable [us] to prioritize values to Judaize the Galilee with settlement, and IDF soldiers and the security forces,”

What you might wonder is happening in the Negev and Galilee that they are in imminent danger of being lost? Are they about to float away in the Mediterranean? Not at all. I am reliably informed that they remain in the same position that they’ve always been in!

Yitzhak Wasserlauf - Israeli Government Minister

What Gvir means by lost is that they are ‘lost’ to the Jewish people. In other words there are too many Arabs living there. According to the Times of Israel Yitzhak Wasserlauf, the Negev, Galilee and National Resilience Minister, and Otzma Yehudit wants to Judaise the Negev and Galilee because of ‘the large Arab populations in those regions’.

Imagine that the British government decided, in the light of the fact that ethnic minorities make up the majority of Londoners, that they were going to adopt a British First policy increasing the number of White Britons in London. Racist? How could anyone doubt this yet in Israel ‘Judaisation’ is normal consensual Zionist politics.

The Times of Israel reported that in April ‘during a tour of illegal Bedouin villages in the Negev’ Ben-Gvir stated that one of his goals as minister was “activities to increase Jewish settlement and its foundations in the Negev and Galilee.”

This state of affairs exists in no other western country. Because Israel is a state of the fictional ‘Jewish People’ this racial engineering is not commented on. In the words of Netanyahu

“Israel is not a state of all its citizens. According to the basic nationality law we passed, Israel is the nation state of the Jewish people – and only it.”

This was in response to criticism by Israeli actor, Rotem Sela, who protested against the racist incitement of Culture Minister Miri Regev who, in the election campaign, had accused other Zionist parties of being willing to form a government with Arab parties. Sela wrote:

“When the hell will someone in this government convey to the public that Israel is a state of all its citizens and that all people were created equal? Even the Arabs – believe it or not – are human beings,”

Netanyahu was right. Israel is not a state of all of its citizens. It is a state of its Jewish citizens only. Within Israel only Jews have the right of self-determination. Arabs have no such rights because they aren’t nationals of the state they live in. They live in Israel on sufferance. I, who have never lived in Israel, have more rights as a diaspora Jew than a Palestinian born there even if they possess Israeli citizenship.

In February Wasserlauf, lamented that just 14 percent of the population of the Galilee was Jewish and even worse “an extra 135,000 Bedouin and Arabs” had been added to the region’s population over the last decade, compared to “just 1,200 Jews.” In a state based on race, it is important that the dominant or master race is in a majority everywhere. It is a racist counting of heads.

The explanatory text of Wasserlauf’s resolution states that considerations used by the government and its various branches sometimes “ignore basic Zionist values,” including “in [the field of] settlement, security, culture, and immigration.” The resolution states:

“We determine… that the values of Zionism, as they are expressed in the Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People, will be guiding and decisive values in the formulation of public administrative policy, internal and foreign policy, legislation and government activity and all its units and agencies… first and foremost in the fields of settlement and in giving benefits to those who served in the army and the security services, or civilian service, with priority for those who performed combat duty,” 

The Zionist ‘opposition’ rushed to oppose the latest proposals, even though they agree with them. War criminal Tzipi Livni declared:

 “This is not Zionism, this is the continuation of the nationalistic insanity and another spit [in the face] for the values of equality in the Declaration of Independence, which states that ‘The State of Israel will strive towards the development of the land for all its inhabitants,’”

Yair Lapid, the last Prime Minister, argued that the resolution was discriminatory against the Druze, who alone amongst Israeli Arabs, serve in the Israeli army. Lapid said that ‘rather than the decision representing Zionism, it represented racism.’ But Zionism is a form of racism. This is the same Lapid who said

“My principle says maximum Jews on maximum land with maximum security and with minimum Palestinians.”

The Israeli Labor Party has always declared that it wishes to see a separation between the Palestinians and Jews which was its reason for supporting a Palestinian ‘state’ (in reality a Bantustan) in the West Bank. It did not want a Palestinian majority in a ‘Jewish’ state. Apartheid too was defined by its authors as ‘separate development.’

When Netanyahu, Wasserlauf and Ben-Gvir talk about Zionist values they are talking about the values of the Labour Zionist movement and successive ILP governments. They are the values of ethnic cleansing, land confiscation, discriminatory treatment, wars of expansion and colonisation. It used to be called Jewish Labour, Land and Produce. What the ILP started Ben-Gvir is finishing.

Tony Greenstein

Why do we need to define anti-Semitism?

The Political Uses of Anti-Semitism

There is an excellent article today (for once) in Tuesday's ‘i’ – by Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, one of Britain’s few decent mainstream columnists. Defining Islamaphobia is dubious. (the online version is We need to be able to criticise Islam – any definition of Islamophobia must recognise that) argues against the adoption of an Islamic version of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of ‘anti-Semitism’. Following the debate on the IHRA a mixture of religious reactionaries, misguided liberals and Baroness Warsi have combined to demand that there should be an Islamic version of the IHRA hoping that it would curtail discussion of things like religious coercion.

