Jeremy Corbyn’s acceptance of this Tory
definition of ‘anti-Semitism’ is shameful and must be reversed
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| Tzipi Hotoveli is a virulent racist who believes it is a crime for Jews and non-Jews to have sexual relations or marry. This is what the Nazis also believed in yet Theresa May is happy to be photographed with her. |
On
Monday the Guardian reported that the
government was going to ‘formally adopt a
definition of what constitutes antisemitism, which includes over-sweeping
condemnation of Israel.’ According
to Theresa
May this would ‘help efforts to combat
hate crime against Jews.’
Britain
would ‘become one of the first countries
to use this definition of antisemitism’ and the intention was to “ensure that culprits will not be able to get
away with being antisemitic because the term is ill-defined, or because
different organisations or bodies have different interpretations of it”.
 |
| Theresa May is happy to keep company with Tzipi Hotoveli, Israel's Deputy Foreign Minister, a religious nut-case |
The idea
that because there is no agreed definition of anti-Semitism that people will
get away with arson at a synagogue or attacking someone who is Jewish is
ludicrous. Jewish self defence against
the pogromists in Czarist Russia did not depend on an academic definition of anti-Semitism!
Sajid Javid, Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government issued a statement saying it was ‘legally non-binding’
and should be seen in the light of the Home Affairs Select Committee
Report on anti-Semitism, which recommended that ‘For the purposes of criminal or disciplinary investigations, use of the
words ‘Zionist’ or ‘Zio’ in an accusatory or abusive context should be
considered inflammatory and potentially antisemitic.’ In other words, if you equate Zionism and
racism in the same breath you could be guilty of a ‘hate crime’.
 |
| Tzipi Hotoveli, Theresa May's friend invites Lehava, a fascist group into the Knesset and secures them a grant to prevent mixed marriages |
Although this definition will be ‘legally
non-binding’ it will be part of the operational policy of the Police and other
statutory bodies and it will begin to take on the force of a legally accepted
definition. The road to hell is paved
with good intentions except that neither May nor Javid have any good
intentions.
 |
| Having being attacked himself as 'anti-Semitic' it is baffling that Corbyn refuses to call out May's abuse of anti-Semitism as a weapon against the Palestinians |
Corbyn retreats again from facing up to the Zionists
What is staggering, stupefying, unbelievable is that Jeremy Corbyn simply
accepted this new definition without demur. It is as if he has learnt no lessons from the past year. Simply repeating 'I condemn anti-Semitism' just encourages those who accuse anti-Zionists of 'anti-Semitism'. Corbyn should know since he himself has been called it enough.
If Corbyn were to combined condemnations of anti-Semitism with a condemnation of those who make bogus accusations of anti-Semitism against supporters of the Palestinians then he would call the bluff of those who will never be satisfied by his protestations.
If Corbyn or his team thinks he
is going to avoid accusations of anti-Semitism in the Labour Party by signing
up to this bogus definition of anti-Semitism then he should think again.
Theresa May used the introduction of this new, Orwellian definition of anti-Semitism
to attack
Corbyn for the increase in anti-Semitism:
“It is disgusting that these
twisted views are being found in British politics,” May said, adding that “of course, I am talking mainly about the
Labour Party and their hard-left allies.”
What was Corbyn’s feeble
response? ‘A spokesman for Corbyn said in a statement that he fully supports the
IHRA definition of anti-Semitism.’
If Corbyn
had called out May for her opportunism, if he had attacked her for using the
issue of anti-Semitism for narrow party political purposes and for a defence of
the indefensible racist Zionist policies of Israel, Corbyn would have gained respect
rather than contempt. This feebleness by
Corbyn just makes a rod for his own back.
It encourages May and the Right to continue to attack him rather than
putting them on the defensive. It bodes
ill for other areas of policy that Labour is ambiguous on.
What is this
definition? Well the first part of it
reads:
“Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews,
which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical
manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish
individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and
religious facilities.”
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| The Government's new definition of anti-Semitism is based on this old, discredited 'working definition' that the EU junked |
EUMC is the Undead of Anti-Racism
 |
Despite being rejected by the University Colleges Union, NUS, anti-racists and the European Union’s Fundamental Rights Agency, the European Union Monitoring Committee’s Working Definition of Anti-Semitism resurfaces in different guises like the Undead of Dracula
|
The EUMC was junked
because it had become embroiled in controversy.
