How antisemitism has complemented Zionism

 The Irony of Zionist Accusations of Anti-Semitism Against Anti-Zionists is that Historically it is the Zionists who Worked With and Had Most in Common with Anti-Semites

Webinar on How Anti-Semitism Complemented Zionism

Please Register Here

https://tinyurl.com/4hedue7k

Speakers

Tony Lerman, author of the book, Whatever Happened to Antisemitism? Redefinition and the Myth of the 'Collective Jew', Pluto Books, https://www.plutobooks.com/9780745338774/whatever-happened-to-antisemitism/

 Barnaby Raine, PhD candidate, Columbia University. Author of several articles, e.g. ‘Jewphobia’ in the journal Salvage, https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/blogs/news/4059-jewophobia 

 Michael Richmond, independent writer, author of ‘Philosemitism: an instrumental kind of love’, New Socialist, 2022, https://newsocialist.org.uk/transmissions/philosemitism-instrumental-kind-love/; also co-author of Fractured: Race, Class, Gender and the Hatred of Identity Politics

 Tony Greenstein, author, Zionism During the Holocaust: The Weaponisation of Memory in the Service of State and Nation

There is probably no Palestine solidarity supporter who hasn’t been accused of anti-Semitism. We know, because Netanyahu has told us, that the International Criminal Court decision to issue a warrant for his arrest was because of anti-Semitism! Any criticism of Israel today is automatically a form of 'antisemitism'. Antisemitism is no longer hatred or hostility to Jews as Jews, it is criticism of the 'Jewish state'.

Zionism arose as a reaction to anti-Semitism but it was a reaction of a special kind. Zionism accepted that Jews did not belong in their own countries, that they were a nation apart. For Zionism anti-Semitism could not be fought because it was inherent in the non-Jew.

As Leon Pinsker, the founder of the Lovers of Zionism wrote in his 1882 pamphlet Autoemancipation

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

And if anti-Semitism was incurable, then there was no point opposing it. Theodor Herzl, the founder of Political Zionism drew the same conclusion from the Dreyfus Trial:

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.

Edouard Drumont

The leading anti-Semite and leader of the anti-Dreyfusards in France was Edouard Drumont whose book La France Juive sold 100,000 on its first edition. He published the anti-Semitic paper La Libre Parole and argued for the exclusion of Jews from society.

Yet this didn’t stop Herzl from admiring him. Herzl wrote that ‘I owe to Drumont a great deal of the present freedom of my concepts, because he is an artist.’ Herzl shared Drumont’s antagonism to French Jewry writing that:

I took a look at the Paris Jews and saw a family likeness in their faces: bold, misshapen noses, furtive and cunning eyes.

After Herzl had badgered his friend Alphonse Daudet, a well-known anti-Semite, Drumont favourably reviewed The Jewish State, in an article ‘Solution de la Question Juive’ published in La Libre Parole on 16 January 1897. Herzl expressed his delight with the review in his Diary.

It was little wonder that Herzl wrote that

‘the anti-Semites will become our most dependable friends, the anti-Semitic countries our allies.’

Chaim Weizmann

So it has proved. Others went even further. Chaim Weizmann, the long-standing President of the Zionist Organisation and Israel’s first President, expressed his understanding and sympathy with the leader of the anti-Semitic British Brothers League, William Evans-Gordon MP. Weizmann wrote in his autobiography, Trial and Error, that:

our people were rather hard on him. The Aliens Bill in England and the movement which grew around it were natural phenomenon which might have been foreseen... Sir William Evans-Gordon had no particular anti-Jewish prejudices... He acted as he thought, according to his best lights and in the most kindly way, in the interests of his country… he was sincerely ready to encourage any settlement of Jews almost anywhere in the British Empire, but he failed to see why the ghettos of London or Leeds or Whitechapel should be made into a branch of the ghettos of Warsaw and Pinsk.

Arthur Balfour & Winston Churchill

Evans-Gordon was a strong supporter of Zionism as was another anti-Semite, Arthur James Balfour. As Prime Minister Balfour introduced the 1905 Aliens Act aimed at keeping Russian Jews out of Britain. In 1917 Balfour wrote a letter, which became known as the Balfour Declaration, to Lord Walter Rothschild pledging the land of the Palestinians to the Zionist movement. The only member of the Lloyd George Cabinet who opposed the BD was its only Jewish member, Sir Edwin Montagu.

As Zionist novelist A B Yehoshua said, in a lecture to the Union of Jewish Students (Jewish Chronicle 22.1.82)

‘Anti-Zionism is not the product of the non-Jews. On the contrary, the Gentiles have always encouraged Zionism, hoping that it would help to rid them of the Jews in their midst. Even today, in a perverse way, a real anti-Semite must be a Zionist.’

The Zionists aimed to create the ‘new Jew’ in Palestine and they despised the gutter ghetto Jew who lived in Eastern Europe plying their trades and living at the margins of society. 

