I
was vaguely aware of Harper’s. It has
a radical tradition. It published Seymour
Hersh’s exposure of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam. It lambasted
the American invasion of Iraq. It has also published
some relatively insightful articles on Palestine and Israel, especially from
Bernard Avishai. Perhaps it was this reputation, more than anything else, which
caught me off my guard.
On
reflection, especially when it comes to Israel and Zionism, I should have been
more wary and remembered that most journalists have the same relationship to
the truth that Myra Hindley had to child protection. I count myself fortunate
in that I got off lightly at Tanya’s hands. She didn’t quote anything I said!
Gold
is a freelance journalist who writes for mostly right-wing media including The Guardian, Mail, Independent,
Telegraph, Sunday Times, and Spectator where she
is a restaurant
critic.
Gold’s
description
of Princesses Eugenie and Beatrice’s ‘vanity, foolishness and lack of
self-awareness’ is a remarkably
apt description of her own self. Having interviewed me over
the phone, Gold wanted to speak to me in more depth. We agreed to meet at the
Golden Dragon restaurant in Soho last April. Since Harper’s was picking up the tab
I had no objection (although it wasn't kosher)!
The
reason why I have titled this article ‘deceit
and deception’ is that for the two hours or so that we talked, Gold gave no
indication that she was a died-in-the-wool Zionist with a fixed and determined
hostility to anti-Zionists whom she terms ‘anti-Semites’. She came across as
someone who was relatively progressive and even open-minded. Why the subterfuge? Why the dishonesty? Was she afraid of a direct confrontation with her real views? Did she not have confidence in her own beliefs? Probably not.
 |
| Tanya Gold - Deceit and deception are the tools of her trade |
Tanya
was very good at hiding her views. She
reminds me of the police from the Special
Demonstration Squad who infiltrated the environmental
activists’ movement and who entered into what were effectively relationships of
rape with female activists. When you open yourself up to someone else about
things personal to how you developed politically, you expect that person to be open
and honest. The problem with Zionists is that, with very few exceptions, they have no morality since everything is subordinated to their nationalist zealotry. And that applies as much to the 'left' which is what Tanya Gold probably sees herself as, as the Right.
When
I finished reading Among Britain’s Anti-Semites I sent Gold an email to which she didn’t
respond. What shocked me even more than the deception was her sheer banality. I
wrote:
‘What
is remarkable for an article so long in gestation is its sheer superficiality
and lack of insightful comment. What is sad is how bland and mundane it is. It
is as if you lack even one original thought or idea.’
I copied my email to Jackie Walker who responded: ‘Well done Tony - her deception was deep as was Harper’s.’ Since nothing I said to her during the interview was used I have to assume that she didn’t feel capable of distorting anything I said to ‘prove’ that I too am an ‘anti-Semite’.
The
article ‘Among Britain’s Anti-Semites’
was a studied exercise in deception and dishonesty. It begins with the
photograph of a demonstrator at the Zionist Enough
is Enough demonstration on March 26th holding up a poster ‘For the many not the Jew.’ This choice
of a graphic is instructive.
This
‘joke’ first coined by Howard Jacobson in an article
for the New York Times could have been culled from Goebbels. It essentialises ‘the Jew’ as something apart and special. It is a form of exceptionalism. The Jew does not belong, which in Zionist eyes is true.
It distorts a slogan which emphasises that the Labour Party stands for the poor and oppressed as opposed to the wealthy minority into an anti-semitic meme. By positing Jews as being counterposed to the poor and needy it is
inherently anti-Semitic. Jews, all of them, are conflated with the tax dodging rich. It has a long pedigree. The North American Congress of Latin America described how ‘the U.S. press tends to portray left-leaning Latin American governments as hotbeds of anti-Semitism.’ Discrimination against the rich is held to be discrimination against the Jews. And then they accuse us of antisemitism!
It distorts a slogan which emphasises that the Labour Party stands for the poor and oppressed as opposed to the wealthy minority into an anti-semitic meme. By positing Jews as being counterposed to the poor and needy it is
inherently anti-Semitic. Jews, all of them, are conflated with the tax dodging rich. It has a long pedigree. The North American Congress of Latin America described how ‘the U.S. press tends to portray left-leaning Latin American governments as hotbeds of anti-Semitism.’ Discrimination against the rich is held to be discrimination against the Jews. And then they accuse us of antisemitism!
 |
| The Zionists have repeatedly attacked Black Lives Matter because to them Black and Palestinian lives don't and never have mattered |
It implies a Jewish exceptionalism that
places Jews on a pedestal of their own. It is a reflection of the Nazi idea of
the 'Eternal
Jew', (Der Ewige Jude) an example of how Zionism mirrors its antisemitic twin.
