Israel’s Fascist Right is on the march

The Mainstreaming of Israel's Alt-Right

This is an interesting article by Newsweek of all publications.  To listen to the nonsense coming out of racist Labour politicians like Emily Thornberry, Joan Ryan et al, you would think that Israel was the embodiment of western democratic values in the Middle East.  The 'villa in the jungle' to borrow the racist phrase of the last Labour Prime Minister, Ehud Barak.

Yair Lapid is leader of Yesh Atid, a centrist party tipped to be the second largest party in the next Knesset

The reality is that Israel is the most right-wing, racist society on the planet.  It is a society where hatred of Arabs, Africans and non-Jews is visceral.  What is worse is that this hatred is encouraged by a far-Right government which includes a 'Justice Minister' Ayelet Shaked who has advocated genocide.  

This is the consequence of Israel being an ethno-nationalist society, a society based on only part of its population.  A society obsessed with racial purity, because being Jewish in Israel is a national/racial not a religious category.  In Israel race is defined on the basis of religion, something which often confuses people.  To make matters worse the Israeli Jewish population is itself divided between those who define themselves as Israeli first or Jewish first with a majority saying Jewish first.  Not that this matters to Israel's Palestinians because they are excluded from the tent and confined to the margins.

Although the article is well worth reading on the growing influence of Israel’s neo-Nazi far Right although it doesn’t deal with the reason why Israel’s alt-Right is growing so fast.  When Lehava calls for preventing Arab-Jewish relationships they are going with the grain of society.  There is broad consensus in the whole of society that Jewish-Arab relationships are a danger to society, because a Jewish state cannot tolerate large numbers of mixed couples.  That is the nature of the racism of Israeli society.  Mixed relationships, mishlinge, were also a problem for the Nazi state and this one topic consumed most of the time at the Wannsee Conference in 1942 which was devoted to planning the Final Solution.

Lapid is a Zionist consensus, from 'left' to 'right'.  So Yair  Lapid, of the secular centrist Yesh Atid declared that “It bothers me, I admit. I say that if tomorrow my son came to me and said, ‘Dad, I want you to meet Rona, not Rina, and she’s Russian Orthodox or Catholic and we’re getting married and the kids won’t be Jewish’ — would that bother me? It would bother me greatly.'

Israel is a Jewish state, or more accurately a State of the Jews and the Jews are defined as a Jewish Nation.  What that means is that Israel consideres itself a state, not just of its own Jewish citizens but all Jews, wherever they live.  One of the central tasks of Zionism is the 'ingathering of the exiles'

What Israel is not is a state of all of its citizens.  That is why it’s an apartheid state.  Non-Jewish citizens do not have equal right with Jewish citizens.  That is why there is no Israeli nationality but a central Jewish nationality and over 130 other nationalities.

Because a Jewish state means a permanent Jewish majority, the idea of  mixed marriages and a dilution of the primary race is seen as a threat to the state itself.  That is why Lehava thugs patrol areas of Jerusalem unmolested by the Police attacking Arab males who are seen as likely to establish social or personal relations with Jewish women.

The suggestion that Israel can do nothing about Lehava, as the article states, is for the birds.  The article quotes Israeli authorities as saying that ‘there is little they can do to stop Gopstein—that he is protected by free speech.’  Utter nonsense. Israel's Palestinians are closely monitored on social media and any threats they make result in instant arrest.  Of course Jewish abuse is not punished.

For example Dareen Tatour, a Palestinian Israeli poet, was imprisoned and is now under house arrest, because she mentioned ‘resistance’ in an online poem.  The reason Gopstein has not been prosecuted and gaoled is because he is Jewish.  Even when he threatened to burn down churches and mosques he was not arrested. See for example VATICAN CALLS ON A-G TO INDICT EXTREMIST JEWISH LEADER FOLLOWING ENDORSEMENT OF BURNING CHURCHES

Raed Salah, leader of the Northern Muslim League, was convicted of racial hatred and gaoled for 9 months because it was held he made a comparison between Israel’s behaviour and the Jewish blood libel, a comparison which incidentally he disputed.

