Zionism - an Antidote to Socialism (von Plehve – Czarist Interior Minister)

Despite its Pretensions Socialist Zionism was simply an an attempt to reconcile the irreconcilable – Colonisation and Socialism

On Sunday at 5 pm, I will be giving a talk on my book Zionism During the Holocaust to the Communist Party of Great Britain and I intend to focus in particular on the reactionary and counter-revolutionary role of Zionism amongst the Jews of Europe. You can join using this link

I grew up in a Zionist household with all the myths of Zionism. I learnt that what we now call the Nakba (a word never used) was the Palestinians voluntarily leaving in order to make way for the invading Arab armies.

We were told that far from expelling the Arabs, the Zionists had begged them to stay! What was never mentioned was the use of barrel bombs against the Arab population of Haifa and the fact that they were forced to board ships to flee. Far from wanting to ‘drive the Jews into the sea’ the opposite was the case. It was the Palestinians who were driven into the sea, many of whom drowned.

The Idealised View of the Kibbutzim

Israel was seen as an oasis of socialism in a backward, feudal Arab Middle East. The Kibbutzim were held out as socialism in action and many were the times I was told that far from taking part in struggles here I should go and live on a Kibbutz. Of course I was never told that the Kibbutz was a racially pure institution, which no Arab could become a member of or that they were established as stockade and watchtower settlements on confiscated Arab land.

The myths of Zionism could, by themselves, fill a whole volume.  Today of course people are wiser as the true nature of Zionism has revealed itself with the ascent to power of the Jewish Nazi Jewish Power (Otzma Yehudit) and the assorted freaks of Israel’s far-Right.

What is interesting is how it began. Is it true that when Zionism began amongst the Jewish masses in Czarist Russia that it was a progressive movement that over time has moved to the right? Was Zionism a good idea that turned out badly or was it born with the Mark of Cain?

The strategy of the founder of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, was a simple one. He wanted to establish a Jewish State and from the start he sought to find a partner from one of the imperialist powers. This was a strategy that the Zionist movement never deviated.

In 1917 Great Britain agreed to sponsor the Zionist colonisation of Palestine and it formalised its agreement in the Zionism Haifa Otzma Yehudit Balfour Declaration but before then Herzl had traipsed round the rulers of Europe – from the Ottoman Sultan, the German Kaiser, the Pope, Hungary’s King Victor Emmanuel and the Ministers of Czarist Russia.

Before the advent of Hitler and the Nazis the Czar of Russia was seen by most Jews as the symbol of murderous anti-Semitism. Pogroms against the Jews were seen as a means of diverting the wrath of the masses away from the Czarist regime and towards Jews living in the Pale of Settlement where they were confined.

Vyacheslav von Plehve

To this end Czarist Interior Minister Vyacheslav von Plehve organised the Black Hundreds, a group of reactionary, counter-revolutionary, anti-Semitic groups during and after the Russian Revolution of 1905. They were responsible for hundreds of pogroms against Russian Jews and the death of thousands. They were supported by Czar Nicholas II who instructed his ministers to support and fund them.

The Bolsheviks and Russian workers were forced to fight them militarily. Lenin called them ‘tramps, rowdies, hawkers, and similar disreputable characters’. See The Black Hundreds and the Organisation of an Uprising

Brendan McGeever - Revisionist anti-Communist Historian

Russia had been plagued by pogroms against the Jews. Anti-Semitism was seen as the way of dividing the opposition to the Czarist regime. This was why, contrary to revisionist academics such as Brendan McGeever’s Bolsheviks and Anti-Semitism, the Bolsheviks took anti-Semitism very seriously as it was a weapon posed over the heart of the revolution.

The most famous pogrom was in Kishinev on 19- 20 April 1903. Nearly 50 Jews were killed and 92 were severely injured. ‘No Jewish event of the time would be as extensively documented.’ [Zipperstein, Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History]  Reports in the New York Times and The Times ensured that it had an unprecedented impact internationally. [See Jewish Massacre Denounced’. NYT April 28 1903].