Jacob Klatzkin, the editor of the Zionist Organisation paper Die Welt and co-founder of Encyclopedia Judaica , held that the Jews in the diaspora or ‘exile’ (Galut) were:

a people disfigured in both body and soul – in a word, of a horror. At the very most it can maintain us in a state of national impurity and breed some sort of outlandish creature… The result will be something neither Jew nor gentile - in any case, not a pure national type... some sort of oddity among the peoples going by the name - Jew.

Pinhas Rosenbluth, Israel’s first Justice Minister described Palestine as ‘an institute for the fumigation of Jewish vermin’. So damning were these elite Zionists for their Jewish brothers and sisters that Israeli political scientist, Joachim Doron wrote in an article ‘Classic Zionism and Modern Anti-Semitism’ in the Journal of Israeli History No. 8 that

‘a perusal of the Zionist sources reveals a wealth of charges against the Diaspora Jew, some of which are so scathing that the generation that witnessed Auschwitz has difficulty comprehending them.’

Arthur Ruppin

The most important figure in pre-state Palestine, Arthur Ruppin was an avid supporter of the racial sciences, eugenics and Social Darwinism. He considered Arab Jews as an inferior dysgenic element among Jews.

When a friend of Ruppin called him an anti-Semite he retorted ‘I have already established here [in his diary] that I despise the cancers of Judaism more than does the worst anti-Semite.’

Ruppin was not alone in his support for anti-Semitism. Jacob Klatzkin wrote that

If we do not admit the rightfulness of anti-Semitism we deny the rightfulness of our own nationalism... Instead of establishing societies for defence against the anti-Semites who want to reduce our rights, we should establish societies for defence against our friends, who desire to defend our rights.

Although Zionists today call anti-Zionists ‘self-haters’ if anyone hated themselves, it was the Zionists. It is little wonder that when Zionism arose amongst Jews it was seen as a form of Jewish anti-Semitism.

That is why in nearly all the Jewish communities prior to 1945, Zionism was a distinct minority.  In Germany in 1933 they constituted just 2% of the Jewish population.

During the Nazi era, 1933-9, the Zionists were the favoured children of the Nazis whereas the ‘assimilationists’, those Jews who asserted that they were Germans as well as Jewish, were subject to restrictions.

On 28 January 1935 Reinhard Heydrich, the ‘real engineer of the final solution’  issued a directive stating that:

The activity of the Zionist-oriented youth organisations that are engaged in the occupational restructuring of the Jews … lies in the interest of the National Socialist state’s leadership. (These organizations) 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).

In May 1935 Schwarze Korps, paper of the SS, wrote that:

the Zionists adhere to a strict racial position and by emigrating to Palestine they are helping to build their own Jewish state.... The assimilation-minded Jews deny their race and insist on their loyalty to Germany or claim to be Christians because they have been baptized, in order to subvert National Socialist principles.

When the Nazis came to power the only group amongst Jews who welcomed them were the Zionist leaders.  That was why they were so opposed to the Boycott of Nazi Germany. They wished to profit from them not fight them.

Berl Katznelson, a founder of Mapai (the Israeli Labour Party  and editor of Davar as well as Ben-Gurion’s effective deputy, saw the rise of Hitler as ‘an opportunity to build and flourish like none we have ever had or ever will have.’ Ben-Gurion was even more optimistic. ‘The Nazis’ victory would become “a fertile force for Zionism.” Joachim Prinz, one of the leaders of German Zionism and later Deputy President of the World Jewish Congress, admitted that:

It was morally disturbing to seem to be considered as the favored children of the Nazi Government, particularly when it dissolved the anti-Zionist youth groups, and seemed in other ways to prefer the Zionists. The Nazis asked for a ‘more Zionist behaviour’.

Ben-Gurion on Saving Jewish Refugees

Eitan Bloom quoted Emil Ludwig (1881-1948), the world-famous biographer, ‘who expressed the general attitude of the Zionist movement’:

Hitler will be forgotten in a few years, but he will have a beautiful monument in Palestine. You know, the coming of the Nazis was rather a welcome thing. … Thousands who seemed to be completely lost to Judaism were brought back to the fold by Hitler, and for that I am personally very grateful to him.

Nahman Bialik

Nahman Bialik, the national Zionist poet, volunteered that ‘Hitlerism has perhaps saved German Jewry, which was being assimilated into annihilation.’ Germany’s remaining Jews were of course annihilated, but not by assimilation.

So it should not be any surprise today that the best friends of Israel – Trump, Orban, Tommy Robinson, Richard Spencer, are all fascists and anti-Semites.

This webinar has 4 speakers on anti-Semitism, all them experts in their field. Register and join us.

Why is the Morning Star’s Communist Party of Britain Justifying Zionism’s ‘Anti-Semitism’ Narrative?