Nonetheless, despite its weaknesses this article should be read by people as it outlines very well where Israel is now heading.

I also attach an older article beneath it from the Jerusalem Post, when Tzipi Hotovely, who is now acting Foreign Minister of Israel, invited Benzi Gopstein into the Knesset to address a Committee on the 'problem' of combating inter-marriage.  Racism in Israel starts from the top down.

Tony Greenstein

 

Israel’s Alt-Right Is Now Mainstream—Are Lawmakers Doing Enough to Stop It?

By Yardena Schwartz On 3/7/18 at 9:50 AM

American-born rabbi Meir Kahane, founder of the Jewish Defense League, in Jerusalem, where he was known for his extreme views, such as expulsion of all Palestinians on the West Bank. He was assassinated in New York City. David H. Wells/Corbis via Getty

Updated | On November 5, 1990, at a Marriott Hotel on Manhattan’s East Side, Rabbi Meir Kahane had just taken his seat at a Zionist conference when El Sayyid Nosair, a 34-year-old Egyptian-American, shot him in the neck. Hours later, the Brooklyn-born rabbi—known as the most racist politician in Israeli history—was pronounced dead.

Most Israelis didn’t mourn. Two years before, the Israeli government had banned his political party, Kach, for its anti-Arab platform. Kahane had called for the forced expulsion of the millions of Arabs living in Israel, whom he often referred to as “dogs.” As the Israeli writer Yossi Klein Halevi puts it, “Kahane turned his political agenda into a kind of Jewish jihad with an explicitly religious, apocalyptic message.”

Yet 27 years after Kahane’s murder, on another November evening, hundreds of Israelis gathered in West Jerusalem to commemorate the anniversary of his death. It was one of 25 such events held throughout Israel that week. At the podium, Jewish extremists took turns praising the rabbi, calling him a righteous prophet whose politics were ahead of his time.

Among those in attendance: Kahane’s prodigy and successor, Ben Zion “Bentzi” Gopstein. In 2005, he established Lehava, a nonprofit whose Hebrew name translates to “preventing assimilation in the Holy Land.” Gopstein’s group sends patrols of young men to “defend” Jewish women from Arabs. It also runs a hotline for people to report Jews having interfaith relationships, or renting or selling apartments to Israeli Arabs. Lehava has grown into the largest radical right-wing organization in Israel, with chapters in every city and more than 10,000 registered members—most of them young adults and teenagers. The group spreads its message and recruits members in schools, city streets and community centers.

Though Gopstein operates under the guise of fighting assimilation—a cause familiar to many American Jews—his critics argue that mission is just a front. Lehava, they say, is as dangerous as Kach. And like Kahane before him, Gopstein is rallying people around the goal of expelling Palestinians from Israel and the West Bank.

Benzi Gopstein, Israeli leader of the extreme right-wing movement Lehava, poses on August 11, 2015, in Jerusalem. Israel police had questioned him after he condoned torching churches amid an uproar over hate crimes, including the deadly firebombing of a Palestinian home. MENAHEM KAHANA/AFP/Getty

But unlike Kahane’s views, which stood on the margins of Israeli society, Gopstein’s perspective has become mainstream—a shift, analysts say, that reflects Israelis’ dwindling faith in the prospect of peace with the Palestinians.

Critics argue that Israeli lawmakers have also enabled Lehava, even as they’ve demonized left-leaning human rights groups. Yet Israeli authorities say there is little they can do to stop Gopstein—that he is protected by free speech, and because his group is a nongovernmental organization, it has avoided the legal restrictions placed on Kahane’s political party. “Lehava is doing this very smartly,” says Tehilla Shwartz-Altshuler, a law professor at Hebrew University and a senior fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute, a Jerusalem-based think tank.