Jacobson wrote
that Zionism ‘is integral to the
Jewish mind and imagination. Those who say they are against Zionism but not
Jews are speaking in riddles.’ The only riddle is why people take
Jacobson seriously when he has so little to say. If Jacobson weren't such a
lightweight intellectually and a proud ignoramus he would know that until the Holocaust Zionism was a
tiny minority amongst diaspora Jewry. Zionism was seen as a form of Jewish anti-semitism. The ability to read history backwards through today’s
media prism is a common failing.
The Article
Tanya
Gold’s opening sentence begins with a lie, ‘this
is the story of how the institutions of British Jewry went to war with Jeremy
Corbyn.’ Not so. Those who went to war with Corbyn were Zionist
organisations representing at best one-third of British Jewry. The Board of
Deputies neither represents secular Jews nor the Haredi and Ultra-Orthodox.
One of the features
of pundits and political commentators in Britain is how they feed off
and reinforce each other’s talking points. It is one reason why they convinced
each other that Corbyn was going to be humiliatingly defeated at the General
Election, whereas someone like me, because I managed to ignore their bilious verbiage, got the result about right. An example of
this is when Gold
mentions Corbyn calling Hezbollah and Hamas speakers ‘friends’ as if that has
anything to do with anti-Semitism.
Corbyn’s
crime according to Gold was that he ‘invited
the Islamist leader Raed Salah, who has accused Jews of killing Christian
children to drink their blood, to Parliament.’ If true, then Corbyn’s
behaviour would be appalling. However Gold is content to repeat as fact the
lies of others. If she had investigated the circumstances surrounding Raed
Salah then, she could not have written this nonsense. I covered this in depth
three years ago in Stephen Pollard Jewish Chronicle Editor & Apologist for Europe's
anti-Semitic politicians. This
lie is illustrative of Gold’s method. Unfortunately it always takes longer to
refute a lie than to tell it.
In June 2011 Raed
Salah was banned from entering Britain. However as no one was notified of this, he entered the country for a speaking tour before being arrested. Theresa May sought
to deport him on the grounds that he had made a series of antisemitic
statements and that his presence in Britain was not conducive to the public
good.
When it came to court the case was judged ‘very weak’ by Justice Ockleton, Vice-President of the Upper Immigration Tribunal. Theresa May was ‘misled’ as to a poem by Salah and this deception was perpetrated by the Community Security Trust, a Zionist charity which combines two roles – defending Jewish premises from attack and attacking Jewish opponents of Zionism.
When it came to court the case was judged ‘very weak’ by Justice Ockleton, Vice-President of the Upper Immigration Tribunal. Theresa May was ‘misled’ as to a poem by Salah and this deception was perpetrated by the Community Security Trust, a Zionist charity which combines two roles – defending Jewish premises from attack and attacking Jewish opponents of Zionism.
David Hearst's article [Theresa May's haste to ban Raed Salah will be repented
at leisure] quotes Professor David Miller of Strathclyde University who submitted a
report to the court referring to the CST’s “controversial monitoring of
pro-Palestinian activists” suggesting that it has a “tendency to treat denunciation of Israel or
Zionism as evidence of anti-Semitism.”
Robert Lambert, a
retired head of the Metropolitan police 's Muslim Contact Unit noted that the
CST:
"failed to distinguish between antisemitism
and criticism of the actions of the Israeli state and therefore gives an
unbalanced perspective." [Palestinian
activist wins appeal against deportation]
Justice Ockelton concluded that the original
text of a poem by Salah was “completely different” from how it appeared
in a government order banning him from UK territory. [Raed
Salah deportation case disintegrates in UK court, but verdict still to follow]
According to Ockelton, the decision by Theresa
May to ban Salah had been based on the “Jerusalem Post’s inaccurate summary” of the poem, Civil Liberties.
The JP had added
the words “you Jews” to the poem,
making it appear anti-Semitic. The original
text of the poem later emerged. Rosenorn-Lanng, a Home Office caseworker admitted
that the UK Border Agency had not sought the original text of the poem, relying
instead on Internet sources.
