Support for Zionism and racism abroad has led to support for the Witchhunt at home
The AWL’s guru and founder, Sean
Matgamna, has just penned
an Open Letter to Jeremy Corbyn which marks the final break of the AWL with
the Left. In it Matgamna both justifies and supports the Labour Party’s Witchhunt. He openly calls for the
expulsion of anti-Zionists. If there are any socialists left in the AWL then
they should get out. Matgamna has aligned the AWL with Tom
Watson, Jon Lansman and Jonathan Freedland, to say nothing of the Tory press
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| More Jews want to expel Israel's Arabs than Oppose it - this is the reality of Israel today |
Matgamna
declares that anti-Zionism, including support for the Right of Return of Palestinian
refugees ‘should not be tolerated in a
healthy labour movement’ and should be made ‘incompatible with membership of the Labour Party’. Only a died-in-the-wool racist could suggest that advocating
a multi-racial society should be an offence. This is the politics of Enoch
Powell not Karl Marx.
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| AWL campaign against BDS |
Matgamna attacks the Corbyn left as anti-Semitic. He states
that ‘the Corbyn surge was also an antisemitic purge.’ This is
the language of the Daily Mail.
Matgamna describes the hundreds of thousands who joined the Labour
Party in the wake of Corbyn’s victory as having ‘brought their
political baggage’ i.e. anti-Semitism with them. Most of those who joined
Labour in the wake of Corbyn’s victry had never belonged to any political party
and were motivated above all by disgust at the re-election of the Tories and
the austerity politics of New Labour. Matgamna displays utter contempt for the movement
that brought Corbyn to victory in the leadership elections of 2015 and 2016.
 |
| Praise for Matgamna by JLM's Adam Langleben - a vehemently opponent of Corbyn who secretly recorded Jackie Walker - he resigned from the Labour Party with TIG |
Matgamna
begins with an innocent question: ‘How
has the crisis that grips the new, new Labour Party on antisemitism come about?
How has it come to be the major scandal it is now?’
The answer is of course obvious. Even
before Corbyn was elected he was accused of anti-Semitism. False allegations
were made in the Daily
Mail and Jewish
Chronicle that Corbyn was an associate of a holocaust denier, Paul Eisen.
Attacking Corbyn for ‘anti-Semitism’ was somewhat easier than denouncing him
for opposing privatisation of the NHS, but that is amongst the real reasons.
 |
| One crook supporting another |
The reasons for the vicious and never
ending campaign against Corbyn and the Left are not difficult to understand.
Corbyn was seen as a threat to the political and economic interests of the Establishment.
He was anti-nuclear, anti-NATO, pro-Palestinian and anti- imperialist. He was an
ally of workers in struggle. To have him as the leader of the second major party
of the US’s closest ally in Europe was unacceptable – not only to the Israeli but
to the US and British states. The ‘anti-Semitism’ smears were their answer.
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| AWL's all-White delegation to Israel |
For
over 30 years, the AWL (Socialist Organiser) was unique for its theory of ‘left anti-Semitism’. AWL refused to
accept the most obvious reason for socialists’ hostility to the Israeli state,
namely that most people don’t like Apartheid.
You
don’t have to be a socialist to understand that anti-Zionism is not about antagonism
to Jews but opposition to racism and colonialism. Israel is a state where a plurality
of Israeli Jews support the deportation of Israeli Arabs and where 79% believe
that Jews should be given preferential treatment over Arabs. Israel is a state
where the Right marches to the drumbeat of ‘Death
to the Arabs’ and where Arab villages are demolished in order to
make way for Jewish towns.
 |
| This is the reality of the Jewish supremacist nature of the Israeli state |
Israel is the only state
in the world where Donald Trump is popular. A recent survey by the Pew Research Center found that
94% of Jewish Israelis have a favourable view of the US in general (83%
overall).
The
AWL’s obsessions with Israel have been humoured by the rest of the Left, treated
much as one treats a dotty aunt. However what in previous times was a quaint oddity
has become unacceptable. Where once the AWL’s support for imperialism was passed
over in awkward silence today we have to call a spade a spade and say that the
AWL has become a scab organisation in the service of the Right. It is not the
first group to have taken this path, e.g. the Revolutionary Communist Party.
 |
| anti-Corbyn member from Hove Tom Gray can't praise Matgamna's racist article enough |
The
AWL's politics have come full circle. What were reactionary politics externally
have infected its domestic politics. Marxism teaches that in time theory and
practice align with each other. Nowhere was this truer than with the socialist
Zionists who, when they began the colonisation of Palestine, abandoned their
socialism as it was incompatible with their day to day relations with the
natives. Instead they chose ‘constructivism’, the building up of the proto
Jewish state with the capital of the Jewish bourgeoisie.
