America’s Jewish Currents, of which Peter Beinart is an Editor, says it represents the Jewish Left – but which Jewish Left?

Jewish Currents refuses to print any response to Joshua Leifer’s ‘The real Corbyn Tragedy’ – finding that Corbyn should have prostrated himself to the Board of Deputies 

America’s Jewish Currents describes itself as ‘a magazine committed to the rich tradition of thought, activism, and culture of the Jewish left.’  When Joshua Leifer penned a 5000+ word article The Tragedy of Jeremy Corbyn offering his advice as to where Corbyn had gone wrong I felt impelled to respond.

Leifer’s analysis can be summed up as saying that:

i.                   Yes there was a basis to the ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign, because various tropes and remarks surfaced on social media, thus completely redefining the meaning of racism from actions such as discrimination and physical attacks to the froth and foam of Twitter.

ii.                That the problem in Britain was that there was

‘no left-wing Jewish organizational infrastructure in Britain comparable to what has recently emerged in the US…. there were few progressive Jewish voices that could meaningfully challenge them.’

In fact Jewish Voices for Labour was specifically set up to address this problem and the impact it had on the ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign was negligible, because it was never about Jews or anti-Semitism. They were a metonym for the determination of the Right to oust Corbyn.

iii.             Leifer quotes Matt Seaton of the New York Review of Books as saying that

“the fight between Corbyn skeptics and Corbyn fans over Jews and Israel has become a ruinous proxy for what is, in its essence, a struggle between social-democrats and socialists for the soul of the party.”

Leifer drew no conclusions from this statement regarding the fake ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign.

iv.             Leifer accepted that ‘The British Jewish establishment would brook no compromise with Corbyn’. Nonetheless he argued that:

Corbyn and the left’s initial failure to adequately address accusations of antisemitism meant that when he took a stand against the IHRA definition, he had no political room to maneuver. For his protest to have had even the slimmest chance of success, he also would have needed partners within the British Jewish community: people with public respect and Jewish bona fides who were willing to challenge the notion that opposition to the IHRA definition was beyond the pale.

v.                The problem with this is that the British Jewish Establishment in the form of the Board of Deputies has hardwired into its constitution support for Israel i.e to

‘Take such appropriate action as lies within its power to advance Israel's security, welfare and standing.’

The JLM which Leifer refers to was specifically refounded in 2015 in order to unseat Corbyn.  It is a right-wing anti-socialist group, the overseas wing of what is left of the Israeli Labour Party. In fact plenty of prominent Jews opposed the IHRA, e.g. Professor David Feldman, Sir Geoffrey Bindman, Sir Stephen Sedley and others. They too had no effect.

vi.             Leifer however had found the solution whereas those of us on the ground had completely missed it. If only Corbyn had apologised to the ‘Jewish community’ when Andrew Neil, who when Editor of the Sunday Times hired Holocaust denier David Irving, had asked him! Leifer wrote that:

Corbyn appeared stubbornly determined to insert his foot directly into his mouth. In a 2019 pre-election interview, the BBC’s Andrew Neil asked him if he would like to apologize to the British Jewish community. … With only a few words—“yes, I’m sorry”—Corbyn might have been able to avoid bad press in a crucial stretch leading up to the election.

Anyone acquainted with the situation knows that anything Corbyn had said would have been used against Labour and apologising would have confirmed the Labour ‘anti-Semitism’ myth. Leifer’s brilliant conclusion? ‘

It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that Corbyn’s maladroit media appearances led, at least in part, to his defeat.

vii.          Leifer concluded his article with a series of ‘what ifs’

What if, instead of retreating into defensiveness, they had moved to reconcile sooner with the British Jewish communal institutions where reconciliation was possible? What if those communal institutions had faced internal opposition to launching an all-out campaign against Corbyn? 

What if kosher pigs could fly? I wrote to JC offering the outline of a proposed reply. You can see the outline of my article, which was published yesterday on Mondoweiss. I was not the only person to respond to Jewish Currents.

Arielle Angel

Donna Nevel submitted a letter which Editor Arielle Angel, refused to print. Her excuse? That it was the only letter they have received which was being economical with the truth given my response. Mondoweiss published Donna’s letter but it should not have had to.

After waiting a week without a response I sent a follow up email and this time Arielle did reply saying that they simply did not have the ‘bandwidth’  to publish a full response article. Which begs the question why publish mediocre articles if you are not prepared to have a debate?

Peter Beinart - Editor-at-large at the Jewish Currents

I also copied the correspondence to the JC's Editor-at-large Peter Beinart, America’s premier liberal Zionist. Beinart famously broke with a Jewish State and supported a single binational state last July Yavne: A Jewish Case for Equality in Israel-Palestine.

Despite being someone who has criticised the totalitarian mentality of the Zionist lobby and its apologists Beinart, who is a Professor Journalism at the City University of NY, has not deigned to respond.

In my reply to Arielle Angel I asked exactly what the JC is for:

You say that you are a paper of the Jewish Left. If this article stands without a response and maybe more than 1 response, then you should amend this to say that you represent the non-socialist and the non-Marxist left.

JC says it is of the ‘left’ but is meaningless if it is a left divorced from socialism, anti-imperialism or solidarity with the oppressed.

Below is my article in Mondoweiss

The real Corbyn ‘tragedy’ — and ‘Jewish Currents’ refusal to publish an opposing view

In a recent article on the "tragedy" of Jeremy Corbyn, Jewish Currents overlooks the rightwing bigoted records of those criticizing Corbyn because of his support for Palestinian rights.

By Tony Greenstein December 22, 2020

At the end of November Joshua Leifer, an Associate Editor of Jewish Currents [JC], wrote an article about the “tragedy” of Jeremy Corbyn. He did not seek the opinions of any Jewish victims of the “antisemitism” witchhunt in the Labour Party. As the first Jewish member of the party to be expelled I submitted a response.

At first I was simply ignored and after a reminder, Arielle Angel, Editor-in-chief, explained that it was a lack of resources that prevented them publishing my reply. JC “simply do not have the bandwidth to publish full response articles to articles we’ve published”. So I am publishing my response here.