Salah was clear that the poem was addressed to
all perpetrators of injustice, regardless of religion, race or group. He
pointed out that his poem also addressed Arab oppressors. Salah had said that “God
is not a racist,” This was confirmed by Dr. Stefan Sperl an expert in
Arabic poetry from the School of Oriental and African Studies who described it
as being addressed to all “perpetrators
of injustice,” whether Jewish or not.
Aside from the poem, the other main accusation
was a speech Salah gave in Jerusalem in 2007, in which he had talked about
Israeli soldiers shedding the blood of Palestinians. The citation had
reportedly included the line: “Whoever wants a more thorough explanation,
let him ask what used to happen to some children in Europe, whose blood was
mixed in with the dough of the holy bread.”
Hostile press coverage in Israel inserted the
word “Jewish” in square brackets before the words “holy bread” (“Islamic Movement head charged with incitement to
racism, violence,” Haaretz, 29
January 2008).
Contrary to Gold’s lie
Raed Salah did not accuse Jews of killing Christian children to drink their
blood nor was he convicted of making blood libel allegations against Jews. He
was convicted of racist incitement by a government that has just made Israel an
officially Apartheid state. Even according to the Jerusalem
Post, Raed Salah’s ‘conviction was a
reversal of an acquittal on those charges by the Jerusalem Magistrate’s Court
in 2013 when that court convicted him of incitement to violence, but acquitted
him of racist incitement.’ In other
words the evidence was not strong enough to convict him before the lower court.
He was found guilty on appeal in a
nakedly political decision by the Jerusalem District Court. Clearly the
evidence was not unambiguous. Islamic Movement leader Salah convicted of racist
incitement on appeal.
When the Home Office’s Neil Sheldon QC accused
Salah of invoking the blood libel, Salah denied it explaining that his purpose
had been to liken the Israeli occupation forces to the Inquisition which used
to shed the blood of children, and which also used religion to perpetuate
injustice. UK government conflates criticism of Israel with
anti-Semitism in Salah trial
Tanya Gold’s article took some 6 months to
write. Long enough for her to research
assertions such as that about Raed Salah. She could have referred to the suspicion
that the Israeli military tried
to assassinate him on the Mavi Marmara and murdered someone else in his
place or that he led the resistance to the encroachment of Zionism’s messianic
fanatics on the Golden Dome and Al Aqsa mosques in Jerusalem. Instead she
preferred to mouth Israeli government propaganda and dress this up as a well
researched article. The real question is why Harper’s commissioned this hatchet
job.
A good example of Gold’s mendaciousness is her
observation that Corbyn is a patron of Palestine Solidarity Campaign at whose
rallies the chant ‘From the River to the
Sea Palestine will be free’ is heard.
She complains that ‘there is no rhyme
for what will happen to the Jewish population in this paradise.’. Does
there need to be? Is there a rhyme for Arabs in Safed who try to rent housing but find it impossible because the Chief Rabbi, a paid state official, issued an edict forbidding Jews from renting to Arabs?
Isn’t a unitary democratic non-racial state, the same as South Africa is today, obvious? Does it need a rhyme? Gold's argument is similar to that of what were called the 'bitter enders' in South Africa.
Isn’t a unitary democratic non-racial state, the same as South Africa is today, obvious? Does it need a rhyme? Gold's argument is similar to that of what were called the 'bitter enders' in South Africa.
What is depressing is that Gold never rises
above the trite. She is a walking Israeli government press release. She
criticises the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign because it ‘delegitimises’ Israel and even worse
would ‘end its existence as a Jewish
state.’ as if that were a self-evident evil.
Boycotts have long been the weapon of the
oppressed and dispossessed. Examples include the bus boycott in Montgomery
Alabama, the boycott
of slave grown sugar in the West Indies, the boycott
of Irish landowners and Captain Boycott, the
Jewish
Boycott of Nazi Germany and the Boycott
of South African Apartheid. All of these
boycotts were accused of ‘delegitimising’ the oppressor. Of course the Zionist
movement was consistent in that it opposed the Boycott of Nazi Germany, so much
so that they entered into Ha'avara, the Transfer Agreement in August 1933.
Not once does Gold ask herself what a Jewish
State actually means? In Israel being Jewish is a national/racial category.