For the past 2 years there has been a wholly artificial debate around the need to define anti-Semitism. This involved a concerted attempt by the mainstream press, the Zionist movement and the Labour Right (including Jon Lansman) to get the Labour Party to adopt a definition of anti-Semitism that could be used to attack supporters of the Palestinians and opponents of Zionism. 

The IHRA definition has been around, in one guise or another, since 2005. The definition has been contested by academic researchers such as Brian Klug, David Feldman, and Antony Lerman; jurists including Hugh Tomlinson QC, Stephen Sedley, Geoffrey Bindman QC, and Geoffrey Robertson QC and even the original drafter of the IHRA, Kenneth S. Stern.

It is worth recalling these critiques had no effect whatsoever on the determination of the Right to push the IHRA because the IHRA was never about combating anti-Semitism. First adopted by Theresa May, Corbyn thought be was being clever in rushing to mimic her, oblivious to the consequences not least for himself.

Paul Besser of Britain First and a signed up Zionist is a dedicated supporter of the IHRA definition of antisemitism

Lerman, a former Director of the Institute of Jewish Policy Research stated that

‘Not only is there now overwhelming evidence that it’s not fit for purpose, but it also has the effect of making Jews more vulnerable to antisemitism, not less.’

Sir Geoffrey Bindman described the 38 word IHRA definition as

‘poorly drafted, misleading, and in practice has led to the suppression of legitimate debate and freedom of expression.

Being accused of 'racism' by racists is an occupational hazard on Twitter - it is the go to form of abuse for (usually non-Jewish) members of the Labour Right

Sedley, a Jewish former Court of Appeal Judge said the IHRA ‘fails the first test of any definition: it is indefinite. He also described it as restricting criticism of Israel and

‘placing the historical, political, military and humanitarian uniqueness of Israel’s occupation and colonisation of Palestine beyond permissible criticism.’

David Feldman, Director of the Pears Institute for the Study of Anti-Semitism described it as ‘bewilderingly imprecise” Hugh Tomlinson QC said the IHRA ‘lacks clarity and comprehensiveness’ and that it has ‘a potential chilling effect on public bodies’

There is a very simple definition of 'anti-semitism' it comprises all of 6 words

Geoffrey Robertson QC stated that it would ‘chill free speech’ and was  ‘not fit for purpose’  

Kenneth Stern, in testimony to Congress, said:

‘“The definition was not drafted, and was never intended, as a tool to target or chill speech on a college campus.,”. “It was never supposed to curtail speech on campus.”

What the proponents of the IHRA lacked in argument they made up for in political muscle. Britain’s delegate to the IHRA, an inter-governmental body consisting of 31 countries, was the right-wing ex-Conservative MP and government minister, Eric Pickles, a former Chairman of Conservative Friends of Israel. 

We can gain some idea of Pickles’ devotion to anti-racism by the decision of the High Court, in 2015 to rule that Pickles had unlawfully discriminated against Romani Gypsies who wanted pitches in the Green Belt. When, in 2009 David Miliband condemned the Tory Party’s alliance with anti-Semitic parties in the European Parliament, it was Pickles who leapt to their defence. He denounced the attacks on Roberts Zile, a Latvian MEP who marched with veterans of the Latvian SS each March.  Apparently they had only been ‘following orders’ a defence which was thrown out at the Nuremburg Trials.

As befits most Islamaphobes, Katie Hopkins is also a dedicated Zionist

During the whole debate about the IHRA there was one question that was conspicuous by its absence.  Why the need for a definition of anti-Semitism at all?  For sure it satisfies a psychological need to define things on the basis that if you don’t define something then it doesn’t exist.

However there were already adequate definitions. The Oxford English Diction defines anti-Semitism as ‘hostility to or discrimination against Jews.’ Brian Klug, an Oxford academic, in his lecture at the Jewish museum in Berlin on the 75th anniversary of Kristalnacht proposed that anti-Semitism was

‘a form of hostility to Jews as Jews, where Jews are perceived as something other than what they are’ which for all its academic subtlety begs the question, what are the Jews? [1] but still the question that keeps knocking on the door.  Why a definition?

When my father and thousands of Jews like him demonstrated in Cable Street on October 4^th 1936 against Oswald Moseley and the British Union of Fascists, in defiance of the Jewish establishment, they didn’t need a definition of anti-Semitism to know what they were fighting.  Do you really need to define a brick hurtling towards you or a boot in the face because you are Jewish?

If the proponents of the IHRA were being honest then they would admit that the real reason for the definition is an attempt to redefine the traditional understanding of what anti-Semitism in order to substitute Israel for Jews. That they have been able to get away with this is a consequence of changes in the Jewish community itself.

When Moseley attempted to march through the Jewish East End of the 1930’s the Police and the Conservative establishment were hostile to what they saw as a communist infested, left-wing minority ethnic community. All sorts of revolutionary, anarchist and socialist groupings competed for support amongst the Jews of Whitechapel.

The elephant in the room of the debate over the IHRA and anti-Semitism is that the Jewish community has changed out of all recognition in the past 80 years. The Jews of the East End have migrated to Golders Green, Hendon or further out still.  They have also risen up the socio-economic ladder.