Who sponsored the false ‘antisemitism’ campaign against Corbyn

The first question to ask is who was behind the campaign to root out “antisemitism” in the Labour Party? Were they genuinely concerned about antisemitism or defending Israel? Were the allegations confected?

The first article exposing Corbyn as an “antisemite” came from the Tory Daily Mail. On 7 August 2015, even before Corbyn was elected, it published an ‘exclusive’ revealing that Corbyn was an associate of a Holocaust denier, Paul Eisen. It was untrue but mud sticks.

This is the same Daily Mail which, according to Professor Tony Kushner, “has been an anti-alien newspaper since the 1900s. There’s great continuity.” The Daily Mail is the paper which supported Hitler and which had an infamous front page ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts’. Nor is this ancient history.  Despite this, Leifer quoted Dan Hodges of the Daily Mail uncritically accusing Labour of being a racist party. Hodges is hardly neutral, an ex-New Labourite, right-wing and hostile. 

Just three months later the Mail employed an ex-Sun columnist against Corbyn, Katie Hopkins who had previously described refugees as ‘cockroaches’. The whole of the British press, from the Sun to the neo-liberal Guardian, was mobilised in the cause of fighting ‘antisemitism’.

The Conservative Party and the Labour Right also joined hands in opposing Labour “antisemitism”. These were the same political forces that had supported the disastrous 2014 Immigration Act and the official policy of creating a “hostile environment” for immigrants that had led to hundreds if not thousands of Black British citizens being deported to the West Indies. Just 6 Labour MPs voted against the Act, including the “antisemitic” Corbyn. In fact, Labour’s Right was permeated with antisemitism. After a racist Labour MP Phil Woolas was removed from Parliament by the High Court in 2010 for election offences, which included running a campaign aimed at stirring up racial strife by “making the white folk angry” he was defended by Tom Watson, who “lost sleep” over “poor Phil.” Watson later became Corbyn’s unfriendly deputy leader and led the ‘antisemitism’ witchhunt.

Historically it was the Right of the Labour Party which was antisemitic. The Board of Deputies of British Jews, which claims to be the representative body of British Jewry (although in fact it represents at best 40% of British Jews), raised no objection when Sidney Webb (1859-1947), Colonial Secretary, founder of the Fabians and New Statesman, remarked that there were ‘“no Jews in the British Labour party” and that while “French, German, Russian Socialism is Jew-ridden…We, thank heaven, are free”, adding that was probably the case because there was “no money in it”. (Paul Kelemen, “The British Left and Zionism: The History of a Divorce”, Manchester University Press 2012)

Herbert Morrison, Home Secretary during World War 2, adamantly refused to admit Jewish refugees. Hundreds if not thousands died as a result. 

We see this today with Labour leader Keir Starmer. He has expressed his determination to “root out the poison” of antisemitism from the Labour Party. Yet Sir Keir, was unable to challenge a racist caller on the talk show station LBC, who stated that White people would be in a minority by 2066 and asked why Britain can’t be like Israel which

“has a state law that they are the only people in that country to have self-determination. Well why can’t I as a white British female have that same right?”

Perhaps it was the comparison with Israel that threw Keir!

Not once did Joshua Leifer ask simple questions as to why, if the Board of Deputies was concerned with Labour “antisemitism,” it had said nothing about Boris Johnson’s genuinely antisemitic and racist 2004 novel “72 Virgins” or about the fact that the Tories sat in the European Parliament in a “conservative and reformist” bloc with fascists and antisemites such as Roberts Ziles and Michal Kaminsky. When the Leader of the House of Commons, Jacob Rees Mogg, spoke last year of the “Illuminati who are taking the powers to themselves,” in reference to two Jewish fellow MPs, there was no comment on this patently antisemitic reference.

John Bercow, the recently retired Jewish Speaker of the House of Commons, was asked in an interview if Corbyn was an antisemite. His response was that he had known Corbyn for 22 years and there wasn’t a ‘whiff’ of antisemitism about him. Bercow also recalled how he remembered an MP saying:  

“If I had my way, Berkoff, people like you wouldn’t be allowed in this place.” On inquiring whether  his antagonist meant being lower-class or Jewish?’ the response was ‘Both’!

The idea that the Conservative Party, the party of Empire,  is opposed to racism, including antisemitism, lies in the realm of fantasy. Yet Leifer asked no questions as to the bona fides of Corbyn’s right-wing antagonists.

Almost as soon as the ‘antisemitism’ controversy raised its head I had my doubts.  Was antisemitism spontaneously arising in the Labour Party because of Corbyn’s election or were we seeing the state destabilisation of Labour?

My answer came on March 18^th when I was suspended. All the allegations that were put to me later were about Israel. Did I compare Israel’s marriage laws to those of Nazi Germany? My answer was yes, but so did Hannah Arendt, a refugee from Nazi Germany! Did I say that Israel was hoping that Holocaust survivors would die in order they could save on their welfare benefits?  Yes I did but so did Ha’aretz!

It takes little imagination to guess at the reaction to Corbyn’s election – from the CIA HQ at Langley Virginia, to MI5 to Israel. Corbyn was a veteran anti-imperialist, anti-nuclear and hostile to NATO. He was now leader of the second party of government in the US’s closest ally in Europe. Al Jazeera’s The Lobby gave us a snapshot of what was happening when we saw Israeli Embassy operative Shai Masot being deeply involved in Labour’s ‘antisemitism’ crisis.

The facts can be true, yet the narrative can be false

Are there antisemites in the Labour Party?  Of course there will be a few. Any party of ½ million is bound to have them. Does that mean that Labour or any other political party was overrun by them?  Of course not. Yet Leifer, instead of probing beneath the surface, declares that ‘If people are exposing a valid problem, you have to deal with it’.

But there wasn’t a problem. Leifer mentioned the infamous mural, erased in 2012, that the right-wing former Director of Labour Friends of Israel Luciana Berger made an issue of before the 2018 local elections. It depicted six bankers, two of whom were Jewish. They had fat, not hooked noses.  Corbyn had opposed their erasure on free speech grounds. Opinions differ as to whether the mural was antisemitic but the real issue was why this had been raised 6 years later. No one had considered the matter important in 2012.