Hence when the wedding of TV announcer Lucy Aharish and Tsahi Halevy was
announced Zionist politicians vented their spleen. The leader of the ‘centrist’
Yesh Atid, Yair Lapid announced “I
have a problem with mixed marriage: “We haven’t
recovered from the Holocaust yet.” Oren Hazan MK, blamed
Aharish for the crime of “seducing a Jewish soul with the goal of harming
our country.”
But it’s not just the Israeli Right. Isaac Herzog, former
leader of the Israeli Labour Party and now Chair of the Jewish Agency declared
that mixed-marriages were a ‘plague’.
Herzog told
how ‘We are talking about
every (Jewish) family in the US, millions,"
Herzog is not a religious Jew yet he had no doubt that ‘we have to rack our brains and see how we solve
this great challenge."
The Orthodox
objection to intermarriage was a form of religious chauvinism. But when the
State pursues such a policy because it wants to preserve the purity of the
ruling group, Jews, that is racist.
Three years ago
Israel’s Education Ministry banned a book, Borderlife,
from the high school English syllabus because it depicted a relationship
between a Jewish woman and a Palestinian. Senior Education officials explained that
intimate relations between Jews and non
Jews, and certainly the option of formalising them through marriage and having
a family... is perceived by large segments of society as a threat to a separate
identity
Only in a state based on the principle of
racial purity can the idea that people who marry for
love be condemned as a threat to national identity. But to Gold, any challenge to such a
state is inherently anti-Semitic.
Gold was obsessed
and puzzled by Jackie Walker, who has twice been suspended by the Labour Party
for ‘anti-Semitism’. When Jackie exclaimed that it would be ‘wonderful if Holocaust Day was open to all
people who experienced Holocaust.’ Gold’s response was ‘I paused on the word ‘wonderful.’ She gives no further explanation
but of one thing she was sure: ‘I had
never seen it (anti-Semitism) until
Jeremy Corbyn was elected leader of the Labour Party.’
For 42 years
she had never experienced anti-Semitism but ‘now
I hear it every day.’ One wonders what it is that Tanya Gold hears that is
so frightening. Is it the sound of her own conscience?
Gold
is particularly troubled by Jackie Walker’s statement that ‘Anti-Semitism is no more special than any
other form of racism.’. When a Black woman mentioned ‘police genocide’ Gold’s response is to ask ‘why should that minimise anti-Semitism? Does that mean the Labour
Party does not have a problem with anti-Semitism.’ It is as if Gold is
oblivious to Britain and America’s actual day to day racism against Black
people. For her only ‘anti-Semitism’ has any meaning. What she deems to be antisemitism is, in reality, any threat to her own privilege.
One
wants to cry out, where are the Jewish deaths in Police custody or the Jewish
Windrush deportations? Where is the Police stop and search of Jewish children
and the racial violence against Jews? As Jabotinsky once said, it is a question
of appetite vs hunger. Even genuine, as opposed to the mostly fake
anti-Semitism, is only a marginal form of racism compared to the state racism
that Black, Muslim and Roma experience. Gold has difficulty coping with the
fact that Jews in Britain today are a privileged White minority.
I wonder what Gold's response to the murder of 11 Jews in Pittsburgh was? Perhaps she too thought that American Jews should 'go home' to Israel and do the bidding of American anti-Semites? That was the advice of the leader of Israel's Labor Party, Avi Gabbay.
I wonder what Gold's response to the murder of 11 Jews in Pittsburgh was? Perhaps she too thought that American Jews should 'go home' to Israel and do the bidding of American anti-Semites? That was the advice of the leader of Israel's Labor Party, Avi Gabbay.
Bizarrely
Gold considers a call for Ken Livingstone, the former Mayor of London and a man
who pioneered anti-racist programmes in local government, to be reinstated in
the Labour Party as a call for Nazis to be called Zionists and Zionists Nazis.
Without pausing for breath she quips ‘I
do not know why calling Jews Nazis is so irresistible.’
The habits of writing for the Daily Mail die hard. What Livingstone referred to in his comments to Vanessa Feltz was the well-known support of the Nazi government for the German Zionist movement in preference to non-Zionist Jews. As the late David Cesarani noted in his book The Final Solution (p.96), quoting the Gestapo, ‘The efforts of the Gestapo are oriented to promoting Zionism as much as possible and lending support to its efforts to further emigration.’ What this has to do with calling Jews Nazis is unclear.
