Jeremy Corbyn’s Arrogance & Disdain for Democracy Plus His Belief That He Alone Can Lead Your Party Is Destroying It

We Are Seeing a Repeat of Corbyn’s Disastrous Labour Leadership - He Has Learnt Nothing From His Expulsion of Anti-Zionists & Betrayal of Comrades

Corbyn's Car Crash Interview on London Politics Program 2 November 2025

The following blog is, as the title suggests, extremely critical of Jeremy Corbyn and his behaviour in the formation of Your Party and his treatment of Zarah Sultana. I do not expect those who substitute hero worship for critical analysis to understand or accept what I write. I hope though that before denouncing what I write that people take the time to read what I say.

Reason can never defeat blind faith. That is the secret of religion.  But for those who are open to rational argument the case I make is powerful. No one can defend Corbyn's behaviour as leader of the Labour Party in dancing to the Zionist tune. In years to come no one will defend his obstinacy, delay tactics and undemocratic practices in Your Party. What will seem obvious in the future eludes many people now.

Bob Dylan's I Threw It All Away Could be Corbyn's Signature Tune

Your Party started out with a massive advantage. Within weeks it had 800,000 potential supporters yet Corbyn by his petulance and nepotism has thrown it all away.

With Reform and Authoritarianism growing day by day the need for a strong socialist and left wing party is overwhelming. Corbyn's refusal to subordinate his own prejudices and whims to that of the movement is indefensible. His rejection of a co-leadership with a young enthusiastic MP is nothing short of selfish and outrageous.

His wife, Laura Alvarez is said to be concerned about Corbyn's legacy. Ironically Corbyn's legacy will be one of failure, of someone who dithered, delayed and procrastinated when decisiveness was required. He will be seen to have betrayed not only his comrades like Ken Livingstone but also his own past reputation.  

It is a living tragedy and those who are blinded by idol worship will rue the day they didn't sit down and ask themselves how it is that Corbyn never once fought the Right when he became leader and today is repeating the same trick. Corbyn is singlehandedly sinking YP by refusing to accept that maybe being the sole leader of YP isn't his by right.

For the past few weeks Your Party has become obsessed with its own internal elections for the Central Executive Committee. It is as if the world outside, the deproscription of Palestine Action and the acquittals of the Filton 24 had never happened. The looming war on Iran is barely discussed.

I have been bombarded with increasingly frantic messages from Corbyn’s Peace & Justice Project [PJP] saying that if The Many slate, don’t win the internal elections then Your Party is doomed.

The latest message, sent on Sunday, says that ‘Jeremy Corbyn needs your help’ and that if I don’t vote for his slate then YP

is in real danger of becoming... an angry fringe party that conducts purity tests at the door and rails against potential allies.’

On 22 January I receive a mailshot from PJP, calling on me to endorse Corbyn from info@thecorbynproject.com.

On February 2 I was told that the Many ‘will make Jeremy Your Party’s Parliamentary Leader’ ignoring a ballot of members in favour of a collective leadership. It is ironic that in Parliament Corbyn describes himself as an Independent not a Your Party MP.

On February 4 another mailshot explained that ‘Jeremy is uniquely placed for this role’ because of his ’record of moral clarity’. It didn’t mention his disastrous Labour Party leadership when he threw away victory by appeasing the Right.

On February 9 I was told that ‘Your Party [could[ become(s) the broad, inclusive party.’ On February 15 it was ‘make or break for Your Party’. The choice being between ‘A mass socialist party’ or ‘A narrow fringe party.’

Last Friday they told me that ‘The next three days will decide if Your Party survives as a viable political force.’ 

Leaving aside the increasingly frenetic nature of these messages I wonder how the PJP/ Corbyn Project have obtained my email address. I never joined PJP. Corbyn’s election campaign has had access to the YP mailing list because Karie Murphy and his wife Laura Alvarez, the power behind the throne, are running the elections, debarring candidates and doing their best to fix the results.

Were other candidates given the chance of mailing YP members or was it just Corbyn’s slate? This is a corrupt election practice. Murphy has never been elected. She’s accountable to no one yet she makes the decisions. This is Corbyn's idea of democracy.

I have had no mailshot from anyone else. Everyone else standing for election has had to make do as best they can.

There are some good people on The Many slate like ex-MP Laura Smith and there are also abusive characters like Terry Deans. I don’t like slates because they are all or nothing but a group that talks about fairness and equality has seized control of YP’s machine and is being anything but fair.