 At a time of Genocide & Ethnic Cleansing in Gaza the CPB is Holding a Seminar ‘Understanding Anti-Semitism’s ‘Contested’ Relationship to Anti-Zionism'

[This article also appears in this week's Weekly Worker as Distracting from genocide]

‘Anti-Semitism’ has been the weapon that Zionism has deployed to defend genocide in Gaza. It is not out of choice but necessity. Any manifestation of support for the Palestinians is deemed anti-Semitic for one simple reason. It is impossible to defend mass executions, starvation of a population, destruction of hospitals and mass murder of children unless you attack your critics. It is as if protesters against Apartheid in South Africa had been motivated by hatred of White people.

Student Sit-in at Columbia University

Reactionaries like Sunak, have labelled Palestinians and their supporters as anti-Semitic hate marchers. Braverman described the slogan ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine must be free’ as ‘an anti-Semitic chant’ whilst calling for the marches to be banned.

Despite all their talk of wars for democracy what the warmongers really mean is a war on democracy. If there’s one thing that the Bravermans, Priti Patels, Sunaks and Starmers fear is that we exercise our rights to get rid of them and capitalism with it.

John Pilger: The War on Democracy": Out on DVD

Nowhere is this more in evidence than in the unprecedented wave of solidarity in universities in the United States where campus after campus has risen up in revolt and established encampments. The American State is demonstrating that underneath the sugar coating of democracy lies a highly repressive military-police apparatus.

Despite all the rhetoric about a free society, the United States is proving that the constitutional guarantees of freedom of speech and freedom from government tyranny are as nothing when compared to a police baton and arbitrary imprisonment.

Violence at UCLA as Zionist thugs attack students and Police Violence at Columbia University

According to House Speaker Mike Johnson, Republicans would “hold these universities accountable for their failure to protect Jewish students on campus.” Instead of attacking the student demonstrators as a threat to US imperialism’s interests, Johnson and Biden articulate their concerns in terms of the ‘safety’ of Jewish students. The safety of Palestinian students is of no concern. 

Shocking footage shows several officers at Washington University St. Louis beating a professor, slamming him, and dragging his limp body.
SIUE history professor Steve Tamari is reportedly hospitalized with broken ribs and a broken hand.
One doctor told him he's lucky to be alive. pic.twitter.com/QSafPxVMD3

— Prem Thakker (@prem_thakker) April 30, 2024

The vicious attack on Emory University Professor Caroline Fohlin by Police is unlikely to attract their attention. Likewise the attack on History Professor Steve Tamari at Washington University, which left him with broken ribs and hand, shows us the real face of US capitalism when its interests are challenged. One doctor told him he's lucky to be alive.

Police Violence at Emory University as they arrest a woman professor

The concerns of Braverman and Johnson, about anti-Semitism contrasts with their racism towards Black people, Muslims and refugees. ‘Anti-Semitism’ is all the rage with the Establishment which is why anyone pretending to be a socialist would question their motives.

Not so the Communist Party of Britain. It is holding a seminar ‘UNDERSTANDING & COMBATTING ANTISEMITISM’. You might have thought it would devote at least one session to exploring the weaponisation of anti-Semitism by the right and the far-right.

How is it that Suella Braverman, whose ‘dream’ consisted of the expulsion of refugees to Rwanda, was so concerned about ‘anti-Semitism’?

How is it that Donald Trump of the Muslim Ban is nonetheless perturbed about‘anti-Semitism’? To say nothing of Steve Bannon who whilst not wanting his daughters to go to school with Jewish children, was also very concerned about anti-Semitism?

Pro-Israel THUGS Attack Student Protesters - While Cops Rampage In New York

Tommy Robinson too is equally opposed to ‘anti-Semitism’? Indeed how is it that the founder of the alt-Right, neo-Nazi Richard Spencer, can describe himself as a White Zionist?

I’m afraid to disappoint you. There is no session on the weaponisation of anti-Semitism at the CPB Seminar. There is one however on what is called ‘the contested relationship between anti-Zionism and antisemitism’. Contested by who you may ask? Certainly not supporters of the Palestinians or anti-Zionists? We are quite clear. There is no relationship.

If you are an anti-Zionist you are an anti-racist and you will be equally opposed to anti-Jewish racism. But if you are an anti-Semite then the chances are that you are also a Zionist. As Zionist novelist A B Yehoshua once said in a lecture to the Union of Jewish Students

‘Anti-Zionism is not the product of the non-Jews. On the contrary, the Gentiles have always encouraged Zionism, hoping that it would help to rid them of the Jews in their midst. Even today, in a perverse way, a real anti-Semite must be a Zionist.’

If you didn’t know better you would be forgiven for thinking that the CPB seminar had been organised by the Jewish Labour Movement or a pro-genocide Zionist group. Yet it has been organised by Professor Mary Davis, the CPB’s resident Zionist and Labour historian.

The question people need to ask is why it is that in the middle of a live genocide that is justified by false allegations of anti-Semitism, the CPB is running a seminar whose sole aim and purpose is to bolster the Zionist narrative about anti-Semitism?