Draw up by an openly Zionist group, the American Jewish Committee, it
consciously sought, not to combat anti-Semitism, but to redefine opposition and
hostility to Israel, the ‘Jewish’ state as anti-Semitism. The EUMC Working Definition is like Dracula and the Undead. However many times a stake is driven through its heart, it seems to revive, because US imperialism and its satraps have a vested stake in it. Anti-Semitism is the 'anti-racism' that justifies imperialist barbarism. That is why those who most oppose the 'new' anti-Semitism, like the Zionist Organisation of America, AIPAC and our own Board of Deputies, President, Jonathan Arkush, are so effusive in welcoming Donald Trump and his Breibart allies into government in the USA.
The IHRA definition of anti-Semitism followed on
naturally from what was called the ‘new
anti-Semitism’. Ideologues such as
the former Canadian Minister Irwin Cotler believed that Israel was the ‘new Jew’ and that opposition to Israel
had nothing to do with the fact that it was a barbaric, racist state, the world’s
only settler colonial and Apartheid state.
The argument that Israel is
attacked because it is a ‘Jewish’ state is fundamentally flawed. It rests on the assumption that if Israel had
been a Christian state which had occupied the West Bank and introduced different
set of laws for the occupied Palestinians and for the Christian settlers, then
no one would have objected! If a
Christian Israel had demolished ‘unrecognised’ Arab villages like Umm al-Hiran,
a Bedouin village in the Negev, in order to make way for a Christian settler
town, then no one would have objected.
If two weeks ago born-again Christian Prime Minister of Israel ,
Benjamin Netanyahu, had blamed Israeli Arab terrorists for the fires that had
spread out of control in Israel and threatened to revoke the citizenship of all
those found guilty, then no one would have objected to this racist pillorying
of a minority community.
Even the introduction to
the IHRA definition is unsatisfactory. There
is no need to include discrimination against a non-Jew in a definition of anti-Jewish
hatred. What is called ‘associative’ discrimination,
which is when someone wrongly believes that a person is Jewish and therefore
discriminates against them, may be appropriate in employment law but it serves
no purpose in a definition which is aimed at defining what anti-Semitism is. For example in Israel a year ago, an Israeli Jew
stabbed another Jew mistakenly believing him to be an Arab! That is associative discrimination.
The inclusion of Jewish property
is also unnecessary since hostility to Jews will cover this e.g. an arson
attack at a synagogue. But the
destruction of property belong to a Jew will not always be anti-Semitic, it
depends on the circumstances. The
inclusion of Jewish communal organisations is even more absurd. The Board of Deputies for example should be attacked
for its support for the attack on Gaza.
Yet a definition such as this is likely to catch in the net quite
genuine political criticism.
Brian
Klug is a Philosophy lecturer at Oxford University and an expert in
anti-Semitism as well as being Jewish.
His article in Patterns of Prejudice [Vol. 37, No. 2, June 2003,
Routledge The collective Jew: Israel and
the new antisemitism is well
worth reading. In it he defines
anti-Semitism much more simply. It is ‘a form of hostility towards Jews as Jews, in
which Jews are perceived as something other than what they are.’ The ‘Jew’
towards whom the antisemite feels hostile is not a real Jew at all. In short
anti-Semitism can be defined as ‘hostility to Jews’.
Brian
Klug goes on to argue, quite persuasively, that anti-Semitism is not just
hostility to Jews but also envy and even admiration of them, sometimes called
philo-semitism. We saw an example of
this in the summer when Owen Smith MP, the hapless anti-Corbyn candidate was
asked what he admired most about the Jews and he said their ‘entrepreneurial skills’ which is a
classic anti-Semitic trope!
But if
your intention is not to define anti-Semitism but to redefine it in order to outlaw and criminalise criticism of Israel
and to provide an ideological comfort blanket for British foreign policy in the
Middle East, then it makes sense to dress it up as opposition to racism. There were those who said our opposition to
the Iraq war was a form of anti-Americanism and that opposition to Apartheid in
South Africa was anti-White prejudice.
These arguments never got very far because they were so transparent.
In the
case of Israel however, there are much more powerful and determined forces
seeking to outlaw any criticism of Israel that challenges the state
itself. Yes you can criticise individual
policies but it is verboten to
criticise the Jewish state itself.