Corbyn is guilty of the same undemocratic practices which led to his failed leadership of the Labour Party. His strategy of appeasing Tom Watson and the Labour/Zionist Right led to his defeat and has warped his judgement. What made it truly laughable was his final act of proposing Tom Watson's elevation to the House of Lords.

The Corbyn I met and worked with in 1983, a young Bennite MP, is not the same as today’s Corbyn. Then he was a sponsor of the Labour Committee on Palestine, later to become the Labour Movement Campaign on Palestine, of which I was Chair. He supported a democratic, secular state in Palestine and Chaired a Labour Movement Conference that called for the disaffiliation of Poalei Zion (now the Jewish Labour Movement) from the Labour Party.

Corbyn praising the Father of Israel's Nuclear Bomb Shimon Peres - A Thorough Going Racist

When Corbyn was elected Leader of the Labour Party in 2015 the first thing he did was to act as the JLM’s messenger boy. Regular meetings with Jeremy Newmark, the corrupt leader of the JLM. Speaking at the Labour Friends of Israel fringe meeting in 2016 was part of his wooing the Zionists.

Corbyn trumps his ‘moral clarity’ and peace mongering but politically he is very weak. He doesn’t link war to capitalism and imperialism and doesn’t oppose Zionism as a settler colonial movement whose project, a Jewish State, means a state of Jewish Supremacy.

Zionism is not a fluffy form of Jewish identity. Zionism demands that Palestinian villages are razed to the ground to be replaced by Jewish settlements. They call it ‘redeeming the land.’ When the Zionist Opposition leader, Yair Lapid says that what he wants is ‘maximum Jews, maximum land and minimum Arabs’ he is articulating the politics of Zionism.

When over half of Israeli Jews call marrying a non-Jew ‘national treason’ and when marrying a Palestinian is a social taboo in Israel (it is impossible for a Jew and non-Jew to marry in Israel) we are in Nuremberg territory, as Hannah Arendt pointed out in Eichmann in Jerusalem.

The Nazis’ 1935 Nuremberg race laws made marriage between a Jew and an Aryan a crime. Yet despite this Corbyn refuses to call himself an anti-Zionist whereas Zarah Sultana has unequivocally stated that she is an anti-Zionist. Instead of joining with her Corbyn insists he supports the right of the Israeli Apartheid state to continue.

The survey was conducted, not in 2023 but 2003. It demonstrates the depth of racism in the ‘Jewish’ State. The poll  found that over 75% did not approve of apartment buildings being shared between Arabs and Jews. 60% said they would not allow an Arab to visit their home.

About 40% of participants agreed that “Arabs should have their right to vote for Knesset revoked”. Over half agreed that Israel should encourage its Arab citizens to emigrate. Over half said they would not want to work under the direct management of an Arab, and 55% said “Arabs and Jews should be separated at entertainment sites”. This is Zionism.

After 40 years of supporting the Palestinians Corbyn still hasn’t worked out why Israel is like it is.  He still supports a two state solution not a single, non-racist unitary state.

It is as if, in the day of South Africa Apartheid he were to support a separate White state. Did Corbyn condemn the human rights record of the Apartheid state but say that you couldn’t oppose Apartheid because it was a movement of White identity?

No one would have bought this nonsense for a moment but Corbyn refuses to oppose Zionism. His peace and love stuff is a cop out, a way of politically avoiding saying that a Jewish settler state is a racist state. 

The ‘Anti-Semitism Witchhunt’

In April 2020 a Report which originated as an internal, 860-page dossier, by staff in the final days of Corbyn's leadership, was leaked. It was a direct response to the EHRC investigation into allegations of ‘anti-Semitism’.

It included extensive, unredacted WhatsApp messages and emails from senior Labour Party staff who were opposed to Corbyn's leadership. These messages contained racist and sexist comments about Corbyn supporters and demonstrated how these staff had, under Iain McNicol, deliberately tried to sabotage the Labour Party’s electoral prospects.

The Witchhunter's Dirty Tricks Included Fixing the Composition of the National Constitutional Committee

The report was aimed at showing that Corbyn and his Leader of the Opposition Staff had done all they could to combat ‘anti-Semitism’. It never challenged the idea that the ‘anti-Semitism smear campaign’ had itself been fraudulent. This was its major political weakness and this was central to Corbyn’s inability to rebut the ‘anti-Semitism’ attacks.  See my two blogs on the Leaked Report here and here.

Corbyn's office ended up urging that the expulsions be carried out more quickly

The report was never submitted to the EHRC on legal advice. Prepared in March 2020 it was leaked to the media in April 2020, shortly after Starmer became leader. The leak triggered an inquiry led by Martin Forde QC (the Forde Report) which Starmer did his best to close down and then ignore.