It’s been a long time since the British Communist Party was anti-Zionist. Following Stalin’s about turn in November 1947, when the Soviet Union supported the establishment of a medieval ethno-religious Jewish state in Palestine, communist parties have steadfastly refused to oppose Zionism as a settler-colonial movement.

The Russian workers movement at the beginning of the 20^th century saw Zionism as a counter-revolutionary movement. The founder of Poale Zion, Ber Borochov, was expelled from the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1901 when he founded a Zionist Socialist Workers Union in Yekaterinoslav.

Anti-Semitism was one of the main weapons of the Czarist autocracy in its fight against the working class and its organisations yet Theodor Herzl, the founder of Political Zionism, was happy to parley with it.

After the Kishinev pogrom of 1903, which was publicised worldwide, Herzl’s response was to warn the leaders of Europe that if the Zionist project failed, ‘hundreds of thousands of our adherents would at one swoop change over to the revolutionary parties.’

In August 1903, barely four months after Kishinev, Herzl visited Russia, meeting with the Czarist Interior Minister Count Vyacheslav von Plehve who bore direct responsibility for the pogroms. Herzl was concerned that the Russian Zionist Federation should retain its legal status. As he began explaining the merits of Zionism Plehve interrupted him: ‘You don’t have to justify the movement to me. Vous prêchez à un converti.’ [You are preaching to a convert].

Herzl asked Plehve: ‘Help me to reach land sooner and the revolt will end. And so will the defection to the Socialists.’ Herzl wrote to the Kaiser describing how:

our movement… has everywhere to fight an embittered battle with the revolutionary parties which rightly sense an adversary in it. We are in need of encouragement even though it has to be a carefully kept secret.

Herzl promised the Czarist rulers that the revolutionaries would stop their struggle in return for a charter for Palestine in 15 years. The Bund, the General Jewish Workers Union of Russia, was outraged.

Being a supporter of Empire the Labour Party was even more ardently pro-Zionist than the Conservative Party. In August 1917, its War Aims Memorandum supported a ‘return’ of the Jewish people to Palestine, there to establish a free state.

All manner of reactionaries and social democrats supported Zionism, from Churchill and Balfour to Arthur Henderson and Ramsay MacDonald. In those days there was no pretence that opposing Zionism was anti-Semitic because that was the position of most Jews.

After visiting Palestine in 1922, Ramsay MacDonald wrote of how

‘The rich plutocratic Jew ... is the person whose views upon life make one anti-Semitic. He has no country, no kindred. Whether as a sweater or a financier, he is an exploiter of everything he can squeeze. He is behind every evil that Governments do and his political authority, always exercised in the dark, is greater than that of Parliamentary majorities... He detests Zionism because it revives the idealism of his race.’

This was printed in a pamphlet, produced by Poale Zion, the forerunner of today’s Jewish Labour Movement!

Zionism has always been a reactionary, racist movement. Today an exterminationist mood has swept the Israeli state. Yet still the CPB clings to Stalin’s nostrums that Jewish people need a state. Alone on the left the CPB still adheres to the apartheid solution of two states. It’s time the CPB started to wake up to the movement around them.

Open Letter to Rob Griffiths, the General Secretary, The Communist Party of Britain at Office@communist-party.org.uk

Dear Rob Griffiths,

Today we are witnessing a genocide in real time in Gaza. It has been accompanied by clear statements of intent from Israel’s leaders. Defence Minister Yoav Gallant outlined what was in store:

We are imposing a complete siege on Gaza. There will be no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. Everything will be closed. We are fighting against human animals and we are acting accordingly.

Your party shrinks from making comparisons between Zionism and the Nazis but the similarities are striking - from car bumper stickers saying ‘finish them off’ to stickers saying ‘exterminate Gaza’.

On October 4 1943 Heinrich Himmler, used exactly this phrase in a lecture to senior SS officers in Posnan when justifying the holocaust. The Nazis, he explained, were

the only people in the world’ to have taken a ‘decent attitude’ toward animals and who would be equally decent towards ‘human animals.

Gallant was not the only senior Israeli politician or military leader to make genocidal statements. South Africa’s application to the International Court of Justice documented numerous such statements. 

“no half-assed job: Rafah, Dir El Balah, Nusseirat - total annihilation. erase the memory of Amalek from under the sky. There is no place for this pure evil, has no cure, cannot exist.” — If Smotrich’s words aren't genocidal language, don't know what is.
pic.twitter.com/FSHDcw5sz7

— Hanno Hauenstein (@hahauenstein) April 30, 2024

Only last Monday Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s far-right Finance Minister and the Head of the ‘Civil Administration’ in the West Bank uttered these words:

"There are no half measures. [The Gazan cities of] Rafah, Deir al-Balah, Nuseirat – total annihilation. 'You will blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven' – there's no place under heaven."

