Edited by Jamie Stern-Weiner, Verso, 2019
Below is a Review of Anti-Semitism and the Labour Party, an
Ebook Below is my Review of Anti-Semitism
and the Labour Party, an Ebook brought out shortly before the General
Election and edited by Jamie Stern-Weiner. It is a critical review because the
book fails to come to terms with what the anti-Semitism attacks are really
about.
If, as I have argued for the past 4 years, the ‘anti-Semitism’
attacks by the Board of Deputies and the Zionists are not about anti-Semitism but
Israel/Zionism then it is futile ‘proving’ that only 0.06% or whatever of
Labour members are anti-Semitic. Even
assuming that those expelled were genuine anti-Semites whereas of course most
of those, like Jackie Walker, Marc Wadsworth and myself are committed
anti-racists, it is irrelevant.
The Labour Party is
supposed to be the party of the working class. If that is true then it will
also include all the mass of petty prejudices and chauvinism of
capitalist society, including racism, that circulate in the working
class. What Marx called the 'muck of ages'. That will inevitably
include anti-Semitism. Those who plotted and planned the Board of Deputies and
Zionist campaign knew full well that if they looked they could find
‘anti-Semitism’. It has always been there. It has
nothing to do with Jeremy Corbyn and the Left.
‘Anti-Semitism’ provided the ideal pretext to attack Corbyn and
unfortunately in accepting the framework of the anti-Semitism attack, viz. that
the attacks are genuinely about anti-Semitism, books such as this do little to
help in the fightback.
 |
| The Zionist demonstration against 'antisemitism' outside Parliament March 2018 - it was the first 'antiracist' demonstration that Norman Tebbit, Ian Paisley and Sajid David had attended |
This is the fatal mistake that Jewish Voice for Labour made.
It assumes the campaign was about Jews but of course it was not. That is why
you have the phenomenon of non-Jewish racists, like the hapless Lukey Stanger,
attacking Black anti-racists as ‘anti-Semitic’.
This isn’t so strange as it seems. When Donald Trump told 4 Black Congresswomen
to ‘go home’ he added for
completeness that they were ‘anti-Semites’ because they hated Israel. In Donald
Trump and the Zionists’ eyes, Israel = Jews.
 |
| The Zionist Campaign to Paint Corbyn as an Antisemite had to overcome the difficulty that he was an antiracist activist |
Jamie sent me a copy of the book on 26th November
and we engaged in a short correspondence.
I wrote that though his and Alan Maddison’s article ‘Smoke Without Fire’
was impressive, nonetheless
The point
though is that however logical, fact filled etc. it is it fails to understand
one point. This campaign is not based on logic or rationale. It is a
campaign in defence of ruling class capitalist interests and the Zionist
leaders are quite happy to perform like dancing bears for that
establishment. It is in many ways reminiscent of the role that Jews used
to play in Eastern Europe, the tools of the nobles or kings which brought so
much wrath down on their heads.
 |
| The anti-Semitic slogan of the 'antisemitism' smear merchants - it implies that all Jews are of the 'few' not the 'many' |
Jamie
replied that
‘Of course, the campaign serves interests -
but that does not mean its claims should not be debunked. The Iraq War also
served ruling interests, but it was still important to critique the arguments
for war on the evidence.’
Which is of
course true but the problem is that politically the whole campaign is based on
debunking the lies of our opponents rather than pushing an alternative
narrative that is about Palestine and Zionism.
Although I didn’t realise it at the time, one of the weakest
essays in the collection by Richard Kuper, ‘Hue and Cry over UCU’, was written
in 2011 for Open Democracy on the situation concerning the University College
Union. The article was relevant then and irrelevant now. Richard’s comments on
the EUMC Working Definition of Anti-Semitism now the IHRA are ill-thought out
and I’m sure he would no longer stand by them, in particular his comment that refers
to ‘six relatively unproblematic examples
of antisemitism’ being the first 6 examples of ‘anti-Semitism’ that is
given.
In one sense this series of essays, which are highly uneven
in quality, encapsulate all the mistakes made by people in the ‘anti-Semitism wars’
in the Labour Party.
As these wars show every sign of continuing I can only hope
that some attention is paid to this analysis.