The attitude of the Hayim Nahman Bialik, the Zionist national poet, “In the City of Killing” was to talk of the ‘disgraceful shame and cowardice’ of the Jewish victims of the pogrom. The Zionists of course had done nothing to organise self-defence.

The Czarist regime refused to intervene except when the Jews defended themselves. The international and the liberal press in Russia were outraged by stories of rape, mutilation and the murder of children. The anti-Zionist Jewish Bund organised self-defence units here and elsewhere.

The Governor of Bessarabia, whose capital was Kishinev, was replaced by Prince Serge Urusov, a ‘severe critic of autocracy’. Urusov’s study of the massacre confirmed that it had been instigated by Plehve.

On August 8 1903, barely four months after the Kishinev pogrom, Herzl visited Russia, meeting with Plehve. Herzl was concerned that Zionism should retain its legal status. As he began explaining the merits of Zionism Plehve interrupted him: ‘You don’t have to justify the movement to me. Vous prêchez un converti.’ [You are preaching to a convert].’ [Herzl Diaries, pp. 1522-1525, 10.8.1903]

What was the response of the Zionists?  Did they condemn the Czarist regime?  Not at all. The 6^th Zionist Congress which met on 23 August 1903 said nothing just as 30 years later in Prague, it would remain silent about the Hitler regime. It was more concerned with the Uganda Project.

Herzl asked Plehve: ‘Help me to reach land sooner and the revolt will end. And so will the defection to the Socialists.’ [Complete Diaries, p. 1526] Plehve approved the holding of the second Russian Zionist Conference, the publication of a Zionist daily, Der Fraind and the legalisation of the Zionist movement at a time when all other political organisations were banned.

The Jewish Bund

Herzl promised that the revolutionaries would stop their struggle in return for a charter for Palestine in 15 years. The Bund were outraged. [Henry Tobias, The Jewish Bund in Russia – From Its Origins to 1905, p. 252] Kishinev created a crisis for the fledgling Labour Zionist groups, who realised that they could not ignore the struggle against anti-Semitism.

Herzl had earlier written to the Kaiser describing how:

our movement… has everywhere to fight an embittered battle with the revolutionary parties which rightly sense an adversary in it. We are in need of encouragement even though it has to be a carefully kept secret. [Complete Diaries, p. 59, October 17 1897]

Lucien Wolf - Anti-Zionist Spokesman of the Board of Deputies

Later when he came to London, in an interview with Lucien Wolf of the Board of Deputies, Plehve spoke favourably of Zionism as an encouragement to Jewish emigration. For ‘non-emigrants’ he thought that ‘Zionist ideas... might be useful as an antidote to Socialist doctrines.’ [The Times 6.2.04, ‘Mr Lucien Wolf’s Interview with M. de Plehve’].

Sixteen years later, in February 1920 Winston Churchill wrote in Zionism v Bolshevism of a ‘worldwide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilisation’ by Jewish revolutionaries. In 1935 Ben-Gurion described Zionism as a ‘bulwark against assimilation and communism.’ [ https://tinyurl.com/y269wb72]

Socialist Zionism arose out of the contradiction between the needs of Jewish workers in Russia to fight anti-Semitism where they were and the dream of Palestine. Although Zionism had foresworn the struggle in the here and now, it couldn’t ignore the fact that Russian Jews were the oppressed of the oppressed.  Socialist Zionism arose as a result of the conflict between Zionism’s support for the existing order and the Jewish proletariats' class interests. [Lucas, Modern History of Israel, p. 35]

The myth of Zionist socialism in Palestine rested on the belief that the kibbutzim were socialist. In reality the kibbutzim were the result of an alliance between the Zionist labour movement and the Zionist financial institutions. The socialism of the pioneers did not prevent them from entering into an alliance with the Jewish bourgeoisie.

Collective colonisation was the most efficient and cost effective means of colonising Palestine. They were not a means of changing society. They were ‘tools in forging national sovereignty.’ [Ze’ev Sternhell, Founding Myths of Israel, p. 325] They fooled though westerners like Hannah Arendt who described them as ‘the most promising of all social experiments made in the 20^th century.’  [Hannah Arendt, The Jew As Pariah, p. 185].