Starmer launched expensive legal proceedings against those he thought had leaked the Report. He wasn’t concerned about the virulent racism and sexism of people like Emily Oldknow, John Stolliday and others – both of whom were employed later by the right-wing leadership of UNISON.

In a good example of genuine anti-Semitism my Jewish sounding name was used as a 'search term' on activists

In these extracts from the Labour Leaked Report two things stand out:

i.                   Corbyn’s close relationship with the JLM.

ii.                Corbyn’s refusal even to countenance the possibility that the ‘anti-Semitism’ that the JLM and Labour Right were talking about was anti-Zionism, opposition to the Israeli state.

Corbyn showed a complete lack of judgement. When I was suspended in March 2016 I had one message. It was that Jackie Walker and myself were not the real target. We were collateral damage. The real target was Corbyn. The Zionists made no attempt to disguise their hatred of Corbyn yet he was blissfully unaware. This was unforgiveable.

Corbyn had been around the Palestine solidarity movement long enough to know that ‘anti-Semitism’ was the first resort of the Zionists to any criticism.

Even Len McLuskey, whose own role was disgraceful, twigged that something was wrong when he wrote in Huffington Post in August 2018 that the Board of Deputies and JLM ‘are refusing to take yes for an answer’. Whatever concessions Corbyn made they wanted more – his scalp.

The JLM was dead up till 2015. When Corbyn was elected leader it was refounded for the sole purpose of leading the campaign to remove Corbyn. Asa Winstanley, in an article which led to his suspension, described how Jeremy Newmark and a key Israeli Embassy operative explained how“a bunch of us sat in a coffee shop in Golders Green” around September 2015 to“talk about re-forming the JLM to do something with it.’

Despite appeasing and acting as their errand boy, the JLM passed a motion of no confidence in Corbyn, days after he had begged them not to disaffiliate from the Labour Party. A bogus threat designed to win them sympathy.

Corbyn’s ‘strategy’ was to retreat, apologise and promise to do better. However the JLM had no intention of letting up because their explicit aim was removing Corbyn altogether.

Chris Williamson was the ONLY Labour MP to oppose the 'anti-Semitism' witchhunt

18 months ago Jackie Walker, Chris Williamson, myself and others wrote to Corbyn saying that it was time to admit that thousands of Labour members had been victim of false allegations of anti-Semitism and that if he had fought back against the Zionists he might have been Prime Minister.

Corbyn refused to respond, despite two reminders. To this day Corbyn has refused to accept that he made any mistakes in throwing his political friends overboard.

It is this which explains his witchhunting today. Corbyn has a bad conscience over how he behaved when he was leader of the Labour Party. He cannot come to terms with the fact that instead of appeasing the Zionists and their false anti-Semitism allegations he should have fought them.

Corbyn betrayed those who had stuck out their necks to support him. Not only did Corbyn say nothing over the expulsions of Jackie Walker, Marc Wadsworth or myself but he actually urged that our expulsions be sped up.

Corbyn betrayal of Ken Livingstone, the former leader of the Greater London Council, was shameful. Livingstone had stuck his neck out to defend Corbyn. He had repeatedly come to Corbyn’s rescue but Corbyn didn’t lift so much as a finger to support him. Instead he cast him to the wolves and John Mann.

Nothing that Livingstone had said, about the Nazis supporting Zionism was wrong. Hitler had supported the Ha’avara trade agreement between the Zionists and the Nazis when sections of the Nazi party had opposed it. Livingstone was forced out of the Labour Party for raising a historical fact. See my debate with Google’s AI!

When I was interviewed by Vanessa Feltz on BBC London, (Feltz had conducted the original interview with Livingstone), I made mincemeat of her. Yet Corbyn apologised to all his critics.

When the Zionists targeted Chris Williamson, Corbyn’s most ardent supporter in the Parliamentary Labour Party, who alone of the Campaign Group understood what the ‘anti-Semitism’ witchhunt was really about, he too was betrayed.

Corbyn refused to stand up for Williamson when Tom Watson organised a campaign to resuspend Chris.

I don’t know what went through Corbyn’s head at this time. He shied away from any confrontation with the Labour Right. With General Secretary Jennie Formby he stepped up the expulsion of any critic of Israel who fell foul of the Zionists. Anne Mitchell, the Secretary of Brighton and Hove PSC, was expelled for criticising Israel. It was  obvious to us what was happening. Corbyn however saw nothing.