As William Rubinstein, a past President of the Jewish Historical Society, wrote [The Right, Left and the Jews, p. 51, 1982]:

the rise of Western Jewry to unparalleled affluence and high status has led to the near disappearance of a Jewish proletariat of any size: indeed the Jews may become the first ethnic group in history without a working class of any size.’

In short as the Jews changed so did anti-Semitism and this was exactly Rubinstein’s conclusion:

It has rendered obsolete (and rarely heard ) the type of anti-semitism which has its basis in fears of the swamping of the native population by a limitless horde of Yiddish speaking aliens, and it has made Marxism, and other radical doctrines, irrelevant to the socio-economic bases of Western Jewry, and increasingly unattractive to most Jews

Dr Geoffrey Alderman, a right-wing Jewish academic wrote that:

‘By 1961, over 40% of Anglo-Jewry was located in the upper 2 social classes, whereas these categories accounted for less than 20% of the general population.’ [Jewish Community in British Politics, p. 137]

In other words the fatuous argument of the Right that Jews are not voting for the Labour Party because of Israel simply has no basis. Jews began voting Conservative long before the issue of Israel even raised its head.  The reasons why Jews today vote overwhelmingly for the Conservative Party has everything to do with their own perceived economic interests.

Of course there will be some middle class Jews who may be put off voting Labour because of its perceived support for the Palestinians, the Maureen Lipman’s of this world, but they will be few and far between.

When Jonathan Freedland defines anti-Semitism as being in opposition to the perceived self-identity of today’s Jews with Israel then what he is saying is that anti-Semitism is no longer hatred of Jews as Jews but disagreement with their political views. It is this, more than anything, which explains the hypocrisy that lies at the heart of the debate over anti-Semitism today and also explains why anti-Semitism has been used as a crude weapon against the Left.

Below is a very interesting conversation from the Boston Review on What is and is not anti-Semitism.

Tony Greenstein

What Anti-Semitism Is—And What It Is Not

Boston Review - A Political and Literary Forum

Two Jewish activists discuss the place of anti-Semitism in contemporary movements for social justice.

Donna Nevel, Mark Tseng-Putterman

As Jewish activists invested in antiracist and anti-colonial movements from the United States to Palestine, we have been following, with interest and concern, progressive Jewish discussions of anti-Semitism. These discussions have been brought on in part by the horrors of the Tree of Life synagogue massacre last October, and in part by larger concerns about the rise of racial violence in the Trump era.

We acknowledge the real causes for alarm behind these discussions, but we also find a great deal to be concerned about. It is now commonplace for slanderous accusations of anti-Semitism to be leveled against Palestinians and supporters of Palestine, especially against black leaders and other activists of color. Many progressives have criticized the conflation of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, but narratives about anti-Semitism persist that feed into the same rhetoric used to derail movements for justice in the United States and in Palestine. In questioning these progressive analyses of anti-Semitism, we look to the wider context of global systems of injustice. We are concerned that a lack of clarity about what anti-Semitism is—and isn’t—allows false equivalencies and elisions to be weaponized against movements for social justice.

We recognize that some will think that we are dismissing or minimizing anti-Semitism at a time when it is crucial to stand up to anti-Jewish ideologies. But of course we aren’t interested in dismissing the reality of anti-Semitism, past or present. Instead our goal is to contribute to a careful analysis of the threats of anti-Semitic ideology, without downplaying or minimizing the very tangible structures of racism, colonialism, and imperialism under which people of color live every day. Our back-and-forth has challenged our thinking about how we can be as effective and thoughtful as possible in our organizing and our work for justice. We hope that, in sharing our conversation, it will serve that purpose for others as well. 

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Donna Nevel: I’m troubled by a common refrain I see expressed by progressive Jews on social media, directed toward social justice communities. They say, in effect: those who aren’t Jewish need to believe us when we talk about anti-Semitism, when we say we’re vulnerable.

On the one hand, that makes perfect sense: we should listen to Jews who say they are the victims of anti-Semitism, just as we would listen to those impacted by other injustices. But we also need to look more deeply at this particular call and its consequences, given how routinely false accusations of anti-Semitism are hurled at Palestinians and those who support Palestinian rights, at Muslims and those perceived to be Muslim, and at others—most often people of color—involved in antiracist movements.

False accusations have done real harm to people’s lives and careers. The threat of such consequences has a pernicious chilling effect on what people say and do.

Many people hesitate to engage with these issues because of the well-substantiated fear that they will be falsely accused of anti-Semitism—and bullied and intimidated in the process. These false accusations generally get a lot of air time and have done real harm to people’s lives and careers. The threat of such consequences has a very real and pernicious chilling effect on what people say and do. We need to take this reality into account when statements are made regarding who is “entitled” to speak, and to be listened to.

We all have a lot to learn by engaging honestly and thoughtfully about anti-Semitism, both its history and its current manifestations. The rise in white nationalist anti-Semitism in this country should be addressed, but that reality should not be used to buttress overzealous, reckless accusations of anti-Semitism. We must acknowledge how deeply the conflation between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism has become normalized, including within some progressive Jewish circles.