The IHRA
definition does this by saying that ‘Contemporary examples of anti-Semitism... could,
taking into account the overall context, include, but are not limited to’ the examples
listed below.
1.
Accusing Jewish citizens of being
more loyal to Israel, or to the alleged priorities of Jews worldwide, than to
the interests of their own nations.
it's
strange that representatives of Israel’s immigrant absorption and foreign
ministries have just distributed a questionnaire to tens of thousands of
Israelis living in the United States and Jewish Americans, which includes
problematic questions on exactly these issues, and asks them to indicate where
their allegiance would lie in the case of a crisis between the two
countries....
One
question in the survey asked specifically which side the respondents would
support publicly if there was a crisis in the relationship between the United
States and Israel.
Israel
proclaims itself as a Jewish state, a state of the Jewish people throughout the
world not just Israeli Jews. The Jerusalem Program of the World Zionist Organisation speaks of ‘the centrality of the State of Israel and Jerusalem,
its capital, in the life of the nation.’ The Jewish nation means all Jews
wherever they live. Dual loyalty is part
of the Zionist’s DNA.
2.
‘Denying the Jewish people their
right to self-determination (e.g. by claiming that the existence of a State of
Israel is a racist endeavour).’
This is a
non-sequitur. Saying that the existence
of the State of Israel is racist is not a consequence of a denial of Jewish
self-determination. The argument that
Jews or anyone has a ‘right of
self-determination’ is founded on the idea that they are a nation. It used to be the anti-Semites who claimed that
Jews were a nation. When Theodor Herzl,
founder of Political Zionism set out to establish a Jewish state, he freely
conceded that:
It might
more reasonably be objected that I am giving a handle to Anti-Semitism when I
saw we are a people – one people; that I am hindering the assimilation of Jews
where it is about to be consummated and endangering it where it is an
accomplished fact.’ [The Jewish State, H Pordes, London 1972, p. 17]
3.
‘Applying double standards by
requiring of it a behaviour not expected or demanded of any other democratic
nation.’
This of
course assumes that Israel is a ‘democratic nation’. The definition therefore depends on whether
you accept Israel is a democratic state, which is a politically contentious
issue. It is a strange basis on which to
rest a neutral definition of anti-Semitism.
In any case the definition is flawed in itself, since it refers to ‘any other democratic nation’. There is no Israeli nationality. In the case of Tamarin v State of Israel 1972 and Uzzi Ornan v State of Israel 2013, the Israeli Supreme Court made
it crystal clear that there was no
Israeli nation. Judge Agranat ruled in
the former that:
‘the
desire to create an Israeli nation separate from the Jewish nation is not a legitimate
aspiration. A division of the population into Israeli and Jewish nations would
… negate the foundation on which the State of Israel was established.... There
is no Israeli nation separate from the Jewish People. The Jewish People is
composed not only of those residing in Israel but also of Diaspora Jewry.” [see
O. Kraines, The Impossible Dilemma:
Who Is a Jew in the State of Israel? (Bloch Publishing Company, 1976),
p.67. Supreme
Court Rejects Citizens' Request to Change Nationality From 'Jewish' to
'Israeli', Revital Hovel , Ha’aretz 3.10.13].
This is the
root of Zionist and Israeli racism.
Israel is not a state of its own citizens but a state of its Jewish
citizens and Jewish nationality is not confined to Israeli Jews.
4.
‘Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli
policy to that of the Nazis.’
This is
the most ludicrous and hypocritical of all.
There are numerous examples of where Israelis have identified with the
Nazis when engaging in the repression of the Palestinians.
For example Israeli soldiers
called some of their companions 'Our
Nazis' meaning those who like to beat. [Hotam, 24 June 1988, Sara Ben
Hillef] They identified themselves with the Nazis and the Palestinians with
their Jewish victims: [Israeli Soldiers
Called Themselves the Mengele Unit’], Al Hamishmar 24 July 1989, Ha'aretz
27th July 1989 and 24th
July 1989 and Hadashot 25 July 1989].
Ha’aretz described how groups of soldiers who “were called the Auschwitz 10”
and “Demjanjuks’ had plotted to kill Arabs.”[Ha’aretz,
1.10.10. The Mengele
Squad, see also Tom Segev, The Seventh Million, p. 408,
Hill & Wang].