At the 2018 Labour Party Conference Corbyn opposed the Open Selection of Labour MPs and got Len McLuskey to break his mandate. As I wrote at the time, this marked the death of the Corbyn Project. Corbyn was protecting the Right.

In 2019 he and Jennie Formby sought to speed up the witchhunt of socialists and so they proposed a ‘fast track’ system whereby anti-Semitism cases would be dealt with without even a hearing, thus avoiding the National Constitutional Committee.

At conference delegates were told that only the most ‘egregious’ cases would be dealt with in this way. This was a lie.  Every single anti-Semitism case was fast-tracked.

In an interview with Middle East Eye in June 20 Corbyn said:

“I then realised there was a logjam building up in the party on individual cases. And so I proposed the expansion of the National Constitutional Committee, which was duly done in order to deal with cases more quickly. I also introduced a system where egregious cases could be dealt with very quickly, but still within the ambit of rules of natural justice. So I feel that the attacks on me have been extremely unfair on this.”

How could expelling people without a hearing be compatible with natural justice? This was an egregious lie. From then on the NCC did not deal with any ‘anti-Semitism’ cases. You were accused, asked for a response and then expelled.

This self-serving lie demonstrated, even after the election of Starmer, that Corbyn still did not understand what had happened. He still thought the allegations of ‘anti-Semitism’ were genuine. This is the man who believes that he is capable of leading Your Party when the reality is that he would cave in at the first whiff of ‘anti-Semitism’ being alleged.

The Formation of Your Party, Zarah and Karie

When Zarah Sultana resigned the Labour Whip and announced that she and Corbyn would be co-leaders immediately 70,000 people expressed an interest in joining a new party. Within weeks this had grown to 800,000. But equally soon people became disillusioned with Corbyn's delaying tactics and prolonged sulks. See I quit Alba to join Your Party (but I resigned)

Corbyn had dithered and delayed for months in announcing the formation of a new party. Zarah bounced Corbyn into it. Instead of being grateful he resented this upstart secular Muslim woman and turned for solace to the male Muslim MPs, who also told him that he should work with Zarah.

Frustration at Corbyn’s behaviour and his reliance on his old failed advisors led to Jamie Driscoll’s defection to the Green Party and the withdrawal altogether of Andrew Feinstein who gained over 7,000 votes against Starmer in the General Election.

Corbyn’s behaviour has been that of a petulant spoilt child. He prefers to make Your Party his plaything rather than work together with Zarah as joint leaders. He forced the ballot on the method of leadership and when the outcome of the vote was not to his liking he announces that he is going to ignore it.

If the membership had been offered the choice of co-leadership I have no doubt they would have voted for that but his mate Karie Murphy chose the questions.

Despite conference voting that people can be members of two parties Murphy has been expelling people deemed members of another party and some who aren’t members.

I accept that if someone is a member of a party standing candidates against YP or using YP to recruit to their sect there is a problem. However the way to deal with it is not through bureaucratic expulsions but by building a mass membership.

The worst indictment against Corbyn is that instead of agreeing a temporary interim civil service in YP consisting of supporters of both him and Zarah, he inserted Murphy, his wife and other advisors into YP’s central office, wherever that is, and they made the decisions without any accountability.

I have no faith whatever in a party led by Corbyn because Corbyn has shown that he cannot stand up to the Right.

Corbyn's Car Crash interview on BBC London Politics

In November Jackie Walker and myself sent an Open Letter to Corbyn explaining why we couldn’t support him as sole leader of Your Party. This was based on a car crash interview with Samantha Simmonds on BBC London Politics Show. When questioned about the ‘anti-Semitism’ smear campaign instead of rebutting the whole premise he accepted the framing and simply explained that he did his utmost to get rid of those the Zionists demanded.

Corbyn is incapable, even in the middle of a Zionist genocide, of understanding that Zionism doesn’t oppose genuine anti-Semites, it works with them. See ‘Two Jewish activists withdraw support for Corbyn’s Your Party bid over ‘unlearned lessons’

Even if the Grassroots slate and the Independents win it’s hard to see how YP will recover from the sabotage of Karie Murphy, Laura Alvarez and Corbyn. They have completely lost momentum, have driven thousands of socialists into the pro-capitalist, pro-NATO Green Party and have disillusioned those who believed Your Party (whose name should have been Left Party) was a feasible project.

Your Party had a chance of becoming a significant socialist alternative, not just to the Labour Party but to  Reform.  Thanks to Corbyn they have blown it.