Mark Tseng-Putterman: I also see this admonition—to trust Jews when we talk about anti-Semitism—as problematic. Of course we need to consider Jewish experiences and analyses. But there is a tendency in “social justice” spaces to defer to individual subjectivity over substantive institutional critique that becomes especially dangerous in the context of discussions of anti-Semitism. Is “trust” politically efficacious given that criticisms of the state of Israel or of U.S. Jewish institutions like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) or the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) are so frequently shut down by Jews claiming anti-Semitism? In order to think critically about Zionism and white supremacy, we must all have the nuance to recognize and call out bad faith claims of anti-Semitism when we see them.

There is a tendency in “social justice” spaces to defer to individual subjectivity over substantive institutional critique.

Consider an example. The assertion that white Jews reap white privilege—and, like all white people, play a role in upholding white supremacy—is now being denounced by reactionaries wielding social justice language as anti-Semitic, Jewish erasure, and even gaslighting. I worry that a consequence of this “trust Jews on anti-Semitism” language is to silence the criticisms and analyses of people of color—including Jewish people of color—about racism and complicity in Jewish communities.

Many Jews do indeed refuse to accept, or even sit with, such criticisms. They also raise the specter of supposed “left anti-Semitism,” claiming that Jews are being excluded from progressive spaces. And many progressive Jews have been too quick to accept the premise that there exists a unique “left anti-Semitism” that must be engaged. The result, I worry, is a vacuum where Jewish communities and institutions can cover their ears and block out critical conversations about white supremacy and Zionism happening on the left.

Of course anti-Semitism exists in pockets of the left, as does ingrained racism, misogyny, and transphobia. But, to me, the way we talk about “left anti-Semitism” reeks of a smear campaign designed to block critiques of Zionism. These admonitions aren’t about seeking greater Jewish inclusion or participation in the left; they’re about delegitimizing some of the most important social justice movements of our time, from Black Lives Matter to the global call by Palestinian  civil society for Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS). As Jews on the left, we need to ask ourselves how our deference to the sensitivities of some Jews is enabling this rhetorical violence.

DN: I think we always need to ask whose voices are being promoted and why, whose voices are being silenced and why, whose interests are being served and whose aren’t. At this moment, particularly, we need to be welcoming critical, challenging conversations about these issues, not trying to shut them down.

The rise in white nationalist anti-Semitism in this country should be addressed. But that reality should not be used to buttress reckless accusations of anti-Semitism.

Take the ADL’s biased analysis of anti-Semitism. Their “research” and data reflect a broader anti-Arab, anti-Palestinian agenda. Yet, we see people uncritically citing the ADL as “the” expert on what constitutes anti-Semitism, and who is being anti-Semitic. And when their authority is challenged due to their troubling record, many claim it is further evidence of the left’s anti-Semitism. That was the accusation made, for example, when the ADL was dropped from a high-profile Starbucks “anti-bias training” following many substantive concerns expressed by leaders of the Women’s March and Black Lives Matter as well as by left Jewish activists.

Here’s another example. I read numerous accounts after the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute rescinded Angela Davis’s human rights award, arguing that Jews were being unfairly blamed for what happened to her—that it was unfair, even anti-Jewish, to focus on local Jewish organizations that had applied pressure on the Museum to rescind the award. They argued that it was white evangelicals, not Jews, in Birmingham, who have the power to make those things happen.

But Jewish organizations, including the Birmingham Holocaust Education Center and the Birmingham Jewish Federation, did play a key role in pressuring the museum to rescind the award. That doesn’t mean all Jews opposed her talk; they didn’t. And it is true that efforts to thwart supporters of the Palestinian movement for justice extend far beyond Jewish groups. It also true that sometimes the decision makers may not have consisted of many, if any, Jews, and that some Jewish groups oppose these kinds of actions when they happen.

To say that Jewish groups applied pressure on the museum—and were likely listened to—is consistent with what Jewish groups have done across the country to supporters of BDS applying for jobs, seeking tenure, and more. I just can’t see it as anti-Jewish to hold these organizations accountable. It’s not anti-Jewish to point out that many Jewish organizations have power to exert their influence in damaging ways.

It’s not anti-Jewish to point out that many Jewish organizations have power to exert their influence in damaging ways.

MTP: Absolutely. When activists, including many Jews, confront the bad politics of so-called “liberal” Jewish organizations like the ADL, they end up getting tarred as anti-Semitic. I’m thinking of the ridiculous allegations (many from leaders of left-of-center Jewish groups, including T'ruah’s Jill Jacobs, who has also falsely accused Palestinian activists of anti-Semitism) against the Deadly Exchange campaign by Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP). They claimed the campaign, which sought to end police exchanges between Israel and U.S. municipalities, was perpetuating an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that Israel was responsible for racist policing in the United States. JVP and other activist groups exhibited very tangible evidence of the exchange of repressive policing tactics, and the links between racist state violence, in both nations. But this overzealous analysis of anti-Semitism distorted the campaign into a case of Jew-blaming.

Most recently, we’ve seen the attacks by both progressive and conservative Jews directed at Representative Ilhan Omar, denouncing as anti-Semitic her demonstrably true assertion that AIPAC and the Israel lobby influence U.S. policy in the Middle East. What’s worse, the coordinated attack on Omar was catalyzed by Batya Ungar-Sargon, an editor at The Forward, a supposedly progressive Jewish platform with a rich socialist history. After Ungar-Sargon went so far as to write that Omar “won the approval of the KKK,” The Forward used the smear campaign as a fundraising email talking point.