In
the words of David Ha’Cohen, an important figure in Labour Zionism:
‘I had to fight my friends on the issue of Jewish
socialism, to defend the fact that I would not accept Arabs in my Trade Union,
the Histadrut; to defend preaching to housewives that they should not buy at
Arab stores; to defend the fact that we stood guard at orchards to prevent Arab
workers from getting jobs there... to pour kerosene on Arab tomatoes; to attack
Jewish housewives in the markets and smash Arab eggs they had bought... to buy
dozens of dunums from an Arab is permitted but to sell God forbid one Jewish
dunum to an Arab is prohibited; to take Rothschild the incarnation of
capitalism as a socialist and to name him the ‘benefactor’ – to do
all that was not easy.’ [David Hirst, The Gun and the Olive Branch, p.185,
Faber, 2003 citing Ha’aretz 15.11.69.
The
Histadrut’s policy of Jewish Labour,
Kibbush Ha’avodah meant a Boycott of
Arab Labour. Labour Zionism opposed solidarity between Arab and Jewish workers in
favour of unity with Jewish employers.
Those
socialist Zionists who chose socialism over Zionism were a minority. Those who prioritised
work with the Arab working class formed the Palestine Communist Party MOPSI
and became anti-Zionists. This resulted in them coming into conflict with both
the British colonial forces, who deported many of them with the active
connivance of Histadrut and the Zionist leadership.
So
it is with the AWL. Over 30 years ago they abandoned anti-Zionism and support
for a democratic, secular state in Palestine in favour of a two state solution.
This meant giving positive support to Israel as a Jewish state. AWL became a Zionist
organisation yet for reason of nostalgia still called itself Trotskyist despite
its support for the occupation of Iraq, the CIA backed Mojahedeen and America’s
war in Afghanistan and Partition in Ireland. [See
Hoist By Their Own Petard - The Zionist Alliance for
Workers Liberty and Siding
with Labour right
The
AWL has consistently opposed any solidarity with the Palestinians. In the trade unions they vehemently opposed
BDS in UNISON and the UCU amongst other unions.
Life has not been easy for the AWL ever since Corbyn
was elected as Leader. On the one hand they could hardly be seen to oppose him
or the movement that brought him to power but on the other hand they found support
for the Palestinians and opposition to Zionism galling. This led to an uneasy tension.
In Momentum the AWL supported
Jon Lansman’s removal of Jackie Walker, an anti-Zionist, as Vice-Chair only for
Lansman to then turn on them.
The AWL also found itself the target of the witchhunt
under Iain McNicol. This reached farcical proportions in 2016 when Owen Smith denounced
the AWL’s ‘anti-Semitism’! Quite understandably the AWL were furious. After
having done their best to ingratiate
themselves with the Right over Zionism they had become a victim of the
‘anti-Semitism’ attacks on the crude basis that Left=Anti-Semitic!
Soon after Corbyn’s victory against Smith I debated
with Daniel Randall of the Alliance for Workers Liberty. Randall had himself just
been expelled for ‘anti-Semitism’. Randall conceded that
it is undeniably the case
that the issue of anti-Semitism has been instrumentalised and manipulated by
some on the Labour Right and their supporters in the press in order to
undermine Corbyn and the Left.... Owen Smith accused us of anti-Semitism on
national television, so it is very clear that there is a certain process going
on there, a certain instrumentalisation and manipulation of an issue for
cynical factional ends. ‘
Israel – an oasis of democracy
To the AWL Israel is synonymous with
being Jewish. They have a fantasy of Israel as a democratic oasis, an island of
toleration and civilisation in a barbarous Middle East. It is Reagan’s City on the Hill
transplanted to Tel Aviv. The AWL are engaged in a love-in
with a mythical Israel.