It was clear that sections of the press and others were researching everything that Corbyn had ever said and putting the worst possible interpretation on it. This was in contrast to ignoring the openly racist record of Prime Minister Boris Johnson who in 2002 spoke about “picanninies” and Black people having “watermelon” smiles.’

Nearly half of Conservative Party members oppose having a Muslim Prime Minister. Yet these bigoted attitudes were never problematic. Why? Because it was not antisemitism that was the real issue in Labour, but defence of Israel.

What antisemitism there is in the Labour Party is confined to social media; and much of that, such as Rothschild/banker conspiracy theories, are a way in which people try to explain what they see as the extraordinary power of the Israel lobby to bend politicians to their will.  This is a power that Israeli politicians like Prime Ministers Benjamin Netanyahu and Ehud Olmert have openly boasted of.  Israel calls itself a Jewish state and it’s unsurprising that  lacking an understanding of how imperialism works, people can ascribe American responsiveness to Israel’s demands as the bowing to Jewish power rather than the interplay between an imperialist power and its watchdog in the region. In my own experience, people who talk of the Rothschilds don’t even realise that they are Jewish.

Antisemitism is not what some idiot writes on social media bearing in mind that one person can post a million tweets. Antisemitism is what people do to Jewish people not what they tweet about. No one died from a tweet.

Who were the victims of the antisemitism witchhunt?

Leifer failed to ask basic questions such as, who were the targets of the ‘antisemitism’ witchhunt? Not only was I expelled but so was Jackie Walker, a Black Jewish women who was utterly demonised. Jackie was active in the fight against the National Front and the far-Right UKIP.

Another person expelled was Marc Wadsworth, who criticised former Israel lobbyist Ruth Smeeth for her assisting the Tory Daily Telegraph. Wadsworth didn’t even know Smeeth was Jewish when he criticised her at the launch of the Chakrabarti Report in June 2016 into racism in the Labour Party. In the campaign against Police racism over the murder of Stephen Lawrence, which led to the Government MacPherson Inquiry that found the Metropolitan Police institutionally racist, Wadsworth introduced the Lawrence family to Nelson Mandela and put the campaign on the map. Then Marc was expelled because of the lies of an Israel lobbyist turned MP. Yet in Jewish Currents, Leifer stayed silent or oblivious of this context.

I spent most of my youth involved in anti-fascist work as first Secretary of the Anti-Nazi League in Brighton and then served on the Executive of Anti-Fascist Action. The Board of Deputies spent most of their time attacking us, not the fascists, because we were anti-Zionist!

The Board of Deputies has never opposed antisemitism

The Board of Deputies and the Jewish Chronicle, which led the ‘antisemitism’ attacks on Corbyn, have never campaigned against genuine antisemitism. In 1936 when Moseley’s British Union of Fascists attempted to march through the East End of London the Board of Deputies and the Jewish Chronicle told Jews to keep away.  Thousands of Jews and non-Jews ignored them in what became known as the Battle of Cable Street.  After the war the 43 Group of Jewish ex-serviceman took the battle to the resurgent Union Movement and literally smashed them off the streets.  The Board vehemently opposed them.  In the 1970s and 1980s it was the same story.

As the Editor of the Searchlight anti-fascist magazine, Maurice Ludmer wrote:

“In the face of mounting attacks against the Jewish community both ideologically and physically, we have the amazing sight of the Jewish Board of Deputies launching an attack on the Anti Nazi League with all the fervour of Kamikaze pilots… It was as though they were watching a time capsule rerunof the 1930’s, in the form of a flickering old movie, with a grim determination to repeat every mistake of that era. ” (Issue 41, November 1978)

The first time that the Board held an ‘anti-racist’ demonstration was against Corbyn outside Parliament in March 2018. Who took part?  Arch Tory racist Norman Tebbit, proponent of the racist ‘cricket test’ (the idea that immigrants who support the Indian/Pakistani cricket teams weren’t really British) and sectarian bigot, Ulster Unionist MP Ian Paisley! Even the Zionist placards were antisemitic!

Antisemitism was weaponised

‘Antisemitism’ was the chosen weapon of attack on the Labour left.  It played to their weak spot, identity politics. It was easier to attack Corbyn over ‘antisemitism’ than austerity or his anti-nuclear politics. The fact that so many Jews are being suspended today over supposed antisemitism attitudes because of their criticism of Israel proves that this is not about antisemitism.  According to Jewish Voices for Labour, at least 25 Jewish members were investigated for ‘antisemitism’, and many of them suspended, in recent years, with no coverage of the purge in the mainstream media.

The British Jewish Community is not the American Jewish Community

Leifer operated under the belief that the Jewish community in Britain and the United States are comparable.  They are not. American Jewry is not centrally directed by Zionist bodies like in Britain. I am the son of an Orthodox Rabbi.  I knew the Jewish community and modern Orthodoxy pretty well. Former Chief Rabbi Joseph Hertz visited my house. It is a deeply conservative and racist community (anti-Arab/Muslim). There is no comparison with the American Jewish community which is largely Reform/Conservative. The British Jewish community is far more insular.  It is a community which has for the last 50 years voted Tory by overwhelming majorities. Even under Labour’s first Jewish leader Ed Miliband, it voted by more than 3-1 for the Tories. The days of the Jewish workers in the East End joining and voting Communist are long gone.

Leifer mentions a letter from 60 rabbis attacking Corbyn. What he doesn’t mention is the letter signed by 29 Ultra Orthodox rabbis dissociating themselves from the Board’s attacks saying they did not represent the Ultra Orthodox community, which is the fastest growing part of the British Jewish community.

Would Jewish groups like If Not Now or JVP have helped?

Leifer argues that if there had been similar Jewish groups in Britain to America’s If Not Now or Jewish Voice for Peace then things might have been different.  I don’t believe so. American Jewry is more liberal. This was why Jewish Voices for Labour was formed in Britain. But they were ignored during the antisemitism controversy because the campaign was not about either Jews or antisemitism. The proof of this lies in the fact that the Board of the Deputies and the Zionist Jewish Labour Movement focused on the IHRA (International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance) definition of antisemitism, which conflates antisemitism and anti-Zionism.  It is the same IHRA that the antisemitic Trump and the equally antisemitic Viktor Orban of Hungary have taken to heart.