A number of progressive Jews responded to the Omar smear by balking at the assertion that the Israel lobby has anything to do with Jews. Similarly to the troubling dynamic you saw in Birmingham, many were quick to excise Jewish agency from pro-Israel lobbying, instead pointing to Christian evangelical groups and claiming that AIPAC is not a Jewish organization—despite its U.S. Jewish base and participation in various Jewish institutional constituencies such as the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. We are seeing an impulse, often coming from progressive Jews, to deny the agency and influence of Jews and Jewish institutions, which I think really limits our capacity to foment effective antiracist change.

This hesitance to confront Jewish institutional complicity in structures of violence may be rooted in a particular analysis of anti-Semitism: the idea that Jews are perpetual “middlemen” caught between the masses and the power elite. I’ve written elsewhere—and Tallie Ben Daniel has a wonderful essay tackling similar questions from a Mizrahi perspective in JVP’s recent book On Anti-Semitism (2017)—about how this notion that Jews are “allowed success” in order to be made “useful” as scapegoats later inevitably freezes our ability to call out Jewish complicity. It has us seeking to absolve bad-acting Jewish institutions by looking for the “man behind the curtain.” By that logic, Jewish organizations can’t have the power and influence to blacklist Angela Davis or defame academics such as Steven Salaita; right-wing evangelicals must have done it. And yet we know very clearly that there are numerous influential Jewish groups that are successfully leading smear campaigns against pro-Palestine activists and funding anti-Muslim hate groups.

According to “middlemen” logic, Jewish organizations can’t be blamed; right-wing evangelicals must have done it.

As Ben Daniel implores, we need to understand the privileges and powers granted to white American Jews not as an inevitable symptom of anti-Semitism, but as a symptom of whiteness, white supremacy, and the ability (and willingness) of many white American Jews to align themselves with both a fundamental American anti-blackness, as well as an imagined “Judeo-Christian” West that serves the imperialist project of Western Islamophobia. We must confront head on how institutions that purport to speak in the name of U.S. Jews are so deeply implicated in perpetuating racism and Islamophobia.

DN: This is an issue of real concern for me and for many others. Elly Bulkin and I have been working with different groups for many years to challenge Islamophobia within our communities. We created Jews Against Anti-Muslim Racism (JAAMR) as a resource because we didn’t feel anti-Muslim racism, and particularly structural Islamophobia, the “war on terror,” and the Islamophobia-Israel connection, were being prioritized enough within Jewish communities, including within many progressive Jewish spaces. More recently, after you brought to our attention some research about the New York Jewish Communal Fund (JCF) and its complicity in funding virulently Islamophobic groups, we continued that research, and recently published a report, together with Jews Say No! and JVP-NYC, detailing this funding and calling on the JCF to defund Islamophobia now.

While there has been some outrage expressed within Jewish communities about the JCF’s funding of Islamophobia, vocal opposition to it—or making it a real priority—hasn’t been as widespread as it surely would be if grants and financial resources were going to support anti-Semitic, neo-Nazi groups.

Institutions that purport to speak in the name of U.S. Jews are deeply implicated in perpetuating Islamophobia.

MTP: Another thread here is that in the United States, the most visible forms of racism and other forms of oppression tend to be these spectacular iterations—hate violence, mass shootings, police brutality—and not the profound mundanity of everyday, structural state violence. While the terrors of the Tree of Life and Christchurch massacres have rightly inspired global outpourings of solidarity, I think it is important to recognize the underlying institutional Islamophobia (which doesn’t elicit the same kind of bipartisan condemnation anti-Semitism does). It doesn’t minimize the tragedy to acknowledge that the Tree of Life shooting is not an instance of routine state violence against American Jews. Indeed, admitting this is a prerequisite to building the sort of coalitions necessary to take on the forces we’re confronted with today.

It seems to me we suffer from a lack of clarity about the meaning of structural, state-sanctioned violence. This lack of clarity in turn muddies the waters when it comes to understanding anti-Semitism. Some Jewish progressive organizations argue that anti-Semitism is structural in the United States today. What are the structures and institutions that uphold it?

This is where I find the analysis murky. My sense is that many would respond along these lines: Anti-Semitism is different from other forms of oppression. Rather than depriving Jews of resources and power, anti-Semitism thrives by allowing Jews success so that they can be made scapegoats in the future.

My issue with this answer, which was perhaps most popularly encapsulated in April Rosenblum’s pamphlet The Past Didn’t Go Anywhere (2018), is that it exonerates, or at least overlooks, Jewish participation and relative success in racial capitalism. The strategy thus evades questions of Jewish complicity with state power and the global racial hierarchy and instead freezes us in a perpetual state of victimhood, or potential future​ victimhood. Besides chalking up American Jewish power and assimilation to anti-Semitism’s predetermined “middleman” role (rather than to whiteness, antiblackness, or Islamophobia), it also assumes a cyclicality to anti-Semitism that makes it impossible to take Jewish power or safety at face value—instead seeing these as symptoms of a future, inevitable scapegoating. Rosenblum’s ideas are being amplified in this political moment, in countless news articles, Twitter threads, and resources that lean heavily on her analysis, such as Jews for Racial and Economic Justice’s “Understanding Anti-Semitism.”