How is this call for annihilation any different from Hitler’s call for the annihilation of the Jewish people in his ‘prophecy’ speech of January 30 1939? What kind of political cowardice is there in your party that refuses to see the comparisons with the leaders of the Third Reich yet is happy to go along with the ‘anti-Semitism’ smears of Biden and the Republican Right?

The current death toll is, when one includes those under the rubble, approaching 50,000, including perhaps 20,000 children. How has the Zionist movement justified this?

They have both spread false atrocity propaganda about October 7 on the one hand and they have resorted to accusing their critics of anti-Semitism on the other. Sad to say the CPB and its resident Zionist Mary Davis, have joined in with this.

The final death toll for October 7 is accepted as 1,139. Just two babies were killed, both accidentally. Neither was burned or beheaded. Yet we had lurid headlines of 40 beheaded babies. According to that well known paper of record, the Daily Mail,

Hamas terrorists massacred at least 40 babies and young children before beheading some of them and gunning down their families in a small kibbutz in Israel, horrified Israeli soldiers have claimed.

I24 News quoted IDF Major General Itai Veruv as saying:

It’s not a war, it’s not a battlefield. You see the babies, the mother, the father, in their bedrooms, in their protection rooms, and how the terrorists killed them, It’s a massacre.

When these allegations were discredited Israel’s narrative changed to false allegations of mass rape. Naturally that faithful servant of imperialist propaganda, the New York Times joined in with Screams without Words. However that has been completely discredited by a variety of different sources. Even the BBC has abandoned plans to run with the story.

The second line of defence has been our old friend ‘anti-Semitism’. In Britain we saw Gideon Falter’s attempt to portray himself as the victim of anti-Semitism backfire, after a policeman misspoke. Falter had attempted to provoke a confrontation with Palestine demonstrators.

In the United States thousands of students have taken to sit-ins and protests against the genocide. ‘Anti-Semitism’ has been wheeled out by the right as an excuse to attack peaceful demonstrations. Biden condemned ‘blatant’ anti-Semitism at Columbia. Even war criminals become sensitive when it comes to ‘anti-Semitism’ these days.

Premiere of Jeremy Corbyn The Big Lie at which Ben Chacko, the Morning Star's Editor was Guest Speaker

The Weaponisation of Anti-Semitism

On 23 February 2023 Jeremy Corbyn - The Big Lie premiered at Conway Hall with the guest speaker being Ben Chacko, Editor of the Morning Star. The film, which Starmer and the TUC did their best to prevent being shown, showed how false allegations of anti-Semitism had been weaponised in order to remove Corbyn as Labour leader.

I am astounded therefore that the CPB, whose paper the Morning Star opposed the ‘anti-Semitism’ witchhunt, should be organising a seminar on ‘anti-Semitism’ which takes as its main sources those who led the ‘anti-Semitism’ witchhunt in Labour. The seminar has been organised by the CPB’s resident Zionist, Mary Davies.

Last September I wrote ‘Elephant in the Room’ criticising Davies’s article in Communist Review ‘‘The contested relationship between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism’.

As readers of Zionism During the Holocaust will know, the only relationship that exists is between Zionism and Anti-Semitism. Both share the belief that the ‘real home’ of Jews is Israel, as Netanyahu told French Jews in 2015.

Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville organised by Richard Spencer in August 2017

When the Zionist movement began at the end of the 19^th century most Jews saw it as a form of Jewish anti-Semitism. Today neo-Nazis like Richard Spencer, organiser of the Unite the Right Charlottesville march call themselves ‘White Zionists’? Tommy Robinson and others of his ilk declare their support for Zionism.

Davis would have to be stupid not to notice the support of the far-Right for Zionism. Since she’s a professor I assume she’s not stupid. There is no relationship, contested or otherwise between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism.

Of course there has been a determined campaign by the Zionists to conflate anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. This is based on the idea that Israel was ‘conceived as a Jewish collectivity’ (IHRA).

Counter-protest to Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville which Trump described as containing 'very fine people'

Davis’ course on understanding & combating antisemitism makes no attempt to either understand or combat anti-Semitism. Its real purpose is to perpetuate the myth that opposition to Zionism and the Israeli state derives from it being ‘Jewish’ rather than its actions.

In July 2019 she wrote an article for the Morning Star in which she asked whether allegations of anti-Semitism in the Labour Party were

a fiction manufactured by a conspiratorial alliance between the Israeli government and anti-socialist forces seeking to discredit Jeremy Corbyn?

There were clearly conspiracies as Asa Winstanley documented with the refounding of the Jewish Labour Movement in 2015.

There is no need for conspiracies given that the mass media shares the same Zionist, pro-imperialist agenda. Anti-socialist forces are always pro-imperialist and pro-Zionist. There is an unwritten consensus.

It is a strange argument coming from someone who is allegedly a communist. Is the anti-communism of the press also a conspiracy?