The internal social structure of the kibbutzim reflected their political role. Personal space was eliminated in favour of collectivism. They were a Zionist Sparta intended to produce fighters without personal attachments of affection to each other or their children. ‘Everything was the property of the collective including the individual’s thoughts.’ [Bloom, ‘What “The Father” had in mind,’ p. 346].

The kibbutzim were Jewish-only stockade and watchtower settlements, marking out the borders of a future Jewish State. They provided the organisational backbone of Haganah, the pre-state army and Palmach, the Zionist shock-troops. Although never more than 5% of Israel’s population, the kibbutzim produced a disproportionately high number of Israel’s officer corps.

As the pogroms intensified, Labor Zionist parties were drawn into the fight against anti-Semitism. In Poland Poale Zion split into a Right and Left at its February/March 1919 conference, with Left Poale Zion emerging as much the stronger. This was the forerunner of the split at the World Union of Poale Zion’s fifth world congress in Vienna in 1920. LPZ supported the Bolshevik revolution and attended the second and third congresses of the Communist International as observers. LPZ opposed the decision by PZ to rejoin the World Zionist Organisation [WZO], viewing it as bourgeois.

But in Palestine it was the right-wing of PZ which was stronger. Because of the rhythms of colonisation Palestine PZ gravitated to the right whereas Poale Zion’s diaspora sections were pulled to the left as a result of the class struggle and the fight against anti-Semitism.

In Russia the success of the revolutionaries in overthrowing the Czarist regime in February 1917 lessened the attraction of Zionism. At their conference in Petrograd in June 1917 the Russian Zionists omitted all mention of British sponsorship of the Zionists settlement in Palestine. [Leonard Stein, The Balfour Declaration. p. 437].

According to the Labor Zionists, the Jewish and Palestinian workers would unite against the Jewish bourgeoisie at the very same time that they were calling for a Boycott of Arab Labour! We can see the results in Israel today where the Israeli Labor Party and Meretz (Mapam) entered into a coalition government with the far-right. Far from achieving socialism, the ‘left’ Zionists have almost disappeared.

The Jewish Chronicle's Contempt for its readership knows no limits - they treat them as idiots (probably because they are)

Political Correspondent 'Liar' Lee Harpin inflates the pre-war membership of Poale Zion (now the JLM) by tens of thousands

It was a pretty stupid mistake but then ‘Liar’ Lee Harpin, the Jewish Chronicle’s Political Correspondent is pretty stupid. He is used to getting his information from hacking into other peoples’ phones, hence normal journalism is alien to him.  For those not aware, he was arrested by Police when working for the Daily Mirror but unfortunately he wasn't charged.

Shapurji Saklatvala - first Communist MP in England

In a puff piece in the Jewish Chronicle ‘Hundreds join Jewish Labour Movement to vote on who succeeds Jeremy Corbyn’ Liar Lee informed the Jewish Chronicle’s gullible readership that

‘While JLM once counted tens of thousands of members during the group’s pre-Second World War heyday, the 3,000-strong membership list is the highest it has been over the past decade.’

I therefore wrote a simple letter to the Editor, the far-right Islamaphobe and member of the Henry Jackson Society, Stephen Pollard, also former editor of The Express, pointing out just a few of Liar Lee’s many inaccuracies:

This article was a lie from beginning to end but no one at the Jewish Chronicle cares any longer about the truth

i.                   The JLM wasn’t in existence before the war. Poale Zion ‘the Workers of Zion’ was the name of the Israeli Labour Party’s British wing. It changed its name in 2004 as a cursory look at Wikpedia would have told LL.

ii.                 Far from its membership being in the ‘tens of thousands’ before the war, it barely reached 500! Jewish workers had contempt for Zionism.  Zionism was a movement of the reactionary middle class not workers. Even after the war it only climbed to 1,500 according to Paul Kelemn’s authoritative British  Zionism and the Left.