We suffer from a lack of clarity about the meaning of structural, state-sanctioned violence.

I also take issue with the claim that anti-Semitism doesn’t work like other systems of oppression, because anti-Semitism positions Jews as a powerful threat to be eradicated rather than a weak minority to be exploited. Anti-Semitism is certainly not unique in this regard. Take the Yellow Peril tropes that have galvanized anti-Asian racism—from immigration exclusion to U.S. military intervention—since at least the turn of the twentieth century. These mechanics also invoke Asians as a powerful, external threat. The same can be said for “clash of civilizations” rhetoric about Muslims and the so-called “East” that is central to the “War on Terror.”

I worry that the tendency to render anti-Semitism as abstract, cyclical, and permanent (language of anti-Semitism as a “virus” or an “ancient prejudice” abound) prevents us from looking closely at our current political conditions and from understanding anti-Semitism in relation to the escalation of racist state violence we are seeing in this moment.

DN: It is true that negative stereotypes of Jews differ qualitatively from those about some other groups. But that doesn’t speak to the structures at work, nor is it a reason to exceptionalize anti-Semitism or to assume nobody but Jews can possibly understand it or its seriousness. Promoting that view has real consequences: it distracts us from the impact of white supremacy on targeted communities.

At the same time, there is the entrenched narrative of Jews as the “chosen people.” Many progressive Jews have rejected it, but many have not as clearly rejected notions of Jewish exceptionalism with which we were inculcated in Hebrew school and in other Jewish spaces—that Jews have higher ethical standards and are smarter than others, and that nobody has suffered as much as we have. (For many of us, who have power and privilege as members of white, affluent communities in the United States, these claims of exceptionalism perhaps have greater potential to do harm today than in the past.)

Many progressive Jews still think that nobody has suffered as much as we have.

We must genuinely grapple with these beliefs. They impact how we treat communities we perceive as not “our own.” They foster our sense of entitlement. They shape how we move in social justice spaces and in the political worlds we inhabit, and how we may come to understand and center our own suffering. (This is not to assert that there is one fixed Jewish value system. There are many Jewish histories, experiences, and lived realities; we all navigate multiple identities.)

One way this entitlement shows up, for example, is public outrage when social justice movements are accused of failing to center anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism needs to be included as an injustice we challenge, and, in my experience, I’ve not heard social justice groups claim otherwise. Many movements have been focused on challenging the dangerous structural, institutional, state-sanctioned racism, xenophobia, Islamophobia, and other injustices at the core of U.S. society. As we are seeing a marked rise in white nationalist anti-Semitic violence (as well as violence directed toward other communities) part of our commitment is to address and incorporate it meaningfully into our justice work. But that doesn’t mean that being sensitive and responsive to anti-Semitism requires centering it or believing that—in this country at this time—it is the same as communities targeted daily by the state and by a range of institutions.

MTP: I think this notion that the left, particularly people of color on the left, don’t give anti-Semitism enough air time sets up a problematic savior complex: white Jews swoop in as educators tasked with tackling the supposed ignorance of people of color. This, in turn, perpetuates this patronizing and paternalistic relationship between white Jews and particularly black activists that the often romanticized history of black-Jewish civil rights organizing hinges on. It’s not that activists of all backgrounds shouldn’t learn about anti-Semitism. But when activists of color do anything deemed anti-Semitic (including merely criticizing Israel), they are chastised by the press, forced to apologize, and required to commit to being “educated” on the issue—a ritual that I think receives undue airtime because it reinforces tropes about angry and ignorant people of color.

This sense of “finally people will believe we’re oppressed too” is echoed across the Jewish political spectrum.

Your point about how deep the ideology of the “chosen people” runs, even in liberal secular American Jewish circles, resonates here. Is twenty-first-century American Jewish identity—at least as it is popularly understood and circulated—even possible without anti-Semitism? Can we conceive of “Jewishness” in its modern, often class-privileged and white American manifestation, without a sense of victimization? Certain responses to the anti-Semitism of the Trump campaign, the “alt-right,” and even the Tree of Life shooting seem to indicate that these episodes resolve the crisis of modern white American Jewish identity—by confirming that anti-Semitism is indeed cyclical and permanent. Contemporary American Jewishness has thus become parasitic on victimhood. But retreating to these comfortable narratives about who “we” are is preventing us from building coalitions, challenging institutions, and engaging in self-criticism in effective ways.

This sense of “finally people will believe we’re oppressed too” is echoed across the Jewish political spectrum. This narrative was crystallized in a March 2017 piece in the Times of Israel which described a “silver lining” to rising anti-Semitism: it proved a counter to “intersectional” campus movements that excluded Jews on the basis of their being “white and privileged.” Of course, this narrative of Jewish exclusion from the left conveniently conflates Jewishness and Zionism. But this concept of the “silver lining” speaks to a larger dynamic in which instances of anti-Jewish violence are seen as “useful” insofar as they confirm to Jews and “prove” to everyone else our oppressed status. This seems to me an incredibly cynical and troubling way of approaching anti-Semitism in our current moment.