Tony Greenstein
 |
| Jamie Stern-Weiner did his best to avoid any serious discussion of the relationship of Zionism to the antisemitism campaign |
Smoke Without
Fire (this review appears in Weekly Worker)
It is said
that those who fail to learn from the past are doomed to repeat it. It would
seem that the contributors to this title were determined to prove the truth of
this aphorism.
The centrepiece of this Internet book
is Smoke Without Fire, referring to
the ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign against the Labour Party: Their conclusion being that:
‘no
persuasive evidence has been presented to demonstrate that antisemitism within
the Labour Party has increased since 2015..’
How then to account for the widespread
perception to the contrary? Why is it that between 15 June 2015 and 31 March
2019 there were five and a half thousand articles on Labour ‘anti-Semitism’ in
the national press? [1]
Or to put it another way. How is it
that the Windrush Scandal, when dozens of Black British citizens were illegally
deported to the Caribbean has garnered only a fraction of such coverage? Why is
it that genuine racism is a matter of indifference for the British media but ‘anti-Semitism’
garners such attention?
 |
| Jamie Stern-Weiner and friends have consciously avoided the question of Israel and Jamie clearly harbours illusions in Zionism as an ideology |
Weiner and Maddison’s observe that:
‘There
were no witches in Salem; Jewish elders did not gather in a graveyard at night;
a Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy did not target Nazi Germany. The allegation that
Labour is rife with antisemitism is of a piece with these fantastic
antecedents.
But if the allegations of anti-Semitism
against the Labour Party are of a piece with the belief that Salem was host to
a coven of witches, then what were they about?
Where did they come from? On this
Weiner and Maddison and indeed virtually all the contributors are silent.
If Labour’s ‘anti-Semitism’ affair was
not about anti-Semitism then what was it about? Virtually no one in this
collection is prepared to call out the BBC/Daily Mail smear campaign for what
it was. A vicious, right-wing campaign, using bogus allegations
of anti-Semitism as a stick to beat a left-wing leader of the Labour Party who
was held to represent a threat to all that the British Establishment held to be
dear to them.
When the Daily Mail and the BBC are
concerned about racism, then surely it cannot be too difficult to figure out
what has happened? There seems to be a reluctance amongst these luminaries of
the left elites to say what is or should be obvious namely that we have just
witnessed the destabilisation of a political party by state actors, British and
foreign.
At the beginning of 2017 Al Jazeera
broadcast a four-part programme, The
Lobby, which provided a snapshot of what had been happening. Clearly the Israeli state and its surrogates,
Labour Friends of Israel and the Jewish Labour Movement, were actively
organising for the overthrow of Corbyn using anti-Semitism as their chosen
weapon.
Equally clearly the British and
American states were also involved. That is why there was no
interest by the British government in inquiring as to why an Israeli
intelligence operative, Shai Masot, was plotting
the downfall of Britain’s Deputy Foreign Minister,
Alan Duncan. Anyone acquainted with the actions of the CIA and the intelligence
agencies, as documented by ex-CIA agent Phil Agee in Inside the Company, should
not have been surprised.
Just contrast this with the reaction
should Al Jazeera’s programme have focussed on the activities of an Iranian
political agent seeking the downfall of particular government ministers.
In Jeremy Corbyn we had the election of
someone who was anti-Nato, a supporter of the Palestinians and a well known
opponent of US foreign policy, to the leadership of the second major party in
the US’s closest ally in Europe. Why would the Americans not intervene to
prevent Corbyn becoming Prime Minister? Do the left social democrats and
liberals who contributed to these essays really believe that the United States
wouldn’t intervene in British politics if its interests were at stake?
In 20 or 30 years, when the present
furore has died down, some enterprising young researcher or journalist, perhaps
on The Guardian, will obtain details under freedom of information legislation
about what really happened, which was a conspiracy against democracy.
Antisemitism
and the Labour Party was distributed as an EBook two weeks
before December 12th. It claimed to ‘bring(s) together the most rigorous and penetrating analytical writings
on the ‘Labour antisemitism’ affair.’ Unfortunately, with the exception of
two articles by Norman Finkelstein and that by Justin Schlosberg, all the
contributions suffer from the same fallacy, namely that what it calls the ‘strange events that have warped British
politics since 2015’ are actually about anti-Semitism.