The real question is whether the allegations of anti-Semitism in the Labour Party were true. I was the first Jewish person to be expelled in February 2018, followed by Jackie Walker, Marc Wadsworth, Ken Livingstone and Chris Williamson. Were any of us guilty of anti-Semitism? All of us were caught up in the false ‘anti-Semitism’ smear campaign yet the charges against us did not allege anti-Semitism.

Mary Davis, the Communist Party of Britain's resident Zionist

Davis avoids any concrete examples to back up her argument. She prefers innuendo. Her clinching argument that there was a problem with anti-Semitism in the Labour Party is that

the leadership of the Labour Party itself has acknowledged that there is an anti-semitic element within its ranks.’

What kind of argument is this? The fact that Corbyn was bullied into accepting the false ‘anti-Semitism’ narrative is proof of nothing.

Corbyn and Jennie Formby began expelling people at a rate that Iain McNicol, the former General Secretary could only dream of. They believed that by expelling Palestinian supporters they could impress their enemies. All they ‘proved’ was that there was an anti-Semitism problem, something Davis is happy to exploit.

Davies argues that there is an ‘anti-Semitic current’ in the Labour Party because after 2,000 years anti-Semitism ‘has penetrated deeply into mainstream thinking.’

What Davis demonstrates is the poverty of her analysis of anti-Semitism historically. I realise that the CPB has an aversion to Trotskyism or even dissident Marxism, given its Stalinist antecedents, but the books that Davis doesn’t mention are Abram Leon’s The Jewish Question – A Marxist Interpretation and Maxime Rodinson’s Cult, Ghetto and State, that put anti-Semitism in a historically materialist contest. Leon wrote that

Zionism transposes modern anti-Semitism to all of history and saves itself the trouble of studying the various forms of anti-Semitism and their evolution.

To Davis anti-Semitism is one seamless fabric. It is a Zionist idea that anti-Semitism has never gone away, that it is an unchanging virus that affects all non-Jews. This is both unMarxist and ahistorical. Anti-Semitism has changed as society has changed and as the Jews have changed. Racial anti-Semitism represented a sharp break from religious or feudal anti-Semitism. Far from being widespread, anti-Semitism today is a marginal form of prejudice.

This seminar that Davis organised is a reactionary junket whose only purpose will be to reinforce the Zionist smear that anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism are one and the same.

If CPB members wish to understand the reasons why British imperialism gave its backing to Zionism they should read Winston Churchill’s ‘ZIONISM versus BOLSHEVISM (8.2.20). It combines Churchill’s support for Empire with support for Zionism and anti-Semitism. He told readers that:

In violent contrast to international communism, it (Zionism) presents to the Jew a national idea of a commanding character.... In the Soviet institutions the predominance of Jews is even more astonishing. And the prominent, if not indeed the principal, part in the system of terrorism applied by the Extraordinary Commissions for Combating Counter-Revolution has been taken by Jews, and in some notable cases by Jewesses. The same evil prominence was obtained by Jews in the brief period of terror during which Bela Kun ruled in Hungary.’

Communist Jews were bad. Zionist Jews were good. Davis’s attempts to marry Zionism and Communism is a sisyphean task. As David Ben-Gurion, the first Prime Minister of Israel observed in December 1935, Zionism was a ‘bulwark against assimilation and communism’

The Zionist Community Security Trust - Davis's go to Zionist group on anti-Semitism - funded by the Home Office, founded by Mossad

Davis’s Reactionary Course Reading Materials

You only get an indication of just how reactionary is the furrow that Davis ploughs when you peruse her reading list. Included is a pamphlet ‘campus anti-Semitism’ from the Community Security Trust, funded by the Home Office and set up by Israel’s Mossad (MI6). The CST led the campaign to have Professor David Miller sacked from Bristol University. An employment tribunal later upheld his complaints of Unfair Dismissal and Discrimination.

You can get a flavour of the CST’s commitment to anti-racism from its choice of guest at its 2023 Annual Dinner - Suelle Braverman!

At a time when thousands of American students are protesting their Universities’ complicity in genocide in Gaza, what does Davis do? She backs those who assert that support for Palestine is a threat to the safety of Jewish students.

‘Antisemitism on campus surges as agitators take over’ shouts Fox News. Davis never once asks why it is that opposition to ‘anti-Semitism’ is so popular with those who are racist to the core on everything else.

Tony Lerman's 'Antisemitism Redefined' in Jewish Voice for Peace's 'On Antisemitism'

Davis’s next recommended text is their 2021 Anti-Semitic Incidents Reports. Tony Lerman, founding director of the IJA and Institute of Jewish Policy Research, was principal editor of the annual Antisemitism World Report. Lerman described how he had been

pressurised by the London Mossad representative dealing with antisemitism into ‘either ceasing publication or merging our report with one that the then-new Project for the Study of Antisemitism at Tel Aviv University... and part-financed by the Mossad, was beginning to produce. I vigorously resisted the pressure,... I tried to persuade the Israelis to allow us to operate without interference, but was given short shrift by the Mossad representative at the Israeli embassy in London and by the Israel ambassador [Moshe Raviv] himself. [‘Anti-Semitism Redefined’,  On Anti-Semitism’ JVP, Haymarket Books, 2017]

Lerman lost the battle and what resulted is the CST. Why should Israel’s MI6 be interested in anti-Semitism statistics unless they are being manipulated to further the interests of the Israeli state?