The habits of writing for the Daily Mail die hard. What Livingstone referred to in his comments to Vanessa Feltz was the well-known support of the Nazi government for the German Zionist movement in preference to non-Zionist Jews. As the late David Cesarani noted in his book The Final Solution (p.96), quoting the Gestapo, ‘The efforts of the Gestapo are oriented to promoting Zionism as much as possible and lending support to its efforts to further emigration.’ What this has to do with calling Jews Nazis is unclear.
 |
| State Racism that Jews simply don't experience |
Gold
was equally dismissive of the Report of Shami Chakrabarti into Racism and Anti-Semitism
in the Labour Party. Because Chakrabarti had had nothing to say about whether ‘calls for an end to the Jewish state,
however oblique, were anti-Semitic’ her Report was ‘essentially worthless.’ So Chakrabarti’s call for the adoption of
due process and natural justice in Labour’s disciplinary processes, her
analysis of the MacPherson Report’s description of a racial incident and the
experience of Muslims in the Labour Party were all worthless because
Chakrabarti hadn’t defended the existence of a Jewish state.
What is depressing is that not once does Gold actually tell us what she means by a ‘Jewish state’. Probably it hasn't even occurred to Gold to ask whether or not it is a state with some sense of Jewish values. Things like Leviticus 19:34 where it is written:
What is depressing is that not once does Gold actually tell us what she means by a ‘Jewish state’. Probably it hasn't even occurred to Gold to ask whether or not it is a state with some sense of Jewish values. Things like Leviticus 19:34 where it is written:
Perhaps Gold could tell us how this compares with the determination of Likud and Israeli Labour to forcibly deport 40,000 Black African refugees for the double sin of being Black and not Jewish? Or is a Jewish state a state where Jews are privileged over non-Jews as in present day Israel? Is it a state where the 20% non-Jewish minority are confined to 3% of the land and scapegoated for natural disasters such as wildfires? Gold doesn’t tell us. In fact Gold tells us very little about what her devotion to Israel actually means.You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.
Tanya
Gold is nothing if not a junkie for every trite and shopworn phrase. It is the
sheer lack of originality or evidence of any deep thought which is the most frustrating
thing about her article. It is as if Gold
had assembled every last cliché as she set out to repel her imagined critics. ‘Anti-Semitism’ she tells us ‘is the only racism that must not be defined
by those who experience it.’ Racism isn’t ‘defined’ but described by its
victims. Definitions are best left to experts in linguistics. Almost in the same breath
she attacks Jewish Voice for Labour
for their denial that they are anti-Zionist asking ‘I wonder if this is tactical’ Clearly some self-definitions are
preferable to others!
Tanya
Gold is dishonest. Not all Jewish self-definitions are to be treated equally because
Jewish anti-Zionism is ‘demonic’. One
wonders whether Gold would have treated claims of racism by Afrikaners and
Ulster Protestants with equal seriousness?
 |
| Unlike fake 'antisemitism' Black people face genuine and murderous racism as with Eric Garner, choked to death in New York by the Police |
If
there is one thing worse than someone who doesn’t listen to their opponents is
someone who forgets what they have written. The idea that racism is entirely
subjective and dependent upon who shouts the loudest is absurd. Victims of
racism do not speak with one voice nor do they share the same experiences. The
experience of Chuka Ummuna is not that of a Black teenager at the hands of the Brixton
Police. Racism is objective. Its proof lies in Fergusson
and the death of Michael Brown or the cry ‘I
can’t breathe’ of Eric Garner.
Claiming
to be a victim of racism doesn’t make you one. When Abe Foxman declares that
anti-Semitism equals anti-Zionism we are entitled to interrogate that assertion
and ask if that extends to Khan
al Ahmar. Is the demolition of Palestinian homes and villages what
Jewish self-determination means? If the alt-Right declares that it is the White
man who is oppressed should we take that too at face value? Should every
assertion of victimhood be accepted?
Gold
is particularly exercised by the presence of Ken Loach at the launch of JVL.
She reminds us that in 1987 he directed Jim Allen’s play Perdition which was based on Israel’s trial of Rudolf Kasztner,
leader of Hungarian Zionism in the war. The play was she informs us ‘a monstrous libel’ for criticising
Kasztner’s ‘bargain with the Nazis that
saved 1,684 Jews in 1944.’ Gold doesn’t tell us why Eichmann agreed to such
a bargain.