Finkelstein in his chapter on the IHRA
definition of anti-Semitism points the finger at Zionism and
Israel but others seem strangely reluctant. Daniel Finn’s Corbyn Under Fire concludes
that if Chakrabarti’s recommendation
‘to ‘use the term “Zionist” advisedly, carefully and never
euphemistically ... and to ‘resist the use of Hitler, Nazi and Holocaust
metaphors, distortions and comparisons in debates about Israel/Palestine’
had been heeded then ‘some of the controversies of the past two
years could have been avoided.’ Complete nonsense. Indeed the exact reverse
of the truth. Far from avoiding the use of the term ‘Zionist’ people should
have emphasised that the attacks on the Labour Party came from the Zionist
If Luciana Berger could resurrect a six
year old long erased mural in the East End to attack Corbyn with then why would
Hitler comparisons make any difference?
But if people had fought back and not
accepted the ‘anti-Semitism’ framework.
If they had argued that ‘Zionism’ meant a political settler colonial
project that anti-Semites like Trump and Orban were only too happy to support
then perhaps some much needed political clarification might have been injected.
Is it seriously suggested that when the
Israel State funds campaigns against miscegenation and when mobs chant ‘Death to the Arabs’ or when Israeli law recognises
the right of Jewish communities to bar Arabs as members, that comparisons with pre-Holocaust
Nazi Germany are inappropriate? That when
Israel uses the Holocaust to justify its barbarism that it is inappropriate for
us to respond in kind?
Was it anti-Semitic for Hannah Arendt
in ‘Eichmann in Jerusalem: the Banality
of Evil’ to compare Israeli laws forbidding marriage between Jew and Arab
with those of the Nuremburg Laws? Was Professor Ze’ev Sternhell, an expert on
fascism and a childhood survivor of the Polish ghetto of Przemyśl,
wrong to write
that in Israel there is a ‘Growing
Fascism and a Racism Akin to Early Nazism’?
Jamie Stein-Werner continues where Finn
left off with his report on the 2017 Labour Party Conference. He says that
‘whereas ‘Nazis[m]’ and ‘apartheid’ unambiguously refer to
extreme oppression, ‘Zionism’ might denote any one along a spectrum of beliefs
ranging from the harmful to the benign (e.g., support for the right of Jews to
collective self-determination.’
It’s no wonder that the JLM had it so easy
when even our supporters fail to understand that Zionism was a reflection of
anti-Semitism and is the ideological font of racial supremacy in Israel.
This acceptance of Jewish racism
originated with Jon Lansman’s Left Futures and Why
the Left Must Stop Talking About ‘Zionism’. The fact that
every act of racism in Israel is justified by reference to the ‘ideals’ of the Zionist
vision is simply obliterated.
When appeals were made for the right of
African refugees to stay in Israel Interior Minister Elli Yishai was quoted
as saying that ‘The migrants are giving
birth to hundreds of thousands, and the Zionist dream is dying’ [2]
The whole debate around these refugees was conducted in terms of Zionism’s
desire for as Jewish a state as possible and a permanent Jewish demographic
majority.
Every act of racism in Israel is
carried out in the name of preserving the ‘Jewish’ state and its majority. It
is the failure to take this on board in their critique of Israel and Zionism that
lies behind much of the failure of the opposition to the anti-Semitism witchhunt.
Only Finkelstein raised the issue of
genuine racism against Black people which should have been the major plank of
our fightback.
How many Jews have been shot dead by police or railroaded
into jail? Whereas being Black or Muslim closes doors, being Jewish opens them.
Where was the anger with those, Tory
and New Labour, who had introduced a ‘hostile environment’ policy which led to Windrush?
Not one contributor pointed the finger at the Labour Right’s complicity in
supporting the 2014 Immigration Act and in playing the race card.
I have long
campaigned to highlight Tom Watson’s support
for Labour MP Phil Woolas who was removed as an MP by the High Court after
having waged an election campaign based on ‘making
the white folk angry’. Or Watson’s role
in the 2004 by-election in Hodge Hill where he issued a leaflet ‘"Labour is on your side, the Lib Dems are on
the side of failed asylum seekers."