I have no idea who is going to present the topic Anti-Semitism and the Labour Party Under Corbyn, but the title itself has framed the discussion. Davis has clearly embraced those who made false accusations of anti-Semitism. 

Stalinist Anti-Semitism

The whole seminar is dishonestly selective. The role of communists in the fight against antisemitism during the 1930s and 40s is a mixed one. In Germany the Communist Party (KPD) described the Social Democrats as ‘social fascists’ thus destroying any possibility of a united working class front against the Nazis. Often they accepted the Strasserite equation of Jew and Capitalist.

In 1923 KPD leader Ruth Fischer gave a speech to Nazi students in which she said:

Those who call for a struggle against Jewish capital are already, gentlemen, class strugglers, even if they don’t know it. You are against Jewish capital and want to fight the speculators. Very good. Throw down the Jewish capitalists, hang them from the lamp-post, stamp on them. But, gentlemen, what about the big capitalists, the Stinnes and Klöckner?

Donald Niewyk describes the KPD appeal to the SA and SS in 1933: ‘you have shot enough workers. When will you hang the first Jew?’ Between 1930 and 1933 there were no Jewish KPD deputies elected.

During the Holocaust the Soviet Union adamantly refused to recognise that the Nazis were targeting Jews for extermination.

Stalinism engaged in rewriting history when it argued that the Jews suffered no more than other groups at the hands of the Nazis. It enabled the USSR to gloss over the collaboration of Russians with the Nazis. As Samuel Moyn writes of Soviet-Jewish writer Vasily Grossman’s account of Treblinka,

the disproportionate victimhood of Jews was not ideologically useful from the perspective of Moscow…. From the perspective of official anti-fascism, ‘humanity’ had suffered, not one group within it more than the rest… the Soviets could not accept that the victims had been predominantly Jewish.’ Though Grossman’s essay had already been circulated elsewhere… the plates of the Black Book were destroyed.’ [Chil Rajchman, Treblinka – A Survivor’s Memory, p. 8, London, 2011]

In 1952 there was the Slansky trial, when 14 Czech communists were accused of being Zionist agents. 11 of them were Jewish. 11 were executed. In 1963 Slansky was pardoned.

Or the Doctors Plot when mostly Jewish doctors were accused of conspiring to murder Soviet leaders. Fortunately Stalin died before their trial, after which they were released.

Or the ‘anti-Zionist’ campaign in 1967 in Poland after the 6 Day War. It was led by Gomulka who conflated Jew and Zionist and blamed Jews for the era of Stalinist repression.

The failure by Davis and the CPB to examine honestly the history of their own anti-Semitic tradition marks out Davis’ course as a worthless propaganda exercise and an attempt to rewrite history.

The Holocaust

Under the Holocaust there is a review of Jonathan Freedland’s dishonest book about Rudolf Vrba, one of only 5 Jewish prisoners to escape from Auschwitz, on April 10 1944. Freedland’s book is the object of uncritical praise by Davis.

Vrba and fellow escapee, Alfred Wetzler, produced the Vrba-Wetzler Report which revealed for the first time the existence of Auschwitz as a death camp. Prior to that Auschwitz was believed to be a labour camp. The Report was given to the leader of Hungarian Zionism, Rudolf Kasztner, at the end of April and was immediately suppressed by Hungary’s Zionist leaders.

Suffice to say Freedland, as an arch Zionist glosses over much of this, including the Kasztner trial which convulsed Israel for 4 years (1954-58). It led to the collapse of the second Israeli government under Moshe Sharrett.

Rudolf Vrba - Jewish anti-Zionist Hero of the Holocaust Erased from History by the Zionist Historians

If Davis knew anything about the background to the affair she would know that Vrba’s book I Cannot Forgive is a far more reliable guide to what really happened than Freedland’s cheap thriller. Vrba’s book describes in far more detail their escape from Auschwitz but one suspects that she has not read any source books on the Holocaust.

The other text on the Holocaust is none other than an article by Davis herself on Holocaust Memorial Day. In her concluding remarks she quotes Blackface Badiel that we must ‘strenuously rebut the notion that in the fight against racism “Jews don’t count.” Quite.

The session on Islamist Anti-Semitism takes the prize. Zionism is the mainstay of Islamaphobia. Davis links to Rakib Ehsan’s article The establishment has not been robust enough against Muslim anti-Semitism in a paper that is an expert on the topic – the Jewish Chronicle, the anti-Palestinian rag which the ruling class loves so much that they run it at a permanent deficit. It has only 6,000 paid subscriptions!! We are told that

The existence of ‘parallel societies’ in Britain carries significant social risks which must be treated with the utmost seriousness by the UK government.