Of course there is another Israel. It
is the Israel of Geoff Halper’s War
Against the People a militarised state that trained the Guatemalan army
of Rios Montt as it murdered
up to 200,000 Mayan Indians. It is the Israel which today is supplying
weapons to the genocidal army of Myanamar in its war against the Rohinga
people. It is the state which was the closest ally of Apartheid South Africa
and the death squad regimes of Central and South America. This is the AWL’s
golden state. As Dr Verwoerd, the South African Premier acknowledged,
"The Jews took Israel from the Arabs after the
Arabs had lived there for a thousand years. Israel, like South Africa,
is an apartheid state,"
None of this penetrates the minds of
the AWL. Matgamna isn’t ignorant he is indifferent. Like the colonists that
Ahad Ha'am warned against in The Truth
from the Land of Israel (1891) Matgamna cannot see the Palestinians. They
are invisible, caricature Muslims and Islamic fanatics (he ignores Palestinian Christians).
Matgamna offers instead a sop: ‘There is
an element of supporting the Palestinians, championing their rights which
Israel often tramples on...’
Palestinian
oppression is merely incidental to the AWL. What matters is the survival of the
Israeli state. Matgamna concedes that ‘There
is a lot to criticise and condemn in Israeli policy’ but his only example
is Israel’s ‘opposition to a Palestinian
state’. Israel’s racist treatment of the Palestinians is irrelevant.
Israel is historical
recompense for the Nazi genocide. No matter that Zionist colonisation predated
the Holocaust and that it was the Nazis not the Palestinians who were responsible
for the Holocaust .
Matgamna
calls himself a socialist and he is probably sincere after all Ramsey MacDonald
also believed he was a socialist What is clear is that Matgamna is Islamaphobic
since the only alternative he can contemplate to a two state solution is an Arab
Islamic state. Arabs being incapable of democratic politics, that is reserved
for Europeans. The AWL is in a long line of pro-imperialist ‘socialist’ groups.
A Jewish State is a Racist State
The French Revolution of 1789 marked
a break from the ethno-religious state. The French revolution held that the
nation state consisted of all of those who lived in it. Henceforth religion and
state were separate. Religion was irrelevant to one’s civil and political
rights. In the words
of Clermont Tonnerre, a Deputy in the Constituent Assembly ‘To the Jews as a nation nothing, to the Jews
as individuals everything.’ France was the first state to grant Jewish
Emancipation. Zionism began from a hatred of Emancipation for whom it signalled
assimilation. It took Britain a further 69 years before Jewish
Emancipation allowed Lionel de Rothschilds to take his seat in Parliament.
Israel is a throwback to the Europe
of the 1930’s. The objection to the Israeli state is not this or that act of
discrimination but to a state, not of its own citizens but of Jews wherever
they live in the world. That is why there
is no Israeli nationality. As the recently passed Jewish Nation State Law
makes clear only Jews have national rights in Israel. Its non-Jewish
inhabitants are resident aliens. Even
within Israel Arabs are tolerated guests which is why half the Arab
villages are unrecognised i.e. liable
to be demolished at any time.
Because Israel is a Jewish state the
Chief Rabbi of Safed, a paid state
official, can issue an edict
forbidding the renting of apartments to Arabs and be backed up by dozens of rabbis. It is why
hundreds of Jewish residents of Afula can demonstrate
for days in protest at the sale of a single home to an Arab. In Israel there
are hundreds of Jewish communities where Arabs are barred and the Admissions Committee Law
gives them the right to keep Arabs out.
Yet to Matgamna Israel as a Jewish
state is entitled to treat non-Jews as aliens. He has no complaint about discrimination
against Arabs. His only concern is with what he calls ‘absolute anti-Zionism’ which is ‘barely distinguishable from antisemitism.’ I confess I was absolutely
opposed to Apartheid in South Africa but that didn’t make me anti-White.
Matgamna doesn’t pretend that
‘anti-Semitism’ is not about Israel. During the past 3 years the Labour Right
has run with false ‘anti-Semitism’ and if you questioned their claims then that
was proof of your ‘anti-Semitism’. An Orwellian Catch-22.
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| AWL support a definition of antisemitism that equates anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism |
When the Zionists and the Labour
Right demanded that the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism be accepted (promising
that this would mean an end to the false anti-Semitism campaign) they conceded
that ‘anti-Semitism’ meant opposition to Israel, the ‘racist endeavour.’