There was a total failure by Corbyn to
call out the Daily Mail and Sun, who employed Katie Hopkins, who described
refugees as ‘cockroaches’. This is also reflected in the contributions to this
book. We should have responded to the
hypocritical nature of the attacks on us rather than scurrying to find ‘evidence’
of how many anti-Semites there were in the Labour Party.
 |
| Sentiments that Rebecca Long-Bailey finds difficult to endorse |
6 days before the General Election I wrote
Expect the worst, hope for the best. The night before the election, whilst campaigning
for Chris Williamson, I penned an Open Letter to Seamus Milne which read
that ‘the strategy of apologising for
‘anti-Semitism’ and appeasement of the Right had led to Disaster’.
I had sleepless nights asking myself
how Corbyn could win. ‘What’ I asked
myself, ‘had I missed’? People were confident. Hundreds of Momentum
supporters were flooding marginal constituencies. Was I a natural born
Jeremiah, forever a Cassandra? It was clear to me that Corbyn Labour’s
inability to stand up for its beliefs and to rebut the smears were going to
result in an election defeat. The only question was ‘how bad it was going to
be’. In 2017, when even my closest comrades in Brighton and Hove Momentum were
gloomy I had been optimistic. In two blog articles I had predicted a hung
parliament and even
victory.
It was the inability of Corbyn and
McDonnell to fight back against this state-inspired campaign, including
throwing Chris Williamson to the wolves, that spelt the end. It was not that ‘anti-Semitism’
was raised on the doorstep, rather that his permanent apologising, temporising,
failing to answer questions and an inability to go on the offensive and face
down his critics that was not only depressing but demeaning. Corbyn appeared weak
and it was this that led to the low opinion of him on the doorsteps. After all
how would Corbyn and McDonnell stand up to a much fiercer onslaught when in
government?
When I had been
suspended in March 2016 for ‘comments you
are alleged to have made’ (I only learnt what these comments were when I
read The
Telegraph and Times
two weeks later) it was immediately clear that the allegations of ‘anti-Semitism’
had nothing to do with anti-Semitism. In 2018 I was expelled as part of the
‘anti-Semitism’ moral panic as was Marc Wadsworth and then Jackie Walker. Ken
Livingstone was forced out too and yet Corbyn failed to speak out
Anti-Semitism
and the Labour Party contains 20 different contributions
and there are 21 different testimonies from Jews in the Labour Party. The most
obvious lacuna is that nowhere in the nearly 300 pages is there any
contribution from someone, Jewish or non-Jewish, who has been the victim of Labour’s
‘anti-Semitism’ witchhunt. Neither
Jackie Walker, Ken Livingstone, Chris Williamson, Marc Wadsworth, Asa
Winstanley or myself was invited to contribute. It is as if the testimony of
those who were at the sharp end of what happened was of no account.
This arrogance reminds me of the
question posed by Rudolph Vrba, the Jewish escapee from Auschwitz in April
1944. Vrba was deliberately ignored and rendered anonymous by Israel’s
Holocaust historians, because what he had to say did not accord with Zionism’s
holocaust narrative. Vrba asked who was the better historian: ‘those of us who saw the Nazis in action in
Auschwitz’ or ‘those who did not have direct experience with the Nazis’? [3]
This book contains many good essays but
there are also a considerable number of mundane stocking fillers. One of the
worst is by David Rosenberg of the Jewish Socialist Group. Appearing in July David
spoke of ‘improvements’ in Labour’s
procedures for handling complaints of anti-Semitism. David imagined that
Labour’s right-wing had
‘been pushed back. The detail will be discussed more and
refined before Labour Conference. And it has been confirmed that antisemitism
will not be separated out but these processes will apply to all complaints that
discrimination/abuse has occurred against members across the range of protected
characteristics.
This is a pure flight of fantasy. At
the Labour Party conference it was agreed that people would be expelled by a
fast track procedure without so much
as a hearing. In practice any statement critical of Israel can and does lead to
expulsion. David was also silent on the unlawful suspension of Chris
Williamson.