'Liar' Lee Harpin's previous speciality was phones - other peoples!

iii.              I could have added that if the JLM boasts a membership of 3,000 then it is its highest ever.  I doubt it had even 200 members a decade ago.  It had been defunct and was only refounded in 2015 with the specific task of campaigning against Jeremy Corbyn. In short the JLM is an arm of the Israeli state inside the British Labour Party rather than an organisation of Labour supporting Jews. That is why it refused to support Labour in the last election.

iv.              One should take the claimed 3,000 membership with a hefty dose of salt.  As I’ve written before the majority of the JLM’s members are non-Jewish.  So much for its claim to represent Jewish labour members. If more Jewish members are joining now, as Liar Lee claims, then it is highly unlikely they are Labour Party members or even supporters of the Labour Party (you don’t need to be a Labour Party member to join the JLM).  Given the JLM’s campaign against Corbyn it is likely to attract the likes of Jonathan Hoffman and others closer to Zionism’s fascist wing.

Liar Lee Harpin - after a spell hacking phones at The Mirror Lee felt quite at home at the Jewish Chronicle

Below is my letter to the Jewish Chronicle correcting a few of their mistakes.  Unsurprisingly my letter was not published.

Phil Piratin Communist MP for Mile End 1945-50 - over half his voters were estimated to be Jewish

In my letter I too made a minor mistake. Phil Piratin was not the only Communist MP to have sat for an English constituency. In fact Shapurji Saklatvala was elected for Battersea  North in October 1922, defeated in 1923 and was elected again from 1924 to 1929.  However Saklatvala was endorsed by the then Labour Party in 1922 and de facto in 1924.  Unlike the Jewish Chronicle, I admit to even the most minor of errors!

Given the lies that Liar Lee and his Editor have told for the past 4 years about Jeremy Corbyn and ‘anti-Semitism’ in the Labour Party LL’s ‘mistake’ concerning the JLM must be considered trivial indeed.

Tony Greenstein

The Editor

Stephen Pollard,

The Jewish Chronicle,
915 High Rd,
London,
N12 8QJ

Dear Stephen,

I realise that Lee Harpin has always had a tenuous grip on reality, hence his appointment as your political correspondent, however his claim [Hundreds join Jewish Labour Movement to vote on who succeeds Jeremy Corbyn, January 6^th 2020] that the Jewish Labour Movement ‘once counted tens of thousands of members during the group’s pre-Second World War heyday’ , has taken his ability to invent facts to new, undreamt of heights.

I realise that you will consider me pedantic but prior to 2004 there was no JLM. The group was called, more accurately, Poale Zion, an organisation which all good class conscious Jewish workers avoided like the plague.

According to Paul Kelemen’s 2012 book ‘The British Left and Zionism – History of a Divorce’ the pre-war membership of PZ stood at 500 (see page 98) before increasing to 1,500 after the war. Much as you would like to rewrite history, so as to pretend that British Jews were always solid Zionists, the fact is that the Jewish working class of the East End was indifferent if not hostile to Zionism.

It was Jewish workers in the East End constituency of Mile End who voted overwhelmingly in 1945 to elect the only Communist MP that has ever sat for an English constituency, Phil Piratin. You see the anti-fascist struggle against the genuine anti-Semitism of Sir Oswald Moseley’s British Union of Fascists and support for Zionism did not go hand in.

Yours truly,

Tony Greenstein

REVIEW - Paul Kelemen, The British Left and Zionism – History of a Divorce

Slaying the Myth that Socialists ever supported Zionism

It is not often that a book appears which can be classed as indispensable to an understanding of Zionism, the racist and colonialist ideology of the movement that established the Israeli state. This book describes the relationship of Zionism to the Left and the Labour Movement in Britain.

There are many books which have been written about the history of Zionism , most of them tedious and repetitive, whose conclusions were formed before even a word was written. Books under this heading include Tel Aviv Professor of Political Science David Vital’s The Origins of Zionism and Zionism: The formative Years. There are some books on Zionism by Zionists which are well worth reading for example Walter Lacquer’s History of Zionism and Noah Lucas’s The Modern History of Israel.