Perhaps
Dr Rudolph Vrba, who together with Alfred Wexler, escaped from Auschwitz on
April 10 1944 in order to warn of the preparations being made to exterminate
Hungarian Jewry was also guilty of a monstrous libel when he wrote in the Daily Herald of February 1961:
“I accuse
certain Jewish leaders of one of the most ghastly deeds of the war. This small
group of quislings knew what was happening to their brethren in Hitler's gas
chambers and bought their own lives with the price of silence. Among them was
Dr Kasztner.”
When
Kasztner was accused of collaboration with the Nazis by survivors of the
Hungarian Holocaust he sued them in an Israeli court in 1954. Judge Benjamin
Halevi found that the charges of collaboration were proven and that Kasztner
had ‘sold his soul to the devil’.
Gold
tells us that when researching her article she was told that Zionists had
opposed the Kindertransport, which saved 10,000 Jewish children in England. She
concludes that ‘a few merely said they
would prefer the children to be settled in Palestine.’ It would appear that
her research didn’t even extend to reading the speech of David Ben Gurion,
Israel’s first Prime Minister and then Chair of the Jewish Agency, of 9th
December 1938. It can be found in Shabtai Teveth’s official biography of Ben Gurion (The
Burning Ground, p. 855). Most decent libraries stock it but Gold didn't manage to obtain a copy.
If Gold had read the Ben Gurion's biography she would have found the final chapter on the Holocaust, Disaster Means Strength fascinating. Because to the Zionist movement, the disaster of the Holocaust meant a strengthened Zionist movement and a future Jewish state. Ben Gurion wrote at the time, in the wake of Kristallnacht:
If Gold had read the Ben Gurion's biography she would have found the final chapter on the Holocaust, Disaster Means Strength fascinating. Because to the Zionist movement, the disaster of the Holocaust meant a strengthened Zionist movement and a future Jewish state. Ben Gurion wrote at the time, in the wake of Kristallnacht:
‘If I knew
that it would be possible to save all the children in Germany by bringing them
over to England, and only half of them by transporting them to Eretz Yisrael,
then I would opt for the second alternative. For we must weigh not only the
life of these children, but also the history of the People of Israel.’
Ben
Gurion openly declared that he would sacrifice half of Germany’s Jewish children
if they could come to Palestine rather than England. To gloss over this is a
form of historical revisionism on the scale of David Irving. The Zionist
movement fought against providing a haven for Jewish refugees other
than Palestine. The refugee question was used as a battering ram to open the gates
of Palestine to Jewish immigration. This undoubtedly led to the death of many
thousands of Jews who would otherwise have been saved.
Gold
denies the claim of Jackie Walker’s Jewish partner, Graham Bash, that the JVL
demonstration on March 9th represented thousands of Jews who were
not Zionist. ‘Anti-Zionists are a fringe
movement... 93% of British Jews say that Israel forms part of their identity.’ Which
is almost word for word the argument
of the Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland. In 2015 Yachad commissioned a survey The
Attitudes of British Jews Towards Israel. The percentage of those identifying as
Zionists (59%) had dropped 12% since a previous study five years before. 31%
said they were not Zionists. Israel forms part of my identity but I'm not a Zionist!
Gold confesses to being fascinated by Jackie
and accepts that her play The Lynching
is ‘a shocking story of racism’ and
then concludes that ‘the insinuation (is)
that the Jews – or a similar evil – destroyed her mother.’ One wonders for
the sanity of someone who can draw such a conclusion, literally out of thin
air. Perhaps the only true statement in her whole article is when Gold
concludes that ‘The door of Walker’s
psychology is closed to me, utterly.’ Never a truer word spoken in jest,
except this was more a mea culpa.
Whilst accepting that Jackie ‘is terribly abused by some Zionist Jews’ in
other words she is the recipient of KKK style racism, she nonetheless ‘wondered whether she is just another
narcissistic and intractable Jewish female, like so many I have loved.’ One
gets the feeling that Gold is projecting her own inability to empathise onto
Jackie whom she accepts is ‘warm and
emotional’.
When
Jackie complains that ‘anti-Semitism’ is being used to displace concern about
anti-Black racism and Islamaphobia, Gold concludes that what Jackie is saying
is that there is a limited space for justice and the Jews took it all. One
wonders whether Gold is being deliberately obtuse. What Jackie is saying is
that ‘anti-Semitism’ is counterposed to other forms of racism and it has become
the acceptable anti-racism of the Right. In addition Zionism reinforces racism
against Blacks and Muslims.