In reality this campaign was not about
procedures. The focus on that was another red herring which unfortunately David
and much of the JSG swallowed. However good the procedures (to do what?) they
could never have satisfied Labour’s opponents.
Meanwhile all other examples of racism
have been ignored. Black and Muslim people have been primary targets of the ‘anti-Semitism’
campaign. Anti-racist campaigner Marc
Wadsworth, who played a pivotal role in the Stephen Lawrence campaign was
expelled at the behest of Ruth Smeeth, a former Israel lobbyist
for BICOM.
In Brighton and Hove notorious
right-winger, Lukey Stanger, who stated
that Travellers were ‘frequently a nasty
blight on communities’ has been suspended for months with no sign of an impending
expulsion. Stanger was protected by Tom Watson.
Luke Akehurst, the Director of We Believe in
Israel who openly
campaigned to defend Israel’s murder of unarmed Palestinian
demonstrators, including children, in Gaza by Israeli snipers,[4]
has not been disciplined. We can only
assume that Palestinian lives are worth less than Israeli or Jewish lives.
David Rosenberg bears a greater
responsibility than most. He lives in Corbyn’s constituency and knows Corbyn
personally. David did his best to ensure that there was no criticism of
Corbyn’s feeble tactics even though it should have been obvious that it was
only counter-pressure that might have led to Corbyn fighting back.
Even worse Jon Lansman was (is?) a
member of the JSG. When I posted an article on the Jewish Socialists’ Facebook
Group it was removed by David’s partner, Julia Bard. When I persisted in
criticising the JSG’s refusal to support Jackie Walker I was removed
altogether.
David has been pivotal in the formation
of Jewish Voice for Labour. I refused to join JVL because I opposed a Jewish
only group when the ‘anti-Semitism’ attacks were not about Jews or
anti-Semitism. The first rule of any political campaign is not to accept your
opponents’ terms of reference.
That is why JVL has failed to make any
impression on the witchhunt or anti-Semitism campaign. The attacks were always
about Israel, Zionism and wider British foreign policy, not Jews or
anti-Semitism. JVL consistently refused to criticise Corbyn’s weak leadership
or raise the wider question of racism in the Labour Party.
In the Chimera of British Anti-Semitism
Norman Finkelstein notes that the fear in the Jewish community of an impending
Corbyn government did not mean they had anything to fear.
If residents of Salem, Massachusetts, experienced deep
anxiety about witches; if Americans experienced deep anxiety about Communists;
... if, for that matter, Christians experienced deep anxiety about Jewish
ritual child-murderers – if an anxiety is widespread, surely it doesn’t
necessarily, or even probably, follow that it is a rational fear. It could just
as plausibly have been induced by powerful social forces standing to benefit
from a deliberately contrived paranoia. (p.41)
Instead of tackling head on reports of
the disaffection of British Jews the Jewish Chronicle’s campaign to instil fear
was simply ignored and allowed to fester.
Where I disagree with Finkelstein’s is
his references to an ‘outsized Jewish
political power’. It is true that Zionist groups such as the Jewish People
Policy Planning Institute boasts of such power. It is also true that Jews are
disproportionately represented amongst the wealthy, in the media, politics and academia.
But does this therefore translate into
Jewish Power? Do all Jews possess the same class interests? Unless we believe
that Jews are acting in concert, as an organised block or caste, then we should
avoid the ethnicisation of what are historic, political, social and economic
phenomenon.
There is no separate Jewish interest or
lobby in society. Of course the Zionist lobby purports to represent all Jews
but we should not accept their claim. In the United States politics is ethnicised
precisely because of the weakness of class politics. Lenni Brenner is another
American anti-Zionist who falls into this trap.
Finkelstein is a brilliant writer however
he is not infallible. Although he is not using the concept of ‘Jewish power’ in
an anti-Semitic sense there is no doubt that ‘Jewish Power’ is both an
anti-Semitic and a Zionist concept. It suits Zionism to pretend that Jews
worldwide, apart from us ‘self haters’ all support Israel. It suits
anti-Semites to make ‘Jew’ and ‘Israel’ synonymous.