But the group’s critics aren’t giving up. Last fall, the state attorney’s office announced its intention to indict Gopstein on charges of incitement to violence, racism and terrorism, along with obstruction of justice, pending a prehearing. (The charges all relate to statements he’s made in recent years. Among them: that Palestinian men who flirt with Jewish women deserve to be beaten.) Gopstein is still awaiting his prehearing. In the meantime, to the dismay of his distractors, he is a free man, with a large and growing following.

"The Israeli army, the Shin Bet and Mossad, they know how to deal with Muslim terror,” says Gadi Gvaryahu, the chairman of Tag Meir, one of the organizations battling Lehava. “Yet the state of Israel doesn’t know how to deal with right-wing extremists. People like Bentzi Gopstein are more dangerous to Israel than Muslim terror.”

 ‘You Can’t Coexist With Cancer’

Several months ago, I met Gopstein in the lobby of a Jerusalem hotel, and he appeared giddy. A Jewish teenager had just left her Arab lover. Gopstein had been calling her for months, urging her to do so. Now, she finally had—because she was pregnant with his child. Gopstein says this was important because now the baby would be raised Jewish instead of Muslim.

Since founding Lehava, he says, he has “rescued” at least 1,000 girls like her. And in Jerusalem, Lehava activists are known for harassing—and sometimes beating—Palestinian men. Gopstein’s work has sometimes gotten him into trouble. Weeks earlier, police detained him, along with 14 members of Lehava, for threatening Arabs who were dating Jewish women. “Every time they arrest me, more people join my cause,” he says, smiling. In 2016, he was questioned by police after calling Christians bloodsucking vampires who should be expelled from the country. In 2014, he was detained after Lehava members set fire to a joint Jewish and Arab school in Jerusalem. The group also sprayed graffiti on the school’s walls. "You can't coexist with cancer,” it read.

In each of those cases, Gopstein was released the same day. He has never been indicted either. The last time Israeli authorities put him behind bars was in 1994, when the government banned Kahane’s political party. (The ban was in response to a massacre committed by another Kahane prodigy, Baruch Goldstein, who opened fire in Hebron’s Cave of the Patriarchs, killing 29 Muslim worshippers and wounding 125 others.)

The Justice Ministry refused to comment on Gopstein’s case while the investigation is underway. “He’s always been found not guilty because they have nothing,” says Gopstein’s attorney, Itamar Ben Gvir. “They don’t even have one example of Bentzi telling people to commit an attack. Praising Baruch Goldstein [which Gopstein has done] isn’t illegal. You can think it’s an awful thing to say. You can think it’s a wonderful thing to say. That’s a democracy.”

Yet Gopstein’s actions, critics say, speak to his real agenda: anti-Palestinian hatred. “Gopstein wants us to believe that he’s just worried about the future of the Jewish religion, but he’s not,” says Gvaryahu. “We never heard him fight against assimilation in the United States, and here the intermarriage rate is really insignificant.” Indeed, just 2 percent of Jewish Israelis have a non-Jewish spouse, compared with 44 percent in the U.S.

The Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security agency, has a unit for Jewish terrorism, but a spokesman tells me it’s the police’s responsibility to deal with Lehava. Israel Police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld says the local cops have been trying to prevent and respond to violence committed by Gopstein’s activists, but there is only so much they can do. “Police operations take place all year round in connection with Lehava,” Rosenfeld says, speaking in October, shortly after Gopstein’s latest detention. “Those suspects were released after significant evidence was presented against them. The police recommendation was to continue holding them. But at the end of the day, the decision made by the court, unfortunately, is what it is.”