Anyone wanting a comprehensive Marxist analysis of Zionism could not do better than Nathan Weinstock’s Zionism: A False Messiah. This is despite Weinstock himself undergoing a personal and political crisis which ended up in him becoming a Zionist![1]

Dorset Street in the Jewish East End at the beginning of the 20th century

For an understanding of the origins of the Zionist labour movement Ze’ev Sternhell’s The Founding Myths of Zionism is groundbreaking. Sternhell, a childhood survivor of the Nazis in Poland tells the story of the endemic political and financial corruption of the Histadrut and its lack of democracy, holding conventions every six or seven years. As Golda Meir noted, Histadrut was not so much a trade union as a ‘great colonising agency.’ [2] The ‘socialism’ of the Israeli Labour Party, Mapai, which was expressed in the collective Jewish only settlements, Kibbutz, was harnessed to its colonising goal of establishing a Jewish only society.

If you want a history of Zionism and Israel from both a cultural and political perspective, employing the tools of comparative history, then Gabriel Piterberg’s The Returns of Zionism cannot be bettered.

Joseph Gorny’s The British Labour Movement and Zionism 1917-1948 is a history of the relationship of the British labour movement to Zionism but from a Zionist perspective. Gorni never once questioned the fundamentals of Zionism. Gorny is also a Tel Aviv University Professor of Modern Jewish History. In Israel there are two forms of history at university.  General history and Jewish history! Jewish history is about researching and developing the myths that sustain the Israeli state. It is about the Zionist narrative of Israel and is thus engaged in rewriting history from a Zionist perspective. Gorny’s is essentially a functional and descriptive history.

Sir Oswald Moseley looking none too happy at the Battle of Cable Street

Kelemen’s book is written from an avowedly anti-Zionist perspective and because of this it provides an essential and unique insight into the twists and turns of the Communist  Party as it had to adapt its understanding of Zionism and the colonisation of Palestine to the needs of the Soviet Union’s foreign policy.

In these days when ‘anti-Semitism’ is the principal weapon of the Right in the Labour Party this book is indispensable to an understanding of how the British labour movement came to adopt and support Zionism from August 1917 onwards. Support for Zionism was an essential component of Labour’s support for the British Empire and today’s opposition to ‘anti-Semitism’ is nothing more than a rationale for Labour support for British foreign policy in the Middle East .

Old Montague Street in the East End

Kelemen begins by noting that the character of the Israeli state was determined by the circumstances of its birth, the expulsion of the Palestinians. Its formation as an ethno-nationalist state ‘carried a strand of the ideological legacy that the state’s existence was meant to refute.’ In other words the Israeli state was the bastard offspring of European fascism not least Hitler’s Germany.

Hannah Arendt observed in 1961, when reporting on the Eichmann trial for the New Yorker, that there was

something breathtaking in the naiveté with which the prosecution denounced the infamous Nuremburg laws of 1935, which had prohibited intermarriage and sexual intercourse between Jews and non-Jews. The better informed among the correspondents were well aware of the ‘irony’ but they did not mention it in their reports. This was not the time to tell the Jews what was wrong with the laws and institutions of their own country.[3]

 Although they could marry abroad, their children would be considered bastards, effectively Mischlinge to use the Nazi term for those of mixed race.

Lord Passfield (Sydney Webb)

In view of the fabricated ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign battering the Labour Party today and the allegations that Labour has been ‘overrun’ by anti-Semitism, it is worth noting the comments of Sydney Webb, one of the founders of the Fabians and Colonial Secretary in the MacDonald government between 1929 and 1931:

French, German, Russian socialism is Jew-ridden. We, thank heaven, are free.’ And why? ‘There’s no money in it.’  (20)

It is worth noting, in view of the reports that Jeremy Corbyn and ‘anti-Semitism’ has been responsible for putting Jews off voting for the Labour Party,[4] that demographic and socio-economic trends led, as early as the 1959 General Election to Jews in Finchley supporting the Tories by a ratio of 3-1. In the 1964 General Election Jewish voters still preferred the Tories by 2:1. As Kelemen noted ‘The Jewish Community’s embourgeoisiement would also alter its interaction with Zionist politics.’ Those who therefore suggest that all was fine with the Jewish community and that the only thing preventing it from supporting the Labour Party, as it had done in the past, was the advent of Jeremy Corbyn are being dishonest.