The EHRC report on Labour ‘Antisemitism’

Leifer quotes uncritically the recent report of the Equality and Human Rights Commission that concluded that “there were unlawful acts of harassment and discrimination for which the Labour Party is responsible” and identified “serious failings in leadership and an inadequate process for handling antisemitism complaints.”  

The EHRC is hardly a reliable source. The EHRC is a state-appointed, state-funded body that has refused to investigate Tory Party Islamophobia.  It has an abysmal record on racism and has recently come in for criticism by the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights. Until recently it didn’t have a single Black or Muslim Commissioner. Leifer might have mentioned the author of the report. The Anti-Semitism Report on Labour was produced by Alasdair Henderson, a supporter of fascist Roger Scruton and Douglas Murray, whose book “The Strange Death of Europe” articulates the White Replacement Theory. The EHRC is held in contempt by Black people yet Leifer said nothing about this miserable record.

Leifer quotes Britain’s Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis who issued a statement attacking Corbyn during the General Election over Labour ‘antisemitism’. Leifer failed to tell his readers that Mirvis trained at a yeshiva on a West Bank settlement, Alon Shvut. Mirvis joined in and encouraged others to march, in Jerusalem’s annual March of the Flags, when thousands of settler youth parade through Palestinian neighborhoods in East Jerusalem chanting ‘Death to the Arabs’. Mirvis marched despite appeals in the Times of Israel and Ha’aretz.

Leifer gives as examples of Labour ‘antisemitism’ former London Mayor Ken Livingstone’s assertion that the Nazis supported Zionism in the 1930’s. Even were this untrue it wouldn’t be antisemitic. But a Zionist historian, Professor Francis Nicosia, has spoken of the ‘illusory assumption’ of German Zionism that Zionism “must have been well served by a Nazi victory.” Another Zionist historian, David Cesarani wrote in his book “Final Solution” that “The efforts of the Gestapo are oriented to promoting Zionism as much as possible and lending support to its efforts to promote emigration.” It may be inconvenient today to remember Zionism’s record during the Nazi period, but to tell the truth is never antisemitic.

The IHRA definition of antisemitism

It should be obvious that the IHRA definition of ‘antisemitism’ is about Zionism not antisemitism. What has comparing Israel to pre-war Germany got to do with antisemitism? Was the late Professor Ze’ev Sternhell, a child survivor of the Holocaust, also antisemitic for making such a comparison? Was Knesset member and former deputy chief of staff Yair Golan antisemitic when he made the same comparison?

Leifer quotes uncritically the assertion of the Zionist Board of Deputies that ‘Jeremy Corbyn, simply had no right to argue with Jewish organizations over the definition of antisemitism’. Why not?  No one has a monopoly on the definition of racism.

Not once did Leifer ask why British Jews and Zionist groups had the right to define antisemitism in terms that rule out the Palestinian expression of their experience of racism.

Nor did Leifer ask, Why the need for a definition. The Oxford English Dictionary defines antisemitism as ‘hostility to or prejudice against Jews.’ Why the need for a 500+ WORD definition? My dad took part in the Battle of Cable Street. He didn’t need a definition of antisemitism! Even the principal drafter of the IHRA, Kenneth Stern, has condemned the definition’s weaponisation and chilling of free speech, yet Leifer was seemingly oblivious to the motives behind the Zionist demands to accept the IHRA.

Should Corbyn have ‘apologised’ to the Jewish community?

Quite amazingly Leifer suggests that during the election Corbyn should have apologised for Labour’s ‘antisemitism’ to the Jewish community when asked to do so by BBC interviewer Andrew Neil. The proper response would have been ‘Apologise? What for?’ However, by that time Corbyn too had accepted the false narrative of ‘antisemitism’ and the more people he expelled the more ‘proof’ there was that Labour had an ‘antisemitism’ problem.

That was the real tragedy of Corbyn, not that he put up some resistance to the narrative.

Corbyn’s failure was to refuse to go on to the offensive. When Neil, a former editor of the Murdoch Sunday Times, asked Corbyn to apologise Corbyn should have asked Neil why he was so concerned by antisemitism when he had employed a Holocaust denier, David Irving, to interpret the Goebbels Diaries! Neil as Chairman of the Spectator also agreed to keeping the openly antisemitic Taki Theodoracopulos on as a columnist. (Taki openly praised the Greek Nazi party Golden Dawn and described himself as a “soi-disant anti-Semite”.) Corbyn had an easy response but he was incapable of punching a paper bag. His reformist politics were the problem, not his inability to apologise.

Leifer correctly criticises Corbyn for having ‘no real strategy for pursuing a boldly anti-imperialist, pro-Palestine politics or skillfully parrying the inevitable attacks from his opponents” but the criticism is rich coming from him. His only suggestion for how Corbyn should have parried is to ask ‘What if, instead of retreating into defensiveness, they had moved to reconcile sooner with the British Jewish communal institutions’

He can’t be serious. The answer to his suggestion lies in section 3(d) of the Board of Deputies Constitution which states that the  Board shall

‘Take such appropriate action as lies within its power to advance Israel’s security, welfare and standing.’

The Board of Deputies is an Israel, right or wrong, group. An organisation that tweets its support of the Israeli military when its snipers are mowing down children, is hardly likely to be won over to pro-Palestinian politics!

Appeasement is not a useful strategy. Labour’s Leaked Report makes it clear that Corbyn sincerely believed that if he offered Jackie Walker, Marc Wadsworth, Ken Livingstone and myself up as sacrificial lambs, the Board would be appeased. On page 306 it tells how

Jeremy Corbyn himself and members of his staff team requested to [the Governance and Legal Unit] that particular antisemitism cases be dealt with. In 2017 LOTO [Leader of the Opposition] staff chased for action on high-profile antisemitism cases Ken Livingstone, Tony Greenstein, Jackie Walker and Marc Wadsworth, stressing that these cases were of great concern to Jewish stakeholders and that resolving them was essential to “rebuilding trust between the Labour Party and the Jewish community”.

Well we were expelled but was trust reestablished?  Of course not. They simply demanded more victims like the one honourable MP Chris Williamson. You have to fight a wild animal and Corbyn was not prepared to do that. That was the problem which the ever clever Leifer wasn’t able to discern.