Gopstein’s critics argue that Israel should treat him the same way it treats his Palestinian counterparts. But Israel has a long history of handling Jewish radicals differently. In 1984, the authorities determined that a Jewish militant group was plotting to blow up the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, one of Islam’s holiest shrines. A court convicted 25 Jewish settlers of waging an underground campaign of violence against Arabs in the West Bank and the Golan Heights. All were soon released, except for three who were convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison—but they wound up serving less than seven years. Jewish settlers cheered their return home. And they weren’t the only ones. Many of the Jewish extremists arrested in the 1980s and 1990s quickly re-entered Israeli society, becoming settlement leaders and political activists.

Israeli supporters of Lehava chant slogans outside the wedding hall where an Arab-Israeli man and a Jewish woman got married on August 17, 2014, in the Israeli coastal city of Rishon Letzion. GALI TIBBON/AFP/Getty

More recently, in 2005, a Jewish extremist went to prison for stabbing marchers at Jerusalem’s gay pride parade. In 2015, three weeks after his release, he stabbed a 16-year-old Israeli girl to death at the same event. Gopstein and Lehava activists protested against that parade, calling it an “abomination,” and have continued to protest it every year since. “Israel should put much more into fighting Bentzi,” argues Gvaryahu. “It’s about time.”

Yet Gopstein’s supporters believe the state has treated him too harshly, protecting free speech for Arabs and not for Jews. “What they’re accusing Bentzi of, you can say the same about the Arabs,” says Ben Gvir, Gopstein’s attorney. “Thousands of Arabs praise Palestinian terrorists, and no one is indicting them.”

Human rights groups call that argument absurd. Israel has imprisoned 470 Palestinians for social media incitement since 2015. Among them: the Arab-Israeli poet Dareen Tatour, who was arrested in October 2015, jailed for three months and remains under house arrest for publishing a poem and two Facebook status updates, which her attorneys claim Israeli authorities translated improperly. Tatour was indicted for incitement to violence and support of a terrorist organization.

Some, such as Shwartz-Altshuler, say this disparity is not caused by racism or bias but by outcomes: Because Arabs commit more terrorist attacks against Jews than the other way around, they’re more likely to be convicted of incitement. “The fear is that those incitements on Facebook in Arabic will make someone who sees them take a knife and go stab someone,” says the law professor. “On the other hand, Israeli authorities are well aware of the dangers that movements like Lehava pose to Israeli society”—and yet perhaps less concerned they’ll lead to deadly violence.

But are they doing enough to contain that danger? Jewish extremists have committed some of the most horrific crimes in Israeli history—from Goldstein’s massacre to the murder of Yitzhak Rabin, the prime minister who championed peace with the Palestinians. His assassination—by Yigal Amir, a Jewish radical—came after months of right-wing Jewish incitement against Rabin and his peace efforts. It remains the only assassination of an Israeli head of state in the country’s history.

This poster is indicative of the racism in Israeli elections - a government party promises to campaign against inter-racial sex and relationships

“The fact that Kach was considered a terror organization means that any group stemming from it is essentially also a terrorist group,” argues Fady Khoury, an attorney at Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel.

Unlike the U.S., Israel has no constitution—and so no fundamental right to free speech. Instead, Israeli courts protect this freedom on a case-by-case basis. “The courts are very careful when it comes to pressing criminal charges against people over speech,” says Shwartz-Altshuler. And when it comes to people like Gopstein, the professor claims, “the Supreme Court is more afraid of government censorship than of what Lehava is saying to Israeli society.”

Ultimately, Israel may not have the power to stop Gopstein, since he is not a politician and has not committed any known attacks. “Kahane was not banned from speaking outside the Knesset,” notes Halevi, a senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute and a former member of Kahane’s Jewish Defense League in New York. “A democracy, especially a democracy under siege from constant war and terror, needs to walk a fine line between allowing freedom of speech and ensuring that freedom of speech doesn’t result in violence. Lehava needs to be reined in when it crosses the line. And it has repeatedly crossed the line. At the same time, Lehava’s ideas cannot be banned.”