Tony Greenstein

Why You Can’t Be a Genuine Supporter of the Palestinians Unless You Are Anti-Zionist

 Just as Supporters of Black Liberation in South Africa Opposed Apartheid, Supporters of the Palestinians Must Oppose Zionism and Israel as a ‘Jewish’ State

This is the logic of Zionism – if you believe in universal values then you are no better than the Jews who perished in the gas chamber – indeed it is a pity that you weren’t among them

I have written many hundreds of articles, thousands if you count my blogs, but my article in today’s Electronic Intifada Only anti-Zionists are real supporters of Palestine is one of the most important, I have written.

I have long grappled with the question as to why it was that those who purported to support the Palestinians in the Labour Party, gave their support to an ‘anti-Semitism’ smear campaign, whose sole purpose was to remove Jeremy Corbyn as leader because of his support for the Palestinians.

On 11 April 2016, I wrote to Ben Soffa, Secretary of Palestine Solidarity Campaign about the Zionists’ ‘anti-Semitism’ smear campaign. Rereading it today it seems prescient.

Despite initiatives from a number of Jewish groups… to stem the [anti-Semitism] attacks from the Board of Deputies, the BBC and the Guardian in particular, there has been complete silence from PSC. PSC prides itself on being the largest solidarity organisation in Britain. The Executive boasted in its Annual Report that it had contacted 1,042 candidates at the General Election, yet it hasn’t seen fit to contact any Labour parliamentarians to speak up against the attacks of the Zionists and the Labour Right… 

Why haven’t you for example organised a large public meeting on the issue with say Ken Livingstone and a sympathetic MP as speakers or issued press releases, produced leaflets, called press conferences, pressed for articles in the Opinion columns of the quality press etc?  I know that PSC is renowned for its caution and timidity but there must be some limits to this….

PSC has resources that other groups do not…. It is inexcusable that it has done absolutely nothing to respond to the Zionists daily attacks. …

… Part of the problem is undoubtedly the political weakness of PSC, which supports the Palestinians whilst not opposing Zionism. Historically PSC has prefered to act as a campaigning group around human rights whilst avoiding thorny issues such as Zionism and anti-Semitism. 

The ceaseless political attack by the Zionists on support for the Palestinians in the LP cannot simply be ignored.  They will not go away because their campaign is linked with the determination of the Right in the LP to remove Corbyn.  ‘Anti-Semitism’ is their weapon of choice….

Until Jeremy Corbyn firmly rebuts his critics he will continue to come under attack.  Appeasement rarely works.  It is no use Corbyn saying that he opposes anti-Semitism because what he means by anti-Semitism and the Zionists mean by it are two different things.… Until Corbyn speaks out saying that yes he opposes anti-Semitism but yes he supports the Palestinians, including the Boycott of Israel, giving chapter and verse on why Israel is a racist and apartheid state, then the attacks will continue.

Ben Soffa’s response oozed complacency. He began his letter to me of 20 April 2016 by quoting the 2010 Report of the Reut Institute.

A central objective is to change this situation by forcing them [Palestine solidarity organisations] to 'play defense'.

This means systematically exposing information about delegitimizers, their activities, and the organizations that they operate out of. The goal is to eventually frame them, depending on their agendas, as anti-peace, anti-Semitic, dishonest purveyors of double standards.

Despite saying that ‘It is clear that the upsurge in attempts to link support for the rights of the Palestinian people with anti-Semitism requires a new a concerted response.’ Soffa went on to say that

… I make no apology for the fact that we do not engage in every debate some would wish to involve us in. As the Reut Institute set out, there is a plan to force us to 'play defence' on the terrain chosen by those wishing to preserve the status quo in Palestine. We must not fall into the trap of allowing our opponents to set our agenda, which is precisely why PSC chooses to make the intervention we feel are most helpful to the situation, rather than seeking to make every intervention which might be possible…

There is much work to be done, but it is also not necessarily most effective for PSC to be the organisation leading on all aspects of this.

The problem with not engaging with the ‘anti-Semitism’ smear campaign was that it didn’t then go away. What it did mean was Britain’s largest Palestine solidarity group was absent from the fight against the Zionist lobby and their allies, the Labour Right.

There is good reason to believe that PSC did not want to align itself with the Corbyn left since their strategy involved aligning and working with those bitterly opposed to Corbyn. The problem with this was that the Labour Right, even those like Nisa Nandy who professed to support the Palestinians, would willingly throw the Palestinians under the bus to get rid of Corbyn.