Corbyn’s period as leadership and his demise was indeed a tragedy, one which is now resulting in mass expulsions from the Labour Party. It is or should be crystal clear that the ‘antisemitism’ campaign was never about antisemitism and always about the threat that a party led by a socialist represented.

In 20-30 years some enterprising young journalist will no doubt use the Freedom of Information Act to uncover the names and details of who was at the centre of the anti-Corbyn campaign, orchestrating the different parts.

As for Jewish Currents, it describes itself as ‘a magazine committed to the rich tradition of thought, activism, and culture of the Jewish left.’ I was left wondering what it means to say that you stand in the tradition of the Jewish left?  It seems for many on the passive left this comprises a mixture of romantic kitsch and schmaltzy memories.

The traditions of the Jewish left – the Bund, the Communists, Socialists and Anarchists –can be summed up in one word – solidarity. An injury to one is an injury to all. It was in solidarity with the murdered millions of Jews of Poland that Shmuel Zygielbojm, the Bund representative in the Polish Government-in-exile, committed suicide in London in 1943. This was at the same time as his Zionist counterpart Ignacy Schwarzbart, was playing down the extent of the Holocaust.

The state-sponsored attack against Jeremy Corbyn and the movement that he led is a litmus test of whether or not you are a socialist. Joshua Leifer’s article was an attack on all those who have been victims of the Right’s heresy hunt, not least the Palestinians. I therefore wrote back to the editor suggesting that if Arielle Angel was going to refuse a reply to Leifer’s article then it would be more honest for JC to declare that it represented the non-socialist and non-Marxist left. It seems that to JC being on the ‘left’ is a lifestyle statement.

I have also sent an Open Letter to Peter Beinart.

Peter Beinart’s Bombshell Decision to Abandon Support for a Jewish State in favour of a Single Democratic Binational State Shows that Zionism has lost the Political and Moral Argument

The Recognition by Liberal Zionism’s Apostle that Democracy and a Jewish State are Incompatible is a Breakthrough that cries of ‘anti-Semitism’ won’t silence

Peter Beinart is a Professor of Journalism and Political Science at City University, a former Editor of New Republic and the Editor-at-large of Jewish Currents. Beinart is at the heart of the liberal Zionist establishment in America. His recent support, in Jewish Currents, for a single binational state, not a Jewish state, has sent shock waves around the Zionist blogosphere.

Beinart argued in the New York Times that ‘For decades I argued for separation between Israelis and Palestinians. Now, I can imagine a Jewish home in an equal state.’

Liberal Zionists have vented their fury with Beinart for this ‘treachery’. Beinart still considers himself a Zionist but is he?

Yitzhak Laor, Israel’s finest poet, wrote in ‘The Myths of Liberal Zionism’ that there never was such a creature as a liberal Zionist. Liberal Zionism is an oxymoron. It is like supporting a democratic dictatorship.  At least when Viktor Orban, Hungary’s Prime Minister expresses his wish to create a Christian ethno-nationalist state he calls it for what it is – an ‘illiberal Christian democracy’.’

Zionism is based on creating a Jewish state in which the Palestinians are guests. Its intention, from the very beginning, was to exclude the indigenous population.  As Herzl wrote in his Diary

This is what a Jewish State results in

‘When we occupy the land, we shall bring immediate benefits to the state that receives us. We must expropriate gently the private property on the estates assigned to us. We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our country.’ (Diaries pp. 88,90)

This was as much the policy of Labour Zionism as it was of the Revisionists. The only difference was that the latter were more honest. The Revisionists believed that only a policy of force, an Iron Wall would convince the Arabs that Zionism was here to stay. As Vladimir Jabotinsky wrote in his famous essay of the same name:

My readers have a general idea of the history of colonisation in other countries.  I suggest that they consider all the precedents with which they are acquainted, and see whether there is one solitary instance of any colonisation being carried on with the consent of the native population. There is no such precedent.

The liberal Zionists sought to cajole the Arabs, by guile and sweet honeyed words, that Zionism would benefit them but the reality was all too obvious. Wherever Jewish settlements were established, the Arab workers were expelled from the land rather than being re-employed as wage labour. As Tony Lerman wrote, Liberal Zionism’s only role is to act as a

‘fig leaf for the only Zionism that does have political agency today—right-wing, messianic, ethnonationalist settler Zionism—it’s positively harmful.’

Although Labour Zionism has almost died in Israel, it is alive and kicking in the British Labour Party where it is leading the McCarthyist anti-Semitism’ campaign, whose purpose is to demonise the critics of the State of Israel.

There have been predictable attacks on Beinart such as that of David Weinberg for whom Beinart is a ‘a shill for Israel’s enemies’, a ‘woke and deracinated American Jew’ whose concern for the Palestinians is akin to understanding Nazi SS stormtroopers!

Another leading Zionist who invoked the Nazi analogy is Alan Dershowitz, a right-wing American lawyer. Dershowitz’s thoughtful analysis in Newsweek was ‘Beinart's Final Solution: End Israel as Nation-State of the Jewish People’. The same Zionists who insist that any comparison between Israel and the Nazi state is anti-Semitic never hesitate to compare their enemies to the Nazis.

The reaction of ‘liberal’ Zionist Daniel Gordis, was little different. Gordis described Beinart as ‘a traitor to the Jewish people’ for calling for an end to Israel as a Jewish state. ‘Beinart's position is in line with many anti-Semites.’ Gordis asks rhetorically “Are you in the same camp as Ilhan Omar and in the same camp as Rashida Tlaib?" declaring that “if you are in that camp, then we should treat you the way we treat them...  we call you an “enemy” of our people.”

The Stab in the Back meme was used by German nationalists to portray Jews as disloyal and traitors - this is now used against Jewish anti-Zionists

Talk of ‘traitors’ and ‘enemies of the people’ is part of the lexicon of the far-Right yet it comes naturally to ‘liberal’ Zionism.

In End the Jewish State? Let’s try some honesty, first Gordis vents his anger. Beinart is accused of stringing together ‘an astonishing array of sleights of hand and misrepresentations’ Gordis speaks of ‘dozens of misrepresentations’ but thankfully spares us the detail.