Hard-Right Turn

In recent years, there have been political efforts to derail Gopstein, but they have largely failed. In 2015, former Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon tried to designate Lehava as a terrorist group. A year later, he was forced out of the government and replaced by Avigdor Lieberman, a hawkish figure who once said that disloyal Arab citizens of Israel should be beheaded. “Extremist and dangerous forces, Ya’alon warned as he resigned, “have taken over Israel.”

Since Kahane’s days, Israel has moved far to the right. Today, according to a recent Pew Research Center poll, 48 percent of Jewish Israelis believe that Israel should expel its Arab citizens, who constitute nearly 20 percent of its population. Twenty years ago, 32 percent of Israelis considered themselves left-wing. Today, that figure is 19 percent, according to the IDI, the Jerusalem-based think tank. A November report by IDI found that 51.5 percent of Jewish Israelis feel that to preserve Israel's Jewish identity, Arabs and Jews should live separately, and 58 percent say that people who aren’t willing to say Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish people should have their citizenship revoked. Today, the government is even considering legislation that some observers say would make Israel’s status as a Jewish-majority state more important than its democratic values. This would be the first step, some observers claim, toward establishing the country Kahane envisioned.

Part of this hard-right shift, analysts say, has to do with the trauma of the violent second intifada, or uprising. Between 2000 and 2005, Israelis lived through a long series of almost daily suicide bombings in cities such as Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. It also reflects a loss of faith in the peace process. After Israel and the Palestinians signed the historic Oslo Accords in 1993, many had hoped the bloody, decades-long conflict would end. Instead, both sides are locked in a stalemate, and Israel has fought two wars with Hamas, the Islamist group that controls Gaza.

Arab-Israeli Muslim groom, Mahmoud Mansour, and his Israeli bride Morel Malcha sit in Mansour's family home in Tel Aviv on August 17, 2014, ahead of their wedding ceremony. Their union was met with extreme protests from Lehava, which militates against the "Jewish assimilation and intermarriage." Daniel Bar-On/AFP/Getty

Gopstein says he’s merely expressing what most Israelis believe, which he insists isn’t racist. "Arabs who accept this state as a Jewish state can stay here. Those who don’t need to leave,” he tells me. “We don’t want to kill Arabs just because they’re Arabs. That’s racism. But Arabs who want to take our country from us? God gave Israel to the Jewish people, and people who don’t believe that shouldn’t be here. ”

A resident of Kiryat Arba, the radical Jewish settlement inside the mostly Palestinian city of Hebron, Gopstein rejects the claim that he encourages or even inspires his followers to commit violence. “I’m against doing illegal things,” he insists. “The solution is not to burn the Arab-Jewish schools; the solution is to close them.” And yet he doesn’t condemn those illegal acts and even defends Goldstein’s Hebron massacre. “I don’t think that what Goldstein did was bad. I just wouldn’t do it myself. He saw Arabs killing his friends and family, and he saw them being happy about their deaths. So he took revenge.”

Gopstein claims to have no interest in following Kahane’s footsteps into politics. Yet his influence is felt, even without him serving in the Israeli parliament. Members of the country’s ruling party have invited him multiple times to speak in the Knesset. The Jerusalem municipality allowed Lehava to post billboards in November, advertising the Kahane memorial and thanking Gopstein for his work. In 2015, the Education Ministry banned an award-winning novel about an Arab-Jewish romance from the national high school curriculum, after Gopstein launched a campaign against it.

Like Kahane, Gopstein’s ultimate dream is an Israel that operates according to Jewish law, or Halacha, where the only Arabs who live there are those loyal to a Jewish theocracy. “At this rate,” he says of Palestinian citizens of Israel, “it’s either us or them.”