The Zionists and the Jewish bourgeoisie didn't want Jewish workers opposing Moseley's fascists

The Jewish community today is not the Jewish community of the 1930’s. The East End Jewish working class has gone. It simply does not exist today. As Jews have move to the suburbs so they have moved up the socio-economic ladder and their politics have also changed, for the worse. Support for Zionism is part of that political shift to the Right.

‘While Anglo-Jewry’s Jewishness was redefined by Zionism, its Englishness was reshaped to mirror the social conservatism of English suburbia.’ (71)

The Police try to batter a way for the fascists but without success

Jewish working class residents of Hackney in the late 1970’s were found to hold similar racist views of their Black neighbours as non-Jewish white inner city residents. Jewish racism, not least Islamaphobia, is the elephant in the room. Amidst all the nonsense about ‘anti-Semitism’ what is omitted is the growing Islamaphobia and racism amongst a section of the Jewish population. (74) This reflects the finding of Geoffrey Alderman, an academic and Jewish Chronicle columnist that nearly 2% of the Jewish community in 1979 were voting for the National Front.[5] The Jewish Chronicle of 3^rd March 1978 cited the head of a Jewish primary school headteacher in

North-West London that Jewish parents didn’t wish to send their children to the same schools as Black children. (77)

Anti-fascists in the East End built barricades to stop the fascists

In his chapter on British communists and Palestine Kelemen began by noting that the Mile End constituency in the East End, which was heavily Jewish, elected England’s only Communist MP Phil Piratin in 1945. This was a consequence of the leading role that the Communist  Party had played in the anti-fascist struggle and a reflection of the role that the Soviet Union had played in defeating Nazi Germany. In 1936 over a hundred thousand Jewish and non-Jewish workers had prevented the British Union of Fascists, led by Sir Oswald Moseley, from marching through the Jewish East End.

The Jewish bourgeoisie, the Zionists included, vehemently opposed any anti-fascist mobilisation and told the Jews of the East End to stay indoors.

As Zionism, in the wake of the Holocaust, began to gain a base among the Jewish working class of the East End, the Communist Party had great difficulty in coming to terms with Zionism, which it saw as just another form of nationalism. Their problems were compounded by their Stalinist politics and the geo-political considerations of the Soviet Union which did a 180 degree turn in 1947 by supporting the creation of the Israeli state.  The CP were afflicted by what Kelemen terms ‘Yishuvism’ (the Yishuv was the Jewish community in Palestine).

The CP saw the Jewish working class in Palestine as being like any other. ‘The Communist movement’s Marxism furnished no insight into the specificity of settler colonialism.’ They failed to see that the Jewish working class was privileged in comparison with the Arab workers and that it was their institutions that were spearheading the exclusion and dispossession of the Arabs. Rennap, a leader of the CP’s National Jewish Committee went so far as to describe the Jewish working class in Palestine as oppressed. The CP depicted the Yishuv ‘in crude instrumentalist terms as a tool of British imperialism.’ (93)

Zionism in Britain made very little impact among Jewish workers or trade unionists. A correspondent in the Young Zionist in the 1930s complained about how the Jewish working class have no interest in Zionism and join the Communist Party instead.  It was not until the war years that Poale Zion increased its membership from less than 500 to 1500. In 1946 Jews made up 10% of the CP’s membership. (98)

Kelemen described how in 1948 the CP supported Israel in its war against the Arab states. (101) The reason for this U-turn lay in Stalin’s crude analysis which saw Britain as the main obstacle to Soviet interests in the Middle East. The Arabs were seen as British pawns and the future Israeli state as being in revolt against imperialism rather than just British imperialism. It was a gross miscalculation which undermined the position of the Communist Parties in the Arab East. The CP’s position helped consolidate support for Zionism in the left-wing of the Jewish community.

In his chapter on Social Democracy and Israel Kelemen noted the attitude of the Labour Party towards the British Empire. Far from supporting the movements for colonial independence Labour leaders rationalised imperialism into ‘good’ and ‘bad.’