Almost all the trade unions affiliated to Palestine Solidarity Campaign, who proudly use their affiliation as ‘proof’ that they support the Palestinians, were at one and the same time supporting the IHRA ‘definition’ of anti-Semitism and the Jewish Labour Movement. The IHRA’s sole purpose was to label supporters of the Palestinians as anti-Semitic.

Lisa Nandy's Concern for Palestinian Children's Rights Didn't Prevent Her 'Barnstorming' Speech to Labour Friends of Israel - PSC was happy to provide a Platform for these Creatures

In some unions like the GMB, the IHRA has been used to expel genuine supporters of the Palestinians like Bert Schouwenburg.

Even the most stupid trade union leaders, like Gary Smith or Sharon Graham, understand the purpose behind the IHRA. Nearly all of the IHRA’s examples of ‘anti-Semitism’ involved opposition to Israel and Zionism. It completely ignored the genuine anti-Semitism of the far-right, yet PSC took a conscious decision not to raise the IHRA with its trade union affiliates.

Since PSC never asked anything of Nandy, Thornberry et al. they got nothing back except platitudes

When PSC held a trade union conference in 2019 Director Ben Jamal asked me to leave because I had distributed leaflets opposing the IHRA. Why is it that PSC is so reluctant to raise ‘difficult issues’ like the weaponisation of anti-Semitism with trade unions? Why does PSC value affiliations which are politically worthless?

First She was Chair of Labour Friends of Palestine

The conclusions I reached don’t make for easy reading but we have to face up to unpleasant truths. The trade unions, with the support of PSC, were able to proclaim their support for the Palestinians at one and the same time as they supported a Jewish Supremacist state.

and then a regular on PSC Platforms

As Jesus wisely observed you cannot serve two masters, God and Mammon. You have to make a choice between opposition to Israeli settler colonialism and support for the Palestinians or support for Israel as a Jewish State.

and then the JLM's preferred candidate for leader

PSC has chosen to ride two horses which is why it is ineffectual politically. On the one hand it supports the Palestinians and on the other it refuses to challenge the imperialist neo-colonial narrative of support for the two state solution. It doesn’t even challenge the anti-Semitism narrative that says Jews are an oppressed group still less argue that Israel as a ‘Jewish’ state must inevitably be a racist state.

PSC has failed to master the art of riding 2 horses at the same time

The result is that PSC’s narrative is entirely incoherent and all that it can do is point to Israel’s human rights abuses. That of course is fine but how is PSC different from a human rights NGO such as War on Want? In many ways PSC is less effective than WOW.

When it came to supporting Corbyn against the Zionists PSC was conspicuous by its absence. PSC put up no opposition to the Zionists’ anti-Corbyn campaign for fear of upsetting trade union leaders and the Labour Right. PSC abandoned Palestinian supporters inside the Labour Party. They left the field clear to the Zionists.

Anyone claiming to support both Black people in South Africa and Apartheid would have been ridiculed yet today you have large numbers of people who claim to both support the Palestinians and the Israeli state. Quite simply you cannot support the Executioner and the Condemned Man – politics is about making choices not compromises.

No one was too opportunistic or right-wing to go on PSC's platforms

Today supporters of a two state solution are in reality supporters of an Apartheid Solution in Palestine. They are supporting the continuing existence of a state based on ethnic cleansing whilst at the same time supporting their victims. The time has come for genuine supporters of the Palestinians to say to groups like PSC that you have to make a choice. You cannot continue to try and ride two horses.

I resigned from PSC in 2021 when it adopted a Constitution which abandoned opposition to Zionism. PSC did this with the support of the Socialist Workers Party and others who claim to be on the left.

I hope that my article stimulates the discussion that is necessary if we are going to see a strategic change of direction for the Palestine solidarity movement in Britain. PSC’s ‘strategy’ of ‘mainstreaming’ is dead in the water. The British Establishment is wedded to support for Zionism, as it has been for over a century. No amount of rational argument will change the minds of racists like Robert Jenrick.

I am grateful to Electronic Intifada, the most important Palestinian news site there is, for carrying my article.

Tony Greenstein

Only anti-Zionists are real supporters of Palestine

Tony Greenstein The Electronic Intifada 3 October 2023

Britain’s Palestine solidarity movement is at a crossroads. Loredana Sangiuliano ZUMA Press

The statement that you can’t be a supporter of the Palestinians unless you are an anti-Zionist may seem dogmatic, even sectarian to some.

But it is the failure of Britain’s Palestine solidarity movement to understand this simple truth which is responsible for so many of our recent setbacks. It is this which has enabled the successful weaponization of anti-Semitism.