Jews are implicated symbolically in this scheme, but not materially.

Perhaps one consequence of this ideology is the shifting in emphasis away from white supremacy and toward “white nationalism” when we talk about anti-Semitism in the United States. For instance, Eric Ward has argued to great acclaim in some parts of the Jewish left that anti-Semitism is the central “fuel” of white nationalism, and that white Jews must give up their “fantasy” of white privilege. Ward has written that white nationalism is a “new competitor” to white supremacy, a social movement that is “stand[ing] up” as white supremacy “falls down.” Make no mistake: it is crucial to recognize the growing threat of white nationalism and the role of anti-Semitism within its ranks. But I worry that we are embracing a strand of post-racialism by saying, in effect, that white supremacy was defeated and that white nationalism is a new force rising to fill the void. This frame ignores the deep continuity in structural violence through both the Obama and Trump eras, and of course back even before the founding of the United States.

We need to talk about the white nationalist movement while recognizing that white supremacy—as a structure—remains in full force, one too often accepted as the status quo. If that’s the case, what are the implications of anti-Semitism supposedly being at the core of white nationalist ideology, if white supremacy remains hegemonic? And why should we restrict our analysis of anti-Semitism to its supposedly central role in white nationalist thought and not consider its more marginal role in systemic white supremacy?

The core of white nationalism is not anti-Semitism, but settler colonialism and antiblackness.

It also seems odd to position white nationalism’s pursuit of a white ethno-state as a new ideology rather than the founding doctrine of the United States. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz has traced (in these very pages) the genealogy of white nationalist thought back to the so-called Indian Wars that founded the United States as a white nation-state. All of this is part and parcel with the liberal amnesia that has folks responding to, for instance, the state-sanctioned violence at the U.S.-Mexico border or the separation of asylum-seeking families with the ahistorical “this isn’t the America I know.” So while anti-Semitism may play an important role in contemporary white nationalist discourses, we need to keep in mind this longer history of white ethno-nationalism. Its core is not anti-Semitism, but settler colonialism and antiblackness.

DN: I had similar concerns reading a recent piece by Tim Wise as those you describe about Ward’s analysis. While Wise correctly rejects “the false equivalence some are trying to draw” between Minister Louis Farrakhan and far right, neo-Nazis, he then makes assertions about the role of anti-Semitism in white nationalism that I question.

“For neo-Nazis and modern white nationalists,” Wise writes, “anti-Jewish bigotry is literally the fuel of their movement, the glue that binds them.” He adds that “Jew-hatred is the thing, bigger than racism against folks of color.” While I’m skeptical that neo-Nazis actually believe Jews are worse than black people or Muslims, I also don’t see that it’s a relevant or useful distinction to make. White nationalists, with great frequency, target people of color, transgender and queer people, and others. At the 2017 Charlottesville march, anti-Semitic chants were indeed frightening, but they were also plainly a part of a broader call to uphold white supremacy and defend the legacy of the Confederacy, which goes well beyond the march, reflecting the day-to-day realities for communities of color. I am concerned that, while surely not his intention, Wise’s assertions about the role of anti-Semitism in the white nationalist movement end up diminishing both the consequences and impact of white nationalism on other communities and the central role of pervasive, structural forms of racism and of white supremacy—with its long and deep foundational history that continues until today.

I’ve also been reflecting upon what Lesley Williams wrote after the Charlottesville march about the swastika and what it means for white Jews versus for Black people. “For Jews, Nazi symbols evoke a terrifying, traumatic past,” she wrote. “For African Americans, they evoke a terrifying, traumatic, unending present. White Jews may be shocked at this undeniable evidence of U.S. racism; African Americans merely see more of the same. Black people did not need to be reminded by hoods and swastikas that we live in a dangerously racist country.”

MTP: I agree. The language that Wise and Ward use about anti-Semitism as the “fuel” of white nationalism decenters the communities most tangibly targeted by the white nationalist agenda. Trump has alluded to anti-Semitic conspiracy theories that George Soros funded the Central American migrant caravan approaching the U.S.-Mexico border. Jewish progressives certainly need to confront that rhetoric. But the tangible impact remains the same: to militarize the border, separate families, and detain and deport asylum seekers, many of whom belong to Indigenous Maya groups. Jews are implicated symbolically in this scheme, but not materially. Clearly, that symbolism has consequences—the Tree of Life shooting being the most chilling example of late. Still, I think it is worth sitting with the distinction between being a symbol in the white nationalist imaginary versus being a target in the crosshairs of the state.

There is a difference between being a symbol in the white nationalist imaginary and being a target in the crosshairs of the state.

The same problem can be seen in responses to the Tree of Life shooting. The Forward ran a telling piece entitled “Is America Still Safe for Jews?” This phrasing—“still safe”—says so much. When has America ever been safe for black people? For Indigenous people? For those living under the boot of U.S. imperialism and militarism abroad? There are truths about this country—truths being exposed in new ways in this moment—that American Jews have not had to fully grapple with, as Jews, in recent U.S. history. So how do we sit with what for many white American Jews is a new, creeping feeling—that the promise of America is in fact built on violence—while recognizing that communities of color have been feeling that violence for centuries?