The Labour Party’s handbook for speakers stated that

‘Imperialism is dead but the Empire has been given a new life. Socialist planning is developing it not for personal profit but the Common-Weal. (118)

The Labour Party bought into the arguments of the Zionists, despite their campaigns for a Boycott of Arab Labour an Produce, that the resulting economic prosperity would assuage the Arabs and lead to them forgetting their nationalist desires.

Labour’s support for Zionism was at one with its overall support for Empire. Whereas the Tories did not bother to hide their belief that the Empire was a source of wealth, Labour’s imperialists dressed up Britain’s role in the language of trusteeship and benevolence. On 20^th August 1948 Tribune’s editorial was headed ‘Let’s stay in Africa.’ The reason being that ‘Africa offers huge material resources which can be exploited for the benefit of Britain and the world.’  (122)

In practice what happened was that Africa and Malaya were super exploited by the Attlee government in order to pay for reforms such as the NHS. Thus was the British working class tied into support for imperialism. It was the Left as much as the Right of the Labour Party which subscribed to the ideas of Whig historian Thomas Babington Macaulay that colonisation was for the benefit of the colonised. This belief in a ‘constructive’ imperialism was the basis of Labour’s support for Zionism. Between 1917, when the Labour Party first declared its support for a ‘Jewish home’ in the War Aims Memorandum and 1949 the Party conference declared its support for Zionism on 11 occasions.

During Israel’s war of independence, when ¾ million Palestinians were expelled, the Labour press was full of articles such as that in the New Statesman by David Kimche, a Labour Zionist who described Jewish farmers watching with ‘tears in their eyes’ as the Arabs left Haifa and Jaffa. What Kimche didn’t mention was that they were leaving because the Zionist militias had bombarded them with mortars. (126)

Labour’s leaders failed to mention that the Histadrut, which was Israel’s second largest employer, didn’t even admit Arabs as members until 1959. Kelemen quotes Ian Lustick that of the thousands of Histadrut owned factories and firms not one was situated in an Arab village.

In the 1960’s the few MPs sympathetic to the Palestinians were on the Right of the Party – Christopher Mayhew, George Brown, David Watkins. This contrasts with the position today when the Right of the Labour Party is solidly behind Zionism in all its racist glory.

Kelemen shows how the Left of the Party was up in arms about Nasser’s nationalisation of the Suez Canal in 1956. Prominent among them was Aneurin Bevan.

Kelemen skilfully shows how the growth of anti-Zionism on the Left post-1968 owed nothing to Soviet propaganda as is alleged by Zionist propagandists and their echo chamber in the Alliance for Workers Liberty. It was a consequence of Vietnam and support for third world national liberation movements.

Isaac Deutscher, who had abandoned his earlier anti-Zionism had by 1967 become revolted by the open displays of nationalism and chauvinism in the wake of Israel’s victories. He described Israel as the Prussia of the Middle East.

One of the great myths of Labour Zionism was that regardless of its colonisation it was internally socialist. It operated the collective kibbutzim and owned a major chunk of the Israeli economy. It was a new generation of historians such as Baruch Kimmerling, Zachary Lockman and Zeev Sternhell who demolished this theory. Labour Zionism’s colonisation took a collective form even as it gave birth to capitalism.  Collective colonisation was simply the most efficient form of colonising Palestine.

The New Left, unlike the Communist Party, were not hindered by the foreign policy requirements of the Soviet Union and their crude understanding of Zionism which shaded into anti-Semitism. Anti-Zionism was never a part of Soviet opposition to Israel.

Kelemen described the first Palestine solidarity march held in Britain in London in 1969 organised by Tariq Ali’s Black Dwarf when 500 were expected and 2000 turned up. In November 1969 there was held a first Palestine Solidarity Conference of 300 people although the organisation seems to have then disappeared. (159/160)

This was a time of considerable ferment with the emergence of an Israeli anti-Zionist organisation Matzpen and the idea emerged of a democratic unitary secular state in the whole of Palestine. The Communist  Party was constrained by its previous support for the Israeli state. In 1972 Ghada Karmi, a Palestinian doctor in London formed Palestine Action.