This story has updated the titles of Tehilla Shwartz-Altshuler and Fady Khoury​

MKS TOLD MORE EDUCATION IS NEEDED TO COMBAT INTERMARRIAGE

Likud MK Hotovely hosts hearing on marriages between Jewish women, Arab men in honor of Jewish Identity Day in the Knesset

By Rebecca Anna Stoil

Jerusalem Post, February 11, 2011 01:31

Tzipi Hotovely 311. (photo credit: Ariel Jerozolimski)

Marriages between Jewish women and Arab men took center stage at a meeting of the Knesset Committee for the Advancement of Women this week, when committee chairwoman Tzipi Hotovely (Likud) hosted a hearing on the subject in honor of Jewish Identity Day in the Knesset.

“We must confront the fact that the country has not valued education, which is the only way to prevent Jewish women from forging life connections with non-Jews,” Hotovely said.

“The struggle against assimilation only reaches headlines through stories about Jewish women marrying Muslim men, but it is important to remember that the phenomenon is much wider – 92,000 mixed families live in the State of Israel. There is a need to create a curriculum for girls in high schools that deals with Jewish identity. The fact that girls reach a state of intermarriage testifies to the fact that the education system was absent.”

Jewish Identity Day in the Knesset on Tuesday was sponsored by the Tzohar organization and by MK Zevulun Orlev (Habayit Hayehudi), and featured a number of committee meetings, all focusing on aspects of Jewish identity in Israel. But not all the lawmakers thought that the subject was appropriate material for a committee hearing.

“There cannot be a hearing that seeks to determine with whom it is permissible to be married. It is a personal issue – there are things that the state should not be involved with,” complained MK Taleb a-Sanaa (United Arab List-Ta’al). “This hearing gives legitimacy to an anti-democratic and very dangerous situation in which the Knesset is expected to back up Halacha – the concept of Jewish identity does not need to make racism kosher.”

Sanaa elicited a chuckle from fellow MKs when he cited the Bible as proof of his argument.

“Ruth the Moabite wasn’t Jewish, but her descendant was King David,” he said. “I’d like to see what would happen if in France they held a hearing about what happens when Christians marry Jews.”

Yad L’Achim’s Zehava Drori said her organization took care of women who “are affiliated with all kinds of minorities.
“The scale of the problem is very wide – we feel that there is a constant silencing of the phenomenon,” she said.

Yad L’Achim representatives said there was a growing phenomenon of “girls who are converted to Islam without even being aware of the significance of what is happening to them. The sheikh comes to their house, and converts them.”

Under Israeli law, mixed-religion couples cannot be married in Israel, and thus the women are converted to Islam. But the women, said organization representatives, do not understand that their children, though Jews according to Halacha, will be registered as Muslim.

Yad L’Achim says it is currently working with approximately 1,000 women, while in 2008, it only had about 500. Most of the women, it says, came from backgrounds of severe economic or emotional distress.

“It is not racist to oppose intermarriage – marriages between Jewish women and Muslim men are like water and oil,” said Sarit, a Jewish woman who had been married to an Arab man. “It is not racist because they are not bad, but there are differences in mentalities that are impossible to deny.”

Ben-Zion Gopstein of the Lehava organization said that “there are a number of organizations that work with these girls after they ask for help, but we need to reach them before they get to the [Arab] villages.

“This is Lehava’s goal. We go to schools and to entertainment areas and explain to girls what it means to be a Jewish woman. There are those who date and marry Arabs – including those from religious schools, and haredi girls.”

Gopstein said that in one religious girls’ school he had visited in Bat Yam, 20 percent of the girls at the age of 14 were dating Arabs. “The problem is the legitimacy that is given today to intermarriage,” he said.

“The Jewish Agency invests millions in the war against assimilation overseas, but here in Israel, every girl wants to be Bar Refaeli,” he continued, referring to the Israeli supermodel who is dating non-Jewish film star Leonardo DiCaprio.

Gopstein noted that “in this very Knesset, there is an MK who is married to a German man,” a reference to Labor MK Einat Wilf. But, he complained, “it is not politically correct to speak out about it. We don’t discuss this as being unacceptable.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I wrote an article for Jacobin nearly 2 years ago

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

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

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

Gary Spedding

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tony Greenstein