I think it starts with realizing we don’t need to be the center of attention in order to have a role to play in dismantling the structures of oppression that the contradictions of the Trump era continue to reveal.

Labour and Antisemitism

Eliane Glaser

I’m an opinionated Jew with a PhD in the history of antisemitism, but I find it daunting to weigh in on the debate about antisemitism in the Labour Party. To describe the accusations as disproportionate is to risk being branded an antisemite. But while genuine instances of antisemitism should be tackled, there is no more of it in Labour than in other parties. The sustained offensive by the Labour right and by Conservatives is not only unfairly damaging the party and the left in general, it also unthinkingly reinforces antisemitic motifs.

The populist right’s public enemy number one is the ‘liberal elite’. This phrase deliberately merges two very different entities: metropolitan intellectuals on the one hand, and global capitalism on the other. In her 2016 ‘citizens of nowhere’ speech, Theresa May declared that ‘liberalism and globalisation … have left people behind.’ The elision harnesses public anger at banks and multinational corporations and turns it onto members of the middle-class precariat: academics, journalists and left-wing MPs.

This scapegoating of a relatively powerless ‘elite’ echoes the antisemitic fantasy of the rootless cosmopolitan who is also part of an international financial network. The notion that prejudice is festering among the ‘chattering classes’ of North London unwittingly invokes an antisemitic stereotype. It also undermines qualities that are both vital and under threat in an age of philistine oligopoly: intellectualism, expertise, rationality.

Allegations of antisemitism employ a hermeneutics of suspicion, often uncovering examples recorded in meetings, or buried on social media, even from years ago. This replicates the classic dynamics of conspiracy theory, a common feature of traditional antisemitism. The language of the accusations, too, echoes that of antisemitism – a ‘stain’ or ‘scourge’ that has ‘infected’ the party and must be ‘rooted out’. I’m not arguing that centre-right and right-wing critics of antisemitism are antisemitic, but their campaign has a ferocious hygiene about it that carries unpleasant and ironic resonances, and leads to irrational outcomes. Attempts to reveal hidden hatred are a central feature of the asymmetrical identification of antisemitism with the left. Right-wing antisemitism is assumed to be more blatant, and therefore attracts less scrutiny. The left is held to a higher standard, and ‘gotcha’ moments trump statistical evidence.

On Monday, the Labour MP Siobhain Mcdonagh said on the Today programme that ‘it’s very much part of their politics, of hard-left politics, to be against capitalist and to see Jewish people as the financers of capital, ergo you are anti-Jewish people.’ ‘In other words to be anti-capitalist you have to be antisemitic,’ John Humphrys interrupted. ‘Yes,’ Mcdonagh said. ‘Not everybody but there’s a certain strand of it.’ I could hardly believe my ears, but she is not alone. In the New Statesman last year, Matt Bolton and Frederick Harry Pitts wrote about the ‘deep-seated theoretical underpinnings of left critiques of capitalism that have antisemitism as their logical consequence’.

Such commentators make associations that they would regard as antisemitic if articulated in reverse: the link between Jews and a version of capitalism that is about actors as well as systems. Similarly, they are keen to stress the distinction between Israel’s actions on the one hand and Jews on the other, yet at the same time frequently identify criticism of Israel as at least latently antisemitic.

Unlike political opposition, and because of the Holocaust, the charge of antisemitism has an absolute, unarguable quality, which is exploited by Jeremy Corbyn’s critics for a political end. It’s true that Corbyn and some of his allies are digging their heels in, creating a vicious circle, but many of the accusations are implacable because their aim is to undermine the left. On quitting Labour last month, Joan Ryan MP said antisemitism was ‘never’ a problem before Corbyn became leader: fifteen years ago I reviewed a volume of essays on the perceived rise of ‘a new antisemitism’ on the left.

What is new is Corbyn’s indictment of the financial greed hollowing out our society. An analysis of broader social and economic power was missing from British politics through the decades of New Labour, and is still absent on the right of the Labour Party. Corbyn’s message has resonated profoundly with many people. But it is being muted and drowned out by the antisemitism row.

Some conspiracies – not involving the Rothschilds – are real: the networks of offshore tax havens and shell companies, and the links between Russian money, Facebook, Cambridge Analytica, Trump and the Brexit campaign. Bolton and Pitts criticise Corbyn’s portrayal of ‘a parasitical “1 per cent” draining the vitality from the “real economy”’ and a ‘global elite’ who ‘do not produce anything tangible but merely make money out of money’. But that portrayal rings true.

Viewing power in perspective lays bare the vast and widening wealth gap, and a left that is at a low ebb compared to the neoliberal hegemony and the resurgent populist right. The antisemitism furore is undermining the left still further at a time when we need more than ever to challenge the real financial elites that are wrecking our world. Critics should not feel bullied into silence.

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[1]               What Do We Mean When We Say ‘Antisemitsm’? Echoes of shattering glass, 8-9 November 2013.