He does though engage in a few sleights of hand himself, such as his assertion that ‘the miracle of Israel is that we no longer worry about annihilation’. Which is strange given Zionism’s weaponisation of the Holocaust. Idith Zertal wrote that there hasn’t been a war involving Israel ‘that has not been perceived, defined, and conceptualized in terms of the Holocaust.’ Israel has mobilised the Holocaust ‘in the service of Israeli politics.’ [Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood, p.4]

Begin described Yasser Arafat as Hitler in his bunker during the siege of Beirut. The examples of how the Holocaust informs Israel’s settler siege mentality are legion. Yet according to Gordis Israel is

‘a grand experiment in the cultural, intellectual, historical, linguistic and religious rebirth that can unfold when a people is restored, with sovereignty, to its ancestral homeland.’

Which is as good an example as any of the maxim that scratch a liberal Zionist and you will find the same old racist. Beinart’s heresy is that he ‘cares more about the future of the Palestinians than he does about the future of Judaism’s richness.’  Gordis ‘grand experiment’ is at the expense of 2 million Palestinians caged in Gaza and a military rule in the West Bank. The culture that Gordis speaks of exists on the back of torture, child imprisonment, settler violence and racism. This is the Liberal Zionism that Beinart has betrayed.

Israeli soldiers interacting in the West Bank last month with a Palestinian woman protesting the demolition of an unapproved animal shed.Credit...Abed Al Hashlamoun/EPA, via Shutterstock

Gordis’s final insult is that Beinart is ‘much more American than Jewish.’  This really is a sin that cannot easily be washed away in the eyes of Zionism.  In Gerald Kaufmann’s phrase, Beinart is a ghetto, gutter Jew. He is part of Zionism’s despised Jewish Galut.

Beinart links the dehumanisation of the Palestinians to the way that Zionism has internalised and instrumentalised the Holocaust. The attribution of genocidal aspirations to the Palestinians is a latter day abuse of the Holocaust and a consequence of this dehumanisation. Beinart quotes Holocaust survivor Yehuda Elkana’s essay in Ha’aretz, The Need to Forget’ that relations with the Palestinians are mediated by ‘a particular interpretation of the lessons of the Holocaust’ which sees everyone as against us. Not only is it a lesson that is nationalistic and militaristic but it paints Zionism’s enemies as modern-day Nazis.

Beinart describes the results of Zionist colonisation but refrains from describing Zionism as a settler-colonial movement. Instead he describes the dehumanization of Palestinians as ‘a cancer’ which

‘not only turns Palestinians into Nazis, it turns anyone who takes up the Palestinian cause into a Nazi sympathizer, guilty of antisemitism until proven innocent.’

And now, as if on cue, Beinart himself has now attracted such accusations.

Thus the enmity of the Palestinians for Zionism has nothing to do with the actions of Israel. Rather the Palestinians are motivated by anti-Semitism. It is as if the Irish were motivated by racial hatred of the English rather than Drogheda and Bloody Sunday.

It was left to Gideon Levy to draw out the significance of Beinart’s conversion on the road to Damascus. American Jews, he wrote ‘are beginning, if belatedly, to take a clear-eyed look at Israel, its darling.’ American Jews have become increasingly disenchanted with an Israel which does things to Palestinians that they would call anti-Semitic if done to them. Beinart is the voice of an increasingly alienated American Jewish youth.

What has particularly angered liberal Zionists is that Beinart has belatedly recognised that the 2 state solution is dead. Levy describes it as a ‘delusional mirage. For 53 years there has been a single state here’ an ‘apartheid regime’. The fiction of 2 States and the ‘Peace Process’ has enabled Apartheid in the West Bank to be justified.

Alan Dershowitz

The blackmail used against a single state is the same as that which was employed in southern Africa, the settler fear that it would unleash a tidal wave of violence from their victims. Yet as Levy points out ‘when a government of equality is established’ then ‘all its inhabitants win freedom and can exercise their rights’. It is part of Zionism’s culture of violence against the Palestinians.

Jonathan Leiter writes that ‘it’s likely that most liberal Zionists will continue to choose the path of denial’ referring to the major American Jewish Organisations. American Jewish groups are not going to fold because of Beinart’s insights yet nonetheless he has, like Tony Judt before him, challenged the basic premises of Zionism in a way that will resound with younger American Jews. Beinart has posed two very clear alternatives – a democratic or a racist, exclusivist Israel. Liberal Zionism has chosen the latter.

8 liberal Zionist Jewish organizations gave the game away when they declared that annexation would prove that the Israeli government no longer seeks a two-state solution, and that it has chosen a system of permanent repression and inequality over liberal democracy. Their complaint was based on the consequences for the Israeli state:

Such action will drive further the wedge between many American Jews and Israel. It would undercut the bipartisan nature of support for Israel in the United States and risk triggering serious international diplomatic consequences.

It is the attachment of liberal Zionists to ‘the peace process’ that has enabled Israel to consolidate its territorial gains. At least the right-wing Zionists were more honest. Leiter concludes by arguing that

‘The lack of a viable two-state solution does not mean that American Jews will stop believing in one. Political fictions of such existential importance take a long time to die.’

Just as there are some people who deny the Holocaust or who believe in a flat Earth there are those who will cling to the idea that an ethnic Jewish state can be democratic. Ideas persist beyond the material circumstances that gave birth to them. [see Marx and Engels. Selected Correspondence. p. 498]

Jonathan Cook describes the development of Beinart’s disenchantment with the Israeli state and how his rejection of the ‘most fundamental tenet of liberal Zionism’ the need for a Jewish state verges on the sacrilegious. Netanyahu’s annexation proposals ripped the ‘comfort blanket’ out of the liberal Zionist hands.

Cook quotes Ha'aretz’s Anshel Pfeffer its ‘in-house liberal Zionist’ who argues that Israel doesn’t need a moral narrative since its existence is one of pragmatism. This is a glaring admission that Zionism has lost the war of narratives. As Cook notes, the issue isn’t what Israeli Jews think but what Israel’s western sponsors demand.  