Kelemen mentions the travails of the Guardian which employed the first pro-Arab Middle East correspondent Michael Adams. Adams was the only western correspondent who was not dazzled by the messianic hysteria that accompanied Israel’s conquest of the West Bank. I vividly remember BBC correspondent Michel Elkins[6] barely containing his joy as Israel won the 1967 war. Guardian Editor Alistair Hetherington censored a report of Adams on Israel’s destruction of 3 Palestinian villages– Beit Nuba, Yalu and Imwas – which today form part of Canada Park, from which their inhabitants were expelled.[7]  (161)

A pivotal change in Labour’s pro-Israel attitude took place in the wake of the 1973 Yom Kippur war when Ted Heath froze British arms sales to Israel. Harold Wilson put down a motion opposing Heath and calling for the supply of arms to Israel. After a backbench rebellion, Labour MPs were given a free vote and 15 voted with the government and 70 abstained. David Watkins saw this as the end of 50 years of Zionist domination of Labour policy. Unfortunately he was a tad too optimistic! (163)

Until 1982 and the Lebanese War, the Labour left was overwhelmingly pro-Israel. Tony Benn and Eric Heffer left Labour Friends of Israel though Ian Mikardo never renounced his Zionism. Kelemen states that LFI were launched in the wake of the Suez War with the support of 40 Labour MPs and that it was created by Poale Zion which nearly died out before it was resuscitated in 2015 in order to campaign against Jeremy Corbyn. It now calls itself the Jewish Labour Movement. Kelemen claims that at that time Poale Zion was a Jewish only organisation whereas today at least two thirds of the JLM are not Jewish.

When Tony Blair took over the leadership of the Labour Party LFI came back into favour. Blair declared that it was ‘one of the most important organisations in the Labour Movement’ and the following November Gordon Brown declared that LFI had more support among MPs than it had ever had in the 40 years since its formation. (179)

In his concluding chapter on ‘A New Anti-Semitism?’ Kelemen notes that the 2006 Report of Dennis MacShane’s All Party Inquiry into Anti-Semitism had recommended that the ‘the Jewish community itself that is best qualified to determine what does and does not constitute anti-Semitism.’ As Kelemen comments, this represented a ‘considerable slippage’ from the MacPherson Report which stated that initial reports were only prima facie evidence and not conclusive as to whether a racist incident had occurred.  It was also an anti-Semitic formulation since there is no single Jewish viewpoint on what constitutes anti-Semitism.

What the Zionists mean by ‘Jewish community’ is a politically organised group of people defining anti-Semitism in terms of opposition to Israel. It is an obvious recipe for a politically inspired, IHRA definition which conflates Zionism and anti-Semitism. (187) Kelemen is correct that the political context for the ‘new anti-Semitism’ is the decline of traditional anti-Semitism and the rise of Islamaphobia. (193)

Israel, the alleged object of the new anti-Semitism, in 2009 launched a campaign to dissuade Jews abroad from marrying non-Jews. To most people that would constitute racism but in Zionism’s eyes it is merely the preservation of the Jewish race. 

Tony Greenstein

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[1]        Meet the Trotskyist anti-Zionist who saw the errors of his ways, Jewish Chronicle 4.12.14., https://www.thejc.com/news/uk-news/meet-the-trotskyist-anti-zionist-who-saw-the-errors-of-his-ways-1.62661, Labour’s first Jewish leader is losing the Jewish vote

[2]        Tony Greenstein, Histadrut: Israel’s racist ‘trade union’ Electronic Intifada, 9 March 2009, https://electronicintifada.net/content/histadrut-israels-racist-trade-union/8121

[3]        Eichmann in Jerusalem – The Banality of Evil, pp. 7,8.

[4]        Why Just 13 Percent of British Jews Say They Will Vote For Labour in the General Election, The Tablet, 30.5.17 https://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/236063/why-just-13-percent-of-british-jews-say-they-will-vote-for-labour-in-the-general-election see also Labour’s first Jewish leader is losing the Jewish vote, The Telegraph 30.10.14.

[5]        The Jewish Community in British Politics (1982) pp. 159, 163-167

[6]        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Elkins

[7]        https://mondoweiss.net/2017/06/picnicking-israelis-palestinian/