It was Paul Eisen, whose alleged
association with Corbyn first began the
anti-Semitism campaign, who published ‘Jewish
Power’, the first of 3 articles which mapped his coming out as a holocaust
denier.[5]
 |
| Being Jewish is no barrier to being accused of 'antisemitism' |
When Finkelstein says that ‘Were it not for the outsized power of
British Jews, it’s hard to conceive that British society would be interminably
chasing after a hobgoblin’ he has completely missed the point. Just as there can be anti-Semitism without
Jews, as in Eastern Europe, so there can be an anti-Semitism smear campaign
without Jews as the United States may be about to prove with Bernie Sanders.
Daniel Finn got it right when he wrote
that ‘Israel’s supporters are not an
external force that has bent the British ruling class to its will. They are the
outriders of that class.’ Zionism is the ruling class’s cutting edge. The
fake anti-Semitism campaign had nothing whatsoever to do with ‘Jewish Power’.
Daniel is also right when he wrote that ‘A
narrative can still be false even if it contains truthful elements: in fact,
there are very few that don’t.’ Indeed
I would argue that in that one sentence Daniel summed up everything about the ‘anti-Semitism’
smears. Yes there were anti-Semites in the Labour Party. There always have
been. The campaign was not however about them.
Of course there will be people with
anti-Semitic or conspiracy ideas in their heads in the Labour Party. There
always have been. But it was only when Corbyn was elected leader that the hunt
began to find them. Such people are not a threat to Corbyn or even anti-Semitic
in any meaningful sense. They are certainly no threat to Jews.
There will also be people in Labour who
support racist immigration controls, who believe that migrants take British
jobs and who believe that Gypsies are a social nuisance. The way to deal with
them is by way of education and debate. If
Labour is to be the party of the working class then it cannot exclude those who
offend its middle class sensibilities.
It is a sign of the theoretical and political
poverty of the Labour Right that it resorted to disciplinary measures and it is
equally a measure of the intellectual bankruptcy of the Labour Left that it has
given way to the Right on this. This book does not challenge that vacuum.
Jews in Britain were the alibi, the
pretext for the British Establishment. It was extremely useful to be able to
wage the war against Corbyn in the name of Britain’s Jews. In much the same way
that British imperialism justified its occupation of India by reference to its
campaign against Suttee not the
exploitation of the Indian peasantry. Opposition to anti-Semitism had a ring of
moral righteousness that support for austerity lacked!
It was however the weakness of the
Labour Left and this book reflects that weakness, that it failed to draw any conclusions
from who supported the ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign. The same Daily Mail which
supported Hitler and the British Union of Fascists and which campaigned against
the admission of Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany. Then there was the BBC and
the Sun. Yet not once did Corbyn or Lansman point out these basic facts.
The ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign was adopted
by a Tory Party which has historically been riddled with anti-Semitism and
which even today sits, in the European Parliament in the ECR group with
fascists and anti-Semites.
Justin Schlosberg and Laura
Laker’s article ‘Labour, Antisemitism, and the News - A Disinformation Paradigm’ is
well worth reading for the detail it provides on the overwhelming bias, not
only of the printed press but the broadcast media and the BBC in particular. They
are the only contributors to refer to the outrageous and unlawful suspension of
Chris Williamson MP.
Richard Kuper’s outdated Hue
and Cry over the UCU adds nothing to the
criticism of the IHRA
definition of anti-Semitism by Hugh Tomlinson QC,
Geoffrey Robertson QC and Sir Stephen Sedley. It is truly abysmal. It is
difficult to know why it was included. Kuper refers to ‘six relatively unproblematic examples of
antisemitism’ amongst the 11 illustrations of ‘anti-Semitism’. In fact they
are all problematic. His first example is
‘Calling for,
aiding, or justifying the killing or harming of Jews in the name of a radical
ideology or an extremist view of religion.’
Is Richard seriously suggesting that
calling for the killing of Jews in the name of a ‘moderate’ ideology or
religion is acceptable? Clearly what this ‘illustration’ is about is demonising
Muslims.
Richard also says that ‘using the symbols and images
associated with classic antisemitism’ – could hardly be anything but anti-Semitic.’