Peter Beinart’s ‘A Jewish Case for Equality in Israel-Palestine’

Like many Jews before him, Beinart has fallen out of love with Israel. A state based on a single ethnicity, especially one defined by religion, cannot be other than a racist state. Today India is becoming the new Hindu Israel. Beinart is aghast at what Israel has become and how it has transformed the Palestinians into the Jews’ historical enemy:

‘Through a historical sleight of hand that turns Palestinians into Nazis, fear of annihilation has come to define what it means to be an authentic Jew.’

Racist Comments by Israel's Chief Rabbis are two a penny

Israel, Beinart notes, views its relations with the Palestinians through a ‘Holocaust lens’. For example on the eve of the invasion of Lebanon, Prime Minister Menachem Begin declared that ‘The alternative to this is Treblinka’.

As Peter Novick and Norman Finkelstein have argued, the Holocaust has become the new Jewish religion. However it is a religion in the service of a state. Instead of drawing universal, anti-racist lessons from the Holocaust Zionism drew nationalistic conclusions. Racism was only wrong when Jews were the victims. Those Jews who rejected Zionism could not complain about anti-Semitism. One of the barbs thrown at anti-Zionist Jews is that by embracing the Arab ‘enemy’ they deserve to have been murdered by Hitler.

For Zionism anti-Semitism was the understandable reaction of non-Jews to the Jewish stranger in their midst. As Jacob Klatzkin, Editor of Die Welt,(1909-1911) explained:

 ‘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.’

Zionism concluded that Jews must have their own militaristic state based on the same principles that led to the persecution of the Jews. Except that this time it wouldn’t be the Jews who were the victims. The opponents of that state, the Arabs, were cast as the new Nazis.

This was what Rabbi Kashtiel of the Bnei David pre-military training college argued

Some like Rabbis Kashtiel and Radler went so far as to conclude that Hitler was ‘100% correct’.  His only mistake was to choose the wrong target! In the hands of the Jews Hitler’s racist ideology would be correctly applied - to the Arabs. Kashtiel and Radler were ‘educators’ at the Bnei David military prep school and Eli Yeshivah, which is closely connected to Rafi Peretz, the Minister of Jerusalem Affairs.

Netanyahu, with his address to the 2015 World Zionist Congress, exonerated Hitler claiming that it was the Palestinian Mufti of Jerusalem who was responsible for the Holocaust. According to Netanyahu, Haj Amin al-Husseini went to Hitler and said 'If you expel them, they'll all come here (to Palestine).', Hitler then asked: "What should I do with them?" and the Mufti replied: "Burn them."

What a member of the fascist Lehava, which the new Israeli Ambassador Tzipi Hotoveli funded, proclaimed

Beinart describes the apartheid discrimination that Palestinians experience in the West Bank, complete with Jewish only roads and settlements. He also observes that the Green Line dividing pre-1967 Israel from the West Bank rarely appears on most Israeli maps and that with some 650,000 settlers colonising the West Bank and Jerusalem, there is now no possibility of a two-state solution. This is the background to the question which provides the theme to the essay,

‘whether the price of a state that favors Jews over Palestinians is too high. After all, it is human beings—all human beings—and not states that are created b’tselem Elohim, in the image of God.

Beinart declares that

It is time for liberal Zionists to abandon the goal of Jewish–Palestinian separation and embrace the goal of Jewish–Palestinian equality.

This is where Beinart effectively marks his break with Zionism, although he still doesn’t recognise the implications of what he is saying. It is a long-standing Zionist fiction that Israel can defy the laws of logic and be both a democratic and a Jewish state.

How can a state based on one religion not discriminate against those who are not of that religion? How can defining nationality on the basis of religion not be racist? Unfortunately Beinart does not ask these questions explicitly. He is an empirical non-Zionist. Beinart maintains the fiction that you can be a Zionist and support equality. The history of Israel proves otherwise.

In 1948 Israel solved its ‘demographic problem’, having too many Arabs in the Jewish state by the simple expedient of expelling them. In 1967 it was unable to expel the Palestinians of the West Bank although about 300,000 were expelled. Beinart fears, quite rightly, that annexation will provide the political opportunity for another mass expulsion and quotes Israel’s Democracy Institute that over half of Israeli Jews, in the event of Area C in the West Bank being annexed, favour the expulsion of its Palestinians. According to the IDI:

The Jewish public’s preferred solution for the Palestinians who live in Area C, in case it is annexed, is to transfer them to the areas under the Palestinian Authority’s control. The solution preferred by the Arabs is to grant full citizenship rights... 

Annexation is ‘a waystation on the road to hell.’ It is this which has led Beinart to the conclusion that a Jewish state cannot be other than a racist state. Beinart’s Zionist critics place the blame for the failure of the 2 State Solution squarely on the victims, the Palestinians as colonialism has always done. This is why those hoping for any major rupture inside the Zionist movement are likely to be disappointed.

Beinart has belatedly reached the same conclusion that increasing numbers of American Jews have reached. The only alternative to apartheid and ethnic cleansing is equality. It is this which drives his Zionist critics mad. To them, equality is genocide. The idea of a state with equal rights for all its inhabitants is anathema to Zionism because such a state cannot be a Jewish ethnic state. It is the death of a nation.

What particularly infuriates his liberal Zionist critics is that Beinart criticises Apartheid within 1948 Israel. He quotes the leader of the Joint List, Aymen Odeh, in which he describes a situation in which “700 Jewish towns and not a single Arab town” have been built in Israel since its founding. It is an abiding principle of the Zionist ‘left’ that pre-1967 Israel was a haven of equality. They forget that from 1948-1966 Israel’s Arabs lived under military rule.

Rabbi Dahan was Deputy Defence Minister in Netanyahu's 2015 Government

Beinart’s comparisons between Israel and Apartheid South Africa, breaks new ground for a liberal Zionist critique. Some Zionists will concede that the situation in the Occupied Territories is like Apartheid but they fiercely resist its application to pre-1967 Israel.

Despite its eloquent wording with its obscure Yavne metaphor, the essay is intellectually incoherent in one respect. Beinart still hesitates in cutting the umbilical chord to liberal Zionism. Beinart argues that embracing the goal of Jewish–Palestinian equality does not require abandoning Zionism and observes that when in 2018 the Knesset passed the Jewish Nation State Basic Law which determined that only Jews have the right to national self-determination in Israel, several 'members of the Joint List proposed an alternative, which affirmed “the principle of equal citizenship for every citizen.” The Zionist parties however rejected equality in favour of Jewish supremacy.