Luciana Berger MP’s Constituency Labour
Party wanted to deselect her. She was a Blairite parachuted into a working
class Liverpool seat. It had nothing to do with her being Jewish. Tom Watson
called it ‘‘worst day of shame in
party’s 120-year history’ presumably more shameful than the war in Iraq,
the deportation of asylum seekers, the 1968 Kenyan Asian Immigration Act etc.
Matgamna agreed:
Nobody who watched and listened to Luciana Berger's speech explaining
why she left the Labour Party will doubt the sincerity of her account of the
antisemitism that has driven her and the others, or most of them, out of the
Party.’
Matgamna and the AWL’s parroting of
Watson’s lies is shameful. There isn’t the slightest evidence that Berger was the
subject of anti-Semitism in the Labour Party. The AWL’s theory of ‘left
anti-Semitism’ has led it into supporting the Blairite Right.
The person who has been the recipient of most racial abuse is not Luciana Berger
but Dianne
Abbot. Yet whereas 6 people have been charged for abusing Luciana no one
has ever been arrested for abusing Dianne. Yes there is institutional racism
but it is in the Metropolitan Police not the Labour Party.
Matgamna’s ‘solution’, a two state
solution is both reactionary and impossible. In the words
of Israel’s Deputy Foreign Minister Tzipi Hotoveli “This land is ours. All of it is ours. We did not come here to apologise
for that.”
Unmarxist
Matgamna’s article
rests entirely on assertion. It consists of windy rhetoric, bile and frothing
at the mouth. A Marxist or class analysis it is not. Evidence is conspicuous by its absence.
Matgamna asserts:
There is a long tradition in much of the Jewish
community of support and involvement with the Labour Party. To the leaders of
the Jewish community, and many Jews... the "left" in the Party, or
some of it, must appear as possible future anti-Jewish pogromists, as has much
of the would-be "revolutionary" left for a long time now.
Anyone who considers themselves a
socialist would ask which sections of the Jewish community is Matgamna
referring to? Matgamna treats the whole Jewish community as one.
The scurrilous allegation of socialists
being ‘future anti-Jewish pogromists’ is
the product of Matgamna’s fetid imagination. It is venom masquerading as an
antidote. Any Marxist worth their salt would ask why the ‘long tradition’ of Jewish involvement in the labour movement, has come
to an end and when. They would ask what are the sociological changes in British
Jewry.
Matgamna inability to make a serious
case comes from a tradition of ‘left’ denunciations that has more to do with
Stalinism and the Workers Revolutionary Party. which regularly denounced their opponents as
spies and agents.
Any serious analysis would begin by asking
when the decline in Jewish support for the Labour Party began. As far back as
2014 the Telegraph ran with a story
about Ed Miliband ‘losing the Jewish vote.’
The class composition of the Jewish
community had changed and so had its involvement in the labour movement. A Marxist would ask what
political effect has the growing socio-economic prosperity of the Jewish population
had on its political allegiances? Matgamna is the poor man’s Nick Cohen.
Before
the 1960’s the majority of the Jewish population in London lived in the East
End. I remember as a child going for a meal in Blooms, a
popular kosher restaurant and waiting in a long queue. In 1996 the restaurant
closed. Why? Because ‘from the 1960s onwards, Whitechapel’s Jewish
population declined as people made their money and moved out to the suburbs of
Golders Green and Ilford.’
William Rubinstein,
a past President of the Jewish Historical Society, wrote [The Right, Left and the Jews, p. 51, 1982]:
the rise of Western Jewry to unparalleled affluence and high
status has led to the near
disappearance of a Jewish proletariat of any size:
indeed the Jews may become the first ethnic group in history without a working
class of any size. .. it has made Marxism, and other radical doctrines,
irrelevant to the socio-economic bases of Western Jewry, and increasingly
unattractive to most Jews.
Dr Geoffrey Alderman, a Jewish academic
wrote that
‘By 1961, over 40%
of Anglo-Jewry was located in the upper 2 social classes, whereas these categories accounted for less than 20% of the general
population.’ [Jewish Community in British
Politics, p. 137]
Alderman charted
the political shift in British Jewry. In 1945 Phil Piratin became the only
Communist MP ever elected in England from the heavily Jewish constituency of
Mile End. By the 1960’s Jews were becoming strong supporters of the
Conservative Party. Class not Israel explained the shift in Jewish voting
patterns.