It is not often that Muslims write for the Jewish Chronicle. So who is Dr Ehsan? Well he is a research fellow at the far-right Henry Jackson Society, one of whose founders and Directors is William Shawcross, who in 2012 said “Europe and Islam is one of the greatest, most terrifying problems of our future”.

Douglas Murray of the Henry Jackson Society

Another key figure in the HJS is Associate Director Douglas Murray. According to Nafeez Ahmed

Behind the facade of concern about terrorism is a network of extremist neoconservative ideologues, hell-bent on promoting discrimination and violence against Muslims and political activists who criticise Israeli and Western government policies.

Murray is the author of The Strange Death of Europe which espouses the White Replacement Theory. According to a review:

Chapter after chapter circles around the same repetitive themes: migrants raping and murdering and terrorising; paeans to Christianity; long polemics about how Europe is too “exhausted by history” and colonial guilt to face another battle, and is thus letting itself be rolled over by invaders fiercely confident in their own beliefs.

Murray is also a fan of Enoch Powell. The HJS seems perfectly appropriate in the circumstances for Mary Davis’ seminar on anti-Semitism!

Another prominent figure in the HJS is Baroness Cox, former Deputy Speaker of the House of Lords. In 2007, she told the Jerusalem Summit – an anti-Palestinian network - that “Britain has been deeply infiltrated” by Islamist extremists, who have converted the country into “a base for training and teaching militant Islam”.

The crème de la crème lies in Davis’ Selected Reading for the course. I will only pick out one suggestion and that is The Definition of Anti-Semitism by Kenneth L. Marcus.

In October 2017, Donald Trump nominated Marcus to be Assistant Secretary of Education for Civil Rights. Marcus was endorsed by a variety of Zionist groups including B'nai B'rith and The American Jewish Committee, and opposed by groups including The U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights and Jewish Voice for Peace. Naturally Davis thought he was kosher.

In September 2018, Marcus reopened a seven-year-old case against Rutgers University, previously closed by the Obama administration. The Zionist Organization of America welcomed its reopening.

In May 2020, nine civil rights groups filed a complaint against Marcus. Ian Lustick, writing in The Forward, deplored both Marcus's appointment, and his use of his office, arguing that:

"Marcus came to his position not to protect and expand learning opportunities in American educational institutions, but to threaten and narrow them, especially when it comes to open debate about Israel and the Palestinians. And his use of accusations of anti-Semitism in order to silence debate about Israel is being done with the sanction of the President of the United States."

The ZOA is on the far -right. When Trump was elected President it invited his anti-Semitic strategic director, Stephen Bannon to be its guest of honour at its Gala Dinner. Even the staunchly Zionist Anti-Defamation League took fright. In the end a large picket by the Jewish If Not Now group kept Bannon away. However in November 2018 Bannon was reinvited and this time he attended.

Sebastian Gorka - Hungarian neo-Nazi in Trump's Administration

Bannon was the Editor of Breitbart, the magazine of the alt-Right whose founder, Richard Spencer organised the Charlottesville march whose slogan was ‘the Jews shall not replace us.’Also in attendance was Sebastian Gorka, a Hungarian émigré and supporter of the neo-Nazi Vitezi Rend.

Marcus’s views on anti-Semitism would seem to be perfectly in tune with Mary Davis’ seminar on anti-Semitism. After all who better to learn from than genuine anti-Semites?

Communist Party Policy on Anti-Semitism

Davis’ seminar would not be complete without a restatement of party policy.

Davis boasts of the support the CP gave to the establishment of a Israel as a Jewish state. In November 1947 the Soviet Union under Stalin did a volte-face and supported Zionism. This calamitous decision, which its satellites obeyed, led to the establishment of the ethnic cleansing State of Israel.

Stalin’s cynical about turn had nothing to do with recompense for the holocaust survivors and everything to do with his wish to see an end to British imperialism in the Middle East. After the Zionist terror gangs had fought the British to a standstill Stalin embraced them in the fond hope that Israel would not fall into the American orbit.

By this one decision Stalin helped destroy the strong Communist Parties of the Middle East in Egypt, Syria, Iran and Iraq. However Davis is oblivious to all of this.

The CP demonstrates why it is a dinosaur incapable of adapting to changed circumstances. The party boasts its support for a 2 state solution when it is obvious to all that Zionism is not going to concede even a mini Bantustan. 2 states has been the smokescreen behind which the West Bank has been colonised.

Two states is an apartheid solution to what I termed ‘Hitler’s bastard offspring.’ The CPB like its Israeli counterpart, has never been an anti-Zionist party. It has never accepted that Zionism is a settler colonial movement incapable of making peace with the indigenous population. So when Israel is seeking to complete its ethnic cleansing project in Gaza through genocidal means, you shamefully decide to focus on ‘anti-Semitism’ instead.

Tony Greenstein