Subjectively speaking, it is perfectly possible to support the Palestinians and the “right of Israel to exist” at the same time. In theory, there was no reason at all why good men and women could not sit down and draw the boundaries of a two-state solution equitable to all.

There was only one problem. Such a solution failed to take into account the dynamics of settler-colonialism and of Zionism in particular.

Many supporters of the British Empire, liberal imperialists such as Thomas MacCaulay and the Labour Party Fabians, really did believe that there could be a benevolent imperialism that was compatible with supporting the rights of the colonized. It was called “trusteeship.”

Moving from PSC to Labour Friends of Israel is effortless for Emily Thornberry because PSC asks so little of its speakers

Many honest people believed that the colonies were the “White Man’s Burden,” as the British novelist and poet Rudyard Kipling infamously put it, and that we were only in India and Africa out of the goodness of our hearts.

The Church Missionary Society and people like John Philip would have been aghast if you had accused them of supporting white supremacy. Yet that is what they did.

Thornberry repays PSC's invitation by attacking BDS to Israeli Embassy Group Labour Friends of Israel

Holding contradictory ideas inside one’s head is what most people do, for much of the time. It’s called “cognitive dissonance” or as George Orwell termed it, “doublethink.”

However, for a solidarity organization to do the same renders its task impossible. Sooner or later a choice has to be made.

Solidarity with the Palestinians, although it involves opposing many egregious abuses of human rights, is not at bottom a question of human rights. Just as apartheid in South Africa was not primarily about human rights but Black liberation from white minority rule, so too is the Palestinian question primarily about liberation from Zionism and a state of Jewish supremacy.

PSC climbdown

In 2022 I resigned, for the second time, from the organization I had helped found, the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, because it had adopted in March of that year a new constitution which eliminated its previous opposition to Zionism. If the truth be told, opposition to Zionism had long been abandoned by PSC. But by removing this from its constitution PSC made explicit what before had been implicit.

Prior to its March 2022 annual general meeting (when the PSC executive railroaded through the changes) the PSC’s old constitution had included an unambiguous clause stating that one of the group’s objectives was “opposition to racism, including … the apartheid and Zionist nature of the Israeli state.”

The new constitution has watered this down significantly, stating only that Israel’s system of apartheid and settler colonialism is “motivated by Zionism,” without explaining PSC’s position on Zionism. The argument privately used by the PSC to “justify” this change was that Zionism means different things to different people.

Zionism is the racist creed and movement which led to the dispossession and expulsion of the Palestinians.

It was the failure of former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and much of the Labour left to combine support for the Palestinians with opposition to Zionism that was their Achilles’ heel. It was no surprise that the Jewish Labour Movement and its faithful poodle Jon Lansman wanted to abolish any mention of Zionism.

Their reasoning was that some people used the term “Zionist” when they really meant “Jew.” But it was the Zionists themselves who had deliberately sought to confuse the distinction in the minds of people.

Their other argument was that “Zionism” covered a multitude of sins – from left to right, obscuring the fact that all wings of Zionism agreed on establishing a Jewish state with a large majority of Jews.

Corbyn was undoubtedly a supporter of the Palestinians but he had no understanding of Zionism and could not therefore explain why or how the Palestinians had become marginalized and oppressed in Israel.

Appeasement

When the “anti-Semitism” campaign first began, Corbyn effectively became a Zionist.

He supported a Palestinian state but also recognized the legitimacy of the Jewish Labour Movement’s claim to represent Jews in the Labour Party. Instead of seeing the JLM as a lobby group, the primary purpose of which was support for the Israeli state and therefore the oppression of the Palestinians, Corbyn accepted that the group’s purported concerns about anti-Semitism were genuine.

There was absolutely no excuse for Corbyn’s pathetic response to the JLM and the Board of Deputies of British Jews (another pro-Israel group which led the “anti-Semitism” campaign against him).

Having spent 30 years as a campaigner for Palestinian rights, Corbyn above all was familiar with the Zionist accusation of “anti-Semitism.” Yet when he became leader he forgot all of this.

Support for the two-state solution enabled Corbyn to both support the Zionists and support the Palestinians. Saying, as he did, that there was a place for both Zionists and anti-Zionists in Labour was in effect saying there was a place for both racists and anti-racists in the party.

Corbyn’s human rights concerns disappeared as he lent his support to the very organization, the JLM, which was formed to remove him.

Those who accept Israel’s “right to exist” accept the legitimacy of Zionism. They fail to understand that a “Jewish” state, as an expansionist ethno-nationalist settler-colonial state, could never accept anything more than a set of mini bantustans.