Dealing with the argument that hatred between Israeli Jews and Arabs is intractable, Beinart notes that the same excuse was used in respect of southern Africa: ‘progress often appears utopian before a movement for moral change gains traction.’ He observes that what lies behind such arguments is a dehumanisation of the colonised, otherwise ‘it would be obvious that they, too, prefer not to kill or be killed when they can achieve their rights in more peaceful ways.’

Despite making the comparison with post-Apartheid South Africa Beinart shies away from its example of a unitary non-racial state. Beinart argues that the ANC ‘never saw itself as representing a separate Black nation, but rather the South African nation.’ This is true but instead of drawing the obvious conclusion that Palestinians should include Israeli Jews under the umbrella of Palestinian nationhood, Beinart argues for a binational state.

Beinart attempts to rewrite the history of Zionism so as to suggest that at one time the Zionist movement was benevolent and inclusive, that it did not envisage statehood.  He argues that

‘the demand for a Jewish state did not define Zionism until the 1940s. This wasn’t only true for “cultural Zionists” like Ahad Ha’am. It was also true for “political Zionists” like Theodor Herzl, Leon Pinsker, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, and even, for much of his life, David Ben-Gurion.’

This is simply not true. It is rewriting history. In 1896 Herzl published a short book, ‘The Jewish State’. Statehood was Herzl’s aim and he set about achieving this by attempting to secure the backing of the imperialist powers. Chaim Weizmann, the President of the Zionist Organisation declared, not in 1940 but at the 1919 Peace Conference that “the Zionist objective was gradually to make Palestine as Jewish as England was English”. That was why Ben-Gurion and the Zionist movement consistently opposed any democratic representative institutions in Palestine until they achieved a majority.

If the Zionists did not oppose a binational state until the 1940s why, from 1920 onwards did Histadrut, the Labour Zionist colonising agency, support a campaign of Jewish Labour and Jewish Land? In deliberately creating an Arab-free economy, Zionism was sowing the seeds of transfer.

When Beinart says that ‘The early Zionists were concerned, above all, with creating a place of Jewish refuge and rejuvenation.’ this again is untrue. Zionism’s goal was the preservation of the Jewish race/nation. Hence their hatred of assimilation which, according to former Education Minister Rafi Peretz “is like a second Holocaust.” Their chosen instrument was statehood.

Zionism never was a refugeeist organisation. Barely 1% of Jews fleeing the pogroms of Czarist Russia went to Palestine. In Palestine itself Arthur Ruppin and the Jewish Agency had a strict policy of selecting immigrants. Two thirds of Jews who wanted to immigrate to Palestine in the 1920s were denied certificates of entry.

Beinart is wrong to state that ‘it was the Holocaust that fundamentally transformed Jewish thinking about sovereignty’. The 1919 King-Crane Commission that Woodrow Wilson set up found that ‘the Zionists looked forward to a practically complete dispossession of the present non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine.’ [Tom Suarez, ‘State of Terror – How terrorism created modern Israel’, p.44. In May 1911, Arthur Ruppin, the Director of the Palestine Office, ‘suggested in a letter to the Zionist executive a limited population transfer’ of Arabs dispossessed by Jewish land purchases to other lands near Aleppo and Homs.

Of course, whilst they were still a minority, the Zionists talked in euphemism’s about a ‘Jewish national home’ and more ambiguously a ‘Jewish Commonwealth’ but the idea of statehood was fixed from the very beginnings of Zionism.

At the Zionists’ Biltmore Conference in New York in May 1942 the demand was first made explicitly for a Jewish state. This was when the death mills of Auschwitz were in full operation. As Noah Lucas observed Ben Gurion was determined that

‘The forces unleashed by Hitler in all their horror must be harnessed to the advantage of Zionism. ... By the end of 1942… the struggle for a Jewish state became the primary concern of the movement.’

The Holocaust took second place to statehood. Ben-Gurion’s strategy was that

‘Disaster is strength if channelled to a productive course. The whole trick of Zionism is that it knows how to channel our disaster, not into despondency or degradation, as is the case in the Diaspora, but into a source of creativity and exploitation.’ [The Burning Ground, p. 853]

Beinart observes that the Zionist movement views activists who boycott Israel ‘as a greater threat to Jewish life than white supremacist politicians whose followers attack synagogues’ without reaching any conclusions as to the nature of Zionism itself.

Beinart instinctively grasps that Zionism cannot be reformed internally and that Israel is headed on a path that will lead to it becoming a pariah. However he still clings to the myths of Zionism and its origins. It is this which leads him to characterise the situation as a conflict of 2 people, to be solved by a binational state.

None of his Zionist critics comes to grip with Beinart’s arguments as to the consequence of Israel’s occupation. They prefer to attack the messenger. However a binational state would simply replicate the present problems of racism and segregation it would not overcome them. It would channel religious sectarianism into legal channels.

The only solution is on the lines of South Africa. A single unitary state enabled joint Black-White participation in political movements. That is what is necessary in a new Israel/Palestine. Jews and Arabs should be members of political parties because, like most of the world, they share the same political beliefs.  Their ethnicity or religion should be irrelevant but in a Jewish state or even a binational state you would have Jewish and non-Jewish parties.

The significance of Beinart’s article is considerable but lies not in terms of heralding a split in the American Zionist movement. What it does do is provide legitimation for the increasing number of Jews who have become disillusioned with Israel. It helps to bring the argument for de-Zionisation of Israel into the mainstream.

The same rules apply to Israeli society as any other class society. If you give power and privilege to one section of the population and base the very existence of the state on that section, don’t expect the outcome to be any different from that in any other racist states. As in Israel today, ruling elites will always deploy racism as a method of ensuring the loyalty of the masses.

Beinart’s analysis still shies away from understanding that Zionism was flawed from the outset, not simply in terms of the Palestinians but for Jews too.  Zionism began by an acceptance of anti-Semitism and this was its original sin, its mark of Cain.

Tony Greenstein