Many
comparisons of Israel’s actions to the Nazis between 1933 and 1939 are
extremely valid and have nothing to do with anti-Semitism. Is it seriously claimed that when Jewish mobs
in Tel Aviv chant ‘death to the Arabs’ that this is not similar to what took
place in the Europe of the 1930’s? Or
when the Chief Rabbi of Safed, Shmuel Eliyahu, supported by dozens of Jewish
rabbis, forbids
the renting of Jewish flats and apartments to Arabs that this doesn’t smack of
the Third Reich?
Labour
Prime Minister David Ben Gurion responded to a call for his resignation by an
Israeli professor by asking ‘Is he not
aware that the Mufti [a leader of the Palestinian before the war] was a
counselor and a partner in the extermination schemes and that in all Arab countries the popularity of Hitler rose
during World War II?’ [Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood,
Idith Zertal, p.101 CUP, 2011]. Netanyahu
accused
the Palestinians of having been partners with the Nazis in the Final Solution. These claims were false but the Palestinians
and Arab leaders have repeatedly been called ‘new Nazis’ by Zionist leaders.
5.
‘Holding Jews collectively responsible
for actions of the state of Israel.’
The key question is why the focus on
anti-Semitism and not Islamaphobia and anti-Muslim racism? In 2015 Tell
Mama reported that Incidents of
anti-Muslim abuse were up by
326% in 2015. They spoke of an ‘exponential growth’ in anti-Muslim hate
crimes. Even the Daily ‘Hate’ Mail recognised that
anti-Muslim hate crimes have doubled in London between 2013 and 2015.
Yet we don’t have a new definition of Islamophobia nor any statements of
concern shown by Theresa May or lapdog Sajid Javid at the real incidents of
anti-Muslim racism which have resulted in death, serious injury, firebombing of
mosques etc.
The level of anti-Semitic incidents is trivial and mainly confined either
to social media or verbal attacks on Jews because of the actions of
Israel. In Antisemitic
Incidents Report 2015, the Community Security Trust’s recorded the
third-highest annual total, 924, of antisemitic hate incidents in the UK during
2015. This was a 22 per cent fall from
2014’s record high of 1,179 incidents, which had been caused by antisemitic
reactions to the conflict in Israel and Gaza during July 2014 (316 incidents)
and August 2014 (228 incidents). The CST
noted that ‘the second-highest annual
total of 931 incidents came in 2009, also a year when there was a major
conflict in Israel and Gaza.’
The 924 antisemitic incidents in
2015 included 86 violent antisemitic assaults, an increase of 6 per cent from
2014 and the highest number of violent incidents since 2011. This is the only
antisemitic incident category that increased in 2015. Four of these violent
incidents were classified by CST as ‘Extreme Violence’, meaning they involved
potential grievous bodily harm (GBH) or threat to life.
In
the Antisemitic
Incident Report January-June 2016 it was stated that in the first six months of 2016
there was an 11 per cent increase in antisemitic hate incidents, 557, compared
to the same period in 2015, 500. However
if one looks beyond the bare statistics one finds that there were 41 violent
antisemitic assaults in the first six months of 2016, ‘a 13 per cent fall from the 47 violent assaults recorded in the first
half of 2015’ and none of these 41 ‘were
serious enough to be classified as Extreme Violence.’ In other words the 2016 anti-Semitic
incidents were a distinct improvement on 2015 yet the government, like the Home
Affairs Select Committee has used an alleged increase in anti-Semitic incidents
in order to justify adopting a bogus new definition of ‘anti-Semitism’ which conflates
anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism.
If we want to get some form of
perspective for the approximately 1,000 anti-Semitic incidents, most of them
either verbal abuse or abuse on social media, then one can look at the Report ‘Hate Crime, England and Wales,
2015/16’ by Hannah Corcoran and Kevin Smith, in which it states that the number
of hate crime offences in 2015/16 were:
·
49,419
(79%) race hate crimes;
·
·7,194 (12%) sexual orientation hate crimes;
·
· 4,400 (7%) religious hate crimes;
·
3,629
(6%) disability hate crimes; and
·
858 (1%)
transgender hate crimes.
In
other words, not only are anti-Semitic hate crimes less serious than other hate
crimes, but they constitute at most 2% of the total yet they command 90%+ of
the political attention that hate crimes receive. The only explanation for this is that
anti-Semitism is being used to justify British foreign policy that is related
to Israel.
Tony
Greenstein