When Corbyn decided to commission the Chakrabarti inquiry he set the seal on this process. He accepted that there was a problem of anti-Semitism in the Labour Party.

Having appeased the Zionists once, Corbyn went on to appease them repeatedly until he himself became a victim.

The resulting report, authored in 2016 by human rights lawyer Shami Chakrabarti, found no evidence that Labour was dominated by anti-Semitism as was being claimed at the time. Nevertheless, it made some key concessions to this false narrative.

Chakrabarti defined Zionism not as a political creed or movement but as a form of Jewish identity. In so doing she completely failed to understand where the accusations of anti-Semitism were coming from.

She wrote in the report that:

A further complexity comes from left-wing British Jewry, including, but not exclusively, young people becoming increasingly critical of, and disenchanted with, Israeli government policy in relation to settlements in the West Bank and the bombardment of Gaza in particular. This has led to some people personally redefining their Zionism in ways that appear to grant less support to the state of Israel and more solidarity to fellow Jewish people the world over … It seems to me that it is for all people to self-define their political beliefs and I cannot hope to do justice to the rich range of self-descriptions of both Jewishness or Zionism, even within the Labour Party, that I have heard.

Of course, anyone can self-define their political beliefs and what they understand Zionism means. However, there is no obligation on anyone else to accept such an identity.

The only meaning of Zionism that counts is that of those who suffer its ill effects – the Palestinians. People who define themselves as Zionists tell us nothing other than what is going on in their heads.

Confusion as a badge of honor

The ability to combine both support for the Palestinians with support for Zionism enabled political charlatans like the lawmaker Lisa Nandy to chair Labour Friends of Palestine whilst denouncing opposition to Zionism as anti-Semitic.

Just imagine that someone had said that although they supported the rights of Black South Africans they refused to oppose apartheid. They would have been ridiculed, yet that is precisely what is happening when people claim to support the Palestinians yet refuse to identify as anti-Zionists.

This is why I term support for a two-state solution, with its assumption that a racist “Jewish” state could co-exist alongside a Palestinian state, as support for the continued oppression of the Palestinians.

Jeremy Corbyn, with his support of the two-state solution, made his own political confusion over Palestine into a badge of honor. He also disarmed his supporters and gave confidence to his detractors.

By supporting the state of Israel, Corbyn also supported the idea that Israel was the nation state of the Jews.

If this was the case, and if Jews were indeed a nation, despite living in most of the world’s countries, then clearly Jews have the right to self-determination. Ipso facto, one must welcome Israel’s new neo-Nazi police minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir.

Theirs is the monstrosity that is called Israel.

Instead of calling out the Jewish Labour Movement as supporters of a racist, settler-colonial state, Corbyn bought into the idea that Israel was guilty of nothing more than Jewish nationalism and its opponents were guilty of anti-Semitism. The tragedy was that the Palestinians themselves, in the form of the Palestine Liberation Organization, had abandoned their own anti-Zionism in the belief that Zionism could be confined within only part of historic Palestine – what the Zionists term Eretz Yisrael (Hebrew for the land of Israel).

To say you support the Palestinians while refusing to oppose Zionism, the movement with a primary goal not of fighting anti-Semitism but fighting the native Arab Palestinians, is to accept the left-Zionist narrative of a “conflict” between two peoples, a clash of right vs right. It renders any solution, other than a neo-colonial one, impossible and in practice it means surrendering to the existing power structure in Palestine.

Nowhere is this clearer than in Britain’s trade unions.

Nearly all major trade unions are affiliated to the Palestine Solidarity Campaign. All of them claim to support the Palestinians.

Yet Gail Cartmail, the assistant general secretary of Unite – which calls itself Britain’s leading union – justified banning the film Oh Jeremy Corbyn: The Big Lie and a talk by Asa Winstanley covering his new book Weaponising Anti-Semitism (which documents the fake “anti-Semitism” campaign) all on the grounds that Jews have been hurt and even made afraid by journalism that seeks to tell the truth.

The reality is that by adopting Israel’s twisted definition of anti-Semitism, British unions are facing both ways at the same time. They support the Palestinians yet also support the Jewish Labour Movement and those who took down Corbyn.

The trade unions can only get away with this because supporters of the Palestinians in the Labour Party, including Corbyn, fail to understand how anti-Semitism has been weaponized in the service of state and nation.

Tony Greenstein is the author of Zionism During the Holocaust.

See my blog from January 2020

Without an anti-Zionist critique solidarity with the Palestinians is nothing more than charity