Matgamna refers
to the ‘Jewish leaders’. As Audrey
Gillan noted
The Jewish Board of Deputies advised Jews to stay
away. The Jewish Chronicle warned: "Jews are urgently warned to keep away
from the route of the Blackshirt march and from their meetings."
These self-same
leaders in the Board of Deputies are though happy to fight the ‘anti-Semitism’
i.e. anti-Zionism of the Left.
Magamna
asserts that anti-Zionism derives from Stalinist anti-Semitism. On the contrary
it derived from the new Left’s rejection of Stalinism in the wake of support
for the Vietnam War and wars of
liberation.
As part of his racist demonisation of the Palestinians Matgamna
echoes Zionist propaganda that ‘Only a
small fraction of those six million are refugees.’ Matgamna
joins hands with Trump and Netanyahu in denying the existence of the
Palestinian refugees.
Matgamna
justifies the Nakba, the expulsion of
the Palestinians by comparing them with ethnic German refugees expelled from
Eastern Europe at the end of the war. There is no comparison. The Palestinian
refugees were the victims of Zionist settler colonialism which sought to create
a racially exclusive Jewish majority state.
The Sudeten
Germans acted as a fifth column for the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia in
1938. In 1935 the pro-Nazi Sudeten German Party won over
60% of the vote. The expulsion of ethnic Germans from Hungary, Poland,
Yugoslavia was understandable given the role a majority of these communities
had played in the Nazi occupation and in the Volksbund militias which worked with the Nazi occupation forces in helping
deport the Jews and fight the resistance. Nonetheless socialists would have
opposed the deportation of Germans en
masse.
Matgamna
claims that ‘The Jewish nation that won
independence in 1948 was built up around Jews indigenous to the area.’ In
other words he subscribes to the racial myth that Jewish settlers are ‘returning’
to Israel rather than dispossessing the indigenous population. Jews constituted
a fraction of the original population of Palestine. It is true that in
Jerusalem by the mid-19th century there were a majority of
ultra-Orthodox Jews from Eastern Europe. However
these Jews were anti-Zionist. They were known as the Old Yishuv. Chaim Weizmann, Israel’s first
President wrote disparagingly about them in his autobiography Trial and Error (pp. 225-9)
As part of his justification for the Nakba, Matgamna refers
to the myth that the Arabs aimed to "Drive the Jews into the
sea". As Ilan Pappe documented
the only people thrown into the sea were the Palestinians of Haifa in their
panic to flee the shelling.
What marks the writings of Matgamna concerning
Palestine is his sheer ignorance. AWL’s support for Israel and Zionism relies on
nothing more than Israeli hasbarah (propaganda).
Matgamna caricatures supporters of Palestine, saying that ‘Arab and Islamic states that want to put it out of existence should be
supported.’ The reality is that Israel is surrounded by a belt of
reactionary Arab states – from Egypt to Saudi Arabia - with which it has friendly relations. Just as
opponents of Apartheid in South Africa had no illusions in the surrounding
Black states, so no supporter of the Palestinians seriously believes that Zionism
will end as a result of the Arab armies. The corrupt pro-American Arab states
are also a product of imperialism.
Referring to the Ken Livingstone
affair Matgamna mentions ‘the nonsense....
about Zionist-Nazi affinity’ What he doesn’t do is explain why. Zionist
historian David Cesarani cites how ‘The
efforts of the Gestapo are oriented to promoting Zionism as much as possible....
Zionists saw the [Nazi] pressure
towards segregation as the fulfilment of their assertion that the Jews were a
separate nation with no place in Germany.’ [Final Solution, pp. 96, 102,
2016]
AWL’s rhetoric about a progressive
imperialism disguises its superficial understanding of Zionism and Israel. Nothing
Matgamna writes contributes to our understanding of neo-colonialism and
imperialism today. Matgamna is no Frantz Fanon.
Israel is a
Jewish state representing the ‘Jewish
nation’ both inside and outside Israel. Matgamna can only see the liberation of
Palestine as leading to the creation of an Arab- Islamic state. This is part of
his racist Orientalist perspective in which the Arabs are backward and infested
with religion unlike a ‘Jewish’ state which alone amongst western nations
forbids civil marriage.
Today the
AWL’s domestic politics have caught up with their imperialist politics and the
result is that they have joined hands with Tom Watson and Luciana Berger. We
should recognise them as such and shun them as we would other members of the
Labour Right.
Tony Greenstein