Where has Richard been? It is part of Zionist hasbara (propaganda) to associate
criticism of Israeli practices today with medieval anti-Semitism. When
criticism is made of documented
examples of settlers poisoning Palestinian water sources, this is
compared to medieval allegations that Jews poisoned wells. As Finkelstein notes:
Israeli hasbara (propaganda) itself promiscuously
exploits the ‘blood libel’ charge (i.e., that Jews murdered Christian children
for ritual purposes) in order to silence critics by reversing its sting. mere
mention of Palestinian children killed by Israel typically prompts accusations
of a ‘Global Blood Libel against Israel’
Richard says that another
example ‘Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination’ ‘could be antisemitic.’ I
disagree. There is no scenario in which this is anti-Semitic. It is the concept
of a single Jewish people, in practice a Jewish race, which is anti-Semitic.
In what is a far more well thought out analysis
of the IHRA Finkelstein argues that socialists, who for too long have sought to
restrict free speech on the grounds of not ‘hurting the feelings’ of one group
or another or because of a desire to achieve a ‘safe space’ (are there any
under capitalism?) have colluded with the government’s attacks on free speech.
It is on the grounds of free speech
that the Left should have made its stance, instead of being the censorious,
nannying busy bodies that too many on the left have become. Instead of banning
or expelling people for transphobia we should have encourage debate on the
issue.
Finkelstein quotes Marx saying that ‘You must have doubts about everything’.
This should be emblazoned on the Left’s banners.
Finkelstein also points to the problems
with Brian Klug’s alternative definition of ‘anti-Semitism’ as
‘a form of hostility to Jews as Jews, where Jews are
perceived as something other than what they are’.
I agree that anti-Semites often take
issue with Jews for what they are, not for what they are not. So someone who hates Jews for being too
clever or good businessmen is not anti-Semitic! Brian’s definition is too
clever by half and we would do better to rely on the OED definition
of anti-Semitism: ‘hostility
to or prejudice against Jews.’
Only Antony Lerman makes the point in When
Jews Are Just Fodder for the Tory Propaganda Machine that
when Tories, like Jacob Rees-Mogg make reference to Jews as the ‘Illuminati’
pulling the strings, a genuinely anti-Semitic remark, no one criticises him. The same could be said of Boris
Johnson’s book 72 Virgins which is replete with racist and anti-Semitic
comments. This and the Tories support
for Viktor Orban in the European Parliament
Jeremy Gilbert’s trite Antisemitism,
Cosmopolitanism and the Politics of Labour’s ‘Old’ and ‘New’ Right-Wings is another Xmas stocking filler. Jeremy tells us that ‘there will be no more suspensions of party
members simply because they support Corbyn and the party machinery think they
can get away with suspending them.’ Where has Jeremy been?
Tom Mills and David
Miller’s article for Ceasefire ‘Notes on Power, Elites, and
Anti-Racism’ is a useful corrective to the idea that seems to have gotten hold
that criticising elites in society is now anti-Semitic (presumably because Jews
make up most of the elites!). According
to Siobhan McDonagh MP, not the sharpest tool in the
Labour Right’s toolbox, anti-capitalism is anti-Semitic because Jews are
capitalists! Thus the fake
‘anti-Semitism’ comes full circle.
The final article is ‘Jews,
Antisemitism and the Law’ by Naomi Wayne who works for the Equal
Opportunities Commission for Northern Ireland. It is a timely reminder of the
pending investigation by the Equalities and Human Rights Commission, who have
made a partisan political intervention in Labour’s internal affairs launching
an Inquiry into the accusations of anti-Semitism.
When all the candidates for Labour
leadership have committed themselves to accepting the EHRC investigation report
we should be clear that this is a ruling class stitch-up.
Unfortunately this Ebook is less than
the sum of its parts. I recommend that those interested in this subject read Bad News for Labour,
whose book launch the Zionists tried unsuccessfully to stop at the Labour Party
Conference and the earlier Labour’s
Anti-Semitism Wars, to which I contributed.
Tony Greenstein
[1] Philo, Berry Schlosberg, Lerman & Miller, Bad News
for Labour, p. vii,Pluto Press, London, 2019.
[2]
Israel
PM: illegal African immigrants threaten identity of Jewish state,
Guardian 20.5.12.
[3] Ruth
Linn, Escaping Auschwitz: A Culture of Forgetting - p. 108.