In
perhaps her only poetic moment Gold describes Corbyn at the debate on
‘anti-Semitism’ that the Tories sponsored, as someone through whom ‘the wind seems to blow.’ Perhaps this
was because the plaints of Ruth Smeeth and Luciana Berger were hollow.
On
the controversy over the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance
definition of ‘anti-Semitism’, Gold’s ire was reserved for the fact that Labour
had amended some of the IHRA’s examples. She complained that accusing Jews of
being more loyal to Israel than their own nations ‘is now “wrong” ‘ rather than anti-Semitic. Perhaps Gold is
oblivious to another IHRA example in which ‘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.’ is anti-Semitic.
Only nations have the right to self-determination and if Jews are a nation and
Israel is their nation state then surely it is right to claim Jews are more
loyal to Israel than their own nations, not least because they aren’t a member
of ‘their own nations’.
Logic
however is not Tanya Gold’strongest point! Which is why at the end of her
monologue she complains that in 2010 Corbyn hosted a meeting in Parliament
entitled ‘The Misuse of the Holocaust for
Political Purposes.’ Yes Tanya and what is worse a survivor of Auschwitz,
Hajo Meyer spoke at it. No doubt he too was one of the ‘anti-Semites’ that you
spent time with.
Tony
Greenstein
This is the email I sent to Tanya Gold on reading her article for the
first time (4th October 2018)
Tanya
I sent you a text message a few
weeks ago but did not receive a reply concerning your article which you
interviewed me for. I wrote then about the rumours I had heard about how
abysmal your article was but, as is often the fate of Jews, I lived in hope. Your failure to respond however confirmed my
worst fears. Being disillusioned is also a Jewish condition.
It would have been a small
courtesy to send me a copy of your article in advance although, having now read
your article online, that omission is perhaps understandable.
I guess I should be grateful that
you didn't quote me in it as you would undoubtedly have got everything I told
you wrong. A feat you managed with just
about everyone else, especially Jackie Walker. When we met in that Soho restaurant you did at
least manage to hide your inner feelings. What I told you must have grated with you
badly so I guess I should congratulate you on your ability to hide your
feelings, which is not something Jews are renowned for.
To say that you comprehensively
failed to understand that which you wrote about, namely the 'antisemitism
crisis' in the Labour Party would be an understatement. What is remarkable for
an article so long in gestation is its sheer superficiality and lack of
insightful comment. What is sad is how bland and mundane it is. It is as if you
lack even one original thought or idea. To take but one example. You state,
apropos the right of the oppressed to define their own oppression
'Yet a definition that rolls
over the sensibilities of Jews who are the victims of this racism is somehow
OK.'
What is this racism that Jews
today are victims of? Concretely what? Which Jews? All Jews? Isn't that anti-semitic? An article
which was sold to me as being about the viewpoint of non-Zionist Jews, seems to
omit the fact that not all Jews think alike. Strange that. Oh and if 93% of Jews say Israel forms part of
their identity, as it does with me, it
doesn't mean they are Zionists.
If you had bothered to read up on
the 2015 Yachad sponsored Attitudes of British Jews to Israel produced by City
University's Sociology Department you would find that 59% of British Jews
define themselves as Zionist and 31% don't. I guess it would have been too much to expect
you to do more than quote (unacknowledged) Jonathan Freedland's windy rhetoric.
Instead of trying to understand
where this crisis in the Labour Party came from you instead projected your own
feelings and frustrations. You simply
turned the commonplace rhetoric of everyday hasbara into a glossy article, fit
for the coffee table but little else.
Perhaps it was too much to expect
you to do anything else but simply recycle the same hackneyed cliches and
phrases, including that racist poster 'for the many not the Jew' (do you
really not understand why it is so revolting to suggest that society is
compartmentalised into 'the Jew' and all others, that this is a reflection of
the Nazi idea of the 'Eternal Jew' - (Der Ewige Jude)? Yes this is another example of how Zionism
unconsciously mirrors its antisemitic twin.
I shall prepare a fuller response
to this atrocious hatchet job which you have produced. That you have
comprehensively misunderstood the Kasztner Affair is perhaps little comfort
given that you have comprehensively misunderstood just about everything else
that you touched. It seems that
journalistically you have the midas touch in reverse.
Tony Greenstein
Letters in Reply in the current edition of Harpers
Letters in Reply in the current edition of Harpers
